The Two Timers

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The Two Timers Page 9

by Bob Shaw


  "John's entitled to leave if he wants," she said finally, and went out. A minute later he heard her MG booming in the garage. He waited at the window to see her go by, but the car was fitted with its hardtop and Kate's face was an impersonal blur behind the chiseled sky-fragments of the windows.

  Breton turned away from the window, suddenly filled with a sense of outrage. Both his creations -- the people he had brought into being as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings, putting breath into inert clay -- had lived independently of him for nine years. Now, in spite of what they had learned, they were insisting on pursuing their courses, ignoring him when necessary, leaving him alone in a house where he hated to be alone. Breton moved with clenched fists through the silences of the empty rooms. He had been prepared to wait a week, but things had changed and were still doing so. It would be necessary to act more quickly, more decisively.

  From a rear window he glimpsed the silvery dome of the observatory beyond the beech trees, and felt a grudging curiosity about its construction. Right from the moment of his arrival there had been a tacit, instinctive agreement that nobody outside the house should get any clue about the existence of the two Bretons -- so he could not justify going outside. But the rear garden was well shielded from the neighboring houses, and it would take him only a few seconds to reach the observatory and get inside.

  He went down into the kitchen, peered through the curtained door and went out onto the roofed patio. The lemon-tinted sunlight of an October afternoon streamed through the trees in slowly merging beams, and from the distance came the patient, regular sound of a lawn mower. Breton walked towards the observatory.

  "Ho there! Not working today?"

  Breton spun as the voice came from behind him. The speaker was a tall, fit-looking man of about forty who had just come around the side of the house. He was dressed in neat sport clothes, worn the way other men wear business suits, and his tightly-waved hair was grayed at the temples. His face was broad and sunburned, with a tiny nose which made scarcely any division between widely-spaced blue eyes.

  Breton experienced a thrill of almost superstitious dread as he recognized Lieutenant Convery -- the man who, in another time-stream, had come to tell him of Kate's death -- but he remained in perfect control of his reactions.

  "Not today," he said, smiling. "A man has to relax every now and then."

  "I didn't know you felt that way, John."

  "But I do, I do -- I don't make a habit of it, that's all." Breton noticed the other man's use of his Christian name, and tried unsuccessfully to think of Convery's. This is incredible, he thought. How can a man have such bad luck?

  Convery smiled, showing very white teeth made even more brilliant in places by slight fluoride mottling. "I'm glad to hear you don't work all the time, John -- it makes me feel less of a slob."

  John again, Breton thought. I can't call him Lieutenant if we're on first-name terms. "Well, what brings you out this way?"

  "Nothing much -- a couple of routine calls in the area." Convery reached into his pocket. "So I brought this." He brought out a brown pebble-like object and handed it to Breton.

  "Oh, yes." Breton inspected the object, noting its segmented, spiral construction. "Oh, yes?"

  "Yeah. My boy got it from another kid at school. I told him I'd get you to . . ." He let his voice trail away, and stood waiting.

  Breton stared down at the coiled stone, mind racing desperately. He remembered Kate saying that Convery sometimes called to drink coffee with John and talk about fossils. Presumably this was because John had some professional knowledge of geology. Did it include fossils? He tried to send his mind back more than nine years to the time when he too had been interested in the rock-embalmed time travelers.

  "This is a reasonably fair ammonite," he said, praying that Convery merely wanted a simple identification.

  Convery nodded. "Age?"

  "About two hundred and fifty million years -- hard to say for sure without knowing where it was found."

  "Thanks." Convery took the fossil back and dropped it in his pocket. His intelligent blue eyes flickered momentarily and Breton suddenly knew that his relationship with the other Breton was a complex and uneasy thing. "Say, John?"

  "Uh-huh?" Why, Breton wondered, did he insist on using the first name so much?

  "You're losing some weight, aren't you?"

  "It's nice of you to notice it. A fellow can get discouraged if he goes on dieting for weeks without any obvious result."

  "I'd say you've lost seven or eight pounds."

  "That's about right -- and I really feel better for it."

  "I think you looked better the way you were, John," Convery said thoughtfully. "You look tired."

  "I am tired -- that's why I took the afternoon off." Breton laughed, and Convery joined in.

  Breton remembered the coffee. "Do you feel like risking a cup of coffee brewed with my own hand? Kate's out shopping."

  "Where's Mrs. Fitz?"

  Breton's mind went numb, then be recalled that Mrs. Fitz was the cook-housekeeper. "We gave her a few days off," he said easily. "She has to rest too, you know."

  "I guess I'll just have to risk your coffee then, John."

