Bob Shaw: The Two Timers

“What are you talking about, Gordon?” Miriam Palfrey leaned far back in her chair and her right hand, poised over the block of paper, began to dip and sway like a kite in high wind.

“I was telling Kate and John about old Hamish.”

“Oh, yes — we enjoyed old Hamish.” Miriam’s voice had become a faint monotone which sounded to Breton like an incredibly banal imitation of something from a Bela Lugosi film. Seeing the rapt attention on Kate’s face he decided to launch a full-scale attack in defense of common sense.

“So you enjoyed old Hamish,” he said in an unnaturally loud and cheerful voice. “What a picture that conjures up! I can see old Harnish slumped in a corner of his croft — an empty, dried-up husk, his purpose in life fulfilled — he has been enjoyed by the Palfreys.”

But Kate waved him to silence and Gordon Palfrey, who had been unfolding the velvet square, draped it over Miriam’s upturned face. Immediately, her plumply white hand took up the pen and began to fly across the paper, producing line after line of neat script. Gordon knelt beside the coffee table to steady the writing pad and Kate removed each top sheet as it was filled, handling them with a reverence that Breton found more annoying than any other aspect of the whole business. If his wife wanted to take an interest in so-called automatic writing, why could she not have been more rational about it? He would almost have been prepared to help her investigate the phenomenon himself had she not insisted on putting every sample in the general category of a Message From the Other Side.

“Anybody ready for another drinkie?” Breton stood up and walked to the mirror-backed cocktail cabinet. Drinkie, he thought. Christ! What are they doing to me? He poured himself a generous shot of Scotch, tempered it with soda, and leaned against the cabinet, watching the tableau at the other side of the room. Miriam Palfrey’s body was limp in the chair but her hand was moving as quickly as it was possible to write without the aid of shorthand, producing thirty or more words a minute. The material she turned out was usually flowery, outdated prose on unrelated subjects, with a high proportion of words like Beauty and Love, always written with the initial capital. The Palfreys claimed it was dictated by the spirits of dead authors, whom they tentatively identified on a stylistic basis. Breton had his own ideas, and he had been more shocked than he cared to admit by Kate’s uncritical acceptance of what he regarded as a party trick straight out of a Victorian drawing room.

Sipping steadily at his drink, Breton watched Kate as she gathered up the sheets, numbered the corners and set them in a neat pile. Eleven years of marriage had not made any real physical changes in her — tall and still slim, she wore richly colored silks as though they were natural plumage, reminding Breton of a gorgeous and exotic bird; but her eyes had grown much older. Suburban neurosis, he thought, that must be it. Fragmentation of the family reflected in the individual. Give it a label and forget it. A woman is never completely a wife until all her own family are dead. Amalgamate orphanages and marriage bureaus. I’m drinking too much…

A low gasp of excitement from Kate brought his attention back to the group at the table. Miriam Palfrey’s hand had begun to trace what, at that distance, looked like an intricate circular pattern, like a drawing of a freshly opened carnation. He went closer and saw that she was writing in a tight, slowly spreading spiral, moaning faintly and shuddering as the pattern grew. An edge of the black cloth across her upturned face alternately clung and fluttered, like the breathing apparatus of a marine animal.

“What is it?” Breton asked the question reluctantly, not wishing to show too much interest, but aware that this was something new to the writing sessions. Miriam sat up uncertainly as he spoke, and Gordon Palfrey put an arm around her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Kate said, rotating the sheet in her long-fingered hands. “This is… it’s a poem.

“Well, let’s hear it.” Breton spoke with a tolerant joviality, annoyed at letting himself be sucked in, yet impressed by the sheer manual dexterity Miriam had shown.

Kate cleared her throat and read:

“I have wished for you a thousand nights, While the green-glow hour-hand slowly veers. I could weep for the very need of you, But you wouldn’t taste my tears.”

Breton found the lines vaguely disturbing, for no reason he could name. He went back to the cocktail cabinet and, while the others examined the fragment of poetry, stood frowning down into the mirrored array of bottles and glasses. Sipping the tingling ice-warmth of his drink, he stared back at his own eyes in the crystal microcosm; then — quite suddenly — his mind plumbed the possible significance of the phase “almost exactly nine years.” That was the real kicker in the call he had received, if he guessed right; it was a psychological depth charge, perfectly aimed, fused to sink deep.

It had been nine years earlier, to the month, that a police cruiser had found Kate wandering in the darkness of 50th Avenue, with flecks of human brain tissue spattered across her face…

Breton stiffened with shock as the phone shrilled in the hall. He set his glass down with a sharp double click, left the room and picked up the phone.

“Breton here,” he snapped. “Who’s that?”

“Hello, John. What’s the matter?” This time the voice was immediately identifiable as that of Carl Tougher.

“Carl!” Breton sank onto a chair, and groped for his cigarettes. “Did you call me earlier? Within the last half hour?”

“No — I’ve been too busy.”

“You’re sure?”

“What is this, John? I told you I’ve been too busy — we’re in serious trouble over the Silverstream survey.”

“It doesn’t check out?”

“That’s right. I made a series of eight random readings in our designated area this morning, and checked with a different gravimeter after lunch. As far as I can tell at this point the initial survey we made last month is completely haywire. The new readings are roughly twenty milligals down on what they should be.”

“Twenty! But that would suggest a much lighter rock formation than we thought. It could mean something like — “

“Salt,” Tougher cut in. “Could you interest the client in a salt mine in place of a cement works?”

Breton put a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, wondering why the world had chosen this particular evening to begin drifting out of focus. “Listen, Carl. We can make two interpretations of these discrepancies. The first is the one you’ve already mentioned — that the limestone we know to lie under that site has changed overnight into salt — and, with your support, I’m ruling that one out right now. The other is that somehow both our gravimeters are out of adjustment — right?”

“I guess so,” Tougher said wearily.

“So we rent a couple of new instruments tomorrow and go over the ground again.”

“I thought you’d say that. Do you know how many miles I covered today, John? I feel like I’ve walked clear across the state of Montana.”

“I’ll go with you next time,” Breton replied. “I need the exercise. See you in the morning, Carl.”

“Yeah, see you. Oh, John — you left out the third possible explanation.”

“Which is…?”

“That the force of gravity has lessened since yesterday.”

“Get some rest, Carl — even your jokes are getting tired.” Breton set the phone down and smiled in appreciation of the way in which the little geologist never got depressed or rattled. A telephone crank who picked on Tougher would have ricocheted off a massive shield of sane practicability — yet in this case Tougher was the only suspect Breton had had. His jokes were usually on the locker room level, but there was the time a couple of years earlier when Tougher had spent something like fifteen dollars of his own money in bringing a can of gasoline to work every day and sneaking it into the office janitor’s car. Later Tougher had explained, matter-of-factly, that he had wanted to study the janitor’s reactions when he discovered his car was apparently manufacturing gas instead of using it up. Was that particular hoax on a par with “You have been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years”? Breton was uncertain. He went back along the mustard carpeted hall, automatically touching the wall with his knuckles at every step to prevent any build-up of static in the dry air.