The Two Timers

IV

It was long past midnight before Jack Breton stopped talking, but he knew they were just about convinced.

Somewhere along the way John Breton and Kate had begun to believe him — which was why it was so important to go carefully, not risk losing their trust. This far, everything he had told them had been true, but now the lies would begin and he had to avoid falling into his own trap. He sat back in the deep chair and looked at Kate. There had been almost no physical change in the past nine years, except for her eyes, and the way in which she had acquired conscious control of her own beauty.

“This must be a trick,” Kate said tensely, not wanting to surrender normalcy without a fight. “Everybody has a double somewhere.”

“How do you know?” Both Bretons spoke at once, in perfect synchronization, and glanced at each other while Kate seemed to grow pale, as though the coincidence had proved something to her.

“Well, I read it…”

“Kate’s a student of the funny papers,” John interrupted. “If a thing happens independently to Superman and Dick Tracy, then it must be true. It stands to reason.”

“Don’t speak to her like that,” Jack said evenly, suppressing sudden anger at his other self’s attitude. “It isn’t an easy thing to swallow first time around without proof. You should know that, John.”

“Proof?” Kate was immediately interested. “What proof can there be?”

“Fingerprints, for one thing,” Jack said, “but that calls for equipment. Memories are easier. I told John something that nobody else in the world knows.”

“I see. Then I ought to be able to test you the same way?”

“Yes.” His voice was shaded with sudden doubt.

“All right. John and I went to Lake Louise for our honeymoon. On the day we left there, we went to an Indian souvenir place and bought some rugs.”

“Of course we did,” Jack replied, laying the faintest stress on the pronoun. “That’s one of them over by the window.”

“But there was more. The old woman who ran the store gave me something else, free of charge, because we were on our honeymoon. What was it?” Kate’s face was intent.

“I…” Jack floundered, wondering what had gone wrong. She had beaten him, effortlessly. “I can’t remember — but that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Doesn’t it?” Kate stared at him triumphantly. “Doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” John Breton put in. “I can’t remember that episode either, honey. I don’t remember that old stick giving us anything.” He sounded regretful.

“John!” Kate turned to him. “That tiny pair of moccasins — for a baby.”

“I still don’t remember. I’ve never seen them around.”

“We never had a baby, did we?”

“That’s the advantage of family planning.” John Breton smirked drunkenly into his glass. “You don’t have any family.”

“Your jokes,” Kate said bitterly. “Your indestructible, polyeurethane jokes.”

Jack listened with a peculiar sense of dismay. He had created these two people as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings and breathed life into handfuls of clay, yet they had lived independently. For nine years, he thought, with an indefinable feeling of having been cheated. He fingered the oily metal of the pistol in his pocket.

John Breton flicked the rim of his empty glass, making silvery ringing sounds. “The point is that we know this man is telling the truth. I can see myself sitting over there; you can see me sitting over there. Look at that tie clip he’s wearing — I’ll bet it’s that gold wire one you made at that jewelry class you went to before we were married. Is it… Jack?”

Jack Breton nodded. He opened the worn clip and reached it across to Kate. She hesitated, then took it from him in such a way that their hands did not touch. Her eyes narrowed with a look of incongruous professionalism as she held the clip up to the light and a pang of affection checked his breathing. She stood up abruptly and left the room, leaving the two men facing each other across an open hearth with its dying, whitening logs.

“There’s more to tell, isn’t there?” John Breton sounded carefully casual.

“Yes. It took another year to modify the chronomotor to make it possible for me to travel across time. There’s a negligible amount of power involved, but the demand is continuous, I think that to get here I had to travel back in time for perhaps a millionth of a second — which is, of course, just as ‘impossible’ as going back for a year — thus causing a kind of temporal ricochet into — “

“That’s not what I mean,” John cut in. “I’m asking you what your plans are. What happens next?”

“Well, what do you think ought to happen? As I told you earlier tonight — you’re living here with my wife, and I want her back.” Jack Breton watched his other self carefully, and saw that his reaction was surprisingly small.

“But Kate is my wife. You told us yourself that you let your wife go out and get murdered.”

“And so did you, John. But it was I who gave up nine years to finding a way to go back and correct your mistake. Don’t forget that, old friend.”

John Breton’s mouth tightened obstinately. “There’s something terrible wrong with your reasoning there, but I still want to know what happens next. Have you got a gun in your pocket?”

“Of course not,” Jack said quickly. “I couldn’t think of shooting you, John. It’d be like shooting myself.” He paused, listening to the sound of Kate upstairs opening and slamming drawers. “No, we have an eternal triangle here, and the only reasonable way to resolve it is for the lady concerned to choose one corner or the other.”

“Some choice!”

“But it is a real choice, John. Nine years have changed us both. We’re two different men, each with a claim on Kate. I want to stay here for a week or so, to let her get used to the idea, and then…”

“You’re crazy! You can’t just move in on us like that!”

John Breton’s sudden anger surprised Jack. “But why not? It seems a reasonable proposition to me.”

“Reasonable! You appear out of the blue..

“I appeared out of the blue once before, and Kate was glad of it then,” Jack interrupted. “Maybe I still have something to offer her. You two don’t seem to be hitting it off too well.”

“That’s our business.”

“I agree — yours and Kate’s and mine. Our business, John.”

John Breton jumped to his feet, but Kate came into the room before he could speak. He turned his back to her and began kicking the burnt-out logs, sending topaz sparks twisting up into the darkness of the chimney.

“I found it,” Kate said quietly. She held out both hands, showing an identical gold tie clip in each. “They are the same, John. And I know my own work.”

“How do you like that?” John Breton spoke bitterly to the colored stones of the fireplace. “The tie clip convinced her. Anybody could rustle up a good facsimile of me — that meant nothing — but she knew nobody could reproduce a complicated thing like her Goddam tie clip.”

“This is no time to be childish.” Kate stared at John’s back, wasting one of her exaggerated looks of scorn on it.

“We’re all tired,” Jack said. “I could use some sleep.”

Kate hesitantly crossed the room towards him, holding out his clip. Their fingers touched momentarily as he took it, swamping him with a fierce yearning to wrap his arms around her achingly familiar body with its taut, horizontally wrinkled silks. Their eyes met and locked for an instant, forming an invisible axis around which the rest of the universe seemed to seethe like clouds in a whirlwind. Before she turned away, he thought he glimpsed in her face all the compassion and forgiveness he had needed so desperately for the past nine years.

Later, he stood at the window of the guest room, listening to the old house settling down for what was left of the night. One week, he thought. That’s how long I’m prepared to wait. By that time I should be able to step into John Breton’s shoes without anyone — apart from Kate — being able to tell the difference.

As he was turning away from the window, the night sky was suddenly splintered into starry fragments by a shower of criss-crossing meteors. He got into bed and tried to sleep, but he found himself watching — with a strange uneasiness — for further shooting stars.

Finally, he got up, pulled the drapes and allowed himself to sink into the warm, black ocean of sleep.