by Jack Finney
“Okay.” I nodded, walked to the door, and opened it. In the doorway I turned to face him again, a hand on the knob. “Just think, Cus,” I said, “when you’re rich, all the worms you can eat!” Just before he got to it, I yanked the door shut behind me, and had the pleasure of hearing him plow into it, cursing, as I clattered down the stairs whistling “Blue-tail Fly.”
It was only nine blocks, and I walked, leading an invisible band playing a hymn of triumph—“Pomp and Circumstance” with some pretty nifty triangle and timpani work—to Forty-second and Lex. But there I stopped, the music fading, staring out at the passing traffic, trying to get things straight in my mind. Was I doing this selfishly, in a last desperate and probably hopeless attempt to get Hetty for myself? Or was I doing it for the reason I’d said I was: for Hetty’s sake, not mine, simply because I loved her? Well, I said finally, maybe a little of each, and I crossed Forty-second Street simulating nonchalance, flipping and catching a coin like George Raft in an old black-and-white.
The coin was a dime, the other of the two dimes I’d found in my hand the last time I approached Herman’s newsstand at the intersection of two alternate worlds. This was the Woodrow Wilson dime, and now I reached across the stacks of New York Posts and slapped the dime on the counter, opening my mouth to ask for a paper. Before I could speak, Herman had snatched one up, double-folding it in the same motion and sticking it sideways into my mouth, my teeth automatically closing down on it. “Home, Rover,” he said humorously, and I grinned, turning away with the paper still in my mouth and, to Herman’s contempt, pretending to wag my tail.
But I didn’t care; from a corner of my eyes I could read part of the masthead of the folded paper: World-Sun, it said. Just across Forty-second Street stood the fine old yellow-brick Doc Pepper Building, and as I started to cross toward it I was almost hit by a Hupmobile.
•
CHAPTER ELEVEN
•
It’s true I loved Hetty, but I certainly wasn’t mad at Tessie, and if you think she wasn’t a hell of a welcome change from the Y, we just aren’t communicating. She was pleased with the sudden change in me. I’d been a little indifferent lately, she said: taking her too much for granted again. But tonight I was my old self once more . . . Gemini, Virgo, Betelgeuse, Andromeda; it sure beat Ping-Pong with the fellows!
In the morning though, very conscious of where I was going now and why, I felt guilty about Tess as I kissed her goodbye. She smiled happily, still tired and half asleep because the odd L-shaped way I’d slept last night hadn’t given her much room. I reminded myself that I was concerned with another world now, a world in which I didn’t even know where Tessie was. I had to do what I had to do, and did it: downstairs I took a cab to Custer’s office.
It was hard not to laugh when I walked in and saw him look up from his desk and smile, then stand, shoving out his hand to shake mine; except for his blond hair and blue eyes, he looked exactly the same as the Custer Huppfelt of another world, who would liked to have killed me.
We went through the preliminaries. Forcing my lips to move, I asked how Hetty was; she was away for the next week or so visiting her mother, he said, and hope rose momentarily. Trouble? Divorce ahead? But it was too soon, and I knew it. Cus asked after Tessie, I inquired about his health, he asked after mine, and we made a joke about bridge. “Well,” he said then, “what can I do for you, Ben?”
“Something pretty unbusinesslike, Cus; you’ll hate it. I know I could get rich developing my invention myself, but riches don’t matter; I want to sell it. To the safety-pin company that offered to buy it last week. No bargaining, no haggling: I’ll take the two hundred and fifty thousand bucks they offered just as fast as you can wrap up the deal.”
Cus sat frowning as though he couldn’t understand, and I thought I knew what he was going to say, that he’d urge me not to be hasty, but I was wrong. He said, “What invention?”
Even as I tolerantly smiled at his lapse, I knew what you know; I knew what everybody knows; I knew what I should never have forgotten: a Custer Huppfelt is always a Custer Huppfelt, in any world at all. “The zipper, of course,” I said, still smiling, but my blood was congealing into an icy slush because I knew what he was going to say.
