"Jack Finney - The Third Level" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finney Jack)

THE THIRD LEVEL
Jack Finney

[07 feb 2002—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

Jack Finney was one of the premier fantasists of the 1950s. His stories appeared in all the
leading magazines and the best were collected into two volumes, The Third Level and I Love
Galesburg in the Springtime. His novel The Body Snatchers was made twice into films called Invasion
of the Body Snatchers. His finest novel, Time and Again, was published in the 1960s, and his novels
still appear, but he has ceased writing short fiction in recent decades. Time and nostalgia are
recurring interests in his fiction, and "The Third Level" is quintessential Finney, yearning for a
Utopia in the past and finding it in the midst of, at the center of, the contemporary world.

The presidents of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads
will swear on a stack of timetables that there are only two. But I say there are three, because I've been
on the third level at Grand Central Station. Yes, I've taken the obvious step: I talked to a psychiatrist
friend of mine, among others. I told him about the third level at Grand Central Station, and he said it was
a waking-dream wish fulfillment. He said I was unhappy. That made my wife kind of mad, but he
explained that he meant the modern world is full of insecurity, fear, war, worry and all the rest of it, and
that I just want to escape. Well, hell, who doesn't? Everybody I know wants to escape, but they don't
wander down into any third level at Grand Central Station.
But that's the reason, he said, and my friends all agreed. Everything points to it, they claimed. My
stamp collecting, for example; that's a "temporary refuge from reality." Well, maybe, but my grandfather
didn't need any refuge from reality; things were pretty nice and peaceful in his day, from all I hear, and he
started my collection. It's a nice collection, too, blocks of four of practically every U. S. issue, first-day
covers, and so on. President Roosevelt collected stamps, too, you know.
Anyway, here's what happened at Grand Central. One night last summer I worked late at the office.
I was in a hurry to get uptown to my apartment so I decided to take the subway from Grand Central
because it's faster than the bus.
Now, I don't know why this should have happened to me. I'm just an ordinary guy named Charley,
thirty-one years old, and I was wearing a tan gabardine suit and a straw hat with a fancy band; I passed a
dozen men who looked just like me. And I wasn't trying to escape from anything; I just wanted to get
home to Louisa, my wife.
I turned into Grand Central from Vanderbilt Avenue, and went down the steps to the first level,
where yon take trains like the Twentieth Century. Then I walked down another flight to the second level,
where the suburban trains leave from, ducked into an arched doorway heading for the subway—and got
lost. That's easy to do. I've been in and out of Grand Central hundreds of times, but I'm always bumping
into new doorways and stairs and corridors. Once I got into a tunnel about a mile long and came out in
the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel. Another time I came up in an office building on Forty-sixth Street, three
blocks away.
Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases
like roots. There's probably a long tunnel that nobody knows about feeling its way under the city right
now, on its way to Times Square, and maybe another to Central Park. And maybe—because for so
many people through the years Grand Central has been an exit, a way of escape—maybe that's how the
tunnel I got into ... But I never told my psychiatrist friend about that idea.
The corridor I was in began angling left and slanting downward and I thought that was wrong, but I
kept on walking. All I could hear was the empty sound of my own footsteps and I didn't pass a soul.
Then I heard that sort of hollow roar ahead that means open space and people talking. The tunnel turned
sharp left; I went down a short flight of stairs and came out on the third level at Grand Central Station.
For just a moment I thought I was back on the second level, but I saw the room was smaller, there were