“Come back and fight,” Maggie said. “I dare you to say that again.” She rubbed her eyes without much hope, and she was right. The watcher was gone.
Rather forlornly, Maggie took to her bed again. “It’s the worst hangover I’ve ever had,” Maggie moaned. “So maybe I wasn’t looking my best, but it’s a bitter blow...”
The worst of it was, she could never tell anybody, even Mark. What woman could ever admit she had less charm than a beat-up old tomcat? “But I’ve found out one thing,” Maggie thought. “I know now what dogs and cats stare at when people can’t see anything there. . . .” But she almost wept when she remembered her old day-dream—of watchers lovingly studying and guiding mankind, or at least holding themselves ready to step in and help when the going got too rough. Suppose, though, the watchers considered mankind no more than servants to the other animals? Feeding and bathing them, providing warm houses and soft, safe beds. ...”
It was a sickening thought. Maggie harbored it for two minutes, and then resolutely dismissed it from mind.
“Fiddlesticks! He wasn’t that stupid. In fact, he was a damn smart-aleck. So he liked Gomez. So what? Maybe he’s a woman-hater.”
She settled back against her pillow and opened the bird book:
Remember, birds can’t count. When you build your blind, let two people enter it. Let one person go away, and the birds will return without fear, thinking they are safe. In this way, you will get good, natural pictures of our friends eating, fighting, and mating. . .
Mark opened the bedroom door and walked in. “Maggie?”
“Hmm?” Maggie went on reading.
“I couldn’t polish the car....”, Mark grinned at her.
“Why not?” Maggie dropped the dull book with alacrity. She knew that grin.
“I kept thinking about that new game you were playing. . . Some type of photography, did you say? Then I know the perfect name for it.”
“What?
“It’s called see-the-birdie, and it isn’t a new game at all—it’s just part of an old one.”
Maggie stretched luxuriously and made an apparently irrelevant remark: “So long, hangover.”
<
* * * *
OF MISSING PERSONS
by
Jack Finney
Here, more than in any other story in this book (though “Bulkhead,” and “Home There’s No Returning” come close), is pure fable in the form of science-fantasy. And this time there is even a moral, clearly— if sadly—stated.
The conflict in this story is not, as in most of the others, generated by the prospect of problems we may have to face tomorrow or next year. It is the immediate and all-too-familiar problem of a normal, nice guy caught in the trap of steel and concrete, of wheels, fumes, and strangers that we call The City.
There were two other stories published this past year that handled the same theme, either of which might have been included here instead: Abernathy’s “Single Combat,” and “The Vanishing American,” by Charles Beaumont. I chose the Finney, both for its compassionate treatment and for its evocative prose.
* * * *
Walk in as though it were an ordinary travel bureau, the stranger I’d met at a bar had told me. Ask a few ordinary questions—about a trip you’re planning, a vacation, anything like that. Then hint about The Folder a little, but whatever you do, don’t mention it directly; wait till he brings it up himself. And if he doesn’t, you might as well forget it. If you can. Because you’ll never see it; you’re not the type, that’s all. And if you ask about it, he’ll just look at you as though he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
I rehearsed it all in my mind, over and over, but what seems possible at night over a beer isn’t easy to believe on a raw, rainy day, and I felt like a fool, searching the store fronts for the street number I’d memorized. It was noon hour, West 42nd Street, New York, rainy and windy; and like half the men around me, I walked with a hand on my hatbrim, wearing an old trench coat, head bent into the slanting rain, and the world was real and drab, and this was hopeless.
Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking, who am I to see The Folder, even if there is one? Name? I said to myself, as though I were already being asked. It’s Charley Ewell, and I’m a young guy who works in a bank; a teller. I don’t like the job; I don’t make much money, and I never will. I’ve lived in New York for over three years and haven’t many friends. What the heck, there’s really nothing to say—I see more movies than I want to, read too many books, and I’m sick of meals alone in restaurants. I have ordinary abilities, looks, and thoughts. Does that suit you; do I qualify?
Now I spotted it, the address in the 200 block, an old, pseudo-modernized office building, tired, outdated, refusing to admit it but unable to hide it. New York is full of them, west of Fifth.
I pushed through the brass-framed glass doors into the tiny lobby, paved with freshly mopped, permanently dirty tile. The green-painted walls were lumpy from old plaster repairs; in a chrome frame hung a little wall directory—white-celluloid, easily changed letters on a black-felt background. There were some twenty-odd names, and I found “Acme Travel Bureau” second on the list, between “A-l Mimeo” and “Ajax Magic Supplies.” I pressed the bell beside the old-style, open-grille elevator door; it rang high up in the shaft. There was a long pause, then a thump, and the heavy chains began rattling slowly down toward me, and I almost turned and left—this was insane.
But upstairs the Acme office had divorced itself from the atmosphere of the building. I pushed open the pebble-glass door, walked in, and the big square room was bright and clean, fluorescent-lighted. Beside the wide double windows, behind a counter, stood a tall gray-haired, grave-looking man, a telephone at his ear. He glanced up, nodded to beckon me in, and I felt my heart pumping—he fitted the description exactly. “Yes, United Air Lines,” he was saying into the phone. “Flight”—he glanced at a paper on the glass-topped counter—”seven-oh-three, and I suggest you check in forty minutes early.”
Standing before him now, I waited, leaning on the counter, glancing around; he was the man, all right, and yet this was just an ordinary travel agency: big bright posters on the walls, metal floor racks full of folders, printed schedules under the glass on the counter. This is just what it looks like and nothing else, I thought, and again I felt like a fool.
“Can I help you?” Behind the counter the tall gray-haired man was smiling at me, replacing the phone, and suddenly I was terribly nervous.
“Yes.” I stalled for time, unbuttoning my raincoat. Then I looked up at him again and said, “I’d like to—get away.” You fool, that’s too fast! I told myself. Don’t rush it! I watched in a kind of panic to see what effect my answer had had, but he didn’t flick an eyelash.
“Well, there are a lot of places to go,” he said politely. From under the counter he brought out a long, slim folder and laid it on the glass, turning it right side up for me. “Fly to Buenos Aires—Another World!” it said in a double row of pale-green letters across the top.
I looked at it long enough to be polite. It showed a big silvery plane banking over a harbor at night, a moon shining on the water, mountains in the background. Then I just shook my head; I was afraid to talk, afraid I’d say the wrong thing.
“Something quieter, maybe?” He brought out another folder: thick old tree trunks, rising way up out of sight, sunbeams slanting down through them—”The Virgin Forests of Maine, via Boston and Maine Railroad.” “Or”—he laid a third folder on the glass—”Bermuda is nice just now.” This one said, “Bermuda, Old World in the New.”
I decided to risk it. “No,” I said, and shook my head. “What I’m really looking for is a permanent place. A new place to live and settle down in.” I stared directly into his eyes. “For the rest of my life.” Then my nerve failed me, and I tried to think of a way to backtrack.
But he only smiled pleasantly and said, “I don’t know why we can’t advise you on that.” He leaned forward on the co
unter, resting on his forearms, hands clasped; he had all the time in the world for me, his posture conveyed. “What are you looking for; what do you want?”
I held my breath, then said it. “Escape.”
“From what?”
“Well—” Now I hesitated; I’d never put it into words before. “From New York, I’d say. And cities in general. From worry. And fear. And the things I read in my newspapers. From loneliness.” And then I couldn’t stop, though I knew I was talking too much, the words spilling out. “From never doing what I really want to do or having much fun. From selling my days just to stay alive. From life itself—the way it is today, at least.” I looked straight at him and said softly, “From the world.”
Now he was frankly staring, his eyes studying my face intently with no pretense of doing anything else, and I knew that in a moment he’d shake his head and say, “Mister, you better get to a doctor.” But he didn’t. He continued to stare, his eyes examining my forehead now. He was a big man, his gray hair crisp and curling, his lined face very intelligent, very kind; he looked the way ministers should look; he looked the way all fathers should look.
He lowered his gaze to look into my eyes and beyond them; he studied my mouth, my chin, the line of my jaw, and I had the sudden conviction that without any difficulty he was learning a great deal about me, more than I knew myself. Suddenly he smiled and placed both elbows on the counter, one hand grasping the other fist and gently massaging it. “Do you like people? Tell the truth, because I’ll know if you aren’t.”
“Yes. It isn’t easy for me to relax though, and be myself, and make friends.”
He nodded gravely, accepting that. “Would you say you’re a reasonably decent kind of man?”
“I guess so; I think so.” I shrugged.
“Why?”
I smiled wryly; this was hard to answer. “Well—at least when I’m not, I’m usually sorry about it.”
He grinned at that, and considered it for a moment or so. Then he smiled—deprecatingly, as though he were about to tell a little joke that wasn’t too good. “You know,” he said casually, “we occasionally get people in here who seem to be looking for pretty much what you are. So just as a sort of little joke—”
I couldn’t breathe. This was what I’d been told he would say if he thought I might do.
“—we’ve worked up a little folder. We’ve even had it printed. Simply for our own amusement, you understand. And for occasional clients like you. So I’ll have to ask you to look at it here if you’re interested. It’s not the sort of thing we’d care to have generally known.”
I could barely whisper, “I’m interested.”
He fumbled under the counter, then brought out a long thin folder, the same size and shape as the others, and slid it over the glass toward me.
I looked at it, pulling it closer with a finger tip, almost afraid to touch it. The cover was dark blue, the shade of a night sky, and across the top in white letters it said, “Visit Enchanting Verna!” The blue cover was sprinkled with white dots—stars—and in the lower left corner was a globe, the world, half surrounded by clouds. At the upper right, just under the word “Verna,” was a star larger and brighter than the others; rays shot out from it, like from a star on a Christmas card. Across the bottom of the cover it said, “Romantic Verna, where life is the way it should be.” There was a little arrow beside the legend, meaning Turn the page.
