by John Wyndham
‘The Director saw you leaving, sir. He sent me to remind you that he must have your figures for the final co-ordination by five. He thought you might have forgotten it, sir.’
Which was what I had done. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was getting on for four-thirty already. That drove Jean and her friend out of my mind, and I hurried back towards the Institute.
There were only a couple of minor calculations to finish off, and I had the results in the Director’s office by four fifty-five. He looked at me rather hard.
‘I am sorry to intrude business upon your – ah – domestic arrangements, Ruddle, but it is quite necessary that all these findings should be assembled tonight,’ he said, rather coldly, I thought.
I apologized for leaving it until the last minute. He received that somewhat coldly, too, considering that I was the right side of the last minute. It was not until I was outside his room that a possible explanation occurred to me. Even I had been surprised by the extraordinary likeness of Jean’s companion to myself: it was scarcely a matter where I could make a mistake as to which was which, but others might … I recalled the arm-in-arm progress in full public view …
The best thing to do seemed to be to get home as quickly as possible, hoping to put my word in before gossip said hers …
There was only another twenty yards before I should reach my house, when I encountered Jean and her companion turning out of my own gateway, and we came face to face. Jean was looking flushed and embarrassed, and he was looking embarrassed and angry. Their expressions changed with astonishing speed as they recognized me.
‘Oh, there you are! Thank goodness,’ said Jean. ‘Where on earth have you been?’
It was not the kind of opening I was prepared for. After all, it was nearly three years since we had exchanged anything more than a necessary politeness. While I was trying to collect myself I took refuge in a touch of dignity.
‘I don’t think I quite understand,’ I said, and looked from her to her companion. ‘Perhaps you will introduce me to your friend – ?’ I suggested.
‘Oh, don’t be so stiff and silly, Peter,’ she told me impatiently.
But the man was looking at me closely. There was a rather curious expression on his face: I did not greatly wonder at it; very likely the expression on my own was no less curious. For the similarity – no, it was more than that – the duplication, was uncanny. The clothes were different, certainly. I had none like those he was wearing, but apart from that … I suddenly caught sight of his wrist-watch: it, and the metal bracelet that held it were the exact double of mine. I felt my own wrist to make sure that it hadn’t somehow got transferred. My own was still there, all right. He said:
‘I’m afraid this is a bit complicated. And we’ve both pulled a most frightful gaff in your house. Both feet, right up to the neck. I’m terribly sorry. We just didn’t know.’
‘Oh! That woman!’ said Jean, furiously. ‘Oh, I could strangle her, cheerfully.’
With a feeling of drowning slowly, I gasped.
‘What woman?’ I inquired.
‘The one in your house. That dreadful Tenter woman.’
I stared at them.
‘Look here!’ I said. ‘This is going a bit far. My wife is –’
‘She is? She said she was, but I couldn’t believe it. Oh, Peter, not really! You couldn’t marry her! Oh, you couldn’t!’
I looked at her hard – clearly there was something much more than ordinarily wrong somewhere. I don’t say that half the people you meet may not be thinking like that about other people’s wives; but it is a thing that doesn’t get said, not in the second person, at any rate. One can only meet it with anger – or compassion.
‘I’m afraid you aren’t well,’ I suggested. ‘Suppose you come indoors and lie down for a little while I ring up for a taxi. I’m sure …’
Jean stared at me.
‘Ha! Ha!’ she said, in a decisively mirthless way.
‘I’m sorry to say that is just where we put the feet in,’ her companion explained. ‘You see, we very much wanted to get hold of you, and there was nobody at home, so we thought we’d just sit and wait there until you came in. But then it wasn’t you who came in, it was Miss Tenter. We hadn’t expected her at all, and then she wouldn’t believe that I wasn’t you, and she behaved atrociously – I’m sorry to say it, but it was atrociously – to Jean, and – oh, well, it all became very unpleasant and difficult …’ He kind of ebbed away, in confusion.
There certainly was something up the pole about this.
‘Why on earth do you say “Miss Tenter”?’ I said. ‘Jean, at any rate, knows perfectly well that she’s been Mrs Peter Ruddle for more than two years now.’
‘Oh dear!’ said Jean. ‘It is so confusing. But I never, never could have imagined that you’d marry her.’
It wasn’t easy to keep tolerantly in mind that she must be a bit off her rocker. Her manner was as normal as could be.
‘Indeed!’ I said coldly. ‘And who, may I ask, did you think I would marry?’
‘Why, me, of course,’ said Jean.
‘Look here –’ began her companion, in a rather desperate way, but I cut him off.
‘You pretty firmly shut the door on any chance of that when you took up with Freddie Tallboy,’ I reminded her – and not without a touch of bitterness: the skin on the old wound was still a little more sensitive than I had thought.
‘Freddie Tallboy?’ she repeated. ‘Who’s he?’
That was too much for my patience.
‘Mrs Tallboy,’ I said, ‘I don’t pretend to understand the reason for this fooling – but I’ve had enough of it.’
‘But I’m not Mrs Tallboy,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Peter Ruddle.’
