The Two Timers (6 page)
Authors: Bob Shaw
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 with 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."
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 with 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."
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