Authors: Bob Shaw
The Two Timers (10 page)
And Joe Washburn's score was exactly fifty.
Raphael stubbed out his cigar with a shaking hand. He felt deathly cold
as he raised the microphone, but he kept his voice as flat as possible
to avoid injecting even the minutest disturbance into the experiment.
"That was all right for a warm-up, Jean and Joe. Let's run through another
set." They both nodded. He moved a switch and spoke to Jean only. "I'd like
you to use both the abstract and the related symbols this time."
He hunched over the console and watched the monitors with the eyes of a
man playing Russian roulette. The addition of the five meaningful symbols
-- tree, automobile, dog, chair, man -- brought the range up to ten,
and made a freak run of success that much more difficult.
Washburn made one mistake in the next series of fifty, and no errors at
all in the following three sets. Raphael decided to introduce the demons
of emotion and self-consciousness.
"Listen, you two," he said thickly. "I don't know how you're doing it, but
you've been scoring virtually one hundred percent since this experiment
started, and I don't have to tell you what that means. Now let's keep
blasting away at this thing till we see how far it's going to go."
Washburn made four mistakes in the next set, two in the following set,
and none in the five further tests which Raphael put him through before
switching off the recording equipment. Both Jean and Washburn had to
examine the print-out for themselves before they accepted that the
whole affair had not been a trick devised by Raphael to introduce a
new experimental factor. When the truth had sunk in they stared at each
other with cautious, wondering eyes.
"I think it'd be a good idea if we had some coffee now, Jean," Raphael
said. "This needs some thinking about."
While Jean was fixing coffee, Joe Washburn wandered around the laboratory
grinning, shaking his head and driving his fist into the palm of his
left hand. Raphael lit another cigar and put it out almost immediately,
realizing he would have to tell somebody about what had happened. He
went to the phone and was on the point of lifting it when it rang.
"A long-distance call for you, Dr. Raphael," the university operator said.
"It's Professor Morrison calling from Cleveland."
"Thank you," Raphael said dully, shocked at the coincidence. He had
been going to call Morrison, who was his closest friend among the
handful of men still working in the unfashionable field of extrasensory
perception. Somehow, he had a prescient awareness of why Morrison was
calling, and the feeling was confirmed when he heard the other man's
excited tones.
"Hello, Fergus? Thank God I got hold of you -- I had to get this off
my chest to somebody before I exploded. You'll never guess what's been
happening here."
"I will," Raphael said.
"Try it then."
"You've begun getting hundred percent successes in telepathy experiments."
Morrison's gasp of surprise was clearly audible. "That's right. How did
you know?"
"Perhaps," Raphael said somberly, "I'm telepathic too."
VIII
A full day had passed before Jack Breton's consternation over the fragment
of poetry began to abate.
He had questioned Kate about it as closely as he dared and, when he
learned how it had been written, pretended a sympathetic interest in
automatic writing. Kate had seemed pleased and flattered at his support,
and had explained in detail everything she knew about Miriam Pa]frey's
powers.
Becoming more and more uneasy, Breton had examined hundreds of samples of
the automatic writing and learned that the piece of verse was the only
thing of its kind Miriam had ever produced. Furthermore, she had done
it within hours of his arrival in the Time B world -- which would hardly
be a coincidence. The only answer his mind could produce, no matter how
he juggled the facts, was telepathy -- and the last thing he wanted was
somebody reading his mind.
On the following morning his guess, wild as it had seemed, was
confirmed in an unexpected manner. The apparent breakdown in John
Breton's relationship with Kate had accelerated visibly since Jack's
arrival. He had become more withdrawn, more caustic when he did speak
of her, obviously in the throes of assessing his whole life. And, as if
to assert his claim to an independent existence in his own universe,
he constantly patrolled the house with a radio tucked in the crook of
his arm, turning it to full volume at every news broadcast.
