A World Apart
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_For obvious reasons, since time-travel has yet to be invented as far as we know, science fiction authors usually attribute it to the future. Yet there is always the possibility that somewhere, somehow, somewhen, it has already been put to use. A possibility which Sammy Merwin here considers in highly intriguing and human terms. Let's go back with Coulter...._
a world apart
_by ... Sam Merwin, Jr._
Most men of middle age would welcome a chance to live their lives a second time. But Coulter did not.
It wasn't much of a bump. The shock absorbers of the liquid-smoothconvertible neutralized all but a tiny percent of the jarring impactbefore it could reach the imported English flannel seat of Coulter'sexpensively-tailored pants. But it was sufficient to jolt him out of hisreverie, trebly induced by a four-course luncheon with cocktails andliqueur, the nostalgia of returning to a hometown unvisited in twentyyears and the fact that he was driving westward into an afternoon sun.
Coulter grunted mild resentment at being thus disturbed. Then, as hequickly, incredulously scanned the road ahead and the car whose wheelwas gripped by his gloved hands, he narrowed his eyes and muttered tohimself, "Wake up! For God's sake snap out of it!"
The road itself had changed. From a twin-laned ten-car highway,carefully graded and landscaped and clover-leafed, it had become asingle-laned three-car thoroughfare, paved with tar instead of concreteand high-crowned along its center. He swung the wheel quickly to avoidrunning onto a dirt shoulder hardened with ice.
Its curves were no longer graded for high-speed cars but were scarcelytilted at all, when they didn't slant the wrong way. Its crossings wereblind, level and unprotected by traffic lights. Neat unattractiveclusters of mass-built houses interspersed with occasional clumps ofwoodland had been replaced with long stretches of pine woods, onlyoccasionally relieved by houses and barns of obviously antiquemanufacture. Some of these looked disturbingly familiar.
And the roadside signs--all at once they were everywhere. Here aweathered but still-legible little Burma-Shave series, a woodenHorlick's contented cow, Socony, That Good Gulf Gasoline, the blackcat-face bespeaking Catspaw Rubber Heels. Here were the coal-black GoldDust twins, Kelly Springfield's Lotta Miles peering through a largerubber tire, a cocked-hatted boniface advertising New York's PrinceGeorge Hotel, the sleepy Fisk Tire boy in his pajamas and carrying acandle.
And then a huge opened book with a quill pen stuck in an inkwellalongside. On the right-hand page it said, _United States Tires Are GoodTires_ and on the left, _You are 3-1/2 miles from Lincolnville. In 1778General O'Hara, leading a British raiding party inland, was ambushed onthis spot by Colonel Amos Coulter and his militia and forced to retreatwith heavy loss._
Slowing down because the high-crowned road was slippery with sun-meltedice, Coulter noted that the steering wheel responded heavily. Then hesaw suddenly that it was smaller than he'd remembered and made of blackrubber instead of the almond-hued plastic of his new convertible. Andhis light costly fabric gloves had become black leather, lined with fur!
A gong rang in his memory. He had driven this road many times in yearsgone by, he had known all these signs as quasi-landmarks, he had wornsuch gloves one winter. There had been a little triangular tear in theheel of the left one, where he had snagged it on a nail sticking out ofthe garage wall. But that had been many years ago....
He looked and found the tear and felt cold sweat bathe his body underhis clothes. And he was suddenly, mightily, afraid....
He hit another bump and this time the springs did not take up the shock.He felt briefly like a rodeo cowboy riding a bucking mustang. The car inwhich he rode had changed. It was no longer the sleek convertible of themid-1950's. It was his old Pontiac sedan, the car he had driven for twoyears before leaving Lincolnville behind him twenty years ago!
Nor was he wearing the dark-blue vicuna topcoat he had reclaimed an hourbefore from the checkroom girl in the restaurant back in the city. Hissleeves now were of well-worn camel's hair. He didn't dare pull therear-view mirror around so he could see his face. He said again,fiercely, "Snap out of it! For God's sake wake up before you hitsomething!"
