Twenty years, he thought wonderingly, and all the while she must have known that one day I’d climb a September hill and see her standing, young and lovely, in the sun, and fall in love with her all over again. She had to know because the moment was as much a part of her past as it was a part of my future. But why didn’t she tell me? Why doesn’t she tell me now?
Suddenly he understood.
He found it hard to breathe, and he went into the hall and donned his raincoat and stepped out into the rain. He walked down the walk in the rain, and the rain pelted his face and ran in drops down his cheeks, and some of the drops were raindrops, and some of them were tears. How could anyone as agelessly beautiful as Anne — as Julie — was be afraid of growing old? Didn’t she realize that in his eyes she couldn’t grow old — that to him she hadn’t aged a day since the moment he had looked up from his desk and seen her standing there in the tiny office and simultaneously fallen in love with her? Couldn’t she understand that that was why the girl on the hill had seemed a stranger to him?
He had reached the street and was walking down it toward the corner. He was almost there when the bingo bus pulled up and stopped, and the girl in the white trench coat got out. The tightness of his throat grew knife-sharp, and he could not breathe at all. The dandelion-hued hair was darker now, and the girlish charm was gone; but the gentle loveliness still resided in her gentle face, and the long and slender legs had a grace and symmetry in the pale glow of the November streetlight that they had never known in the golden radiance of the September sun.
She came forward to meet him, and he saw the familiar fear in her eyes — a fear poignant now beyond enduring because he understood its cause. She blurred before his eyes, and he walked toward her blindly. When he came up to her, his eyes cleared, and he reached out across the years and touched her rain-wet cheek. She knew it was all right then, and the fear went away forever, and they walked home hand in hand in the rain.
NIGHTMARE IN TIME
by Fredric Brown
Chances are that no one could have composed this short-shortshort horror story except a man who worked as a proofreader for some twenty years, before turning in desperation to writing.
Professor Jones had been working on his time theory for many years.
“And I have found the key equation,” he told his daughter one day. ‘Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.”
Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, “This should make time run backward run time make should this,” said he, spoke he as button a pushing.
“Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time.” Day one daughter his told he, “Equation key the found have I and.”
Years many for theory time his on working been had Jones Professor.
LOOKING BACKWARD
by Jules Feiffer
THREE PROLOGUES AND AN EPILOGUE
by John Dos Passos
A shift in viewpoint, lighting, or perspective may serve to study the background as well as the figure. Most of the selections so far have been concerned with individual insights; in the group that follows the focus shifts to the outlook for society.
Jules Feiffer’s cartoon made graphic use of a device for this purpose that was also effectively employed, recently, in Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet: the detached observer’s viewpoint (from space or time). George Elliott used, instead, the reflection of a single individual in the mirrors of two cultures, to shed light on both. Ward Moore (who follows this selection) makes use of retroflection — a sort of hindsight-in-advance gained by viewing through sympathetic and familiar eyes a society that could result from ours.
John Dos Passos is probably the outstanding contemporary practitioner of a less common and non-science-fiction technique for the same purpose. In his “mural novels,” he interweaves and counterposes strands of fact and story lines in such a way as to compel the mental eye to follow a pattern which composes a sort of aerial view of society. This can, sometimes, constitute Einstein’s famous “pause to wonder” in its most immediate form — as in these excerpts from Midcentury.
I should like to express my gratitude to the editors of Audit (published at the University of Buffalo), where I first saw this printed as a unified whole.
Walking the earth under the stars,
musing midnight in midcentury,
a man treads the road with his dog;
the dog, less timebound in her universe of stench and
shrill, trots eager ahead.
The man too senses smells:
the frosted pasture and the cold loblollies,
he warmsweet of cows, and perhaps a hint of the passing of a skunk; hears
the hoot, hoot, hoot-hoot of the horned owl,
as full of faraway foreboding as the hoot of a
woodbuming locomotive heard across the plains as a child long ago; sees
Orion overhead sport glistening Rigel
and Betelgeuse, and the three belt buttons
that point out Sirius, and Belletrix that indicates
smoldering Aldebaran.
Eyes sweep
the bluedomed planetarium pivoting on the
polestar which the meditative Greeks and the Bedouin dreamed
engraved with the quaint creatures of the
zodiac; the spheres spun to music
and cherubim, benign to man,
with halcyon voices chanted
glory to God.
The dog stops short, paw poised, sniffs deep
and takes off yelping after some scuttle in the underbrush.
The man walks on alone.
Thoughts swarm; braincells, as multitudinous as the wan
starpoints that merge into the Milky Way overhead, trigger notions; tonight,
in the century’s decline,
new fantasies prevail. Photoelectric calculators
giddy the mind with number mechanically multiplying immensities by
billions of lightyears.
A million hostile chinamen a month; a hundred and thirty thousand
miscellaneous manmouths a day added to the population of the planet Earth.
But rockets successfully soar and satellites trundle on their punctual trails
above the stratosphere. Sam the Rhesus returns in his space capsule, his little face as inscrutable as when he went up. An aeronaut from a twelvemilehigh balloon spies moisture in the Venusian atmosphere. Norbert Weiner says his calculators are hep; watch out if they get a will of their own. A certain Dr. Otto Struve has predicted the possibility of ten million lifebreeding planets among the island galaxies, and, at Green Bank, West Virginia.
(far from the sins of the world)
they are building a radio telescope the size of a
baseballfield, tipped sixty stories up in the air, where the