Then I saw him. He had dropped the shovel and was tugging something out of the hole. I let him get it out before I called…
“Kenny…”
He froze, then came up very slowly to a crouch, ready to flee. He turned out the flashlight.
“Kenny, don’t run away from me again. Stay there. I’m not angry.”
No answer.
“Kenny!”
He called back then, with a quaver in his voice. “Stay where you are, Dad—and let me finish. Then I’ll go with you. If you come any closer, I’ll run.” He flashed the light toward me, saw that I was a good twenty yards away. “Stay there now…”
“Then will you come back to the house?”
“I won’t run, if you stay right there.”
“Okay,” I agreed, “but don’t take long. Cleo’s frantic.”
He set the light on a rock, kept it aimed at me, and worked by its aura. The light blinded me, and I could only guess what he might be doing. He pried something open, and then there was the sound of writing on tin. Then he hammered something closed, replaced it in the hole, and began shoveling dirt over it. Five minutes later, he was finished.
The light went out.
“Kenny…?”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t want to lie… I had to.”
I heard him slipping quickly away through the brush—back toward the pasture. I hurried to the fork and climbed up out of the knee-deep water, pausing to strike a match.
Something gleamed in the grass; I picked it up. Cleo’s kitchen clock, always a few minutes slow. What had he wanted with the clock?
By the time I tore through the brush and found the path, there was no sound to, indicate which way he had gone. I walked gloomily back toward the house, half-heartedly calling to Kenny… then… a flash of light in the trees!
BRRUUMMKP!
A sharp report, like a close crash of thunder! It came from the direction of the meadow, or the house. I trotted ahead, ignoring the sharp whipping of the brush.
“Kenny Westmore?… Kenny…”
A strange voice, a foreign voice—calling to Kenny up ahead in the distance. The police, I thought.
Then I came to the stone fence… and froze, staring at the think or perhaps at the nothing—in the meadow.
It was black. It was bigger than a double garage, and round. I stared at it, and realized that it was not an object but an opening.
And someone else was calling to Kenny. A rich, pleasant voice—somehow it reminded me of Doctor Jules, but it had a strong accent, perhaps Austrian or German.
“Come on along here, liddle boy. Ve fix you op.”
Then I saw Kenny, crawling on toward it through the grass.
“Kenny, don’t!”
He got to his feet and stumbled on into the distorted space. It seemed to squeeze him into a grotesque house-of-mirrors shape; then it spun him inward. Gone.
I was still running toward the black thing when it began to shrink.
“Come along, liddle fellow, come mit oss. Ve fix.”
And then the black thing belched away into nothingness with an explosive blast that knocked me spinning. I must have been out cold for awhile. The sheriff woke me.
Kenny was gone. We never saw him again. Cleo confirmed what I had seen on the meadow, but without a body, Kenny remains listed as missing.
Missing from this century.
I went back to the fork in the creek and dug up the breadbox he had buried. It contained his stamp collection and a packet of famous autographs. There was a letter from Kenny, too, addressed to the future, and it was his will.
“Whoever finds this, please sell these things and use the money to pay for a time machine, so you can come and get me, because I’m going to die if you don’t…”
I paused to remember… I don’t think the bank’d wait a hundred years.
But Dad, don’t you see? What difference does time make, if you’re working on a time machine?
There was more to the note, but the gist of it was that Kenny had made an act of faith, faith in tomorrow. He had buried it, and then he had gone back to dig it up and change the rendezvous time from four months away to the night of his disappearance. He knew that he wouldn’t have lived that long.
I put it all back in the box, and sealed the box with solder and set it in concrete at the foot of a sixfoot hole. With this manuscript.
(To a reader, yet unborn, who finds this account in a dusty and ancient magazine stack: dig. Dig at a point 987 feet southeasterly on a heading of 149° from the northwest corner of the Hayes and Higgins Tract, as recorded in Map Book 6, p. 78, Cleve County records. But not unless the world is ready to buy a time machine and come for Kenny, who financed it; come, if you can cure him. He had faith in you.)
Kenny is gone, and today there is a feeling of death in my house. But after a century of tomorrows? He invested in them, and he called out to them, pleading with the voice of a child. And tomorrow answered:
“Come, liddle boy. Ve fix.”
1954
ANYBODY ELSE LIKE ME?
Quiet misery in a darkened room. The clock spoke nine times with a cold brass voice. She stood motionless, leaning against the drapes by the window, alone. The night was black, the house empty and silent.
“Come, Lisa!” she told herself. “You’re not dying!”
She was thirty-four, still lovely, with a slender white body and a short, rich thatch of warm red hair. She had a good dependable husband, three children, and security. She had friends, hobbies, social activities. She painted mediocre pictures for her own amusement, played the piano rather well, and wrote fair poetry for the University’s literary quarterly. She was well-read, well-rounded, well-informed. She loved and was loved.
Then why this quiet misery?
Wanting something, expecting nothing, she stared out into the darkness of the stone-walled garden. The night was too quiet. A distant street lamp played in the branches of the elm, and the elm threw its shadow across another wing of the house. She watched the shadow’s wandering for a time. A lone car purred past in the street and was gone. A horn sounded raucously in the distance.
What was wrong? A thousand times since childhood she had felt this uneasy stirring, this crawling of the mind that called out for some unfound expression. It had been particularly strong in recent weeks.
She tried to analyze. What was different about recent weeks? Events: Frank’s job had sent him on the road for a month; the children were at Mother’s; the city council had recommended a bond issue; she had fired her maid; a drunk had strangled his wife; the University had opened its new psycho-physics lab; her art class had adjourned for the summer.
Nothing there. No clue to the unreasoning, goalless urge that called like a voice crying in mental wilderness: “Come, share, satisfy, express it to the fullest!”
Express what? Satisfy what? How?
A baby, deserted at birth and dying of starvation, would fell terrible hunger. But if it had never tasted milk, it could not know the meaning of the hunger nor how to case it.
“I need to relate this thing to something else, to something in my own experience or in the experience of others.” She had tried to satisfy the urge with the goals of other hungers: her children, her husband’s lovemaking, food, drink, art, friendship. But the craving was something else, crying for its pound of unknown flesh, and there was no fulfillment.