Authors: Bob Shaw
The Two Timers (4 page)
"No," Breton said dully. He led the way into the living room, and had
to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a
nervous housewife.
"I don't quite know how to break this to you, Mr. Breton," Convery said
slowly. He had a broad, sunburned face and a tiny nose which made scarcely
any division between widely spaced blue eyes.
"What is it, Lieutenant?"
"It's about your wife. It appears she was walking in the park tonight,
without company -- and she was attacked."
"Attacked?" Breton felt his knees begin to swim. "But where is she now?
Is she all right?"
Convery shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mr. Breton. She's dead."
Breton sank down into a chair while the universe heaved and contracted
around him like the chambers of a vast heart suddenly exposed.
I did
it,
he thought, I killed my wife. He was dimly aware of the second
detective taking Convery to one side and whispering to him. A few seconds
later Convery returned.
"My partner reminds me I've jumped the gun a bit, Mr. Breton.
Officially, I should have said that the body of a woman had been found
with identification on it which suggested she was your wife, but in a
clear-cut case I don't like prolonging things. Just for the record, have
you any reason to believe that the body of a woman of about twenty-five,
tall, black-and-gold hair, wearing a silver-blue cocktail dress, we
found near the 50th Avenue entrance of the city park, would not have
been that of Mrs. Breton?"
"No reason. She was out alone this evening, dressed like that." Breton
closed his eyes.
I did it -- I killed my wife.
"I let her go alone."
"We still have to make a positive identification; if you like, one of
the patrolmen will drive you to the morgue."
"It isn't necessary," Breton said. "I can do that much."
The refrigerated drawer rolled out easily on oiled bearings, forming
an efficient cantilever, and a stray thought intruded determinedly
on Breton's mind. A
good machine.
He looked down at Kate's cold,
dreaming face, and at the jewels of moisture curving precisely along her
eyebrows. Of its own accord, his right hand moved out to touch her. He
saw the blackness of oil rimming the fingernails, and willed his hand
to stop.
Thou hast not a stain on thee.
Lieutenant Convery moved into a corner of his field of vision, close
at hand yet light-years away across a universe of pulsating fluorescent
brilliance, "Is this your wife?"
"Who else?" Breton said numbly. "Who else?"
An indeterminate time later he learned Kate had been clubbed, raped and
stabbed. A forensic expert added that they could not be sure of the order
in which those things had happened. Breton contained the knowledge of his
guilt successfully for a matter of days, while going through senseless
formalities, but all the while he knew he was a bomb in which the charge
had already ignited, that he was living through the nanoseconds preceding
his disintegration into human shrapnel.
It came, with the spurious gentleness of a filmed explosion, on the
day after Kate's funeral. He was walking aimlessly through the city's
north side, along a street of time-defeated buildings. The day was
cold and, although there was no rain, the sidewalks were wet. Near
an undistinguished corner he found a clean, new feather and picked it
up. It was striped pearly gray and white -- dropped by a bird in haste --
and he remembered how Kate had worn her clothes like plumage. He looked
for a windowsill on which to set the feather, like a single lost glove,
and saw a man in shabby denims smiling at him from a doorway. Breton
let the feather fall, twinkling and tumbling, onto the greasy concrete
and covered it with his foot.
His next action to be guided by his own identity came five weeks later,
when he opened his eyes in a hospital bed.
The intervening time was not completely lost to him, but it was flawed
and distorted like a scene viewed through pebbled glass. He had been
drinking hard, annihilating self-awareness with raw spirit, contracting
the frontiers of consciousness. And somewhere in the midst of that
kaleidoscope world was born an idea which, to his fevered mind, had all
the simplicity of genius.
Psychopathic killers were hard to find, the police had told him. They
could not hold out much hope in a case like this. A woman who goes into
the park at night alone, they seemed to be saying, what did she
expect?
