by Jerry
“You will perhaps understand how great a people the Antha were when I tell you that they alone, unaided, dependent entirely upon their own resources, fought the rest of the Galactics, and fought them to a standstill. As the terrible years went by we lost whole races and planets—like this one, which was one the Antha destroyed—and yet we could not defeat them.
“It was only after many years, when a Galactic invented the most dangerous weapon of all, that we won. The invention—of which only the Galactic Council has knowledge—enabled us to turn the suns of the Antha into novae, at long range. One by one we destroyed the Antha worlds. We hunted them through all the planets of the desert; for the first time in history the edict of the Federation was death, death for an entire race. At last there were no longer any habitable worlds where the Antha had been. We burned their worlds, and ran them down in space. Thirty thousand years ago, the civilization of the Antha perished.”
Roymer had finished. He looked at the Earthmen out of grave, tired old eyes.
Cohn was staring in open-mouth fascination, but Jansen—unaccountably felt a chill. The story of Caesar remained uncomfortably in his mind. And he had a quick, awful suspicion.
“Are you sure you got all of them?”
“No. Some surely must have escaped. There were too many in space, and space is without limits.”
Jansen wanted to know: “Have any of them been heard of since?”
Roymer’s smile left him as the truth came out. “No. Not until now.”
There were only a few more seconds. He gave them time to understand. He could not help telling them that he was sorry, he even apologized. And then he sent the order with his mind.
The Antha died quickly and silently, without pain.
Only thirty thousand years, Roymer was thinking, but thirty thousand years, and they came back out to the stars. They have no memory now of what they were or what they have done. They started all over again, the old history of the race has been lost, and in thirty thousand years they came all the way back.
Roymer shook his head with sad wonder and awe. The most brilliant people of all.
Goladan came in quietly with the final reports.
“There are no charts,” he grumbled, “no maps at all. We will not be able to trace them to their home star.”
Roymer did not know, really, what was right, to be disappointed or relieved. We cannot destroy them now, he thought, not right away. He could not help being relieved. Maybe this time there will be a way, and they will not have to be destroyed. They could be—
He remembered the edict—the edict of death. The Antha had forged it for themselves and it was just. He realized that there wasn’t much hope.
The reports were on his desk and he regarded them with a wry smile. There was indeed no way to trace them back. They had no charts, only a regular series of course-check coordinates which were preset on their home planet and which were not decipherable. Even at this stage of their civilization they had already anticipated the consequences of having their ship fall into alien hands. And this although they lived in the desert.
Goladan startled him with an anxious question:
“What can we do?”
Roymer was silent.
We can wait, he thought. Gradually, one by one, they will come out of the desert, and when they come we will be waiting. Perhaps one day we will follow one back and destroy their world, and perhaps before then we will find a way to save them.
Suddenly, as his eyes wandered over the report before him and he recalled the ingenious mechanism of the freeze, a chilling, unbidden thought came into his brain.
And perhaps, he thought calmly, for he was a philosophical man, they will come out already equipped to rule the galaxy.
THE END
THERE IS A TIDE . . .
Jack Finney
I believe in ghosts. I believe in the ghost of Harris L. Gruener. I have to: he came to haunt me right in my own apartment
I’LL say this for myself, and it’s something that gripes me: if I had any other story to tell—if I said I’d seen a blue horse, a wild antelope or a three-toed sloth in my apartment—I’d finally be believed by the people who know me, when they saw I wasn’t kidding, because I’m simply not the kind of guy to pull a pointless hoax. And I’m not a pathological liar.
I’m normal, I’m average, I even look like most people. I’m sound in body and limb, if not in wind; I’m married; twenty-eight years old; and I don’t “imagine” or “dream” things that aren’t so—a particularly exasperating explanation a number of people have offered me. I’ll admit that at least once a week I imagine I’m president of McCreedy & Cluett, the big candy and cough-sirup company I work for, and once I even dreamed I was. But believe me, I don’t sit down in the president’s office and start giving orders. In the daytime, anyway, I have no trouble remembering that I’m actually assistant sales manager; no trouble distinguishing reality from dreams.
