by Jack Finney
Ted looked at me, then at Nell. Naturally, then, the inevitable happened; the only possible ending to my story. Maybe you've figured out what had to happen?
I shook my head, and Ted looked at Nell to see if she knew; then he said, It's easy. People simply stopped coming back. All over the world, within less than a month after TT is introduced, the same almost simultaneous thought seems to strike everyone: Why return? By this time everyone has discovered a favorite time and place in the history and geography of the world. And everybody is enthusiastic for his own particular discovery; some one century or decade, some country, city, town, island, woods or seashore, some one spot on the world's surface at a certain time that best suits his temperament. And so the same inspiration hits nearly everyone: Why not stay there? Why come back? To what?
Ted slapped at a stray mosquito and said, Within forty days' time the population of the entire world is down to less than seven million people, and nearly all of them are getting ready to leave. Suddenly the world is left to the tiny fraction of one per cent of human beings who want wars and who cause them. But the people who fight them walk out. Before the governments of the world realize what's happening — before there's time to do anything about it — the world's population is nearly gone.
The last emergency Cabinet meeting of the U.S. government breaks up when the assembled members discover that all but one of them are themselves planning to leave for other times. In six more days the twenty-first century is deserted like a sinking ship, its population scattered thinly back through the preceding twenty-five hundred years. And of the very few who are finally left — the tiny minority who preferred the present — most are soon forced, out of sheer loneliness and the breakdown of a world, to join friends and families in earlier times.
Ted looked at us for a moment, then said, And that, my friends, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.
For maybe half a minute Ted sat staring at nothing, and no one said anything; a cricket began to chirp feebly off in the grass somewhere. Then Ted smiled. Well, he said, how do you like it, Al? Good story?
Yeah, I said slowly, still thinking about it. Yeah, I said, I like it fine. Why don't you write it; maybe get it published somewhere?
Well, I thought about that, as a matter of fact, but on the whole I prefer inventing. It's easier.
Well, it's a good story, I said. though there are some flaws in it, of course.
I'm sure of it, Ted said, but what are they?
Well, for one thing, wouldn't people in those earlier times notice the sudden increase in population?
I don't think so. Spread the world's population through the thousands of preceding years, and at any one time or place it wouldn't be more than a drop in the bucket.
Okay, I said, but speaking of inventions, wouldn't everyone traveling back to simpler times start introducing twenty-first-century inventions?
Not to amount to anything. You mean like space ships in 1776?
Something like that.
Ted shook his head. It couldn't happen. Suppose you went back a hundred years; could you make a television set?
No.
Or even a radio?
I might. A simple one, anyway. Maybe a crystal set.
All right, Ted said. suppose you did. I doubt if you could find all the materials — copper wire, for example — but suppose you managed; what would you listen to? You'd tell people it was a radio and what it was for, and they'd lock you up. You see? And what do most people know anyway about the marvelous things they use every day? Practically nothing. And even the few who do know could never find what they'd need to duplicate them, except in the actual time they belong in. The best you could do would be to introduce one or two of the very simplest things people used in your time, like a modern safety pin in Elizabethan England, if you could find the steel. And a few things like that wouldn't upset the history of the world.
No, Al, you'd just have to take your place as best you could in the world as you found it, no matter what you knew about the future.
Well, I let it go at that. I didn't mean to get started knocking holes in Ted's story, and I went into the house and broke out beer for all hands. I liked Ted's story, though, and so did Nell, and we both said so, and after a while even Ann broke down and said she liked it, too. Then the conversation got off onto other things.
But there you are. It's like I said; the Hellenbeks were strange in some ways, but very interesting neighbors, and I was sorry to see them move away. They moved not too long afterward. They liked California fine, they said, and liked the people they'd met. But they were lonesome for old friends, people they'd grown up with, and that's understandable, of course.
So they moved to Orange, New Jersey. Some old friends were arriving there soon, they said, and the Hellenbeks were anxious to be with them. They expected them, Ted told me, sometime in the spring of 1951, and they wanted to be on hand to meet them.
There's a new couple next door now — perfectly nice people who play a good game of bridge, and we like them okay. But I don't know; after the Hellenbeks, they seem kind of dull.
I'm Scared
I'm very badly scared, not so much for myself — I'm a gray-haired man of sixty-six, after all — but for you and everyone else who has not yet lived out his life. For I believe that certain dangerous things have recently begun to happen in the world. They are noticed here and there, idly discussed, then dismissed and forgotten. Yet I am convinced that unless these occurrences are recognized for what they are, the world will be plunged into a nightmare. Judge for yourself. One evening last winter I came home from a chess club to which I belong. I'm a widower; I live alone in a small but comfortable three-room apartment overlooking lower Fifth Avenue. It was still fairly early, and I switched on a lamp beside my leather easy chair, picked up a murder mystery I'd been reading, and turned on the radio; I did not, I'm sorry to say, notice which station it was tuned to.
