The Two Timers

by Bob Shaw

  Kate kept her eyes averted as he entered the room, and Breton felt a slight pang of guilt over his earlier sarcasm.

  "That was Carl," he volunteered. "He's been working late."

  She nodded disinterestedly, and his guilt instantaneously transformed itself into resentment -- not even in the presence of friends would she pretend to care anything about the business. That's the way, Kate, he thought furiously, never ease up for a second. Live well off me, but at the same time reserve the right to despise my work and everybody connected with it.

  Breton stared somberly at his wife and the Palfreys, who were now going back through all the material Miriam had produced, and suddenly realized he was beginning to sway slightly. He retrieved his drink, finished it with one gulp and poured another. I keep on taking this sort of treatment -- the old, familiar and repetitious anger patterns began to flow redly on the surface of his mind -- but how much is a man supposed to take? I have a wife who complains night and day because I spend too much time at the office, but when I do take an evening off -- this is what I get. Phony spiritualists and another king-sized dose of her damned, stinking indifference. To think I wept -- yes sir, actually wept with relief -- because she was safe that night they found her with Spiedel's brains scattered through her hair. I didn't know it then, but Spiedel was trying to do me a favor. I know it now, though. If only I could . . .

  Breton chopped the thought off in alarm as he realized he was setting himself up for a trip.

  But he was too late.

  Without getting smaller, the subdued orange lights and white-mortared stone chimney of the living room began to recede into planetary, stellar, galactic distances. He tried to speak, but the transparent overlay of language was shifting across the face of reality, robbing nouns of their significance, making predication impossible. Strange geometries imposed themselves on the perspectives of the room, snapping him sickeningly from pole to alien pole. A face in the group turned towards him -- a pale, meaningless free-form -- man or woman, friend or enemy? Ponderously, helplessly, over the edge we go. . . .

  Breton slammed down the hood of the Buick so savagely that the big car moved like a disturbed animal, rocking on its gleaming haunches. In the darkness of its interior Kate was waiting, immobile, Madonna-like -- and because she showed no anger, his own became uncontrollable.

  "The battery's dead. That settles it -- we can't go."

  "Don't be silly, Jack." Kate got out of the car. "The Maguires are expecting us -- we can phone for a taxi." Her party clothes were completely inadequate against the night breezes of late October, and she huddled in them with a kind of despairing dignity.

  "Don't be so damned reasonable, Kate. We're an hour late already, and I'm not going to a party with my hands like this. We're going back home."

  "That's childish."

  "Thank you." Breton locked up the car, carelessly smudging the pale blue paintwork with oil from his hands. "Let's go."

  "I'm going on to the Maguires," Kate said. "You can go home and sulk if that's what you want."

  "Don't be stupid. You can't go all the way over there by yourself."

  "I can go by myself and I can get back by myself -- I did it all right for years before I met you."

  "I know you've been around, sweetie -- I've always been too tactful to mention it, that's all."

  "Thank you. Well, at least you won't have the embarrassment of being seen in public with me tonight."

  Hearing the hopelessness creep into her voice, Breton felt a flicker of malicious glee. "How are you planning to get there? Did you bring any money?"

  She hesitated, then held out her hand. "Give me something for taxi fare, Jack."

  "Not a chance. I'm childish -- remember? We're going home." He savored her helplessness for a moment, somehow extracting revenge for his own cruelty, then the whole thing fell apart in his hands. This is bad, he thought, even for me. So I arrive late at a party with my face and hands all black -- a balanced person would see that as a chance to do an Al Jolson act. Let her ask me just once more and I'll give in and we'll go to the party.

  Instead, Kate uttered one short, sharp word -- filling him with wounded dismay -- and walked away down the street past blazing store windows. With her silvered wrap drawn tight over the flimsy dress, and long legs slimmed even further by needle-heeled sandals, she looked like an idealized screen version of a gangster's moll. For a moment he seemed to see the physical presence of her more clearly than ever before, as though some long-unused focusing mechanism had been operated behind his eyes. The ambient brilliance from the stores projected Kate solidly into his mind, jewel-sharp, and he saw -- with the wonder of a brand new discovery -- the tiny blue vein behind each of her knees. Breton was overwhelmed by a pang of sheer affection. You can't let Kate walk through the city at night looking like that, a voice told him urgently, but the alternative was to crawl after her, to knuckle under. He hesitated, then turned in the opposite direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly.

  It was almost two hours later when the police cruiser pulled up outside the house.

  Breton, who had been standing at the window, ran heavy-footed to the door and dragged it open. There were two detectives, with darkly hostile eyes, and a backdrop of blue uniformed figures.

  One of the detectives flashed a badge. "Mr. John Breton?"

  Breton nodded, unable to speak. I'm sorry Kate, he thought, so sorry -- come back and we'll go to the party. But at the same time an incredible thing was happening. He could feel a sense of relief growing in one deeply hidden corner of his mind. If she's dead, she's dead. If she's dead, it's all over. If she's dead, I'm free. . . .