The point I’m beating you over the head with is that if I say I saw a ghost, people who know me ought to remember these things. I don’t mind a few snickers at first; this sounds ridiculous, and I know it. In a modern, seventeen-story New York apartment building on East Sixty-eighth Street, I saw a plump, middle-aged ghost wearing rimless glasses. So snicker if you want, but at least consider the evidence before you laugh out loud.
I SAW the ghost in my own living room, alone, between 3 and 4 in the morning, and I was there, wide awake, for a perfectly sound reason: I was worrying. The candy we make is doing pretty well, but the cough sirup isn’t. It only sells by the carloads, that is, and the company would naturally prefer to measure sales in trainloads—big, long trains with two engines. That wasn’t my problem as much as Ted Haymes, the sales manager’s. But I did see a chance in the whole situation, to put it bluntly, of beating him out of his job, and I worried about it, at the office, at home, at the movies, while kissing Louisa hello, good-by or what’s new. Also while awake or asleep.
On this particular night, my conscience and I woke up around 3, all set for some wrestling. I didn’t want to disturb Louisa; so I grabbed the spare blanket and bundled up on the davenport in the living room. I did not sleep; I want to make that plain. I was full of my problem and wide awake. The street outside was dead; there’d be minutes at a time when not a car went by, and once, when a pedestrian passed, I could distinctly hear his footsteps three stories below. The room was dark, except for the windows outlined by the street lamp, and with no distractions the battle of ambition versus conscience began. I reminded myself of the spectacular variety of ways in which Ted Haymes was a heel; you could hardly ask for a more deserving victim. Besides, I wouldn’t be knifing him in the back, or anything.
I rationalized, I explained, I hunted for a way of talking myself into doing what I wanted to do, and maybe half an hour went by. I guess I’d been staring through the darkness down at the davenport, or the floor, or the cigarette in my hand, or something. Anyway, I happened to glance up, and there, clearly silhouetted against the street light, a man stood at the livingroom windows with his back to me, staring down at the street.
MY FIRST quick thought was burglar or prowler, but in that same instant I knew it wasn’t. His whole attitude and posture were wrong for it, because he simply stood there, motionless, staring down through the window. Oh, of course he moved a little; shifting his weight slightly, altering the position of his head a little. But in every way it was the attitude of a man up in the middle of the night over some problem.
Then he turned back into the room, and for an instant the street light caught his face from the side, and I saw it clearly. It was the face of a man around 60; round, plump, undistinguished. He was quite bald and wore glasses, the eyes behind them wide in thought, and in that pale, harsh light I saw he was wearing a bathrobe, and I knew it was no prowler; I knew it was a ghost.
How did you know? some of my wiseacre friends have asked. Was he transparent, yak, yak, yak? No, he wasn’t. No long white sheet with holes
for the eyes? several dozen people with rare, rich senses of humor have asked. No, this figure moving in the faint light looked ordinary, harmless and real. And I knew it wasn’t, that’s all. I just knew.
How did you feel? people have asked, trying to keep their faces straight. I was terrified. The figure turned absently into the room, and he began to walk toward the hall leading to the bedroom and bathroom, and I could feel the thousands of separate little follicles on my head prickle and swell.
He did a strange thing. From the windows to the hall, the path is clear, yet he altered his direction for several steps, exactly as though he were walking around some piece of furniture that was no longer there.
And all up and down the middle of my back, the skin turned suddenly cold. I was horribly frightened, and I don’t like the memory of it. Yet I wasn’t worried. I felt no threat, that is, toward Louisa or me. I had the idea—the certainty, in fact—that for him I wasn’t there at all, just as that invisible object was still there for him. And I knew, as he turned into the hall, out of my sight, that he wasn’t going into the bedroom where Louisa lay, or into the bathroom, or anywhere else in that apartment. I knew he was going back into whatever time and place he had momentarily appeared from.
Our apartment is small, with just about adequate closet and cupboard space for a large family of mice. It took only a few minutes to search every last place a man might be hiding, and he was gone, as I’d known he would be. Some ghost, eh? A chubby, middle-aged ghost in a ratty old bathrobe; and not a moan, groan or peep out of him.
