Once or twice Henderson had paid them a visit, and they could see that he was now laboring under a considerable strain. He obviously wanted to talk about his work, but was not going to do so until the final tests had been completed. They could only admire his self-control and wish that it would break down. Davis had a distant impression that the elusive Barnes was mainly responsible for his secrecy; he had something of a reputation for not publishing work until it had been checked and double-checked. If these experiments were as important as they believed, his caution was understandable, however infuriating.
Henderson had come over early that morning to collect the Professor, and as luck would have it, his car had broken down on the primitive road. This was unfortunate for Davis and Barton, who would have to walk to camp for lunch, since Professor Fowler was driving Henderson back in the jeep. They were quite prepared to put up with this if their wait was indeed coming to an end, as the others had more than half-hinted.
They had stood talking by the side of the jeep for some time before the two older scientists had driven away. It was a rather strained parting, for each side knew what the other was thinking. Finally Barton, as usual the most outspoken, remarked:
“Well, Doc, if this is Der Tag, I hope everything works properly. I’d like a photograph of a brontosaurus as a souvenir.”
This sort of banter had been thrown at Henderson so often that he now took it for granted. He smiled without much mirth and replied, “I don’t promise anything. It may be the biggest flop ever.”
Davis moodily checked the tire pressure with the toe of his boot. It was a new set, he noticed, with an odd zigzag pattern he hadn’t seen before.
“Whatever happens, we hope you’ll tell us. Otherwise, we’re going to break in one night and find out just what you’re up to.”
Henderson laughed. “You’ll be a pair of geniuses if you can learn anything from our present lash-up. But, if all goes well, we may be having a little celebration by nightfall.”
“What time do you expect to be back, Chief?”
“Somewhere around four. I don’t want you to have to walk back for tea.”
“O.K.—here’s hoping!”
The machine disappeared in a cloud of dust, leaving two very thoughtful geologists standing by the roadside. Then Barton shrugged his shoulders.
“The harder we work,” he said, “the quicker the time will go. Come along!”
———
The end of the trench, where Barton was working with the power drill, was now more than a hundred yards from the main excavation. Davis was putting the final touches to the last prints to be uncovered. They were now very deep and widely spaced, and looking along them, one could see quite clearly where the great reptile had changed its course and started, first to run, and then to hop like an enormous kangaroo. Barton wondered what it must have felt like to see such a creature bearing down upon one with the speed of an express; then he realized that if their guess was true this was exactly what they might soon be seeing.
By mid-afternoon they had uncovered a record length of track. The ground had become softer, and Barton was roaring ahead so rapidly that he had almost forgotten his other preoccupations. He had left Davis yards behind, and both men were so busy that only the pangs of hunger reminded them when it was time to finish. Davis was the first to notice that it was later than they had expected, and he walked over to speak to his friend.
“It’s nearly half-past four!” he said when the noise of the drill had died away. “The Chief’s late—I’ll be mad if he’s had tea before collecting us.”
“Give him another half-hour,” said Barton. “I can guess what’s happened. They’ve blown a fuse or something and it’s upset their schedule.”
Davis refused to be placated. “I’ll be darned annoyed if we’ve got to walk back to camp again. Anyway, I’m going up the hill to see if there’s any sign of him.”
He left Barton blasting his way through the soft rock, and climbed the low hill at the side of the old riverbed. From here one could see far down the valley, and the twin stacks of the Henderson-Barnes laboratory were clearly visible against the drab landscape. But there was no sign of the moving dust-cloud that would be following the jeep: the Professor had not yet started for home.
Davis gave a snort of disgust. There was a two-mile walk ahead of them, after a particularly tiring day, and to make matters worse they’d now be late for tea. He decided not to wait any longer, and was already walking down the hill to rejoin Barton when something caught his eye and he stopped to look down the valley.
Around the two stacks, which were all he could see of the laboratory, a curious haze not unlike a heat tremor was playing. They must be hot, he knew, but surely not that hot. He looked more carefully, and saw to his amazement that the haze covered a hemisphere that must be almost a quarter of a mile across.
And, quite suddenly, it exploded. There was no light, no blinding flash; only a ripple that spread abruptly across the sky and then was gone. The haze had vanished—and so had the two great stacks of the power-house.
Feeling as though his legs had turned suddenly to water, Davis slumped down upon the hilltop and stared open-mouthed along the valley. A sense of overwhelming disaster swept into his mind; as in a dream, he waited for the explosion to reach his ears.
It was not impressive when it came; only a dull, long-drawn-out whoooooosh! that died away swiftly in the still air. Half unconsciously, Davis noticed that the chatter of the drill had also stopped; the explosion must have been louder than he thought for Barton to have heard it too.
The silence was complete. Nothing moved anywhere as far as his eye could see in the whole of that empty, barren landscape. He waited until his strength returned; then, half running, he went unsteadily down the hill to rejoin his friend.
Barton was half sitting in the trench with his head buried in his hands. He looked up as Davis approached; and although his features were obscured by dust and sand, the other was shocked at the expression in his eyes.