He sat shaking his head as though baffled, but way back in those snakelike eyes there gleamed a needle point of pure malice. “The zipper?” he said. “Ben, I don’t understand you. That isn’t your invention; it’s mine.”
It wasn’t the past that flashed instantaneously through my mind; it was the future. Even as I opened my mouth to reply, I foresaw all the shouts, the rage, the threats of suit and murder, the bland denials, and the complete futility of everything that was about to happen. I went through it all; I couldn’t help it. I yelled at Custer, pounded his desk, raged and stormed around his office, threatened to kill him and would have, except that in this world, too, he was a lot bigger, heavier, and stronger than I was. But all the while I knew how useless it was; I hadn’t even a scrap of proof that I’d invented the zipper. Laughing at me deep in his eyes, Custer acted solicitous, worried about me, suggesting that I was working too hard. He was actually taunting me, of course, and he let me know that he was accepting the offer next Friday when his patent papers had come through—getting his kicks out of robbing me, and driving me into a wilder and wilder rage.
Suddenly I had to turn and run out of the office, knowing that something would burst in my head if I didn’t. This unspeakable—any word or phrase I’d ever known was far too mild—this Custer, this Huppfelt, had stolen Hetty in this world, and now he’d just stolen the only way I had of keeping him from stealing her in another. Outside on the walk, I wanted to lift my head to the sky and howl like a dog; I wanted to roll in the gutter, tearing my clothes and hair.
I walked, block after block, I didn’t know where and still don’t. Then, by what I can only feel was a miracle, the traffic lights changed just ahead of me, I stopped at the curb as traffic rolled by, and a lavender Rolls-Royce floated past my glittering eyes. In it, chin and folded hands resting on the golfball-size cut diamond which formed the head of his cane, sat the brooding, mysterious, silk-hatted figure of Nate Rockoski. Once again I caught a glimpse of an incredibly expensive suit—this one a pattern of enlarged stock-market quotations woven into a yellow-gold background of shark’s-tooth cloth—and I could feel the cold slush in my veins melting; then it turned to steam.
This skinny little plutocrat was an inspiration to America’s youth, as the very symbol of persistence. As I knew, and as the entire world now knew, from the foreign-language editions of Reader’s Digest, this was the man who had persisted through the bitter years of the scenic living picture, the inflatable umbrella, the cylindrical portrait, until finally he had invented Coca-Cola. Inspired by him, touched by the flame of his genius and greed, I reminded myself that I had invented the zipper, even if no one else in the world was ever to know it. And I was inspired again. Eyes calm once more, and smiling, albeit a little grimly, I knew what I had to do, and I turned in my tracks and walked back toward the office.
Passing through Grand Central Station, steps brisk and purposeful, I glanced out of habit over to where the familiar little curtained booth had stood, but it was gone. In its place stood a chrome-and-enamel waist-high machine, about the size and general shape of a cigarette machine. It was a pleasant forest-green, and across its front in large white capital letters it said, TRY ME! I walked over, and in the lower right corner a neat white arrow pointed to a slot; the green words in the arrow read ONLY 50¢
Intrigued, I dropped in a half, and a little glass button began flashing red, on and off rapidly like a pulse, and a buzzing began. Then the button flashed green, there was an inner clunk of mechanism, and a card dropped into a cup below the coin slot, as the light went out and the machine was silent. I picked up the card, and read it. It said Thanks, and god bless you, sir! Your Friendly Automated Panhandler, and I walked on toward the office with that warm inner glow that I knew Cus
ter had never known, which comes only from offering a helping hand to those less fortunate than ourselves.
In my office I pressed a button on my desk, then walked over to stand staring out a window. Behind me I heard the office door open quietly, close almost soundlessly, then the faint squeak of cheap shoes. The sound stopped, and, almost whispering it, little Bert Glahn said, “Yes, sir?”
Without turning, I said, “Bert, I’ll lay it on the line,” and heard him gulp. Then I turned to glare at him. “I don’t have to tell you that you’ve been fouling up lately.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve had things on my mind.”
I stood looking at him, but I couldn’t bring myself to lower the poor devil’s salary. “Things in your life even more important than Navel-O-No?” I said in soft rebuke. “Come to attention!” He snapped erect, heels coming together, thumb along trouser seams, eyes straight ahead. I walked around him, inspecting, but found nothing wrong. “I’m going to give you a chance to redeem yourself.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“If you care to volunteer,” I added softly.
He went a little pale, but said, “Yes, sir.”
“For the next week or so, Glahn, I’m leaving you in charge. As a test! It’s make or break. Every now and then I’ll check in, and if you absolutely have to, you can phone me at home. But I want to see what you can do on your own. So buckle down! Do your level best! I still think you’ve got good stuff in you.” I threw him a salute, dismissing him.
He snapped one back. “Yes, sir!” he said, eyes shining. “I’ll make good! Just you wait and see!” He about-faced, marched out, and I picked up my phone, called Perce Shelley at the agency, told him I wanted him to arrange a couple of important appointments for me the first of next week, using the agency’s influence, then I left the office.
Back at my apartment building, using two hundred-dollar bills, I arranged with the building super to use the furnace room and the nondescript collection of tools he had there, for the weekend, while he took the time off. He told me what to do about the furnace, garbage, and complaints from the tenants; for these last I was just to answer the wall phone, listen, say, “Be up first chance I get,” and forget it. It left plenty of time for work, and I started Saturday morning, explaining to Tess that it was a new hobby.
I had problems, of course; the only wheels I could find Saturday were a pair of thin, wooden-spoke affairs with metal rims: an old pair of buggy wheels, actually, somewhat larger than I wanted, that I found at an antique shop. Metal tubing, on the other hand, I found and bought with no trouble, and I rented a welding outfit easily. Welding isn’t as easy as it looks, though, I discovered, and I never did get the hang of making a neat seam. But I was in a fantastic hurry and assured myself it was the idea that counted; refinements could come later.
Late Sunday afternoon, working in the super’s coveralls, I finished. The wall phone was ringing, and I answered in a fake Polish accent; it was some sort of complaint, about a bathroom flooding, and I said I’d be up first thing Monday. Then I set right to work again, using a rechargeable seltzer bottle and five pounds of sugar I’d brought downstairs. Mixing up bottle after bottle, I finally got pretty much the taste I was after. Then I sat sketching; first in pencil, discarding; then refining; and finally, around midnight, finishing up pretty carefully in colored inks.
Monday at ten I kept my first appointment, on Long Island, with half a dozen officials of the American headquarters of Mitsuhashi, meeting them on the office parking lot where a space had been cleared for my demonstration. They stood watching, smiling politely though skeptically, as I climbed on. They say you never forget how, and I didn’t. But of course I was used to rubber-tired wheels a lot closer to the ground, and I started out wobbling badly. That loosened a weld: not instantaneously but through four or five slow and terrible seconds, the front and back wheels drawing farther and farther apart as I sank toward the ground. Then I was sitting on the asphalt, still holding the crude plumber’s-pipe handlebars, watching both wheels of this world’s first and last bicycle rolling straight toward, and scattering, my board of review.
Not too many people, actually, have imaginative ability, and certainly this bunch didn’t; but . . . They were polite, commiserating, urging me to try again and come back; but it was plain that they didn’t believe and never had believed in anything as absurd as a vehicle with only two wheels. And when I tried describing a refinement that would, I assured them perhaps a little too excitedly, sweep the world—simply adding a motor, that is, and calling it a Honda—they nodded and smiled even more, bunching together for protection.
There was no time for self-pity. At two o’clock—Perce Shelley had done his work well—I sat in the office of the president of a large and important company. He listened to me, nodding politely; then I took the glass from the carafe set on his desk, and filled it from the stoppered bottle I’d brought along. “Looks like water,” he said doubtfully, holding it to the light; then he tasted it, and shrugged. “And what would you call it?” he said.
This was the big moment, and I was ready; I had my large color sketch mounted on cardboard, with a heavy paper flap the way the ad agencies do. I held it up and then slowly and a little dramatically, I’ll admit, lifted the flap to reveal the label I’d sketched. He stared at it for several seconds, then turned to me. “Seven-Up?” he said. “What the hell kind of name is that?”
I tried to tell him it was a good name, that I guaranteed it would succeed, but he didn’t even let me finish. “What does it mean, what does it mean?” he kept saying, and when I told him it didn’t mean anything, he just looked at me, then at his watch, and I knew I was finished, and gathered up my stuff.
Just before I walked out the door I turned, and said bitingly, “What the hell does Coca-Cola mean!” but of course—no imagination again—it didn’t help a bit.
Four days left till the wedding: sitting in front of the furnace that afternoon, working feverishly—an eyelid had begun to twitch—I cut sheet after sheet of cellophane into half-inch strips. Then I scraped the sticky surface from a dozen sheets of flypaper.
Next morning, for the first time, there in the offices of the Minnesota Mining Company, I met real enthusiasm! Tearing off an inch or so from the crude roll I’d made, I stuck a piece of paper to the wall, and the president stared at it. “Scotch tape!” I said, and he grinned and began nodding eagerly. He walked quickly toward the wall, his hand reaching out for the paper as I mentally upped my price to three hundred thousand, and—damn that flypaper!—it slid slowly down the wall to the carpet, and when I looked up at prexy again: fish eyes.
All that night I typed, down in the furnace room; my fingers were literally bleeding when I stoked up the furnace at dawn. But I delivered my stuff at nine sharp, then walked the streets, sat in parks, and drank a dozen cups of coffee in a dozen places till my four o’clock appointment, when I was back. “We don’t usually read quite this fast, you know,” my man said reprovingly, “but since Manny put it on the basis of a personal favor . . .” He shrugged, and leaned back in his swivel chair; he was a guy around forty, I thought, who looked twenty-six, wearing a gray tweed coat and a pipe. “Anyway, I’ve read your first chapters and outlines. This first one”—he riffled the pages with his thumb—“what’s it called again?”
“ ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ”
“Well, believe me,” he said, chuckling, “that’s a name you’d have to change! Surely you can see that it’s much too—well, cute, I’m afraid I must say. I gather from your outline that the book is entirely about a boy floating down a river on a raft?”
“Pretty much.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment; just stared at me. Then he slowly shook his head. “What in the world ever made you think . . . Well, never mind. No sex in the book, Mr. Bennell? I don’t find any in the outline.”
“ ’Fraid not.”
“None whatsoever?”
I shook my head.
“Quite frankly, I think you’d better add some! It’s about your only hope. Suppose, and I’m only thinking out loud, suppose Aunt Polly and the Widder Brown—‘Widder’ Brown, Mr. Bennell, really!—were both a lot younger, Huck a bit older, and—”
I was shaking my head.
He shrugged. “Then I’m terribly afraid it’s not for us. Frankly, I doubt if even a vanity press would touch it. As for the other, what’s your title?”
“ ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ”
“Try shortening it. And eliminate a good half of the characters. Rhett Butler, for one; he’s incredible. Meanwhile”—he stood up—“don’t give up your job in—what is it, advertising?” He handed my material across the desk. “Nice of you, I suppose, to let us see these.”
Two days till the wedding—I still think that with only a little more time . . . But I had none to spare; at the union office I had to hire practically the first three men I talked to, and there was no time to really work on the outfits. Yet we looked pretty good, I thought, and after only half a day’s practice we were working together surprisingly well.
I had real hope when we kept the appointment, although there was some trouble getting into the studio. Once inside, though, the guy who was to see us—Fred Something—looked at us for a while, not saying anything. Then he shrugged, and said, “Okay; you’re here, so go ahead.”
I glanced around at my group, nodded, and we jumped smack-bang-boom into a fast, pounding, hard rock, electric guitars whanging away, drums pounding, our long-haired wigs swaying in rhythm, dark-lensed glasses actually bouncing. Then, in the correct high-pitched howl, I began singing the “words,” using a combination Oklahoma whine and Deep South mushmouth, as is proper.
