Time Travel Omnibus, page 543
I shook my head. “Hard to see how you could be mistaken about what you saw unless you’ve suddenly gone crazy.”
“Which I have not,” said Nordstrum. “Not yet. Come here.” He turned to walk down the old carriageway toward the street, then stopped and pointed. “Here’s where the horses stood,” he said, “well away from the heat of the fire.”
I looked down at the dirt and saw the horseshoe marks sharp and plain in the damp black earth, dozens of them, overlapping. Nordstrum pointed again with his foot and I saw the manure and, deeply imprinted in the earth at the edges of the carriageway, the long indented ribbons that were wagon tracks.
That was just under a year ago. Two months later, in September, Doug Blaisdel sold the Pollard place—cheap, as he had to, but still he was glad now that it hadn’t burned down—to a retired farm-equipment dealer from Peoria who’d grown up in Galesburg. It took all last winter and I don’t know how much money—the farm-equipment business must have been good—to get the old place fixed up; but now it looks the way it always used to, clean and white again, the lawn and iron fence and the burned window restored, and the inside of the house is beautiful. They’ve got an unmarried daughter, and last Friday they gave a dance in the old ballroom. It was a big affair, and walking up the path to the house—the daughter had invited me—I saw the house all lighted up, heard the music, and saw all the people at the windows and out on the huge porch, the big old house white and fresh and alive again, and I was glad it hadn’t burned down and the site sold for an apartment building.
Do you see? Do you understand now what’s happening in Galesburg? If you do, then you know why the phone rang late one night last fall out at the old Denigmann farm. It’s one of the finest of the farms just past the city limits; a wonderful place. There are a half-dozen acres of fine woodland including some nut trees; there’s a small but deep stream that winds through the whole farm and is wide enough for swimming in several places; and scattered over two acres of corn land are a dozen regularly shaped mounds which the kids out there have always believed were Indian burial mounds, and around which every generation of Denigmanns since they’ve owned the place has carefully plowed.
A lot of the neighboring farms are gone without a trace, the land covered with new houses. That’s necessary, of course, and some of them are nice ones. But you wonder why so many of the houses we build nowadays are so tiny, so lightly built, and so nearly identical. And why it’s necessary to lay them out in indistinguishable rows alongside raw concrete streets without even sidewalks for children to play on. And why they’ve simply got to be jammed together a few feet apart, on what was once Illinois prairie with an unlimited horizon. Can you imagine some of the houses we build today lived in and loved a century from now?
Carl Denigmann was going to sell his place to the subdividers, too, a big Florida outfit that was reaching up into the North. It was a good offer; he was fifty-nine years old, a widower, his children all grown and gone; why not? Late one night, he told me—this was last November, about the middle of the month, after all his crops were in—he was sitting alone in the farm kitchen thinking about it. Carl’s a small, strong man with black heavily grayed hair, all of which he still has, and he was probably smoking a pipe there in the farm kitchen.
Now, the Galesburg telephone company is an independent, and in the fall of last year it brought various country phone lines up to date including Denigmann’s—putting lines underground and installing dial phones. And in many a place, Carl’s included, the company didn’t bother removing the old out-of-date and now useless wall phone, unless the customer insisted on getting rid of it.
So Carl sat in his kitchen—there’s a ninety-year-old fireplace in it, and he had a fire going—staring at the fire and thinking, smoking his pipe, I’m sure. And when the telephone rang—the stuttering, uncertain grumbling ring of an old hand-crank phone—he simply got up, stepped to the wall, and answered it as he’d done hundreds of times all through his life. The conversation, then, was ordinary enough; it was just Billy Amling asking Carl if he wanted to go rabbit hunting with their twenty-twos in the woods after school next day, keeping one eye open, as usual, for arrowheads. Carl listened, half nodding, ready to agree, as always, before it came back into his head that Billy had been killed in the war in France in 1918; and the telephone receiver lay dead in his hand, not in the way of a phone when the other party has hung up, but in the completely lifeless way of a telephone that is connected to nothing any more and is just hanging on a wall without even wires leading away to the outside now.