“So you heard it too!” Davis said. “I think the whole lab’s blown up. Come along, for heaven’s sake!”
“Heard what?” said Barton dully.
Davis stared at him in amazement. Then he realized that Barton could not possibly have heard any sound while he was working with the drill. The sense of disaster deepened with a rush; he felt like a character in some Greek tragedy, helpless before an implacable doom.
Barton rose to his feet. His face was working strangely, and Davis saw that he was on the verge of breakdown. Yet, when he spoke, his words were surprisingly calm.
“What fools we were!” he said. “How Henderson must have laughed at us when we told him that he was trying to see into the past!”
Mechanically, Davis moved to the trench and stared at the rock that was seeing the light of day for the first time in fifty million years. Without much emotion, now, he traced again the zigzag pattern he had first noticed a few hours before. It had sunk only a little way into the mud, as if when it was formed the jeep had been traveling at its utmost speed.
No doubt it had been; for in one place the shallow tire marks had been completely obliterated by the monster’s footprints. They were now very deep indeed, as if the great reptile was about to make the final leap upon its desperately fleeing prey.
JACK FINNEY
Jack Finney (1911–1995) was fascinated with the idea of time travel, and used it in many of his stories. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with the given name John Finney, he was renamed Walter Braden Finney in honor of his father, although the nickname Jack remained with him throughout his life. Well after he graduated from Knox College, his first short story, “The Widow’s Walk,” won a contest sponsored by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1946. In addition to publishing novels and short stories, he also contributed articles to a number of popular periodicals like Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and The Saturday Evening Post. He moved to Marin County, California, in the early 1950s with his wife, Margueri
te Guest, and their two children. Several of Finney’s novels were adapted for the big screen, including the science-fiction cult classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the comedy novel Good Neighbor Sam, and his classic time-travel romance Time and Again. Finney died of pneumonia and emphysema in 1995 at age 84 not long after finishing the long-awaited sequel, From Time to Time.
“I’m Scared” is a Finney classic, a tale of an ordinary man (as the subjects of his stories often were) stumbling upon a terrifying bit of spatial horror, which leads him to the only inescapable conclusion. As with much speculative fiction during the 1950s, the emphasis wasn’t so much on technical explanations or scientific theories, more on Finney’s evocation of mood and setting, and that perhaps is why its quiet sense of terror is so completely intertwined with the theme of the story—that there is no explanation for why the events in this story are happening.
I’M SCARED
JACK FINNEY
I’M VERY BADLY SCARED, not so much for myself—I’m a gray-haired man of sixty-six, after all—but for you and everyone else who has not yet lived out his life. For I believe that certain dangerous things have recently begun to happen in the world. They are noticed here and there, idly discussed, then dismissed and forgotten. Yet I am convinced that unless these occurrences are recognized for what they are, the world will be plunged into a nightmare. Judge for yourself.
One evening last winter I came home from a chess club to which I belong. I’m a widower; I live alone in a small but comfortable three-room apartment overlooking Fifth Avenue. It was still fairly early, and I switched on a lamp beside my leather easy chair, picked up a murder mystery I’d been reading and turned on the radio; I did not, I’m sorry to say, notice which station it was tuned to.
The tubes warmed, and the music of an accordion—faint at first, then louder—came from the loudspeaker. Since it was good music for reading, I adjusted the volume control and began to read.
Now I want to be absolutely factual and accurate about this, and I do not claim that I paid close attention to the radio. But I do know that presently the music stopped and an audience applauded. Then a man’s voice, chuckling and pleased with the applause, said, “All right, all right,” but the applause continued for several more seconds. During that time the voice once more chuckled appreciatively, then firmly repeated, “All right,” and the applause died down. “That was Alec Somebody-or-other,” the radio voice said, and I went back to my book.
But I soon became aware of this middle-aged voice again, perhaps a change of tone as he turned to a new subject caught my attention. “And now, Miss Ruth Greeley,” he was saying, “of Trenton, New Jersey. Miss Greeley is a pianist; that right?” A girl’s voice, timid and barely audible, said, “That’s right, Major Bowes.” The man’s voice—and now I recognized his familiar singsong delivery—said, “And what are you going to play?”
The girl replied, “‘La Paloma.’” The man repeated it after her, as an announcement: “‘La Paloma.’” There was a pause, than an introductory chord sounded from a piano, and I resumed my reading.
As the girl played, I was half aware that her style was mechanical, her rhythm defective, perhaps she was nervous. Then my attention was fully aroused once more by a gong which sounded suddenly. For a few notes more the girl continued to play falteringly, not sure what to do. The gong sounded jarringly again, the playing abruptly stopped and there was a restless murmur from the audience. “All right, all right,” said the familiar voice, and I realized I’d been expecting this, knowing it would say just that. The audience quieted, and the voice began, “Now . . . ”
The radio went dead. For the smallest fraction of a second no sound issued from it but its own mechanical hum. Then a completely different program came from the loudspeaker; the recorded voices of Bing Crosby and his son were singing the concluding bars of “Sam’s Song,” a favorite of mine. So I returned once more to my reading, wondering vaguely what had happened to the other program, but not actually thinking about it until I finished my book and began to get ready for bed.
