by Hank Davis
“Did you ever hear the limerick about Miss Bright?” he asked. She shook her head. “It goes something like this:
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned home the previous night.*
“Let me elaborate,” Roger went on. “I met Becky a little less than twenty-four hours before I met you, and I met her the same as I did you—on the very bench we’re sitting on now. So if you’re telling the truth you really don’t have a problem at all. All you have to do is make a round trip to Altair VI enough in excess of the velocity of light to bring you back to Earth twenty-four hours before your original arrival. Then you simply come walking down the walk to where I’m sitting on the bench, and if your wodget is worth a plugged nickel I’ll feel the same way toward you as you feel toward me.”
“But that would involve a paradox, and the cosmos would have to create a time shift to compensate for it,” Alayne of Altair objected. “The millisecond I attained the necessary velocity and the extent of the paradox became evident, time would go whoom! And you, I and everybody else in the cosmos would be catapulted back to the moment when the paradox began, and we’d have no memory of the last few days. It would be as though I’d never met you, as though you’d never met me—”
“And as though I’d never met Becky. What more do you want?”
She was staring at him. “Why—why, it just might work at that. It—it would be sort of like Aparicio stealing first base. Let me see now, if I take a bus out to the farm, Ill get there in less than an hour. Then if I set the grodgel for Lapse Two, and the borque for—”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Roger said, “come off it, will you!”
“Sh-sh!” Alayne of Altair said. “I’m trying to think.”
He stood up. “Well, think then! I’m going back to my room and get ready for my date with Becky!”
Angrily he walked away. In his room, he laid his best suit out on the bed. He shaved and showered leisurely and spent a long time getting dressed. Then he went out, rented a car and drove to Becky’s apartment. It was 2:00 P.M. on the nose when he rang her bell. She must have been taking a shower, because when she opened the door all she had on was a terry-cloth towel and three anklets. No, four.
“Hi, Roger,” she said warmly. “Come on in.”
Eagerly he stepped across the threshold and made—
Whoom! Time went.
Little did Roger Thompson dream when he sat down on the park bench that Friday morning in June that in a celibate sense his goose was already in the oven and that soon it would be cooked. He may have had an inkling of things to come when he saw the cute blonde in the blue dress walking down the winding walk some several seconds later, but that inkling could not conceivably have apprised him of the vast convolutions of time and space which the bowing out of his bachelorhood had already set in motion.
The cute blonde sat down at the other end of the bench, produced a little red notebook and began writing in it. Presently she glanced at her wrist watch. Then she gave a start and looked over at him.
He returned the look cordially. He saw a dusting of golden freckles, a pair of eyes the hue of bluebirds and a small mouth the color of sumac leaves after the first hard frost.
A tall brunette in a red sheath came down the walk. Roger hardly even noticed her. Just as she was opposite the bench one of her spike heels sank into a crevice and brought her to an abrupt halt. She slipped her foot out of the shoe and, kneeling down, jerked the shoe free with her hands. Then she put it back on, gave him a dirty look and continued on her way.
The cute blonde had returned her attention to her note book. Now she faced him again. Roger’s heart turned three somersaults and made an entrechat.
“How do you xpell matrimony?” she said.
*By Arthur H. B. Buller; in Punch.
The Other Now
INTRODUCTION
His wife was dead, killed in an accident that might instead have killed him, or neither of them. He had seen her buried, but their home was somehow haunted by her presence. Suppose there was a parallel world where he had died and she had survived? Could that gulf between dimensions be crossed?
# # #
William F. Jenkins (1986-1975) was a prolific and successful writer, selling stories to magazines of all sorts, from pulps like Argosy to the higher-paying slicks such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, writing stories ranging from westerns, to mysteries, to science fiction. However, for SF he usually used the pen name of Murray Leinster, and he used it often. Even though SF was a less lucrative field than other categories of fiction, he enjoyed writing it (fortunately for SF readers everywhere) and wrote a great deal of it, including such classics as “Sidewise in Time” (which introduced the concept of parallel time tracks into SF). “First Contact,” and “A Logic Named Joe,” the last being a story you should keep in mind the next time someone repeats the canard that SF never predicted the home computer or the Internet. Leinster did it (though under his real name, this time) in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1946! His first SF story was “The Runaway Skyscraper,” published in 1919, and his last was the third of three novelization of the Land of the Giants TV show. For the length of his career, his prolificity, and his introduction of original concepts into SF, fans in the 1940s began calling him the Dean of Science Fiction, a title he richly deserved.
The Other Now
by Murray Leinster
This story is self-evident nonsense. If Jimmy Patterson had told anybody but Haynes, nice men in white jackets would have taken him away for psychiatric treatment, which undoubtedly would have been effective. He’d have been restored to sanity and common sense, and he’d probably have died of it. So, to anyone who liked Jimmy and Jane, it is good that things worked out as they did. The facts are patently impossible, but they are satisfying.
Haynes, though, would like very much to know exactly why it happened in the case of Jimmy and Jane and nobody else. There must have been some specific reason, but there’s absolutely no clue to it.
