PAGE 4
Time And Time Again
by
That went over all right. Anybody knew that there was no rational accounting for the vagaries of the adult mind, and no appeal from adult demands. The prospect of company at the Hartley home would keep Larry away, that afternoon. He showed his disappointment.
“Aw, jeepers creepers!” he blasphemed euphemistically.
“Mebbe t’morrow,” Allan said. “If I c’n make it. I gotta go, now; ain’t had breakfast yet.” He scuffed his feet boyishly, exchanged so-longs with his friend, and continued homeward.
* * * * *
As he had hoped, the Sunday paper kept his father occupied at breakfast, to the exclusion of any dangerous table talk. Blake Hartley was still deep in the financial section when Allan left the table and went to the library. There should be two books there to which he wanted badly to refer. For a while, he was afraid that his father had not acquired them prior to 1945, but he finally found them, and carried them onto the front porch, along with a pencil and a ruled yellow scratch pad. In his experienced future–or his past-to-come–Allan Hartley had been accustomed to doing his thinking with a pencil. As reporter, as novelist plotting his work, as amateur chemist in his home laboratory, as scientific warfare research officer, his ideas had always been clarified by making notes. He pushed a chair to the table and built up the seat with cushions, wondering how soon he would become used to the proportional disparity between himself and the furniture. As he opened the books and took his pencil in his hand, there was one thing missing. If he could only smoke a pipe, now!
His father came out and stretched in a wicker chair with the Times book-review section. The morning hours passed. Allan Hartley leafed through one book and then the other. His pencil moved rapidly at times; at others, he doodled absently. There was no question, any more, in his mind, as to what or who he was. He was Allan Hartley, a man of forty-three, marooned in his own thirteen-year-old body, thirty years back in his own past. That was, of course, against all common sense, but he was easily able to ignore that objection. It had been made before: against the astronomy of Copernicus, and the geography of Columbus, and the biology of Darwin, and the industrial technology of Samuel Colt, and the military doctrines of Charles de Gaulle. Today’s common sense had a habit of turning into tomorrow’s utter nonsense. What he needed, right now, but bad, was a theory that would explain what had happened to him.
Understanding was beginning to dawn when Mrs. Stauber came out to announce midday dinner.
“I hope you von’t mind haffin’ it so early,” she apologized. “Mein sister, Jennie, offer in Nippenose, she iss sick; I vant to go see her, dis afternoon, yet. I’ll be back in blenty time to get supper, Mr. Hartley.”
“Hey, Dad!” Allan spoke up. “Why can’t we get our own supper, and have a picnic, like? That’d be fun, and Mrs. Stauber could stay as long as she wanted to.”
His father looked at him. Such consideration for others was a most gratifying deviation from the juvenile norm; dawn of altruism, or something. He gave hearty assent:
“Why, of course, Mrs. Stauber. Allan and I can shift for ourselves, this evening; can’t we, Allan? You needn’t come back till tomorrow morning.”
“Ach, t’ank you! T’ank you so mooch, Mr. Hartley.”
At dinner, Allan got out from under the burden of conversation by questioning his father about the War and luring him into a lengthy dissertation on the difficulties of the forthcoming invasion of Japan. In view of what he remembered of the next twenty-four hours, Allan was secretly amused. His father was sure that the War would run on to mid-1946.