by John Wyndham
‘You were engaged to Tallboy before I proposed to her,’ I said. ‘At least, I suppose I mean not you, of course. The other Jean.’
She stretched out her left hand and took her husband’s.
‘Oh, dear!’ she said again, in a half-frightened voice. ‘Oh, think of that poor, poor other me …’ She paused a moment. ‘Perhaps we oughtn’t to have come at all. It was all right to begin with,’ she added. ‘And, you see, we thought that if we went to our house – your house, on this level, I mean – we thought we’d find you and the other me there, and that’d be all right. I ought to have known sooner. The moment I saw those curtains she’s put in the windows I had a feeling something was wrong. I’m sure I wouldn’t have chosen them – and I don’t think the other me would, either. And the furniture – that wasn’t a bit like me. And then that woman … ! And this has all happened wrong, just because … Oh, this is dreadful, Peter, dreadful … !’
She pulled a handkerchief out of her bag, dabbed at her eyes, and blew her nose; then she leaned earnestly towards me again, her eyes still swimming a little.
‘You can’t, Peter … It wasn’t meant to be this way … It’s all wrong … That other me, the other Jean – where is she?’
‘She’s still here,’ I told her. ‘She lives a little outside, along the Reading road.’
‘You must go to her, Peter.’
‘Now, look here –’ I began, with some bitterness.
‘But she loves you, Peter, and she needs you. She’s me, and I know how she must feel … Don’t you see that I know?’
I looked back at her, and shook my head.
‘What you don’t seem to know,’ I told her, ‘is how it feels to have the knife turned. She is married to someone else, I am married to someone else, and there’s an end to it.’
‘Oh, no – no!’ she said. Her hand sought her husband’s again. ‘No. You can’t do that to her, or to yourself. It’s –’ She broke off and turned in distress to the other Peter. ‘Oh, darling, if only we could make him understand somehow what it means. He doesn’t – he can’t understand, how should he?’
The other Peter’s eyes rested on mine.
‘I think he does – well enough,’ he said.
I got up.
‘I hope you’ll excuse me now,’ I said to them. ‘I’ve had about as much of this as I can stand.’
Jean got up quickly, too. Contritely she said:
‘I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t want to hurt you. I only want you to be happy – you, and the other me. I … I …’ she choked a little. The other Peter put in quickly:
‘Look, if you can spare half an hour or so, do come over to old Whetstone’s room. It’ll be much easier there to give you a rough idea of the adaptations his stuff needs. That’s what I really came for, after all.’
‘What did you come for?’ I asked Jean.
She had her back towards me now, and did not turn.
‘Curiosity,’ she said, in an unsteady voice.
I hesitated, but he was right about the similarity of our minds – what had caught his interest caught mine, too.
‘All right,’ I agreed, more than half reluctantly.
The street was almost empty when we came out into the dusk, and turned towards the Institute. The grounds beyond the gates were quite deserted: the building itself showed a few lighted windows where there were some people still at work. We walked along, with Jean silent, and Peter talking about time quantum-radiation, and explaining how the scope appeared to have quite natural limits at present – how it was possible, for instance, to move on to another rib of the fan only if there happened to be the space for you to do so.
One could, for instance, move only to a line of existence where old Whetstone’s room was arranged in such a way that there was a clear area ready to receive what he called the transfer-chamber. If there were something else occupying that space it would be destroyed, so there must always be a preliminary practical test to ensure that it would return intact. That established quite a narrow limit: go too far round the fan, so to speak, and you would hit a time-sequence in which the room did not exist at all because the Institute had never been built. The consequences to a transfer-chamber trying to occupy an already occupied space, or making its début in the new time-sequence in mid air, would be quite disastrous.
When we reached the room everything looked as usual except for the transfer-chamber itself, standing in the middle of the sheeted apparatus. It looked rather like a sentry-box with a door added.
We cleared the covers off some of the rest of the stuff, and the other Peter started explaining to me what he had done in the way of altering circuits and introducing new stages. Jean dusted off a chair and sat on it, smoking a cigarette patiently. We should have got along more quickly had we been able to refer to the old man’s notes and diagrams, but unfortunately the steel filing-cabinet which held them was locked. Nevertheless, he was able to give me the general theory and a fair working idea of how to set about making the necessary changes.
After a time Jean looked pointedly at her watch, and got up.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but we really must get back. I told the girl we’d not be later than seven – and it’s half past already.’
‘What girl?’ inquired my double, absently.
‘That baby-sitter girl, of course,’ she told him.
Somehow that brought me up more sharply than anything yet.
‘You – you’ve got a baby?’ I asked, stupidly.
Jean looked at me. ‘Yes,’ she said, gently. ‘And she’s a lovely little baby, isn’t she, Peter?’
‘Definitely quite the best baby known to us,’ agreed Peter.
I stood there, blankly.
‘Oh, don’t look like that, my dear,’ Jean said.
She came closer. She put her right hand on the left side of my face, and pressed my other cheek against hers.
‘Go to her, Peter. Go to her. She wants you,’ she whispered close to my ear.
