The Two Timers

The incredible realization fountained through him, bringing the first involuntary movement of his limbs. He brought his hands up under his shoulders and pressed hard against the ground. The process of getting to his feet was an extended one, involving getting his arms to raise his body, resting on his heels, then grimly forcing his legs to accept weight. He unslung the rifle, put it under his coat and began to walk. There was nobody near the three elm trees, but this was not surprising. The man he had shot would have been found and taken away eight years earlier, and as for Kate — she must be at the house. A woman’s place is in the home, he thought inanely as he began to run, swaying grotesquely as his knees orbited at every step. His wild elation lasted until he was close to the park’s entrance, and could see the milk-white globes on their twin pillars. Until a thought ended it.

But, a voice suddenly whispered, if Kate’s at home — why are you out in the park with a rifle?

If she’s alive — how can you remember her funeral?

Later, while sanity still lingered, he drove past house. The new owners had not yet moved in, and the FOR SALE sign was still standing in the garden, reflecting stray beams from the street lights. Breton experienced a yearning impulse to go into the house and make sure, but instead he pressed down hard on the gas pedal. The old Buick faltered for a moment, then surged away down the quiet avenue. There were lights in all the other houses.

Breton drove to a bar on the city’s north side, right on the edge of the prairie, where tumbleweeds sometimes came nuzzling at the door like hungry dogs. Seated at the long bar, he ordered a whiskey — his first since the nightmare binge of eight years earlier — and stared into its amber infinities. Why had he not deduced what was bound to happen? Why had his mind gone so far along its lonely road, only to stop short of the final, obvious step?

He had gone back in time, he had shot a man — but nothing was going to alter the reality of Kate’s death. Breton dipped a finger in the whiskey and drew a straight line on the smooth plastic of the bar top. He stared at it for a moment, then added another line forking out from the first. If the first line represented the stream of time as he knew it, and in which nothing had changed, then the few seconds he had wrested from the past had taken place on the divergent line. When his brief moment of death- dealing was over, he had snapped back to the present in his own time-stream. Instead of bringing Kate back to life in his own line he had prevented her death in the divergent track.

Breton took another sip from his glass, trying to assimilate the idea that somewhere Kate was alive. He looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Kate might be in bed, or having a last cup of coffee with her husband — the other Jack Breton. For Breton’s trip into the past had, when it set up a new time-stream, created another universe in its entirety, complete with a duplicate of himself. That other universe would have its own cities, lands and oceans, planets and stars, receding galaxies — but none of these things were important beside the fact that he had bought Kate another life, only to have her share it with another man. And it was wrong to say that the other man was himself, because an individual is the sum of his experiences, and that other Breton had not looked on Kate’s dead face, endured the guilt, or surrendered eight years of his life to the monomania which had recreated Kate Breton.

The forked line he had drawn on the bar was fading away into the air. Breton stared at it somberly. He had a feeling he had used up something inside himself, that he would never again be able to summon up the vast chronomotive potential which had hurled him back through the barriers of time. But supposing…

He wet his finger again, made a fresh dot to mark the present on the line representing the main timestream, and matched it with a similar dot on the divergent line. After a moment’s thought, he drew a heavy lateral stroke connecting the two.

Suddenly he understood why the deeply-buried but ever-watchful part of his mind that controlled these things had allowed him to continue on the path he had chosen eight years earlier. He had defied time itself to create another Kate, and that was a far greater task than the one which lay before him now.

All he had to do was reach her.

IV

It was long past midnight before Jack Breton stopped talking, but he knew they were just about convinced.

Somewhere along the way John Breton and Kate had begun to believe him — which was why it was so important to go carefully, not risk losing their trust. This far, everything he had told them had been true, but now the lies would begin and he had to avoid falling into his own trap. He sat back in the deep chair and looked at Kate. There had been almost no physical change in the past nine years, except for her eyes, and the way in which she had acquired conscious control of her own beauty.

“This must be a trick,” Kate said tensely, not wanting to surrender normalcy without a fight. “Everybody has a double somewhere.”

“How do you know?” Both Bretons spoke at once, in perfect synchronization, and glanced at each other while Kate seemed to grow pale, as though the coincidence had proved something to her.

“Well, I read it…”

“Kate’s a student of the funny papers,” John interrupted. “If a thing happens independently to Superman and Dick Tracy, then it must be true. It stands to reason.”

“Don’t speak to her like that,” Jack said evenly, suppressing sudden anger at his other self’s attitude. “It isn’t an easy thing to swallow first time around without proof. You should know that, John.”

“Proof?” Kate was immediately interested. “What proof can there be?”

“Fingerprints, for one thing,” Jack said, “but that calls for equipment. Memories are easier. I told John something that nobody else in the world knows.”

“I see. Then I ought to be able to test you the same way?”

“Yes.” His voice was shaded with sudden doubt.

“All right. John and I went to Lake Louise for our honeymoon. On the day we left there, we went to an Indian souvenir place and bought some rugs.”

“Of course we did,” Jack replied, laying the faintest stress on the pronoun. “That’s one of them over by the window.”

“But there was more. The old woman who ran the store gave me something else, free of charge, because we were on our honeymoon. What was it?” Kate’s face was intent.

“I…” Jack floundered, wondering what had gone wrong. She had beaten him, effortlessly. “I can’t remember — but that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Doesn’t it?” Kate stared at him triumphantly. “Doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” John Breton put in. “I can’t remember that episode either, honey. I don’t remember that old stick giving us anything.” He sounded regretful.

“John!” Kate turned to him. “That tiny pair of moccasins — for a baby.”

“I still don’t remember. I’ve never seen them around.”

“We never had a baby, did we?”

“That’s the advantage of family planning.” John Breton smirked drunkenly into his glass. “You don’t have any family.”

“Your jokes,” Kate said bitterly. “Your indestructible, polyeurethane jokes.”

Jack listened with a peculiar sense of dismay. He had created these two people as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings and breathed life into handfuls of clay, yet they had lived independently. For nine years, he thought, with an indefinable feeling of having been cheated. He fingered the oily metal of the pistol in his pocket.

John Breton flicked the rim of his empty glass, making silvery ringing sounds. “The point is that we know this man is telling the truth. I can see myself sitting over there; you can see me sitting over there. Look at that tie clip he’s wearing — I’ll bet it’s that gold wire one you made at that jewelry class you went to before we were married. Is it… Jack?”

Jack Breton nodded. He opened the worn clip and reached it across to Kate. She hesitated, then took it from