The Two Timers

by Bob Shaw

  Hetty glanced sideways at him. "You're talking like a human being, Jack. There's nothing wrong with that."

  "How do I usually talk?"

  "Business has been pretty good the last few weeks," Hetty said crisply. "You're going to need extra staff."

  She went on to give him a rundown on the new business and the progress that had been made on the existing survey contracts being handled by Breton's engineering consultancy. As she talked he realized he was not as concerned as he ought to be about his business. A gadgeteer by instinct, he had taken a couple of degrees without any real effort because it was the economically sound thing to do, had strayed into the geologically-oriented consultancy, and had taken it over when the owner retired. It had all been so easy, so inevitable, yet vaguely dissatisfying. He had always enjoyed making things, giving rein to the intelligence his hands appeared to possess of their own right, but there seemed to be no time for that now.

  Breton huddled in his overcoat, staring nostalgically out at the wet black thoroughfares which were like canals cut through banks of soiled snow. As the car gathered speed, white fluffy chunks of new snow broke upwards from the front end, pounded silently on the windshield and swirled away to the rear, disintegrating, vanishing. He tried to concentrate on Hetty's words, but saw with dismay that a pinpoint of colored, shimmering light had been born in the air ahead of him. Not now, he thought, rubbing his eyes; but the flickering mote of brilliance was already beginning to grow. Within a minute it was like a brand-new coin spinning, coruscating, remaining in the center of the field of vision of his right eye no matter which way he turned his head.

  "I went over to your place this morning and turned the heat on," Hetty said. "At least you'll be warm.

  "Thanks," he said numbly. "You go to too much trouble over me.

  The furtive shimmer was growing faster now, blocking out more of his view, beginning to unfold its familiar patterns -- restless prismatic geometries, marching, shifting, opening windows into alien dimensions. Not now, he pleaded silently, I don't want to make a trip right now. The optical phenomenon was something he had known since childhood. It could happen at intervals of three months, or of a few days -- depending on his degree of mental stress -- and was generally preceded by a feeling of unusual well-being. Once the euphoria was past, the zigzag shimmering over the field of his right eye would begin, and that would be followed by one of his inexplicable, frightening trips into the past. The knowledge that each trip took only a fraction of a second of real time, and that it must be some freak of memory, made its imminence no easier to bear -- for the scenes he relived were never pleasant. Always, they were segments of his life he would have preferred to forget, crisis points. And it was not hard to guess the particular nightmare which was likely to crop up in the future.

  By the time the car reached his house, Breton was effectively blinded on the right side by a beautiful blanket of color -- geometrical, tremulous, prismatic -- which made it difficult for him to judge distances accurately. He persuaded Hetty not to get out of the car, waved to her as she moved off down the snow-covered drive, and fumbled open the front door. With the door locked behind him he walked quickly into the living room and sat down in a deep chair. The shimmering was at its maximum, which meant it would withdraw quite abruptly at any moment, and the trip to God-knows-where would be on. He waited. The vision in his right eye began to clear, he tensed, and the room began to recede, to distort, to exhibit strange perspectives. Ponderously, helplessly, over the edge we go. . . .

  Kate was walking away down the street, past blazing store windows. With her silvered wrap drawn tight over the flimsy party dress, and long legs slimmed even further by needle-heeled sandals, she looked like an idealized screen version of a gangster's moll. ,The ambient brilliance from the stores projected her solidly into his mind, jewel-sharp; then he saw -- with a vast sense of wrongness -- three trees growing in the center of the street beyond her, right in the traffic lanes, where no trees had ever grown. They were elms, almost stripped of leaves, and something about the configuration of their naked limbs made him want to recoil in loathing. Their trunks, he realized, were insubstantial -- automobile headlights were shining right through them. The grouping of the trees was still filling him with dread, yet at the same time he was drawn towards them.

  And all the time, Kate was walking away, and a voice was telling him he couldn't let her go through the city at night looking as she did. He fought the same battle with his pride, then turned in the opposite direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly. . . .

  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. ...

  Breton gripped the arms of his chair and held on tightly until the sound of his breathing died away into the silence of the room. He got up, went to the fireplace and wound the old oak-cased clock. The heavy key was cool in his fingers, cool and real. Outside the windows the snow was coming down again in small, dry crumbs, and cars with their lights switched on early ghosted past beyond the trees. The house was filled with patient brown shadows.

  He went into the kitchen and began to make coffee while his mind slowly released itself from the stasis induced by the trip. The ensuing lack of nervous energy was another familiar feature of the excursions into the past, but this time the drain had been greater than ever before. Waiting for the water to boil, Breton realized belatedly that the trip had been unusual in other respects -- one of them being the introduction of an element of fantasy. Those elm trees growing in the middle of 14th Street had surprised him, but there was more to his sense of shock than an awareness of their incongruity. They had been semi-transparent, like images projected on a more vivid background, but that ragged archway was real. He had seen it somewhere, and it meant something -- but what?

