Four-Sided Triangle

by William F. Temple

  “Congratulations, old lad,” he said. “Come and have a drink and tell us all about it.”

  They squatted, on the grass and helped themselves from the table. Will could see that Bill had been overworking himself badly. His face was drawn and tired, his eyelids red, and he was in the grip of a nervous tension which for the time held him dumb and uncertain of himself.

  Joan noticed this, too, and checked the questions she was going to bombard upon him. Instead, she quietly withdrew to the house to prepare a pot of the China tea which she knew always soothed Bill’s migraine. When she had gone, Bill, with an effort, shook some of the stupor from him, and looked across at Will. His gaze dropped, and he began to pluck idly at the grass.

  “Will,” he began, presently, “I—” He cleared his throat nervously, and started again in a none too steady voice. “Listen, Will, I have something a bit difficult to say, and I’m not so good at expressing myself. In the first place, I have always been crazily in love with Joan.”

  Will sat, and looked at him curiously. But he let Bill go on.

  “I never said anything because—well, because I was afraid I wouldn’t make a success of marriage. Too unstable to settle down quietly with a decent girl like Joan. But I found I couldn’t go on without her, and was going to propose—when you beat me to it. I’ve felt pretty miserable since, though this work has taken something of the edge off.”

  Will regarded the other’s pale face—and wondered.

  “This work held out a real hope to me. And now I’ve accomplished the major part of it. I can make a living copy of any living thing. Now-do you see why I threw myself into this research? I want to create a living, breathing twin of Joan, and marry her! ”

  Will started slightly. Bill got up and paced restlessly up and down.

  “I know I’m asking a hell of a lot. This affair reaches deeper than a scientific curiosity. No feeling man can contemplate such a proposal without misgivings, for his wife and for himself. But honestly, Will, I cannot see any possible harm arising from it. Though, admittedly, the only good thing would be to make a selfish man happy. For heaven’s sake, let me know what you think.”

  Will sat contemplating, while the distracted Bill continued to pace. Presently, he said, “You are sure no physical harm could come to Joan in the course of the experiment?”

  “Certain—completely certain,” said Bill.

  “Then I personally have no objection. Anything but objection. I had no idea you felt that way, Bill, and it would make me, as well as Joan, very unhappy to know you had to go on like that.”

  He caught sight of his wife approaching with a laden tray. “Naturally, the decision rests with her,” he said. “If she’d rather not, there’s no more to it.”

  “No, of course not,” agreed Bill.

  But they both knew what her answer would be.

  “Stop the car for a minute, Will,” said Joan suddenly, and her husband stepped on the foot-brake.

  The car halted in the lane on the brow of the hill. Through a gap in the hedge the two occupants had a view of Bill’s laboratory as it lay below in the cradle of the valley.

  Joan pointed down. In the field behind the ‘cemetery’ two figures were strolling. Even at this distance, Bill’s flaming hair marked his identity. His companion was a woman in a white summer frock. And it was on her that Joan’s attention was fixed.

  “She’s alive now!” she whispered, and her voice trembled slightly. Will nodded. He noticed her apprehension, and gripped her hand encouragingly. She managed a wry smile.

  “It’s not every day one goes to pay a visit to oneself,” she said. “It was unnerving enough last week to see her lying on the other couch in the lab, dressed in my red frock—which I was wearing—so pale, and—Oh, it was like seeing myself dead!”

  “She’s not dead now, and Bill’s bought her some different clothes, so cheer up,”

  said Will. “I know it’s a most queer situation, but the only possible way to look at it is from the scientific viewpoint. It’s a unique scientific event. And it’s made Bill happy into the bargain.”

  He ruminated a minute.

  “Wish he’d given us a hint as to how he works his resuscitation process, though,” he went on. “Still, I suppose he’s right to keep it a secret. It’s a discovery which could be appallingly abused. Think of dictators manufacturing loyal, stupid armies from one loyal, stupid soldier! Or industrialists manufacturing cheap labour!

