them at this stage, although I still have the house in reserve and its capital value has appreciated considerably. (What a good idea it was for me to assign formal control of my business to Hetty and that new man Tougher. My only worry is a nagging suspicion that she sometimes augments my check with money of her own.)
“There is some cause for excitement today. My work has finally passed from the investigatory to the constructively experimental stage. I could have reached this point sooner but for following several false trails. All of them were suggested by Dr. Garnet at the migraine clinic, and I am glad my association with that organization is coming to an end.
“To think that my big breakthrough came as a result of using a badly designed screwdriver!
“I don’t know what prompted me to withdraw the fluid from that huge blister on the palm of my right hand, unless it was that I had been thinking a lot about the possible use of hemicranial pain as a trigger mechanism to augment chronomotive impulses. Work at the clinic had established that a substance called kinin was produced in the region of the head arteries during migraine attacks in people not fortunate enough to be afflicted with
“Blister fluid itself does not cause pain, but I have proved that when it is withdrawn and put in contact with glass it develops kinin, which — when put into the blister again — certainly does cause pain. By injecting kinin at the first onset of teichopsia heralding my last three trips I was able to experience genuine hemicrania, and — for the first time — I
“That phase of my work is now complete, and I now am faced with the problem of effecting the temporal displacement of a considerable physical mass, i.e. my own body. Vast amplification of neural impulses will be required, and I have an uneasy premonition I may have to look for some loophole in Kirchoff’s Laws.
“However, I am in a mood of supreme confidence. I must calm down, though, in case I precipitate another trip. Excitement is a traditional trigger factor in hemicrania. Somewhere I have a note of a comment by the French patriot Dr. Edward Liveing who, in 1873, said — ‘We all know that it is not everyone who can with impunity, do himself the pleasure of assisting at certain theatrical representations where the glory of France is daily celebrated with noise and smoke…’ “
And after a further three years:
“Abrogation of Kirchoff’s Laws was almost easier than I had expected — consideration of the fourth dimension makes so many things possible — but I had seriously underestimated the expense. The sale of the house and furniture raised only a fraction of the money I needed. Fortunately, I was able to persuade Hetty and Carl Tougher to void our agreement of the last eight years in favor of an outright sale. They are worried about me, especially Hetty, but I think I have convinced them of both my sanity and my physical well-being. Hetty has got noticeably older, though, and she smokes too much.
“Kate, my darling, this is the last time I will address you through the medium of this notebook. The time is not too distant, however, when we shall be able to turn its pages together. Until then, my love, until then…”
Breton waited till dusk before he went to the park.
He stopped the now-aged blue Buick several hundred yards from the 50th Avenue entrance and spent a few minutes checking over the equipment. The hat came first. It was lying on the rear seat, looking very much like any other slightly shabby hat, except that occasional flickers of orange light escaped from under its brim. He picked it up, positioned it carefully on his head and spent some time connecting the leads which projected down from the sweat band to others which emerged from under his shirt collar. When the connections were completed, he turned up the collar of his raincoat and moved his limbs experimentally. The network of wires taped to his body dragged painfully at his skin, but he had what amounted to complete freedom of movement.
Breton turned his attention to the rifle. When moving his personal belongings out of the house he had found the weapon lying in the basement cupboard, coated in white dust, and had brought it to his newly rented apartment on the east side. On checking it over, he had discovered the firing pin was jammed — the result of some forgotten accident — and had paid a gunsmith to put it right. The slim lines of the rifle were marred by the bulk of the infrared sight he had added for use in darkness. Breton filled the ammunition clip with cool brass cylinders from his pocket, latched it onto the rifle and bolted the first cartridge up into the breech. There was a possibility he would get as little as two seconds to find his mark, aim and fire — and he did not want to waste any of his meager ration of time.
He sat motionless for a few minutes, waiting for the immediate vicinity to empty of pedestrians. It was almost a week since his last trip, and he could feel that the time was right. His veins were coursing with excitement — one of the basic hemicranial trigger factors — and the electrical activity in his brain was higher than normal, producing a kind of taut exultation. The almost psychedelic change in perception, familiar to migraine sufferers as the first symptom of a new onslaught, was influencing his awareness, ringing everyday objects with a halo of imminence — sadness, lurking peril, intoxication. As soon as the block was clear, Breton got out of the car, withdrew the rifle and closed his raincoat around it, grasping the stock through the slit pocket. Night breezes tugged at him from many directions, exploring his form like blind men’s fingers while he walked awkwardly with the concealed burden.
As he neared the 50th Avenue entrance, the first visual disturbances began. A fugitive glimmer of light trembled in the field of his right eye and slowly spread, exhibiting its prismatic complexities. Breton was reminded of a swarm of water beetles, tumbling on each other, splitting sunlight with the movement of their oily bronze backs. He was glad it was not the falling black star; the fortification figures took longer to develop, giving him more time.
Breton went into the park and headed towards its center along paths on which dry fallen leaves rolled with metallic crackles. A few people, mostly couples, were sitting on benches near the lighted paths, but he veered away across the grassy central area and was swallowed by the anonymous darkness in a matter of seconds. He brought the rifle out from under his coat and self-consciously raised it to his face to check the infrared scope, but his right eye was dazzled with marching colors and he remembered he had no choice other than to trust his previous zeroing-in work. The blanket of living brilliance was nearing its maximum when he found the three elms.
He went to within thirty yards of the triangular group, twisted his left arm through the rifle’s broad leather sling and dropped down on one knee in the classical marksman’s position. The damp earth made an oval patch of coldness on his leg. I must be crazy, he thought, but he could hear himself whispering Kate’s name over and over again. He touched the brim of his hat and a low humming sound came from it as the high-efficiency batteries strapped to his body began delivering power. Simultaneously, the hypodermic gun built into the circuit fired a cloud of kinin into the shaven patch above his right temple. He felt its icy sting, then agony coiled languorously through his head as the chemical spread in the cerebral arteries. Breton noted abstractedly that there were no people about — all his painstaking work to produce an arrangement which would not attract too much attention had been quite unnecessary — then the sheet of prismatic geometries began to shrink, abruptly. It was time.
“Kate!” he screamed. “
She was moving uncertainly through the darkness, her pale blue dress A black shape moved from under the ragged archway of the elm trees, keening unhappily, like a loathsome bird of prey. It closed with Kate, arms upraised, and she sobbed once with fear. Breton put the thick crosshairs onto the black silhouette, but his finger hesitated on the trigger. Their bodies were close together — suppose the bullet passed right through both? He raised his left arm a fraction and fired instinctively as the crosshairs intersected fleetingly on the head. The rifle jarred against his shoulder, and the dark head was no longer a head…
Breton lay for a long time with his face pressed down into a microcosm of grassy roots. Under his left hand the rifle barrel grew warm from the single shot, then cooled again, and still he was unable to move. He was in the grip of an exhaustion so intense that each thought required eons of dogged effort to drive it through to completion. How long, he wondered, have I been lying here? The fear that somebody would come along and find him lying there nagged at him incessantly, gradually reaching a thundering urgency, but he might as well have been trapped in a dead body.
His mind, too, felt different. Pressures had been relieved, potentials had been discharged by the fantastic cerebral orgasm of the trip.