Nearly all the rest of the night Carl Denigmann sat up thinking of all the farm had been to him, and Billy Amling, and many others, including Denigmanns who were dead long before he’d been born. And this spring Carl is out plowing it again and he expects to keep farming for at least a few more years. By then, he told me, he’ll have figured out what to do; he thinks maybe Galesburg might accept the old farm as a sort of park or preserve, with picnic tables, maybe, but mostly leaving it pretty much as is for kids to hunt through with their twenty-twos, and swim in the creek, and prowl around the old mounds, and pretend, at least, that they’re Indian graves. Carl doesn’t know, exactly, what he’ll do about the farm; he just knows he’s not going to let them subdivide it.
I’m glad about that; just as I’m glad the old Pollard place was saved, and that there won’t be a great big factory right out at the end of Broad Street, and about a lot of other things I haven’t got time to tell. I’m glad because here in Galesburg, and everywhere else, of course, they’re trying—endlessly—to destroy the beauty we inherit from the past. They keep trying, and when they succeed, they replace it—not always, but all too often—with drabness and worse. With a sterile sun-baked parking lot where decrepit, characterful, old Boone’s Alley once ran; rechristening the asphalt-paved nothingness (as though even the memory of old Boone’s Alley must be blotted from mind) with the characterless title Park Plaza. And with anonymous apartment buildings where fine old houses once stood. With concrete-block ugliness sprawling along what were charming country roads. With—but you know what they’re doing; wherever you live, you see it all around you. They even want to level Galesburg’s ancient Public Square into—well, a parking lot, of course, as though there were nothing more important.
And who are “they?” Why, “they” are us, of course; who else? We’re doing these things to ourselves as though we were powerless to stop; or as though any feeling for beauty or grace or a sense of the past were a kind of sentimental weakness to be jeered down. So what has been happening in Galesburg? Why, it’s simple enough.
Galesburg’s past is fighting back. It’s resisting us, for the past isn’t so easily destroyed; it’s not simply gone with yesterday’s newspaper. No, it is not, for it has been far too much—we are all products of it—to ever be completely gone. And so, somehow, in Galesburg, Illinois, when it’s been necessary as it sometimes has, the past has fought against the present. When the need becomes desperate enough, then the old yellow streetcars, or horse-drawn fire engines, or abandoned wall phones can and do flicker into momentary existence again, struggling to keep what I and so many others—Carl Sandburg, for one, who was born here—love about Galesburg, Illinois.
It’s hard to say whether it’s succeeding; they did, after all, chop down a lot of fine old Galesburg elms to widen Losey Street; Boone’s Alley is gone; and last year the library burned down and the townspeople voted against rebuilding it. And yet—well, I’d hate to be responsible for turning the old square into a parking lot, I can tell you that much. Because just last night, for example, I learned that those twenty-odd old elm trees on that big corner lot on north Cedar Street will not, after all, be chopped down. The man who was going to whack down with a power saw these trees older than himself—he was tired of raking leaves every fall, he said—is in the hospital instead, with a broken leg in traction. It’s strung up in a wire-and-pulley contraption like a broken leg in a comic strip. The neighbor who saw what happened told me that the man was standing out in the street last night looking up at the old trees and estimating which way they’d fall when he sliced through them this weekend. All of a sudden he was struck by a car that appeared out of nowhere. The police report calls it a hit-and-run accident, which it was, and the chief has assured the Register-Mail that they’ll find the car very soon. It shouldn’t be hard to find, they feel, because the neighbor who saw it happen got a good look at the car and furnished a complete description. It was a 1916 Buick roadster with a red body, varnished spoke wheels, and big polished brass headlights each the size of a small drum.
TIME ENOUGH
Damon Knight
Nowadays we lie on a couch and talk about the past. Someday we’ll be able to go back ourselves and right the wrongs, or pacify the guilts. There’s time enough, both ways—isn’t there? Isn’t there?