  We should soon have a world of robots, all traces of individuality wiped out. No variety, nothing unique—life would not be worth living.”

  “No,” replied Joan, mechanically, her thoughts still on that white-clad figure down there.

  Will released the brake, and the car rolled down the hill toward the laboratory. The two in the field saw it coming, and walked back through the cemetery to meet it. They reached the road as the car drew up.

  “Hello, there!” greeted Bill. “You’re late—we’ve had the kettle on the boil for half an hour. Doll and I were getting anxious.”

  He advanced into the road, and the woman in the white frock lingered hesitantly behind him. Joan tightened her lips and braced herself to face this unusual ordeal. She got out of the car, and while Will and Bill were grasping hands, she walked to meet her now living twin.

  Apparently Doll had decided to face it in the same way, and they met with oddly identical expressions of smiling surface ease, with an undercurrent of curiosity and doubt. They both saw and understood each other’s expression simultaneously, and burst out laughing. That helped a lot.

  “It’s not so bad, after all,” said Doll, and Joan checked herself from making the same instinctive remark.

  “No, not nearly,” she agreed.

  And it wasn’t. For although Doll looked familiar to her, she could not seem to identify her with herself to any unusual extent. It was not that her apparel and hairstyle were different, but that somehow her face, figure and voice seemed like those of another person.

  She did not realise that hitherto she had only seen parts of herself in certain mirrors from certain angles, and the complete effect was something she had simply never witnessed. Nor that she had not heard her own voice outside her own head, so to speak—never from a distance of some feet.

  Nevertheless, throughout the meal she felt vaguely uneasy, though she tried to hide it, and kept up a fire of witty remarks. And her other self, too, smiled at her across the table and talked easily.

  They compared themselves in detail, and found they were completely identical in every way, even to the tiny mole on their left forearm. Their tastes, too, agreed. They took the same amount of sugar in their tea, and liked and disliked the same foodstuffs.

  “I’ve got my eye on that pink iced cake,” laughed Doll. “Have you?”

  Joan admitted it. So they shared it.

  “You’ll never have any trouble over buying each other birthday or Christmas presents,” commented Will. “How nice to know exactly what the other wants!”

  Bill had a permanent grin on his face, and beamed all over the table all the time. For once he did not have a great deal to say. He seemed too happy for words, and kept losing the thread of the conversation to gaze upon Doll fondly.

  “We’re going to be married tomorrow!” he announced unexpectedly, and they protested their surprise at the lack of warning. But they promised to be there. There followed an evening of various sorts of games, and the similar thought-processes of Joan and Doll led to much amusement, especially in the guessing games. And twice they played checkers and twice they drew. It was a merry evening, and Bill was merriest of all. Yet when they came to say goodnight, Joan felt the return of the old uneasiness. As they left in the car, Joan caught a glimpse of Doll’s face as she stood beside Bill at the gate. And she divined that under that air of gaiety, Doll suffered the same uneasiness as she. Doll and Bill were married in a distant registry office next day, using a fictitious name and birthplace for Doll to avoid any publicity-after all, no
one would question her identity.

  Winter came and went.

  Doll and Bill seemed to have settled down quite happily, and the quartet remained as close friends as ever. Both Doll and Joan were smitten with the urge to take up flying as a hobby, and joined the local flying club. They each bought a single-seater, and went for long flights, cruising side by side.

  Almost in self-protection from this neglect (they had no interest in flying) Bill and Will began to work again together, delving further into the mysteries of the atom. This time they were searching for the yet-to-be-discovered secret of tapping the potential energy which the atom held.

  And almost at once they stumbled onto a new lead.