‘I suppose you find that amusing,’ I told her, bitterly, ‘but to me it isn’t very funny,’ I added. And it was not: there had been a time when what I hoped for above all else was to hear Jean call herself Mrs Peter Ruddle. I looked at her steadily.
‘Jean,’ I said. ‘This is not your kind of joke – it’s a cruel kind.’
She looked as steadily back at me for some seconds. Then I saw her eyes change; they glistened a little.
‘Oh!’ she said, as if she had seen something there. ‘Oh, this is dreadful! … Oh, dear! … I – Oh, Peter, help me,’ she said – but the appeal was to the other man, not to me. I turned to him, too.
‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what’s going on, but –’
‘Oh,’ he said, as if suddenly enlightened. ‘No, of course you don’t. I’m Peter Ruddle.’
There was a longish pause. I decided I had had enough of being made to look a fool, and started to turn away. He said:
‘Isn’t there somewhere we can go and talk? You see, we’re both of us Peter Ruddle, that’s what’s making it all so difficult.’
‘I look on “difficult” as an understatement,’ I said, coldly, and started to walk off.
‘But you don’t see,’ said his voice behind me. ‘It’s old Whetstone’s machine, man. It works!’
My own house was evidently barred to us, and the only nearby place that I could think of at the moment was the upstairs room of the Jubilee Café. Most of the people who worked at the Institute would be knocking off about now, and still trickling out for an hour to come. I had no desire to confirm the impression of my private affairs that had already reached the Director, so I went ahead to the café, found there was no one in the upstairs room, and beckoned through the window to them. The girl who brought us tea was not a bright type. If she noticed our likeness at all, it made no perceptible impression on her. When she had left, Jean poured out, and we started to get down to things.
‘You’ll remember,’ said my double, leaning forward earnestly, ‘you’ll remember old Whetstone’s concept of time? He used to give that rough analogy about the sea freezing. The present was represented by the leading edge of the ice, gradually building up and advancing. Behind it was the solid ice that rep
resented the past: in front, the still fluid water represented the future. You could tell that a given number of the moving molecules which represented the future would become frozen in a given space of time, but you couldn’t predict which, nor in what relationship they would be to one another.
‘About the solid stuff behind, the past, he thought you could probably do nothing; but he reckoned that somehow or other you ought to be able to find a way of pushing out a little ahead of the main freezing line, which is the present. If you could do that, you would be creating little advanced bridgeheads of frozen – that is to say, factualized – matter. This must, in due course, be overtaken by, and thus become part of, the advancing present. In other words, by going a little ahead you would create a bit of a future which would have to come true. You couldn’t choose which molecules you would bind together, but those that you found would be solidified by your finding them, and therefore become inevitable.’
‘Yes, I remember that well,’ I told him. ‘It was cock-eyed.’
‘Certainly it was cock-eyed,’ he agreed promptly. ‘Everyone who ever tried to give him a hand came to that conclusion sooner or later, and cleared out. But he wouldn’t see it. Obstinate as a mule over that, he was.’ He glanced at Jean.
‘It’s all right. I know,’ she said, sadly. He went on:
‘He would keep on trying to make that machine of his support his theory – which, of course, it couldn’t possibly do with a theory that was all up the pole. And because of that he wouldn’t follow up the leads that the thing did give. Nothing would loosen him up on that theory, with the result that he overworked and worried himself by trying to pin down the impossible.
‘And so he died – sooner than he need have done – and his stuff just stayed there, with no one quite liking to disturb it.
‘Now, shortly after Jean and I got married –’
I felt the fog beginning to come down on me again.
‘But Jean didn’t marry you. She married Freddie,’ I objected.
‘Wait a minute. I’m just coming to that. As I said, not long after we were married I had an idea, quite a different idea about this time business. Jean agreed that I should use her father’s apparatus – as much of it as could be useful – to see if I could work the idea out, if possible. To some extent I have succeeded, and this is the result.’ He paused.
‘I’m in just about as thick a fog as I was before,’ I told him.
‘Well, here’s the basis – mind you, I don’t claim that it may not be misconceived in some ways, but the empirical result is that I’m talking to you now.
‘Now, time is something similar to a quantum-radiation. The atoms of time are not dissimilar from radio-active atoms – that is to say, they are in a continual state of disintegration, or fission, and they throw off quanta. There must, presumably, be a half-life, but, so far, I’ve not been able to determine it. Obviously it has to be something very, very much smaller than a second, so let’s just call it an “instant” for illustration.
‘So every “instant” an atom of time splits. The two halves then continue upon different paths and encounter different influences as they diverge – but they don’t diverge as constant units; each of them is splitting every instant, too. The pattern of it is the radiating ribs of a fan; and along each of the ribs, more fans; and along the ribs of those, still more fans; and so, ad infinitum.