Breton had found himself uneasy in their presence, and decided the
dismaying thing about the police mentality was that dealing so much
with criminals made them aware of another system of morality. Without
sympathizing with it, they nevertheless came to understand to some extent,
and the needle of their moral compass was deflected. Not their direction
-- because so long as the amount of bias is known it is still possible
to steer -- but this, he deduced, was why he felt like a player who did
not understand the rules of the game. This was why he was looked at with
resentment when he asked what results they were getting -- and at some
point early in the last weeks he decided to invent new rules.
Kate's murderer had not been seen and, as he had no circumstantial
motive for the killing, there was nothing to link him physically to the
crime. But, Breton reasoned, there was another kind of connection. Breton
had no way of knowing the killer --
but the killer must know him.
The
case had been well covered by the local papers and television services,
both of which had carried Breton's picture. It would be impossible for
the killer not to have shown interest in the man whose life he had so
savagely twisted. And, for a time, Breton came to believe that if he
encountered the killer on the street, in the park, in a bar, he would
know that man by his eyes.
The city was not large, and it was possible that in his lifetime he had,
at one time or another, glimpsed every man in it. Obviously, he had to
get into the streets and keep moving, going everywhere that people went,
making a rapid playback of a lifetime's exposure to the city's corporate
identity -- and someday he would look into another man's eyes, and he
would
know.
And when that happened . . .
The mirage of hope glimmered crazily in front of Breton for five weeks,
until it was finally extinguished by malnutrition and alcoholic poisoning.
He opened his eyes and knew by some quality of the light on the hospital
ceiling that there was snow on the ground outside. An unfamiliar
emptiness was gnawing at his stomach and he experienced a sane,
practical desire for a dish of thick farmhouse soup. Sitting up in
the bed he looked around him and discovered he was in a private room,
which was barely rescued from complete anonymity by several sprays of
deep-red roses. He recognized the favorite flowers of his secretary,
Hetty Calder, and there was a vague memory swirl of her long homely face
looking down at him with concern. Breton smiled briefly. In the past,
Hetty had almost visibly lost weight every time he got a head cold -- he
hesitated to think how she might have been affected by his performance
over the recent weeks. The desire for food returned with greater force
and he reached for the call button.
It was Hetty who, five days later, drove him home from the hospital in
his own car.
"Listen, Jack," she said desperately. "You've just
got
to come and
stay with us for a while. Harry and I would be delighted to have you,
and with you not having any family of your own . . ."
"I'll be fine, Hetty," Breton said. "Thanks again for the offer, but
it's time I went back home and began gathering up the pieces."
"But will you be all right?" Hetty was driving expertly through the
slush-walled streets, handling the big old car as if she were a man,
blowing through her cigarette every now and again to send a flaky cylinder
of ash onto the floor. Her sallow face was heavy with anxiety.
"I'll be all right," he said gratefully. "I can think about Kate now.
It hurts like hell, of course, but at least I'm able to accept it.
I wasn't able to do that before. It's hard to explain, but I had a
feeling there ought to be some government office I could go to -- a sort
of Department of Death -- and explain that there'd been a mistake. That
Kate
couldn't
die . . . I'm talking nonsense, Hetty."
Hetty glanced sideways at him. "You're talking like a human being, Jack.
There's nothing wrong with that."
"How do I usually talk?"
"Business has been pretty good the last few weeks," Hetty said crisply.
"You're going to need extra staff."
She went on to give him a rundown on the new business and the progress
that had been made on the existing survey contracts being handled by
Breton's engineering consultancy. As she talked he realized he was not
as concerned as he ought to be about his business. A gadgeteer by instinct,
he had taken a couple of degrees without any real effort because it was the
economically sound thing to do, had strayed into the geologically-oriented
consultancy, and had taken it over when the owner retired. It had all been
so easy, so inevitable, yet vaguely dissatisfying. He had always enjoyed
making things, giving rein to the intelligence his hands appeared to
possess of their own right, but there seemed to be no time for that now.
