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WELCOME, ANNELISE!
Historians say so: The years between 1910 and 1915 were the pleasantest this country has ever known . . .
—Allen Churchill, Remember When
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TWO SUSANS HELPED ME WITH this book. Susan La Rosa of New York found all the photos I needed, and also some fine ones I didn’t know I needed until she produced them. Susan Ferguson did the same in California archives.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a continuation of—a sequel to—a novel called Time and Again. In that book a young man, Simon Morley, is invited to join a secret government-sponsored Project housed in an old Manhattan warehouse. The purpose of this Project is to test the theory of a retired professor of physics, from Harvard. He is Dr. E. E. Danziger, who believes that the past still exists, and that under certain conditions it might be possible to reach it.
Si Morley is one of the very few candidates in the Project who succeeds. He reaches the 1880s . . . returns to the present to make his report to the Project . . . but then returns to the 1880s to marry a girl of the time, Julia, and stay there forever.
But he doesn’t. And this book is the story of what happens when Si—out of simple curiosity—returns to the present just to see what’s going on.
PROLOGUE
The man at the end of the long table—he wore a trimmed black beard streaked white at the ends of his mouth—looked up at the wall clock: three minutes past seven. “Okay,” he said to the dozen men and women around the table, “we better get started.” But he turned once more to look at the open doorway behind him, and so did everyone else. No one appeared, though, no footsteps approached along the wood-floored hall outside, and he turned back to the group. He was the oldest of them, a trim youthful forty, wearing blue denims and a plaid cotton shirt—and the only full professor. “Audrey, you want to begin?”
“Sure.” She bent up the clasp of a manila envelope on the table beside her purse, and partly pulled out a newspaper folded to quarter size. Only a portion of its masthead was visible, reading, w-York Courier, and one or two people smiled at what they took to be the deliberate drama of this. All were casually dressed, casually seated; aged from twenty-five to forty. This was the little Chemistry Department library, cheerful with shelved books and framed sepia photographs of the old laboratories. It was early evening, September and still light, and here in Durham still warm. Someone had opened the three tall round-topped windows, and they could hear birds wrangling in the campus trees.
“So far my network is only four people,” Audrey said. Her hand, wearing a plain wedding ring, lay on the tabletop, curved forefinger just touching the word Courier. “If you can call that a network. One is my brother-in-law, and I honestly never thought he’d turn up a thing. But he has. A friend of his owns a floor covering store of some kind in Brooklyn, New York. One of his men was working in an old house there, tearing up worn-out kitchen linoleum, and underneath—” She stopped: rapid footsteps sounded woodenly outside, and they all turned to watch the doorway. But the hurrying figure, glancing in at them, moved on by. “Under the linoleum the floor was covered about half an inch thick with newspapers. To cushion it, I suppose. And of course he looked at some of the papers, read the old comics—you know. I envied him. They were all really old, been there for decades. And he kept this one.” She drew the folded newspaper from its envelope, and passed it to the man beside her.
He opened it, spreading it flat on the tabletop, and the others around the table hunched forward to look. The New-York Courier, read the complete masthead, and the man who’d opened it began reading the headline aloud. “ ‘President Urges Trade Recip—’ ”
“No, not the news, the date.”
“Tuesday, February 22, 1916.”
After a moment she said, slightly annoyed and disappointed, “Well, don’t you see? There was no New-York Courier in 1916. It went out of business—I looked this up—on June 8, 1909.”
“Hey,” a woman across the table from her murmured, and someone else said, “Looks like a good one. Let’s see that thing,” and the paper was passed down to him.
“Is that it, Audrey—the date?” said the chairman.
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, it’s a good one. Write it up, will you? Use the new form; we got new ones, we’re getting organized, sort of. Can we keep the paper?”
“Sure.” Her face flushing with pleasure, she ducked to give close attention to bending down the clasp of her envelope.
A woman of thirty, small, with straight dark hair, said, “Dick, I have to leave early; I’ve got a babysitter who can’t stay long. Can I be next?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
She touched a cardboard folder on the table before her. “I got this from my aunt in Newton, Kansas. The local library there has a little history room. History of the town; people give them old photographs, clippings, and so on, and she had one of these photos copied for me.” Opening the folder, she exposed a large, glossy black-and-white photograph. “This was taken in 1947”—she touched the date inscribed in white in a lower corner of the photograph. “It shows the main street. As it was then, of course. It includes the movie theater, and you can read the marquee. I’ll pass this around in a minute, but let me just read it to you first.” From the table she picked up her reading glasses and put them on, bending over the photo, pushing the glasses slightly higher on her nose. “It says, ‘Clark Gable and Mary Astor in Devil’s Judgment, Cartoons, and Pathé News.’ ”
She sat back, snatching her glasses off, sliding the photograph to the man beside her. “I’ve checked every old-movie book in the libraries here; listings of old pictures. And this summer in New York I checked a lot more in the main library there. No such movie is listed. I wrote to the studio, never got an answer, so I phoned, got through to someone eventually who said he’d check it out, and call me back. To my amazement, that’s just what he did. Phoned a couple days later. Very pleasant; had a nice voice. They had no record of any such movie, he said. And—well, that’s my offering.” She glanced around at the others.
The chairman said, “Well, it’s interesting, but we’ve got to be rigorous. The movie listings could be incomplete. Or the studio’s mistaken. Or, nice as your man’s voice was, maybe he didn’t really look that hard. Old pictures that weren’t too popular get forgotten. Lost.”
“But a Clark Gable?”
“I know, but”—he moved a shoulder reluctantly—“we’ve got to be impeccable. It could be only a title change. Released as Devil’s Judgment, then changed to something else. I think they do that.”
“Okay.” She reached across the table as someone returned her picture. “I had some more checking in mind anyway, but I wanted to bring this to the meeting to show I haven’t been loafing all summer.”