Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  Without stopping we walked over an empty area roughly rectangular in shape, one end a little wider than the other. Far below two men on hands and knees were marking off the area with strips of cloth tape and with colored chalk. "I don't quite remember what's going in here," Rube said, "but I think it will be a field hospital of the AEF near Vimy Ridge, France, 1918."

  We looked down at a section of a snow-covered North Dakota farm in the dead of winter of 1924. The air over it was sharply cold; within half a minute we were shivering. We stood over a Denver street corner of 1901; it included a cobbled street with streetcar tracks, and a little grocery store with a tattered awning, into which two overalled men were wheeling supplies. Leaning on the rail beside me Rube murmured, ''Reconstructed from seventy-odd photographs and snapshots, including one magnificently clear stereoscope view. Together with Lord knows how many present-day, on-the-site measurements. We're not finished yet; they're stocking the store now, everything absolutely authentic to the time. When it's done, it'll be the way it was, you can be certain of that." He glanced at his watch. "There are a few others, but it's time to meet Danziger now." We turned to walk back, Rube just behind me. "And our New York site doesn't need to be duplicated; we'll catch that after lunch. You hungry? Confused? Tired and irritable?"

  I said, "Yeah, and my feet hurt."

  4

  We ate in a small cafeteria on the sixth floor, a windowless fluorescent-lighted room tiled in pale blue and yellow and not very much larger than a big living room. Danziger was already waiting, seated alone at a table. As we picked up trays he waved to us; on the table before him stood a piece of apple pie and a bowl of soup covered with a saucer to keep it warm. Rube and I slid our trays along the chromed rails. I took a glass of iced tea, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from a stack of them already made up and wrapped; Rube had Swiss steak and mixed vegetables, served up by a nice-looking girl. There was no cashier at the end of the rails, no charge, and Rube picked up his tray, said he'd see me later, and walked over to join a man and a woman just starting to eat. I carried my tray to Dr. Danziger's table, looking the place over as I walked. There were only seven or eight people besides us, with room for about a dozen more, and as I stood unloading my tray after speaking to Danziger, he guessed what I was thinking and smiled.

  He said, "Yes, it's a small project. Maybe the smallest of any importance in the history of modern government, a pleasing thought. We have only about fifty people who are fully involved; eventually you'll meet most of them. We can and do occasionally draw on the services and resources of various government branches. But we do it in a way that doesn't suggest what we're up to or arouse questions." He lifted the saucer from his bowl of soup. "No chocolate pie today, damn it."

  He picked up his spoon and sat watching me unwrap the sandwich I didn't really want. I was too tense to feel like eating; I'd have liked a drink. He said, "We maintain secrecy not by stamping things 'Classified' and wearing lapel badges but through inconspicuous-ness. The President, of course, knows what we're doing, though I'm not sure he thinks we do. Or that he even remembers us. Unavoidably we're known to at least two Cabinet members, several members of the Senate, the House, the Pentagon. I could wish that somehow even that weren't necessary but of course they're the people who get us our funds. Actually I can't complain; I make my reports, they're accepted, and they haven't really bothered us."

  I made some sort of reply. The couple eating with Rube across the room were the girl I'd seen practicing the Charleston and a young guy about the same age. Danziger saw me looking at them, and said, "Two more of the lucky ones: Ursula Dahnke and Franklin Miller. She was a high-school mathematics teacher in Eagle River, Wisconsin; he managed a Safeway store in Bakersfield, California. She's for the North Dakota farm, he's for Vimy Ridge; you probably saw him bayonet practicing this morning. I'll introduce you next time, but right now: How much do you know about Albert Einstein?"

  "Well, he wore a button sweater, had bushy hair, and was terrible at arithmetic."

  "Very good. There are only a few other things to say after that. Did you know that years ago Einstein theorized that light has weight? Now, that's about as silly a notion as a man could have formed. Not another human being in the world thought that or ever had; it contradicts every feeling we have about light." Danziger sat watching me for a moment; I was interested, and tried to look it. "But there was a way to test that theory. During eclipses of the sun, astronomers began observing that light passing it bent in toward it. Pulled by the sun's gravity, you see. Inescapably, that meant that light has weight: Albert Einstein was right, and he was off and running."

  Danziger stopped for several spoonfuls of soup. My sandwich, I'd found, was pretty good: plenty of butter, and the cheese actually had some taste; I was hungry now. Danziger put down his spoon, touched his mouth with his napkin, and said, "Time passed. That astonishing mind continued to work. And Einstein announced that E equals MC squared. And, God forgive us, two Japanese cities disappeared in the blink of an eye and proved he was right again.

  "I could go on; the list of Einstein's discoveries is a considerable one. But I'll skip to this: Presently he said that our ideas about time are largely mistaken. And I don't doubt for an instant that he was right once more. Because one of his final contributions not too long before he died was to prove that all his theories are unified. They're not separate but interconnected, each depending upon and confirming the others; they largely explain how the universe works, and it doesn't work as we'd thought."

  He began peeling the red cellophane strip from the little package of crackers that came with his soup, looking at me, waiting. I said, "I've read a little on what he said about time, but I can't say I really know what he meant."