  When the coffee had percolated, he opened the refrigerator and found there was no cream or milk. His stomach moved uneasily at the thought of black coffee, but a search of the depleted kitchen showed that the oniy other liquid available was in a pickle jar where several pieces of dill swam mistily like surgical specimens. Breton poured a cup of the black brew, flat gray spirals of vapor swirling close to its surface, and went back to the living room. He sat down, sipped some coffee, and tried vaguely to think about taking control of his personal affairs, but the room was growing dim and he felt tired. One week of treatment and rest had not been enough to repair the damage his extended binge had caused.

  Breton awoke in near-darkness several hours later. A wan, violet-tinted light was filtering into the room from a street lamp, and tree shadows were moving uneasily on the innermost wall. Repressing a shiver and a surge of self-pity, Breton sat up and decided to go out to eat. As he was getting out of the chair he noticed the vacillating shadow of branches on the dead gray face of the television set -- and he remembered where he had seen the three elms.

  During a newscast one of the local channels had carried a still photograph of the spot where Kate's body had been found -- right by three elms.

  The only trouble was that the elms he had seen on his trip had not been frozen to stillness by the camera. They had been moving . . . arranging and rearranging their black-etched limbs to the dictates of the night winds. They had been -- Breton hesitated before applying the adjective -- real. Its use meant there had been a shift in his attitude towards the trips, that some part of his mind had found it necessary to believe he had actually seen Kate that very afternoon. Could it be, Breton wondered coldly, that his lonely, guilt-ridden consciousness had defied every law in nature -- to travel back through time? Suppose the age-old human desire to do the impossible, to go back into the past and correct mistakes, had been the psychic driving force behind all the trips he had ever made? That would explain why the recreated scenes were always crisis points, times when the course of his life had taken a disastrous turn. Could it be that he was a fr
ustrated time traveler, anchored in the present by the immovable reality of his corporeal body, but managing to release some immaterial aspect of his identity to look back through time and hammer on the invisible walls of the past? If that was the case, then -- God help him -- he was going to relive that awful, final scene with Kate until he died. And the three elm trees had begun to loom. . . .

  I've got to get out of here, Breton thought, and find a good noisy diner with a juke box, checkered table cloths, huge vulgar plastic tomatoes on the tables, and normal human beings arguing about the things normal human beings argue about.

  He put on lights all over the house, freshened himself up, changed his clothes and was going out through the front door when a slightly shabby sedan swung in the gateway and wallowed up the snow-covered drive. The passenger door opened and Hetty Calder got out, surveyed the snow with obvious disgust, and blew some cigarette ash onto it in a gesture of retaliation.

  "Going out? Harry and I came over to see if there was anything we could do."

  "There is." Breton was amazed at just how much pleasure the sight of her thick, tweedy figure was able to inspire in him. "You can be my guests at dinner. I'd be glad of your company."

  He got into the rear seat and exchanged brief greetings with Harry Calder, a balding, bookish man of about fifty. The clutter of shopping bags, scarves and magazines around him on the broad seat gave Breton a comforting feeling of being securely back in the world of uncomplicated normalcy, He studied the pre-Christmas store displays as they drove across the city, absorbing every detail, leaving no room for thoughts of Kate.

  "How're you feeling now, Jack?" Hetty peered back into Breton's homely little kingdom. "You didn't look too good when I dropped you off today."

  "Well, I wasn't feeling too wonderful right then, but I'm fine now."

  "What was wrong?" Hetty persisted.

  Breton hesitated, and decided to experiment with the truth. "As a matter of fact, I wasn't seeing very well. Sort of colored lights had spread over most of my right eye.

  Unexpectedly, Harry Calder turned his head and clucked sympathetically. "Prismatic, zigzag patterns, eh? So you're another one?"

  "Another one? What do you mean, Harry?"

  "I get them too -- and then the pain starts," Harry Calder said. "It's a common preliminary symptom of migraine."

  "Migraine!" Breton felt something heave convulsively in his subconscious. "But I never get headaches."

  "No? Then you must be one of the lucky ones -- what I go through after those pretty colors start marching isn't ordinary. You wouldn't believe it."

  "I never knew there was any coiniection between that sort of thing and migraine," Breton said. "As you say -- I must be one of the lucky ones."

  Even to his own ears, his voice did not carry much conviction.

  Breton's belief in the possibility of time travel was born painfully, over a period of months.

