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

that. I miss it." His hand returned to his lapel. "But I'm not going to start again. I drink moderately; medicinally, actually. And I once drank a lot on occasion. Frequent occasion. Because I liked it. But no more now, and I follow a diet besides. Why all this nonsense?" He raised a hand, forefinger pointing up. "Because I want to live and be with this project just as long as I possibly can. I've had an interesting life, I haven't been cheated; I've been in two wars, lived in five countries, had two wives, a great many friends of both sexes, and once for four years I was rich. No children, though; you can't have everything." Again Dr. Danziger stared at me, eyes friendly and envious, hands hung on his lapels. "But if this project should succeed, it will be the most remarkable thing mortal man has ever done, and I'll give up anything, I'd follow a diet of raw turnips and horse manure, just to get an extra year or even an extra month of life for it. No matter how carefully a man lives, though, at sixty-eight his remaining years are numbered, while you — you're what: twenty-eight?" I nodded. "Well, you've got forty years on me then, and if I could steal them from you I'd do it, cheerfully and without compunction. I even envy you this day. Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?"
    "Yes, sir; Huckleberry Finn."
    "Right. Well, that's how I feel about the day you're going to have now. Take him away, Rube. There's lots to show him, and we're in a hurry now." He raised a wrist to look at his watch. "Bring him to the cafeteria at noon."

3
    Out in the corridors as I walked along with Rube, people passed us, moving to and from offices. They were men and women, mostly young, and whenever one walked by, speaking or nodding to Rube, he or she would glance at me curiously. Rube was watching me, I saw, smiling a little, and when I looked at him he said, "What do you think you're going to see?"
    I tried to find an answer but had to shake my head. "I haven't a glimmering, Rube."
    "Well, I'm sorry to be so damn mysterious. But it's the director who explains this, not me. And you have to see it before he can explain it." We turned a corner and then another, into a corridor considerably narrower than the others. We turned once more, and now we were walking along a narrow aisle that stretched ahead for a considerable distance.
    One wall of the aisle was blank. The other was a series of tinted windows through which we could see into what Rube told me were instruction rooms. The first three were empty and were fitted out as ordinary classrooms. There were six or eight one-armed wooden chairs in each, the arms widening into writing surfaces; there were blackboards, bookshelves, teachers' desks and chairs. At the fourth window two men were sitting in the same kind of room, one at the desk, the other in a wooden chair facing him, and we stopped to watch. "We can see in, they can't see out," Rube said. "Everyone knows it; it's just a matter of not disturbing people at work."
    The man in the student's chair was talking, steadily but with frequent pauses, sometimes rubbing his face in thought. He was about forty, thin and dark, and wore a navy-blue sweater and a white shirt open at the collar. The instructor at the desk was younger and wore a brown tweed sport coat. Beside the window on a stainless-steel wall plate was a pair of buttons. Rube pushed one and now we could hear the speaking man's voice from a loudspeaker behind a grill over the window.
    It was a foreign language, and after a dozen seconds or so I thought I recognized it and was about to say so, then I stopped. I'd thought it was French, a language I can recognize, but now I wasn't sure. I stood listening carefully; some of the words were French, I was almost certain, but pronounced not quite correctly. He kept on, fluently enough, the instructor