They stood before the same house on the same street but on a soft summer evening. Fire wheels hissed, on front porches laughing children tossed things out that went bang!
“Don’t run!” cried Mr. Fields. “It’s not war, don’t be afraid!”
But Janet’s and Robert’s and William’s faces were pink, now blue, now white with fountains of soft fire.
“We’re all right,” said Janet, standing very still.
“Happily,” announced Mr. Fields, “they prohibited fireworks a century ago, did away with the whole messy explosion.”
Children did fairy dances, weaving their names and destinies on the dark summer air with white sparklers.
“I’d like to do that,” said Janet, softly. “Write my name on the air. See? I’d like that.”
“What?” Mr. Fields hadn’t been listening.
“Nothing,” said Janet.
“Bang!” whispered William and Robert, standing under the soft summer trees, in shadow, watching, watching the red, white, and green fires on the beautiful summer night lawns. “Bang!”
October.
The Time Machine paused for the last time, an hour later in the month of burning leaves. People bustled into dim houses carrying pumpkins and corn shocks. Skeletons danced, bats flew, candles flamed, apples swung in empty doorways.
“Halloween,” said Mr. Fields. “The acme of horror. This was the age of superstition, you know. Later they banned the Grimm Brothers, ghosts, skeletons, and all that claptrap. You children, thank God, were raised in an antiseptic world of no shadows or ghosts.
You had decent holidays like William C. Chatterton’s Birthday, Work Day, and Machine Day.”
They walked by the same house in the empty October night, peering in at the triangle-eyed pumpkins, the masks leering in black attics and damp cellars. Now, inside the house, some party children squatted telling stories, laughing!
“I want to be inside with them,” said Janet at last.
“Sociologically, of course,” said the boys.
“No,” she said.
“What?” asked Mr. Fields.
“No, I just want to be inside, I just want to stay here, I want to see it all and be here and never be anywhere else, I want firecrackers and pumpkins and circuses, I want Christmases and Valentines and Fourths, like we’ve seen.”
“This is getting out of hand . . .” Mr. Fields started to say.
But suddenly Janet was gone. “Robert, William, come on!” She ran. The boys leaped after her.
“Hold on!” shouted Mr. Fields. “Robert! William, I’ve got you!” He seized the last boy, but the other escaped. “Janet, Robert—come back here! You’ll never pass into the seventh grade! You’ll fail, Janet, Bob—Bob!”
An October wind blew wildly down the street, vanishing with the children off among moaning trees.
William twisted and kicked.
“No, not you, too, William, you’re coming home with me. We’ll teach those other two a lesson they won’t forget. So they want to stay in the past, do they?” Mr. Fields shouted so everyone could hear. “All right, Janet, Bob, stay in this horror, in this chaos! In a few weeks you’ll come sniveling back here to me. But I’ll be gone! I’m leaving you here to go mad in this world!”
He hurried William to the Time Machine. The boy was sobbing. “Don’t make me come back here on any more Field Excursions ever again, please, Mr. Fields, please—”
“Shut up!”
Almost instantly the Time Machine whisked away toward the future, toward the underground hive cities, the metal buildings, the metal flowers, the metal lawns.
“Good-bye, Janet, Bob!”
A great cold October wind blew through the town like water. And when it had ceased blowing it had carried all the children, whether invited or uninvited, masked or unmasked, to the doors of houses which closed upon them. There was not a running child anywhere in the night. The wind whined away in the bare treetops.
And inside the big house, in the candlelight, someone was pouring cold apple cider all around, to everyone, no matter who they were.
Changeling
By eight o’clock she had placed the long cigarettes and the wine crystals and the silver bucket of thin shaved ice packed around the green bottle. She stood looking at the room, each picture neat, ashtrays conveniently disposed. She plumped a lounge pillow and stepped back, her eyes squinting. Then she hurried into the bathroom and returned with the strychnine bottle, which she laid under a magazine on an end table. She had already hidden a hammer and an ice pick.
She was ready.
Seeming to know this, the phone rang. When she answered, a voice said:
“I’m coming up.”