The newscasts he overheard told one part of Jack Breton's mind that some
very unusual events were taking place, but he was too deeply involved
in working out his own personal destiny to pay much attention to stories
of scientific curiosities. Had he not been weighing up his plans in the
light of the fact that Miriam Palfrey appeared to have snatched something
right out of his mind, he would not have absorbed the news that telepathy
experiments in several universities had suddenly begun to yield dramatic
results. The information served to demote Miriam from the status of an
inexplicable menace to that of the other background phenomena.
Strangely, Jack Breton found no deterioration in his relationship with
his other self. The big house was filled with almost-tangible currents of
emotion as John and Kate maneuvered endlessly, each waiting for the other
to break the stasis which had descended on them. But at odd moments Jack
discovered himself in a calm backwater in which he and John could talk
like twin brothers who had not met in a long time. He also discovered,
and was mildly surprised, that John's memory of their common boyhood was
much more detailed and complete than his own. Several times he argued with
John about the authenticity of some detail until the relevant compartment
of his mind seemed to open suddenly, admitting the varicolored stains
of memory, and he realized John had been right.
A tentative explanation reached by Jack was that memories were reinforced
by repetition of the act of recall -- and, at some time during the past
nine years, John Breton had begun to live in the past. Some dissatisfaction
with the shape of his life in the Time B world had led him to draw on the
stored comforts of a bygone era.
Even in the short time he had been in the house Jack had noticed
John's obsessive interest in old movies, the way in which he invariably
compared people to the old-time actors and actresses. Photographs of
Thirties-style cars with their tiny vertical windshields were hung
around the basement workshop. ("I'd love to drive one of those myopic
old things," John had said. "Can't you
smell
the dust in those big
cloth-covered seats?") And when he had lifted himself clear of the past,
he avoided the human realities of the present, sinking his mind into the
engineering and commercial disciplines of running the Breton Consultancy.
Jack Breton received the up-to-date details of the business gratefully
-- he was going to need all available information when the time came for
him to take over. It also gave him the opportunity to establish one fact
which was vital to his plan. . . .
"Gravimetric surveying has become impossible, of course," John was saying
after lunch. "The Bureau of Standards came right out and said it this
morning -- the force of gravity is decreasing. It always did fluctuate,
and I'm willing to bet we're simply on the downward slope of a more
massive variation than usual, but all the same, it's funny the news
broadcasts don't make more of it. I mean, there's nothing more basic
than gravity. Perhaps there's been a clamp-down of some kind."
"I doubt it," Jack said absently, thinking of Kate upstairs in the same
house, perhaps in the bedroom adjusting her plumage.
"At least my gravimeters are all right. Carl and I were worried. Did you
have him in your setup? Carl Tougher?"
"Yes. Hetty and he took over the business." Kate might be moving naked
through the guilty afternoon twilight of closed blinds.
"It wouldn't have mattered too much about the gravimeters, luckily. There
was a time when a gravimeter, a theodolite and a couple of ex-Army Dumpy
levels were just about all the capital equipment I had. That was before
I started accepting bore-hole contracts and some large-bore work."
Jack's interest was suddenly aroused. "How about these new non-physical
drills? The matter disrupter gadgets? Do you use those?"
"Got three of them," John replied warmly. "We use them for all the
large-bore drilling. Carl doesn't like them because they don't have a
coring facility, but they're fast and clean. You can sink a two-foot
hole through any kind of strata, and it all comes up as micro-dust."
"I've never seen one in action," Jack said with deliberate
wistfulness. "Are there any sites close to town?"
"The nearest is about twenty miles north of here on the main route to
Silverstream." John sounded doubtful. "I don't see how you could get
out there, though. People are going to start wondering if they see two
of us walking around."
"But that situation's going to be corrected soon."
"Is it?" John Breton was instantly suspicious, and Jack wondered if he
had any inkling of the fate planned for him.
"Of course," he said quickly. "You and Kate are bound to reach a decision
any time now. In fact, I don't see what's taking you so long. Why don't
you admit that you're sick to death of each other, and get it over with?"