  Convery pushed open the kitchen door and ushered Breton inside. While Breton was preparing the coffee he considered the problem of the fact that they were supposed to know each other's preferences about cream and sugar, and circumvented it by setting both on the kitchen table in advance. He found the familiar domestic activity relaxing, realizing he had been needlessly alarmed over Convery's visit. Kate had said the policeman sometimes dropped by to talk about fossils and drink coffee -- and that was exactly what was happening. Even if Kate were to return right then there would be nothing to arouse Convery's curiosity, and John Breton was not expected for at least three hours.

  Breton took his coffee black and so hot that flat gray films of vapor crazed its surface. Convery took cream but no sugar, and sipped it with evident appreciation. While he drank he raised the subject of the meteor bombardments which were turning the night skies into firework displays. Pleased at finding the conversation turning to something which placed him on an equal footing with any other inhabitant of the Time B universe, Breton discussed the meteors willingly.

  "Back to work," Convery said when he had finished his second cup. "Us minions of the law aren't supposed to laze around like this." He stood up and carried his cup and saucer over to the sink unit.

  "That's life," Breton said uninspiredly.

  He said goodbye to Convery in the patio and went back into the house, filled with a heady sense of satisfaction. There was now nothing to stop him going ahead with his plan to step into John Breton's shoes. The one point about which he had been uncertain was his ability to meet people who knew John and be with them for extended periods without arousing suspicious or, at least, curiosity. But he had carried off the encounter with Lieutenant Convery well, extremely well, and could see that there was nothing to be gained by delaying things any further -- especially since Kate's emotional reactions were showing signs of becoming complicated.

  Jack Breton went upstairs to the guest bedroom, took the pistol from its hiding place deep in a closet, and laid the cool, oily metal against his lips.

  IX

  When Lieutenant Blaize Convery was a boy of four, his mother once told him that deaf-and-dumb people usually learned "to talk with their hands."

  He decided then and there that this would be a useful and fascinating accomplishment, even for a person who had all his faculties. For the next three years the infant Convery devoted some time every day to learning the secret, sitting alone in his room, staring at his right hand while putting it through every conceivable contortion, hoping to discover the magical combination of flexures and tensions which would cause a voice to issue from his palm. When he finally found out, through another chance remark, that his mother had been referring to sign language he abandoned his quest immediately and without regre
ts. He had learned the truth, and was satisfied.

  When Lieutenant Blaize Convery was a boy of seven, his father had shown him a diagram consisting of a square, nested inside a circle, with straight lines connecting the corners laterally. It was possible, his father had said, to reproduce that diagram without lifting his pencil or going over any line twice. Convery worked on the puzzle at odd moments for six years.

  After the first month he was virtually certain it was impossible -- but his father, who had died in the meantime, had claimed he had seen it done -- so he kept on gnawing at the problem. Then he had chanced on a magazine biography of the eighteenth century Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler, founder of topography. The article mentioned Euler's solution of the problem of the seven bridges of Konigsberg, proving it was possible to cross all of them without crossing any twice. It also mentioned, incidentally, that the same proof provided a way to check on the solvability of diagram puzzles -- count the number of lines entering each node of the diagram, and if more than two of them have an odd number, you cannot draw it without going over a line or lifting your pencil.

  Again, he had closed a mental file, satisfied at having reached a firm conclusion one way or the other, and the pattern of thinking that was to make him a very special kind of policeman was already sharpening into focus.

  He had gone into the force almost automatically, but -- in spite of excellent academic qualifications -- had not made his expected progress through the ranks. A good police executive learns to live with the statistics of his profession. He accepts the fact that while some crimes are solvable, most are not, and channels his energies accordingly; optimizing gains, cutting losses.

  But Blaize Convery was known in the force as a "sticker" -- a man who was constitutionally incapable of letting go a problem once he had got his teeth into it. His seniors and fellow detectives respected his personal record of successes, but it was a standing joke in the area that the chief of the records bureau had resorted to making secret raids on Convery's desk to get back sizable sections of his filing system.

  Convery understood his own idiosyncrasies, and knew how they were affecting his career. He frequently resolved to alter his approach to the job, often managing to conform for weeks on end, but just as it was beginning to look as though he had won, his subconscious would throw up a new slant on a three-year-old investigation, and an icy, egotistical joy would start churning his stomach. This moment, Convery knew, was the crunch: his own private version of the experience which made other men great religious leaders, immortal artists, or short-lived combat heroes. He had never resisted its mystical blandishments, and had never been disappointed in the rewards, or lack of them.

  And as he drove away from the Breton house, through tree-guarded avenues, Convery could feel that arctic elation stalking the pathways of his nervous system.

  He guided his elderly but well-maintained Plymouth past green lawns, reviewing the Breton-Spiedel affair, reaching nine years into the receding past. The case was unique in his memory, not for the fact that he had failed to crack it -- there had been many failures in his career -- but because he had been so monumentally wrong. Convery had been in the station when Kate Breton was brought in, and he had got most of the story from her in those first stunned minutes while a policewoman was washing flecks of human brain tissue from her hair.

