The Two Timers

XI

Several decades had gone by since General Theodor Abram had actually set foot on a field of battle, but he thought of himself as living in an ephemeral no-man’s-land separating two of the greatest war machines ever seen in the region’s ancient and bloody history.

There was never an hour, a minute, a single instant in which his mind was not dominated by the realization that he was a vital part of his country’s front line defenses. If the ultimate conflict was ever joined he would not be required to press any buttons; the tools of his trade were made of paper, not steel; but he was a warrior nonetheless because the burden of responsibility for technical preparedness was such that only a patriot and a hero could have borne it.

The nightmare of General Abram’s life was compounded by the fact that he had two entirely separate sets of enemies.

One was the nation against whom his own people might some day be called to arms; the other set was represented by his own missiles and the technicians who designed and maintained them. A scarred fortress of a man, intended by nature for fighting with broadsword and mace, he had little instinct for technological warfare and even less for the interminable waiting which was the alternative. As far as possible he avoided making personal visits to the underground bases — too often, seven out of a batch of eight missiles would have malfunctionings in their incredibly complex innards. The technicians in charge seemed oblivious to the thought that these “minor defects” and the subsequent replacernent and testing procedures were reducing the country’s initial strike power to a fraction of its nominal value.

Abram could not understand why a ballistic missile had to have something like a million parts; still less could he fathom the mathematics of reliability which dictated that the assembly of individually trustworthy components in such large numbers invariably produced a willful, capricious entity whose effectiveness could vary from minute to minute. During his years in office he had developed a profound dislike for the scientists and engineers who had inflicted his present circumstances on him, and he took every opportunity to show it.

He glanced at his watch. Dr. Rasch, chief scientist in the Defense Ministry, had phoned earlier for an appointment and was due to arrive at any second. The thought of having to endure the little man’s thin, overly-precise tones so late in the afternoon made General Abram’s already taut nerves sing like high tension cables in a storm. When he heard the outer door of his office open, he leaned forward on his desk, scowling, ready to crush the scientist by the sheer weight of his hatred.

“Good afternoon, General,” Dr. Rasch said as he was shown in. “It was most kind of you to see me at such short notice.”

“Afternoon.” Abram looked closely at Rasch, wondering what had happened. The little man’s yellowed eyes had a strange light in them. It could have been fear, relief, or even triumph. “What’s the news?”

“I don’t quite know how to tell you, General.” Abram suddenly realized that Rasch was enjoying himself, and his depression grew even deeper. They must have found a design flaw in some component — a pump perhaps, or a microscopic valve — which demanded retrospective modification to every installation.

“I hope you’ll find some way to express yourself,” Abram said heavily. “Otherwise your visit seems rather pointless.”

Rasch’s lean face twitched violently. “The difficulty is not in my powers of expression, but in your powers of comprehension.” Even in anger, Rasch still spoke with carefully measured pedantry.

“Make it very simple for me,” Abram challenged.

“Very well. I presume you’ve noticed the meteor shower which has been going on for some time now?”

“Very pretty,” Abram sneered. “Is that what you came to discuss with me?”

“Indirectly. Have you learned what’s causing this unprecedented display?”

“If I have, I’ve forgotten it already. I have no time for scientific trivialities.”

“Then I’ll remind you.” Rasch had recovered his poise — a fact which Abram found vaguely disturbing. “There is now no doubt that the force of gravity is decreasing. The Earth normally travels in an orbit which it has long ago swept clear of cosmic debris, but with the new change in the gravitic constant the orbit is becoming cluttered again — partly as a result of displacement of the planet, even more so as a result of the apparently greater effect on minute bodies. The meteor displays are visual evidence that gravity — “

“Gravity, gravity!” Abram shouted. “What do I care about gravity?”

“But you should care, General.” Rasch permitted himself a small, tight smile. “Gravity is one of the constants in the calculations which the computers in your missiles perform to enable them to reach their designated targets — and now the constant is no longer a constant.”

“You mean.. ” Abram broke off as the enormity of Rasch’s words got through to him.

“Yes, General. The missiles won’t land precisely on the selected targets.”

“But you can allow for this change in gravity, surely.”

“Of course, but it’s going to take some time. The decrease is progressive, and — “

“How long?”

Rasch shrugged carelessly. “Six months, perhaps. It all depends.”

“But this places me in an impossible situation. What will the President say?”

“I wouldn’t venture a guess, General — but we all have one consolation.”