The tubes warmed, and the music of an accordion — faint at first, then louder — came from the loud-speaker. Since it was good music for reading, I adjusted the volume control and began to read.
Now, I want to be absolutely factual and accurate about this, and I do not claim that I paid close attention to the radio. But I do know that presently the music stopped and an audience applauded. Then a man's voice, chuckling and pleased with the applause, said, All right, all right, but the applause continued for several more seconds. During that time the voice once more chuckled appreciatively, then firmly repeated, All right, and the applause died down. That was Alec Somebody-or-other, the radio voice said, and I went back to my book.
But I soon became aware of this middle-aged voice again; perhaps a change of tone as he turned to a new subject caught my attention. And now, Miss Ruth Greeley, he was saying, of Trenton, New Jersey. Miss Greeley is a pianist; that right? A girl's voice, timid and barely audible, said, That's right, Major Bowes. The man's voice — and now I recognized his familiar singsong delivery — said, And what are you going to play? The girl replied, La Paloma. The man repeated it after her, as an announcement: La Paloma. There was a pause, then an introductory chord sounded from a piano, and I resumed my reading.
As the girl played, I was half aware that her style was mechanical, her rhythm defective; perhaps she was nervous. Then my attention was fully aroused once more by a gong which sounded suddenly. For a few notes more the girl continued to play falteringly, not sure what to do. The gong sounded jarringly again, the playing abruptly stopped and there was a restless murmur from the audience. All right, all right, said the now familiar voice, and I realized I'd been expecting this, knowing it would say just that. The audience quieted, and the voice began, Now —
The radio went dead. For the smallest fraction of a second no sound issued from it but its own mechanical hum. Then a completely different program came from the loud-speaker; the reco
rded voices of Bing Crosby and his son were singing the concluding bars of Sam's Song, a favorite of mine. So I returned once more to my reading, wondering vaguely what had happened to the other program, but not actually thinking about it until I finished my book and began to get ready for bed.
Then, undressing in my bedroom, I remembered that Major Bowes was dead. Years had passed, half a decade, since that dry chuckle and familiar, All right, all right, had been heard in the nation's living rooms.
Well, what does one do when the apparently impossible occurs? It simply made a good story to tell friends, and more than once I was asked if I'd recently heard Moran and Mack, a pair of radio comedians popular some twenty-five years ago, or Floyd Gibbons, an old-time news broadcaster. And there were other joking references to my crystal radio set.
But one man — this was at a lodge meeting the following Thursday — listened to my story with utter seriousness, and when I had finished he told me a queer little story of his own. He is a thoughtful, intelligent man, and as I listened I was not frightened, but puzzled at what seemed to be a connecting link, a common denominator, between this story and the odd behavior of my radio. The following day, since I am retired and have plenty of time, I took the trouble of making a two-hour train trip to Connecticut in order to verify the story at firsthand. I took detailed notes, and the story appears in my files now as follows:
Case 2. Louis Trachnor, coal and wood dealer, R.F.D. 1, Danbury, Connecticut, aged fifty-four.
On July 20, 1950, Mr. Trachnor told me, he walked out on the front porch of his house about six o'clock in the morning. Running from the eaves of his house to the floor of the porch was a streak of gray paint, still damp. It was about the width of an eight-inch brush, Mr. Trachnor told me, and it looked like hell, because the house was white. I figured some kids did it in the night for a joke, but if they did, they had to get a ladder up to the eaves and you wouldn't figure they'd go to that much trouble. It wasn't smeared, either; it was a careful job, a nice even stripe straight down the front of the house.
Mr. Trachnor got a ladder and cleaned off the gray paint with turpentine.
In October of that same year, Mr. Trachnor painted his house. The white hadn't held up so good, so I painted it gray. I got to the front last and finished about five one Saturday afternoon. Next morning when I came out, I saw a streak of white right down the front of the house. I figured it was the damn' kids again, because it was the same place as before. But when I looked close, I saw it wasn't new paint; it was the old white I'd painted over. Somebody had done a nice careful job of cleaning off the new paint in a long stripe about eight inches wide right down from the eaves! Now, who the hell would go to that trouble? I just can't figure it out.
Do you see the link between this story and mine? Suppose for a moment that something had happened, on each occasion, to disturb briefly the orderly progress of time. That seemed to have happened in my case; for a matter of some seconds I apparently heard a radio broadcast that had been made years before. Suppose, then, that no one had touched Mr. Trachnor's house but himself; that he had painted his house in October, but that through some fantastic mix-up in time, a portion of that paint appeared on his house the previous summer. Since he had cleaned the paint off at that time, a broad stripe of new gray paint was missing after he painted his house in the fall.
