Bob Shaw - The Two Timers

“All right,” Jack said placatingly. “How do you feel about probability travel?”

“Are you telling me you’re from another present? From another time-stream?”

“Yes, John.”

“But, why? If it were true, what would bring you here?” John Breton raised the glass to his lips, but did not drink. His eyes were thoughtful. “Nine years, you said. Is it anything to do with…?”

“I heard voices, John.” Kate was standing in the doorway. “Who have you got with you? Oh…”

Jack Breton stood up as she entered the room, and the sight of her filled his eyes, just as it had on the last night he had seen her alive, until her image swamped his awareness — three-dftnensional, glowing, perfect. Kate’s gaze met his for an instant, then darted away again, and a single star-shell of pleasure burst in his head.

He had reached her already. Without saying a word, he had reached her.

“John?” Her voice was tremulous, uncertain. “John?”

“You’d better sit down, Kate,” John Breton said in a thin, cold monotone. “I think our friend has a story to tell.”

“Perhaps Kate should have a drink, too,” Jack Breton suggested. “This is likely to take some time.” Kate was watching him with a wariness he found delicious, and he had to work to keep his voice steady. She knows, she knows. While his other self was pouring her a colorless measure, he realized he could be in some danger of making an involuntary trip. He examined his own field of vision and found it clear — no teichopsia, no black star slowly sinking, no fortification phenomena. It appeared safe.

Slowly, carefully, he began marshaling his facts, allowing the past nine years to re-create themselves on the taut canvas of his mind.

Kate was walking away down the street, past blazing store windows. With her silvered wrap drawn tight over the flimsy party dress, and long legs slimmed even further by needle-heeled sandals, she looked like an idealized screen version of a gangster’s moll. The ambient brilliance from the stores projected her solidly into his mind, jewel-sharp, and he saw — with the wonder of a brand-new discovery — the tiny blue vein behind each of her knees. Breton was overwhelmed by a pang of sheer affection.

You can’t let Kate walk through the city at night looking like that, a voice told him urgently, but the alternative was to crawl after her, to knuckle under. He hesitated, then turned in the opposite direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly.

It was almost two hours later when the police cruiser pulled up outside the house.

Breton, who had been standing at the window, ran heavy-footed to the door and dragged it open. There were two detectives, with darkly speculative eyes, and a backdrop of blue uniformed figures.

One of the detectives flashed a badge. “Mr. John Breton?”

Breton nodded, unable to speak. I’m sorry, Kate, he thought, so sorry — come back and we’ll go to the party.

“I’m Lieutenant Convery. Homicide. Do you mind if I come in?”

“No,” Breton said dully. He led the way into the living room, and had to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a nervous housewife.

“I don’t quite know how to break this to you, Mr. Breton,” Convery said slowly. He had a broad, sunburned face and a tiny nose which made scarcely any division between widely spaced blue eyes.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“It’s about your wife. It appears she was walking in the park tonight, without company — and she was attacked.”

“Attacked?” Breton felt his knees begin to swim. “But where is she now? Is she all right?”

Convery shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Breton. She’s dead.”

Breton sank down into a chair while the universe heaved and contracted around him like the chambers of a vast heart suddenly exposed. I did it, he thought, I killed my wife. He was dimly aware of the second detective taking Convery to one side and whispering to him. A few seconds later Convery returned.

“My partner reminds me I’ve jumped the gun a bit, Mr. Breton. Officially, I should have said that the body of a woman had been found with identification on it which suggested she was your wife, but in a clear-cut case I don’t like prolonging things. Just for the record, have you any reason to believe that the body of a woman of about twenty-five, tall, black-and-gold hair, wearing a silver-blue cocktail dress, we found near the 50th Avenue entrance of the city park, would not have been that of Mrs. Breton?”

“No reason. She was out alone this evening, dressed like that.” Breton closed his eyes. I did it — I killed my wife. “I let her go alone.”

“We still have to make a positive identification; if you like, one of the patrolmen will drive you to the morgue.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Breton said. “I can do that much.”

The refrigerated drawer rolled out easily on oiled bearings, forming an efficient cantilever, and a stray thought intruded determinedly on Breton’s mind. A good machine. He looked down at Kate’s cold, dreaming face, and at the jewels of moisture curving precisely along her eyebrows. Of its own accord, his right hand moved out to touch her. He saw the blackness of oil rimming the fingernails, and willed his hand to stop. Thou hast not a stain on thee.

Lieutenant Convery moved into a corner of his field of vision, close at hand yet light-years away across a universe of pulsating fluorescent brilliance, “Is this your wife?”

“Who else?” Breton said numbly. “Who else?”

An indeterminate time later he learned Kate had been clubbed, raped and stabbed. A forensic expert added that they could not be sure of the order in which those things had happened. Breton contained the knowledge of his guilt successfully for a matter of days, while going through senseless formalities, but all the while he knew he was a bomb in which the charge had already ignited, that he was living through the nanoseconds preceding his disintegration into human shrapnel.

It came, with the spurious gentleness of a filmed explosion, on the day after Kate’s funeral. He was walking aimlessly through the city’s north side, along a street of time-defeated buildings. The day was cold and, although there was no rain, the sidewalks were wet. Near an undistinguished corner he found a clean, new feather and picked it up. It was striped pearly gray and white — dropped by a bird in haste — and he remembered how Kate had worn her clothes like plumage. He looked for a windowsill on which to set the feather, like a single lost glove, and saw a man in shabby denims smiling at him from a doorway. Breton let the feather fall, twinkling and tumbling, onto the greasy concrete and covered it with his foot.

His next action to be guided by his own identity came five weeks later, when he opened his eyes in a hospital bed.

The intervening time was not completely lost to him, but it was flawed and distorted like a scene viewed through pebbled glass. He had been drinking hard, annihilating self-awareness with raw spirit, contracting the frontiers of consciousness. And somewhere in the midst of that kaleidoscope world was born an idea which, to his fevered mind, had all the simplicity of genius.

Psychopathic killers were hard to find, the police had told him. They could not hold out much hope in a case like this. A woman who goes into the park at night alone, they seemed to be saying, what did she expect?

Breton had found himself uneasy in their presence, and decided the dismaying thing about the police mentality was that dealing so much with criminals made them aware of another system of morality. Without sympathizing with it, they nevertheless came to understand to some extent, and the needle of their moral compass was deflected. Not their direction — because so long as the amount of bias is known it is still possible to steer — but this, he deduced, was why he felt like a player who did not understand the rules of the game. This was why he was looked at with resentment when he asked what results they were getting — and at some point early in the last weeks he decided to invent new rules.