From Time to Time by Jack Finney Page B

out into the real thing. Indiai'is out onto an enormous stretch of real prairie. Doughboys in France in genuine World War One trenches rCStO)red. Because the Project, Major, was a search for a way to) move l)ack in time.
    He sat waiting but Rube outwaited him, looking at him expressionlessly, and McNaughton smiled, leaning closer. "It was you, Major, who first told me all this, the first day I joined the Project. Standing up on the catwalk over the Big Floor; you could walk anywhere on the catwalks and look down on the sets. Big banks of lights up there to imitate day, night, cloudy, sunny, rain, anything. Machinery to control temperatures: winter on one set, heat wave on another. You and I stood up there looking down, me brand- new to the Project. You said that according to Einstein, time is like a narrow winding river. And we're all in a boat. All we can see around us is the present. But back in the bends behind us the past still exists. Can't see it, but it's there; really there, Einstein said. And meant it. Well, Dr. Danziger-
    "What were his initials?
    "E.E."
    "Right! Right: E. E. Danziger.
    "Major, let's get out of here, the guy's starting to listen. Pay him for-what does he call this stuff? Coffee, I think.
    Outside they crossed the street to a lone bench in the little paved-over square. "Danziger said that if the past really exists and Einstein says it does-there ought to be a way to reach it. Took him two years but he got money for the Project. From the federal government.
    "Where else?
    "Well, who pays you?
    Rube smiled.
    "He got, must have been a few million. Built the Project, and, Major, they bought this town, the whole town. Couldn't have been many holdouts, because look at this garbage dump. Out here in the middle of nothing but played-out farmland going back to brush. Nobody here anymore but drunks, druggies, and dropouts. Can't make it anywhere else, come up here, get on welfare, and drink. Or raise marijuana on land don't belong to them. Misfits. No-goods.
    "Including you?
    "Why not? But the Project restored this whole town to the way it was in the twenties. He sat watching Rube mak'~ a show of looking around at the dilapidated town, and smiled. "Oh, it doesn't look like it now, I know. Kind of a mystery here, Major. but one thing at a time. Take my word for it, they restored this place, made it a Gateway'-as Dr. D called them. Makes it easier to slip from the simulation into the real thing. I did it. Made the transition to the real Winfield of the twenties. Damn few can do it, Major. You couldn't. Tried, but couldn't do it. But a few of us could, and I was one, and Major . . . it took me where I'd wanted to be all my life. You should see this little town in the twenties. Beautiful, so beautiful. Quiet dirt roads, trees, trees everywhere. And a drugstore that-
    "Spare me the nostalgia.
    "I hate that word. You know who uses it mostly? Time patriots. Same people who live in the best country in the world. Must be the best because that's where they live. And they live in the best of times; has to be best because it's their lifetime. You even suggest there just might have been better times than here and now, and it's nostalgia, nostalgia.' Don't even know what the word means. Means overly sentimental, for crysakes.
    "Give em hell, John.
    "What I'll give you is the present-look at this street. But you should see it-oh Lord, you should see it in the twenties. Saturday night, say; in the summertime. Main Street here jammed; townspeople, farmers in from the country. They knew each other, stopped to talk. Someone else would come along and join in, and there'd be a little group on the walk. Not like the damn shopping malls. Go to a shopping mall a hundred times, and it's always mostly' strangers you never saw before, and never see again. In the twenties this miserable dead little square was beautiful; trees, grass, shrubbery, paths, green benches, and people. Some of the farmers came in buggies or wagons. Hitching posts