The Third Level

by Jack Finney

  All of them had, plainly and unmistakably, one quality in common: You knew as you looked at them that these rooms were home, really home, to the people who lived in them. On the wall of one living room, over the stone fireplace, hung a hand-stitched motto; it said, There Is No Place Like Home, but the words didn't seem quaint or amusing, they didn't seem oldfashioned, resurrected or copied from a past that was gone. They seemed real; they belonged; those words were nothing more or less than a simple expression of true feeling and fact.

  Who are you? I lifted my head from the folder to stare into the man's eyes.

  He lighted his pipe, taking his time, sucking the match flame down into the bowl, eyes glancing up at me. It's in the text, he said then, on the back page. We — that is to say, the people of Verna, the original inhabitants — are people like yourself. Verna is a planet of air, sun, land and sea, like this one. And of the same approximate temperature: So life evolved there, of course, just about as it has here, though rather earlier; and we are people like you. There are trivial anatomical differences, but nothing important. We read and enjoy your James Thurber, John Clayton, Rabelais, Allen Marple, Hemingway, Grimm, Mark Twain, Alan Nelson. We like your chocolate, which we didn't have, and a great deal of your music. And you'd like many of the things we have. Our thoughts, though, and the great aims and directions of our history and development have been — drastically different from yours. He smiled and blew out a puff of smoke. Amusing fantasy, isn't it?

  Yes, I knew I sounded abrupt, and I hadn't stopped to smile; the words were spilling out. And where is Verna?

  Light years away, by your measurements.

  I was suddenly irritated, I didn't know why. A little hard to get to, then, wouldn't it be?

  For a moment he looked at me; then he turned to the window beside him. Come here, he said, and I walked around the counter to stand beside him. There, off to the left — he put a hand on my shoulder and pointed with his pipe stem — are two apartment buildings, built back to back. The entrance to one is on Fifth Avenue, the entrance to the other on Sixth. See them? In the middle of the block; you can just see their roofs.

  I nodded, and he said, A man and his wife live on the fourteenth floor of one of those buildings. A wall of their living room is the back wall of the building. They have friends on the fourteenth floor of the other building, and a wall of their living room is the back wall of their building. These two couples live, in other words, within two feet of one another, since the back building walls actually touch.

  The big man smiled. But when the Robinsons want to visit the Bradens, they walk from their living room to the front door. Then they walk down a long hall to the elevators. They ride fourteen floors down; then, in the street, they must walk around to the next block. And the city blocks there are long; in bad weather they have sometimes actually taken a cab. They walk into the other building, they go on through the lobby, ride up fourteen floors, walk down a hall, ring a bell, and are finally admitted into their friends' living room — only two feet from their own.

  The big man turned back to the counter, and I walked around it to the other side again. All I can tell you, he said then, is that the way the Robinsons travel is like space travel, the actual physical crossing of those enormous distances. He shrugged. But if they could only step through those two feet of wall without harming themselves or the wall — well, that is how we “travel.” We don't cross space, we avoid it. He smiled. Draw a breath here — and exhale it on Verna.

  I said softly, And that's how they arrived, isn't it? The people in the picture. You took them there. He nodded, and I said. Why?

  He shrugged. If you saw a neighbor's house on fire, would you rescue his family if you could? As many as you could, at least?

  Yes.

  Well — so would we.

  You think it's that bad, then? With us?

  How does it look to you?

  I thought about the headlines in my morning paper, that morning and every morning. Not so good.

  He just nodded and said, We can't take you all, can't even take very many. So we've been selecting a few.

  For how long?

  A long time. He smiled. One of us was a member of Lincoln's cabinet. But it was not until just before your First World War that we felt we could see what was coming; until then we'd been merely observers. We opened our first agency in Mexico City in nineteen thirteen. Now we have branches in every major city.

  Nineteen thirteen, I murmured, as something caught at my memory. Mexico. Listen! Did —

  Yes. He smiled, anticipating my question. Ambrose Bierce joined us that year, or the next. He lived until nineteen thirty-one, a very old man, and wrote four more books, which we have. He turned back a page in the folder and pointed to a cabin in the first large photograph. That was his home.