Breton huddled in his overcoat, staring nostalgically out at the wet
black thoroughfares which were like canals cut through banks of soiled
snow. As the car gathered speed, white fluffy chunks of new snow broke
upwards from the front end, pounded silently on the windshield and swirled
away to the rear, disintegrating, vanishing. He tried to concentrate on
Hetty's words, but saw with dismay that a pinpoint of colored, shimmering
light had been born in the air ahead of him. Not now, he thought, rubbing
his eyes; but the flickering mote of brilliance was already beginning to
grow. Within a minute it was like a brand-new coin spinning, coruscating,
remaining in the center of the field of vision of his right eye no matter
which way he turned his head.
"I went over to your place this morning and turned the heat on," Hetty
said. "At least you'll be warm.
"Thanks," he said numbly. "You go to too much trouble over me.
The furtive shimmer was growing faster now, blocking out more of his
view, beginning to unfold its familiar patterns -- restless prismatic
geometries, marching, shifting, opening windows into alien dimensions.
Not now, he pleaded silently, I don't want to make a trip right now.
The optical phenomenon was something he had known since childhood.
It could happen at intervals of three months, or of a few days --
depending on his degree of mental stress -- and was generally preceded by
a feeling of unusual well-being. Once the euphoria was past, the zigzag
shimmering over the field of his right eye would begin, and that would be
followed by one of his inexplicable, frightening trips into the past.
The knowledge that each trip took only a fraction of a second of real
time, and that it must be some freak of memory, made its imminence no
easier to bear -- for the scenes he relived were never pleasant. Always,
they were segments of his life he would have preferred to forget, crisis
points. And it was not hard to guess the particular nightmare which was
likely to crop up in the future.
By the time the car reached his house, Breton was effectively blinded
on the right side by a beautiful blanket of color -- geometrical,
tremulous, prismatic -- which made it difficult for him to judge
distances accurately. He persuaded Hetty not to get out of the car,
waved to her as she moved off down the snow-covered drive, and fumbled
open the front door. With the door locked behind him he walked quickly
into the living room and sat down in a deep chair. The shimmering was at
its maximum, which meant it would withdraw quite abruptly at any moment,
and the trip to God-knows-where would be on. He waited. The vision in
his right eye began to clear, he tensed, and the room began to recede,
to distort, to exhibit strange perspectives. Ponderously, helplessly,
over the edge we go. . . .
Kate was walking away down the street, past blazing store windows.
With her silvered wrap drawn tight over the flimsy party dress, and long
legs slimmed even further by needle-heeled sandals, she looked like an
idealized screen version of a gangster's moll. ,The ambient brilliance
from the stores projected her solidly into his mind, jewel-sharp; then
he saw -- with a vast sense of wrongness -- three trees growing in the
center of the street beyond her, right in the traffic lanes, where no
trees had ever grown. They were elms, almost stripped of leaves, and
something about the configuration of their naked limbs made him want
to recoil in loathing. Their trunks, he realized, were insubstantial --
automobile headlights were shining right through them. The grouping of
the trees was still filling him with dread, yet at the same time he was
drawn towards them.
And all the time, Kate was walking away, and a voice was telling him he
couldn't let her go through the city at night looking as she did.
He fought the same battle with his pride, then turned in the opposite
direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly. . . .
A sense of aching vastness, shifting of perspectives and parallax,
unthinkable transitions in which the curvatures of space-time writhe
between negative and positive, and infinity yawns at the mid-point --
numinous, illusory, poignant. ...
Breton gripped the arms of his chair and held on tightly until the sound
of his breathing died away into the silence of the room. He got up,
went to the fireplace and wound the old oak-cased clock. The heavy key
was cool in his fingers, cool and real. Outside the windows the snow
was coming down again in small, dry crumbs, and cars with their lights
switched on early ghosted past beyond the trees. The house was filled
with patient brown shadows.
He went into the kitchen and began to make coffee while his mind slowly
released itself from the stasis induced by the trip. The ensuing lack of
nervous energy was another familiar feature of the excursions into the
past, but this time the drain had been greater than ever before. Waiting
for the water to boil, Breton realized belatedly that the trip had
been unusual in other respects -- one of them being the introduction
of an element of fantasy. Those elm trees growing in the middle of 14th
Street had surprised him, but there was more to his sense of shock than
an awareness of their incongruity. They had been semi-transparent, like
images projected on a more vivid background, but that ragged archway
was
to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a
nervous housewife.