YOU know what occurred to me later, lying in bed wondering when I’d be able to sleep again? It just shows what silly thoughts you can have in the dark, especially when you’ve seen a ghost. He’d looked like a man who was fighting his conscience, and I suddenly wondered if it were the ghost of myself, half a lifetime later, still troubled by guilt, still talking myself into one more thing I knew I shouldn’t do. My hair is thinning a little at the crown; I suppose I’ll be bald someday. And if you added rimless glasses, 40 pounds and 30 years . . . I was actually a little frightened, and, lying there in the darkness, I decided that next morning I was going to stop Ted Haymes from taking the step that would probably get me his job.
At breakfast, I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell Louisa about my decision or what had happened; it was just too silly in the daylight. Louisa talked, though—about cough sirup and sales plans, promotions and more money, and bigger apartments, with a shrewd, intelligent, fur-coat look in her eyes. I mumbled some answers, feeling depressed. Then I put on my Homburg and left for the office, looking like a rising young executive and wishing I were dead.
Right after I got there, Ted strolled into my office and sat down on the corner of my desk, pushing my papers aside—a remarkably annoying and absolutely typical thing for him to do. He started yapping about his big new cough-sirup sales plan, of course; it was simple, direct, inexpensive, and would sound good to the boss—I knew that. He had it all dressed up, but basically his play was distributing samples, in miniature bottles, during nice, brisk, pneumonia weather. He’d gotten cost figures, and he was about ready to present the plan and wanted to know if I agreed.
For a minute I just sat there, knowing his plan would flop, and him along with it. Then I just shrugged and said, Yeah, I guessed he was ready. I was astonished; but at the same time I knew why I’d changed my mind. You’ve known someone like Ted if you ever worked in an office; they’re standard equipment, like filing cabinets. He happens to be tall and skinny, though they come in all shapes, a bumptious sort of guy with a hideous, mocking horse laugh. He’s a know-it-all, a pincher of stenographers, a credit hog—I’ve got to watch him all the time to see that I get any recognition for the work our department does—and even when he’s patting you on the back, there’s a sneer in his eyes.
Sitting at my desk after he’d left, I was perfectly willing again to give him the business. Then, unaccountably, the image of the ghost at my livingroom windows flashed up in my mind. It made me suddenly furious—I didn’t know why—and I knew I wanted that ghost explained and exorcised. Somehow I knew I had to get him out of my apartment and out of my mind.
Now, the building I live in is no ancient, crumbling castle with a history hopelessly shrouded in the mists of time. It was built in 1939 and is managed by Thomas L. Persons Company, a big realty firm. So I reached for the Manhattan telephone book, looked up their number and called them.
A girl answered in a brisk, bitter voice, and I explained that I was a rent-paying customer and wanted to know if she could tell me the names of previous tenants of my apartment. From the way she said, Certainly not! you’d think I’d made an indecent proposal. I persisted, spoke to three more people and finally reached a man who grudgingly consented to open the archives and get me what I wanted.
A woman and her mother—no men in the family—had occupied my apartment from 1940 till 1949, when we moved in. In 1939, and for a few months after, the apartment’s first tenants had lived there: a Mr. Harris L. Gruener—pronounced Greener—and his wife. The ghost was Gruener, I insisted to myself, and if it could possibly be done, I was going to prove that it was, and that it had nothing to do with me.
THAT night, around 3, I woke up again, took the blanket from the foot of the bed and settled down on the davenport to settle Ted’s hash. Deliberately I worked myself into a tough, ruthless frame of mind. Business is business, I said to myself, lying there smoking in the dark. All’s fair, et cetera, and Ted Haymes would certainly do it to me, if the situation were reversed.