  And what about judge Crater?

  Crater?

  Another famous disappearance; he was a New York judge who simply disappeared some years ago.

  I don't know. We had a judge, I remember, from New York City, some twenty-odd years ago, but I can't recall his name.

  I leaned across the counter toward him, my face very close to his, and I nodded. I like your little joke, I said. I like it very much, more than I can possibly tell you. Very softly I added, When does it stop being a joke?

  For a moment he studied me; then he spoke. Now. If you want it to.

  You've got to decide on the spot, the middle-aged man at the Lexington Avenue bar had told me, because you'll never get another chance. I know; I've tried. Now I stood there thinking; there were people I'd hate never to see again, and a girl I was just getting to know, and this was the world I'd been born in. Then I thought about leaving that room, going back to my job, then back to my room at night. And finally I thought of the deep green valley in the picture and the little yellow beach in the morning sun. I'll go, I whispered. If you'll have me.

  He studied my face. Be sure, he said sharply. Be certain. We want no one there who won't be happy, and if you have any least doubt, we'd prefer that —

  I'm sure, I said.

  After a moment the gray-haired man slid open a drawer under the counter and brought out a little rectangle of yellow cardboard. One side was printed, and through the printing ran a band of light green; it looked like a railroad ticket to White Plains or somewhere. The printing said, Good, when validated, for ONE TRIP To VERNA. Nontransferable. One way only.

  Ah — how much? I said, reaching for my wallet, wondering if he wanted me to pay.

  He glanced at my hand on my hip pocket. All you've got. Including your small change. He smiled. You won't need it any more, and we can use your currency for operating expenses. Light bills, rent, and so on.

  I don't have much.

  That doesn't matter. From under the counter he brought out a heavy stamping machine, the kind you see in railroad ticket offices. We once sold a ticket for thirty-seven hundred dollars. And we sold another just like it for six cents. He slid the ticket into the machine, struck the lever with his fist, then handed the ticket to me. On the back, now, was a freshly printed rectangle of purple ink, and within it the words, Good this day only, followed by the date. I put two five-dollar bills, a one, and seventeen cents in change on the counter. Take the ticket to the Acme Depot, the gray-haired man said, and, leaning across the counter, began giving me directions for getting there.

  It's a tiny hole in the wall, the Acme Depot; you may have seen it — just a little store front on one of the narrow streets west of Broadway. On the window is painted, not very well, “Acme.” Inside, the walls and ceiling, under layers of old paint, are covered with the kind of stamped tin you see in old buildings. There's a warn wooden counter and a few battered chrome and imitation red leather chairs. There are scores of places like the Acme Depot in that area — little theater-ticket agencies, obscure busline offices, employment agencies. You could pass this one a thousand times and never really see it; and if you live in New York, you probably have.

  B
ehind the counter, when I arrived, stood a shirt-sleeved man, smoking a cigar stump and working on some papers; four or five people silently waited in the chairs. The man at the counter glanced up as I stepped in, looked down at my hand for my ticket, and when I showed it, nodded at the last vacant chair, and I sat down.

  There was a girl beside me, hands folded on her purse. She was pleasant-looking, rather pretty; I thought she might have been a stenographer. Across the narrow little office sat a young Negro in work clothes, his wife beside him holding their little girl in her lap. And there was a man of around fifty, his face averted from the rest of us, staring out into the rain at passing pedestrians. He was expensively dressed and wore a gray Homburg; he could have been the vice-president of a large bank, I thought, and I wondered what his ticket had cost.

  Maybe twenty minutes passed, the man behind the counter working on some papers; then a small battered old bus pulled up at the curb outside, and I heard the hand brake set. The bus was a shabby thing, bought third- or fourth-hand and painted red and white over the old paint, the fenders lumpy from countless pounded-out dents, the tire treads worn almost smooth. On the side, in red letters, it said “Acme.” and the driver wore a leather jacket and the kind of worn cloth cap that cab drivers wear. It was precisely the sort of obscure little bus you see around there, ridden always by shabby, tired, silent people, going no one knows where.