The other Peter opened the door of the transfer-chamber, and they got in. It was a close fit for two. Then he got out again, and indicated a piece of the floor.
‘When you’ve got it working, come and find us,’ he said. ‘We’ll keep that area clear for you.’
‘Bring her with you,’ said Jean.
Then he got back, and pulled the door to. The last thing I saw as it closed was Jean’s face, with tears in her eyes …
While I was still looking at it the transfer-chamber vanished: it did not fade, or dim, it went in a split second. It might never have been, but for four flattened cigarette-ends by the chair where Jean had sat …
I was in no mood to go home. I hung about the room, going over the apparatus and memorizing what the other Peter had told me, trying to lose myself in the technicalities of it. The attention with which I went over the principles was rather grimly forced; I felt I should have had more of a chance to become absorbed if I had been able to get hold of the locked-up notes and diagrams.
After an hour or so I gave it up. I walked back home from the Institute, but I arrived with something more than a disinclination to go into the house. Instead, I got out the car. And then, somehow, I was driving out along the Reading road …
Jean looked startled when she answered the doorbell.
‘Oh!’ she said, and went a little pale, and then a little flushed. In a carefully calm voice she said: ‘Freddie is working over in Number Four Lab.’
‘I don’t want Freddie,’ I told her. ‘I wanted to talk to you – about your father’s stuff in the room over there.’
She hesitated, and then opened the door wider.
‘All right,’ she said, in a non-committal voice. ‘You’d better come inside.’
It was the first time I had set foot in her house. I followed her to a large, comfortable sitting-room which looked out on the back-garden. The interview began with as much awkwardness as anything I’ve known. All the time I had to keep on reminding myself that she was a
nother Jean from the one of the afternoon. This Jean was a person I had not spoken to for over three years except when some Institute function forced us to recognize one another’s existence. The more I looked at her, the more incredibly crass that barrier became.
I stumbled along, explaining that I had a new theory I would like to work on. I said that her father, in spite of his lack of success, had done a lot of groundwork which should not be wasted, and which I was sure he would not want wasted …
Jean listened as though she were extremely interested in the pattern of the rug before the fire. After a while, however, she looked up and met my eyes. I lost the thread of what I had been saying, and floundered about after it. I grasped wildly at a few phrases and laboured on with a curious feeling that I was talking a language I did not know. After a long time I reached the end, not knowing whether I had been coherent at all.
She went on looking at me for a moment, but not quite so distantly as before, then she said:
‘Yes, I think so, Peter. I know you fell out with him, like all the others, but the apparatus will have to be used by someone sooner or later, or dismantled – and I think he’d sooner it was you than any of the rest. You’d probably like me to give a written consent?’
‘It might be as well,’ I agreed. ‘Some of the stuff there cost a lot of money.’
She nodded, and crossed to a small bureau. Presently she came back holding a piece of paper.
‘Jean –’ I began.
She stood, holding the paper out towards me.
‘What, Peter … ?’
‘Jean –’ I began once more. But then the wretched impossibility of the whole situation came home to me again.
She was watching me. I pulled myself together.
‘It’s – it’s just that I can’t get at his notes. They’re locked up,’ I said, in a rush.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, yes,’ as if she were somewhere a long way off. Then, in a different voice, she added:
‘Would you know the key if you saw it? There’s a box of his keys upstairs.’
I was pretty sure I should. I’d seen it often enough when I had been working with old Whetstone.
We went upstairs. One of the rooms was unfurnished, a lumber-room, with a lot of old junk and half a dozen trunks in it. The box of keys were in the second trunk she tried. There were two of them that might fit, so I pocketed both, and we went downstairs again.
We were half-way down the stairs when the front door opened, and her husband came in …
Well, there it is …
Twenty or thirty people, including the Director, saw us crossing the Institute grounds arm in arm. My wife discovered me entertaining my ex-fiancée in my own house, during her absence. Mrs Terry intruded upon us in the upstairs room of the Jubilee Café. Other people saw us in other places – and nearly everybody, it turns out, has had long-standing suspicions. Finally, her husband surprised his wife descending from the bedroom storey of his house with her ex-fiancé …
So …
And the nature of any evidence that I could produce to the contrary would, I think, sound somewhat unconvincing in court.
Besides, and rather importantly, we have both decided that nothing could be further from our wishes than to defend …
Pillar to Post
Forcett Mental Clinic,
Delano, Conn.
28 Feb.
To
Messrs Thompson, Handett & Thompson
Attorneys-at-Law
512 Gable Street
Philadelphia, Pa.
Gentlemen,
In response to your request we have conducted a thorough examination of our patient, Stephen Dallboy, and have taken steps which establish his identity beyond legal question. Attested documents in support of this are enclosed, and dispose entirely of his claim to the Terence Molton property.
At the same time we admit ourselves surprised. The condition of the patient has altered quite radically since our last examination when he was indubitably feeble-minded. Indeed, but for this obsession that he is Terence Molton, which he maintains with complete consistency, we should now classify him as normal. In view of the obsession and the remarkable assertions with which he supports it we feel that he should remain here under observation for a time which may give us the opportunity of dispelling the whole fantasy system – and at the same time of clearing up several points which we find puzzling.