“Which is?”

“Every nation in the world is facing the same problem. You are worried about a comparative handful of short-range missiles — think how the Russians and the Americans and the others must be feeling.” Rasch had acquired an air of dreamy, philosophical calm which Abram found infuriating.

“And what about you, Dr. Rasch?” he said. “Aren’t you worried too?”

“Worried, General, worried?” Rasch stared out through the window to where the desert was shimmering in the day’s still-growing heat. “If you have time to listen, I’ll explain how these scientific trivialities — as you term them — are going to affect the future of humanity.”

He began to speak in a thin, strangely wistful monotone. And, as he listened, General Abram discovered the real meaning of fear…

On almost any clear night on Ridgeway Street, especially if there was a moon, an open window could be seen at the top of the highest house.

People out late sometimes saw a pale blur moving in the oblong of darkness and knew they had caught Willy Lucas watching them. And Willy, his pimply fuzz-covered face twisted with panic, would lunge back from the window, afraid of being seen.

The women who lived opposite often thought Willy was trying to spy into their bedrooms, and had had him punished by complaining to his brother. But Willy was not interested in the tight-lipped, bleak-eyed housewives of Ridgeway Street, nor even in the strange and alluring females who sometimes walked near him in dreams.

The truth was that Willy enjoyed looking out across the silent town when all others had gone to sleep. It was, for those treasured hours, as though they had died and left him alone, and there was nobody to shout or look at him with exasperation…

When the first of the meteors began to fall Willy was at his post high in the tall, narrow building. Quivering with excitement, he snatched up his old mother-of-pearl opera glasses, stolen from Cooney’s junk store on the corner, and focused them into the dark bowl of the sky. Each time he saw a meteor, its transient brilliance limned with prismatic color by the damaged optical system of his glasses, formless and disturbing thoughts stirred in his mind. With the alert instincts of one not altogether at home in the normal pattern of existence, he realized that the fugitive motes of light carried a special message just for him — but what could it be?

Willy watched until near dawn, crouched in the freezing darkness of the little attic, then he closed the window and went to bed.

When he woke up and came down for lunch the grocery store at the front of the house was crowded. His two older sisters, Ada and Emily, were too busy to come back and prepare a meal for him so Willy made sandwiches with mashed banana thickly spread with marmalade.

As he munched in silent abstraction he hardly saw the pages of the book he was leafing through, or heard the sliding rumble of potatoes being weighed in the store. For, just as in the Bible, it had come to him in his sleep — the awful, heart-stilling significance of the falling stars.

He felt uplifted at having been chosen as the instrument whereby the message would be spread throughout the world, but there was also a vast responsibility. Willy had never in his life carried even the smallest shred of responsibility, and he was uncertain about his own capabilities — especially in a matter of such importance. He drifted around the dark, shabby house all day, trying to think of a way to discharge his God-given obligations, but was unable to decide on any worthwhile plan.

At dusk, his brother Joe came home from his job in the town’s gas plant, and was angry because Willy had not whitewashed the yard. Willy paid little attention to him, accepting the furious words meekly, while his mind sought dimly for a way in which to honor God’s trust.

That night the meteor display was even more brilliant than before, and Willy began to feel an unaccustomed sense of urgency, almost a feeling of guilt that he had done nothing about spreading the Word. He began to worry, and when Willy was absentminded it effectively reduced him to a state of imbecility. Once while mooning around the store he knocked over a basket of tomatoes, and another time dropped a crate of empty Coca-Cola bottles on the tiled floor.

Another night of teeming brilliance had passed before the idea came to him. It was a miserable little idea, he realized — achieving some degree of objectivity — but no doubt God understood the limitations of His chosen instrument better than did Willy himself.

Once he understood what he had to do, Willy became impatient to get on with his work. Instead of drifting off to sleep after his nightly vigil, be hurried downstairs and out to the back yard in search of woodworking tools. Joe was standing at the stove, already dressed in stained brown overalls, gulping tea. He looked up at Willy with his usual expression of dismayed hatred.

“Willy,” he said tersely. “If you don’t get the whitewashing done today, I’ll do the job myself, and you’ll be the brush.”

“Yes, Joe.”

“I’m warning you for the last time, Willy. We’re all sick of you not even lifting a finger to pay for your keep.”

“Yes, Joe.”

“You lie in bed all night and half the day too.”

“Yes, Joe.”

