Jack Finney - Time and Again

"Oh, I'm so sorry; it's a lovely city, I've heard." She nodded at the newspaper in her hand. "You have a way to print photographs, I see." She put down the paper and walked to my bookshelves.

"Yes, also in color. There ought to be an old Life magazine around somewhere with some color photos. And — my God, how could I forget! We're shooting rockets into space! They carry capsules with men in them. A couple of them have traveled to the moon, and landed. With men in them. And returned to earth."

"Do you mean that? To the moon? With men in them?"

"Yes, it's really true." Again I heard the ridiculous note in my voice sounding as though I'd had something to do with it.

She looked delighted. "Have they been on the moon?"

"Yep. Walked around on it."

"That's fascinating!"

I hesitated, then said, "Yeah. I suppose so. But not as much as I'd have thought when I was a kid reading science fiction." She looked puzzled, and I said, "It's hard to explain, Julia, but… it doesn't seem to mean anything. After the excitement of the actual trip — it was on television, if you can imagine that, Julia; we could actually see and hear the men on the moon — I almost forgot about it. Right away, too; I seldom thought about it afterward. It was unbelievably courageous of the men, and yet… somehow the project almost seemed to lack dignity. Because it didn't have any real purpose or point." I stopped because she wasn't listening.

As I'd talked, Julia had been looking over my book titles and presently she'd taken down a novel and begun leafing through it. Now, suddenly, she swung around to face me, and her face and neck were scarlet right down to the white collar of her blouse. "Si. Things like this" — she glanced at the open pages of the book in her hands, horrified — "are said in print?" She clapped the book shut as though the words could crawl off the page. "I would never have believed it!" She couldn't look at me.

I had nothing to say. How explain the changes in thought over more than a lifetime? But I was smiling; the novel she'd looked at was really very mild. There were others on the shelves that might literally have made her faint.

Disturbed, agitated, Julia had reached out and plucked another book from the shelves almost at random. She read the title aloud, hardly listening to herself, anxious to bury the subject of the horror she'd come onto. " 'A Pictorial History of World War Eye,' " she said. Then the meaning of the words came to her. "A war? World war? What does that mean, Si?" She started to open the book, and as her hand moved I was on my feet and walking quickly toward her.

It's always astonishing to realize later how lightning-fast the mind can sometimes work, what a lengthy series of thoughts and images it can produce within a fraction of a second. It had been a long time since I'd looked through the book Julia was opening. But during two very fast steps to her side I was remembering dozens of the photographs it contained: a destroyed town, only rubble and partial walls, and in the foreground a dead horse in a ditch… refugees on a dirt road, the frightened face of a small girl looking at the camera… an airplane going down in flames… a trench half filled with dead bodies in uniform, their legs wrapped in cloth puttees, the face of one of them decomposed so badly it was mostly skull, though the hair remained. And one photograph I particularly remembered in every detail: On a shelf-like projection shoved into the wall of the trench sat a bareheaded soldier, alive. His feet were ankle-deep in water at the bottom of the trench directly beside a corpse, and he was smoking a cigarette, looking out at the camera hollow-eyed, stupefied, as though he'd never smiled or ever would. These horrors, I had suddenly realized, mustn't be revealed to Julia unless she joined the world that had produced them, and — making myself smile — I took the book from her hand just before she could open its pages. "Oh, yes," I said easily, turning the book to look at the gold letters of the title on the spine, as though to confirm the title. "That happened a long time ago."

"A world war?"

"They called it that, Julia, because… all the world was concerned about it. It was everyone's business, you see, and… they soon put a stop to it. I'd almost forgotten it."

How much sense that made to her, if any, I don't know. She said, "And what does 'World War Eye' mean?"

"Well…" I couldn't think of anything to say but the truth. "That isn't a letter of the alphabet. It's a number, Julia, a Roman numeral."

"World War… one? There've been more?"

"A second one."

She was suspicious. "And — what was it like?"

My mind performed its commonplace miracle again. Hardly pausing before I replied, I was able to consider the four long years of trench warfare of World War I: the battle at Verdun in which a million men had died, unrestricted submarine warfare. Then I thought of World War II and the destruction of cities by the Germans, the killing of women, old people and babies; of the fire-bombings of German cities by the Americans, creating actual hundred-mile-an-hour hurricanes of fire incinerating women, old people and babies. And of a man I have often imagined, a German designer, getting up each morning, having breakfast, going to his office, sitting at his drawing board, neatly rolling back his sleeves, and then very carefully, with detailed india-ink drawings and precise manufacturing specifications, designing false shower heads which would presently loose poison gas to kill people by the millions in what were literally factories of death. And I thought of people killed even more efficiently: instantaneous death for hundreds of thousands in the brilliant flashes of two atomic explosions over Japan. What was World War II like? Unbelievably, it was worse than World War I, and no answer or foolish lie came to mind now.

She guessed. She knew that wars weren't called "world wars" for nothing. She looked at the thickness of the pictorial history I had taken from her; then she looked up at my face and said, "I don't want to hear about it."

"I don't want to tell you." I put the book back in its place, and we returned to the davenport. Julia didn't sit back, though. She sat on the edge of the cushion, her hands folded — clenched together, actually — in her lap. Staring straight ahead, getting her thoughts in order, she was silent for a few moments. Then she said, "During the day I've thought about what I wanted to do. And I've thought about staying here, if it were possible to tell Aunt Ada what had happened. During part of the day, when we walked down Fifth Avenue, I thought I'd made up my mind that if we could tell Ada, I would stay." I was sitting beside Julia, and she turned to look at me, managing a little smile. "I never thought I could possibly say this to a man, but I can: Do you love me, Si?"

"Yes."

"And I you. Almost from the first, though I didn't know it. But Jake guessed it, didn't he? Or felt it. Now I know, too. What should I do, Si? What do you want me to do? Shall I stay here?"

I thought that needed thinking about, then realized it didn't. I suppose Julia believed I was considering my answer as I sat looking at her face, but I wasn't. I was talking to her silently. I said, No, I won't let you stay here. Julia, we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it.