THE walls and the control panel were gray, but in the viewscreen it was green summer noon.
“That’s the place,” said the boy’s voice in Vogel’s ear.
The old man gently touched the controls, and the viewpoint steadied, twenty feet or so above the ground. In the screen, maple leaves swayed in a light breeze. There was just a glimpse of the path below, deep in shadow.
The display, on the tiny screen, was as real as if one could somehow squeeze through the frame and drop into those sunlit leaves. A warm breath of air came into the room.
“Guess I could go there blindfold, I remember it so well,” he heard Jimmy say. The boy seemed unable to stop talking; his hands tightened and relaxed on his knees. “I remember, we were all standing around in front of the drugstore in the village, and one of the kids said let’s go swimming. So we all started off across town, and first thing I knew, we weren’t going down to the beach; we were going out to the old quarry.”
The leaves danced suddenly in a stronger breeze. “Guess we’ll see them in about a minute,” Jimmy said. “If you got the right time, that is.” His weight shifted, and Vogel knew he was staring up at the dials on the control board, even before his high voice read aloud: 222 “May twenty-eight, nineteen sixty. Eleven-nine-thirty-two A.M.”
His voice grew higher. “Here they come.”
In the screen, a flicker of running bodies passed under the trees. Vogel saw bare brown backs, sports shirts, tee shirts, dark heads and blond. There were eight or nine boys in the pack, all aged about twelve; the last, lagging behind, was a slender brown-haired boy who seemed a little younger. He paused, clearly visible for a moment through the leaves, and looked up with a white face. Then he turned and was gone into the dark flickering green.
“There I go,” said Jimmy’s raw voice. “Now we’re climbing up the slope to the quarry. Dark and kind of clammy up there, so many old spruces you can’t even see the sky. That moss was just like cold mud when you stepped on it barefoot.”
“Try to relax,” said Vogel carefully. “Would you like to do it later?”
“No, now,” said Jimmy convulsively. His voice steadied. “I’m a little tensed up, I guess, but I can do it. I wasn’t really scared; it was the way it happened, so sudden. They never gave me time to get ready.”
“Well, that’s what the machine is for,” said Vogel soothingly. “More time—time enough for everything.”
“I know it,” said Jimmy in an inattentive voice.
Vogel sighed. These afternoons tired him; he was not a young man any more and he no longer believed in his work. Things did not turn out as you expected. The work had to be done, of course; there was always the chance of helping someone, but it was not the easy, automatic thing that youth in its terrible confidence believed.
There was a rustle in the screen, and Vogel saw Jimmy’s hands clench into desperate fists on his knees. A boy flashed into view, the same boy, running clumsily with one hand over his face. His head rocked back and forth. He blundered past, whipped by undergrowth, and the swaying branches closed behind him.
Jimmy’s hands relaxed slowly. “There I go,” his voice said, low and bitter. “Running away. Crying like a baby.”
After a moment Vogel’s spidery fingers reached out to the controls. The viewpoint drifted slowly closer to the ground. Galaxies of green leaves passed through it like bright smoke, and then the viewpoint stopped and tilted, and they were looking up the leaf-shadowed path, as if from a point five feet or so above the ground.
Vogel asked carefully, “Ready now?”
“Sure,” said Jimmy, his voice thin again.
The shock of the passage left him stumbling for balance, and he fetched up against a small tree. The reeling world steadied around him; he laughed. The tree trunk was cool and papery under his hand; the leaves were a dancing green glory all around. He was back in Kellogg’s Woods again, on that May day when everything had gone wrong, and here it was, just the same as before. The same leaves were on the trees; the air he breathed was the same air.
He started walking up the trail. After a few moments he discovered that his heart was thumping in his chest. He hated them, all the big kids with their superior, grinning faces. They were up there right now, waiting for him. But this time he would show them, and then afterward, slowly, it would be possible to stop hating. He knew that. But oh, Christ, how he hated them now!