In order that you may more clearly understand the situation we are enclosing a copy of a statement written by the patient which we beg you to study before reading our concluding remarks.
STATEMENT – by Terence Molton
I know this is difficult to believe. In fact, when the thing first happened I didn’t believe it myself. I reckoned it was just a stage, maybe, in the deteriorating process. I’ve had dope enough long enough to play hell with my nervous system – yet the funny thing was how real it seemed right away. Still, I thought that’s likely the way of it; I reckon everything would seem real to De Quincey when he was under, and to Coleridge, too.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw …
Vision is a poor word – all quality and no quantity. How strong was that vision? Could he put out his hand and touch that damsel? He heard her sing, but did she speak to him? And did he find himself a new man, free from pain? I guess even honeydew and the milk of Paradise are relative. There’ll be fellows who are yearning for a kind of celestial Hollywood, but, for me, just having no pain and being complete was paradise right then.
It was just over four years since that cannonshell had got me – four years, nine operations, and more to come, for, with all their carving, they’d not stopped the trouble yet. And what good was that to me? Interesting for the doctors, no doubt, but it had brought me to being just a hulk in a chair, with only the one half of one leg under the rug. And they said: ‘Go easy on the dope!’ I should laugh. If they’d given me anything else to keep the pain away, maybe I would. But if they’d stopped letting me have the dope then I’d have killed myself. They knew that.
I don’t blame Sally for calling it off. Some of them thought I felt sore about that, but I didn’t – not after the first. The sample I’d offered her was a healthy young man – what was delivered from hospital was pretty different from the sample. Poor Sally. It nearly broke her up. I reckon she’d have tried it out of mistaken loyalty if I’d pressed her. But I was thanking God I hadn’t – at least I hadn’t that on my conscience. They tell me her husband’s a good guy, and the baby’s cute. That’s the way it should be.
All the same, when every woman you see is kind to you – in much the same way as she would be to a sick dog … Oh, well, there was always the dope.
And then, when I wasn’t expecting anything at all except rotting slowly, there was this … this … vision.
I’d had a bad day. My right leg was hurting a lot, and my left foot. But as most of the right leg was taken off and thrown to the sharks four years ago, and the left foot had to go, too, a little later, there wasn’t a lot to be done about it. I’d been keeping the dope down because I still sometimes got an idea that I’d be acquiring virtue by holding off when I wanted it – I wasn’t, of course; I was acquiring nothing but bad temper, and radiating it, too, but you get brought up with these ideas, and they keep on cropping up again. Ten o’clock was to be my limit, I’d decided, and I kept to it. For the last quarter hour I watched the big hand snailing, then I watched the second-hand crawling, then I reached for the bottle.
Maybe I took a little more than usual, but the moment I had taken it I was telling myself what a damn fool I had been to wait. I’d gained nothing. It was just a variation of those limit-setting games kids invent for themselves. For all the difference it made to anyone else I might as well be doped up to the eyes all the time. Wonderful, it was. Blissful. I lay back, feeling as if I’d never rested like that before. The pain faded out, and all feeling with it. I seemed to float smoothly and gently up and away. I was disembo
died, boundless, and filled with a surging lightness. The day must have made me pretty tired, I guess, because I could feel myself falling asleep before I’d properly got round to enjoying it …
When I opened my eyes, there, in front of me, was the vision of the damsel. She hadn’t a dulcimer, and she certainly did not look Abyssinian, but she was singing, very quietly. It was an odd song, and for all I knew it might have been about Mount Abora, for I couldn’t understand a word of it.
We were in a room – well, yes, it was a room, though it was rather like being inside a bubble. It was all cool green, with a pearly iridescence, and the walls curving up so that you couldn’t tell where they became ceiling. There were two arched openings in the sides. Through them were tree tops, and a patch of blue sky. Close to one of them the girl was fiddling with something I couldn’t see. She glanced towards me, and saw that my eyes were open. She turned, and said something that sounded like a question, but it meant absolutely nothing to me. I just looked back at her. She was worth looking at. A tall, beautifully proportioned figure, with brown hair caught back by a ribbon. The material of her dress was diaphanous, yet there was a vast amount of it, arranged in multitudes of cunning folds. It made me think of the pre-Raphaelites’ versions of the classical, and it must have been cobweb-light, for as she moved it swirled and hesitated in mid air. The result was rather like that frozen-high-wind effect so popular in later Greek sculpture.
When I did not reply, she frowned a little and repeated her question – or so it seemed. I did not pay a lot of attention to the words. As a matter of fact I was thinking: ‘Well, that’s that. I’ve had it’, and deciding that I was now in some kind of ante-room to heaven, or – well, anyway, an ante-room. I wasn’t scared; not even greatly surprised. I remember feeling, ‘Good, that’s a nasty experience finished with’, and wondering a little that the prelude to eternity should so favour certain Victorian schools of painting.
When I still did not answer, her dark eyes widened a little. There was a look of wonder in them, perhaps a slight tinge of alarm, as she came towards me. Slowly she said:
