“Will you be here tomorrow?”
“Probably. I’ve been coming here every day. Good-bye now, Mr. Randolph.”
“Good-bye, Julie,” he said.
He watched her run lightly down the hill and disappear into the grove of sugar maples where, two hundred and forty years hence, Two Thousand and Fortieth Street would be. He smiled. What a charming child, he thought. It must be thrilling to have such an irrepressible sense of wonder, such an enthusiasm for life. He could appreciate the two qualities all the more fully because he had been denied them. At twenty he had been a solemn young man working his way through law school; at twenty-four he had had his own practice, and small though it had been, it had occupied him completely—well, not quite completely. When he had married Anne, there had been a brief interim during which making a living had lost some of its immediacy. And then, when the war had come along, there had been another interim—a much longer one this time—when making a living had seemed a remote and sometimes even a contemptible pursuit. After his return to civilian life, though, the immediacy had returned with a vengeance, the more so because he now had a son as well as a wife to support, and he had been occupied ever since, except for the four vacation weeks he had recently been allowing himself each year, two of which he spent with Anne and Jeff at a resort of their choosing and two of which he spent with Anne, after Jeff returned to college, in their cabin by the lake. This year, though, he was spending the second two alone. Well, perhaps not quite alone.
His pipe had gone out some time ago, and he had not even noticed. He lighted it again, drawing deeply to thwart the wind, then he descended the hill and started back through the woods toward the cabin. The autumnal equinox had come and the days were appreciably shorter. This one was very nearly done, and the dampness of evening had already begun to pervade the hazy air.
He walked slowly, and the sun had set by the time he reached the lake. It was a small lake, but a deep one, and the trees came down to its edge. The cabin stood some distance back from the shore in a stand of pines, and a winding path connected it with the pier. Behind it a gravel drive led to a dirt road that gave access to the highway. His station wagon stood by the back door, ready to whisk him back to civilization at a moment’s notice.
He prepared and ate a simple supper in the kitchen, then went into the living room to read. The generator in the shed hummed on and off, but otherwise the evening was unsullied by the usual sounds the ears of modern man are heir to. Selecting an anthology of American poetry from the well-stocked bookcase by the fireplace, he sat down and thumbed through it to Afternoon on a Hill. He read the treasured poem three times, and each time he read it he saw her standing there in the sun, her hair dancing in the wind, her dress swirling like gentle snow around her long and lovely legs; and a lump came into his throat, and he could not swallow.
He returned the book to the shelf and went out and stood on the rustic porch and filled and lighted his pipe. He forced himself to think of Anne, and presently her face came into focus—the firm but gentle chin, the warm and compassionate eyes with that odd hint of fear in them that he had never been able to analyze, the still-soft cheeks, the gentle smile—and each attribute was made more compelling by the memory of her vibrant light brown hair and her tall, lithe gracefulness. As was always the case when he thought of her, he found himself marveling at her agelessness, marveling how she could have continued down through the years as lovely as she had been that long-ago morning when he had looked up, startled, and seen her standing timidly before his desk. It was inconceivable that a mere twenty years later he could be looking forward eagerly to a tryst with an overimaginative girl who was young enough to be his daughter. Well, he wasn’t—not really. He had been momentarily swayed—that was all. For a moment his emotional equilibrium had deserted him, and he had staggered. Now his feet were back under him where they belonged, and the world had returned to its sane and sensible orbit.
He tapped out his pipe and went back inside. In his bedroom he undressed and slipped between the sheets and turned out the light. Sleep should have come readily, but it did not; and when it finally did come, it came in fragments interspersed with tantalizing dreams.
“Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit,” she had said, “and yesterday a deer, and today, you.”
On the second afternoon she was wearing a blue dress, and there was a little blue ribbon to match tied in her dandelion-colored hair. After breasting the hill, he stood for some time, not moving, waiting till the tightness of his throat went away; then he walked over and stood beside her in the wind. But the soft curve of her throat and chin brought the tightness back, and when she turned and said, “Hello, I didn’t think you’d come,” it was a long while before he was able to answer.
“But I did,” he finally said, “and so did you.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad.”
A nearby outcropping of granite formed a bench of sorts, and they sat down on it and looked out over the land. He filled his pipe and lighted it and blew smoke into the wind. “My father smokes a pipe too,” she said, “and when he lights it, he cups his hands the same way you do, even when there isn’t any wind. You and he are alike in lots of ways.”
“Tell me about your father,” he said. “Tell me about yourself too.”
And she did, saying that she was twenty-one, that her father was a retired government physicist, that they lived in a small apartment on Two Thousand and Fortieth Street, and that she had been keeping house for him ever since her mother had died four years ago. Afterward he told her about himself and Anne and Jeff—about how he intended to take Jeff into partnership with him someday, about Anne’s phobia about cameras and how she had refused to have her picture taken on their wedding day and had gone on refusing ever since, about the grand time the three of them had had on the camping trip they’d gone on last summer.
When he had finished, she said, “What a wonderful family life you have. Nineteen-sixty-one must be a marvelous year in which to live!”
“With a time machine at your disposal, you can move here any time you like.”
“It’s not quite that easy. Even aside from the fact that I wouldn’t dream of deserting my father, there’s the time police to take into consideration. You see, time travel is limited to the members of government-sponsored historical expeditions and is out of bounds to the general public.”
“You seem to have managed all right.”
“That’s because my father invented his own machine, and the time police don’t know about it.”
“But you’re still breaking the law.”
She nodded. “But only in their eyes, only in the light of their concept of time. My father has his own concept.”
It was so pleasant hearing her talk that it did not matter really what she talked about, and he wanted her to ramble on, no matter how farfetched her subject. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“First I’ll tell you about the official concept. Those who endorse it say that no one from the future should participate physically in anything that occurred in the past, because his very presence would constitute a paradox, and future events would have to be altered in order for the paradox to be assimilated. Consequently the Department of Time Travel makes sure that only authorized personnel have access to its time machines, and maintains a police force to apprehend the would-be generation-jumpers who yearn for a simpler way of life and who keep disguising themselves as historians so they can return permanently to a different era.