Bob Shaw - The Two Timers

“Does this sound like Reader’s Digest stuff to you?”

Jack Breton nodded.

“I thought it might, but even you — although you can’t admit it — have begun to realize the truth of what I’ve been saying. Where is the happiness you thought the Time B world held for you, Jack? Has it all worked out the way you expected?”

Breton hesitated only momentarily, glancing across at John Breton. “It’s working out. I have a problem with Kate, but that’s a personal matter

“Wrong!” Breton Senior’s single eye gleamed like a beacon. “There’s another reason you must return to your own probability world. If you don’t, it means — quite simply — that you will have destroyed two universes!”

The words had a strangely familiar ring to Jack Breton, as though he had heard them long ago, in a forgotten dream. His first instinct was to scream a denial, but some part of his mind had known for a long time… that the sky was his enemy. He felt his knees begin to swim.

“Go on,” he said faintly.

“On what level do you want it?”

“The most basic.”

“All right. As you’ll remember from your intensive study of electrical phenomena, you decided that the basic problem in building a chronomotive device was the abrogation of Kirchoff’s laws. You had a special interest in the second law and the fact that the algebraic sum of the electromotive forces in any closed circuit or mesh is equal to the algebraic sum of the products of the resistance of each portion of — “

“You’ll have to make it more basic,” Jack Breton interrupted. “I can’t think.”

“Very well — my time’s running out, anyway. We’ll move on to the law of conservation of energy and mass. The universe is an absolutely closed system, and has to obey the principal that the sum of its mass and energy must remain constant. Until you left the Time A universe it contained all the mass and energy that it had ever possessed or ever would possess.” Breton Senior had begun to speak more quickly.

“But you, Jack, are a creature of mass and energy, and in leaving the Time A universe you created a loss where no loss could possibly be sustained. And in entering the Time B universe you created a gain, an overload on the space-time fabric. Imbalances like that can be maintained only for brief periods…”

“So that’s it,” John Breton said softly, coming into the conversation for the first time. “That’s what’s been going on — the changes in the gravitic constant, the meteors, all the rest of it.” He stared at Jack in startled speculation. “It did start that night you showed up. I remember it now. I even saw a couple of meteors when Gordon and Miriam were driving off. And that was the night Carl called up and said — “

“My time here is almost finished,” Breton Senior cut in. He had slumped sideways on the bench and his voice had shrunk to an agonized whisper. “Jack, the longer you remain outside your own universe, the more certainly you will set up the growing imbalances which will destroy both time-streams. You must return — now.”

“I still don’t understand this.” Jack Breton took a deep breath and tried forcing his brain into action. “You say that by remaining here I’ll destroy the universe, yet you, apparently, have come back to this point in time — from the future you say doesn’t exist.”

“How big of a jump do you think I made?”

“I don’t know.” Jack Breton began to feel afraid.

“Twenty years? Thirty years?” Breton Senior pressed.

“Something like that.”

“It was just over four years.

“But…” Jack was aghast, and he noticed the shock register on John’s face too.

“I’m four years older than you are.” Breton Senior made an obvious effort to rally his strength. “But I see that you still haven’t grasped the situation fully. It’s my fault for not making it clearer, but I assumed you would understand…

“Don’t you see, Jack? I am what you will become if you murder your Time B self and live on in this time-stream with Kate. I went through with it, just as you were about to do when I got here, and I got away with it.

“Got away with it!” Breton Senior laughed, in a way that Jack Breton had never heard anyone Laugh before, then he went on speaking — but not to either of the men present — his broken phases sketching in the lineaments of the face of Armageddon.

As the bonds of gravity were slackened, the planets stole away from their parent sun, seeking new orbits commensurate with the altered balance of gravitic and radial forces. But they did not move quickly enough, for the Sun came after them like a demented mother intent on the slaughter of her own children. Bloated, swelling with the nuclear pus of her own dissolution, she bombarded her offspring with unimaginable quantities of lethal radiation.

Breton Senior existed four years in a world which had become an arena for two different forms of death, each struggling for the maximum share of humanity’s carcass. The ancient decimators of famine and plague warred with new competitors — epidemic cancer and epidemic non-viable mutation.

When Kate succumbed to a nameless disease, he discovered within himself something which had been absent since his first trip back through time — the chronomotive potential, which in others was known as remorse. He began to build a new chronomotor and, even though hampered by the loss of a diseased eye, finished it in a matter of weeks. His intention was to persuade Breton A to go back into his own time-stream, thus restoring universal balance before it was too late.

If he was successful, the B time-stream leading to the death of the universe would still continue on its accelerating downwards course — nothing could be done about that — but it would also produce an offshoot stream. This would be a modified Time B probability world in which Kate and John Breton could live out their lives in peace.

The rewards, as far as Breton Senior was concerned, would be philosophical rather than practical — for the cold equations of chronomotive physics dictated that if he tried to enjoy that world his presence there would destroy it. But, having seen what he had seen, he was prepared to settle for the knowledge that the other world existed, somewhere, somewhen.

At first, when arranging the jump, he planned to take a rifle and make sure that Jack Breton returned to his own universe — just as, in that remote earlier life, he had ejected Spiedel from the land of the living.

But that would have been the easy way, and he had done with killing.

If he could not influence Jack Breton by reason alone, then he would die with the awful burden of knowing that he had taken every other living creature in the universe with him…

As he listened, Jack Breton felt the insupportable weight of two universes transferred to his own shoulders. His grotesque older self’s descriptions of the agony and horror that lay in this time-stream’s future struck deeply into Jack’s soul and body; he felt a wrenching sickness growing in his stomach, chilling sweat covering him. His own private universe was crumbling about him, and he wanted to deny it, to shout “No!” as though that would change things.

But Breton Senior stood waiting before him, a Dorian Grey image of his past and his future.

Shuddering, he threw the pistol aside and ran forward, grasping Breton Senior’s hand.

“All right — I’ll go back,” he whispered. “You can let go now. I promise.”

Breton Senior hesitated, judging; but then, perhaps realizing he had no more time, he said:

“Thanks.”

The vibrations of the single word were still in the air when Breton Senior had vanished. Jack Breton found himself staring at the workbench through empty space. He turned helplessly and looked at John Breton, whose face had become ashen with shock. They experienced a moment of pure understanding which had nothing to do with telepathy.