The Two Timers

III

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, 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 speculative 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.

“I’m Lieutenant Convery. Homicide. Do you mind if I come in?”

“No,” Breton said dully. He led the way into the living room, and had to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a nervous housewife.

“I don’t quite know how to break this to you, 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 is it, Lieutenant?”

“It’s about your wife. It appears she was walking in the park tonight, without company — and she was attacked.”

“Attacked?” Breton felt his knees begin to swim. “But where is she now? Is she all right?”

Convery shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Breton. She’s dead.”

Breton sank down into a chair while the universe heaved and contracted around him like the chambers of a vast heart suddenly exposed. I did it, he thought, I killed my wife. He was dimly aware of the second detective taking Convery to one side and whispering to him. A few seconds later Convery returned.

“My partner reminds me I’ve jumped the gun a bit, Mr. Breton. Officially, I should have said that the body of a woman had been found with identification on it which suggested she was your wife, but in a clear-cut case I don’t like prolonging things. Just for the record, have you any reason to believe that the body of a woman of about twenty-five, tall, black-and-gold hair, wearing a silver-blue cocktail dress, we found near the 50th Avenue entrance of the city park, would not have been that of Mrs. Breton?”

“No reason. She was out alone this evening, dressed like that.” Breton closed his eyes. I did it — I killed my wife. “I let her go alone.”

“We still have to make a positive identification; if you like, one of the patrolmen will drive you to the morgue.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Breton said. “I can do that much.”

The refrigerated drawer rolled out easily on oiled bearings, forming an efficient cantilever, and a stray thought intruded determinedly on Breton’s mind. A good machine. He looked down at Kate’s cold, dreaming face, and at the jewels of moisture curving precisely along her eyebrows. Of its own accord, his right hand moved out to touch her. He saw the blackness of oil rimming the fingernails, and willed his hand to stop. Thou hast not a stain on thee.

Lieutenant Convery moved into a corner of his field of vision, close at hand yet light-years away across a universe of pulsating fluorescent brilliance, “Is this your wife?”

“Who else?” Breton said numbly. “Who else?”

An indeterminate time later he learned Kate had been clubbed, raped and stabbed. A forensic expert added that they could not be sure of the order in which those things had happened. Breton contained the knowledge of his guilt successfully for a matter of days, while going through senseless formalities, but all the while he knew he was a bomb in which the charge had already ignited, that he was living through the nanoseconds preceding his disintegration into human shrapnel.

It came, with the spurious gentleness of a filmed explosion, on the day after Kate’s funeral. He was walking aimlessly through the city’s north side, along a street of time-defeated buildings. The day was cold and, although there was no rain, the sidewalks were wet. Near an undistinguished corner he found a clean, new feather and picked it up. It was striped pearly gray and white — dropped by a bird in haste — and he remembered how Kate had worn her clothes like plumage. He looked for a windowsill on which to set the feather, like a single lost glove, and saw a man in shabby denims smiling at him from a doorway. Breton let the feather fall, twinkling and tumbling, onto the greasy concrete and covered it with his foot.

His next action to be guided by his own identity came five weeks later, when he opened his eyes in a hospital bed.

The intervening time was not completely lost to him, but it was flawed and distorted like a scene viewed through pebbled glass. He had been drinking hard, annihilating self-awareness with raw spirit, contracting the frontiers of consciousness. And somewhere in the midst of that kaleidoscope world was born an idea which, to his fevered mind, had all the simplicity of genius.

Psychopathic killers were hard to find, the police had told him. They could not hold out much hope in a case like this. A woman who goes into the park at night alone, they seemed to be saying, what did she expect?

Breton had found himself uneasy in their presence, and decided the dismaying thing about the police mentality was that dealing so much with criminals made them aware of another system of morality. Without sympathizing with it, they nevertheless came to understand to some extent, and the needle of their moral compass was deflected. Not their direction — because so long as the amount of bias is known it is still possible to steer — but this, he deduced, was why he felt like a player who did not understand the rules of the game. This was why he was looked at with resentment when he asked what results they were getting — and at some point early in the last weeks he decided to invent new rules.

Kate’s murderer had not been seen and, as he had no circumstantial motive for the killing, there was nothing to link him physically to the crime. But, Breton reasoned, there was another kind of connection. Breton had no way of knowing the killer — but the killer must know him. The case had been well covered by the local papers and television services, both of which had carried Breton’s picture. It would be impossible for the killer not to have shown interest in the man whose life he had so savagely twisted. And, for a time, Breton came to believe that if he encountered the killer on the street, in the park, in a bar, he would know that man by his eyes.