  Formerly they had been able to divert atomic energy without being able to transform it into useful power. It was as if they had constructed a number of artificial dams at various points in a turbulent river, which altered the course of the river without tapping any of its force—though that is a poor and misleading analogy. But now they had conceived, and were building, an amazingly complex machine which, in the same unsatisfactory analogy, could be likened to a turbine-generator, tapping some of the power of that turbulent river. The ‘river’ however, was very turbulent indeed, and needed skill and courage to harness. And there was a danger of the harness suddenly slipping. Presently, the others became aware that Doll’s health was gradually failing. She tried hard to keep up her usual air of brightness and cheerfulness, but she could not sleep, and became restless and nervous.

  And Joan, who was her almost constant companion, suddenly realised what was worrying that mind which was so similar to hers. The realisation was a genuine shock, which left her trembling, but she faced it.

  “I think it would be a good thing for Doll and Bill to come and live here for a while, until Doll’s better,” she said rather diffidently to Will one day.

  “Yes, okay, if you think you can persuade them,” replied Will. He looked a little puzzled.

  “We have far too many empty rooms here,” she said defensively. “Anyway, I can help Doll if I’m with her more.”

  Doll seemed quite eager to come, though a little dubious, but Bill thought it a great idea. They moved within the week.

  At first, things did improve. Doll began to recover, and became more like her natural self. She was much less highly strung, and joined in the evening games with the other three with gusto. She studied Will’s favourite game, backgammon, and began to enjoy beating him thoroughly and regularly. And then Joan began to fail.

  She became nerveless, melancholy, and even morose. It seemed as though through helping Doll back to health, she had been infected with the same complaint. Will was worried, and insisted on her being examined by a doctor. The doctor told Will in private: “There’s nothing physically wrong. She’s nursing some secret worry, and she’ll get worse until this worry is eased. Persuade her to tell you what it is—she refuses to tell me.”

  She also refused to tell Will, despite his pleadings. And now Doll, who knew what the secret was, began to worry about Joan, and presently she relapsed into her previous nervous condition. So it continued for a week, a miserable week for the two harassed and perplexed husbands, who did not know which way to turn. The following week, however, both women seemed to make an effort, and brightened up somewhat, and could even laugh at times.

  The recovery continued, and Bill and Will deemed it safe to return to their daily work in the lab, completing the atom-harnessing machine. One day Will happened to return to the house unexpectedly, and found the two women in each other’s arms on a couch, crying their eyes out. He stood staring for a moment. They suddenly became aware of him, and parted, drying their eyes.

  “What’s up, Will? Why have you come back?” asked Joan, unsteadily, sniffing.

  “Er—to get my slide-rule: I’d forgotten it,” he said. “Bill wanted to trust his memory, but I think there’s something wrong with his figures. I want to check up before we test the machine further. But—what’s the matter with you two?”

  “Oh, we’re all right,” said Doll, strainedly and not very convincingly. She blew her nose, and endeavoured to pull herself together. But almost immediately she was overtaken by another burst of weeping, and Joan put her arms around her comfortingly.

  “Look here,” said Will, in sudden and unusual exasperation, “I’ve had about enough of this. You know what Bill and I are only too willing to deal with whatever you’re worrying about. Yet the pair of you won’t say a word—only cry and fret. How can we help if you won’t tell us? Do you think we like to see you going on like this?”

  “I’ll tell you, Will,” said Joan quietly.

  Doll emitted a muffled “No!” but Joan ignored her, and went on: “Don’t you see that Bill has created another me in every detail? Every memory and every feeling?

  And because Doll thinks and feels exactly as I do, she’s in love with you! She has been that way from the very beginning. All this time she’s been trying to conquer it, to suppress it, and make Bill happy instead.”

  Doll’s shoulders shook with the intensity of her sobbing. Will laid his hands gently on them, consolingly. He could think of nothing whatever to say. He had not even dreamt of such a situation, obvious as it appeared now.

  “Do you wonder the conflict got her down?” said Joan. “Poor girl! I brought her here to be nearer to you, and that eased things for her.”

