front door when a slightly shabby sedan swung in the gateway and wallowed up the snow-covered drive. The passenger door opened and Hetty Calder got out, surveyed the snow with obvious disgust, and blew some cigarette ash onto it in a gesture of retaliation.
“Going out? Harry and I came over to see if there was anything we could do.”
“There is.” Breton was amazed at just how much pleasure the sight of her thick, tweedy figure was able to inspire in him. “You can be my guests at dinner. I’d be glad of your company.”
He got into the rear seat and exchanged brief greetings with Harry Calder, a balding, bookish man of about fifty. The clutter of shopping bags, scarves and magazines around him on the broad seat gave Breton a comforting feeling of being securely back in the world of uncomplicated normalcy, He studied the pre-Christmas store displays as they drove across the city, absorbing every detail, leaving no room for thoughts of Kate.
“How’re you feeling now, Jack?” Hetty peered back into Breton’s homely little kingdom. “You didn’t look too good when I dropped you off today.”
“Well, I wasn’t feeling too wonderful right then, but I’m fine now.”
“What was wrong?” Hetty persisted.
Breton hesitated, and decided to experiment with the truth. “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t seeing very well. Sort of colored lights had spread over most of my right eye.
Unexpectedly, Harry Calder turned his head and clucked sympathetically. “Prismatic, zigzag patterns, eh? So you’re another one?”
“Another one? What do you mean, Harry?”
“I get them too — and then the pain starts,” Harry Calder said. “It’s a common preliminary symptom of migraine.”
“Migraine!” Breton felt something heave convulsively in his subconscious. “But I never get headaches.”
“No? Then you must be one of the lucky ones — what I go through after those pretty colors start marching isn’t ordinary. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I never knew there was any coiniection between that sort of thing and migraine,” Breton said. “As you say — I must be one of the lucky ones.”
Even to his own ears, his voice did not carry much conviction.
Breton’s belief in the possibility of time travel was born painfully, over a period of months.
He returned to his business, but found himself unable to make valid judgments on even the most clear-cut administrative issues, while technical decisions had receded to another plane of comprehension altogether. With the assistance of the three staff engineers, Hetty guided the consultancy into something approximating its normal channels of operation. At first, Breton sat at his desk staring at meaningless drawings for hours at a stretch, unable to think of anything but Kate and the part he had played in her death. There were times when he tried to write poetry, to crystallize and perhaps depersonalize his feeling about Kate. The heavy snows of the Montana winter buried the world in silence, and Breton watched it silt across the arrays of parked cars beyond his window. Its silence seemed to invade his own body so that he could hear its blind workings, the constant traffic of fluids, the subdividing incursions of air, the patient radial rain of cholesterol in his arteries…
And at intervals of six or seven days he made trips, always to that final scene with Kate. Sometimes the elm trees would be so translucent as to be almost nonexistent; at other times they reared up black and real, giving him the impression he would be able to see two figures moving at their bases were it not for the overlaid light of store windows and automobile headlights.
With the continued in-growing of his perceptions, he became more aware of the phenomena he had learned to identify as preludes to the trips. There would be the gradual intensification of his nervous activity, leading him to think he had escaped from despair as it culminated in a heady sense of well-being. Close on that came the first visual disturbances, starting with a furtive glimmer and spreading all over his right eye. As soon as it began to abate, reality
The discovery that the visual phenomena were familiar to others surprised Breton, because as a boy he had attempted to describe them to his friends and had never achieved any reaction. Even his parents had shown nothing more than indulgent mock-interest and he had never been able to convince them he was not talking about afterimages caused by bright lights. He had learned not to talk about the trips or anything associated with them, and over the years the conviction had grown on him that his experience was unique, private to Jack Breton. But the chance conversation with Harry Calder had changed all that; and the interest it had stirred in him was the only genuine stake he had in the bleak, bitter present
Breton began spending his afternoons in the public library, aware he was following an idea beside which his former fantasy about Kate’s murderer was a working blueprint, but unable to ignore its feverish pounding in his mind. He read the scanty literature on migraine, then went on to general medical works, biographies of famous migraine sufferers, anything his instincts told him might lead in the direction he wanted to go. Never having connected himself with migraine before, Breton had a vague idea it was a recent product of high-pressure civilization. His reading showed him it had been known to ancient cultures, one of them that of the Greeks, who had named it hemicrania — the hall-headache. In the great majority of cases, the visual disturbances were followed by severe headaches affecting one side of the head, then nausea. Some people were lucky enough to escape one or other of these symptoms, and there was a rare category of individual who avoided both. Their condition was known as
One of the most intriguing things, as far as Breton was concerned, was the amazing exactness with which his own visual experiences had been described by other men in other times. The medical terms were various — teichopsia, scintillating scotoma — but the one he preferred for its aptness was “fortification figures.” It had first been used by an 18th century doctor, John Fothergill, who had written:
“… a singular kind of glimmering in the sight, objects swiftly changing their apparent position, surrounded by luminous angles like those of a fortification.”
Fothergill had attributed it to eating too much buttered toast at breakfast time — an explanation Breton found only slightly less satisfactory than up-to-the-minute theories which spoke vaguely about temporary irritations of the visual cortex. One dark brown afternoon, when he and the others in the old building were sitting quietly like objects in the bottom of a petrifying well, he turned the pages of an obscure health magazine and was chilled to find accurate drawings — not of the fortification figures, which would have defeated any artist — but of the black star which sometimes appeared in their place.
One of the drawings was by the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, and another had been done as far back as the 12th century by Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen.
“I saw a great star,” the Abbess had written, “most splendid and beautiful and with an exceeding multitude of falling sparks with which the star followed southwards… and suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.”
Breton read on quickly but, as was the case with all the other recorded accounts, there was no mention of a subsequent vision of the past. In that respect, it appeared, he really was unique.
A year later Breton pedantically wrote in his notebook:
“I now incline more than ever towards the theory that all migraine sufferers are frustrated time travelers. The power which provides temporal motivation is the desire to return to the past, possibly to relive periods of extreme happiness, but more probably to correct mistakes which are seen in retrospect to have had a malign effect on the course of events.
“Prior to Kate’s death my own case was a freakish example of someone who almost
“Since Kate’s death my retroactive potential has reached an abnormally high level, resulting in frequent trips. Leaving aside the problem of constructing a philosophical edifice capable of accommodating the physical implications, the question remains of how to put theory into practice. Ergotamines, methysergide, diuretics — all these things are in use to minimize the effects of hemicrania, which is hardly what I have in mind…”
And after five years:
“The monthly check from Hetty arrived today. It was larger than usual, making it possible for me to clear my account at the Clermont Scientific Company — which was a relief. I have no wish to impair my credit rating with