The city was not large, and it was possible that in his lifetime he had, at one time or another, glimpsed every man in it. Obviously, he had to get into the streets and keep moving, going everywhere that people went, making a rapid playback of a lifetime’s exposure to the city’s corporate identity — and someday he would look into another man’s eyes, and he would know. And when that happened…

The mirage of hope glimmered crazily in front of Breton for five weeks, until it was finally extinguished by malnutrition and alcoholic poisoning.

He opened his eyes and knew by some quality of the light on the hospital ceiling that there was snow on the ground outside. An unfamiliar emptiness was gnawing at his stomach and he experienced a sane, practical desire for a dish of thick farmhouse soup. Sitting up in the bed he looked around him and discovered he was in a private room, which was barely rescued from complete anonymity by several sprays of deep-red roses. He recognized the favorite flowers of his secretary, Hetty Calder, and there was a vague memory swirl of her long homely face looking down at him with concern. Breton smiled briefly. In the past, Hetty had almost visibly lost weight every time he got a head cold — he hesitated to think how she might have been affected by his performance over the recent weeks. The desire for food returned with greater force and he reached for the call button.

It was Hetty who, five days later, drove him home from the hospital in his own car.

“Listen, Jack,” she said desperately. “You’ve just got to come and stay with us for a while. Harry and I would be delighted to have you, and with you not having any family of your own…”

“I’ll be fine, Hetty,” Breton said. “Thanks again for the offer, but it’s time I went back home and began gathering up the pieces.”

“But will you be all right?” Hetty was driving expertly through the slush-walled streets, handling the big old car as if she were a man, blowing through her cigarette every now and again to send a flaky cylinder of ash onto the floor. Her sallow face was heavy with anxiety.

“I’ll be all right,” he said gratefully. “I can think about Kate now. It hurts like hell, of course, but at least I’m able to accept it. I wasn’t able to do that before. It’s hard to explain, but I had a feeling there ought to be some government office I could go to — a sort of Department of Death — and explain that there’d been a mistake. That Kate couldn’t die… I’m talking nonsense, Hetty.”

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 frustrated 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:

“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…”

And after five years:

“The monthly check from Hetty arrived today. It was larger than usual, making it possible for me to clear my account at the Clermont Scientific Company — which was a relief. I have no wish to impair my credit rating with them at this stage, although I still have the house in reserve and its capital value has appreciated considerably. (What a good idea it was for me to assign formal control of my business to Hetty and that new man Tougher. My only worry is a nagging suspicion that she sometimes augments my check with money of her own.)

“There is some cause for excitement today. My work has finally passed from the investigatory to the constructively experimental stage. I could have reached this point sooner but for following several false trails. All of them were suggested by Dr. Garnet at the migraine clinic, and I am glad my association with that organization is coming to an end. Prodromal symptoms and cerebral blood flow, response to various drugs, metabolism of the amines — red herrings, the lot of them. (As far as my work is concerned, anyway. I must not be too unkind to Garnet.)

“To think that my big breakthrough came as a result of using a badly designed screwdriver!

“I don’t know what prompted me to withdraw the fluid from that huge blister on the palm of my right hand, unless it was that I had been thinking a lot about the possible use of hemicranial pain as a trigger mechanism to augment chronomotive impulses. Work at the clinic had established that a substance called kinin was produced in the region of the head arteries during migraine attacks in people not fortunate enough to be afflicted with hemicrania sine dolore.

“Blister fluid itself does not cause pain, but I have proved that when it is withdrawn and put in contact with glass it develops kinin, which — when put into the blister again — certainly does cause pain. By injecting kinin at the first onset of teichopsia heralding my last three trips I was able to experience genuine hemicrania, and — for the first time — I heard those three elm trees moving in the wind!

“That phase of my work is now complete, and I now am faced with the problem of effecting the temporal displacement of a considerable physical mass, i.e. my own body. Vast amplification of neural impulses will be required, and I have an uneasy premonition I may have to look for some loophole in Kirchoff’s Laws.

