by Jack Finney
There across the street just outside the park stood a tall block-wide structure utterly unlike any I'd ever before seen in all New York. One look and you knew it was what Danziger had said: a magnificent survival of another time. I later came back—it was after a snowfall, as you can see—and took photographs of the building, a whole roll of them, the super even taking me up to the roof. The one at the top of the next page I took from where Rube and I stood; the building you see there is pale yellow brick handsomely trimmed in chocolate-colored stone, and as one of my later shots shows, each of its eight stories is just twice as high as the stories of the modern apartment house beside it.
It's a wonderful sight, and the roof almost instantly pulled my eyes up; it was like a miniature town up there—of gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, peaks. From roof edge to highest peak it must have been forty feet tall; acres of slanted surfaces shingled in slate, trimmed with age-greened copper, and peppered with uncountable windows, dormer and flush; square, round, and rectangular; big and small; wide, and as narrow as archers' slits. As the shot that I took on the roof shows—at the bottom of the previous page—it rose into flagpoles and ornamental stone spires; it flattened out into promenades rimmed with lacy wrought-iron fences; and everywhere it sprouted huge fireplace chimneys. All I could do was turn to Rube, shaking my head and grinning with pleasure.
He was grinning, too, as proud as though he'd built the place. "That's the way they did things in the eighties, sonny! Some of those apartments have seventeen rooms, and I mean big ones; you can actually lose your way in an apartment like that. At least one of them includes a morning room, reception room, several kitchens, I don't know how many bathrooms, and a private ballroom. The walls are fifteen niches thick; the place is a fortress. Take your time, and look it over; it's worth it."
It was. I stood staring up at it, finding more things to be delighted with: handsome balconies of carved stone under some of the big old windows, a wrought-iron balcony running clear around the seventh story, rounded columns of bay windows rising up the building's side into rooftop cupolas. Rube said, "Plenty of light in those apartments: The building's a hollow square around a courtyard with a couple of spectacular big bronze fountains."
''Well, it's great, absolutely great." I was laughing, shaking my head helplessly, it was such a fine old place. "What is it, how come it's still there?"
"It's the Dakota. Built in the early eighties when this was practically out of town. People said it was so far from anything it might as well be in the Dakotas, so that's what it was called. That's the story, anyway. I know you won't be astonished to learn that a group of progress-minded citizens was all hot to tear it down a few years ago, and replace it with one more nice new modern monster of far more apartments in the same space, low ceilings, thin walls, no ballrooms or butler's pantries, but plenty of profit, you can damn well believe, for the owners. For once the tenants had money and could fight back; a good many rich celebrities live there. They got together, bought it, and now the Dakota seems safe. Unless it's condemned to make room for a crosstown freeway right through Central Park."
"Can we get in and look around?"
"We don't have time today."
I looked up at the building again. "Must get a great view of the park from this side."
"You sure do." Rube seemed uninterested suddenly, glancing at his watch, and we turned to walk back along West Drive. Presently we walked out of the park; ahead to the west I could see the immense warehouse again, and read the faded lettering just under its roofline: BEEKEY BROTHERS, MOVING & STORAGE, 555-8811.
If I'd expected Danziger's office, as I think I did, to be luxurious and impressive, I was wrong. Just outside it the black-and-white plastic nameplate beside the door merely said E.E. DANZIGER, no title. Rube knocked, Danziger yelled to come in, Rube opened the door, gestured me in, and turned away, murmuring that he'd see me later. Seated behind his desk, Danziger was on the phone, and he gestured me to a chair beside the desk. I sat down—I'd left my hat and coat downstairs again—and looked around as well as I could without seeming too curious.
It was just an office, smaller than Rossoff's and a lot more bare. It looked unfinished really, the office of a man who had to have one but wasn't interested in it, and who spent most of his time outside it. The outer wall was simply the old brick of the warehouse covered by a long pleated drape which didn't extend quite far enough to cover it completely. There was a standard-brand carpet; a small hanging bookshelf on one wall; on another wall a photograph of a woman with her hair in a style of the thirties; on a third wall, a huge aerial photograph of Winfield, Vermont, this view different from the one I'd seen earlier. Danziger's desk was straight from the stock of an office-supplies store, and so were the two leather-padded metal chairs for visitors. On the floor in a corner stood a cardboard Duz carton filled to overflowing with a stack of mimeographed papers. On a table against the far wall something bulky lay covered by a rubberized sheet.
Danziger finished his phone conversation; it had been something or other about authorizing someone to sign vouchers. He opened his top desk drawer, took out a cigar, peeled off the cellophane, then cut the cigar exactly in half with a pair of big desk scissors, and offered one of the halves to me. I shook my head, and he put it back in the drawer, then put the other half in his mouth, unlighted. "You liked the Dakota," he said; it wasn't a question, but a statement of fact. I nodded, smiling, and Danziger smiled too. He said, "There are other essentially unchanged buildings in New York, some of them equally fine and a lot older, yet the Dakota is unique; you know why?" I shook my head. "Suppose you were to stand at a window of one of the upper apartments you just saw, and look down into the park; say at dawn when very often no cars are to be seen. All around you is a building unchanged from the day it was built, including the room you stand in and very possibly even the glass pane you look through. And this is what's unique in New York: Everything you see outside the window is also unchanged."
