The Two Timers

by Bob Shaw

  And after five years:

  "The monthly check from Hetty arrived today. It was larger than usual, making it possible for me to clear my account at the Clermont Scientific Company -- which was a relief. I have no wish to impair my credit rating with them at this stage, although I still have the house in reserve and its capital value has appreciated considerably. (What a good idea it was for me to assign formal control of my business to Hetty and that new man Tougher. My only worry is a nagging suspicion that she sometimes augments my check with money of her own.)

  "There is some cause for excitement today. My work has finally passed from the investigatory to the constructively experimental stage. I could have reached this point sooner but for following several false trails. All of them were suggested by Dr. Garnet at the migraine clinic, and I am glad my association with that organization is coming to an end. Prodromal symptoms and cerebral blood flow, response to various drugs, metabolism of the amines -- red herrings, the lot of them. (As far as my work is concerned, anyway. I must not be too unkind to Garnet.)

  "To think that my big breakthrough came as a result of using a badly designed screwdriver!

  "I don't know what prompted me to withdraw the fluid from that huge blister on the palm of my right hand, unless it was that I had been thinking a lot about the possible use of hemicranial pain as a trigger mechanism to augment chronomotive impulses. Work at the clinic had established that a substance called kinin was produced in the region of the head arteries during migraine attacks in people not fortunate enough to be afflicted with hemicrania sine dolore.

  "Blister fluid itself does not cause pain, but I have proved that when it is withdrawn and put in contact with glass it develops kinin, which -- when put into the blister again -- certainly does cause pain. By injecting kinin at the first onset of teichopsia heralding my last three trips I was able to experience genuine hemicrania, and -- for the first time -- I heard those three elm trees moving in the wind!

  "That phase of my work is now complete, and I now am faced with the problem of effecting the temporal displacement of a considerable physical mass, i.e. my own body. Vast amplification of neural impulses will be required, and I have an uneasy premonition I may have to look for some loophole in Kirchoff's Laws.

  "However, I am in a mood of supreme confidence. I must calm down, though, in case I precipitate another trip. Excitement is a traditional trigger factor in hemicrania. Somewhere I have a note of a comment by the French patriot Dr. Edward Liveing who, in 1873, said -- 'We all know that it is not everyone who can with impunity, do himself the pleasure of assisting at certain theatrical representations where the glory of France is daily celebrated with noise and smoke. . . .' "

  And after a further three years:

  "Abrogation of Kirchoff's Laws was almost easier than I had expected -- consideration of the fourth dimension makes so many things possible -- but I had seriously underestimated the expense. The sale of the house and furniture raised only a fraction of the money I needed. Fortunately, I was able to persuade Hetty and Carl Tougher to void our agreement of the last eight years in favor of an outright sale. They are worried about me, especially Hetty, but I think I have convinced them of both my sanity and my physical well-being. Hetty has got noticeably older, though, and she smokes too much.

  "Kate, my darling, this is the last time I will address you through the medium of this notebook. The time is not too distant, however, when we shall be able to turn its pages together. Until then, my love, until then. . . ."

  Breton waited till dusk before he went to the park.

  He stopped the now-aged blue Buick several hundred yards from the 50th Avenue entrance and spent a few minutes checking over the equipment. The hat came first. It was lying on the rear seat, looking very much like any other slightly shabby hat, except that occasional flickers of orange light escaped from under its brim. He picked it up, positioned it carefully on his head and spent some time connecting the leads which projected down from the sweat band to others which emerged from under his shirt collar. When the connections were completed, he turned up the collar of his raincoat and moved his limbs experimentally. The network of wires taped to his body dragged painfully at his skin, but he had what amounted to complete freedom of movement.

  Breton turned his attention to the rifle. When moving his personal belongings out of the house he had found the weapon lying in the basement cupboard, coated in white dust, and had brought it to his newly rented apartment on the east side. On checking it over, he had discovered the firing pin was jammed -- the result of some forgotten accident -- and had paid a gunsmith to put it right. The slim lines of the rifle were marred by the bulk of the infrared sight he had added for use in darkness. Breton filled the ammunition clip with cool brass cylinders from his pocket, latched it onto the rifle and bolted the first cartridge up into the breech. There was a possibility he would get as little as two seconds to find his mark, aim and fire -- and he did not want to waste any of his meager ration of time.

  He sat motionless for a few minutes, waiting for the immediate vicinity to empty of pedestrians. It was almost a week since his last trip, and he could feel that the time was right. His veins were coursing with excitement -- one of the basic hemicranial trigger factors -- and the electrical activity in his brain was higher than normal, producing a kind of taut exultation. The almost psychedelic change in perception, familiar to migraine sufferers as the first symptom of a new onslaught, was influencing his awareness, ringing everyday objects with a halo of imminence -- sadness, lurking peril, intoxication. As soon as the block was clear, Breton got out of the car, withdrew the rifle and closed his raincoat around it, grasping the stock through the slit pocket. Night breezes tugged at him from many directions, exploring his form like blind men's fingers while he walked awkwardly with the concealed burden.

