The Two Timers

by Bob Shaw

  "I'm going to get dressed." John Breton hesitated at the door as if about to say something further, then went out of the kitchen, leaving Jack alone with Kate for the first time. The air was warm, and prisms of pale sunlight slanted from the curtained windows. A pulsing silence filled the room as Kate toyed desperately with her food, looking slightly distraught and out-of-place against the background of cozy domesticity. She took a cigarette and lit it. Breton's awareness of her was so intense that he could hear the tobacco and rice paper burning as she drew on the smoke.

  "I think I arrived at just the right time," he said finally.

  "Why's that?" She avoided looking at him.

  "You and . . . John are about ready to split up, aren't you?"

  "That's putting it a little strongly."

  "Come on, Kate," be urged. "I've seen the two of you. It was never like this with us."

  Kate looked fully at him and he saw the uncertainty in her eyes.

  "No? I don't understand this Time A and Time B thing very well, Jack, but up until that night in the park you and John were the same person. Right?"

  "Right."

  "Well, we had fights and arguments then, too. I mean, it was you -- as well as John -- who refused to give me taxi fare and -- "

  "Don't, Kate!" Breton struggled to make his mind encompass what she was saying. She was right, of course, but during the last nine years he had avoided some avenues of memory, and he was strangely reluctant to be forced to explore them now. The dream could not sustain the dichotomy.

  "I'm sorry -- perhaps that wasn't fair." Kate tried to smile. "None of us seem to be able to shake off that particular episode. And there's Lieutenant Convery . . ."

  "Convery! Where does he come in?" Breton's senses were alerted.

  "The man who attacked me was called Spiedel. Lieutenant Convery was in charge of the investigations into his death." Kate looked somberly at Breton. "Did you know you were seen that night?"

  "I hadn't thought about it."

  "You were. Half a dozen teenagers who must have been having a communal roll in the grass told the police about seeing a man with a rifle who materialized almost on top of them and vanished just as quickly. Naturally enough, the description they were able to give fitted John. To be honest, until last night I always had an illogical feeling it had been John -- although the investigation cleared him completely. Several of our neighbors had seen him standing at the window, and his rifle was broken anyway."

  Breton nodded thoughtfully, suddenly aware of how near he had come to saving Kate and getting rid of the Time B Breton at one stroke. So the police had tried to pin the shooting on John! What a pity the dictates of chronomotive physics had caused the bullet which killed Spiedel to snap back into Time A along with the rifle and the man who had fired it. The rifling marks on it would have matched those produced by John Breton's unfired and broken rifle -- which would have given the omnipotent ballistics experts something to think about.

  "I still don't see what you mean about Convery," he said aloud. "You said John was cleared."

  "He was, but Lieutenant Convery kept on coming around here. He still calls when he's in the district, and drinks coffee and talks to John about geology and fossils."

  "Sounds harmless."

  "Oh, it is. John likes him, but he reminds me of something I don't want to remember."

  Breton reached across the table and took Kate's hand. "What do I remind you of?"

  Kate moved uneasily, but kept her hand in his. "Something I do want to remember, perhaps."

  "You're my wife, Kate -- and I want you back." He felt her fingers interlock with his then grow tighter and tighter as though in some trial of strength. Her face was that of a woman in childbirth. They sat that way, without speaking, until John Breton's footsteps sounded outside the kitchen door. He came in, now wearing a gray business suit, and went straight to the radio.

  "I'll get the latest news, before I go."

  "I'll tidy up here," Kate said. She began clearing the table.

  Jack Breton stood up, aware of an overwhelming resentment at his other self's presence in the house, and walked slowly through the house until he was standing in the cool brown silence of the living room. Kate had responded to him -- and that was important. It was why it had been necessary for him to do it this way, to walk straight in on Kate and John and explain everything to them.

  A more logical and efficient method would have been to keep his presence in the Time B world a secret; to murder John, dispose of the body and quietly take over his life. But then he would have been burdened with a sense of having cheated Kate, whereas now he had the ultimate justification of knowing she preferred him to the man the Time B Breton had come to be. That mattered very much, and now it was time to think in detail about his next step -- the elimination of John Breton.

  Frowning in concentration, Jack Breton moved about the living room, absentmindedly lifting books and small ornaments, examining them and carefully putting everything back in its original place. His attention was caught by a sheaf of closely-written squares of white paper, the top one of which had an intricate circular pattern on it. He lifted the uppermost sheet and saw that what he had taken to be a pattern was actually handwriting in a finely-executed spiral. Breton rotated the paper and slowly read a fragment of poetry.

  I have wished for you a thousand nights, While the green-glow hour-hand slowly veers. I could weep for the very need of you, But you wouldn't taste my tears.

  He had set the sheet down and was turning away from the table when the significance of the lines speared into him. It took several seconds for the floodgates of memory to open, and when they did his forehead prickled icily with fear. He had written those words himself during the period of near-madness following Kate's death -- but he had never shown them to anyone.