The nice thing was that I didn’t actually have to do anything. I’d worked for a much smaller candy and cough-sirup company, before McCreedy & Cluett; and they had once tried what was virtually Ted’s plan. It had looked good, sounded good—and it had failed completely. We figured out why. Except for the tiny fraction of people who happened to have coughs at the moment we gave out our samples, most of them dropped our little bottles into overcoat pockets, where they stayed for days. Presently they may have reached the shelves of medicine cabinets; and maybe eventually they were used, and even resulted in sales. But the immediate sales results of the plan were zero. And it was dropped, just as fast as we could let go.
I knew it would happen again. All I had to do was say nothing and look doubtful. When it failed, I’d be the man with the sales instinct who’d been pretty doubtful about the plan from the start, and—not right away, of course, but presently—I’d have Ted’s job, and he’d be out. It wasn’t surefire, but I had nothing to lose, and I lay there working out the best way of subtly getting my doubts on record with the boss.
Yet that wasn’t all I was doing, and I knew it. It was the dead of night, utterly silent outside and in, and I knew I was also waiting for a ghost, and that I was actually afraid to light another cigarette.
And then the ghost came strolling in from the hall, his head down on his chest, wearing that mangy old bathrobe. He crossed the room to the windows, and then just stood there again, staring down at the street. For twenty minutes or so, he went through the same performance as he had the night before. I don’t mean identically, every movement the same, like a movie you see twice. I had the feeling this was another night for him, and that he was up once again, standing at that window, working over the same old problem, whatever it was.
THEN he left, just as before, walking around the invisible object that was no longer there, and I knew he was walking through another time.
I had to do something. I knew I had to prove to myself that this ghost had nothing to do with me, and I walked out to the hall telephone and, with my hands trembling, looked up Gruener in the telephone book. There were several listed, but, as I’d expected, no Harris L. Feeling relieved and a bit silly, now, I tried the Brooklyn directory—and there it was. Harris L. Gruener, it said in cold, black type, with a telephone number and address, and then I was really panicky. For now it seemed certain that Gruener was nothing more than a previous tenant of this apartment, who l
ived in Brooklyn now, and had no connection with the ghost. And if the ghost wasn’t Gruener . . . I wouldn’t let myself think about that now, and I went to bed knowing where I had to go in the morning.
The house when I finally found it far out in Brooklyn, was a small white cottage; there was nothing unusual about it. A kid’s bike and an old ball bat, split and wrapped with tape, were lying on the front porch. I pressed the button, and a musical chime sounded inside; then a woman in a house dress and apron came to the door. She was in her early thirties, I’d say; nice-looking but overworked. Mr. Gruener? I said.
She shook her head. He’s at work now. I’d half expected that and wished I’d telephoned first, but then she added, Or do you mean his father?
Well, I said, I’m not sure. I want Harris L. Mr. Harris L. Gruener.
Oh, she answered, he’s around in the back yard. She smiled embarrassedly. You mind walking around the side of the house? I’d ask you through, but it’s in kind of a mess yet, and—
Of course not. I smiled understandingly, thanked her, touching my hat, then followed the walk around to the back yard. A moment or so later, fumbling with the latch of the rusted wire gate, I glanced up, and there in a garden lounge chair across the yard, face up to the sun, sat my Mr. Gruener.
It was a relief and at the same time a cold shock, an utterly frightening thing, and I just stood there, my hand still automatically fumbling with the gate, my mind churning to make sense out of this. I’d seen no ghost, I explained to myself; this man must be insane and had twice broken into my apartment in some unguessable way for some mad, secret reason. Then, as I got the gate open, Gruener opened his eyes, and I knew that I had seen a ghost.
For there, watching me approach, smiling pleasantly in greeting, was unquestionably the face I’d seen staring down at the street from my apartment window—but now it was a dozen years older. Now it was the face of a man in his seventies, looser, the muscle tone gone, the skin softer. With a courteous gesture of his hand, the old man invited me to take a chair beside him, and I sat down, knowing that what I’d seen in my apartment was this man—as he’d looked a decade before. Across the yard, his back against the board fence, a boy of perhaps twelve sat on the grass, watching us curiously, and for a moment I sat staring at him, trying to figure out what I could do or say. Then I turned to the old man and said, I came because I’ve seen you before. In my apartment. Then I added my address and apartment number.