  As he neared the 50th Avenue entrance, the first visual disturbances began. A fugitive glimmer of light trembled in the field of his right eye and slowly spread, exhibiting its prismatic complexities. Breton was reminded of a swarm of water beetles, tumbling on each other, splitting sunlight with the movement of their oily bronze backs. He was glad it was not the falling black star; the fortification figures took longer to develop, giving him more time.

  Breton went into the park and headed towards its center along paths on which dry fallen leaves rolled with metallic crackles. A few people, mostly couples, were sitting on benches near the lighted paths, but he veered away across the grassy central area and was swallowed by the anonymous darkness in a matter of seconds. He brought the rifle out from under his coat and self-consciously raised it to his face to check the infrared scope, but his right eye was dazzled with marching colors and he remembered he had no choice other than to trust his previous zeroing-in work. The blanket of living brilliance was nearing its maximum when he found the three elms.

  He went to within thirty yards of the triangular group, twisted his left arm through the rifle's broad leather sling and dropped down on one knee in the classical marksman's position. The damp earth made an oval patch of coldness on his leg. I must be crazy, he thought, but he could hear himself whispering Kate's name over and over again. He touched the brim of his hat and a low humming sound came from it as the high-efficiency batteries strapped to his body began delivering power. Simultaneously, the hypodermic gun built into the circuit fired a cloud of kinin into the shaven patch above his right temple. He felt its icy sting, then agony coiled languorously through his head as the chemical spread in the cerebral arteries. Breton noted abstractedly that there were no people about -- all his painstaking work to produce an arrangement which would not attract too much attention had been quite unnecessary -- then the sheet of prismatic geometries began to shrink, abruptly. It was time.

  "Kate!" he screamed. "Kate!"

  She was moving uncertainly through the darkness, her pale blue dress A black shape moved from under the ragged archway of the elm trees, keening unhappily, like a loathsome bird of prey. It closed wit
h Kate, arms upraised, and she sobbed once with fear. Breton put the thick crosshairs onto the black silhouette, but his finger hesitated on the trigger. Their bodies were close together -- suppose the bullet passed right through both? He raised his left arm a fraction and fired instinctively as the crosshairs intersected fleetingly on the head. The rifle jarred against his shoulder, and the dark head was no longer a head. . . .

  Breton lay for a long time with his face pressed down into a microcosm of grassy roots. Under his left hand the rifle barrel grew warm from the single shot, then cooled again, and still he was unable to move. He was in the grip of an exhaustion so intense that each thought required eons of dogged effort to drive it through to completion. How long, he wondered, have I been lying here? The fear that somebody would come along and find him lying there nagged at him incessantly, gradually reaching a thundering urgency, but he might as well have been trapped in a dead body.

  His mind, too, felt different. Pressures had been relieved, potentials had been discharged by the fantastic cerebral orgasm of the trip. The big trip. He had made it -- the thought brought a flicker of satisfaction -- eight years of continuous work had had their brief reward. He had breasted the implacable river of time and --

  Kate!

  The incredible realization fountained through him, bringing the first involuntary movement of his limbs. He brought his hands up under his shoulders and pressed hard against the ground. The process of getting to his feet was an extended one, involving getting his arms to raise his body, resting on his heels, then grimly forcing his legs to accept weight. He unslung the rifle, put it under his coat and began to walk. There was nobody near the three elm trees, but this was not surprising. The man he had shot would have been found and taken away eight years earlier, and as for Kate -- she must be at the house. A woman's place is in the home, he thought inanely as he began to run, swaying grotesquely as his knees orbited at every step. His wild elation lasted until he was close to the park's entrance, and could see the milk-white globes on their twin pillars. Until a thought ended it.

  But, a voice suddenly whispered, if Kate's at home -- why are you out in the park with a rifle?

  If she's alive -- how can you remember her funeral?

  Later, while sanity still lingered, he drove past house. The new owners had not yet moved in, and the FOR SALE sign was still standing in the garden, reflecting stray beams from the street lights. Breton experienced a yearning impulse to go into the house and make sure, but instead he pressed down hard on the gas pedal. The old Buick faltered for a moment, then surged away down the quiet avenue. There were lights in all the other houses.

  Breton drove to a bar on the city's north side, right on the edge of the prairie, where tumbleweeds sometimes came nuzzling at the door like hungry dogs. Seated at the long bar, he ordered a whiskey -- his first since the nightmare binge of eight years earlier -- and stared into its amber infinities. Why had he not deduced what was bound to happen? Why had his mind gone so far along its lonely road, only to stop short of the final, obvious step?

  He had gone back in time, he had shot a man -- but nothing was going to alter the reality of Kate's death. Breton dipped a finger in the whiskey and drew a straight line on the smooth plastic of the bar top. He stared at it for a moment, then added another line forking out from the first. If the first line represented the stream of time as he knew it, and in which nothing had changed, then the few seconds he had wrested from the past had taken place on the divergent line. When his brief moment of death-dealing was over, he had snapped back to the present in his own time-stream. Instead of bringing Kate back to life in his own line he had prevented her death in the divergent track.