  And that had been in another world, and another time.

  VI

  John Breton made several abortive attempts to leave for his office, but each time returned to pick up small objects -- papers, cigarettes, a notebook. The mounting tension in the pit of Jack's stomach drove him away from the kitchen table, with a muttered apology, and up into the still-air privacy of his bedroom. He sat tensely on the edge of the bed, listening for the sound of the Lincoln crackling down the driveway.

  When it finally came he went out onto the landing and part-way down the stairs. He stood there in the big house's dark brown silence, hovering, feeling like a pike meditatively selecting its level in dim waters. Nine years, he thought. I'll die. I'll touch her, and I'll die.

  He went the rest of the way down, unable to prevent himself moving stealthily, and into the kitchen. Kate was standing near the window, washing apples. She did not look around, but went on dousing the pale green fruit with cold water. The simple domestic action struck Breton as being somehow incongruous.

  "Kate," he said. "Why are you doing that?"

  "Insecticides." She still refused to turn her head. "I always wash the apples."

  "I see. You've got to do it this morning? It's urgent, is it?"

  "I want to put them away in the fridge."

  "But there's no hurry, is there?"

  "No." She sounded contrite, as though he had forced her to admit something shamefuL

  Breton felt guilty -- he was really putting her through it. "Did you ever notice the way fruit looks so much brighter and more colorful when it's submerged in water?"

  "No."

  "It does. Nobody knows why. Kate!"

  She turned to face him and he caught her hands. They were wet and cold, stirring ghastly memories far back in his mind. He kissed the chilled fingers, making his own private penance.

  "Don't do that." She tried to pull her hands away, but he tightened his grip.

  "Kate," he said urgently. "I lost you nine years ago -- but you lost something, too. John doesn't love you, and I do. It's as simple as that."

  "It isn't safe to make snap judgments about John."

  "For me it's safe. But just look at
the facts -- he went off to work this morning as if nothing had happened. Leaving us alone. Do you think I'd leave you alone with a declared rival? I'd . . ." Breton left the sentence unfinished. He had been going to say he would kill his rival first.

  "That was John acting hurt. He tries mental judo, you know. If you push, be pulls. If you pull, he pushes."

  Kate was speaking quickly, in desperation, as Breton drew her to him. He slid his fingers gently up the fluted back of her neck, through the hair and gripped her head, turning her face to him. She resisted for a few seconds, then -- all at once -- came to him with mouth wide open. Breton kept his eyes open during that first kiss, trying to imprint the moment on his mind, to raise it beyond time itself.

  Later, as they lay in the parchment-colored light of the shuttered bedroom, Breton stared at the ceiling in wonderment. So this, he thought, is sanity. He let his brain absorb the sensations of relaxed well-being that were flooding in from every part of his body. In this mood, everything connected with the process of being alive was good. He could have got immense pleasure from a thousand simple things that had been forgotten somewhere along the way -- climbing a hill, drinking beer, chopping wood, writing a poem.

  He put his hand on the cool skin of Kate's thigh. "How do you feel?"

  "All right." Her voice was sleepy, remote.

  Breton nodded, looking at the room through his brand- new eyes. The baffled sunlight had a yellowed, Mediterranean quality about it, restful yet absolutely clear. And it revealed no flaws in his Time B universe. A strangely relevant fragment from. an old poem drifted into his mind.

  The painted sceneries recall Such toil as Canaletto spent To give each brick upon each wall Its due partition of cement.

  He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at Kate. "My name should have been Canaletto," he said.

  She stared up at him, half-smiling, then turned her face away and he knew she was thinking about John. Breton sank down on his pillow, absentmindedly sliding a finger beneath the strap of his watch to touch the hidden lump of the chronomotor module buried beneath his skin. John Breton was the one flaw in the Time B universe.

  But that state of affairs was strictly temporary.

  VII

  Jake Larmour stared wearily through the curved viewscreen of his crawler at the flat, monotonous surface of the Moon. He kept the vehicle's motors running at maximum revolutions, but the western rim of the Sea of Tranquility, towards which he had been driving for the past two hours, seemed as far away as ever. At intervals he yawned widely, and between times whistled a thin, sad tune. Jake Larmour was bored.

  Back in Pine Ridge, Wisconsin, the idea of being a radar maintenance man on the Moon had seemed glamorous and exciting. Now, after three months of patrolling the line towers, he had reached the stage of crossing off the days on a calendar hand-drawn for that express purpose. He had known in advance that the Moon was dead, but what he had not anticipated was the way in which his own spirit would quail in the face of such complete and utter absence of life.

  If only, he thought for the thousandth time on that trip, if only something would move out there.