  "He meant that we're mistaken in our conception of what the past, present and future really are. We think the past is gone, the future hasn't yet happened, and that only the present exists. Because the present is all we can see."

  "Well, if you pinned me down, I'd have to admit that that's how it seems to me."

  He smiled. "Of course. To me, too. It's only natural. As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there."

  "Did he mean that literally, though? Or did he mean—"

  "He always meant exactly what he said. When he said light has weight, he meant that the sunlight lying on a field of wheat actually weighs several tons. And now we know—it's been measured—that it really does. He meant that the tremendous energy theoretically binding atoms together could really be released in one unimaginable burst. As it really can, a fact that has changed the course of the human race. He also meant precisely what he said about time: that the past, back there around the curves and bends, really exists. It is actually there." For maybe a dozen seconds Danziger was silent, his fingers playing with the little red cellophane strip. Then he looked up and said simply, "I am a theoretical physicist on leave here from Harvard University. And my own tiny extension of Einstein's giant theory is ... that a man ought somehow to be able to step out of that boat onto the shore. And walk back to one of the bends behind us."

  I was struggling to keep a thought from showing in my eyes: that this might be an intelligently, plausibly, mildly deluded old man who'd persuaded a lot of people in New York and Washington to join him in constructing a warehouse full of fantasies. Could it possibly be that I was the only one who'd guessed? Maybe not; this morning Rossoff had made a joke—an uneasy one?—about my joining a booby hatch. I nodded thoughtfully. "Walk back how?"

  Danziger had a little soup left, and now he finished it, tipping his bowl to get the last of it, and I finished my sandwich. Then he raised his head, his eyes looked directly into mine, and I looked back into his and knew that Danziger wasn't crazy. He was eccentric, very possibly mistaken, but he was sane, and I was suddenly glad I was here. He said, "What day is this?"
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  "Thursday."

  "What date?"

  "The ... twenty-sixth, isn't it?"

  "You tell me."

  "The twenty-sixth."

  "What month?"

  "November."

  "And year?"

  I told him; I was smiling a little now.

  "How do you know?"

  Waiting for a reply to form itself in my mind, I sat staring across the table at Danziger's intent, bald-headed face; then I shrugged. "I don't know what you want me to say."

  "Then I'll answer for you. You know the year, the day and the month, for literally millions of reasons: because the blanket you woke up under this morning may have been at least partly synthetic; because there is probably a box in your apartment with a switch; turn that switch, and the faces of living human beings will appear on a glass screen in the face of that box and speak nonsense to you. Because red and green lights signaled when you might cross a street on your way here this morning; and because the soles of the shoes you walked in are a synthetic that will outlast leather.

  "Because the fire engine that passed you sounded a hooter, not a siren; because the teen-aged children you saw were dressed as they were; and because the Negro you walked by eyed you warily, as you did him, each of you trying to conceal it. Because the front page of the Times looked precisely as it did this morning and as it never will again or ever has before. And because millions and millions and millions of still other such facts will confront you all day long.

  "Most of them are possible only in this century, many only in the latter half of it. Some are possible only this decade, some only this year, others only this month, and a few only on this particular day. Si, you are surrounded by literally countless facts that bind you to this century ... year ... month ... day ... and moment, like ten billion invisible threads."

  He picked up his fork to cut into his pie, but instead he raised it to touch his forehead with the handle. "And in here there are millions more of those invisible threads. Your knowledge, for example, of who is President at this moment of history. That Frank Sinatra could now be a grandfather. That buffalo no longer roam the prairie, and that Kaiser Wilhelm isn't generally considered too much of a threat any more. That our coins are now made of copper, not silver. That Ernest Hemingway is dead, everything is turning to plastic, and that things don't go one bit better with Coke. The list is endless, all of it a part of your own consciousness and of the common consciousness. And it binds you as it binds us all to the day and to the very moment when precisely that list and only that list is possible. You never escape it, and I'll show you why." Danziger crushed his paper napkin and set it on the edge of his plate. "Finished? Want anything more?"

  "No, that was fine. Thank you."

  "Pretty frugal lunch but good for you. So they say. Let's go up on the roof. I'll take my pie along."

  Outside, at the end of a short corridor, we climbed an enclosed flight of concrete fire stairs to a door that opened onto the roof. The morning rain had stopped, the sky was nearly clear again except for horizon clouds, and several girls and men were sitting out there in canvas chairs, their faces lifted to the sun. At the sound of our feet on the gravel as we stepped out onto the roof, they turned and spoke, and Danziger smiled and flicked his hand in a wave. The rooftop was immense; a city block square of tar and gravel, ordinary enough except for scores of new skylights set into it, and a forest of stacks and vents. Ducking under rusting guy wires attached to the taller stacks, walking around an occasional puddle, we crossed to a glob of noon shade around the base of the wooden water tower. Danziger cut into his pie, and I stood looking around.

