Jack Finney

I turned toward the ticket windows knowing that here—on the third level at Grand Central—I could buy tickets that would take Louisa and me anywhere in the United States we wanted to go. In the year 1894.

But Ann walked straight into that door and fell. I couldn’t figure out how she came to do it; it was as though she expected the door to open by itself or something. That’s what Ted said, too, going over to help her up. “Be careful, honey,” he said, and laughed a little, making a joke of it. “You’ll have to learn, you know, that doors won’t open themselves.”

Air power in the Civil War? Well, it’s been a pretty well-kept secret all these years, but we had it. The Major and me invented it ourselves.

I saw the ghost in my own living room, alone, between three and four in the morning, and I was there, wide awake, for a perfectly sound reason: I was worrying.

Got himself killed is right. Eleven-fifteen at night in Times Square—the theaters letting out, busiest time and place in the world—and this guy shows up in the middle of the street, gawking and looking around at the cars and up at the signs like he'd never seen them before.

You can’t drive into 1923 in a Jordan Playboy, along a four-lane superhighway; there are no superhighways in 1923.

To make sure, I walked over to a newsboy and glanced at the stack of papers at his feet. It was The World; and The World had’nt been published for years. The lead story said something about President Cleveland. I’ve found that front page since, in the Public Library files, and it was printed June 11, 1894.

We’re looking at a vanished sight. This is a commonplace sight of a world long gone and we’ve reached back and brought it to life again. Maybe we should have let it alone.

I did, and saw what he meant; a face in the old picture almost identical with the one in the Wanted poster. It had the same astonishing length, the broad chin seeming nearly as wide as the cheekbones, and I looked up at Ihren. “ Who is it? His father? His grandfather?”

Out of the world’s three billion people there can’t be more than, say, a hundred women like Jessica Maxwell.

There’s a project. A U.S. government project I guess you’d have to call it. Secret, naturally; as what isn’t in government these days? In my opinion, and that of a handful of others, it’s more important than all the nuclear, space-exploration, satellite, and rocket programs put together, though a hell of a lot smaller. I tell you right off that I can’t even hint what the project is about. And believe me, you’d never guess.

I remember what someone once said; I think it was Einstein or somebody like that. He compared time to a winding river, with all of us in a boat drifting along between two high banks. And we can’t see the future beyond the next curve or the past beyond the curves in back of us, but it’s all still there, as real as the moment around us. To which I now add my own theory . . . that you can’t drive into the past in a modern car because there were no modern cars back then, and you can’t drive into 1926 along a four-lane superhighway, but my car and I—the way I felt about it anyway—were literally rejected that night by our own time.

They’re back there in the past, trampling around, changing things, aren’t they? They don’t know it. They’re just living their happy lives, but changing small events. Mostly trivial, with no important effects. But every once in a while the effect of some small changed event moves on down to the—