"I don't quite know how to break this to you, Mr. Breton," Convery said
slowly. He had a broad, sunburned face and a tiny nose which made scarcely
any division between widely spaced blue eyes.
"What is it, Lieutenant?"
"It's about your wife. It appears she was walking in the park tonight,
without company -- and she was attacked."
"Attacked?" Breton felt his knees begin to swim. "But where is she now?
Is she all right?"
Convery shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mr. Breton. She's dead."
Breton sank down into a chair while the universe heaved and contracted
around him like the chambers of a vast heart suddenly exposed.
I did
it,
he thought, I killed my wife. He was dimly aware of the second
detective taking Convery to one side and whispering to him. A few seconds
later Convery returned.
"My partner reminds me I've jumped the gun a bit, Mr. Breton.
Officially, I should have said that the body of a woman had been found
with identification on it which suggested she was your wife, but in a
clear-cut case I don't like prolonging things. Just for the record, have
you any reason to believe that the body of a woman of about twenty-five,
tall, black-and-gold hair, wearing a silver-blue cocktail dress, we
found near the 50th Avenue entrance of the city park, would not have
been that of Mrs. Breton?"
"No reason. She was out alone this evening, dressed like that." Breton
closed his eyes.
I did it -- I killed my wife.
"I let her go alone."
"We still have to make a positive identification; if you like, one of
the patrolmen will drive you to the morgue."
"It isn't necessary," Breton said. "I can do that much."
The refrigerated drawer rolled out easily on oiled bearings, forming
an efficient cantilever, and a stray thought intruded determinedly
on Breton's mind. A
good machine.
He looked down at Kate's cold,
dreaming face, and at the jewels of moisture curving precisely along her
eyebrows. Of its own accord, his right hand moved out to touch her. He
saw the blackness of oil rimming the fingernails, and willed his hand
to stop.
Thou hast not a stain on thee.
Lieutenant Convery moved into a corner of his field of vision, close
at hand yet light-years away across a universe of pulsating fluorescent
brilliance, "Is this your wife?"
"Who else?" Breton said numbly. "Who else?"
An indeterminate time later he learned Kate had been clubbed, raped and
stabbed. A forensic expert added that they could not be sure of the order
in which those things had happened. Breton contained the knowledge of his
guilt successfully for a matter of days, while going through senseless
formalities, but all the while he knew he was a bomb in which the charge
had already ignited, that he was living through the nanoseconds preceding
his disintegration into human shrapnel.
It came, with the spurious gentleness of a filmed explosion, on the
day after Kate's funeral. He was walking aimlessly through the city's
north side, along a street of time-defeated buildings. The day was
cold and, although there was no rain, the sidewalks were wet. Near
an undistinguished corner he found a clean, new feather and picked it
up. It was striped pearly gray and white -- dropped by a bird in haste --
and he remembered how Kate had worn her clothes like plumage. He looked
for a windowsill on which to set the feather, like a single lost glove,
and saw a man in shabby denims smiling at him from a doorway. Breton
let the feather fall, twinkling and tumbling, onto the greasy concrete
and covered it with his foot.
His next action to be guided by his own identity came five weeks later,
when he opened his eyes in a hospital bed.
The intervening time was not completely lost to him, but it was flawed
and distorted like a scene viewed through pebbled glass. He had been
drinking hard, annihilating self-awareness with raw spirit, contracting
the frontiers of consciousness. And somewhere in the midst of that
kaleidoscope world was born an idea which, to his fevered mind, had all
the simplicity of genius.
Psychopathic killers were hard to find, the police had told him. They
could not hold out much hope in a case like this. A woman who goes into
the park at night alone, they seemed to be saying, what did she
expect?
Breton had found himself uneasy in their presence, and decided the
dismaying thing about the police mentality was that dealing so much
with criminals made them aware of another system of morality. Without
sympathizing with it, they nevertheless came to understand to some extent,
and the needle of their moral compass was deflected. Not their direction
-- because so long as the amount of bias is known it is still possible
to steer -- but this, he deduced, was why he felt like a player who did
not understand the rules of the game. This was why he was looked at with
resentment when he asked what results they were getting -- and at some
point early in the last weeks he decided to invent new rules.
