by Jack Finney
The inspector nodded. "All right; now, why did you do it? They're criminals, you know; and you helped them escape."
I said, "No, I didn't know they were criminals, Inspector. And they didn't tell me. They just seemed like nice people with more troubles than they could handle. And I did it because I needed what a doctor needs when he discovers a new serum—volunteers to try it! And I got them; you're not the only one who ever read that news report."
"Where'd you do it?"
"Out on the beach not far from the Cliff House. Late at night when no one was around."
"Why out there?"
"There's some danger a man might appear in a time and place already occupied by something else, a stone wall or building, his molecules occupying the same space. He'd be all mixed in with the other molecules, which would be unpleasant and confining. But there've never been any buildings on the beach. Of course the beach might have been a little higher at one time than another, so I took no chances. I had each of them stand on the lifeguard tower, appropriately dressed for whatever time he planned to enter, and with the right kind of money for the period in his pocket. I'd focus carefully around him so as to exclude the tower, turn on the current for the proper time, and he'd drop onto the beach of fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty years ago."
For a while the inspector sat nodding, staring absently at the rough planks of the pier. Then he looked up at me again, vigorously rubbing his palms together. "All right, Professor, and now you're going to bring them all back!" I began shaking my head, and he smiled grimly and said, "Oh, yes, you are, or I'll wreck your career! I can do it, you know. I'll bring out everything I've told you, and I'll show the connections. Each of the missing people visited you more than once. Undoubtedly some of them were seen. You may even have been seen on the beach. Time I'm through, you'll never teach again." I was still shaking my head, and he said dangerously, "You mean you won't?"
"I mean I can't, you idiot! How the hell can I reach them? They're back in 1885, 1906, 1927, or whatever; it's absolutely impossible to bring them back. They've escaped you, Inspector—forever."
He actually turned white. "No!" he cried. "No; they're criminals and they've got to be punished, got to be!"
I was astounded. "Why? None of them's done any great harm. And as far as we're concerned, they don't exist. Forget them."
He actually bared his teeth. "Never," he whispered, then he roared, "I never forget a wanted man!"
"Okay, Javert."
"Who?"
"A fictional policeman in a book called Les Misérables. He spent half his life hunting down a man no one else wanted any more."
"Good man; like to have him in the department."
"He's not generally regarded too highly."
"He is by me!" Inspector Ihren began slowly pounding his fist into his palm, muttering, "They've got to be punished, they've got to be punished," then he looked up at me. "Get out of here," he yelled, "fast!" and I was glad to, and did. A block away I looked back, and he was still sitting there on the dock slowly pounding his fist in his palm.
I thought I'd seen the last of him then but I hadn't; I saw Inspector Ihren one more time. Late one evening about ten days later he phoned my apartment and asked me—ordered me—to come right over with my little black box, and I did even though I'd been getting ready for bed; he simply wasn't a man you disobeyed lightly. When I walked up to the big dark Hall of Justice he was standing in the doorway, and without a word he nodded at a car at the curb. We got in, and drove in silence out to a quiet little residential district.
The streets were empty, the houses dark; it was close to midnight. We parked just within range of a corner street light, and Ihren said, "I've been doing some thinking since I saw you last, and some research." He pointed to a mailbox beside the street lamp on the corner a dozen feet ahead. "That's one of the three mailboxes in the city of San Francisco that has been in the same location for almost ninety years. Not that identical box, of course, but always that location. And now we're going to mail some letters." From his coat pocket, Inspector Ihren brought out a little sheaf of envelopes, addressed in pen and ink, and stamped for mailing. He showed me the top one, shoving the others into his pocket. "You see who this is for?"
"The chief of police."
"That's right; the San Francisco chief of police—in 1885! That's his name, address, and the kind of stamp they used then. I'm going to walk to the mailbox on the corner, and hold this in the slot. You'll focus your little black box on the envelope, turn on the current as I let it go, and it will drop into the mailbox that stood here in 1885!"
I shook my head admiringly; it was ingenious. "And what does the letter say?"
He grinned evilly. "I'll tell you what it says! Every spare moment I've had since I last saw you, I've been reading old newspapers at the library. In December, 1884, there was a robbery, several thousand dollars missing; there isn't a word in the paper for months afterward that it was ever solved." He held up the envelope. "Well, this letter suggests to the chief of police that they investigate a man they'll find working in Haring's Restaurant, a man with an unusually long thin face. And that if they search his room, they'll probably find several thousand dollars he can't account for. And that he will absolutely not have an alibi for the robbery in 1884!" The Inspector smiled, if you could call it a smile. "That's all they'll need to send him to San Quentin, and mark the case closed; they didn't pamper criminals in those days!"
My jaw was hanging open. "But he isn't guilty! Not of that crime!"
"He's guilty of another just about like it! And he's got to be punished; I will not let him escape, not even to 1885!"
"And the other letters?"
"You can guess. There's one for each of the men you helped get away, addressed to the police of the proper time and place. And you're going to help me mail them all, one by one. If you don't I'll ruin you, and that's a promise, Professor." He opened his door, stepped out, and walked to the corner without even glancing back.