  "I'm Lieutenant Convery. Homicide. Do you mind answering a few questions?"

  "No," Breton said dully. "You'd better come in." He led the way into the living room, and had to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a nervous housewife.

  "You don't seem surprised to see us, Mr. Breton," Convery said slowly. He had a broad, sunburned face and a tiny nose which made scarcely any division between widely spaced blue eyes.

  "What do you want, Lieutenant?"

  "Do you own a rifle, Mr. Breton?"

  "Ah . . . yes." Breton was thunderstruck.

  "Do you mind getting it?"

  "Look," Breton said loudly. "What's going on?"

  Convery's eyes were bright, watchful. "One of the patrolmen will go with you while you get the rifle."

  Breton shrugged and led the way down into his basement workshop. He sensed the patrolman's tenseness as they stepped off the wooden stair onto the concrete floor, so he halted and pointed at the tall cupboard in which he stored a jumble of large tools, fishing rods, archery equipment and his rifle. The patrolman shouldered quickly past him, opened the doors and dragged out the rifle. He had to disengage the sling, which had snagged a fishing reel.

  Back in the living room, Convery took the rifle and rubbed a fingertip in the fine coating of dust which lay over the stock. "You don't use this much?"

  "No. The last time was a couple of years ago. Before I was married."

  "Uh-huh. It's a high velocity job, isn't it?"

  "Yes." Breton could feel the bewilderment building up inside him to an almost physical pressure. What had happened?

  "Ugly things," Convery commented casually. "They destroy animals. I don't know why people use them."

  "It's a good machine, that's all," Breton replied. "I like good machines. Oh, I forgot -- it isn't working."

  "Why not?"

  "I dropped the bolt one day and I think it jammed the pin."

  "Uh-huh." Convery removed the rifle's bolt, examined it, smelt the breech, peered through the barrel at a table lamp, then handed the weapon back to the patrolman. "That the only rifle you own?"

  "Yes. Look, Lieutenant, this has gone on long enough. Why are you here?" Breton hesitated. "Has anything happened to my wife?"

  "I thought you'd never ask." Convery's blue eyes roved Breton's face. "Your wife is al
l right. She was foolish enough to walk through the park tonight, without company, and a man attacked her -- but she's all right."

  "I don't understand. How . . . how can she be all right if she was attacked?"

  "Well, she was very lucky, Mr. Breton. Another man, who incidentally looked like you, stepped out from behind a tree and blew the attacker's head off with a rifle."

  "What? You don't think . . . Where's the man now?"

  Convery smiled. "We don't know that, as yet. He seems to have vanished. . . ."

  A sense of aching vastness, shifting of perspectives and parallax, unthinkable transitions in which the curvatures of space-time writhe between negative and positive, and infinity yawns at the mid-point -- numinous, illusory, poignant. . . .

  "Look at that guy drink," Gordon Palfrey was saying. "He's really going into orbit tonight."

  The others turned to look at Breton, who -- desperately needing time to reorient himself -- smiled wanly and sat down in a deep armchair. He noticed a speculative look in Kate's eyes and wondered if there was any way for a casual observer to detect that he had been blacked out. An analyst called Fusciardi had, after an unsatisfactory investigation, assured him the lapses were unnoticeable, but Breton had found it difficult to believe because the trips often occupied several hours of subjective time. Fusciardi's explanation was that Breton had an unusual, but not unique, capacity for flashes of absolute recall occupying only split seconds of objective time. He had even suggested referring the case to a university psychological team, but at that point Breton had lost interest.

  Breton relaxed further into the big old chair, enjoying the comfort of its sane solidity. That particular episode was cropping up more often lately and he found it depressing, even though Fusciardi had warned him that key scenes in his life -- especially those involving emotional stress -- would be most liable for reclamation. Tonight's trip had been unusually long, and its impact increased by the fact that he had had so little warning. There had been none of the visual disturbances which Fusciardi had told him were commonly the prelude to a migraine attack in other people.

  Chilled by his brush with the past, Breton tried to increase his hold on the present, but Kate and the Palfreys were still absorbed in the unusual sample of automatic writing. He listened for a moment as they went through the ritual of trying to identify the author, then allowed his mind to drift in a warm alcoholic haze. A lot seemed to have happened in an evening which had started off in an atmosphere of distilled dullness. I should have stayed in the office with Carl, he thought. The Blundell Cement Company survey had to be com pleted in less than a week, and had been going slowly even before the unlikely twenty milligal discrepancies in the gravimeter readings showed up. Perhaps they had not been corrected properly. Carl was good, but there were so many factors to be considered in gravity surveying -- sun and moon positions, tidal movements, elastic deformation of the Earth's crust, etc. Anybody could make a mistake, even Carl. And anybody could send or receive an anonymous phone call. I was crazy to imagine all those specially engineered connotations -- I was caught off balance, that's all. The call was a psychological banana skin and nothing more. Good phrase, that . . . and the whiskey's good too. Even the Palfreys are all right if you look at them the right way -- especially Miriam. Nice figure. Too bad that she had to let her whole life be influenced by the fact she was born with that Hollywood Inca M.G.M. Ancient Egyptian priestess face. If she looked like Elizabeth Taylor she could come around here every night. . . . Or even Robert Taylor. . . .