It began about three months after Jane was killed in that freak accident. Jimmy had taken her death hard. This night seemed no different from any other. He came home, just as usual, and his throat tightened a little, just as usual, as he went up to the door. It was still intolerable to know that Jane wouldn’t be waiting for him. The hurt in his throat was a very familiar sensation, which he was doggedly trying to wear out. But it was extra-strong tonight, and he wondered rather desperately if he’d sleep or, if he did, if he’d dream. Sometimes he had dreams of Jane and was very, very happy until he woke up—and then he wanted to cut his throat. But he wasn’t at that point tonight. Not yet.
As he explained it to Haynes later, he simply put his key in the door, opened it and started to walk in. But he bumped into the closed door instead, so he absently put his key in the door and opened it and started to walk in. Yes. That’s what happened. He was halfway through before he realized. Then he stared blankly. The door looked perfectly normal. He closed it behind him, feeling queer. He tried to reason out what had happened.
Then he felt a slight draught. The door wasn’t shut. It was wide open. He had to close it again.
That was all that happened to mark this night off from any other, and there is no explanation why it happened—began, rather—this night instead of any other. Jimmy went to bed with a rather taut feeling. He had the conviction that he had opened the door twice—the same door. Then he had the conviction that he had had to close it twice. He’d heard of that feeling. Queer, but fairly commonplace.
He slept, blessedly without dreams. He woke next morning and found his muscles tense. That was an acquired habit. Before he opened his eyes every morning, he reminded himself that Jane wasn’t beside him. It was necessary. If he forgot and turned contentedly—to emptiness—the ache of being alive when Jane wasn’t was unbearable. This morning he lay with his
eyes closed to remind himself, and instead he found himself thinking about that business of the door. He’d kicked the door between the two openings, so it wasn’t just an illusion of repetition. And he puzzled over closing the door and then finding he had to close it again. So it wasn’t a standard mental vagary. It looked like a delusion. But his memory insisted that it had happened that way, whether it was impossible or not.
Frowning, he went out, got his breakfast at a restaurant and went to work. Work was blessed, because he had to think about it. The main trouble was that sometimes something turned up that Jane would have been amused to hear, and he had to remind himself that there was no use making a mental note to tell her. Jane was dead.
Today he thought a good deal about the door, but when he went home he knew that he was going to have a black night. He wouldn’t sleep, and oblivion would seem infinitely tempting. Because the ache of being alive when Jane wasn’t was horribly tedious, and he couldn’t imagine an end to it. Tonight would be a very bad one, indeed.
He opened the door and started in. Then he went crashing into the door. He stood still for an instant and then fumbled for the lock. But the door was open. He’d opened it. There hadn’t been anything for him to run into. But his forehead hurt where he’d bumped into the door that hadn’t been closed at all.
There wasn’t anything he could do about it, though. He went in, hung up his coat and sat down wearily. He filled his pipe and grimly faced a night that was going to be one of the worst. He struck a match, lighted the pipe and put the match in an ashtray. And he glanced in the tray. There were cigarette stubs in it. Jane’s brand. Freshly smoked.
He touched them with his fingers. They were real. Then a furious anger filled him. Maybe the cleaning woman had had the intolerable insolence to smoke Jane’s cigarettes. He got up and stormed through the house, raging as he searched for signs of further impertinence. He found none. He came back, seething, to his chair. The ashtray was empty. And there’d been nobody around to empty it.
It was logical to question his own sanity, and the question gave him a sort of grim cheer. The matter of the recurrent oddities could be used to fight the abysmal depression ahead. He tried to reason them out, and, always, they added up to mere delusions. But he kept his mind resolutely on the problem. Sometimes at work he was able to thrust aside for whole half-hours the fact that Jane was dead. Now he grappled relievedly with the question of his sanity or lunacy. He went to the desk where Jane had kept her household accounts. He’d set the whole thing down on paper and examined it methodically, checking this item against that . . .
Jane’s diary lay on the desk-blotter, with a pencil between two of its pages. He picked it up with an inward wrench. Some day he might read it—an absurd chronicle Jane had never offered him—but not now. Not now!
Then he realized that it shouldn’t be here. His hands jumped, and the book fell open. He saw Jane’s angular writing, and it hurt. He closed it quickly, aching all over. But the printed date at the top of the page registered on his brain even as he snapped the cover shut.
Then he sat still for minutes, every muscle taut.
It was a long time before he opened the book again, and by that time he had a perfectly reasonable explanation. It must be that Jane hadn’t restricted herself to assigned spaces. When she had extra much to write, she wrote on past the page allotted for a given date. Of course! So Jimmy fumbled back to the last written page, where the pencil had been, with a tense matter-of-factness. It was—as he’d noticed—today’s date. The page was filled. The writing was fresh. It was Jane’s handwriting.
Went to the cemetery, said the sprawling letters. It was very bad. This is three months since the accident, and it doesn’t get any easier. I’m developing a personal enmity to chance. It doesn’t seem like an abstraction anymore. It was chance that killed Jimmy. It could have been me instead, or neither of us. I wish . . .