Kate's murderer had not been seen and, as he had no circumstantial
motive for the killing, there was nothing to link him physically to the
crime. But, Breton reasoned, there was another kind of connection. Breton
had no way of knowing the killer --
but the killer must know him.
The
case had been well covered by the local papers and television services,
both of which had carried Breton's picture. It would be impossible for
the killer not to have shown interest in the man whose life he had so
savagely twisted. And, for a time, Breton came to believe that if he
encountered the killer on the street, in the park, in a bar, he would
know that man by his eyes.
The city was not large, and it was possible that in his lifetime he had,
at one time or another, glimpsed every man in it. Obviously, he had to
get into the streets and keep moving, going everywhere that people went,
making a rapid playback of a lifetime's exposure to the city's corporate
identity -- and someday he would look into another man's eyes, and he
would
know.
And when that happened . . .
The mirage of hope glimmered crazily in front of Breton for five weeks,
until it was finally extinguished by malnutrition and alcoholic poisoning.
He opened his eyes and knew by some quality of the light on the hospital
ceiling that there was snow on the ground outside. An unfamiliar
emptiness was gnawing at his stomach and he experienced a sane,
practical desire for a dish of thick farmhouse soup. Sitting up in
the bed he looked around him and discovered he was in a private room,
which was barely rescued from complete anonymity by several sprays of
deep-red roses. He recognized the favorite flowers of his secretary,
Hetty Calder, and there was a vague memory swirl of her long homely face
looking down at him with concern. Breton smiled briefly. In the past,
Hetty had almost visibly lost weight every time he got a head cold -- he
hesitated to think how she might have been affected by his performance
over the recent weeks. The desire for food returned with greater force
and he reached for the call button.
It was Hetty who, five days later, drove him home from the hospital in
his own car.
"Listen, Jack," she said desperately. "You've just
got
to come and
stay with us for a while. Harry and I would be delighted to have you,
and with you not having any family of your own . . ."
"I'll be fine, Hetty," Breton said. "Thanks again for the offer, but
it's time I went back home and began gathering up the pieces."
"But will you be all right?" Hetty was driving expertly through the
slush-walled streets, handling the big old car as if she were a man,
blowing through her cigarette every now and again to send a flaky cylinder
of ash onto the floor. Her sallow face was heavy with anxiety.
"I'll be all right," he said gratefully. "I can think about Kate now.
It hurts like hell, of course, but at least I'm able to accept it.
I wasn't able to do that before. It's hard to explain, but I had a
feeling there ought to be some government office I could go to -- a sort
of Department of Death -- and explain that there'd been a mistake. That
Kate
couldn't
die . . . I'm talking nonsense, Hetty."
Hetty glanced sideways at him. "You're talking like a human being, Jack.
There's nothing wrong with that."
"How do I usually talk?"
"Business has been pretty good the last few weeks," Hetty said crisply.
"You're going to need extra staff."
She went on to give him a rundown on the new business and the progress
that had been made on the existing survey contracts being handled by
Breton's engineering consultancy. As she talked he realized he was not
as concerned as he ought to be about his business. A gadgeteer by instinct,
he had taken a couple of degrees without any real effort because it was the
economically sound thing to do, had strayed into the geologically-oriented
consultancy, and had taken it over when the owner retired. It had all been
so easy, so inevitable, yet vaguely dissatisfying. He had always enjoyed
making things, giving rein to the intelligence his hands appeared to
possess of their own right, but there seemed to be no time for that now.
Breton huddled in his overcoat, staring nostalgically out at the wet
black thoroughfares which were like canals cut through banks of soiled
snow. As the car gathered speed, white fluffy chunks of new snow broke
upwards from the front end, pounded silently on the windshield and swirled
away to the rear, disintegrating, vanishing. He tried to concentrate on
Hetty's words, but saw with dismay that a pinpoint of colored, shimmering
light had been born in the air ahead of him. Not now, he thought, rubbing
his eyes; but the flickering mote of brilliance was already beginning to
grow. Within a minute it was like a brand-new coin spinning, coruscating,
remaining in the center of the field of vision of his right eye no matter
which way he turned his head.