Then, undressing in my bedroom, I remembered that Major Bowes was dead. Years had passed, half a decade, since that dry chuckle and familiar, “All right, all right,” had been heard in the nation’s living rooms.
———
Well, what does one do when the apparently impossible occurs? It simply made a good story to tell friends, and more than once I was asked if I’d recently heard Moran and Mack, a pair of radio comedians popular some twenty-five years ago, or Floyd Gibbons, an old-time news broadcaster. And there were other joking references to my crystal radio set.
But one man—this was at a lodge meeting the following Thursday—listened to my story with utter seriousness, and when I had finished he told me a queer little story of his own. He is a thoughtful, intelligent man, and as I listened I was not frightened, but puzzled at what seemed to be a connecting link, a common denominator, between this story and the odd behavior of my radio. Since I am retired and have plenty of time, I took the trouble, the following day, of making a two-hour train trip to Connecticut in order to verify the story firsthand. I took detailed notes, and the story appears in my files now as follows:
Case 2. Louis Trachnor, coal and wood dealer, R.F.D. 1, Danbury, Connecticut, age fifty-four.
On July 20, 1950, Mr. Trachnor told me, he walked out on the front porch of his house about six o’clock in the morning. Running from the eaves of his house to the floor of the porch was a streak of gray paint, still damp. “It was about the width of an eight-inch brush,” Mr. Trachnor told me, “and it looked like hell because the house was white. I figured some kids did it in the night for a joke, but if they did, they had to get a ladder up to the eaves and you wouldn’t figure they’d go to that much trouble. It wasn’t smeared, either; it was a careful job, a nice even stripe straight down the front of the house.”
Mr. Trachnor got a ladder and cleaned off the gray paint with turpentine.
In October of that same year Mr. Trachnor painted his house. “The white hadn’t held up so good, so I painted it gray. I got to the front last and finished about five one Saturday afternoon. Next morning when I came out I saw a streak of white right down the front of the house. I figured it was the damn kids again because it was the same place as before. But when I looked close, I saw it wasn’t new paint; it was the old white I’d painted over. Somebody had done a nice careful job of cleaning off the new paint in a long stripe about eight inches wide right down from the eaves! Now who the hell would go to that trouble? I just can’t figure it out.”
Do you see the link between this story and mine? Suppose for a moment that something had happened, on each occasion, to disturb briefly the orderly progress of time. That seemed to have happened in my case; for a matter of some seconds I apparently heard a radio broadcast that had been made years before. Suppose, then, that no one had touched Mr. Trachnor’s house but himself; that he had painted his house in October, but that through some fantastic mix-up in time, a portion of that paint appeared on his house the previous summer. Since he had cleaned the paint off, at that time, a broad stripe of new gray paint was missing after he painted his house in the fall.
I would be lying, however, if I said I really believed this. It was merely an intriguing speculation, and I told both these little stories to friends, simply as curious anecdotes. I am a sociable person, see a good many people, and occasionally I heard other odd stories in response to mine.
Someone would nod and say, “Reminds me of something I heard recently . . . ” and I would have one more to add to my collection. A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of
Green River, Wyoming.
And so on, and so on; my stories were now in demand at parties, and I told myself that collecting and verifying them was a hobby. But the day I heard Julia Eisenberg’s story, I knew it was no longer that.
Case 17. Julia Eisenberg, office worker, New York City, age thirty-one.
Miss Eisenberg lives in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. I talked to her there after a chess-club friend who lives in her neighborhood had repeated to me a somewhat garbled version of her story, which was told to him by the doorman of the building he lives in.
In October 1947, about eleven at night, Miss Eisenberg left her apartment to walk to the drugstore for toothpaste. On her way back, not far from her apartment, a large black and white dog ran up to her and put his front paws on her chest.
“I made the mistake of petting him,” Miss Eisenberg told me, “and from then on he simply wouldn’t leave. When I went into the lobby of my building, I actually had to push him away to get the door closed. I felt sorry for him, poor hound, and a little guilty because he was still sitting at the door an hour later when I looked out my front window.”
This dog remained in the neighborhood for three days, discovering and greeting Miss Eisenberg with wild affection each time she appeared on the street. “When I’d get on the bus in the morning to go to work, he’d sit on the curb looking after me in the most mournful way, poor thing. I wanted to take him in, but I knew he’d never go home then, and I was afraid whoever owned him would be sorry to lose him. No one in the neighborhood knew whom he belonged to, and finally he disappeared.”
Two years later a friend gave Miss Eisenberg a three-week-old puppy. “My apartment is really too small for a dog, but he was such a darling I couldn’t resist. Well, he grew up into a nice big dog who ate more than I did.”
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