Time Travel Omnibus, page 495
Wild hope surged up in Chandrill.
No. The ship will never fly again, so you cannot leave this world on it nor could you even reach the poles. But with the engine whole . . .
What had the alien meant?
“A chance for your people . . .” the alien had said. What chance!
Silently, and moving with incredible speed in spite of his wounded leg, Minnatose tore across the space which separated the sky craft and the alien. He had the cane knife at the ready as he tore through the briars in front of where the alien lay. Chandrill was dimly aware of Sinoon burying her face in her arms. It was impossible for him to know if Minnatose realised before he made his dive that it was not Chandrill he was tackling.
Chandrill watched his cousin crash down through the briars onto the alien and there was a sudden silent upheaval as the two bodies met. The alien seemed to enfold Minnatose and it became horribly apparent that it possessed more than four limbs, more than six, and all of them in the white garment whose purpose Chandrill was beginning faintly to understand.
The struggle was short and sharp. Chandrill saw fleetingly the cane knife raised in Minnatose’s hand then there was a loud hissing explosion. A cloud of the white mist which had been inside the hull of the ship stood out around the fighters—and the contest was over. All movement ceased in the tangled mass and the cloud was ripped away by the wind bringing the stench of ammonia to Chandrill’s nostrils.
He pulled Sinoon to her feet and ran with her towards the egg out of the way of the gas and brought her round to the engine end. She sat down wordlessly when he told her to. Chandrill climbed up onto the metal of the ship and looked at the engine.
What had the alien meant?
On top of the squat casing was a long graduated slot with a knob at one end of it which looked as though it was intended to be pulled along. Chandrill moved it a little and nothing happened so he moved it back to its original position. He stared hopelessly around the tangle of wreckage. What was the use of the ruined hulk if it would never fly again? The certainty of imminent death bore down on him, worse this time because it had been preceded by hope of life.
“A chance for your people . . .” the alien had said. What chance? Chandrill began to think back to all that the alien had told him about the engine. First, that it was whole . . . The concept that the alien had projected when it meant “engine” was very complex.—He began to examine the fast-fading mental symbol that had been imprinted on his brain. The word “radioactive” was strongly connected with it. Chandrill had a faint understanding of what that meant for there were caves in several parts of the foothills which always shone with a faint radiance.
Suddenly he understood the engine a little. He pushed the knob far up the slot to the very end of its run and depressed two buttons above it. This time when he moved the knob only a fraction of an inch the scattered snow and ice behind the egg hissed and melted. There was a faintly luminous beam reaching out from the engine to the hill where the steam was rising. And this had happened when he had moved the knob only a hundredth of its full distance.
This tremendous energy was made available by moving the tiny knob and Chandrill knew that it would last a long, long time. This was the power which could hurl the egg to the stars but which now spent itself in heat because the converter which changed that power to lift was destroyed. But the power would always be there, and with the engine mounted on a hilltop it could spread its heat for miles. It would be a huge eternal hearth for the tribes to gather around and settle. A hearth that would be warm all through the long night.
With a stationary culture not drained of time and energy by the necessity to keep moving his people could begin to do something. Then the tribes would begin their real destiny—one with a future.
Chandrill jumped down onto the ground and smiled as he saw Sinoon standing near the boulder off to one side. She had had a bad time recently and it would take a lot of work to get her back to normal, but she should be all right.
“Come on, sleepy,” he called out to her. “There’s work to be started. By the time we get all the way back to the Pass, spread this news and get them out here with all their food and sleds for building you’ll really be tired.” Chandrill walked over to Sinoon. He could not help noticing as he went that the hill with its natural shelter would be a pretty good site for the first town that his world had seen in a long, long time.
SECOND CHANCE
Jack Finney
I can’t tell you, I know, how I got to a time and place no one else in the world even remembers. But maybe I can tell you how I felt the morning I stood in an old barn off the county road, staring down at what was to take me there.