"I went over to your place this morning and turned the heat on," Hetty
said. "At least you'll be warm.
"Thanks," he said numbly. "You go to too much trouble over me.
The furtive shimmer was growing faster now, blocking out more of his
view, beginning to unfold its familiar patterns -- restless prismatic
geometries, marching, shifting, opening windows into alien dimensions.
Not now, he pleaded silently, I don't want to make a trip right now.
The optical phenomenon was something he had known since childhood.
It could happen at intervals of three months, or of a few days --
depending on his degree of mental stress -- and was generally preceded by
a feeling of unusual well-being. Once the euphoria was past, the zigzag
shimmering over the field of his right eye would begin, and that would be
followed by one of his inexplicable, frightening trips into the past.
The knowledge that each trip took only a fraction of a second of real
time, and that it must be some freak of memory, made its imminence no
easier to bear -- for the scenes he relived were never pleasant. Always,
they were segments of his life he would have preferred to forget, crisis
points. And it was not hard to guess the particular nightmare which was
likely to crop up in the future.
By the time the car reached his house, Breton was effectively blinded
on the right side by a beautiful blanket of color -- geometrical,
tremulous, prismatic -- which made it difficult for him to judge
distances accurately. He persuaded Hetty not to get out of the car,
waved to her as she moved off down the snow-covered drive, and fumbled
open the front door. With the door locked behind him he walked quickly
into the living room and sat down in a deep chair. The shimmering was at
its maximum, which meant it would withdraw quite abruptly at any moment,
and the trip to God-knows-where would be on. He waited. The vision in
his right eye began to clear, he tensed, and the room began to recede,
to distort, to exhibit strange perspectives. Ponderously, helplessly,
over the edge we go. . . .
Kate was walking away down the street, past blazing store windows.
With her silvered wrap drawn tight over the flimsy party dress, and long
legs slimmed even further by needle-heeled sandals, she looked like an
idealized screen version of a gangster's moll. ,The ambient brilliance
from the stores projected her solidly into his mind, jewel-sharp; then
he saw -- with a vast sense of wrongness -- three trees growing in the
center of the street beyond her, right in the traffic lanes, where no
trees had ever grown. They were elms, almost stripped of leaves, and
something about the configuration of their naked limbs made him want
to recoil in loathing. Their trunks, he realized, were insubstantial --
automobile headlights were shining right through them. The grouping of
the trees was still filling him with dread, yet at the same time he was
drawn towards them.
And all the time, Kate was walking away, and a voice was telling him he
couldn't let her go through the city at night looking as she did.
He fought the same battle with his pride, then turned in the opposite
direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly. . . .
A sense of aching vastness, shifting of perspectives and parallax,
unthinkable transitions in which the curvatures of space-time writhe
between negative and positive, and infinity yawns at the mid-point --
numinous, illusory, poignant. ...
Breton gripped the arms of his chair and held on tightly until the sound
of his breathing died away into the silence of the room. He got up,
went to the fireplace and wound the old oak-cased clock. The heavy key
was cool in his fingers, cool and real. Outside the windows the snow
was coming down again in small, dry crumbs, and cars with their lights
switched on early ghosted past beyond the trees. The house was filled
with patient brown shadows.
He went into the kitchen and began to make coffee while his mind slowly
released itself from the stasis induced by the trip. The ensuing lack of
nervous energy was another familiar feature of the excursions into the
past, but this time the drain had been greater than ever before. Waiting
for the water to boil, Breton realized belatedly that the trip had
been unusual in other respects -- one of them being the introduction
of an element of fantasy. Those elm trees growing in the middle of 14th
Street had surprised him, but there was more to his sense of shock than
an awareness of their incongruity. They had been semi-transparent, like
images projected on a more vivid background, but that ragged archway
was
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