“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.
“I.. ” Jack searched for words. “I’ll get you out of that fishing line.”
“I’d appreciate it. I’ll still hate your guts, though.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
Breton opened the workbench drawer and found another spool of fishing line. He took it to the center of the basement and used its pressure guillotine to cut the line around John’s wrists. It parted with a metallic click. He was fitting the jaws of the guillotine over the line connecting John’s arm to the ceiling joist when he heard a car slither to a halt outside. The sound was followed by the banging of two doors.
Jack Breton shoved the spool into John’s blood-streaked hand and ran to the workbench. He leaped onto it and pulled aside the curtains of the window above. In the garish light from the heavens he saw the outline of Convery’s Plymouth. Kate was already running towards the lodge, the upper surfaces of her body linined in frosty silver. Breton filled his eyes for the last time. The sight of her oval face, long thighs, breasts uplifted by flight, sent pain flooding through him.
He let the curtain fall back in place and jumped down off the bench. In the tool drawer he found a small screwdriver. He pushed his watch further up on his arm, positioned the screwdriver blade directly over the flat lump of the chronomotor module, and hesitated, looking up at John.
“You want to say goodbye?”
“Goodbye.”
“Thanks.”
Jack Breton stabbed the narrow blade deep into his wrist, and the Time B world tilted ponderously away.
XVII
Convery got out of the car more slowly than did Kate Breton.
There was no need to hurry at this stage. The answers he had been seeking for nine years were just a few yards from him, and there was no way they could escape him now. He wanted to move gently, with the windows of his mind wide open, drinking it all in — because this was fulfillment.
The shifting light from the sky was bright enough to show each individual pebble. He noted the Turbo-Lincoln parked close to the boathouse, and was turning towards the lodge when he saw a shoe lying at the water’s edge and picked it up. It was the black slip-on he had noticed in Breton’s hand on the previous day. But why was it lying out here? Convery shrugged. Another piece that would have to be fitted into the puzzle when the final reckoning came.
Keeping the shoe in his hand, he jog-trotted towards the lodge behind Kate Breton. He had taken only a few paces when someone drew aside the curtain of a basement window at the front of the lodge, spilling white fluorescent light on the ground. A man’s face appeared at the window. It could have been John Breton, but Convery was not sure. There might have been another man standing behind the one at the window, but at that instant a particularly bright spray of meteors raced across the sky, and their reflections on the glass turned it to beaten silver. The curtain fell back into place again.
Convery saw Kate Breton disappear into the lodge. He ran up the steps and into the central room. It was in darkness and he had to halt and grope for the light switch. When the lights came on he sprinted to the basement door, dragged it open and skidded to a standstill on the small wooden landing.
John and Kate Breton were standing in the center of the basement. They were clinging to each other, and