I suppose there are those who will say I should have refused to use my little black box no matter what the consequences to me. Well, maybe I should have, but I didn't. The inspector meant what he said and I knew it, and I wasn't going to have the only career I ever had or wanted be ruined. I did the best I could; I begged and pleaded. I got out of the car with my box; the inspector stood waiting at the mailbox." Please don't make me do this," I said. "Please! There's no need! You haven't told anyone else about this, have you?"
"Of course not; I'd be laughed off the force."
"Then forget it! Why hound these poor people? They haven't done so much; they haven't really hurt anyone. Be humane! Forgiving! Your ideas are at complete odds with modern conceptions of criminal rehabilitation!"
I stopped for breath, and he said, "You through, Professor? I hope so, because nothing will ever change my mind. Now, go ahead and use that damn box!" Hopelessly I shrugged, and began adjusting the dials.
I am sure that the most baffling case the San Francisco Bureau of Missing Persons ever had will never be solved. Only two people—Inspector Ihren and I—know the answer, and we're not going to tell. For a short time there was a clue someone might have stumbled onto, but I found it. It was in the rare photographs section of the public library; they've got hundreds of old San Francisco pictures, and I went through them all and found this one. Then I stole it; one more crime added to the list I was guilty of hardly mattered.
Every once in a while I get it out, and look at it; it shows a row of uniformed men lined up in formation before a San Francisco police station. In a way it reminds me of an old movie comedy because each of them wears a tall helmet of felt with a broad turn-down brim, and long uniform coats to the knees. Nearly every one of them wears a drooping mustache, and each holds a long nightstick poised at the shoulder as though ready to bring it down on Chester Conklin's head. Keystone Kops they look like at first glance, but study those faces closely and you change your mind about that. Look especially close at the face of
the man at the very end of the row, wearing sergeant's stripes. It looks positively and permanently ferocious, glaring out (or so it always seems) directly at me. It is the implacable face of Martin O. Ihren of the San Francisco police force, back where he really belongs, back where I sent him with my little black box, in the year 1893.
THE INTREPID AERONAUT
THE INTREPID AERONAUT
On the sixth day that he was home alone Charley Burke walked out onto the patio, nodded at the empty chairs, saying, "Hello, everybody. Don't get up," and dropped into a lounge chair. He was wearing the tan wash pants and brown loafers he'd just changed into and the white shirt he'd worn that day in San Francisco at the office. Now he tilted far back in the chair, his feet rising higher than his head. It was August, still daylight, and he lay staring up at the clear blue sky. He was conscious of the emptiness of the suburban house beside him but absently so, used to it now. Then his jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and he lay motionless, staring up at the sky, paralyzed by the strength of a strange new emotion.
His house, across the Bay from the city, in Marin County, lay in a miniature valley; the street wound between two rows of hills. Fifty yards above the hills that rose behind the patio a hawk hung in the air high in the sun. He was there often hunting field rodents; Charley had seen him before. But now he saw him, actually, for the first time. The big bird didn't move. Wings out he lay on an invisible column of air that pressed against the sides of the hills to be deflected upward. He lay there magically neither rising nor falling, moving neither forward nor back, no least movement of his wings necessary to sustain him. Then the wings tilted, the bird dropped in a sudden swift and graceful arc and soared up again. The wings tilted back once more and again the hawk hung in the summer sky belonging to it; and all that Charley Burke wanted of the entire world was somehow to be able to do that, too.
It was no idle wish. It was an overpowering seizure, a wild and passionate necessity. Its intensity drew him to his feet and he walked the patio, smiling, trying to laugh the feeling away. But there was no escape. He was possessed by an irresistible urge to rise in effortless detachment from gravity up into the blueness till he could feel the sky around him touching his skin. And it occurred to him that he could do what he wanted to do—not in a plane fighting the air but in a balloon.
Stepping between the open glass doors, he stood in the living room, neat in the gathering darkness—ashtrays emptied, magazines stacked. But when he snapped on a light the room looked dusty. He stood thinking over all he knew about balloons. Mostly this was just a picture in his mind of a large, rounded object shaped like a giant punching bag upside down in the sky. It was made in vertical panels of contrasting colors, a long ribbon pennant fluttered from its top, and under it hung a trapezelike bar on which sat a man wearing tights. He wore his hair parted in the center, had a large mustache, and sat smiling, ankles crossed, legs dangling gracefully, a hand negligently holding to one rope of his perch. Stitched to the chest of his tights was an American flag. This picture was supplanted by another very much like it except that now a square basket with high sides hung under the balloon. A man stood in the basket staring out at him; he wore a black silk hat, black frock coat, square-cut beard, pince-nez, and had a brass telescope tucked under one arm.
That was all Charley knew about balloons. He took down volume two of the encyclopedia on the living-room bookshelves, found the article on balloons, and sat down at one end of the davenport, leaning over the pages. "Balloon," the article began, "a bag of impermeable material which, when inflated with a gas lighter than air, rises from the ground." This had almost the lilt of poetry, he felt, the last four words especially, and he read it through several times, glancing up each time to smile.