  It took nearly two hours for the little bus to work south through the traffic, toward the tip of Manhattan, and we all sat, each wrapped in his own silence and thoughts, staring out the rain-spattered windows; the little girl was asleep. Through the streaking glass beside me I watched drenched people huddled at city bus stops, and saw them rap angrily on the closed doors of buses jammed to capacity, and saw the strained, harassed faces of the drivers. At Fourteenth Street I saw a speeding cab splash a sheet of street-dirty water on a man at the curb, and saw the man's mouth writhe as he cursed. Often our bus stood motionless, the traffic light red, as throngs flowed out into the street from the curb, threading their way around us and the other waiting cars. I saw hundreds of faces, and not once did I see anyone smile.

  I dozed; then we were on a glistening black highway somewhere on Long Island. I slept again, and awakened in darkness as we jolted off the highway onto a muddy double-rut road, and I caught a glimpse of a farmhouse, the windows dark. Then the bus slowed, lurched once, and stopped. The hand brake set, the motor died, and we were parked beside what looked like a barn.

  It was a barn — the driver walked up to it, pulled the big sliding wood door open, its wheels creaking on the rusted old trolley overhead, and stood holding it open as we filed in. Then he released it, stepping inside with us, and the big door slid closed of its own weight. The barn was damp, old, the walls no longer plumb, and it smelled of cattle; there was nothing inside on the packed-dirt floor but a bench of unpainted pine, and the driver indicated it with the beam of a flashlight. Sit here, please, he said quietly. Get your tickets ready. Then he moved down the line, punching each of our tickets, and on the floor I caught a momentary glimpse, in the shifting beam of his light, of tiny mounds of countless more round bits of cardboard, like little drifts of yellow confetti. Then he was at the door again, sliding it open just enough to pass through, and for a moment we saw him silhouetted against the night sky. Good luck, he said. Just wait where you are. He released the door; it slid closed, snipping off the wavering beam of his flashlight; and a moment later we heard the motor start and the bus lumber away in low gear.

  The dark barn was silent now, except for our breathing. Time ticked away, and I felt an urge, presently, to speak to whoever was next to me. But I didn't quite know what to say, and I began to feel embarrassed, a little foolish, and very aware that I was simply sitting in an old and deserted barn. The seconds passed, and I moved my feet restlessly; presently I realized that I was getting cold and chilled. Then suddenly I knew — and my face flushed in violent anger and a terrible shame. We'd been tricked! Bilked out of our money by our pathetic will to believe an absurd and fantastic fable and left, now, to sit there as long as we pleased, until we came to our senses finally, like countless others before us, and made our way home as best we could. It was suddenly impossible to understand or even remember how I could have been so gullible, and I was on my feet, stumbling through the dark across the uneven floor, with some notion of getting to a phone and the police. The big barn door was heavier than I'd thought, but I slid it back, took a running step through it, then turned to shout back to the others to come along.

  You perhaps have seen how very much you can observe in the fractional instant of a lightning flash — an entire landscape sometimes, every detail etched on your memory, to be seen and studied in your mind for long moments afterward. As I turned back toward the open door the inside of that barn came alight. Through every wide crack of its walls and ceiling and through the big dust-coated windows in its side streamed the light of an intensely brilliant blue and sunny sky, and the air pulling into my lungs as I opened my mouth, to shout was sweeter than any I had ever tasted in my life. Dimly, through a wide, dust-smeared window of that barn, I looked — for less than the blink of an eye — down into a deep majestic V of forest-covered slope, and I saw, tumbling through it, far below, a tiny stream, blue from the sky, and at that stream's edge between two low roofs a yellow patch of sun-drenched beach. And then, that picture engraved on my mind forever, the heavy door slid shut, my fingernails rasping along the splintery wood in a desperate effort to stop it — and I was standing alone in a cold and rain-swept night.