“However, I am in a mood of supreme confidence. I must calm down, though, in case I precipitate another trip. Excitement is a traditional trigger factor in hemicrania. Somewhere I have a note of a comment by the French patriot Dr. Edward Liveing who, in 1873, said — ‘We all know that it is not everyone who can with impunity, do himself the pleasure of assisting at certain theatrical representations where the glory of France is daily celebrated with noise and smoke…’ “

And after a further three years:

“Abrogation of Kirchoff’s Laws was almost easier than I had expected — consideration of the fourth dimension makes so many things possible — but I had seriously underestimated the expense. The sale of the house and furniture raised only a fraction of the money I needed. Fortunately, I was able to persuade Hetty and Carl Tougher to void our agreement of the last eight years in favor of an outright sale. They are worried about me, especially Hetty, but I think I have convinced them of both my sanity and my physical well-being. Hetty has got noticeably older, though, and she smokes too much.

“Kate, my darling, this is the last time I will address you through the medium of this notebook. The time is not too distant, however, when we shall be able to turn its pages together. Until then, my love, until then…”

Breton waited till dusk before he went to the park.

He stopped the now-aged blue Buick several hundred yards from the 50th Avenue entrance and spent a few minutes checking over the equipment. The hat came first. It was lying on the rear seat, looking very much like any other slightly shabby hat, except that occasional flickers of orange light escaped from under its brim. He picked it up, positioned it carefully on his head and spent some time connecting the leads which projected down from the sweat band to others which emerged from under his shirt collar. When the connections were completed, he turned up the collar of his raincoat and moved his limbs experimentally. The network of wires taped to his body dragged painfully at his skin, but he had what amounted to complete freedom of movement.

Breton turned his attention to the rifle. When moving his personal belongings out of the house he had found the weapon lying in the basement cupboard, coated in white dust, and had brought it to his newly rented apartment on the east side. On checking it over, he had discovered the firing pin was jammed — the result of some forgotten accident — and had paid a gunsmith to put it right. The slim lines of the rifle were marred by the bulk of the infrared sight he had added for use in darkness. Breton filled the ammunition clip with cool brass cylinders from his pocket, latched it onto the rifle and bolted the first cartridge up into the breech. There was a possibility he would get as little as two seconds to find his mark, aim and fire — and he did not want to waste any of his meager ration of time.

He sat motionless for a few minutes, waiting for the immediate vicinity to empty of pedestrians. It was almost a week since his last trip, and he could feel that the time was right. His veins were coursing with excitement — one of the basic hemicranial trigger factors — and the electrical activity in his brain was higher than normal, producing a kind of taut exultation. The almost psychedelic change in perception, familiar to migraine sufferers as the first symptom of a new onslaught, was influencing his awareness, ringing everyday objects with a halo of imminence — sadness, lurking peril, intoxication. As soon as the block was clear, Breton got out of the car, withdrew the rifle and closed his raincoat around it, grasping the stock through the slit pocket. Night breezes tugged at him from many directions, exploring his form like blind men’s fingers while he walked awkwardly with the concealed burden.

As he neared the 50th Avenue entrance, the first visual disturbances began. A fugitive glimmer of light trembled in the field of his right eye and slowly spread, exhibiting its prismatic complexities. Breton was reminded of a swarm of water beetles, tumbling on each other, splitting sunlight with the movement of their oily bronze backs. He was glad it was not the falling black star; the fortification figures took longer to develop, giving him more time.

Breton went into the park and headed towards its center along paths on which dry fallen leaves rolled with metallic crackles. A few people, mostly couples, were sitting on benches near the lighted paths, but he veered away across the grassy central area and was swallowed by the anonymous darkness in a matter of seconds. He brought the rifle out from under his coat and self-consciously raised it to his face to check the infrared scope, but his right eye was dazzled with marching colors and he remembered he had no choice other than to trust his previous zeroing-in work. The blanket of living brilliance was nearing its maximum when he found the three elms.

He went to within thirty yards of the triangular group, twisted his left arm through the rifle’s broad leather sling and dropped down on one knee in the classical marksman’s position. The damp earth made an oval patch of coldness on his leg. I must be crazy, he thought, but he could hear himself whispering Kate’s name over and over again. He touched the brim of his hat and a low humming sound came from it as the high-efficiency batteries strapped to his body began delivering power. Simultaneously, the hypodermic gun built into the circuit fired a cloud of kinin into the shaven patch above his right temple. He felt its icy sting, then agony coiled languorously through his head as the chemical spread in the cerebral arteries. Breton noted abstractedly that there were no people about — all his painstaking work to produce an arrangement which would not attract too much attention had been quite unnecessary — then the sheet of prismatic geometries began to shrink, abruptly. It was time.

“Kate!” he screamed. “Kate!”

