Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  She looked delighted. "Have they been on the moon?"

  "Yep. Walked around on it."

  "That's fascinating!"

  I hesitated, then said, "Yeah. I suppose so. But not as much as I'd have thought when I was a kid reading science fiction." She looked puzzled, and I said, "It's hard to explain, Julia, but... it doesn't seem to mean anything. After the excitement of the actual trip—it was on television, if you can imagine that, Julia; we could actually see and hear the men on the moon—I almost forgot about it. Right away, too; I seldom thought about it afterward. It was unbelievably courageous of the men, and yet ... somehow the project almost seemed to lack dignity. Because it didn't have any real purpose or point." I stopped because she wasn't listening.

  As I'd talked, Julia had been looking over my book titles and presently she'd taken down a novel and begun leafing through it. Now, suddenly, she swung around to face me, and her face and neck were scarlet right down to the white collar of her blouse. "Si. Things like this"—she glanced at the open pages of the book in her hands, horrified—"are said in print?" She clapped the book shut as though the words could crawl off the page. "I would never have believed it!" She couldn't look at me.

  I had nothing to say. How explain the changes in thought over more than a lifetime? But I was smiling; the novel she'd looked at was really very mild. There were others on the shelves that might literally have made her faint.

  Disturbed, agitated, Julia had reached out and plucked another book from the shelves almost at random. She read the title aloud, hardly listening to herself, anxious to bury the subject of the horror she'd come onto. " 'A Pictorial History of World War Eye,' " she said. Then the meaning of the words came to her. "A war? World war? What does that mean, Si?" She started to open the book, and as her hand moved I was on my feet and walking quickly toward her.

  It's always astonishing to realize later how lightning-fast the mind can sometimes work, what a lengthy series of thoughts and images it can produce within a fraction of a second. It had been a long time since I'd looked through the book Julia was opening. But during two very fast steps to her side I was remembering dozens of the photographs it contained: a destroyed town, only rubble and partial walls, and in the foreground a dead horse in a ditch ... refugees on a dirt road, the frightened face of a small girl looking at the camera ... an airplane going down in flames ... a trench half filled with dead bodies in uniform, their legs wrapped in cloth puttees, the face of one of them decomposed so badly it was mostly skull, though the hair remained. And one photograph I particularly remembered in every detail: On a shelf-like projection shoved into the wall of the trench sat a bareheaded soldier, alive. His feet were ankle-deep in water at the bottom of the trench directly beside a corpse, and he was smoking a cigarette, looking out at the camera hollow-eyed, stupefied, as though he'd never smiled or ever would. These horrors, I had suddenly realized, mustn't be revealed to Julia unless she joined the world that had produced them, and—making myself smile—I took the book from her hand just before she could open its pages. "Oh, yes," I said easily, turning the book to look at the gold letters of the title on the spine, as though to confirm the title. "That happened a long time ago."

  "A world war?"

  "They called it that, Julia, because ... all the world was concerned about it. It was everyone's business, you see, and ... they soon put a stop to it. I'd almost forgotten it."

  How much sense that made to her, if any, I don't know. She said, "And what does 'World War Eye' mean?"

  "Well..." I couldn't think of anything to say but the truth. "That isn't a letter of the alphabet. It's a number, Julia, a Roman numeral."

  "World War ... one? There've been more?"

  "A second one."

  She was suspicious. "And—what was it like?"

  My mind performed its commonplace miracle again. Hardly pausing before I replied, I was able to consider the four long years of trench warfare of World War I: the battle at Verdun in which a million men had died, unrestricted submarine warfare. Then I thought of World War II and the destruction of cities by the Germans, the killing of women, old people and babies; of the fire-bombings of German cities by the Americans, creating actual hundred-mile-an-hour hurricanes of fire incinerating women, old people and babies. And of a man I have often imagined, a German designer, getting up each morning, having breakfast, going to his office, sitting at his drawing board, neatly rolling back his sleeves, and then very carefully, with detailed india-ink drawings and precise manufacturing specifications, designing false shower heads which would presently loose poison gas to kill people by the millions in what were literally factories of death. And I thought of people killed even more efficiently: instantaneous death for hundreds of thousands in the brilliant flashes of two atomic explosions over Japan. What was World War II like? Unbelievably, it was worse than World War I, and no answer or foolish lie came to mind now.