  It took four or five seconds, no longer, fumbling at that door, to heave it open again. But it was four or five seconds too long. The barn was empty, dark. There was nothing inside but a worn pine bench — and, in the flicker of the lighted match in my hand, tiny drifts of what looked like damp confetti on the floor. As my mind had known even as my hands scratched at the outside of that door, there was no one inside now; and I knew where they were — knew they were walking, laughing aloud in a sudden wonderful and eager ecstasy, down into that forest-green valley, toward home.

  I work in a bank, in a job I don't like; and I ride to and from it in the subway, reading the daily papers, the news they contain. I live in a rented room, and in the battered dresser under a pile of my folded handkerchiefs is a little rectangle of yellow cardboard. Printed on its face are the words, Good, when validated, for one trip to Verna, and stamped on the back is a date. But the date is gone, long since, the ticket void, punched in a pattern of tiny holes.

  I've been back to the Acme Travel Bureau. The first time the tall gray-haired man walked up to me and laid two five-dollar bills, a one, and seventeen cents in change before me. You left this on the counter last time you were here, he said gravely. Looking me squarely in the eyes, he added bleakly, I don't know why. Then some customers came in, he turned to greet them, and there was nothing for me to do but leave.

  Walk in as though it were the ordinary agency it seems — you can find it, somewhere, in any city you try! Ask a few ordinary questions — about a trip you're planning, a vacation, anything you like. Then hint about The Folder a little, but don't mention it directly. Give him time to size you up and offer it himself. And if he does, if you're the type, if you can believe — then make up your mind and stick to it! Because you won't ever get a second chance. I know, because I've tried. And tried. And tried.

  Something in a Cloud

  You'd never have looked twice at Charley if you'd seen him there, moving along through the crowds in Penn Station — neither did anyone else. No one looked even once, except a tiny girl who was holding her mother's hand and who smiled up at Charley in instant friendship and love as he passed. No one else even glanced at the little sailor, for he was small, undersized even, altogether insignificant.

  But Charley didn't know that, and he moved along confidently, briskly, through the crowds in the winter gloom of the station. His white hat, held by hope or magic to the back of his head,
was only five feet, five inches above the floor. Though Charley was aware of his height statistically, he felt somehow taller. He weighed three pounds less than Anita Eckberg, but in his mind he was stalwart. Only a happy little smile saved his thin, sharp face from downright homeliness, but he had never heard of an inferiority complex, and, most of the time, was unaware of the concept.

  His experiences in the past nineteen years almost invariably contradicted this habitual optimism; Charley glimpsed briefly the facts of life as they applied to small and insignificant men. But only briefly, temporarily, for Charley knew, from the far wider experience of life supplied by the movies, that romance was waiting for him, as for everyone else, just around the corner.

  He turned this corner now, into a station passageway, and headed for a row of phone booths. He glanced at a slip of paper he held on which a name and phone number were written. In the booth he dialed carefully, his eyes on the paper lying on the shelf under the phone. Then his expression and posture altered. His thin body tensed and he leaned forward, shoving his cap to the front of his head at a cocky angle. His smile vanished, his eyes narrowed, one brow lifted jauntily, and these tiny muscle movements transmitted themselves to his brain as a picture. His face felt, somehow, that it looked very like a younger Ronald Colman playing Rudolf in “The Prisoner of Zenda.” As he cleared his throat, ready to speak, the sound was surprisingly deep, resonant and confident.

  The phone rang in a bedroom twenty-four blocks south of Penn station and four stories up. A girl, lying on the bed, jumped to answer the phone. She tossed aside her magazine, the cover of which pictured a disheveled young woman struggling with an ape, and her plain little face smiled eagerly. She moved rapidly, the tight little spikes of her hair, clenched in the teeth of aluminum jaws, vibrating like antennae as she moved. She was thin and small, very little over five feet high, weighing less than ninety-five pounds. The big, old bed sagged in the middle, and she had to struggle up the sides of its concave surface, and before she succeeded, the phone rang again.