It was dark under the spruces as he climbed, and the moss was squashy underfoot. For a passing moment he was sorry he had come. But it was costing his family over a thousand dollars to have him sent back. They 224 were giving him this golden chance, and he wouldn’t waste it.
Now he could hear the boys’ voices, calling hollow, and the cold splash as one of them dived.
Hating and bitter, he climbed to where he could look down across the deep shadowed chasm of the old quarry. The kids were all tiny figures on the other side, where the rock slide was, the only place where you could climb out of the black water. Some of them were sitting on the rocks, wet and shivering. Their voices came up to him small with distance.
Nearer, he saw the dead spruce that lay slanting downward across the edge of the quarry, with its tangled roots in the air. The trunk was silvery gray, perhaps a foot thick at the base. It had fallen straight down along the quarry wall, an old tree with all the stubs of limbs broken off short, and its tip was jammed into a crevice. Below that, there was a series of ledges you could follow all the way down.
But first you had to walk the dead tree.
He climbed up on the thick, twisting roots, trying not to be aware just yet how they overhung the emptiness below. Down across the shadowed quarry, he could see pale blurs of faces turning up one by one to look at him.
Now he vividly remembered the way it had been before, the line of boys tightrope-walking down the tree, arms waving for balance, bare or tennis-shoed feet treading carefully. If only they hadn’t left him till last!
He took one step out onto the trunk. Without intending to, he glanced down and saw the yawning space under him—the black water, and the rocks.
The tree swayed under him. He tried to take the next step and found he couldn’t. It was just the same as before, and he realized now that it was impossible to walk the tree—you would slip and fall, down, down that cliff to the rocks and the cold water. Standing there fixed between the sky and the quarry, he could tell himself that the others had done it, but it didn’t help. What good was that, when he could see, when anybody could see, it was impossible?
Down there, the boys were waiting, in their cold and silent comradeship.
Jimmy stepped slowly back. Tears of self-hatred burned his lids, but he climbed over the arching roots and left the quarry edge behind him, hearing the clear, distant shouts begin again as he stumbled down the path.
“Don’t blame yourself too much,” said Vogel in his gray voice. “Maybe you just weren’t ready, this time.” Jimmy wiped his eyes angrily with the heel of his hand. “I wasn’t ready,” he muttered. “I thought I was, but . . . Must have been too nervous, that’s all.”
“Or, maybe . . .” Vogel hesitated. “Some people think it’s better to forget the past and solve our problems in the present.”
Jimmy’s eyes widened with shock. “I couldn’t give up now!” he said. He stood up, agitated. “Why, my whole life would be ruined—I mean, I never thought I’d hear a thing like that from you, Mr. Vogel. I mean, the whole point of this machine, and everything . . .”
“I know,” said Vogel. “The past can be altered. The scholar can take his exam over again, the lover can propose once more, the words that were thought of too late can be spoken. So I always believed.” He forced a smile. “It’s like a game of cards. If you don’t like the hand that is dealt to you, you can take another, and after that, another . . .”
“That’s right,” said Jimmy, sounding appeased. “So if you look at it that way, how can I lose?”
Vogel did not reply but stood up courteously to see him to the door.
“So, then, I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Vogel,” Jimmy said.
Vogel glanced at the wall calendar; it read, April 21, 1978. “Yes, all right,” he answered.
In the doorway, Jimmy looked back at him with pathetic hopefulness—a pale, slender thirty-year-old man, from whose weak eyes a lost boy seemed to be staring, pleading . . . “There’s always tomorrow, isn’t there, Mr. Vogel?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Vogel wearily. “There’s always tomorrow.”
THE END
ODD
John Wyndham
When, on a day in the late December of 1958, Mr Reginald Aster called upon the legal firm of Cropthorne, Daggit, and Howe, of Bedford Row, at their invitation, he found himself received by a Mr Fratton, an amiable young man, barely out of his twenties, but now head of the firm in succession to the defunct Messrs C, D & H.
