The Two Timers

VIII

A full day had passed before Jack Breton’s consternation over the fragment of poetry began to abate.

He had questioned Kate about it as closely as he dared and, when he learned how it had been written, pretended a sympathetic interest in automatic writing. Kate had seemed pleased and flattered at his support, and had explained in detail everything she knew about Miriam Pa]frey’s powers.

Becoming more and more uneasy, Breton had examined hundreds of samples of the automatic writing and learned that the piece of verse was the only thing of its kind Miriam had ever produced. Furthermore, she had done it within hours of his arrival in the Time B world — which would hardly be a coincidence. The only answer his mind could produce, no matter how he juggled the facts, was telepathy — and the last thing he wanted was somebody reading his mind.

On the following morning his guess, wild as it had seemed, was confirmed in an unexpected manner. The apparent breakdown in John Breton’s relationship with Kate had accelerated visibly since Jack’s arrival. He had become more withdrawn, more caustic when he did speak of her, obviously in the throes of assessing his whole life. And, as if to assert his claim to an independent existence in his own universe, he constantly patrolled the house with a radio tucked in the crook of his arm, turning it to full volume at every news broadcast.

The newscasts he overheard told one part of Jack Breton’s mind that some very unusual events were taking place, but he was too deeply involved in working out his own personal destiny to pay much attention to stories of scientific curiosities. Had he not been weighing up his plans in the light of the fact that Miriam Palfrey appeared to have snatched something right out of his mind, he would not have absorbed the news that telepathy experiments in several universities had suddenly begun to yield dramatic results. The information served to demote Miriam from the status of an inexplicable menace to that of the other background phenomena.

Strangely, Jack Breton found no deterioration in his relationship with his other self. The big house was filled with almost-tangible currents of emotion as John and Kate maneuvered endlessly, each waiting for the other to break the stasis which had descended on them. But at odd moments Jack discovered himself in a calm backwater in which he and John could talk like twin brothers who had not met in a long time. He also discovered, and was mildly surprised, that John’s memory of their common boyhood was much more detailed and complete than his own. Several times he argued with John about the authenticity of some detail until the relevant compartment of his mind seemed to open suddenly, admitting the varicolored stains of memory, and he realized John had been right.

A tentative explanation reached by Jack was that memories were reinforced by repetition of the act of recall — and, at some time during the past nine years, John Breton had begun to live in the past. Some dissatisfaction with the shape of his life in the Time B world had led him to draw on the stored comforts of a bygone era.

Even in the short time he had been in the house Jack had noticed John’s obsessive interest in old movies, the way in which he invariably compared people to the old-time actors and actresses. Photographs of Thirties-style cars with their tiny vertical windshields were hung around the basement workshop. (“I’d love to drive one of those myopic old things,” John had said. “Can’t you smell the dust in those big cloth-covered seats?”) And when he had lifted himself clear of the past, he avoided the human realities of the present, sinking his mind into the engineering and commercial disciplines of running the Breton Consultancy.

Jack Breton received the up-to-date details of the business gratefully — he was going to need all available information when the time came for him to take over. It also gave him the opportunity to establish one fact which was vital to his plan…

“Gravimetric surveying has become impossible, of course,” John was saying after lunch. “The Bureau of Standards came right out and said it this morning — the force of gravity is decreasing. It always did fluctuate, and I’m willing to bet we’re simply on the downward slope of a more massive variation than usual, but all the same, it’s funny the news broadcasts don’t make more of it. I mean, there’s nothing more basic than gravity. Perhaps there’s been a clamp-down of some kind.”

“I doubt it,” Jack said absently, thinking of Kate upstairs in the same house, perhaps in the bedroom adjusting her plumage.

“At least my gravimeters are all right. Carl and I were worried. Did you have him in your setup? Carl Tougher?”

“Yes. Hetty and he took over the business.” Kate might be moving naked through the guilty afternoon twilight of closed blinds.

“It wouldn’t have mattered too much about the gravimeters, luckily. There was a time when a gravimeter, a theodolite and a couple of ex-Army Dumpy levels were just about all the capital equipment I had. That was before I started accepting bore-hole contracts and some large-bore work.”

Jack’s interest was suddenly aroused. “How about these new non-physical drills? The matter disrupter gadgets? Do you use those?”

