Bob Shaw: The Two Timers

The prospect alarmed him, yet — in a way — the meteorite had done him a favor. There would be little likelihood of anybody taking note of, or remembering, the movements of one car. He increased his speed slightly to get clear of the area before the traffic began to pile up.

The lodge would have been in darkness when he arrived had it not been for the uneasily shifting brilliance of the aurora in the north, and the manic tracer-fire of meteors carving the night sky into diamond-shaped fragments. Breton got out of the car and walked quickly towards the lodge, pressing one hand on the outside of his jacket pocket to prevent the pistol from jarring against his hip.

In the variable, unnatural light the solid lines of the fishing lodge seemed to shrink, quiver and expand in a kind of plasmatic glee. Once more Breton felt cold and desperately tired. He opened the front door and went into the sentient darkness, some instinct making him take the pistol out of his pocket. At the head of the basement stairs he hesitated before turning on the light.

The blinking, then steadying, glow of the fluorescents revealed John Breton lying on his side in the center of the floor. His stained and dusty clothing gave him the appearance of a dead creature, but his eyes were intelligent, watchful.

“I tried to get away,” he said, almost casually, as Jack went down the stairs. “Nearly cut my hands off.”

He moved as if to try to exhibit his wrists, then his eyes took in the pistol in Jack’s hand.

“Already?” His voice was sad rather than afraid.

Jack realized he had been half-hiding the weapon behind his body. Reluctantly, he brought it into full view.

“Are you going to stand up?”

“There hardly seems much point.” John seemed aware that he had some obscure psychological advantage. “What would it achieve?”

“All right.” Jack released the safety catch on the pistol and aimed it. There was nothing to be gained by wasting time. Nothing in the world.

“Ah, no.” John’s voice was beginning to quaver. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?”

“I have to. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too — for us all.”

“Save the piety for yourself.”

Jack tightened his finger on the trigger, but it seemed to have acquired the stiffness of a hydraulic ram, and the seconds dragged by. John lay still for a moment, then his resolve broke and he began to squirm frantically, trying to put distance between himself and the gun muzzle. His feet scrabbled on the concrete as he worked to back away. Jack braced his gun arm with his left hand, and went after him doggedly. At last the trigger began its stealthy, pre-orgasmic slide.

Suddenly, cool air gusted past Jack Breton.

He turned, almost firing the pistol in panic. A ghostly, transparent object hung in the air a few feet away. Breton’s face contorted with shock as he identified the familiar, terrible, bilobular shape.

A human brain!

As he watched, a corded vertical column materialized beneath the insubstantial brain, followed by cloudly, branching networks of finer lines, until — within the space of a second — it resembled a three-dimensional plastic model of the human nervous system.

There was a further, stronger, gust of cool air. And Jack Breton found himself staring, paralyzed, into the face of another man.

I too must have looked like that, Jack Breton thought, in the first tortured instant. I must have looked like that — once — when I kept that rendezvous by the three trees… a naked brain, materializing there in the darkness, awful, pulsating, loathesome. With the spreading nervous networks reaching downwards, like a racing fungus, until they were clothed by my own flesh. It was one aspect of chronomotion he had never considered — the arrival and its…

The detailed, convergent thought was blotted out by a sudden, jolting awareness of its significance.

“Put the gun away, Jack.”

The stranger spoke in a lifeless monotone which nonetheless conveyed a sense of crushing urgency. He moved closer to Jack Breton, and the overhead tube bathed his face in cold light. Breton’s first impression was that Nature had made a hideous mistake in fashioning this face — it seemed to have only one eye, and two mouths!

As he brought it into visual and intellectual focus, he saw that the face had indeed only one eye. The missing orb had been completely excised, allowing the whole region of the socket to collapse inwards, and no attempt had been made to disguise or cover the loss. The upper and lower lids met each other in a perfect, sardonic little smile, startlingly similar to the one which twisted the stranger’s lips.

Breton received an impression of graying hair that failed to cover patches of diseased scalp, of heavily lined skin, of shabby strangely-styled clothes — but all his attention was riveted on that ghastly second mouth.

“Who…?” He forced the words out. “Who are you?”

The answer came not from the stranger, but from the floor.

“Don’t you recognize him, Jack?” John Breton spoke with a kind of detached reproach. “That’s yourself.”

“No!” Jack Breton stepped back, instinctively raising the pistol. “It isn’t true.”

“But he is.” John sounded revengeful. “This is the one aspect of this whole time travel business in which I’ve got more experience than you, Jack. You never gave me credit for recognizing and accepting you so quickly that first night…”

“Don’t argue!” The stranger interrupted tiredly but authoritatively, like a dying emperor. “I hadn’t realized the two of you would be so like children — and there’s so little time.”

John Breton struggled to his feet. “Are you going to untie me?”

“There isn’t time,” the stranger said, shaking his head. “I will use no violence, and will do nothing which might precipitate violence. I can use only… words.”

“I asked who you are,” Jack Breton said.

“You know who I am.” The stranger sounded even more tired, as though his strength was failing. “When you were planning to cross into this time-stream you labeled yourself Breton A, and John here as Breton B. I have reason to dislike those unemotional tags — so I’ll accept the name of Breton Senior. It is much more appropriate.”

“I could put a bullet through you,” Breton pointed out, almost irrelevantly, in an attempt to subdue the dismay he could feel building up inside him.

“Why bother? You’ve made one trip back through time yourself, and have a good idea of what it does to the nervous system. You must know I can sustain this strain only for a very short period, and then I’ll be sucked back to fill the temporal vacuum I’ve created in my own time.”

Breton nodded, remembering the way he had lain pole-axed in the grass after he had shot Spiedel. And that jump had lasted only a few seconds. He tried to visualize what Breton Senior would go through on his return, but his mind was already a whirling storm of half-formulated questions…

“You were able to make that jump because, combined with your unusual cerebral structure, you had an overpowering need to go back and correct a mistake. But your obsession led you into a vastly greater mistake. A mistake which has two entirely different aspects — one of them personal, one of them universal.” The older man’s voice wavered slightly. He walked to the cluttered workbench and leaned against it. The stillness of his movements reminded Jack Breton of how difficult it had been to walk with the network of wires taped to his skin.

“The personal mistake,” Breton Senior continued, “was in not learning to live with the tragedy of Kate’s death, and living with it includes accepting your share of the responsibility. Tragedies happen to many people, but the measure of their worth in human beings lies in their ability to surmount tragedy and find new meaning for their lives.