"Has Kate said anything to you?"
"No," Jack replied cautiously, not wanting to precipitate a crisis before
he was completely ready to handle it.
"Well -- anytime she works up the nerve to say what she's thinking, I'll
be ready to hear her out." A look of schoolboyish truculence passed over
John's square face, and Jack realized his own instincts had been right
all along. No man would ever willingly give up a prize like Kate. The
only solution to the triangle problem lay in two pieces of machinery --
the pistol hidden upstairs in his room, and the matter disrupter drill
along the Silverstream highway.
"Is it important for you to get Kate to make the first move?"
"If you don't analyze me, I won't analyze you," John said significantly.
Jack smiled at him, calmly. The reference to analysis made him think of
John's body converted to micro-dust, completely anonymous, defying any
kind of investigation.
When John had returned to the office, Jack waited hungrily for Kate to
come downstairs to him, but she appeared dressed in a tweed suit with
tied belt and a high fur collar.
"Going out?" He tried to mask his disappointment.
"Shopping," she said in a businesslike voice which hurt him in some
obscure fashion.
"Don't go.
"But we still have to eat." Her voice carried what he recognized as a
trace of antagonism, and he suddenly realized she had been virtually
avoiding him since their single physical encounter. The idea that she
might be feeling guilt -- and associating him with it -- filled Breton
with an unreasoning panic.
"John's talking about pulling out." He was unable to prevent himself
blurting the lie like a love-sick adolescent, in spite of his awareness
of the need to prepare her mind for John's disappearance more carefully
than he had ever done anything in his entire life. Kate hesitated between
him and the door. The down on her cheekbones caught the light like frost,
and he seemed to see the mortuary drawer supporting her on its efficient
cantilever. He became afraid.
"John's entitled to leave if he wants," she said finally, and went out.
A minute later he heard her MG booming in the garage. He waited at the
window to see her go by, but the car was fitted with its hardtop and
Kate's face was an impersonal blur behind the chiseled sky-fragments of
the windows.
Breton turned away from the window, suddenly filled with a sense of
outrage. Both his creations -- the people he had brought into being
as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings,
putting breath into inert clay -- had lived independently of him for nine
years. Now, in spite of what they had learned, they were insisting on
pursuing their courses, ignoring him when necessary, leaving him alone
in a house where he hated to be alone. Breton moved with clenched fists
through the silences of the empty rooms. He had been prepared to wait
a week, but things had changed and were still doing so. It would be
necessary to act more quickly, more decisively.
From a rear window he glimpsed the silvery dome of the observatory
beyond the beech trees, and felt a grudging curiosity about its
construction. Right from the moment of his arrival there had been a
tacit, instinctive agreement that nobody outside the house should get
any clue about the existence of the two Bretons -- so he could not
justify going outside. But the rear garden was well shielded from the
neighboring houses, and it would take him only a few seconds to reach
the observatory and get inside.
He went down into the kitchen, peered through the curtained door and
went out onto the roofed patio. The lemon-tinted sunlight of an October
afternoon streamed through the trees in slowly merging beams, and from
the distance came the patient, regular sound of a lawn mower. Breton
walked towards the observatory.
"Ho there! Not working today?"
Breton spun as the voice came from behind him. The speaker was a tall,
fit-looking man of about forty who had just come around the side of the
house. He was dressed in neat sport clothes, worn the way other men wear
business suits, and his tightly-waved hair was grayed at the temples. His
face was broad and sunburned, with a tiny nose which made scarcely any
division between widely-spaced blue eyes.
Breton experienced a thrill of almost superstitious dread as he recognized
Lieutenant Convery -- the man who, in another time-stream, had come to tell
him of Kate's death -- but he remained in perfect control of his reactions.
"Not today," he said, smiling. "A man has to relax every now and then."
"I didn't know you felt that way, John."