  He was leaning back in an extravagant yawn, arms stretching as far as was possible in the crawler's cockpit, when something flickered and vanished on the surface of the crater bed about a hundred yards ahead of him. Larmour instinctively hit the brake and the vehicle whined to a stop. He sat upright in his seat, scanning the ground beyond the viewscreen, wondering if his imagination was beginning to act up on him. Several elongated seconds dragged by while the lunar landscape waited complacently for eternity. Larmour's hand was moving towards the throttle levers when he saw the movement again, off to the left, and a little closer.

  He swallowed hard. His eyes had focused more quickly this time and he had made out a fluffy gray object -- about the size of a football -- which had popped up above ground level for an instant before vanishing downwards. As he watched, the phenomenon was repeated three more times, always in a different place.

  "Well, I'll be damned," he said aloud. "If I've discovered Moon gophers I'll be famous."

  Trembling a little, he reached for the radio button, then remembered there was too much of the Moon's humped back between him and Base Three to allow contact. Beyond the screen a fluffy ball peeked up impudently and disappeared. Larmour hesitated for only a second before he disconnected his relief tube, sealed up his pressure suit and began making all the arrangements necessary for a human being to observe before setting foot on the Moon. A few minutes later, suppressing a sense of unreality, he left the crawler and began moving uncertainly towards where he had seen the last flurry of movement. As he walked he kept his eyes open for the lunar equivalent of gopher holes, but the blanket of eons-old dust was smooth except for the untidy sutures of his own footprints.

  Abruptly, several of the fluffy balls sprang up within a radius of fifty paces, making him snatch for breath. Summoning his presence of mind, he kept his gaze fixed on the spot where the nearest materialization had taken place. Larmour reached the place, laboring with his inexpert low-gravity shuffle, and his gingery brows knit together as he saw there was no hole which could possibly contain the furtive gray entity he was seeking.

  He knelt down to alter the direction of the light rays reflecting from the dust, and thought he could discern a shallow, dish-shaped depression with a minute dimple in the center. Becoming more and more puzzled, Larmour gently scooped the dust away with his hands until he had exposed the surface of the rock three inches below. There was a neat circular hole of about an inch diameter, looking as though it had been put there with a masonry drill. He pushed one finger into the hole, then jerked it out again as heat seared through the insulation of his glove. The surrounding rock was practically red hot.

  Larmour sat back on his heels and stared at the black circle in perplexity. His mind was wrestling unsuccessfully with the problem it represented, when another gray ball appeared momentarily only a few feet away. This time he felt the ground tremors, and then suddenly he had the answer -- the hideous, deadly answer.

  On the Moon -- with no air to buoy up its separate particles -- a cloud of dust remains small and compact, and vanishes back into the ground almost as quickly as the eye can follow. And the only thing which would kick up such a cloud, human agencies excepted, was a meteor impact!

  Larmour had left the safety of his vehicle and was walking about unprotected amid a meteor shower of unprecedented intensity, a hail of bullets fired a billion blind years earlier. Groaning at his own stupidity and lack of experience, he stood up and ran with ballooning Moon-steps towards the waiting crawler.

  An obsolescent, four-engined aircraft was patiently clawing its way across the night skies of Northern Greenland. Inside its drumming, cylindrical belly, Denis Soderman carefully tended his banks of recording equipment, occasionally adjusting verniers, keeping the research plane's inhuman and far-reaching senses at their keenest. He worked with the abstracted efficiency of a man who knows his job is important but who believes he was cut out for higher things.

  Some distance forward of Soderman's station, the senior -- Dr. Cosgrove -- sat at a makeshift desk, running gray paper tape though his hands like a tailor measuring cloth. His still-young face looked old and tired in the clinical light from the overhead tube.

  "We don't need to wait for a computer to process this lot, Denis," Cosgrove said. "The solar corpuscular streams are obviously boosted way beyond normal. I've never seen readings like this, even with freak sunspot activity. The Van Allen belt must be soaking the stuff up like a sponge, and with those reports of fluctuations in the solar constant we got today from M.I.T., it looks . . ."

  Denis Soderman stopped listening. He was adept at shutting out the older man's ruminative voice, but this time it was more than a mere defense mechanism against the effects of unbridled pedantry. Something had happened to the aircraft. Seated far back from the machine's center of gravity, Soderman had experienced a subtle, queasy corkscrewing mo
tion. It had lasted perhaps half a second, but Soderman was a talented amateur pilot and had found something disturbing in the idea of a hundred-ton aircraft flicking its tail like a salmon. Emulating his electronic charges, he spread the network of his senses as wide as possible. For a few seconds he picked up nothing but the normal sensations of flight, then it happened again -- a momentary lift and twist which made his stomach contract in alarm.

  "They're having trouble up front," he said. "I don't like the way this old bus is flying."

  Cosgrove looked up from his perforated streamers. "I didn't feel anything." His voice registered disapproval of Soderman's lack of concentration on the job at hand.