I paid out seventy-five dollars I’d worked hard for after classes last semester—I’m a senior at Poynt College in Hylesburg, Illinois, my home town—and the middle-aged farmer took it silently, watching me shrewdly, knowing I must be out of my mind. Then I stood looking down at the smashed, rusty, rat-gnawed, dust-covered, old wreck of an automobile lying on the wood floor where it had been hauled and dumped thirty-three years before—and that now belonged to me. And if you can remember the moment, whenever it was, when you finally got something you wanted so badly you dreamed about it—then maybe I’ve told you how I felt staring at the dusty mass of junk that was a genuine Jordan Playboy.
You’ve never heard of a Jordan Playboy, if you’re younger than forty, unless you’re like I am; one of those people who’d rather own a 1926 Mercer convertible sedan, or a 1931 Packard touring car, or a ’24 Wills Sainte Claire, or a ’31 air-cooled Franklin convertible—or a Jordan Playboy—then the newest, two-toned, ’56 model made; I was actually half sick with excitement.
And the excitement lasted; it took me four months to restore that car, and that’s fast. I went to classes till school ended for the summer, then I worked, clerking at J. C. Penney’s; and I had dates, saw an occasional movie, ate and slept. But all I really did—all that counted—was work on that car; from six to eight every morning, for half an hour at lunchtime, and from the moment I got home, most nights, till I stumbled to bed, worn out.
My folks live in the big old house my dad was born in; there’s a barn off at the back of the lot, and I’ve got a chain hoist in there, a workbench, and a full set of mechanic’s tools. I built hot rods there for three years, one after another; those charcoal-black mongrels with the rear ends up in the air. But I’m through with hot rods; I’ll leave those to the high-school set. I’m twenty years old now, and I’ve been living for the day when I could soak loose the body bolts with liniment, hoist the body aside, and start restoring my own classic. That’s what they’re called; those certain models of certain cars of certain years which have something that’s lasted, something today’s cars don’t have for us, and something worth bringing back.
But you don’t restore a classic by throwing in a new motor, hammering out the dents, replacing missing parts with anything handy, and painting it chartreuse. “Restore” means what it says, or ought to. My Jordan had been struck by a train, the man who sold it to me said—just grazed, but that was enough to flip it over, tumbling it across a field, and the thing was a wreck; the people in it were killed. So the right rear wheel and the spare were hopeless wads of wire spokes and twisted rims, and the body was caved in, with the metal actually split in places. The motor was a mess, though the block was sound. The upholstery was rat-gnawed, and almost gone. All the nickel plating was rusted and flaking off. And exterior parts were gone; nothing but screw holes to show they’d been there. But three of the wheels were intact, or almost, and none of the body was missing.
What you do is write letters, advertise in the magazines people like me read, ask around, prowl garages, junk heaps and barns, and you trade, and you bargain, and one way or another get together the parts you need. I traded a Winton name plate and hub caps, plus a Saxon hood, to a man in Wichita, Kansas, for two Playboy wheels, and they arrived crated in a wooden box—rusty, and some of the spokes bent and loose, but I could fix that. I bought my Jordan running-board mats and spare-wheel mount from a man in New Jersey. I bought two valve pushrods, and had the rest precision-made precisely like the others. And—well, I restored that car, that’s all.
The body shell, every dent and bump gone, every tear welded and burnished down, I painted a deep green, precisely matching what was left of the old paint before I sanded it off. Door handles, windshield rim, and every other nickel-plated part, were restored, re-nickeled, and replaced. I wrote eleven letters to leather supply houses all over the country, enclosing sample swatches of the cracked old upholstery before I found a place that could match it. Then I paid a hundred and twelve dollars to have my Playboy reupholstered, supplying old photographs to show just how it should be done. And at eight ten one Saturday evening in July, I finally finished; my last missing part, a Jordan radiator cap, for which I’d traded a Duesenberg floor mat, had come from the nickel plater’s that afternoon. Just for the fun of it, I put the old plates back on then; Illinois license 11,206, for 1923. And even the original ignition key, in its old leather case—oiled and worked supple again—was back where I’d found it, and now I switched it on, advanced the throttle and spark, got out with the crank, and started it up. And thirty-three years after it had bounced, rolled and crashed off a grade crossing, that Jordan Playboy was alive again.
