The Other Now
Page 2
ashes. There were cigaret butts in the tray.
He quivered a little. He smoked again, carefully not looking at thedesk. It was not until he knocked out the second pipeful of ashes thathe let himself look where Jane's diary had been.
It was there again. The book was open. There was a ruler laid across itto keep it open.
Jimmy wasn't frightened, and he wasn't hopeful. There was absolutely noreason why this should happen to him. He was simply desperate and grimwhen he went across the room. He saw yesterday's entry, and his ownhysterical message. And there was more writing beyond that.
In Jane's hand.
"_Darling, maybe I'm going crazy. But I think you wrote me as if youwere alive. Maybe I'm crazy to answer you. But please, darling, if youare alive somewhere and somehow--_"
There was a tear-blot here. The rest was frightened, and tender, and asdesperate as Jimmy's own sensations.
He wrote, with trembling fingers, before he put the camera intoposition and pressed the shutter-control for the second time.
When his eyes recovered from the flash, there was nothing on the desk.
He did not sleep at all that night, nor did he work the next day. Hewent to a photographer with the film and paid an extravagant fee tohave the film developed and enlarged at once. He got back two prints,quite distinct. Even very clear, considering everything. One lookedlike a trick shot, showing a door twice, once open and once closed, inthe same photograph. The other was a picture of an open book and hecould read every word on its pages. It was inconceivable that such apicture should have come out.
He walked around practically at random for a couple of hours, lookingat the pictures from time to time. Pictures or no pictures, the thingwas nonsense. The facts were preposterous. It must be that he onlyimagined seeing these prints. But there was a quick way to find out.
He went to Haynes. Haynes was his friend and reluctantly alawyer--reluctantly because law practice interfered with a large numberof unlikely hobbies.
"Haynes," said Jimmy quietly, "I want you to look at a couple ofpictures and see if you see what I do. I may have gone out of my head."
* * * * *
He passed over the picture of the door. It looked to Jimmy like twodoors, nearly at right angles, in the same door-frame and hung from thesame hinges.
Haynes looked at it and said tolerantly, "Didn't know you went in fortrick photography." He picked up a reading glass and examined it indetail. "A futile but highly competent job. You covered half the filmand exposed with the door closed, and then exposed for the other halfof the film with the door open. A neat job of matching, though. You'vea good tripod."
"I held the camera in my hand," said Jimmy, with restraint.
"You couldn't do it that way, Jimmy," objected Haynes. "Don't try tokid me."
"I'm trying not to fool myself," said Jimmy. He was very pale. Hehanded over the other enlargement. "What do you see in this?"
Haynes looked. Then he jumped. He read through what was so plainlyphotographed on the pages of a diary that hadn't been before thecamera. Then he looked at Jimmy in palpable uneasiness.
"Got any explanation?" asked Jimmy. He swallowed. "I--haven't any."
He told what had happened to date, baldly and without any attempt tomake it reasonable. Haynes gaped at him. But before long the lawyer'seyes grew shrewd and compassionate. As noted hitherto, he had a numberof unlikely hobbies, among which was a loud insistence on a belief in afourth dimension and other esoteric ideas, because it was good fun totalk authoritatively about them. But he had common sense, had Haynes,and a good and varied law practice.
Presently he said gently, "If you want it straight, Jimmy ... I hada client once. She accused a chap of beating her up. It was verypathetic. She was absolutely sincere. She really believed it. But herown family admitted that she'd made the marks on herself--and thedoctors agreed that she'd unconsciously blotted it out of her mindafterward."
"You suggest," said Jimmy composedly, "that I might have forged allthat to comfort myself with, as soon as I could forget the forging.I don't think that's the case, Haynes. What possibilities does thatleave?"
Haynes hesitated a long time. He looked at the pictures again,scrutinizing especially the one that looked like a trick shot.
"This is an amazingly good job of matching," he said wrily. "I can'tpick the place where the two exposures join. Some people might manageto swallow this, and the theoretic explanation is a lot better. Theonly trouble is that it couldn't happen."
Jimmy waited.
* * * * *
Haynes went on awkwardly, "The accident in which Jane was killed. Youwere in your car. You came up behind a truck carrying structural steel.There was a long slim girder sticking way out behind, with a red rag onit. The truck had airbrakes. The driver jammed them on just after he'dpassed over a bit of wet pavement. The truck stopped. Your car slid,even with the brakes locked.--It's nonsense, Jimmy!"
"I'd rather you continued," said Jimmy, white.
"You--ran into the truck, your car swinging a little as it slid. Thegirder came through the windshield. It could have hit you. It couldhave missed both of you. By pure chance, it happened to hit Jane."
"And killed her," said Jimmy very quietly. "Yes. But it might have beenme. That diary entry is written as if it had been me. Did you notice?"
There was a long pause in Haynes' office. The world outside the windowswas highly prosaic and commonplace and normal. Haynes wriggled in hischair.
"I think," he said unhappily, "you did the same as my girlclient--forged that writing and then forgot it. Have you seen a doctoryet?"
"I will," said Jimmy. "Systematize my lunacy for me first, Haynes. Ifit can be done."
"It's not accepted science," said Haynes. "In fact, it's consideredeyewash. But there have been speculations...." He grimaced. "Firstpoint is that it was pure chance that Jane was hit. It was just aslikely to be you instead, or neither of you. If it had been you--"
"Jane," said Jimmy, "would be living in our house alone, and she mightvery well have written that entry in the diary."
"Yes," agreed Haynes uncomfortably. "I shouldn't suggest this,but--there are a lot of possible futures. We don't know which onewill come about for us. Nobody except fatalists can argue with thatstatement. When today was in the future, there were a lot of possibletodays. The present moment--now--is only one of any number of nowsthat might have been. So it's been suggested--mind you, this isn'taccepted science, but pure charlatanry--it's been suggested that theremay be more than one actual now. Before the girder actually hit, therewere three nows in the possible future. One in which neither of you washit, one in which you were hit, and one--"
He paused, embarrassed. "So some people would say, how do we know thatthe one in which Jane was hit is the only now? They'd say that theothers could have happened and that maybe they did."
* * * * *
Jimmy nodded.
"If that were true," he said detachedly, "Jane would be in a presentmoment, a now, where it was me who was killed. As I'm in a now whereshe was killed. Is that it?"
Haynes shrugged.
Jimmy thought, and said gravely, "Thanks. Queer, isn't it?"
He picked up the two pictures and went out.
Haynes was the only one who knew about the affair, and he worried. Butit is not easy to denounce someone as insane, when there is no evidencethat he is apt to be dangerous. He did go to the trouble to find outthat Jimmy acted in a reasonably normal manner, working industriouslyand talking quite sanely in the daytime. Only Haynes suspected that ofnights he went home and experienced the impossible. Sometimes, Haynessuspected that the impossible might be the fact--that had been anamazingly good bit of trick photography--but it was too preposterous!Also, there was no reason for such a thing to happen to Jimmy.
* * * * *
For a week after Haynes' pseudo-scientific explanation, however, Jimmywas almost l
ight-hearted. He no longer had to remind himself thatJane was dead. He had evidence that she wasn't. She wrote to him inthe diary which he found on her desk, and he read her messages andwrote in return. For a full week the sheer joy of simply being able tocommunicate with each other was enough.
The second week was not so good. To know that Jane was alive was good,but to be separated from her without hope was not. There was no meaningin a cosmos in which one could only write love-letters to one's wife orhusband in another now which only might have been. But for a while bothJimmy and Jane tried to hide this new hopelessness from each other.
Jimmy explained this carefully to Haynes