I turned, and the folder was like most travel folders inside—there were pictures and text, only these were about “Verna” instead of Paris, or Rome, or the Bahamas. And it was beautifully printed; the pictures looked real. What I mean is, you’ve seen color stereopticon pictures? Well, that’s what these were like, only better, far better. In one picture you could see dew glistening on grass, and it looked wet. In another, a tree trunk seemed to curve out of the page, in perfect detail, and it was a shock to touch it and feel smooth paper instead of the rough actuality of bark. Miniature human faces, in a third picture, seemed about to speak, the lips moist and alive, the eyeballs shining, the actual texture of skin right there on paper; and it seemed impossible, as you stared, that the people wouldn’t move and speak.
I studied a large picture spreading across the tops of two open pages. It seemed to have been taken from the top of a hill; you saw the land dropping away at your feet far down into a valley, then rising up again, way over on the other side. The slopes of both hills were covered with forest, and the color was beautiful, perfect; there were miles of green, majestic trees, and you knew as you looked that this forest was virgin, almost untouched. Curving through the floor of the valley, far below, ran a stream, blue from the sky in most places; here and there, where the current broke around massive boulders, the water was foaming white; and again it seemed that if you’d only look closely enough you’d be certain to see that stream move and shine in the sun. In clearings beside the stream there were shake-roofed cabins, some of logs, some of brick or adobe. The caption under the picture simply said, “The Colony.”
“Fun fooling around with a thing like that,” the man behind the counter murmured, nodding at the folder in my hands. “Relieves the monotony. Attractive-looking place, isn’t it?”
I could only nod dumbly, lowering my eyes to the picture again because that picture told you even more than just what you saw. I don’t know how you knew this, but you realized, staring at that forest-covered valley, that this was very much the way America once looked when it was new. And you knew this was only a part of a whole land of unspoiled, unharmed forests, where every stream ran pure; you were seeing what people, the last of them dead over a century ago, had once looked at in Kentucky and Wisconsin and the old Northwest. And you knew that if you could breathe in that air you’d feel it flow into your lungs sweeter than it’s been anywhere on earth for a hundred and fifty years.
Under that picture was another, of six or eight people on a beach—the shore of a lake, maybe, or the river in the picture above. Two children were squatting on their haunches, dabbling in the water’s edge, and in the foreground a half circle of adults were sitting, kneeling, or squatting in comfortable balance on the yellow sand. They were talking, several were smoking, and most of them held half-filled coffee cups; the sun was bright, you knew the air was balmy and that it was morning, just after breakfast. They were smiling, one woman talking, the others listening. One man had half risen from his squatting position to skip a stone out onto the surface of the water.
You knew this: that they were spending twenty minutes or so down on that beach after breakfast before going to work, and you knew they were friends and that they did this every day. You knew—I tell you, you knew—that they liked their work, all of them, whatever it was; that there was no forced hurry or pressure about it. And that—well, that’s all, I guess; you just knew that every day after breakfast these families spent a leisurely half hour sitting and talking, there in the morning sun, down on that wonderful beach.
I’d never seen anything like their faces before. They were ordinary enough in looks, the people in that picture-pleasant, more or less familiar types. Some were young, in their twenties; others were in their thirties; one man and woman seemed around fifty. But the faces of the youngest couple were completely unlined, and it occurred to me then that they had been born there, and that it was a place where no one worried or was ever afraid. The others, the older ones, there were lines in their foreheads, grooves around their mouths, but you felt that the lines were no longer deepening, that they were healed and untroubled scars. And in the faces of the oldest couple was a look of—I’d say it was a look of permanent relief. Not one of those faces bore a trace of malice; these people were happy. But even more than that, you knew they’d been happy, day after day after day for a long, long time, and that they always would be, and they knew it.
I wanted to join them. The most desperate longing roared up in me from the bottom of my soul to be there on that beach, after breakfast, with those people in the sunny morning—and I
could hardly stand it. I looked up at the man behind the counter and managed to smile. “This is—very interesting.”
“Yes.” He smiled back, then shook his head in amusement. “We’ve had customers so interested, so carried away, that they didn’t want to talk about anything else.” He laughed. “They actually wanted to know rates, details, everything.”
I nodded to show I understood and agreed with them. “And I suppose you’ve worked out a whole story to go with this?” I glanced at the folder in my hands.
“Oh, yes. What would you like to know?”
“These people,” I said softly, and touched the picture of the group on the beach. “What do they do?”
“They work; everyone does.” He took a pipe from his pocket. “They simply live their lives doing what they like. Some study. We have, according to our little story,” he added, and smiled, “a very fine library. Some of our people farm, some write, some make things with their hands. Most of them raise children, and—well, they work at whatever it is they really want to do.”
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology] Page 28
