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

fewer ticket windows and train gates, and the information booth in the center was wood and old-looking.
And the man in the booth wore a green eyeshade and long black sleeve protectors. The lights were dim
and sort of flickering. Then I saw why; they were open-flame gaslights.
There were brass spittoons on the floor, and across the station a glint of light caught my eye; a man
was pulling a gold watch from his vest pocket. He snapped open the cover, glanced at his watch, and
frowned. He wore a derby hat, a black four-button suit with tiny lapels, and he had a big, black,
handle-bar mustache. Then I looked around and saw that everyone in the station was dressed like
eighteen-ninety-something; I never saw so many beards, sideburns and fancy mustaches in my life. A
woman walked in through the train gate; she wore a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts to the
top of her high-buttoned shoes. Back of her, out on the tracks, I caught a glimpse of a locomotive, a very
small Currier & Ives locomotive with a funnel-shaped stack. And then I knew.
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 hasn't 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.
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. And I wanted two tickets to Galesburg, Illinois.
Have you ever been there? It's a wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns and
tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings
were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawns, the men smoking cigars and talking quietly, the
women waving palm-leaf fans, with the fireflies all around, in a peaceful world. To be back there with the
First World War still twenty years off, and World War II over forty years in the future ... I wanted two
tickets for that.
The clerk figured the fare—he glanced at my fancy hatband, but he figured the fare—and I had
enough for two coach tickets, one way. But when I counted out the money and looked up, the clerk was
staring at me. He nodded at the bills. "That ain't money, mister," he said, "and if you're trying to skin me
you won't get very far," and he glanced at the cash drawer beside him. Of course the money in his
drawer was old-style bills, half again as big as the money we use nowadays, and different-looking. I
turned away and got out fast. There's nothing nice about jail, even in 1894.
And that was that. I left the same way I came, I suppose. Next day, during lunch hour, I drew three
hundred dollars out of the bank, nearly all we had, and bought old-style currency (that really worried my
psychiatrist friend). You can buy old money at almost any coin dealer's but you have to pay a premium.
My three hundred dollars bought less than two hundred in old-style bills, but I didn't care; eggs were
thirteen cents a dozen in 1894.
But I've never again found the corridor that leads to the third level at Grand Central Station, although
I've tried often enough.
Louisa was pretty worried when I told her all this, and didn't want me to look for the third level any
more, and after a while I stopped; I went back to my stamps. But now we're both looking, every week
end, because now we have proof that the third level is still there. My friend Sam Weiner disappeared!
Nobody knew where, but I sort of suspected because Sam's a city boy, and I used to tell him about
Galesburg—I went to school there—and he always said he liked the sound of the place. And that's
where he is, all right. In 1894.
Because one night, fussing with my stamp collection, I found—well, do you know what a first-day
cover is? When a new stamp is issued, stamp collectors buy some and use them to mail envelopes to
themselves on the very first day of sale; and the postmark proves the date. The envelope is called a
first-day cover. They're never opened; you just put blank paper in the envelope.
 That night, among my oldest first-day covers, I found one that shouldn't have been there. But there it
was. It was there because someone had mailed it to my grandfather at his home in Galesburg; that's what
the address on the envelope said. And it had been there since July 18, 1894—the postmark showed