“Got three of them,” John replied warmly. “We use them for all the large-bore drilling. Carl doesn’t like them because they don’t have a coring facility, but they’re fast and clean. You can sink a two-foot hole through any kind of strata, and it all comes up as micro-dust.”

“I’ve never seen one in action,” Jack said with deliberate wistfulness. “Are there any sites close to town?”

“The nearest is about twenty miles north of here on the main route to Silverstream.” John sounded doubtful. “I don’t see how you could get out there, though. People are going to start wondering if they see two of us walking around.”

“But that situation’s going to be corrected soon.”

“Is it?” John Breton was instantly suspicious, and Jack wondered if he had any inkling of the fate planned for him.

“Of course,” he said quickly. “You and Kate are bound to reach a decision any time now. In fact, I don’t see what’s taking you so long. Why don’t you admit that you’re sick to death of each other, and get it over with?”

“Has Kate said anything to you?”

“No,” Jack replied cautiously, not wanting to precipitate a crisis before he was completely ready to handle it.

“Well — anytime she works up the nerve to say what she’s thinking, I’ll be ready to hear her out.” A look of schoolboyish truculence passed over John’s square face, and Jack realized his own instincts had been right all along. No man would ever willingly give up a prize like Kate. The only solution to the triangle problem lay in two pieces of machinery — the pistol hidden upstairs in his room, and the matter disrupter drill along the Silverstream highway.

“Is it important for you to get Kate to make the first move?”

“If you don’t analyze me, I won’t analyze you,” John said significantly.

Jack smiled at him, calmly. The reference to analysis made him think of John’s body converted to micro-dust, completely anonymous, defying any kind of investigation.

When John had returned to the office, Jack waited hungrily for Kate to come downstairs to him, but she appeared dressed in a tweed suit with tied belt and a high fur collar.

“Going out?” He tried to mask his disappointment.

“Shopping,” she said in a businesslike voice which hurt him in some obscure fashion.

“Don’t go.

“But we still have to eat.” Her voice carried what he recognized as a trace of antagonism, and he suddenly realized she had been virtually avoiding him since their single physical encounter. The idea that she might be feeling guilt — and associating him with it — filled Breton with an unreasoning panic.

“John’s talking about pulling out.” He was unable to prevent himself blurting the lie like a love-sick adolescent, in spite of his awareness of the need to prepare her mind for John’s disappearance more carefully than he had ever done anything in his entire life. Kate hesitated between him and the door. The down on her cheekbones caught the light like frost, and he seemed to see the mortuary drawer supporting her on its efficient cantilever. He became afraid.

“John’s entitled to leave if he wants,” she said finally, and went out. A minute later he heard her MG booming in the garage. He waited at the window to see her go by, but the car was fitted with its hardtop and Kate’s face was an impersonal blur behind the chiseled sky-fragments of the windows.

Breton turned away from the window, suddenly filled with a sense of outrage. Both his creations — the people he had brought into being as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings, putting breath into inert clay — had lived independently of him for nine years. Now, in spite of what they had learned, they were insisting on pursuing their courses, ignoring him when necessary, leaving him alone in a house where he hated to be alone. Breton moved with clenched fists through the silences of the empty rooms. He had been prepared to wait a week, but things had changed and were still doing so. It would be necessary to act more quickly, more decisively.

From a rear window he glimpsed the silvery dome of the observatory beyond the beech trees, and felt a grudging curiosity about its construction. Right from the moment of his arrival there had been a tacit, instinctive agreement that nobody outside the house should get any clue about the existence of the two Bretons — so he could not justify going outside. But the rear garden was well shielded from the neighboring houses, and it would take him only a few seconds to reach the observatory and get inside.

He went down into the kitchen, peered through the curtained door and went out onto the roofed patio. The lemon-tinted sunlight of an October afternoon streamed through the trees in slowly merging beams, and from the distance came the patient, regular sound of a lawn mower. Breton walked towards the observatory.

“Ho there! Not working today?”

Breton spun as the voice came from behind him. The speaker was a tall, fit-looking man of about forty who had just come around the side of the house. He was dressed in neat sport clothes, worn the way other men wear business suits, and his tightly-waved hair was grayed at the temples. His face was broad and sunburned, with a tiny nose which made scarcely any division between widely-spaced blue eyes.

Breton experienced a thrill of almost superstitious dread as he recognized Lieutenant Convery — the man who, in another time-stream, had come to tell him of Kate’s death — but he remained in perfect control of his reactions.