"But I do, I do -- I don't make a habit of it, that's all." Breton noticed
the other man's use of his Christian name, and tried unsuccessfully to
think of Convery's. This is incredible, he thought. How can a man
have
Raphael stubbed out his cigar with a shaking hand. He felt deathly cold
as he raised the microphone, but he kept his voice as flat as possible
to avoid injecting even the minutest disturbance into the experiment.
"That was all right for a warm-up, Jean and Joe. Let's run through another
set." They both nodded. He moved a switch and spoke to Jean only. "I'd like
you to use both the abstract and the related symbols this time."
He hunched over the console and watched the monitors with the eyes of a
man playing Russian roulette. The addition of the five meaningful symbols
-- tree, automobile, dog, chair, man -- brought the range up to ten,
and made a freak run of success that much more difficult.
Washburn made one mistake in the next series of fifty, and no errors at
all in the following three sets. Raphael decided to introduce the demons
of emotion and self-consciousness.
"Listen, you two," he said thickly. "I don't know how you're doing it, but
you've been scoring virtually one hundred percent since this experiment
started, and I don't have to tell you what that means. Now let's keep
blasting away at this thing till we see how far it's going to go."
Washburn made four mistakes in the next set, two in the following set,
and none in the five further tests which Raphael put him through before
switching off the recording equipment. Both Jean and Washburn had to
examine the print-out for themselves before they accepted that the
whole affair had not been a trick devised by Raphael to introduce a
new experimental factor. When the truth had sunk in they stared at each
other with cautious, wondering eyes.
"I think it'd be a good idea if we had some coffee now, Jean," Raphael
said. "This needs some thinking about."
While Jean was fixing coffee, Joe Washburn wandered around the laboratory
grinning, shaking his head and driving his fist into the palm of his
left hand. Raphael lit another cigar and put it out almost immediately,
realizing he would have to tell somebody about what had happened. He
went to the phone and was on the point of lifting it when it rang.
"A long-distance call for you, Dr. Raphael," the university operator said.
"It's Professor Morrison calling from Cleveland."
"Thank you," Raphael said dully, shocked at the coincidence. He had
been going to call Morrison, who was his closest friend among the
handful of men still working in the unfashionable field of extrasensory
perception. Somehow, he had a prescient awareness of why Morrison was
calling, and the feeling was confirmed when he heard the other man's
excited tones.
"Hello, Fergus? Thank God I got hold of you -- I had to get this off
my chest to somebody before I exploded. You'll never guess what's been
happening here."
"I will," Raphael said.
"Try it then."
"You've begun getting hundred percent successes in telepathy experiments."
Morrison's gasp of surprise was clearly audible. "That's right. How did
you know?"
"Perhaps," Raphael said somberly, "I'm telepathic too."
VIII
A full day had passed before Jack Breton's consternation over the fragment
of poetry began to abate.
He had questioned Kate about it as closely as he dared and, when he
learned how it had been written, pretended a sympathetic interest in
automatic writing. Kate had seemed pleased and flattered at his support,
and had explained in detail everything she knew about Miriam Pa]frey's
powers.
Becoming more and more uneasy, Breton had examined hundreds of samples of
the automatic writing and learned that the piece of verse was the only
thing of its kind Miriam had ever produced. Furthermore, she had done
it within hours of his arrival in the Time B world -- which would hardly
be a coincidence. The only answer his mind could produce, no matter how
he juggled the facts, was telepathy -- and the last thing he wanted was
somebody reading his mind.
On the following morning his guess, wild as it had seemed, was
confirmed in an unexpected manner. The apparent breakdown in John
Breton's relationship with Kate had accelerated visibly since Jack's
arrival. He had become more withdrawn, more caustic when he did speak
of her, obviously in the throes of assessing his whole life. And, as if
to assert his claim to an independent existence in his own universe,
he constantly patrolled the house with a radio tucked in the crook of
his arm, turning it to full volume at every news broadcast.