Jimmy went quietly mad for a moment or two. When he came to himself he was staring at an empty desk-blotter. There wasn’t any book before him. There wasn’t any pencil between his fingers. He remembered picking up the pencil and writing desperately under Jane’s entry. Jane! he’d written—and he could remember the look of his scrawled script under Jane’s—where are you? I’m not dead! I thought you were! In God’s name, where are you?
But certainly nothing of the sort could possibly have happened. It was delusion.
That night was very, very bad, but, curiously, not as bad as some other nights had been. Jimmy had a normal man’s horror of insanity, but this wasn’t normal insanity. A lunatic has always an explanation for his delusions. Jimmy had none. He noted the fact.
Next morning he bought a small camera with a flashbulb attachment and carefully memorized the directions for its use. This was the thing that would tell the story. And that night, when he got home—as usual after dark—he had the camera ready. He unlocked the door and opened it. He put his hand out tentatively. The door was still closed. He stepped back and quickly snapped the camera, and there was a blinding flash from the bulb. The glare blinded him. But, when he put out his hand again, the door was open. He stepped into the living room without having to unlock and open the door a second time.
He looked at the desk as he turned the film and put in a new flashbulb. It was as empty as he’d left it in the morning. He hung up his coat and settled down tensely with his pipe. Presently he knocked out the ashes. There were cigarette butts in the tray. He quivered a little. He smoked again, carefully avoiding looking at the desk. It was not until he knocked out the second pipeful of ashes that he let himself look where Jane’s diary had been.
It was there again, and it was open. There was a ruler laid across it to keep it open.
Jimmy wasn’t frightened, and he wasn’t hopeful. There was absolutely no reason why this should happen to him. He was simply desperate and grim when he went across the room. He saw yesterday’s entry, and his own hysterical message. And there was more writing beyond that. In Jane’s hand.
Darling, maybe I’m going crazy. But I think you wrote me as if you were alive. Maybe I’m crazy to answer you. But please, darling, if you are alive somewhere and somehow . . .
There was a tear-blot here. The rest was frightened, and tender, and as desperate as Jimmy’s own sensations.
He wrote, with trembling fingers, before he put the camera into position and pressed the shutter-control for the second time.
When his eyes recovered from the flash, there was nothing on the desk.
He did not sleep at all that night. Nor did he work the next day. He went to a photographer with the film and paid an extravagant fee to have the film developed and enlarged at once. He got back two prints, quite distinct—very distinct, considering everything. One looked like a trick shot, showing a door twice, once open and once closed, in the same photograph. The other was a picture of an open book, and he could read every word on its pages. It was inconceivable that such a picture should have come out.
He walked around almost at random for a couple of hours, looking at the pictures from time to time. Pictures or no pictures, the thing was nonsense. The facts were preposterous. It must be that he only imagined seeing these prints. But there was a way to find out.
He went to Haynes. Haynes was his friend and, reluctantly, a lawyer—reluctantly, because law practice interfered with a large number of unlikely hobbies.
“Haynes,” said Jimmy, “I want you to look at a couple of pictures and see if you see what I do. I may have gone out of my head.”
He passed over the pictures of the door. It looked to Jimmy like two doors, nearly at right angles—in the same door frame and hung from the same hinges.
Haynes looked at it and said tolerantly, “Didn’t know you went in for trick photography.” He picked up a reading-glass and examined it in detail. “A futile but highly competent job. You covered half the film and exposed with the door closed, and then exposed for the other half of the film with the door open. A neat job of matching, tho
ugh. You’ve a good tripod.”
“I held the camera in my hand,” said Jimmy, with restraint.
“You couldn’t do it that way, Jimmy,” said Haynes. “Don’t try to kid me!”
“I’m trying not to fool myself,” said Jimmy. He was very pale. He handed over the other enlargement. “What do you see in this?”
Haynes looked. Then he jumped. He read through what was so plainly photographed on the pages of a diary that hadn’t been before the camera. Then he looked at Jimmy in palpable uneasiness.
“Any explanation?” asked Jimmy. He swallowed. “I—haven’t any.”
He told what had happened to date, baldly and without any attempt to make it reasonable. Haynes gaped at him. But presently his eyes grew shrewd and compassionate. He had a number of unlikely hobbies, and he loudly insisted on his belief in a fourth dimension and other esoteric ideas, because it was good fun to talk authoritatively about them. But he had common sense, had Haynes, and a good and varied law practice.
Presently he said gently, “If you want it straight, Jimmy . . . I had a client once. She accused a chap of beating her up. It was very pathetic. She was absolutely sincere. She really believed it. But her own family admitted that she’d made the marks on herself—and the doctors agreed that she’d blotted it out of her mind afterward.”
“You suggest,” said Jimmy composedly, “that I might have forged all that to comfort myself with, as soon as I could forget the forging. I don’t think that’s the case, Haynes. What’s left?”
Haynes hesitated a long time. He looked at the pictures again, scrutinizing especially the one that looked like a trick shot.