Bob Shaw - The Two Timers

“Ah, hell!”

He exclaimed in disgust as he found himself getting out of the car to walk back to the house. Above him the darkening sky was teeming with meteorites, but they scarcely registered on his brain. The gravel of the drive crunched underfoot as he moved up the shadowed tunnel of shrubbery and along the side, past the porch.

He stepped onto the patio and surveyed the rear of the house. No lights there, either — which was what he had expected. The garage doors were open, showing that John Breton’s Turbo-Lincoln was gone and that Mrs. Breton’s sports model was still there. Obviously, the Bretons had gone out together. Convery flicked his teeth with a thumbnail. He had a definite impression that the Bretons did not go around much together, but there was nothing to stop them spending an evening in each other’s company if they wanted to try it out. There was certainly no law against it — which was not the case where snooping on private property was concerned.

Convery rocked on his heels, undecided, and was turning away when the kitchen door creaked faintly.

He went closer and saw it was ajar and moving slightly in the evening breeze. It swung wide open, emitting a billow of warm air, when he pushed it gingerly with his toe. At last provided with a vestige of a reason for being there, Convery went into the dark kitchen and put on the lights.

“Anybody there?” he shouted, feeling slightly self-conscious.

A frenzy of hammering broke out immediately in the upper part of the house, and he thought he could hear a woman’s cries. Flicking lights on as he went, Convery ran up the stairs and followed the sound to a front bedroom. The hammering was coming from a closet. He tried to open it and discovered unbreakable fishing line lapped around the handles. The steel-hard knots flaked his fingernails away as he tried to open them. He stood back and kicked one of the handles completely off the door. A fraction of a second later, Kate Breton was in his arms, and the arctic exultation was pouring through him as he realized the demon was going to be kind to him after all.

“Mrs. Breton,” he said urgently. “What’s going on here? Who locked you in the closet?”

“Jack Breton,” she said. Her eyes were empty, drained.

“You mean your husband did this?”

“No — not my husband. It was…” She stopped, drew a shuddering breath and he saw awareness flood back into her, subtly altering the lines of her face. Invisible barriers clanged into place between them.

“Tell me what happened, Mrs. Breton.”

“You’ve got to help me, Lieutenant.” She was still afraid, but the period of mindless panic had passed. “I think my husband has been kidnapped. He’s at Lake Pasco. Will you drive me there? Will you drive me to Lake Pasco?”

“But…”

“Have mercy on me, Lieutenant — I’m asking you for my husband!”

“Let’s go,” he said grimly. An opportunity had passed, but he had a feeling that Lake Pasco was the place where he would finally learn to talk with his hands.

In the first part of the journey to the lodge, Breton came near to death several times through trying to take corners in powered drifts which would have been beyond the design limits of a racing jet.

He was well clear of the city before he regained enough control of his right foot to let him lift it off the floor, and the big car slowed its nightmare rush through the darkness. To get killed in a car crash at this stage would be pathetic, he reminded himself, although it would have some interesting consequences. As soon as the activity of his central nervous system came to an end, the chronomotor module embedded in his left wrist would be robbed of its energy source — and his body would vanish back into Time A.

The situation could be even more intriguing if his death was not instantaneous, but occurred in an ambulance rushing him to a hospital. How, he wondered, would the ambulance team even begin to explain the disappearance of one full-size John Doe?

The mental game calmed Breton’s nerves sufficiently to let him think constructively about what had to be done within the next hour. In outline, the schedule of events was simple — kill John Breton, transport his body to the large-bore drilling site, and get rid of it. But there could be practical difficulties. Suppose, for instance, that the drilling operation was running behind its timetable and there was a crew working around the clock…?

Relieved at finding himself a rational being again, Breton began looking for the side road where he had earlier noticed the construction company’s sign. As soon as he began to pay attention to it the road started to seem unfamiliar. He slowed the car even further and scanned the east side of the road, hesitating at every winding side track, until he saw the looming gray-white square of the sign. His headlights picked out the name of the Breton Consultancy in one of the panels allocated to the sub-contractors, and he swung the car off the highway. It waltzed gently along the deep ruts made by heavy construction vehicles, sending dust clouds curling away on each side.

Less than five minutes from the highway the side road petered out into a flat, chewed-up area where earth-moving equipment had been at work. Breton zigzagged the car, its headlights searching through ranges of building materials, until he saw the familiar turret-shaped structures of the boring rigs. There was nobody near them or anywhere else on the machine-scarred site. He wheeled around and drove back to the highway, contented with his return on the few minutes the detour had taken.

As he drove north, he felt his confidence grow stronger. For a time it had seemed as though things were going wrong, as though the Time B world was going to betray its creator, but it had been his own fault. Somehow the days John, Kate and he had spent together had robbed him of his former strength and certainty…

The night sky ahead of the car was suddenly lit up with a pulsing brilliance.

A miniature sun arced across his vision on a descending curve, huge writhing blankets of flame breaking away behind it as it vanished behind a tree-clad ridge less than a mile away. The trees were outlined in the rayed light of an explosion, and then the awful sound of it engulfed the car, paralyzing Breton with primeval fears. A series of diminishing thunderclaps followed the original explosion, dying away into Olympian grumbles and growls, in the air all around.

Breton found himself drenched with sweat, hurtling on through the night in unearthly silence. Several seconds pounded by before his power of reason re-emerged timidly from its cave into the twentieth century and told him he had witnessed a meteorite impact. He swore feebly under his breath and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

The sky, he thought with abrupt, baffled conviction, is my enemy.

He reached the crest of the ridge and far away to his left saw topaz fragments of flame stirring on the sloping grasslands.

Within a matter of minutes the whole area would be overrun with curious sightseers. Breton knew the mentality of the average Montana city-dweller — even a simple brushfire was enough to bring them pouring out of their dessicated houses, ridiculously grateful at having somewhere to go in their brand-new cars, which — big and fast though they were — were unable to perform their function as magic carpets in the face of the prairie vastness.

An event like a meteor strike would draw them in from a hundred miles, and even further when the local radio stations got hold of the news. It meant that on the return journey along this same road, with a dead man in the trunk, he would probably be working his way through heavy traffic. There was a strong possibility that the police would have had to set up traffic control points. Breton got a vision of hard-faced, blue-uniformed men slapping the trunk lid as he crawled by, just as Lieutenant Convery had done the day before.