  Feeling himself borne up on a malty cloud of benevolence, Breton tuned in again on the conversation across the room and heard Kate say something about Oscar Wilde.

  "Not again," he protested mildly. "Not Oscar Wilde again!"

  Kate ignored him and Miriam smiled her sculptured smile, but Gordon Pa]frey was in the mood to talk.

  "We aren't saying that Oscar Wilde communicated these words, John. But somebody did -- and the style of some of the stuff is identical to that of Wilde's early prose -- "

  "His early prose," Breton interrupted. "That's the point. Let's see -- Wilde died about 1900, right? And this is 1981 -- so in eighty-one years on the other side, or beyond the veil, or whatever you spiritualists call it, not only has he failed to develop as a writer, but has even slipped back to his undergraduate phase."

  "Yes, but -- "

  "And it isn't lack of practice, because according to what I've read in those books you lent Kate he's been a favorite with automatic writers since his death. Wilde must be the only author in history whose output went up after he was buried." Breton laughed, pleased at finding himself in that pleasant transient state of drunkenness in which he always felt able to think and talk twice as fast as when sober.

  "You're assuming a one-to-one correspondence between this and any other plane of existence," Palfrey said. "But it need not be like that."

  "It mustn't be. From the data you have about the next plane, it seems to be peopled by writers who have no paper or pencils, and who spend their time telepathically projecting drivel down into our plane. And, somehow, Oscar Wilde has become the stakhanovite -- possibly as a punishment for writing De Profundis.

  Palfrey smiled patiently. "But we're not saying that these . . ."

  "Don't argue with him," Kate said. "That's what he wants. John's a professional atheist, and he's starting to talk too much anyway." She shot him a look of scorn but overdid it, making herself look like a little girl for one fleeting second. What an unlikely emotion, Breton thought, to cause rejuvenation.

  "She's right," he said. "The whole structure of my belief crumbled when I was a kid -- the first crack was the discovery that F.W. Woolworth was not a local businessman."

  Kate lit a cigarette. "He's had ten whiskies. He always pulls that joke when he's had ten."

  And you always pull that one about the ten drinks, Breton thought. You humorless bitch -- trying to make me sound like a booze-operated robot. But he remained jovial and talkative, although aware that it was a reaction against the trauma of his trip. He managed to preserve his good spirits right through the coffee and sandwiches stage, and accompanied Kate to the door as she escorted the visitors out to their car.

  It was a crisp night in late October, and winter constellations were beginning to climb up beyond the eastern horizon, a reminder that snow would soon come marching down from Canada. Feeling warm and relaxed, Breton lounged in the doorway, smoking his last cigarette of the day while Kate talked to the Palfreys in the car. Two meteorites burned briefly in the sky as he smoked -- Journey's end, he thought, welcome to Earth -- and finally the car moved off, crunching and spanging in the gravel while its headlights raked through the elms along the drive. Kate waved goodbye and came back into the house, shivering slightly. Breton attempted to put an ann around her as she passed him in the doorway, but she kept walking determinedly, and he remembered his earlier waspishness. The post mortem still had to be held in the small hours, while the bedroom curtains breathed gently in sleep.

  Breton shrugged to show himself how little he cared, then flicked the cigarette butt out on to the lawn, where it was extinguished by the dewy grass. He took a final breath of the leaf-scented air and turned to go inside.

  "Don't close the door, John." The voice came from the black-tunneled shrubbery beside the drive. "I've come to collect my wife. Had you forgotten?"

  "Who's that?" Breton rapped the question out anxiously as the figure of a tall man came towards the light, but he had already recognized the voice. The anonymous phone caller. He felt a surge of dismayed anger.

  "Don't you know yet, John?" The stranger reached the porch, and slowly came up the steps. The overhead light suddenly made his identity very clear.

  Breton -- transfixed by a vast and inexplicable fear -- found himself staring into his own face.

  II

  Jack Breton discovered a slight shakiness in his legs as he walked up the steps towards the man called John Breton.

  It could, he decided
, have been caused by crouching in the draughty, conspiratorial darkness of the shrubbery for more than an hour. But a more likely explanation was that he had not been prepared for seeing Kate again. No amount of forethought or preparation could have cushioned the impact, he realized. The sound of her voice as she said goodbye to the visitors seemed to have flooded his nervous system with powerful harmonics, eliciting new levels of response from his being as a whole, and from the discrete atoms of which it was composed. I love you, whispered every molecule of his body, along a billion enzymic pathways. I love you, Kate.