I had a date, and knew I ought to get dressed; I was wearing stained dungarees and my dad’s navy blue, high-necked old sweater. I didn’t have any money with me; you lose it out of your pockets, working on a car. I was even out of cigarettes. But I couldn’t wait, I had to drive that car, and I just washed up at the old sink in the barn, then started down the cinder driveway in that beautiful car, feeling wonderful. It wouldn’t matter how I was dressed anyway, driving around in the Playboy tonight.
My mother waved at me tolerantly from a living room window, and called out to be careful, and I nodded; then I was out in the street, cruising along, and I wish you could have seen me—seen it, I mean. I don’t care whether you’ve ever given a thought to the wonderful old cars or not, you’d have seen why it was worth all I’d done. Draw yourself a mental picture of a simple, straight-lined, two-seater, open automobile with four big wire wheels fully exposed, and its spare on the back in plain sight; don’t put in a line that doesn’t belong there, and have a purpose. Make the two doors absolutely square; what other shape should a door be? Make the hood perfectly rounded, louvered at the sides because the motor needs that ventilation. But don’t add a single unnecessary curve, jiggle, squiggle, or porthole to that car—and picture the radiator, nothing concealing it and pretending it doesn’t exist. And now see that Playboy as I did cruising along, the late sun slanting down through the big old trees along the street, glancing off the bright nickel so that it hurt your eyes, the green of the body glowing like a jewel. It was beautiful, I tell you it was beautiful, and you’d think everyone would see that.
But they didn’t. On Main Street, I stopped at a light, and a guy slid up beside me in a great big, shining, new ’57 car half as long as a football field. He sat there, the top of the door up to his shoulders, his eyes almost level with the bottom of his windshield, looking as much in proportion to his car as a two-year-old in his father’s overcoat; he sat there in a car with a pattern of chrome copied directly from an Oriental rug, and with a trunk sticking out past his back wheels you could have landed a helicopter on; he sat there for a moment, then turned, looked out, and smiled at my car!
And when I turned to look at him, eyes cold, he had the nerve to smile at me, as though I were supposed to nod and grin and agree that any car not made day before yesterday was an automatic side-splitting riot. I just looked away, and when the light changed, he thought he’d show me just how sick his big four-thousand-dollar job could make my pitiful old antique look. The light clicked, and his foot was on the gas, his automatic transmission taking hold, and he’d already started to grin. But I started when he did, feeding the gas in firm and gentle, and we held even till I shot into second faster than any automatic transmission yet invented can do it, and I drew right past him, and when I looked back it was me who was grinning. But still, at the next light, every pedestrian crossing in front of my car treated me to a tolerant understanding smile, and when the light changed, I swung off Main.
That was one thing that happened; the second was that my date wouldn’t go out with me. I guess I shouldn’t blame her. First she saw how I was dressed, which didn’t help me with her. Then I showed her the Jordan at the curb, and she nodded, not even slightly interested, and said it was very nice; which didn’t help her with me. And then—well, she’s a good-looking girl, Naomi Weygand, and while she didn’t exactly put it in these words, she let me know she meant to be seen tonight, preferably on a dance floor, and not waste her youth and beauty riding around in some old antique. And when I told her I was going out in the Jordan tonight, and if she wanted to come along, fine, and if she didn’t—well, she didn’t. And eight seconds later she was opening her front door again, while I scorched rubber pulling away from the curb.