  Breton took another sip from his glass, trying to assimilate the idea that somewhere Kate was alive. He looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Kate might be in bed, or having a last cup of coffee with her husband -- the other Jack Breton. For Breton's trip into the past had, when it set up a new time-stream, created another universe in its entirety, complete with a duplicate of himself. That other universe would have its own cities, lands and oceans, planets and stars, receding galaxies -- but none of these things were important beside the fact that he had bought Kate another life, only to have her share it with another man. And it was wrong to say that the other man was himself, because an individual is the sum of his experiences, and that other Breton had not looked on Kate's dead face, endured the guilt, or surrendered eight years of his life to the monomania which had recreated Kate Breton.

  The forked line he had drawn on the bar was fading away into the air. Breton stared at it somberly. He had a feeling he had used up something inside himself, that he would never again be able to summon up the vast chronomotive potential which had hurled him back through the barriers of time. But supposing . . .

  He wet his finger again, made a fresh dot to mark the present on the line representing the main timestream, and matched it with a similar dot on the divergent line. After a moment's thought, he drew a heavy lateral stroke connecting the two.

  Suddenly he understood why the deeply-buried but ever-watchful part of his mind that controlled these things had allowed him to continue on the path he had chosen eight years earlier. He had defied time itself to create another Kate, and that was a far greater task than the one which lay before him now.

  All he had to do was reach her.

  IV

  It was long past midnight before Jack Breton stopped talking, but he knew they were just about convinced.

  Somewhere along the way John Breton and Kate had begun to believe him -- which was why it was so important to go carefully, not risk losing their trust. This far, everything he had told them had been true, but now the lies would begin and he had to avoid falling into his own trap. He sat back in the deep chair and looked at Kate. There had been almost no physical change in the past nine years, except for her eyes, and the way in which she had acquired conscious control of her own beauty.

  "This must be a trick," Kate said tensely, not wanting to surrender normalcy without a fight. "Everybody has a double somewhere."

  "How do you know?" Both Bretons spoke at once, in perfect synchronization, and glanced at each other while Kate seemed to grow pale, as though the coincidence had proved something to her.

  "Well, I read it . . ."

  "Kate's a student of the funny papers," John interrupted. "If a thing happens independently to Superman and Dick Tracy, then it must be true. It stands to reason."

  "Don't speak to her like that," Jack said evenly, suppressing sudden anger at his other self's attitude. "It isn't an easy thing to swallow first time around without proof. You should know that, John."

  "Proof?" Kate was immediately interested. "What proof can there be?"

  "Fingerprints, for one thing," Jack said, "but that calls for equipment. Memories are easier. I told John something that nobody else in the world knows."

  "I see. Then I ought to be able to test you the same way?"

  "Yes." His voice was shaded with sudden doubt.

  "All right. John and I went to Lake Louise for our honeymoon. On the day we left there, we went to an Indian souvenir place and bought some rugs."

  "Of course we did," Jack replied, laying the faintest stress on the pronoun. "That's one of them over by the window."

  "But there was more. The old woman who ran the store gave me something else, free of charge, because we were on our honeymoon. What was it?" Kate's face was intent.

  "I . . ." Jack floundered, wondering what had gone wrong. She had beaten him, effortlessly. "I can't remember -- but that doesn't prove anything."

  "Doesn't it?" Kate stared at him triumphantly. "Doesn't it?"

  "No, it doesn't," John Breton put in. "I can't remember that episode either, honey. I don't remember that old stick giving us anything." He sounded regretful.

  "John!" Kate turned to him. "That tiny pair of moccasins -- for a baby."

  "I still don't remember. I've never seen them around."

  "We n
ever had a baby, did we?"

  "That's the advantage of family planning." John Breton smirked drunkenly into his glass. "You don't have any family."

  "Your jokes," Kate said bitterly. "Your indestructible, polyeurethane jokes."

  Jack listened with a peculiar sense of dismay. He had created these two people as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings and breathed life into handfuls of clay, yet they had lived independently. For nine years, he thought, with an indefinable feeling of having been cheated. He fingered the oily metal of the pistol in his pocket.

  John Breton flicked the rim of his empty glass, making silvery ringing sounds. "The point is that we know this man is telling the truth. I can see myself sitting over there; you can see me sitting over there. Look at that tie clip he's wearing -- I'll bet it's that gold wire one you made at that jewelry class you went to before we were married. Is it . . . Jack?"

  Jack Breton nodded. He opened the worn clip and reached it across to Kate. She hesitated, then took it from him in such a way that their hands did not touch. Her eyes narrowed with a look of incongruous professionalism as she held the clip up to the light and a pang of affection checked his breathing. She stood up abruptly and left the room, leaving the two men facing each other across an open hearth with its dying, whitening logs.