Category: Jack Finney

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

I’m Scared by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I’m Scared by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 15th September 1951) opens with the narrator listening to the radio and hearing a snatch of an old program before the normal one resumes. Soon he learns of other temporal anomalies from his friends and colleagues:

A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.

There are several cases that are described in some detail: a woman is continually pestered by a stray dog—but, when she later gets a puppy, it grows up to be the same animal (and then one day disappears); a man takes several time delay photographs of himself and his family—in the last exposure a woman other than his wife is standing beside him; a revolver is found by the police the night before a gun with the same ballistics is used in a murder; a contemporary car accident victim is found to be a missing person from 1876.
After a little too much of this kind of thing, the narrator floats the idea that, because people are rebelling against the present and have an increasing longing for the past, “man is disturbing the clock of time” and causing it to become tangled. The narrator finally addresses this discontent with a homily about the fact that we have the ability to provide a decent life for everyone—so why don’t we?
This story is never really more than a notion (albeit an interestingly described one), and the ending doesn’t really follow the logic of the narrator’s theory—if people were longing for the past, you would think they would be going back there, not getting knocked down and killed in their future.
** (Average). 5,300 words. Story link.

The Other Wife by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Other Wife by Jack Finney (Saturday Evening Post, January 30th, 1960) starts with a fairly stereotypical husband-wife encounter—she’s prattling on about her knitting and he’s day-dreaming about a sports car—which eventually devolves into a mild spat. During the early stages of this encounter the husband discovers a 1958 Woodrow Wilson coin in his change: this becomes significant later.
The next part of the story sees the husband transported to an alternate world where, after seeing a “Coco-Coola” sign, he notices other changes (the cars are all black, and they are of different makes) before discovering the most significant difference on his arrival back at his apartment—which is that he is married to another woman.
He later realises that she is an ex-girlfriend of his, although this takes some time, and after some slight hesitation he picks up where he left off. He subsequently enjoys a honeymoon period with his other wife and during this also has the pleasure of finding new books that exist in this world but not in his own:

There on the revolving metal racks were the familiar rows of glossy little books, every one of which, judging from the covers, seemed to be about an abnormally well-developed girl. Turning the rack slowly I saw books by William Faulkner, Bernard Glemser, Agatha Christie, and Charles Einstein, which I’d read and liked. Then, down near the bottom of the rack my eye was caught by the words, “By Mark Twain.” The cover showed an old side-wheeler steamboat, and the title was South From Cairo. A reprint fitted out with a new title, I thought, feeling annoyed; and I picked up the book to see just which of Mark Twain’s it really was. I’ve read every book he wrote—Huckleberry Finn at least a dozen times since I discovered it when I was eleven years old.
But the text of this book was new to me. It seemed to be an account, told in the first person by a young man of twenty, of his application for a job on a Mississippi steamboat. And then, from the bottom of a page, a name leaped out at me. “‘Finn, sir,’ I answered the captain,” the text read, “‘but mostly they call me Huckleberry.’”
For a moment I just stood there in the drugstore with my mouth hanging open; then I turned the little book in my hands. On the back cover was a photograph of Mark Twain; the familiar shock of white hair, the mustache, that wise old face. But underneath this the brief familiar account of his life ended with saying that he had died in 1918 in Mill Valley, California. Mark Twain had lived eight years longer in this alternate world, and had written—well, I didn’t yet know how many more books he had written in this wonderful world, but I knew I was going to find out. And my hand was trembling as I walked up to the cashier and gave her two bits for my priceless copy of South From Cairo.  pp. 25-26 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This part of the story, and his realisation about what the odd coins in his change do—see below—is probably the best of it.
In a few months, of course, the shine eventually comes off his new relationship and, while checking his change one night, he finds a Roosevelt coin. He realises that it was the Woodrow Wilson one which transported him to this world—and that the Roosevelt will let him return.
The story ends with him back in his own world where no time has passed. He has a second honeymoon period with his first wife and then, later, finds another Woodrow Wilson coin in his change . . . .
I guess, overall, this story is okay, but it’s essentially shallow New Yorker froth where a bigamous husband has his cake and eats it. A pity, because there is a better story here about how the shine comes off of new relationships and marriages, and of the possibilities of the road not taken. (And hopefully a story which explains the reason there isn’t already a husband in the alternate world.)
** (Average). 5,850 words.