She was moving uncertainly through the darkness, her pale blue dress A black shape moved from under the ragged archway of the elm trees, keening unhappily, like a loathsome bird of prey. It closed with Kate, arms upraised, and she sobbed once with fear. Breton put the thick crosshairs onto the black silhouette, but his finger hesitated on the trigger. Their bodies were close together — suppose the bullet passed right through both? He raised his left arm a fraction and fired instinctively as the crosshairs intersected fleetingly on the head. The rifle jarred against his shoulder, and the dark head was no longer a head…

Breton lay for a long time with his face pressed down into a microcosm of grassy roots. Under his left hand the rifle barrel grew warm from the single shot, then cooled again, and still he was unable to move. He was in the grip of an exhaustion so intense that each thought required eons of dogged effort to drive it through to completion. How long, he wondered, have I been lying here? The fear that somebody would come along and find him lying there nagged at him incessantly, gradually reaching a thundering urgency, but he might as well have been trapped in a dead body.

His mind, too, felt different. Pressures had been relieved, potentials had been discharged by the fantastic cerebral orgasm of the trip. The big trip. He had made it — the thought brought a flicker of satisfaction — eight years of continuous work had had their brief reward. He had breasted the implacable river of time and —

Kate!

The incredible realization fountained through him, bringing the first involuntary movement of his limbs. He brought his hands up under his shoulders and pressed hard against the ground. The process of getting to his feet was an extended one, involving getting his arms to raise his body, resting on his heels, then grimly forcing his legs to accept weight. He unslung the rifle, put it under his coat and began to walk. There was nobody near the three elm trees, but this was not surprising. The man he had shot would have been found and taken away eight years earlier, and as for Kate — she must be at the house. A woman’s place is in the home, he thought inanely as he began to run, swaying grotesquely as his knees orbited at every step. His wild elation lasted until he was close to the park’s entrance, and could see the milk-white globes on their twin pillars. Until a thought ended it.

But, a voice suddenly whispered, if Kate’s at home — why are you out in the park with a rifle?

If she’s alive — how can you remember her funeral?

Later, while sanity still lingered, he drove past house. The new owners had not yet moved in, and the FOR SALE sign was still standing in the garden, reflecting stray beams from the street lights. Breton experienced a yearning impulse to go into the house and make sure, but instead he pressed down hard on the gas pedal. The old Buick faltered for a moment, then surged away down the quiet avenue. There were lights in all the other houses.

Breton drove to a bar on the city’s north side, right on the edge of the prairie, where tumbleweeds sometimes came nuzzling at the door like hungry dogs. Seated at the long bar, he ordered a whiskey — his first since the nightmare binge of eight years earlier — and stared into its amber infinities. Why had he not deduced what was bound to happen? Why had his mind gone so far along its lonely road, only to stop short of the final, obvious step?

He had gone back in time, he had shot a man — but nothing was going to alter the reality of Kate’s death. Breton dipped a finger in the whiskey and drew a straight line on the smooth plastic of the bar top. He stared at it for a moment, then added another line forking out from the first. If the first line represented the stream of time as he knew it, and in which nothing had changed, then the few seconds he had wrested from the past had taken place on the divergent line. When his brief moment of death-dealing was over, he had snapped back to the present in his own time-stream. Instead of bringing Kate back to life in his own line he had prevented her death in the divergent track.

Breton took another sip from his glass, trying to assimilate the idea that somewhere Kate was alive. He looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Kate might be in bed, or having a last cup of coffee with her husband — the other Jack Breton. For Breton’s trip into the past had, when it set up a new time-stream, created another universe in its entirety, complete with a duplicate of himself. That other universe would have its own cities, lands and oceans, planets and stars, receding galaxies — but none of these things were important beside the fact that he had bought Kate another life, only to have her share it with another man. And it was wrong to say that the other man was himself, because an individual is the sum of his experiences, and that other Breton had not looked on Kate’s dead face, endured the guilt, or surrendered eight years of his life to the monomania which had recreated Kate Breton.

The forked line he had drawn on the bar was fading away into the air. Breton stared at it somberly. He had a feeling he had used up something inside himself, that he would never again be able to summon up the vast chronomotive potential which had hurled him back through the barriers of time. But supposing…

He wet his finger again, made a fresh dot to mark the present on the line representing the main timestream, and matched it with a similar dot on the divergent line. After a moment’s thought, he drew a heavy lateral stroke connecting the two.

Suddenly he understood why the deeply-buried but ever-watchful part of his mind that controlled these things had allowed him to continue on the path he had chosen eight years earlier. He had defied time itself to create another Kate, and that was a far greater task than the one which lay before him now.

All he had to do was reach her.