Willy stared down into his brother’s square, competent face and was tempted to reveal just how fortunate it had been for Joe, Ada, Emily and everyone else in the world that he had not been lying in bed all night. Thanks to his vigilance they had all gained a little time. But he decided against saying anything too soon, and went on out to the yard.

The work proved more difficult than Willy had anticipated, one of the first snags being the scarcity of suitable materials. He wasted some time pawing through the heap of rain-blackened lumber at the end of the yard, hurting his fingers on its slippery solidity, covering his clothes with mossy green smears and flecks of orange-red fungus. Finally he realized there was nothing for him in the pile, and went into the outhouse which Ada and Emily used as a storeroom.

Near the door was a large plywood packing case filled with paper bags and squares of brown paper for wrapping vegetables. He began lifting the contents out carefully but the blocks of paper were unexpectedly weighty and hard to control with his numb fingers. They kept falling to the ground and bursting apart. Willy endured the inanimate perversity for as long as he could, then he upended the packing case, releasing a pulpy avalanche which slithered out to the muddy concrete of the yard.

It doesn’t matter much now, he thought.

Even when he had the packing case torn apart, the job refused to go well. The thin plywood kept splintering or reverting to separate laminations when he tried to cut it, and nail-heads continually passed right through it. He worked on determinedly, not pausing to eat or even to dash the sweat from his fuzz-covered face, until by late afternoon he had completed a shaky structure which roughly matched his requirements.

Pangs of hunger were twisting his stomach, but he had been lucky that neither Ada nor Emily had poked her bespectacled face through the back door all day, and he decided to press on with his task. He found a can of red paint and a brush, and went to work with them, occasionally moaning softly as he gave the job all the concentration of which his mind was capable.

It was past five by the time he had finished and — since he had to let the paint dry, anyway — he decided to clean himself up and get something to eat. He loped up the dark stairs, washed his face and feverishly changed into his Sunday suit, which seemed appropriate for the occasion. Satisfying himself that there was still some daylight left, Willy ran back down to the ground floor, panting with eagerness.

In the narrow passage behind the store he collided with the blocky figure of Joe, who had just come in from work.

“Well?” Joe’s voice was taut with suppressed anger. “Have you done it?”

Willy stared down at him, aghast. He had completely forgotten the whitewashing. “Ah… There wasn’t time. I been busy.”

“I thought so.” Joe caught hold of Willy’s lapels and pushed him towards the rear of the house, using all his adult strength. “Get that job done right now, or I’ll kill you, Willy. I’ll kill you!”

Joe opened the back door, threw Willy out into the yard and slammed the door behind him. Willy looked around helplessly for a moment, eyes brimming with tears, then he ran to the shed and got the covered bucket of whitewash and a broad brush. He attacked the job ferociously, splashing the bubbling liquid onto the old uneven bricks in long curving strokes, heedless of his clothes. An hour later the walls were all coated and Willy, aching and blistered, set the bucket aside. At that precise moment, the door opened and Joe came out.

“I’m sorry I was so rough on you, Willy.” Joe sounded tired. “You’d better come in and have something to eat.”

“I don’t want nothing,” Willy replied.

“Look, I said I was sorry…” Joe’s voice trailed away as he noticed the scurf of trampled paper around the outhouse door. Then his gaze reached the object Willy had spent all day building, and his jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

“Stay away!”

Willy felt a pang of alarm as he assessed Joe’s reaction to what he had seen, and knew that the way ahead was not going to be easy. He brushed Joe aside and ran towards his creation. Joe grappled with him but Willy, filled with divine anger, hurled him aside with one arm. From the corner of his eye he saw Joe tumble into the pile of lumber, and he felt a surge of triumphant conviction. He lifted the flimsy structure, placed it over his shoulders and strode purposefully into the house. Women shoppers screamed as he burst out into the store on his way to the street. Willy was only dimly aware of the screams, or of the startled gray faces of his sisters behind the counter. For the first time in his life, he had a real place in the world, with something important to do, and nothing was going to stop him.

He was also only dimly aware of the futile sound of brakes as he thrust his way out onto the street, of the automobile’s slewing rush, of the bone-crushing impact. And a few seconds later he was aware of nothing at all.

People rushing to view the accident trampled unseeingly over the boards which Willy had so laboriously constructed. None of them read the crudely printed words:

“. . but,” General Abram was saying, “if all this is true it means…”

Dr. Rasch nodded dreamily. “That is correct, General. It means the end of the world.”