He didn't hit anything. Road, signs, car, clothing, all stayed the same.Fields abridged by wooded low hills fell away on either side of theroad. The snow had been heavier away from the city and covered tillage,trees and stone walls alike with a tracked and sullen late-winterdark-white blanket.
He came to a hill and the obsolete engine knocked and panted. Once overthe top of the hill, he thought with a sudden encouraging flash, hecould prove that whatever was happening to him was illusion. At its footon the other side had lain the Brigham Farm, a two-century-old house andbarn converted into a restaurant by a pair of energetic spinsters. Arestaurant where Coulter and his parents had habitually dined out onThursday, the servants' night off.
He had heard a long while ago that the Brigham Farm had been struck bylightning and burned during August of 1939. If it were still there ...
He breasted the hill and there it was, ancient timbers painted a neatdark red with white door and window-frames and shutters. He held hiseyes carefully away from it after the one look, held them on the road,which was now paved with a hard-packed layer of snow.
He passed an ear-flapped and baa-baa-coated farmer who sat atop a pungdrawn by a patient percheron whose nostrils emitted twin plumes ofsteam. A pung! How many times had he and the other boys of Lincolnvilleridden the runners of such utility sleighs on hitch-hiked rides throughthe by-ways of the lovely surrounding countryside!
Coulter maneuvered in his seat to take a quick look at this relic fromthe past--and caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above thewindshield. He said just one word--"_Jesus!_" Nor was he blasphemous insaying it.
He thought of Jurgen, of Faust--for in some miraculous way he hadreclaimed his youth or been reclaimed by it. The face that looked backat him was fresh-skinned, unlined, unweathered by life. He saw withsurprise, from the detachment of almost two decades, that he had beenbetter looking than he remembered.
He looked down, saw that his body, beneath the camel's hair coat, wasthin. The fat and fatigue of too many years of rich eating and drinking,of sedentary work, of immense nervous pressures, had been swept awaywithout diet, without tiresome exercise. He was young again--and healmost ran the Pontiac into a ditch at the side of the road....
If it was a dream, he decided, it was a dream he was going to enjoy. Herecalled what Shaw had said about youth being such a wonderful thing itwas a pity to waste it on children. And he knew that he, at any rate,was no child, whatever the body that had so miraculously been restoredto him.
The unhappy Pontiac cleared another hilltop and Lincolnville laystretched out before Coulter, naked and exposed, stripped of its summerfoliage. He had forgotten how dominated it was by the five churchsteeples--Unitarian, Episcopal, Trinitarian, Roman Catholic and SwedishReform. There was no spire atop the concrete-and-stucco pillaredbuilding in which the Christian Scientists held their Sunday readings.
Half-consciously he dug for a cigar in his breast pocket, looked withmild surprise on the straight-stemmed pipe he found there. He hadforgotten that he once smoked a pipe as completely as he had forgottenthe churchly domination of his home town.
Even though Lincolnville remained fixed in his memory as it had lookedtwenty years ago--as it looked now awaiting his belated return--he wasaware of many anachronisms while tooling the Pontiac slowly alongClinton Street. He had become used to the many outer changes of the pasttwo decades, was unable completely to suppress surprise at not findingthem present on his return.
For one thing there was the va
st amount of overhead wiring. Coulter hadforgotten how its lacework of insulation and poles took up space even ina comparatively small community. He had long since forgotten the Englishsparrows, erstwhile avian pest of America, that were to vanish soswiftly with the final abolition of the horse.
There were more horses than he recalled, parked here and there among theshoppers' automobiles. And the cars themselves looked like refugees froma well-aged television movie, all straight-up-and-down windshields andunbuilt-in fenders and wooden spoked or wire wheels. He suspected thePontiac he was driving would look as odd to him once he got out andexamined it.
A dark-overcoated policeman, lounging against the front of the Rexallstore at the main intersection, lifted a mittened hand in casual salute.Coulter replied in kind, drove on through the Center, took the fork pastthe old library with the skeleton of its summer coat of ivy looking bareand chilly against the sunset breeze. The bit of sky he could seethrough the houses and leafless