  She guessed. She knew that wars weren't called "world wars" for nothing. She looked at the thickness of the pictorial history I had taken from her; then she looked up at my face and said, "I don't want to hear about it."

  "I don't want to tell you." I put the book back in its place, and we returned to the davenport. Julia didn't sit back, though. She sat on the edge of the cushion, her hands folded—clenched together, actually—in her lap. Staring straight ahead, getting her thoughts in order, she was silent for a few moments. Then she said, "During the day I've thought about what I wanted to do. And I've thought about staying here, if it were possible to tell Aunt Ada what had happened. During part of the day, when we walked down Fifth Avenue, I thought I'd made up my mind that if we could tell Ada, I would stay." I was sitting beside Julia, and she turned to look at me, managing a little smile. "I never thought I could possibly say this to a man, but I can: Do you love me, Si?"

  "Yes."

  "And I you. Almost from the first, though I didn't know it. But Jake guessed it, didn't he? Or felt it. Now I know, too. What should I do, Si? What do you want me to do? Shall I stay here?"

  I thought that needed thinking about, then realized it didn't. I suppose Julia believed I was considering my answer as I sat looking at her face, but I wasn't. I was talking to her silently. I said, No, I won't let you stay here. Julia, we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it.

  I stopped; I wasn't going to say any of these things. The burden wasn't hers. I said, "You've been to Harlem."

  "Yes, of course."

  "Do you like it?"

  "Certainly. It's charming; I've always liked the country."

  "Have you ever walked in Central Park at night?"

  "Yes."

  "Alone?"

  "Yes; it's very peaceful."

  There were horrors in Julia's time, and I knew it. I knew that the seeds of everything I hated in my own time were already planted and sprouting in hers. But they hadn't yet flowered. In Julia's New York the streets could still fill with sleighs on a moonlit night of new snow, of strangers calling to each other, of singing and laughing. Life still had meaning and purpose in people's minds; the great emptiness hadn't begun. Now the good times to be alive seemed to be gone, Julia's probably the last of them. I said, "You
have to go back," and reached over to take her hands in mine. "Just believe me, Julia. Because I love you. You can't stay here."

  After a few moments she nodded slowly. "And you, Si—will you come back, too?"

  The elation at the very thought of it showed in my face because Julia smiled. But I had to say, "I don't know. I have some duties here first."

  "And you don't know if you could, do you? For the rest of your life."

  "I'd have to be very sure."

  "Yes, you would. For both our sakes." For several moments we looked at each other; then Julia said, "I'm going back, now, Si, tonight. Or I'll begin pleading with you to come, too. And to spend the rest of your life in another time is something you must determine alone."

  I thought so, too, and I nodded. "Can you go back alone?"

  "I think so. I couldn't have come here into a future past all imagining; you had to bring me. But I can visualize my own time, feel it, and know it is there—far better than you the first time you tried."

  Something roared up in my mind that I'd almost forgotten, it seemed so remote from this room and time. "Carmody! You can't go back, Julia! Carmody will—"

  "No, he won't." She was shaking her head. "Do you remember what I was doing when Inspector Byrnes came for us? You were downstairs in the parlor, reading and I—"

  "You were upstairs."

  "Yes; in Jake's room, Si. I'd folded his clothes and put them into his trunk. And I was wrapping his boots when I heard you call. This afternoon for no reason I can understand, I remembered those boots. I'd just picked them up when the doorbell rang, and, Si—I saw the heels. The nails formed a pattern, and the pattern was a nine-pointed star in a circle. Jake survived the fire, not Carmody. That was Jake at Carmody's home covered with bandages. And filled with hate."