  He returned to his business, but found himself unable to make valid judgments on even the most clear-cut administrative issues, while technical decisions had receded to another plane of comprehension altogether. With the assistance of the three staff engineers, Hetty guided the consultancy into something approximating its normal channels of operation. At first, Breton sat at his desk staring at meaningless drawings for hours at a stretch, unable to think of anything but Kate and the part he had played in her death. There were times when he tried to write poetry, to crystallize and perhaps depersonalize his feeling about Kate. The heavy snows of the Montana winter buried the world in silence, and Breton watched it silt across the arrays of parked cars beyond his window. Its silence seemed to invade his own body so that he could hear its blind workings, the constant traffic of fluids, the subdividing incursions of air, the patient radial rain of cholesterol in his arteries. . . .

  And at intervals of six or seven days he made trips, always to that final scene with Kate. Sometimes the elm trees would be so translucent as to be almost nonexistent; at other times they reared up black and real, giving him the impression he would be able to see two figures moving at their bases were it not for the overlaid light of store windows and automobile headlights.

  With the continued in-growing of his perceptions, he became more aware of the phenomena he had learned to identify as preludes to the trips. There would be the gradual intensification of his nervous activity, leading him to think he had escaped from despair as it culminated in a heady sense of well-being. Close on that came the first visual disturbances, starting with a furtive glimmer and spreading all over his right eye. As soon as it began to abate, reality shifted -- and he was back in the past

  The discovery that the visual phenomena were familiar to others surprised Breton, because as a boy he had attempted to describe them to his friends and had never achieved any reaction. Even his parents had shown nothing more than indulgent mock-interest and he had never been able to convince them he was not talking about afterimages caused by bright lights. He had learned not to talk about the trips or anything associated with them, and over the years the conviction had grown on him that his experience was unique, private to Jack Breton. But the chance conversation with Harry Calder had changed all that; and the interest it had stirred in him was the only genuine stake he had in the bleak, bitter present

  Breton began spending his afternoons in the public library, aware he was following an idea beside which his former fantasy about Kate's murderer was a working blueprint, but unable to ignore its feverish pounding in his mind. He read the scanty literature on migraine, then went on to general medical works, biographies of famous migraine sufferers, anything his instincts told him might lead in the direction he wanted to go. Never having connected himself with migraine before, Breton had a vague idea it was a recent product of high-pressure civilization. His reading showed him it had been known to ancient cultures, one of them that of the Greeks, who had named it hemicrania -- the hall-headache. In the great majority of cases, the visual disturbances were followed by severe headaches affecting one side of the head, then nausea. Some people were lucky enough to escape one or other of these symptoms, and there was a rare category of individual who avoided both. Their condition was known as hemicrania sine dolore.

  One of the most intriguing things, as far as Breton was concerned, was the amazing exactness with which his own visual experiences had been described by other men in other times. The medical terms were various -- teichopsia, scintillating scotoma -- but the one he preferred for its aptness was "fortification figures." It had first been used by an 18th century doctor, John Fothergill, who had written:

  " . . . a singular kind of glimmering in the sight, objects swiftly changing their apparent position, surrounded by luminous angles like those of a fortification."

  Fothergill had attributed it to eating too much buttered toast at breakfast time -- an explanation Breton found only slightly less satisfactory than up-to-the-minute theories which spoke vaguely about temporary irritations of the visual cortex. One dark brown afternoon, when he and the others in the old building were sitting quietly like objects in the bottom of a petrifying well, he turned the pages of an obscure health magazine and was chilled to find accurate drawings -- not of the fortification figures, which would have defeated any artist -- but of the black star which sometimes appeared in their place.

  One of the drawings was by the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, and another had been done as far back as the 12th century by Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen.

  "I saw a great star," the Abbess had written, "most splendid and beautiful and with an exceeding multitude of falling sparks with which the star followed southwards ... and suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more."

  Breton read on quickly but, as was the case with all the other recorded accounts, there was no mention of a subsequent vision of the past. In that respect, it appeared, he really was unique.

  A year later Breton pedantically wrote in his notebook:r />
  "I now incline more than ever towards the theory that all migraine sufferers are frustrated time travelers. The power which provides temporal motivation is the desire to return to the past, possibly to relive periods of extreme happiness, but more probably to correct mistakes which are seen in retrospect to have had a malign effect on the course of events.

  "Prior to Kate's death my own case was a freakish example of someone who almost could go back, not because of greater motivation, but though a lower threshold, a chance configuration of the nervous system. (The visual disturbances may be caused by some degree of temporal displacement of the retina -- which is, after all, an extension of the brain, and therefore the sense organ most intimately associated with the activity of the central nervous system.)

  "Since Kate's death my retroactive potential has reached an abnormally high level, resulting in frequent trips. Leaving aside the problem of constructing a philosophical edifice capable of accommodating the physical implications, the question remains of how to put theory into practice. Ergotamines, methysergide, diuretics -- all these things are in use to minimize the effects of hemicrania, which is hardly what I have in mind. . . ."