  Far to the south and east, I could see the outsize bulk of the Pan Am Building overshadowing and dwarfing the entire area around Grand Central Station. Beyond it I saw the dull-gray tip of the Chrysler Building, and to the right of that and farther south the Empire State Building. After that, there was only a nearly solid wall of mist already stained yellow with industrial smoke. To the west, only a block or so away, lay the Hudson River looking like the opaque gray sewer that it is. On its other shore rose the cliffs of New Jersey. To the east I saw a between-buildings sliver of Central Park.

  Danziger gestured at the invisible horizons with his fork and said, "There lies what? New York? And the world beyond it? Yes, you can say that, of course; the New York and world of the moment. But you can equally well say that there lies November twenty-sixth. Out there lies the day you walked through this morning; it is filled with the inescapable facts that make it today. It will be almost identical tomorrow, very likely, but not quite. In some households things will have worn out, used today for the last time. An old dish will have finally broken, a hair or two come out gray at the roots, the first flick of a new illness begun. Some people alive today will be dead. Some scattered buildings will be a little closer to completion. Or destruction. And what will lie out there then, equally inescapably, will be a little different New York and world and therefore a little different day." Danziger began walking forward toward an edge of the roof, cutting off a bite of pie as he walked. "Pretty good pie. You should have had some. I made certain we got a damn good cook."

  It was nice up here: As we walked, the sun, deflected up from the rooftop, felt good on the face. We stopped at the edge of the roof and leaned on the waist-high extension of the building wall, and again Danziger gestured at the city. "The degree of change each day is usually too slight to perceive much difference. Yet those tiny daily changes have brought us from a time when what you'd have seen down there instead of traffic lights and hooting fire engines, was farmland, treetops, and streams; cows at pasture, men in tricornered hats; and British sailing ships anchored in a clear-running, tree-shaded East River. It was out there once, Si. Can you see it?"

  I tried. I stared out at the uncountable thousands of windows in the sooty sides of hundreds of buildings, and down at the streets nearly solid with car tops. I tried to turn it back into a rural scene, imagining a man down there with buckles on his shoes and wearing a pigtailed white wig, walking along a dusty country road called the broad way. It was impossible.

  "Can't do it, can you? Of course not. You can see yesterday; most of it is still left. And there's plenty of 1965, '62, '58. There's even a good deal left of nineteen hundred. And in spite of all the indistinguishable glass boxes and of monstrosities like the Pan Am Building and other crimes against nature and the people"—he waggled a hand before his face as though erasing them from sight—"there are fragments of still earlier days. Single buildings. Sometimes several together. And once you get away from midtown, there are entire city blocks that have been where they still stand for fifty, seventy, even eighty and ninety years. There are scattered places a century or more old, and a very few which actually knew the presence of Washington." Rube was up here now, I saw, wearing a felt hat and a light topcoat, deferentially waiting a few token paces out of earshot. "Those places are fragments still remaining, Si"—Danziger's fork swept the horizon once more—"of days which once lay out there as real as the day lying out there now: still-surviving fragments of a clear April morning of 1871, a gray winter afternoon of 1840, a rainy dawn of 1793." He glanced at Rube from the corner of his eye, then looked back to me. "One of those survivals, in my opinion, is close to being a kind of miracle. Have you ever seen the Dakota?"

  "The what?"

  He nodded. "If you'd ever seen it, you'd remember that name. Rube!" Rube stepped smartly forward, the alert lieutenant responding to the colonel's call. "Show Si the Dakota, will you, please?"

  Outside the big warehouse, Rube and I walked east to Central Park; I'd picked up my hat and coat in the little ground-level office. In the park we turned onto West Drive, which is the street just inside the western boundary of the park. We walked along under the trees; a few still had their leaves, clean and greener now after the morning's rain, and Rube said, looking around us, "This park itself is something of a miracle of survival, too. Right here in the heart of what must be the world's most cha
ngeable city are, not just acres, but several square miles that have been preserved practically unchanged for decades. Lay a Central Park map of the early eighteen eighties beside a map of today, and there on both maps are all the old names and places: the reservoir, the lake, North Meadow, the Green, the pool, Harlem Mere, the obelisk. We've photocopied some of the old maps to precisely the size of a modern one, then superimposed one over the other between glass sheets, and shot a good strong light through them. Allowing for small mapmakers' errors, they've coincided, the sizes and shapes of the things in the park unchanged through the years. Si, the very curve of this road, and nearly all the roads and even the footpaths, are unaltered."

  I didn't doubt it; off to our left, the low boundary wall of the park was not quick-poured concrete but old carefully mortised cut-stone, and the very look of the park, of its bridges and even its trees, is old. "Details are changed, of course," Rube was saying. "The kinds of benches, trash baskets, and painted signs, the way the paths and roads are surfaced. But the old photographs all show that except for automobiles on the roadways there is no difference you can see from, say, six or seven stories up." Rube must have timed what he was saying, or maybe it was past experience at this, because now as we passed under a final tree beside the walk, rounding the curve that led off the West Drive and onto the Seventy-second Street exit from the park, he lifted an arm to point ahead. As we walked out from under the branches of the tree he said, "From an upper apartment of that building, for example," and then I saw it and stopped dead in my tracks.