  I knew it was true, and I knew what had happened. "My God, Julia; he walked out of that fire, somehow. Badly burned, yet a plan already forming in his mind. He walked straight to Carmody's, I'm certain, saw Carmody's widow, and—can you conceive of this?—they made a deal! Without Carmody she could lose the fortune, so he became Carmody. When we saw her at the Charity Ball, her husband newly dead, she'd already made the arrangement. Has anyone ever wanted money and position more than those two? They really make a pair, don't they!"

  "What are you smiling at?"

  "Was I? I didn't realize. It's not easy to explain, but ... I'm smiling because Jake is such a villain! It's the first time I've ever even used the word, but it's what he is, all right. Complete. In everything he does. He's a complete man of his times, and I guess I'm also smiling because in spite of everything I like him. Good old Jake, disguised as Carmody, down on Wall Street at last. I hope he corners the market, whatever that means."

  "Yes," Julia said, "he was cursed. I hope he finds happiness, though I am certain he will not." She didn't know what I'd meant, of course. To her there was no strangeness or comedy in the word villain; it's what Jake was, that's all. She said, "He can't harm me now; I know who he is, and when he understands that, I'm safe. So will you be ... if you come back." She stood abruptly, and walked quickly to the bedroom to change her clothes.

  I rode downtown with Julia in a cab. It was dark now; she sat back from the window, and no one but the driver saw her clothes. Half a block from our destination we got out, well away from the nearest streetlamp. I paid off the cab, then Julia and I walked quickly to the immense granite-block base of the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  In the deepest shadows I took Julia's hands in mine and stood looking at her. In her long skirt, her coat and bonnet, her muff hanging from her wrist on its loop, she looked right; she looked the way Julia ought to. I said, "I want to come back; I want to spend my life with you, but..."

  "I know. I know."

  We repeated what we'd already said, several times. I took Julia in my arms then, and held her for quite a long time. I kissed her, we looked at each other once more, then simultaneously inhaled, mouths opening to speak. We stood staring, breaths held momentarily, then smiled a little sadly; we'd said it all. Julia reached out and laid her fingers on my cheek for a moment, then shook her head quickly; she wouldn't say goodbye.

  She took my hand, and we walked a few paces out from the great granite wall of the bridge tower, then turned to look at it; now it was like an enormous stone curtain shutting out the world. She said, "The time I was born into and belong to are there, Si; far more real to me than the time I glimpsed today. My own world ... I can feel it very strongly, it's very real; can't you?" I nodded; I couldn't speak. Julia turned, kissed me very quickly, then let go my hand and walked swiftly forward at a long angle toward the corner of that enormous wall. She reached it, hesitated, looked back as though she were going to speak, but didn't. She took the final steps and was gone then, around the corner of the huge base of the tower, the sound of her steps rapidly receding.

  Silence. Then I began to walk toward the same corner. I broke into a run, fast as I could move, and was around it far quicker than Julia could have disappeared from sight. But she was gone.

  22

  This may look to you like unseemly haste—and taste," Colonel Esterhazy said to me; with a move of his hand he indicated Dr. Danziger's office. He sat behind the desk; Rube and I had come in and taken the two leather-padded metal chairs before it. Like Rube, Esterhazy was wearing cotton army pants and shirt today, without insignia but as rigidly pressed as though they were made of khaki-painted sheet metal. Rube's were neat enough but the creases didn't look welded in. I had on my blue suit. Esterhazy was saying, "But I'm here only because we're so terribly cramped for space; this was the one empty office. Someone has to head the project, and Dr. Danziger is gone." He moved a shoulder regretfully. "I wish he were sitting here instead of me."