He was leaning over the desk top staring at me, motionless except for the half cigar which rolled slowly from one side of his mouth to the other. "Listen!" he said fiercely. "The real-estate firm that first managed the Dakota is still in business and we've microfilmed their early records. We know exactly when all the apartments facing the park have stood empty, and for how long." He sat back. "Picture one of those upper apartments standing empty for two months in the summer of 1894. As it did. Picture our arranging—as we are—to sublet that very apartment for those identical months during the coming summer. And now understand me. If Albert Einstein is right once again—as he is—then hard as it may be to comprehend, the summer of 1894 still exists. That silent empty apartment exists back in that summer precisely as it exists in the summer that is coming. Unaltered and unchanged, identical in each, and existing in each. I believe it may be possible this summer, just barely possible, you understand, for a man to walk out of that unchanged apartment and into that other summer." He sat back in his chair, his eyes on mine, the cigar bobbing slightly as he chewed it.
After a long moment I said, "Just like that?"
"Oh, no!" He shot forward again, leaning across the desk toward me. "Not just like that by a long shot," he said, and suddenly smiled at me. "The uncountable millions of invisible threads that exist in here, Si"—he touched his forehead—"would bind him to this summer, no matter how unaltered the apartment around him." He sat back in his chair, looking at me, still smiling a little. Then he said very softly and matter-of-factly, "But I would say this project began, Si, on the clay it occurred to me that just possibly there is a way to dissolve those threads."
I understood; I knew the purpose of the project. I'd understood it for some time, of course, but now it had been put into words. For several seconds I sat nodding slowly, Danziger waiting for me to say something. Finally I did. "Why? Why do you want to?"
He slouched back in his chair, one long arm hooked over its back, and shrugged a shoulder. "Why did the Wrights want to build an airplane?
To create jobs for stewardesses? Or give us a way to bomb Vietnam? No, I think all they really had in mind was to see if they could. I think it's why the Russki scientists shot the first satellite into orbit, no matter what supposed purposes they advanced. For no other real reason than to see if they could, like kids blasting a firecracker under a tin can to see if it'll really go up. And I think it was reason enough. For their scientists and ours. Impressive purposes were invented later to justify the horrible expense of these toys, but the first tries were just for the hell of it, boy, and that's our reason, too."
It was okay with me. I said, "Fine, but why Win-field, Vermont, in 1926? Or Paris of 1451? Or the Dakota apartments in 1894?"
"The places aren't important to us." He took the half cigar from his mouth, looked at it distastefully, and put it back. "And neither are the times. They're nothing but targets of opportunity. We're not especially interested in the Crow Indians. Of 1850 or any other time. But as it happens, there are some thousands of federally owned acres of Montana land still virtually untouched, unchanged from the 1850's. For four or five days at most the Department of Agriculture will undertake to close the road through it—no cars or Greyhound buses—and to keep the jets out. They can also provide a herd of approximately a thousand buffalo. If we could have the area for a month we wouldn't need the simulation down on the Big Floor. As it is, our man will get used to it here, and—we hope—be ready to make the most of the few days we'll have in the real location.
"As for Winfield—" he nodded toward the wall photograph. "It's just a very small town in an area of played-out farmland, virtually abandoned when we got it. For forty years the town was slowly dying, gradually losing population. For the last thirty of those years hardly anyone wasted money modernizing and trying to fight the inevitable. It's an old story in parts of New England; the ghost towns aren't all in the West. This one was more isolated than most, so we bought it through another agency simply as a target of opportunity. Supposedly to build a dam on its site."
Danziger grinned. "We've closed off the road into it, and now we're restoring it; God, it's fun! The reverse, for a change, of running a freeway through the heart of a fine old town or replacing a lovely old place with a windowless monstrosity; it would drive the destroyer mentalities insane with frustration, but our people are having a wonderful time." He sat smiling like a sailor talking about his all-time-best shore leave.
"They're ripping out all the neon, they'll tear out every dial phone, unscrew every frosted light bulb. We've carted out most of the electrical appliances already: power lawn mowers and the like. We're removing every scrap of plastic, restoring the buildings, and tearing down the few new ones. We're even removing the paving from certain streets, turning them back into lovely dirt roads. When we're finished, the bakery will be ready with string and white paper to wrap fresh-baked bread in. There'll be little water sprays in Gelardi's store to keep the fresh vegetables cool. The fire engine will be horse-drawn, all automobiles the right kind, and the newspaper will begin turning out daily duplicates of those it published in 1926. We're working from an extensive study and collation of photographs and town records, and when we're finished I think forgotten little Winfield will once more be the way it was in 1926; now what do you think of that?"
I was smiling with him. "Sounds impressive. And expensive."