He was in the elevator now, floating silently up the iron throat of the house, fingering his accurate little mustache, adjusting his white summer evening coat and black tie. He would be smoothing his gray-blond hair, that handsome man of fifty still able to visit handsome women of thirty-three, fresh, convivial, ready for the wine and the rest of it.
“You’re a faker!” she whispered to the closed door a moment before he rapped.
“Good evening, Martha,” he said. “Are you just going to stand there, looking?” She kissed him quietly. “Was that a kiss?” he wondered, his blue eyes warmly amused. “Here.” He gave her a better one.
Her eyes closed, she thought, is this different from last week, last month, last year? What makes me suspicious? Some little thing. Something she couldn’t even tell, it was so minor. He had changed subtly and drastically. So drastically in fact, so completely that she had begun to stay awake nights two months ago. She had taken to riding the helicopters at three in the morning out to the beach and back to see all-night films projected on the clouds near The Point, films that had been made way back in 1955, huge memories in the ocean mist over the dark waters, with the voices drifting in like gods’ voices with the tide. She was constantly tired.
“Not much response.” He held her away and surveyed her critically. “Is anything wrong, Martha?”
“Nothing,” she said. Everything she thought. You, she thought. Where are you tonight, Leonard? Who are you dancing with far away, or drinking with in an apartment on the other side of town, who are you being lovably polite with? For you most certainly are not here in this room, and I intend to prove it.
“What’s this?” he said, looking down. “A hammer? Have you been hanging pictures, Martha?”
“No, I’m going to hit you with it,” she said, and laughed.
“Of course,” he said, smiling. “Well, perhaps this will make you change your mind.” He drew forth a plush case, inside which was a pearl necklace.
“Oh, Leonard!” She put it on with trembling fingers and turned to him, excited. “You are good to me.”
“It’s nothing at all,” he said.
At these times, she almost forgot her suspicions. She had everything with him, didn’t she? There was no sign of his losing interest, was there? Certainly not. He was just as kind and gentle and generous. He never came without something for her wrist or her finger.
Why did she feel so lonely with him then? Why didn’t she feel with him? Perhaps it had started with that picture in the paper two months ago. A picture of him and Alice Summers in The Club on the night of April 17th. She hadn’t seen the picture until a month later and then she had spoken of it to him:
“Leonard, you didn’t tell me you took Alice Summers to The Club on the night of April seventeenth.”
“Didn’t I, Martha? Well, I did.”
“But wasn’t that one of the nights you were here with me?”
“I don’t see how it could have been. We have supper and play symphonies and drink wine until early morning.”
“I’m sure you were here with me April seventeenth, Leonard.”
“You’re a little drunk, my dear. Do you keep a diary?”
“I’m not a child.”
“There you are then. No diary, no record. I was here the night before or the night after. Come on now, Martha, drink up.”
But that hadn’t settled it. She had not gone to sleep that night with thinking and being positive he had been with her on April 17th. It was impossible, of course. He couldn’t be in two places.
They both stood looking down at the hammer on the floor. She picked it up and put it on a table. “Kiss me,” she said, quite suddenly, for she wanted now, more than ever, to be certain of this thing. He evaded her and said, “First, the wine.” “No,” she insisted, and kissed him.
There it was. The difference. The little change. There was no way to tell anyone, or even describe it. It would be like trying to describe a rainbow to a blind man. But there was a subtle chemical difference to his kiss. It was no longer the kiss of Mr. Leonard Hill. It approximated the kiss of Leonard Hill but was sufficiently different to set a subconscious wheel rolling in her. What would an analysis of the faint moisture on his lips reveal? Some bacterial lack? And as for the lips themselves, were or were they not harder, or softer, than before? Some small difference.
“All right, now the wine,” she said, and opened it. She poured his glass full. “Oh, will you get some mats from the kitchen to set them on?” While he was gone she poured the strychnine in his glass. He returned with the mats to set the glasses on and picked up his drink.
“To us,” he said.
Good Lord, she thought, what if I’m wrong? What if this is really him? What if I’m just some wild paranoid sort of creature, really insane and not aware of it?
“To us.” She raised her glass.
He drained his at a gulp, as always. “My God,” he said, wincing. “That’s horrible stuff. Where