“Not today,” he said, smiling. “A man has to relax every now and then.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way, John.”

“But I do, I do — I don’t make a habit of it, that’s all.” Breton noticed the other man’s use of his Christian name, and tried unsuccessfully to think of Convery’s. This is incredible, he thought. How can a man have such bad luck?

Convery smiled, showing very white teeth made even more brilliant in places by slight fluoride mottling. “I’m glad to hear you don’t work all the time, John — it makes me feel less of a slob.”

John again, Breton thought. I can’t call him Lieutenant if we’re on first-name terms. “Well, what brings you out this way?”

“Nothing much — a couple of routine calls in the area.” Convery reached into his pocket. “So I brought this.” He brought out a brown pebble-like object and handed it to Breton.

“Oh, yes.” Breton inspected the object, noting its segmented, spiral construction. “Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. My boy got it from another kid at school. I told him I’d get you to…” He let his voice trail away, and stood waiting.

Breton stared down at the coiled stone, mind racing desperately. He remembered Kate saying that Convery sometimes called to drink coffee with John and talk about fossils. Presumably this was because John had some professional knowledge of geology. Did it include fossils? He tried to send his mind back more than nine years to the time when he too had been interested in the rock-embalmed time travelers.

“This is a reasonably fair ammonite,” he said, praying that Convery merely wanted a simple identification.

Convery nodded. “Age?”

“About two hundred and fifty million years — hard to say for sure without knowing where it was found.”

“Thanks.” Convery took the fossil back and dropped it in his pocket. His intelligent blue eyes flickered momentarily and Breton suddenly knew that his relationship with the other Breton was a complex and uneasy thing. “Say, John?”

“Uh-huh?” Why, Breton wondered, did he insist on using the first name so much?

“You’re losing some weight, aren’t you?”

“It’s nice of you to notice it. A fellow can get discouraged if he goes on dieting for weeks without any obvious result.”

“I’d say you’ve lost seven or eight pounds.”

“That’s about right — and I really feel better for it.”

“I think you looked better the way you were, John,” Convery said thoughtfully. “You look tired.”

“I am tired — that’s why I took the afternoon off.” Breton laughed, and Convery joined in.

Breton remembered the coffee. “Do you feel like risking a cup of coffee brewed with my own hand? Kate’s out shopping.”

“Where’s Mrs. Fitz?”

Breton’s mind went numb, then be recalled that Mrs. Fitz was the cook-housekeeper. “We gave her a few days off,” he said easily. “She has to rest too, you know.”

“I guess I’ll just have to risk your coffee then, John.”

Convery pushed open the kitchen door and ushered Breton inside. While Breton was preparing the coffee he considered the problem of the fact that they were supposed to know each other’s preferences about cream and sugar, and circumvented it by setting both on the kitchen table in advance. He found the familiar domestic activity relaxing, realizing he had been needlessly alarmed over Convery’s visit. Kate had said the policeman sometimes dropped by to talk about fossils and drink coffee — and that was exactly what was happening. Even if Kate were to return right then there would be nothing to arouse Convery’s curiosity, and John Breton was not expected for at least three hours.

Breton took his coffee black and so hot that flat gray films of vapor crazed its surface. Convery took cream but no sugar, and sipped it with evident appreciation. While he drank he raised the subject of the meteor bombardments which were turning the night skies into firework displays. Pleased at finding the conversation turning to something which placed him on an equal footing with any other inhabitant of the Time B universe, Breton discussed the meteors willingly.

“Back to work,” Convery said when he had finished his second cup. “Us minions of the law aren’t supposed to laze around like this.” He stood up and carried his cup and saucer over to the sink unit.

“That’s life,” Breton said uninspiredly.

He said goodbye to Convery in the patio and went back into the house, filled with a heady sense of satisfaction. There was now nothing to stop him going ahead with his plan to step into John Breton’s shoes. The one point about which he had been uncertain was his ability to meet people who knew John and be with them for extended periods without arousing suspicious or, at least, curiosity. But he had carried off the encounter with Lieutenant Convery well, extremely well, and could see that there was nothing to be gained by delaying things any further — especially since Kate’s emotional reactions were showing signs of becoming complicated.

Jack Breton went upstairs to the guest bedroom, took the pistol from its hiding place deep in a closet, and laid the cool, oily metal against his lips.