  Compressed to its essentials, her story was that she and her husband had fought on the way to a party. She bad gone on alone on foot, foolishly taking a shortcut through the park, and had been attacked. A man had appeared from nowhere, put a bullet though the attacker's head, and vanished again into the night. Kate Breton had run blindly until she was on the point of collapse.

  Working on those bare facts, Convery had reached two possible explanations. He had begun by immediately dismissing the idea that it had all happened by chance, that a mysterious stranger had just happened to be walking in the park at the right moment, carrying a high-powered rifle. This left the possibility that the marksman was someone who knew the attacker and suspected him of being a psychotic killer, who had trailed him until he had positive proof, and then carried out a summary execution. It was a theory which Convery had rejected instinctively, although he would check it out as a matter of course.

  He had found his mind drawn into a vortex centered on Kate Breton's husband. Suppose the car breakdown and the subsequent fight had been planned? Suppose Kate Breton's husband had wanted to get rid of her and had brought a gun in the trunk of his car? He could have followed her to the park, been about to shoot when the attack occurred, and on the spur of the moment fired at the attacker.

  The second theory had holes in it, but Convery was experienced at plugging holes. He had begun by asking Kate Breton if she had any idea who did the shooting. Still in a state of shock, she had shaken her head -- but Convery had seen the curve of her lower lip deepen as she subvocalized a word, a name beginning with J.

  And when he had gone to the Breton house, armed with the description provided by the teenagers who had seen the shooting . . . And when he had read the guilt in Breton's eyes, he had known that here was his killer. . . .

  The discovery that Breton could not be touched had wounded Convery in some obscure way he could hardly understand. He had spent weeks trying to shake the alibi given to Breton by the neighbors who had noticed him standing at his front window; and he had made himself unpopular with the forensic staff by insisting they could have been wrong about the rifle not being fired. Convery had even experimented with an old deer rifle -- firing it, cleaning it with various solutions and spraying it with dust. But in the end he had acknowledged that Breton, the man who had charged the very air with his guilt, could not be touched.

  For any other cop, that would have been the time to close the file and move on to something more promising -- but Convery's demon was perched firmly on his shoulder, whispering its heady promises of fulfillment. And as he drove homewards he could hear its voice suddenly grown strong again. There had been times during the past nine years when his visits to the Breton house had seemed utterly pointless, acts of monomania, but today he had smelled the fear and the guilt. . . .

  Convery swung the Plymouth onto the short concrete walk outside his own house, narrowly missing a tricycle belonging to his youngest son. He got out of the car and as he was closing the door detected a faint squeak from one of the hinges. After swinging the door several more times to satisfy himself about the location of the tiny sound, he went into the garage, brought out an oilcan and lubricated the hinges on all four doors. He put the can back in its own appointed place then went through the inner door, through the utilities room, and into the kitchen.

  "You're late, darling." His wife, Gina, was standing at a table which was covered with baking requisites. Her forearms were streaked with flour and the warm air of the kitchen was filled with the nostalgic odor of mince pies.

  "Sorry," Convery said. "I got held back." He patted his wife on the rump, absentmindedly lifted a piece of candied peel and began to nibble at it.

  "Blaize?"

  "What is it, honey?"

  "Were you over at-the Breton house again?"

  Convery stopped chewing. "What makes you ask?"

  "Tim said you'd been into his fossil collection again. He said his ammonite was missing."

  "Hey!" Convery laughed. "I thought I was the detective in this house."

  "But were you there?"

  "Well, I did stop by for a few minutes."

  "Oh, Blaize -- what must those people think?" Gina Convery's face showed her concern.

  "Why should they think anything? It was just a friendly call."

  "People are never friendly with a detective who has investigated them in a murder case. Specially people with their sort of money.

  "There's no need to get all tensed up over it, honey -- John Breton and I get along well together."

  "I can imagine," Gina said as Convery went through into the lounge. He sat down, picked up a magazine and turned the pages un
seeingly. Something very strange had happened in the Breton household nine years earlier, and today had been like a trip back through time to that focus of stress. As well as being thinner, Breton had looked older -- yet, in an indefinable way, he had seemed younger, less experienced, less sure of himself, emitting a different aura. I'm going crazy, Convery thought. Auras aren't evidence -- not unless this telepathy thing that's been in the news is really beginning to spread. He leafed through the magazine, picked up another, then threw it down in disgust.

  "Gina," he called. "What time do we eat?"

  "About five -- soon enough for you?"

  "That's fine. I've got to go out again."

  A second later Convery found himself sitting in the middle of a kind of floury explosion as his wife burst into the room and began waving her fist under his nose.

 

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