"Not at all." Danziger shook his head firmly. "It will cost, all told, only a little over three million dollars, less than the cost of two hours of war, and a better buy. All this for the benefit of one man; you saw him this morning out on the Big Floor."
"The man on the porch of the little frame house."
"Yes; it's a duplicate of one in Winfield. In it, as well as he can, John is doing his level best to work himself into the mood of living in Winfield, Vermont, in the year 1926. Then, when he's ready and when we are, for about ten days—the longest period that is practical—some two hundred actors and extras will begin walking the restored streets of Winfield, driving the old cars, sitting out on the porches if it's warm enough. They'll be told it has to do with an experimental movie technique; hidden cameras catching their impromptu but authentic actions, which must be maintained at all times when outdoors. Among the two hundred—all those having actual dealings with John—will be some twenty-odd people from the project. We hope John will be mentally ready to make the most of those brief ten days." Chewing his cigar stump, the old man sat staring across his office at the huge photograph on the wall.
Then he looked at me again. "And that's the purpose of all our constructions down on the Big Floor. They're preparatory: temporary substitutes for the real sites because they're either not available yet or not available for a long enough time. There aren't many thousand-year-old buildings anywhere, for example, but one of them is Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The actual site will be given to us for less than five hours, between midnight and dawn of one night only. Electricity and gas to be turned off on the Île de Cite and along the Right and Left banks within eye range of the cathedral. And we'll be allowed to stage-set the immediate area. It's the best we could arrange—through the State Department—with the French government. They think it's being done for a movie. We even prepared a full shooting script to show them; realistically bad, which I expect convinced them. No one in the project has a great deal of hope for this particular attempt; there will be only a matter of hours in which to make it, not nearly enough, I'm afraid. And it's reaching a long way back; could anyone really achieve a sense of what it was like? I must doubt it, but still I have hope. We do the best we can, that's all, with the sites we discover."
Danziger stood, and beckoning me to follow, he walked to the covered table. "And now, except for countless details, you know what this project is. I've saved the best for last: your assignment."
He pulled the dust cover from the table and exposed a model, three-dimensional and beautifully made. From a body of white-capped green water a wooded island rose to a peak. Facing the island across a strait, a slanted cliff rose from a boulder-strewn beach. Above the rock face of the cliff grew timber, and among the trees stood a white house with a railed veranda.
"We're building this down on the Big Floor." Danziger touched the peak of the wooded island. "This is Angel Island in San Francisco Bay; it is state and federally owned. Except for a long-abandoned immigration station and an abandoned Nike site, both hidden by trees, the island looks now as it looked at the turn of the century when this house"—he touched its tiny roof—"was new. It was the first house built here, and it took the best view, nearest the water. The actual house still exists, and except from its rear windows you can't see the newer houses around it. And Angel Island blocks off the Bay bridges. So the site is as it was except for modern shipping and power boats passing through the strait. For two full days and three nights we can have the strait as it was, including two cargo sailing-ships and some smaller ones." Danziger smiled at me and put a big heavy hand on my shoulder. "San Francisco has always been a charming place to visit. But they say the city that was lost in the earthquake and fire of 1906 was particularly lovely, nothing like it on earth anymore. And that, Si—San Francisco in 1901—is your assignment."
No one likes anticlimax: There was a kind of innocent drama about this moment that I liked, and I hated to spoil it. But I had to, and I shook my head, frowning. "No. If I have a choice, Dr. Danziger, then not San Francisco. I want to be the man who tries in New York."
"New York?" He moved one shoulder in a puzzled shrug. "Well, I wouldn't myself, but if you like, you may. I thought I was offering you something exceptional, but—"
I had to interrupt, embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Dr. Danziger, but I don't mean the New York of 1894."
He wasn't smiling now; he stood staring intently into my eyes, wondering if he hadn't made a big mistake about me. "Oh?" he said softly. "When?"
"In January—I don't remember the date, but I'll find out—of the year 1882."
Before I'd even finished he was shaking his head no. "Wh
y?"
I felt foolish saying it. "To ... watch a man mail a letter."
"Just watch? That's all?" he said curiously, and I nodded. He turned abruptly, walked to the side of his desk, picked up the phone, dialed two digits, and stood waiting. "Fran? Check our records on the Dakota; they're on film. For parkside vacancies in January 1882."
We waited. I put in the time studying the model on the table, walking around it, stooping to squint across it. Then Danziger picked up a pen, scribbled rapidly on a scratch pad, said, "Thank you, Fran," and hung up. He ripped the sheet from the pad, turned to me, and his voice was disappointed. "I'm sorry to say there are two vacancies in January of 1882. One on the second floor, which is no good. But the other is on the seventh floor and runs for the entire month, from the first of the year on into February. Frankly, I'd hoped there would be none, and that your purpose would therefore be impossible, ending the matter. Si, there can be no private purposes in this project. This is a deadly serious venture, and that's not what it's for. So maybe you'd better tell me what you have in mind."
"I want to. But I don't want to just tell you, sir, I want to show you. In the morning. Because if you actually see what I'm talking about, I think you may agree."
