Bob Shaw: The Two Timers

“It’s a good machine, that’s all,” Breton replied. “I like good machines. Oh, I forgot — it isn’t working.”

“Why not?”

“I dropped the bolt one day and I think it jammed the pin.”

“Uh-huh.” Convery removed the rifle’s bolt, examined it, smelt the breech, peered through the barrel at a table lamp, then handed the weapon back to the patrolman. “That the only rifle you own?”

“Yes. Look, Lieutenant, this has gone on long enough. Why are you here?” Breton hesitated. “Has anything happened to my wife?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Convery’s blue eyes roved Breton’s face. “Your wife is all right. She was foolish enough to walk through the park tonight, without company, and a man attacked her — but she’s all right.”

“I don’t understand. How… how can she be all right if she was attacked?”

“Well, she was very lucky, Mr. Breton. Another man, who incidentally looked like you, stepped out from behind a tree and blew the attacker’s head off with a rifle.”

“What? You don’t think… Where’s the man now?”

Convery smiled. “We don’t know that, as yet. He seems to have vanished…”

A sense of aching vastness, shifting of perspectives and parallax, unthinkable transitions in which the curvatures of space-time writhe between negative and positive, and infinity yawns at the mid-point — numinous, illusory, poignant…

“Look at that guy drink,” Gordon Palfrey was saying. “He’s really going into orbit tonight.”

The others turned to look at Breton, who — desperately needing time to reorient himself — smiled wanly and sat down in a deep armchair. He noticed a speculative look in Kate’s eyes and wondered if there was any way for a casual observer to detect that he had been blacked out. An analyst called Fusciardi had, after an unsatisfactory investigation, assured him the lapses were unnoticeable, but Breton had found it difficult to believe because the trips often occupied several hours of subjective time. Fusciardi’s explanation was that Breton had an unusual, but not unique, capacity for flashes of absolute recall occupying only split seconds of objective time. He had even suggested referring the case to a university psychological team, but at that point Breton had lost interest.

Breton relaxed further into the big old chair, enjoying the comfort of its sane solidity. That particular episode was cropping up more often lately and he found it depressing, even though Fusciardi had warned him that key scenes in his life — especially those involving emotional stress — would be most liable for reclamation. Tonight’s trip had been unusually long, and its impact increased by the fact that he had had so little warning. There had been none of the visual disturbances which Fusciardi had told him were commonly the prelude to a migraine attack in other people.

Chilled by his brush with the past, Breton tried to increase his hold on the present, but Kate and the Palfreys were still absorbed in the unusual sample of automatic writing. He listened for a moment as they went through the ritual of trying to identify the author, then allowed his mind to drift in a warm alcoholic haze. A lot seemed to have happened in an evening which had started off in an atmosphere of distilled dullness. I should have stayed in the office with Carl, he thought. The Blundell Cement Company survey had to be com pleted in less than a week, and had been going slowly even before the unlikely twenty milligal discrepancies in the gravimeter readings showed up. Perhaps they had not been corrected properly. Carl was good, but there were so many factors to be considered in gravity surveying — sun and moon positions, tidal movements, elastic deformation of the Earth’s crust, etc. Anybody could make a mistake, even Carl. And anybody could send or receive an anonymous phone call. I was crazy to imagine all those specially engineered connotations — I was caught off balance, that’s all. The call was a psychological banana skin and nothing more. Good phrase, that… and the whiskey’s good too. Even the Palfreys are all right if you look at them the right way — especially Miriam. Nice figure. Too bad that she had to let her whole life be influenced by the fact she was born with that Hollywood Inca M.G.M. Ancient Egyptian priestess face. If she looked like Elizabeth Taylor she could come around here every night… Or even Robert Taylor…

Feeling himself borne up on a malty cloud of benevolence, Breton tuned in again on the conversation across the room and heard Kate say something about Oscar Wilde.

“Not again,” he protested mildly. “Not Oscar Wilde again!”

Kate ignored him and Miriam smiled her sculptured smile, but Gordon Pa]frey was in the mood to talk.

“We aren’t saying that Oscar Wilde communicated these words, John. But somebody did — and the style of some of the stuff is identical to that of Wilde’s early prose — “

“His early prose,” Breton interrupted. “That’s the point. Let’s see — Wilde died about 1900, right? And this is 1981 — so in eighty-one years on the other side, or beyond the veil, or whatever you spiritualists call it, not only has he failed to develop as a writer, but has even slipped back to his undergraduate phase.”

“Yes, but — “

“And it isn’t lack of practice, because according to what I’ve read in those books you lent Kate he’s been a favorite with automatic writers since his death. Wilde must be the only author in history whose output went up after he was buried.” Breton laughed, pleased at finding himself in that pleasant transient state of drunkenness in which he always felt able to think and talk twice as fast as when sober.

“You’re assuming a one-to-one correspondence between this and any other plane of existence,” Palfrey said. “But it need not be like that.”

“It mustn’t be. From the data you have about the next plane, it seems to be peopled by writers who have no paper or pencils, and who spend their time telepathically projecting drivel down into our plane. And, somehow, Oscar Wilde has become the stakhanovite — possibly as a punishment for writing De Profundis.

Palfrey smiled patiently. “But we’re not saying that these…”

“Don’t argue with him,” Kate said. “That’s what he wants. John’s a professional atheist, and he’s starting to talk too much anyway.” She shot him a look of scorn but overdid it, making herself look like a little girl for one fleeting second. What an unlikely emotion, Breton thought, to cause rejuvenation.

“She’s right,” he said. “The whole structure of my belief crumbled when I was a kid — the first crack was the discovery that F.W. Woolworth was not a local businessman.”

Kate lit a cigarette. “He’s had ten whiskies. He always pulls that joke when he’s had ten.”

And you always pull that one about the ten drinks, Breton thought. You humorless bitch — trying to make me sound like a booze-operated robot. But he remained jovial and talkative, although aware that it was a reaction against the trauma of his trip. He managed to preserve his good spirits right through the coffee and sandwiches stage, and accompanied Kate to the door as she escorted the visitors out to their car.

It was a crisp night in late October, and winter constellations were beginning to climb up beyond the eastern horizon, a reminder that snow would soon come marching down from Canada. Feeling warm and relaxed, Breton lounged in the doorway, smoking his last cigarette of the day while Kate talked to the Palfreys in the car. Two meteorites burned briefly in the sky as he smoked — Journey’s end, he thought, welcome to Earth — and finally the car moved off, crunching and spanging in the gravel while its headlights raked through the elms along the drive. Kate waved goodbye and came back into the house, shivering slightly. Breton attempted to put an ann around her as she passed him in the doorway, but she kept walking determinedly, and he remembered his earlier waspishness. The post mortem still had to be held in the small hours, while the bedroom curtains breathed gently in sleep.