The newscasts he overheard told one part of Jack Breton's mind that some
very unusual events were taking place, but he was too deeply involved
in working out his own personal destiny to pay much attention to stories
of scientific curiosities. Had he not been weighing up his plans in the
light of the fact that Miriam Palfrey appeared to have snatched something
right out of his mind, he would not have absorbed the news that telepathy
experiments in several universities had suddenly begun to yield dramatic
results. The information served to demote Miriam from the status of an
inexplicable menace to that of the other background phenomena.
Strangely, Jack Breton found no deterioration in his relationship with
his other self. The big house was filled with almost-tangible currents of
emotion as John and Kate maneuvered endlessly, each waiting for the other
to break the stasis which had descended on them. But at odd moments Jack
discovered himself in a calm backwater in which he and John could talk
like twin brothers who had not met in a long time. He also discovered,
and was mildly surprised, that John's memory of their common boyhood was
much more detailed and complete than his own. Several times he argued with
John about the authenticity of some detail until the relevant compartment
of his mind seemed to open suddenly, admitting the varicolored stains
of memory, and he realized John had been right.
A tentative explanation reached by Jack was that memories were reinforced
by repetition of the act of recall -- and, at some time during the past
nine years, John Breton had begun to live in the past. Some dissatisfaction
with the shape of his life in the Time B world had led him to draw on the
stored comforts of a bygone era.
Even in the short time he had been in the house Jack had noticed
John's obsessive interest in old movies, the way in which he invariably
compared people to the old-time actors and actresses. Photographs of
Thirties-style cars with their tiny vertical windshields were hung
around the basement workshop. ("I'd love to drive one of those myopic
old things," John had said. "Can't you
smell
the dust in those big
cloth-covered seats?") And when he had lifted himself clear of the past,
he avoided the human realities of the present, sinking his mind into the
engineering and commercial disciplines of running the Breton Consultancy.
Jack Breton received the up-to-date details of the business gratefully
-- he was going to need all available information when the time came for
him to take over. It also gave him the opportunity to establish one fact
which was vital to his plan. . . .
"Gravimetric surveying has become impossible, of course," John was saying
after lunch. "The Bureau of Standards came right out and said it this
morning -- the force of gravity is decreasing. It always did fluctuate,
and I'm willing to bet we're simply on the downward slope of a more
massive variation than usual, but all the same, it's funny the news
broadcasts don't make more of it. I mean, there's nothing more basic
than gravity. Perhaps there's been a clamp-down of some kind."
"I doubt it," Jack said absently, thinking of Kate upstairs in the same
house, perhaps in the bedroom adjusting her plumage.
"At least my gravimeters are all right. Carl and I were worried. Did you
have him in your setup? Carl Tougher?"
"Yes. Hetty and he took over the business." Kate might be moving naked
through the guilty afternoon twilight of closed blinds.
"It wouldn't have mattered too much about the gravimeters, luckily. There
was a time when a gravimeter, a theodolite and a couple of ex-Army Dumpy
levels were just about all the capital equipment I had. That was before
I started accepting bore-hole contracts and some large-bore work."
Jack's interest was suddenly aroused. "How about these new non-physical
drills? The matter disrupter gadgets? Do you use those?"
"Got three of them," John replied warmly. "We use them for all the
large-bore drilling. Carl doesn't like them because they don't have a
coring facility, but they're fast and clean. You can sink a two-foot
hole through any kind of strata, and it all comes up as micro-dust."
"I've never seen one in action," Jack said with deliberate
wistfulness. "Are there any sites close to town?"
"The nearest is about twenty miles north of here on the main route to
Silverstream." John sounded doubtful. "I don't see how you could get
out there, though. People are going to start wondering if they see two
of us walking around."
"But that situation's going to be corrected soon."
"Is it?" John Breton was instantly suspicious, and Jack wondered if he
had any inkling of the fate planned for him.
"Of course," he said quickly. "You and Kate are bound to reach a decision
any time now. In fact, I don't see what's taking you so long. Why don't
you admit that you're sick to death of each other, and get it over with?"
"Has Kate said anything to you?"
