Bob Shaw - The Two Timers

“Don’t look at me like that.” Kate’s voice was taut with anger. “You’re the man around this house — if you don’t like Jack being here why don’t you do something positive about it?”

“Positive? You’re the one that’s in a position to do something positive — he said so himself. All you’ve to do is tell him to leave because you would prefer to go on living with me. What could be easier?”

“You seem to be trying to make it difficult,” Kate said slowly. “Are you doing it deliberately?”

“Very good, Kate,” John commented, abruptly recovering his composure. “I like the way you turned that one around. Very neat.”

Kate’s lips moved soundlessly as she raised a bottle-green coffee cup to her mouth, shooting him one of her exaggerated, schoolgirl looks of scorn over the rim. What an unlikely emotion, Jack thought, to cause rejuvenation.

John Breton pushed his food away and got to his feet. “Sorry to break this up, but somebody around here has to work.”

“You aren’t going to the office!” Kate sounded shocked.

“I’ve got to — besides, you two will have lots to talk about.”

Jack concealed his amazement at the other man’s seeming indifference to how near he was to losing Kate. “Do you have to go? Why not let Hetty handle things for a few days?”

John frowned. “Hetty? Hetty who?”

“Hetty Calder, of course.” Cool vapors of unease swirled momentarily in Jack’s chest as he saw the perplexed look on John’s face. This was supposed to be a duplicate world, perfect in every detail. How could John Breton have any difficulty in placing Hetty Calder?

“Oh, Hetty! It’s been so long, I’d almost forgotten. She’s been dead for seven or eight years.”

“How…?”

“Lung cancer, I think it was.”

“But I saw her just a week or so ago. She was all right — and still smoking two packs a day.”

“Perhaps she changed her brand in your world.” John shrugged casually, and in that instant Jack hated him.

“Isn’t that strange?” Kate spoke in a child’s wondering voice. “To think that funny little woman’s alive, somewhere, going about her business and not knowing we’ve already attended her funeral, not knowing she’s really dead.”

Jack Breton experienced an urge to correct Kate, but was unable to find any suitable grounds. If Kate was really alive, then Hetty was really dead — it was all part of the deal. He sipped hot coffee, surprised at the strength of the regrets conjured up by the memory of Hetty’s homely, capable face breathing through its centrally-mounted cigarette.

“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.