I felt the way you would have by then, and I wanted to get out of town and alone somewhere, and I shoved it into second, gunning the car, heading for the old Cressville road. It used to be the only road to Cressville, a two-lane paved highway just barely wide enough for cars to pass. But there’s been a new highway for fifteen years; four lanes, and straight as a ruler except for two long curves you can do ninety on, and you can make the seven miles to Cressville in five minutes or less.
But it’s a dozen winding miles on the old road, and half a mile of it, near Cressville, was flooded out once, and the concrete is broken and full of gaps; you have to drive it in low. So nobody uses the old road nowadays, except for four or five farm families who live along it.
When I swung onto the old road—there are a lot of big old trees all along it—I began to feel better. And I just ambled along, no faster than thirty, maybe, clear up to the broken stretch before I turned back toward Hylesburg, and it was wonderful. I’m not a sports-car man myself, but they’ve got something when they talk about getting close to the road and into the outdoors again—the way driving used to be before people shut themselves behind great sheets of glass and metal, and began rushing along super-highways, their eyes on the white line. I had the windshield folded down flat against the hood, and the summer air streamed over my face and through my hair, and I could see the road just beside and under me flowing past so close I could have touched it. The air was alive with the heavy fragrances of summer darkness, and the rich nostalgic sounds of summer insects, and I wasn’t even thinking, but just living and enjoying it.
One of the old Playboy advertisements, famous in their day, calls the Jordan “this brawny, graceful thing,” and says, “It revels along with the wandering wind and roars like a Caproni biplane. It’s a car for a man’s man—that’s certain. Or for a girl who loves the out of doors.” Rich prose for these days, I guess; we’re afraid of rich prose now, and laugh in defense. But I’ll take it over a stern sales talk on safety belts.
Anyway, I liked just drifting along the old road, a part of the summer outdoors and evening, and the living country around me; and I was no more thinking than a collie dog with his nose thrust out of a car, his eyes half closed against the air stream, enjoying the feeling human beings so often forget, of simply being a living creature. “ ‘I left my love in Avalon,’ ” I was bawling out at the top of my lungs, hardly knowing when I’d started, “ ‘and saaailed awaaay!’ ” Then I was singing “Alice Blue Gown,” very softly and gently. I sang, “Just a Japanese Saaandman!,” and “Whispering,” and “Barney Google,” the fields and trees and cattle, and sometimes an occasional car, flowing past in the darkness, and I was having a wonderful time.
The name “Dempsey” drifted into my head, I don’t know why—just a vagrant thought floating lazily up into my consciousness. Now, I saw Jack Dempsey once; six years ago when I was fourteen, my dad, my mother, and I took a vacation trip to New York. We saw the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, took a ride on the subway, and all the rest of it. And we had dinner at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on Broadway, and he was there, and spoke to us, and my dad talked to him for a minute about his fights. So I saw him; a nice-looking middle-aged man, very big and broad. But the picture that drifted up into my mind now, driving along the old Cressville road, wasn’t that Jack Dempsey. It was the face of a young man not a lot older than I was, black-haired, black-bearded, fierce and scowling. Dempsey, I thought, that snarling young face rising up clear and vivid in my mind, and the thought completed itself: He beat Tom Gibbons last night.
Last night; Dempsey beat Gibbons last night—and it was true. I mean it felt true somehow, as though the thought were in the very air around me, like the old songs I’d found myself singing, and suddenly several things I’d been half aware of clicked together in my mind. I’d been dreamily and unthinkingly realizing that there were more cars on the road than I’d have expected, flowing past me in the darkness. Maybe some of the farm families along here were having some sort of Saturday-night get-together, I thought. But then I knew it wasn’t true.
Picture a car’s headlights coming toward you; they’re two sharp beams slicing ahead into the darkness, an intense blue-white in color, their edges as defined as a ruler’s. But these headlights—two more sets of them were approaching me now—were different. They were entirely orange in color, the red-orange of the hot filaments that produced them; and they were hardly even beams, but just twin circles of wide, diffused orange light, and they wavered in intensity, illuminating the road only dimly.
