Bob Shaw - The Two Timers

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.