Then he read everything in the article about how and why a balloon rises, descends, and is controlled, and it seemed to him as simple and effective a device as man has yet invented. Filled with a gas lighter than the volume of air it displaces, a balloon must rise. Release some of the gas and its ascent is checked or reversed. Spill ballast and its rise will resume. The open book on his lap, Charley sat back, hands clasped behind his head, at peace with this explanation.
It was easily understood without special training, like most of the mechanical devices of the previous century. Men understood the things they used then; they were masters of the machines that served them. He felt sure that passengers riding in hydraulic elevators of the time knew how they worked, and that most men, a forefinger on a sharp-etched woodcut diagram, could trace through the workings of a horsecar mechanism. Of the thousands of years men have been civilized, it is only in the last fifty, Charley thought, that things we use daily have gone beyond the understanding of most of us—our television sets, jet planes, even our automobiles today. Most of us use them in helplessness, no longer their masters, no longer masters of very much at all any more. So that to understand the balloon was a solid satisfaction and Charley stood up and began to sing. It was an ancient song he hadn't thought of in years and the house being empty he shouted it full voice. "Come, Josephine, in my flying machine, and it's up we'll go, up we'll go!" he yelled in sudden exuberance, and walked quickly to the garage where he began hunting for things he needed, such as his wife's plastic clothesline and two old tennis nets.
Through that and the following two evenings, working hard and steadily, Charley made a balloon. He cut the panels from two rolls of lightweight rubberized cloth—one was blue, and one was white—which he bought in San Francisco, and stitched them together on his wife's sewing machine. With odds and ends around the house—a wire coat hanger, an aluminum pot lid, his wife's clothes pole—he completed the balloon, then hung it from a rope over the patio.
It could turn chilly after the sun was down here in the San Francisco Bay area, and Charley changed into black ski pants and jersey, light in weight but snug-fitting and very warm. Looking down at himself it occurred to him that they somewhat resembled a balloonist's tights, and he smiled. Finally, well after eleven at night, Charley stood on the patio beside the brick barbecue tending a bed of coals. The electric blower was on full, the coals white hot and flameless in the forced draft, and a steady rush of hot air roared up through a stovepipe resting on the grill and into the balloon hanging overhead.
Almost instantly the long blue-and-white wrinkles of hanging cloth rising up into the night over Charley's head had begun to stir; now they were visibly distending. From a long, wrinkled prune the balloon swelled into a thin pear, then rounded into a smooth-skinned sphere. At eleven forty-five the bag, round and tight, began to lift. Within minutes, it seemed alive. Tugging at the anchor rope tied to the barbecue, it swayed in the air fat, buoyant, and eager. Two tennis nets hung draped over it. Tied to their ends by short lengths of clothesline hung a trapezelike seat made from half a clothes pole. Several dozen paper bags imprinted Mill Valley Market and filled with sand hung in the netting.
Charley switched off the barbecue blower and sat on the trapeze. Like a child slowly untying a gift to prolong the anticipation, he began pulling the drawstring that would release his balloon from the anchor rope. At that moment the moon, which had been rising for some minutes, lifted an edge over the uneven horizon of hills. Hanging under the balloon in his black ski suit and a pair of heavy navy-blue wool socks, Charley saw the pale wash of light touch the windows of the empty house beside him and turn them opaque, dimly reflecting himself and the bottom of the balloon like a faded poster from a forgotten circus. Looking up, he watched the moonlight slide up and down the striped sides of the balloon as it swayed and he felt a surge of pride stronger than any he'd felt in years. Of all the things he owned, it suddenly occurred to him, this was the only one he'd created, the only thing he hadn't bought. Of all his possessions this was uniquely his own and, while he knew that what he was about to do could be dangerous, he didn't believe in the danger. His heart beat from joy, not fear, as he yanked hard at the rope in his hand.
Instantly the wooden bar on which he sat pressed
deep into the undersides of Charley's legs and he was looking down onto his moonlit roof. Immediately the roofs of his neighbors came sliding into view from the sides; then he was looking at the street in front of his house. It was growing in length, shrinking in width, winding through the hills between two rows of rooftops which were diminishing as he stared into smaller and smaller rectangles and squares.
Up through the moonlight he rose into the night in glorious silence. His only motive power was air itself, air being lifted by air. He was a weightless part of the element he was in mingling with its breezes. Now he rose above the level of the low Marin County hills and here occasional puffs of air touched him and he drifted a little like a ball of dandelion fluff over the light-speckled patches and great dark areas of town and countryside spreading below him. A hand tightly gripping each support rope, Charley sat on his wife's clothes pole swinging slightly, pleasantly, and felt the gentle lift of the bar under his legs slacken and then stop. Mouth agape, eyes wide and heart pounding, he hung in the air staring down between his dangling feet at the tiny roofs and narrow moonlit black ribbon that was the street he lived on.