  I didn't say anything to that. I'd glanced around the office as we walked in, and it looked about the same only neater. Danziger's photographs and bookshelf were gone and so was a carton filled with papers he'd had on the floor, though now there were half a dozen folding chairs stacked against the far end wall. The desk top was empty except for a pen stand, and I imagine the drawers had been cleared out. Behind the desk now stood a gold-fringed nylon American flag on a standard, and on the wall hung a large framed color photograph of the President.

  Rube said to Esterhazy, "The debriefing showed all-clear, as I phoned you. And believe me, that's a relief." He turned to me, smiling. "Because you were a busy fellow this trip, weren't you? Escaping the fire. Escaping ... what's his name?"

  "Inspector Byrnes."

  "Yeah. And escaping the girl, too, I suspect. Julia."

  I just smiled, and the two of them sat grinning at me for a few moments. I'd spent the morning here at the project, reeling off my list of random facts, dictating a long full report of everything I'd done on this last "trip," as we seemed to be calling them now. Everything except that Julia had come back with me. That had nothing to do with the success or failure of my mission so I just said that in the middle of the night, hiding in the arm of the Statue of Liberty, she'd remembered the nail pattern on Jake's boots. We'd known she was safe then, and at dawn I'd taken her home to 19 Gramercy Park, gotten my money, then hired a hansom up to the Dakota. I said I'd spent yesterday in my apartment sleeping.

  Rube said, "So if the debriefing shows okay after all those shenanigans, it means that the stream of past events—"

  "—is what we always insisted it was," Esterhazy cut in. " 'Twig-in-the-river' theory," he reminded me brusquely. "The stream of past events is a mighty stream indeed, far from easy to deflect casually, as ought to be obvious. It can happen by accident, as we've learned. Although the consequences were negligible. In any historical context, that is. But we have no doubt, nor did Dr. Danziger, that it could be affected by design."

  It was hard to even keep my mind on what he was saying, and when he paused I nodded and rather vaguely said, "Well, fine. Colonel, and Rube, I think I've completed my mission. How practical it is to study past events, considerin
g the risk I've demonstrated of getting involved with them, is something you people will have to judge. But right now my own affairs are piling up on me; I've got things to work out. And what I'd like now, if you're through with me"—I smiled—"is an honorable discharge."

  Neither of them answered for a moment or so. They looked at me, then at each other. Finally Esterhazy said, "Well, before we take that up, Si, there's something I'd like you to know about. You're free to resign; you've done beautifully, done all that could be expected and more. But I'm certain you'll be interested in what I want you to hear. And then maybe you won't want to resign quite yet."

  A girl opened the door; I hadn't seen her around the project before. "The others are here, Colonel."

  "Good. Send them in." Esterhazy stood up behind his desk and looked toward the door with a pleasant smile.

  Two men walked in, and I recognized them. The first was the young history professor with the big nose and big shock of thinning black hair that made him look to me anyway, like a television comic; his name was Messinger. The man behind him was Fessenden, the President's representative, around fifty, bald, with gray-brown hair combed over the shiny top of his head. They both greeted me, and Professor Messinger walked over to my chair as I stood up, to shake my hand. "Welcome home!" he said, and held up a sheet of mimeographed typescript stapled in one corner; I saw it was my dictated account of this last trip. "Terrific," he said, rattling the papers, "absolutely terrific," even sounding like a TV "personality." Fessenden gave me a formal nod, and then in imitation of Messinger decided to add a smile and waggle his copy of my account, which was a mistake; smiling cordiality wasn't really a part of his nature.

  Rube was bringing over a couple of folding chairs, opening one as he walked; with his foot he shoved his own chair to Fessenden and gave the opened folding chair to Messinger. When we were all seated in a little curve at the front of his desk, Esterhazy sat down, saying, "This is the board now, Si, except for the senator, who's shepherding a bill through Congress today and can't join us. And Professor Butts, whom you may remember: professor of biology at Chicago. He's an advisory member now, without vote, present only when his specialty requires it. The old board was unwieldy. This is far more practical. Jack, maybe you'd like to brief Si."