He tapped out his pipe and went back inside. In his bedroom he undressed and slipped between the sheets and turned out the light. Sleep should have come readily, but it did not; and when it finally did come, it came in fragments interspersed with tantalizing dreams.
“Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit,” she had said, “and yesterday a deer, and today, you.”
On the second afternoon she was wearing a blue dress, and there was a little blue ribbon to match tied in her dandelion-colored hair. After breasting the hill, he stood for some time, not moving, waiting till the tightness of his throat went away; then he walked over and stood beside her in the wind. But the soft curve of her throat and chin brought the tightness back, and when she turned and said, “Hello, I didn’t think you’d come,” it was a long while before he was able to answer.
“But I did,” he finally said, “and so did you.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad.”
A nearby outcropping of granite formed a bench of sorts, and they sat down on it and looked out over the land. He filled his pipe and lighted it and blew smoke into the wind. “My father smokes a pipe too,” she said, “and when he lights it, he cups his hands the same way you do, even when there isn’t any wind. You and he are alike in lots of ways.”
“Tell me about your father,” he said. “Tell me about yourself too.”
And she did, saying that she was twenty-one, that her father was a retired Government physicist, that they lived in a small apartment on Two Thousand and Fortieth Street and that she had been keeping house for him ever since her mother had died four years ago. Afterward he told her about himself and Anne and Jeff — about how he intended to take Jeff into partnership with him someday, about Anne’s phobia about cameras and how she had refused to have her picture taken on their wedding day and had gone on refusing ever since, about the grand time the three of them had had on the camping trip they’d gone on last summer.
When he had finished, she said, “What a wonderful family life you have. Nineteen-sixty-one must be a marvelous year in which to live!”
“With a time machine at your disposal, you can move here any time you like.”
“It’s not quite that easy. Even aside from the fact that I wouldn’t dream of deserting my father, there’s the time police to take into consideration. You see, time travel is limited to the members of Government-sponsored historical expeditions and is out of bounds to the general public.”
“You seem to have managed all right.”
“That’s because my father invented his own machine, and the time police don’t know about it.”
“But you’re still breaking the law.”
She nodded. “But only in their eyes, only in the light of their concept of time. My father has his own concept.”
It was so pleasant hearing her talk that it did not matter really what she talked about, and he wanted her to ramble on, no matter how farfetched her subject. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“First I’ll tell you about the official concept. Those who endorse it say that no one from the future should participate physically in anything that occurred in the past, because his very presence would constitute a paradox, and future events would have to be altered in order for the paradox to be assimilated. Consequently the Department of Time Travel makes sure that only authorized personnel have access to its time machines, and maintains a police force to apprehend the would-be generation-jumpers who yearn for a simpler way of life and who keep disguising themselves as historians so they can return permanently to a different era.
“But according to my father’s concept, the book of time has already been written. From a macrocosmic viewpoint, my father says, everything that is going to happen has already happened. Therefore, if a person from the future participates in a past event, he becomes a part of that event — for the simple reason that he was a part of it in the first place — and a paradox cannot possibly arise.”
Mark took a deep drag on his pipe. He needed it. “Your father sounds like quite a remarkable person,” he said.
“Oh, he is!” Enthusiasm deepened the pinkness of her cheeks, brightened the blueness of her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe all the books he’s read, Mr. Randolph. Why, our apartment is bursting with them! Hegel and Kant and Hume; Einstein and Newton and Weizsäcker. I’ve — I’ve even read some of them myself.”
“I gathered as much. As a matter of fact, so have I.”
She gazed raptly up into his face. “How wonderful, Mr. Randolph,” she said. “I’ll bet we’ve got just scads of mutual interests!”
The conversation that ensued proved conclusively that they did have — though the transcendental aesthetic, Berkeleianism and relativity were rather incongruous subjects for a man and a girl to be discussing on a September hilltop, he reflected presently, even when the man was forty-four and the girl was twenty-one. But happily there were compensations. Their animated discussion of the transcendental aesthetic did more than elicit a priori and a posteriori conclusions — it also elicited microcosmic stars in her eyes; their breakdown of Berkeley did more than point up the inherent weaknesses in the good bishop’s theory — it also pointed up the pinkness of her cheeks; and their review of relativity did more than demonstrate that E invariably equals mc2—it also demonstrated that, far from being an impediment, knowledge is an asset to feminine charm.
The mood of the moment lingered far longer than it had any right to, and it was still with him when he went to bed. This time he didn’t even try to think of Anne; he knew it would do no good. Instead he lay there in the darkness and played host to whatever random thoughts came along — and all of them concerned a September hilltop and a girl with dandelion-colored hair.
Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.
Next morning he drove over to the hamlet and checked at the post office to see if he had any mail. There was none. He was not surprised. Jeff disliked writing letters as much as he did, and Anne, at the moment, was probably incommunicado. As for his practice, he had forbidden his secretary to bother him with any but the most urgent of matters.
He debated whether to ask the wizened postmaster if there was a family named Danvers living in the area. He decided not to. To have done so would have been to undermine the elaborate make-believe structure which Julie had built, and even though he did not believe in the structure’s validity, he could not find it in his heart to send it toppling.
That afternoon she was wearing a yellow dress the same shade as her hair, and again his throat tightened when he saw her, and again he could not speak. But when the first moment passed and words came, it was all right, and their thoughts flowed together like two effervescent brooks and coursed gaily through the arroyo of the afternoon. This time when they parted, it was she who asked, “Will you be here tomorrow?”—though only because she stole the question from his lips — and the words sang in his ears all the way back through the woods to the cabin and lulled him to sleep after an evening spent with his pipe on the porch.
Next afternoon when he climbed the hill it was empty. At first his disappointment numbed him, and then he thought,She’s late, that’s all. She’ll probably show up any minute. And he sat down on the granite bench to wait. But she did not come. The minutes passed — the hours. Shadows crept out of the woods and climbed partway up the hill. The air grew colder. He gave up, finally, and headed miserably back toward the cabin.
The next afternoon she did not show up either. Nor the next. He could neither eat nor sleep. Fishing palled on him. He could no longer read. And all the while he hated himself — hated himself for behaving like a lovesick schoolboy, for reacting just like any other fool in his forties to a pretty face and a pair of pretty legs. Up until a few days ago he had never even so much as looked at another woman, and here in the space of less than a week he had not only looked at one but had fallen in love with her.