  “But it didn’t for you,” said Will, quietly, looking straight at her. “I see now why you began to worry. Why didn’t you tell me then, Joan?”

  “How could I?”

  He bit his lip, paced nervously over to the window, and stood with his back to the pair on the couch.

  “What a position!” he thought. “What can we do? Poor Bill!”

  He wondered how he could break the sorry news to his best friend, and even as he wondered, the problem was solved for him.

  From the window there was a view down the length of the wide, shallow valley, and a couple miles away the white concrete laboratory could just be seen nestling at the foot of one of the farther slopes. There were fields all around it, and a long row of great sturdy oak trees started from its northern corner. From this height and distance the whole place looked like a table-top model. Will stared moodily at that little white box where Bill was, and tried to clarify his chaotic thoughts.

  And suddenly, incredibly, before his eyes the distant white box spurted up in a dusty cloud of chalk-powder, and ere a particle of it had neared its topmost height, the whole of that part of the valley was split across by a curtain of searing, glaring flame. The whole string of oak trees, tough and amazingly deep-rooted though they were, floated up through the air like feathers of windblown thistledown before the blast of that mighty eruption.

  The glaring flame vanished suddenly, like a light that had been turned out, and left a thick, brown, heaving fog in its place, a cloud of earth that had been pulverised. Will caught a glimpse of the torn oak trees falling back into this brown, rolling cloud, and then the blast wave, which had travelled up the valley, smote the house. The window was instantly shattered and blown in, and he went flying backwards in a shower of glass fragments. He hit the floor awkwardly, and sprawled there, and only then did his laggard brain realise what had happened. Bill’s habitual impatience had at last been his undoing. He had refused to wait any longer for Will’s return, and gone on with the test, trusting to his memory. And he had been wrong.

  The harness had slipped.

  A man sat on a hill with a wide and lovely view of the country, bright in summer sunshine, spread before him. The rich green squares of the fields, the white ribbons of the lanes, the yellow blocks of haystacks and grey spires of village churches, made up a pattern infinitely pleasing to the eye.

  And the bees hummed drowsily, nearby sheep and cattle made the noises of their kind, and a neighbouring thicket fairly rang with the unending chorus of a hundred birds.

  But all this might as well have been set on another planet, for the
man could neither see nor hear the happy environment. He was in hell. It was a fortnight now since Bill had gone. When that grief had begun to wear off, it was succeeded by the most perplexing problem that had ever beset a member of the human race.

  Will had been left to live with two women who loved him equally violently. Neither could ever conquer or suppress that love, whatever they did. They knew that. On the other hand, Will was a person who was only capable of loving one of the women. Monogamy is deep-rooted in most normal people, and particularly so with Will. He had looked forward to travelling through life with one constant companion, and only one—Joan.

  But now there were two Joans, identical in appearance, feeling, thought. Nevertheless, they were two separate people. And between them he was a torn and anguished man, with his domestic life in shapeless ruins. He could not ease his mental torture with work, for since Bill died so tragically, he could not settle down to anything in a laboratory. It was no easier for Joan and Doll. Probably harder. To have one’s own self as a rival—even a friendly, understanding rival—for a man’s companionship and affection was almost unbearable.

  This afternoon they had both gone to a flying club, to attempt to escape for a while the burden of worry, apparently. Though neither was in a fit condition to fly, for they were tottering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. The club was near the hill where Will was sitting and striving to find some working solution to a unique human problem which seemed quite unsoluble. So it was no coincidence that presently a humming in the sky caused him to lift dull eyes to see both the familiar monoplanes circling and curving across the blue spaces between the creamy, cumulus clouds.

  He lay back on the grass watching them. He wondered which plane was which, but there was no means of telling, for they were similar models. And anyway, that would not tell him which was Joan and which was Doll, for they quite often used each other’s planes, to keep the ‘feel’ of both. He wondered what they were thinking up there…