"No," Jack replied cautiously, not wanting to precipitate a crisis before
he was completely ready to handle it.
"Well -- anytime she works up the nerve to say what she's thinking, I'll
be ready to hear her out." A look of schoolboyish truculence passed over
John's square face, and Jack realized his own instincts had been right
all along. No man would ever willingly give up a prize like Kate. The
only solution to the triangle problem lay in two pieces of machinery --
the pistol hidden upstairs in his room, and the matter disrupter drill
along the Silverstream highway.
"Is it important for you to get Kate to make the first move?"
"If you don't analyze me, I won't analyze you," John said significantly.
Jack smiled at him, calmly. The reference to analysis made him think of
John's body converted to micro-dust, completely anonymous, defying any
kind of investigation.
When John had returned to the office, Jack waited hungrily for Kate to
come downstairs to him, but she appeared dressed in a tweed suit with
tied belt and a high fur collar.
"Going out?" He tried to mask his disappointment.
"Shopping," she said in a businesslike voice which hurt him in some
obscure fashion.
"Don't go.
"But we still have to eat." Her voice carried what he recognized as a
trace of antagonism, and he suddenly realized she had been virtually
avoiding him since their single physical encounter. The idea that she
might be feeling guilt -- and associating him with it -- filled Breton
with an unreasoning panic.
"John's talking about pulling out." He was unable to prevent himself
blurting the lie like a love-sick adolescent, in spite of his awareness
of the need to prepare her mind for John's disappearance more carefully
than he had ever done anything in his entire life. Kate hesitated between
him and the door. The down on her cheekbones caught the light like frost,
and he seemed to see the mortuary drawer supporting her on its efficient
cantilever. He became afraid.
"John's entitled to leave if he wants," she said finally, and went out.
A minute later he heard her MG booming in the garage. He waited at the
window to see her go by, but the car was fitted with its hardtop and
Kate's face was an impersonal blur behind the chiseled sky-fragments of
the windows.
Breton turned away from the window, suddenly filled with a sense of
outrage. Both his creations -- the people he had brought into being
as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings,
putting breath into inert clay -- had lived independently of him for nine
years. Now, in spite of what they had learned, they were insisting on
pursuing their courses, ignoring him when necessary, leaving him alone
in a house where he hated to be alone. Breton moved with clenched fists
through the silences of the empty rooms. He had been prepared to wait
a week, but things had changed and were still doing so. It would be
necessary to act more quickly, more decisively.
From a rear window he glimpsed the silvery dome of the observatory
beyond the beech trees, and felt a grudging curiosity about its
construction. Right from the moment of his arrival there had been a
tacit, instinctive agreement that nobody outside the house should get
any clue about the existence of the two Bretons -- so he could not
justify going outside. But the rear garden was well shielded from the
neighboring houses, and it would take him only a few seconds to reach
the observatory and get inside.
He went down into the kitchen, peered through the curtained door and
went out onto the roofed patio. The lemon-tinted sunlight of an October
afternoon streamed through the trees in slowly merging beams, and from
the distance came the patient, regular sound of a lawn mower. Breton
walked towards the observatory.
"Ho there! Not working today?"
Breton spun as the voice came from behind him. The speaker was a tall,
fit-looking man of about forty who had just come around the side of the
house. He was dressed in neat sport clothes, worn the way other men wear
business suits, and his tightly-waved hair was grayed at the temples. His
face was broad and sunburned, with a tiny nose which made scarcely any
division between widely-spaced blue eyes.
Breton experienced a thrill of almost superstitious dread as he recognized
Lieutenant Convery -- the man who, in another time-stream, had come to tell
him of Kate's death -- but he remained in perfect control of his reactions.
"Not today," he said, smiling. "A man has to relax every now and then."
"I didn't know you felt that way, John."
"But I do, I do -- I don't make a habit of it, that's all." Breton noticed
the other man's use of his Christian name, and tried unsuccessfully to
think of Convery's. This is incredible, he thought. How can a man
have
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