I would be lying, however, if I said I really believed this. It was merely an intriguing speculation, and I told both these little stories to friends, simply as curious anecdotes. I am a sociable person, see a good many people, and occasionally I heard other odd stories in response to mine.
Someone would nod and say, Reminds me of something I heard recently … and I would have one more to add to my collection. A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.
And so on, and so on; my stories were now in demand at parties; and I told myself that collecting and verifying them was a hobby. But the day I heard Julia Eisenberg's story, I knew it was no longer that.
Case 17. Julia Eisenberg, office worker, New York City, aged thirty-one.
Miss Eisenberg lives in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. I talked to her there after a chess-club friend who lives in her neighborhood had repeated to me a somewhat garbled version of her story, which was told to him by the doorman of the building he lives in.
In October, 1947, about eleven at night, Miss Eisenberg left her apartment to walk to the drugstore for toothpaste. On her way back, not far from her apartment, a large black-and-white dog ran up to her and put his front paws on her chest.
I made the mistake of petting him, Miss Eisenberg told me, and from then on he simply wouldn't leave. When I went into the lobby of my building, I actually had to push him away to get the door closed. I felt sorry for him, poor hound, and a little guilty, because he was still sitting at the door an hour later when I looked out my front window.
This dog remained in the neighborhood for three days, discovering and greeting Miss Eisenberg with wild affection each time she appeared on the street. When I'd get on the bus in the morning to go to work, he'd sit on the curb looking after me in the most mournful way, poor thing. I wanted to take him in, and I wish with all my heart that I had, but I knew he'd never go home then, and I was afraid whoever owned him would be sorry to lose him. No one in the neighborhood knew who he belonged to, and finally he disappeared.
Two years later a friend gave Miss Eisenberg a three-week-old puppy. My apartment is really too small for a dog, but he was such a darling I couldn't resist. Well, he grew up into a nice big dog who ate more than I did.
Since the neighborhood was quiet, and the dog well behaved, Miss Eisenberg usually unleashed him when she walked him at night, for he never strayed far. One night — I'd last seen him sniffing around in the dark a few doors down — I called to him and he didn't come back. And he never did; I never saw him again.
Now, our street is a solid wall of brownstone buildings on both sides, with locked doors and no areaways. He couldn't have disappeared like that, he just couldn't. But he did.
Miss Eisenberg hunted for her dog for many days afterward, inquired of neighbors, put ads in the papers, but she never found him. Then one night I was getting ready for bed; I happened to glance out the front window down at the street, and suddenly I remembered something I'd forgotten all about. I remembered the dog I'd chased away over two years before. Miss Eisenberg looked at me for a moment, then she said flatly, It was the same dog. If you own a dog you know him, you can't be mistaken and I tell you it was the same dog. Whether it makes sense or not, my dog was lost — I chased him away — two years before he was born.
She began to cry silently, the tears running down her face. Maybe you think I'm crazy, or a little lonely and overly sentimental about a dog. But you're wrong. She brushed at her tears with a handkerchief. I'm a well-balanced person, as much as anyone is these days, at least, and I tell you I know what happened.
It was in that moment, sitting in Miss Eisenberg's neat, shabby living room, that I realized fully that the consequences of these odd little incidents could be something more than merely intriguing; that they might, quite possibly, be tragic. It was in that moment that I began to be afraid.
I have spent the last eleven months discovering and tracking down these strange occurrences, and I am astonished and frightened at how many there are. I am astonished and frightened at how much more frequently they are happening now, and — I hardly know how to express this — at their increasing power to tear human lives tragically apart. This is an example, selected almost at random, of the increasing strength of — whatever it is that is h
appening in the world.
Case 34. Paul V. Kerch, accountant, the Bronx, aged thirty-one.
On a bright, clear, Sunday afternoon, I met an unsmiling family of three at their Bronx apartment: Mr. Kerch, a chunky, darkly good-looking young man; his wife, a pleasant-faced dark-haired woman in her late twenties, whose attractiveness was marred by circles under her eyes; and their son, a nice-looking boy of six or seven. After introductions, the boy was sent to his room at the back of the house to play.
All right, Mr. Kerch said wearily then, and walked toward a bookcase, let's get at it. You said on the phone that you know the story in general. It was half a question, half a statement.
Yes, I said.
He took a book from the top shelf and removed some photographs from it. There are the pictures. He sat down on the davenport beside me, with the photographs in his hand. I own a pretty good camera, I'm a fair amateur photographer, and I have a darkroom setup in the kitchen; do my own developing. Two weeks ago, we went down to Central Park. His voice was a tired monotone as though this were a story he'd repeated many times, aloud and in his own mind. It was nice, like today, and the kid's grandmothers have been pestering us for pictures, so I took a whole roll of films, pictures of all of us. My camera can be set up and focused and it will snap the picture automatically a few seconds later, giving me time to get around in front of it and get in the picture myself.