The Two Timers

him in such a way that their hands did not touch. Her eyes narrowed with a look of incongruous professionalism as she held the clip up to the light and a pang of affection checked his breathing. She stood up abruptly and left the room, leaving the two men facing each other across an open hearth with its dying, whitening logs.

“There’s more to tell, isn’t there?” John Breton sounded carefully casual.

“Yes. It took another year to modify the chronomotor to make it possible for me to travel across time. There’s a negligible amount of power involved, but the demand is continuous, I think that to get here I had to travel back in time for perhaps a millionth of a second — which is, of course, just as ‘impossible’ as going back for a year — thus causing a kind of temporal ricochet into — “

“That’s not what I mean,” John cut in. “I’m asking you what your plans are. What happens next?”

“Well, what do you think ought to happen? As I told you earlier tonight — you’re living here with my wife, and I want her back.” Jack Breton watched his other self carefully, and saw that his reaction was surprisingly small.

“But Kate is my wife. You told us yourself that you let your wife go out and get murdered.”

“And so did you, John. But it was I who gave up nine years to finding a way to go back and correct your mistake. Don’t forget that, old friend.”

John Breton’s mouth tightened obstinately. “There’s something terrible wrong with your reasoning there, but I still want to know what happens next. Have you got a gun in your pocket?”

“Of course not,” Jack said quickly. “I couldn’t think of shooting you, John. It’d be like shooting myself.” He paused, listening to the sound of Kate upstairs opening and slamming drawers. “No, we have an eternal triangle here, and the only reasonable way to resolve it is for the lady concerned to choose one corner or the other.”

“Some choice!”

“But it is a real choice, John. Nine years have changed us both. We’re two different men, each with a claim on Kate. I want to stay here for a week or so, to let her get used to the idea, and then…”

“You’re crazy! You can’t just move in on us like that!”

John Breton’s sudden anger surprised Jack. “But why not? It seems a reasonable proposition to me.”

“Reasonable! You appear out of the blue..

“I appeared out of the blue once before, and Kate was glad of it then,” Jack interrupted. “Maybe I still have something to offer her. You two don’t seem to be hitting it off too well.”

“That’s our business.”

“I agree — yours and Kate’s and mine. Our business, John.”

John Breton jumped to his feet, but Kate came into the room before he could speak. He turned his back to her and began kicking the burnt-out logs, sending topaz sparks twisting up into the darkness of the chimney.

“I found it,” Kate said quietly. She held out both hands, showing an identical gold tie clip in each. “They are the same, John. And I know my own work.”

“How do you like that?” John Breton spoke bitterly to the colored stones of the fireplace. “The tie clip convinced her. Anybody could rustle up a good facsimile of me — that meant nothing — but she knew nobody could reproduce a complicated thing like her Goddam tie clip.”

“This is no time to be childish.” Kate stared at John’s back, wasting one of her exaggerated looks of scorn on it.

“We’re all tired,” Jack said. “I could use some sleep.”

Kate hesitantly crossed the room towards him, holding out his clip. Their fingers touched momentarily as he took it, swamping him with a fierce yearning to wrap his arms around her achingly familiar body with its taut, horizontally wrinkled silks. Their eyes met and locked for an instant, forming an invisible axis around which the rest of the universe seemed to seethe like clouds in a whirlwind. Before she turned away, he thought he glimpsed in her face all the compassion and forgiveness he had needed so desperately for the past nine years.

Later, he stood at the window of the guest room, listening to the old house settling down for what was left of the night. One week, he thought. That’s how long I’m prepared to wait. By that time I should be able to step into John Breton’s shoes without anyone — apart from Kate — being able to tell the difference.

As he was turning away from the window, the night sky was suddenly splintered into starry fragments by a shower of criss-crossing meteors. He got into bed and tried to sleep, but he found himself watching — with a strange uneasiness — for further shooting stars.

Finally, he got up, pulled the drapes and allowed himself to sink into the warm, black ocean of sleep.

V

John Breton opened his eyes slowly and stared through dim amber light, waiting — with a kind of pleasant terror — for the onrushing tides of identity to return to him. (There’s a rectangle of pale luminosity: what is it? Bedroom window in dim light? Some unfamiliar aspect of disembodied soul? Movie screen? Extra-dimensional doorway?) He was sometimes convinced that each night’s sleep brought a dissolving of personality, and that its accurate reformation in the morning depended entirely on his being given the right clues. If he woke up in different surroundings, with different possessions — then he could take up another life altogether, with nothing more than an uneasy suspicion that something had gone wrong.

There was a movement in the bed beside him and he turned towards it. Kate’s dreaming face…

Breton came fully awake, remembering the previous night and the arrival of Jack Breton. The man was a thinner, shabbier, more intense version of himself. He was a cipher, a flawed human being who apparently saw nothing strange in the idea of asking a man and his wife to accept him into their home, and presenting them with such a preposterous scheme.

So Kate was supposed to choose one or the other!

Breton tried to recall why he had not driven his fist into the familiar face. He had been drunk, of course, but there was more to it than that. Was it something to do with the way in which Kate had seemed to accept the idea, while pretending not to take it too seriously?

Or was it that the fantastic scheme somehow dovetailed into the flaws in their marriage? Kate and he had been together for eleven years, during which time they had seen their ups and downs, and an even more significant motion — the drifting apart. The only way they could reach each other now was by wielding longer and longer knives. It seemed that the more money he made, the more Kate needed; so he worked even harder, while she became more distant and disinterested. A frigid, sterile escalation.

The arrival of Jack Breton could mean an effortless and guilt-free escape. Kate and Jack could go away together, or — the idea gusted coolly through Breton’s mind — he could bow out of the situation and leave them to it. He could take some money and go anywhere — Europe, South America, there was even the Moon. Buzz Silvera’s last letters from Florida had as good as said they were taking any competent practical engineer who was prepared to go.

Breton was lying in his fleecy tunnel of warmth, bemusedly trying the concept on for size, when the tardy intellectual realization came that his other self had not been part of a dream. He would have to be faced, all day and for many days to come. Shivering slightly, Breton got out of bed, put on his dressing gown and went down for breakfast.

Kate Breton kept her eyes closed until John had left the room; then, without getting up, she made walking movements with her legs until the sheets were a crumpled mound at the foot of the bed, and she was lying naked, paralleling the grayed white plane of the ceiling. She lay still for a moment, wondering if John was in the shower or if he had gone downstairs. He might come back into the room and see her lying in self-conscious nudity, but that would be a non-event. (“Anthropologically speaking, you’re not quite right,” he had said reflectively, only a month earlier. “The female is characterized by conical things — and yours are cylindrical.”)

Jack Breton would not have said anything like that, Kate thought, remembering the thin, shabby figure with the eyes of a latter day Swinburne. The man projected emotion with silent-screen intensity, but — although she had mentally disassociated herself — she had felt the responses begin within her, pervasive and unstoppable. Jack Breton was almost the archetype of the Romance hero, sacrificing his life to an unattainable vision. And behind that pain-shadowed face was something which had driven him to challenge and conquer Time