Read Online Time and Again by Jack Finney, Paul Hecht - Free Book Online

the town. Presently he'll hear that he's been accepted for one of these jobs. At that point his habits will change. He'll begin going out into the town, to work." Rube glanced at me, then resumed his contemplation of the scene below. "Meanwhile he putters around the house. Waters his lawn. Reads. Passes the time of day with neighbors. Smokes Lucky Strike cigarettes. From green packages. Sometimes he listens to the radio, although in this weather there's lots of static. Friends visit him occasionally. Right now he's reading a freshly printed copy, done an hour ago, of the town newspaper for September 3, 1926. He's tired; it's been over a hundred down there in the afternoons for the last three days, and in the high eighties even at night. A real Indian-summer heat wave with no air conditioning. And if he looked up here right now all he'd see is a hot blue sky."
    Keeping my voice patient, I said, "You mean they're following some sort of script."
    "No, there's no script. He does as he pleases, and the people he sees act and speak according to the circumstances."
    "Are you telling me that he actually believes he's in a town in —»
    "No, no; not that either. He knows where he is, all right. He knows he's in a New York storage warehouse, in a kind of stage setting. He's been careful never to walk around the corner and look, but he knows that the street ends there, out of his sight. He knows that the long stretch of street he sees at the other end is actually a painted perspective. And while no one has told him so, I'm sure he understands that the houses across the street are probably only false fronts." Rube stood upright, turning from the railing to face me. "Si, all I can tell you right now is that he's doing his damnedest to feel that he's really and truly sitting there on the porch on a late-summer afternoon reading what Calvin Coolidge had to say this morning, if anything."
    "Is there actually a town and a street like this?"
    "Oh, yes; a street with houses, trees, and lawns precisely like that, right down to the last blade of grass and the wicker baby-carriage on the porch. You've seen an aerial shot of it; it's called Winfield, Vermont." Rube grinned at me. "Don't get mad," he said gently. "You have to see it before you can understand it."
    We walked on, high up on the spider web under the humming machinery and just above the hundreds and hundreds of lights. We crossed directly over the house with the man on the porch, and it was strange to think that if he should look up here from his paper he wouldn't see us but only an apparent sky. He didn't look, though; just continued reading his paper until the eave of his porch roof cut him from view. Angling to the left onto another length of catwalk, we passed over a wall and the area was gone from sight.
    It was instantly cooler, with a hint of dampness and a feel of rain, and we stopped to stare down. Far below lay a section of prairie and through it ran a tiny stream. On the other side of the area from where we stood grew a scattering of thin white-trunked birch trees. These were stragglers at the edge of a much thicker woods which stretched up and over the crest of a rise. Most of the woods, I realized now, was painted on a wall but it looked very real. Almost directly under our feet stood three tepees made of hide and daubed with faded circles, jagged lines, and sticklike figures of men and animals. A thin smoke drifted from the open top of each tepee. Before one of them a puppy lay tethered to a peg; he was worrying something held between his paws. As we stared, some of the lights aimed into the area went off one by one — we could just hear the clicks — and the triangular shadows of the tents slowly deepened on the grass of the prairie, and now we could see an occasional spark in the trickles of rising smoke.
    "I love this one," Rube murmured. "Montana, about sixty miles from where Billings now stands. There are eight people — men and women and one child — in those