‘So, here we have Peter Ruddle. An instant later, that atom of time in which he exists is split, and so there are two Peter Ruddles, slightly diverging. Both those time-atoms split, and there are four Peter Ruddles. A third instant, and there are eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two. Very shortly there are thousands of Peter Ruddles. And because the diversion must actually occur many, many times in a second, there is an infinite number of Peter Ruddles, all originally similar, but all different by force of circumstances, and all inhabiting different worlds – imperceptibly different, or widely different; that depends chiefly on the distance from the original point of fission. And, of course, there is also an infinite number of worlds in which Peter Ruddle never managed to get born at all …’
He paused a little to let me stop whizzing, and get the hang of it. When I thought I had, several points for argument immediately presented themselves. I shelved them for the moment, however, and let him continue:
‘Well, then, the problem ceased to be that of travelling in time, as old Whetstone had supposed it to be. You obviously can’t put split atoms together again to reconstruct a past: nor can you observe the result of fission among atoms that have not yet split – at least, I think not, though it would appear that multiple futures must be latent in the present.
‘So the place of that problem was taken by another – was it possible to move from one’s own branch of descent to one of the, so to speak, cognate branches? Well, I went into that – and here we are to show that, within certain limits, one can …’
He paused again for me to take it in.
‘Yes,’ I admitted, at length. ‘I see it in plan, all right. But what I’m finding it really hard to feel is that we – you and I – are both equally – er – valid. I have to accept the theory, at least in the rough, since you are here, but I still feel that I am the real Peter Ruddle, and that you must be the Peter Ruddle I might have been. I suppose that’s a natural subjective view.’
Jean looked up and joined in for the first time.
‘That’s not how I see it, at all. We are the real Peter and Jean. You are what might have happened to Peter …’ She sat looking at me for a long moment, then: ‘Oh, my dear! Why, oh why, did you do it? And you aren’t happy with her, either. I can see that.’
‘This –’ began the other Peter. Then he broke off as the door opened. Somebody looked in. A woman’s voice said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ and the door shut again. It was hidden from me where I sat. I looked inquiringly at Jean.
‘Mrs Terry,’ she told me.
The other Peter started again: ‘Obviously we’re all equally real: it’s just that you and I normally exist on, well, different ribs of the fan.’ He went on expanding that a bit, then he said: ‘Although I’ve done it, I’ve only a very crude notion of how I’ve done it. So I had this idea: you know how one’s mind tends to work in a groove – well, it occurred to me that if I could start one of my “doubles” working on this thing, too, it might lead to a better understanding of it. Obviously our minds must be like enough to be interested in the same kinds of things, but since part of our experience has been different they aren’t likely to run in exactly the same grooves of thought – that’s obvious, really, because if our lines of thought were exactly similar you would have made the same discoveries as I have, and you’d have made them at the same time.’
Certainly his tracks of thought were very similar. I have never had a swifter, clearer understanding of what another person was attempting to convey. It was due to more than the mere words. I asked:
‘When do you reckon, in our case, that this fission took place?’
‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he told me. He held out his left hand. ‘It must have been less than five years ago. We’ve both got the same watch, you see.’
I thought. ‘Well, it must be more than three years ago, because that’s when Freddie Tallboy first showed up here; and, judging by Jean’s question, he doesn’t seem to have shown up at all on your level.’
‘Never heard of him,’ he agreed, shaking his head.
‘You’re lucky,’ I told him, with a glance at Jean.
We thought again.
‘It must have been before your father died, too, because Tallboy was here by then,’ I said to Jean.
But my double shook his head. ‘The old man’s death isn’t a constant. It could have occurred earlier or later in different streams.’
That point had not occurred to me. I tried again:
‘There was a row,’ I said, looking at Jean.
‘A row?’ inquired Jean.
‘You can’t have forgotten that,�
�� I said, incredulously. ‘That was the night that finished things between us. After I said I wasn’t going to help your father any more.’
Her eyes opened widely.
‘Finished things!’ she repeated. ‘That was the night we got engaged.’
‘Of course it was, darling,’ my double supported her.
I shook my head. ‘It was the night I went and got dead drunk because the world didn’t have any bottom any more,’ I said.
‘Now we’re getting warm,’ observed the other Peter, leaning forward, with the light of the chase in his eye.
I did not share his enthusiasm. I was remembering one of the more painful occasions in my life.
‘I told you I’d had enough of helping your father because he would cling pig-headedly to a demonstrably absurd theory,’ I reminded her.
‘And I said you must at least pretend to believe in it because he was getting to be an old man, and another disappointment might do him harm, and the doctor was worried about him anyway.’
I shook my head, decisively.
‘I remember exactly what you said, Jean. You said: “So you’re just as callous as the rest of them; you’re just going to walk out on a poor old man and leave him in the lurch.” Those were your exact words.’ They were both staring at me. ‘We went right on from there,’ I recalled, ‘until I said obstinacy seemed to run in your family, and you said that you were glad to have discovered in time the sort of selfishness and callousness there was in mine.’
‘Oh, no, Peter, never –’ Jean began.
My double broke in excitedly:
‘That must have been it – that was the moment! I never said anything about obstinacy in Jean’s family. I said I’d give it another trial and do my best to be patient with him.’
We sat silent for a bit. Then Jean said, in a shaky voice:
‘Just that! And so you went and married her instead of me!’ There were almost tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, how dreadful! Oh, Peter, my dear!’
