Time Travel Omnibus, page 390
Jimmy waited.
HAYNES went on awkwardly, “The accident in which Jane was killed. You were in your car. You came up behind a truck carrying structural steel. There was a long slim girder sticking way out behind, with a red rag on it. The truck had airbrakes. The driver jammed them on just after he’d passed over a bit of wet pavement. The truck stopped. Your car slid, even with the brakes locked.—It’s nonsense, Jimmy!”
“I’d rather you continued,” said Jimmy, white.
“You—ran into the truck, your car swinging a little as it slid. The girder came through the windshield. It could have hit you. It could have missed both of you. By pure chance, it happened to hit Jane.”
“And killed her,” said Jimmy very quietly. “Yes. But it might have been me. That diary entry is written as if it had been me. Did you notice?”
There was a long pause in Haynes’ office. The world outside the windows was highly prosaic and commonplace and normal. Haynes wriggled in his chair.
“I think,” he said unhappily, “you did the same as my girl client—forged that writing and then forgot it. Have you seen a doctor yet?”
“I will,” said Jimmy. “Systematize my lunacy for me first, Haynes. If it can be done.”
“It’s not accepted science,” said Haynes. “In fact, it’s considered eyewash. But there have been speculations . . .” He grimaced. “First point is that it was pure chance that Jane was hit. It was just as likely to be you instead, or neither of you. If it had been you—”
“Jane,” said Jimmy, “would be living in our house alone, and she might very well have written that entry in the diary.”
“Yes,” agreed Haynes uncomfortably. “I shouldn’t suggest this, but—there are a lot of possible futures. We don’t know which one will come about for us. Nobody except fatalists can argue with that statement. When today was in the future, there were a lot of possible todays. The present moment—now—is only one of any number of nows that might have been. So it’s been suggested—mind you, this isn’t accepted science, but pure charlatanry—it’s been suggested that there may be more than one actual now. Before the girder actually hit, there were three nows in the possible future. One in which neither of you was hit, one in which you were hit, and one—”
He paused, embarrassed. “So some people would say, how do we know that the one in which Jane was hit is the only now? They’d say that the others could have happened and that maybe they did.”
JIMMY nodded.
“If that were true,” he said detachedly, “Jane would be in a present moment, a now, where it was me who was killed. As I’m in a now where she was killed. Is that it?”
Haynes shrugged.
Jimmy thought, and said gravely, “Thanks. Queer, isn’t it?”
He picked up the two pictures and went out.
Haynes was the only one who knew about the affair, and he worried. But it is not easy to denounce someone as insane, when there is no evidence that he is apt to be dangerous. He did go to the trouble to find out that Jimmy acted in a reasonably normal manner, working industriously and talking quite sanely in the daytime. Only Haynes suspected that of nights he went home and experienced the impossible. Sometimes, Haynes suspected that the impossible might be the fact—that had been an amazingly good bit of trick photography—but it was too preposterous! Also, there was no reason for such a thing to happen to Jimmy.
FOR a week after Haynes’ pseudo-scientific explanation, however, Jimmy was almost lighthearted. He no longer had to remind himself that Jane was dead. He had evidence that she wasn’t. She wrote to him in the diary which he found on her desk, and he read her messages and wrote in return. For a full week the sheer joy of simply being able to communicate with each other was enough.
The second week was not so good. To know that Jane was alive was good, but to be separated from her without hope was not. There was no meaning in a cosmos in which one could only write love-letters to one’s wife or husband in another now which only might have been. But for a while both Jimmy and Jane tried to hide this new hopelessness from each other.
Jimmy explained this carefully to Haynes before it was all over. Their letters were tender and very natural, and presently there was even time for gossip and actual bits of choice scandal . . .
Haynes met Jimmy on the street one day, after about two weeks. Jimmy looked better, but he was drawn very fine. Though he greeted Haynes without constraint, Haynes felt awkward. After a little he said, “Er—Jimmy. That matter we were talking about the other day—Those photographs—”
“Yes. You were right,” said Jimmy casually. “Jane agrees. There is more than one now. In the now I’m in, Jane was killed. In the now she’s in, I was killed.”
Haynes fidgeted. “Would you let me see that picture of the door again?” he asked. “A trick film like that simply can’t be perfect! I’d like to enlarge that picture a little more. May I?”
“You can have the film,” said Jimmy. “I don’t need it any more.” Haynes hesitated. Jimmy, quite matter-of-factly, told him most of what had happened to date. But he had no idea what had started it. Haynes almost wrung his hands.
“The thing can’t be!” he said desperately. “You have to be crazy, Jimmy!”
But he would not have said that to a man whose sanity he really suspected.
Jimmy nodded. “Jane told me something, by the way. Did you have a near-accident night before last? Somebody almost ran into you out on the Saw Mill Road?” Haynes started and went pale. “I went around a curve and a car plunged out of nowhere on the wrong side of the road. We both swung hard. He smashed my fender and almost went off the road himself. But he went racing off without stopping to see if I’d gone in the ditch and killed myself. If I’d been live feet nearer the curve when he came out of it—”
“Where Jane is,” said Jimmy, “you were. Just about live feet nearer the curve. It was a bad smash. Tony Shields was in the other car. It killed him—where Jane is.”
Haynes licked his lips. It was absurd, but he said, “How about me?”
“Where Jane is,” Jimmy told him, “you’re in the hospital.”
Haynes swore in unreasonable irritation. There wasn’t any way for Jimmy to know about that nearaccident. He hadn’t mentioned it, because he’d no idea who’d been in the other car.
“I don’t believe it!” But he said pleadingly, “Jimmy, it isn’t so, is it? How in hell could you account for it?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Jane and I—we’re rather fond of each other.” The understatement was so patent that he smiled faintly. “Chance separated us. The feeling we have for each other draws us together. There’s a saying about two people becoming one flesh. If such a thing could happen, it would be Jane and me. After all, maybe only a tiny pebble or a single extra drop of water made my car swerve enough to get her killed—where I am, that is. That’s a very little thing. So with such a trifle separating us, and so much pulling us together—why, sometimes the barrier wears thin. She leaves a door closed in the house where she is. I open that same door where I am. Sometimes I have to open the door she left closed, too. That’s all.”
HAYNES didn’t say a word, but the question he wouldn’t ask was so self-evident that Jimmy answered it.
“We’re hoping,” he said. “It’s pretty bad being separated, but the—phenomena keep up. So we hope. Her diary is sometimes in the now where she is, and sometimes in this now of mine. Cigaret butts, too. Maybe—” That was the only time he showed any sign of emotion. He spoke as if his mouth were dry. “If ever I’m in her now or she’s in mine, even for an instant, all the devils in hell couldn’t separate us again!—We hope.”
Which was insanity. In fact, it was the third week of insanity. He’d told Haynes quite calmly that Jane’s diary was on her desk every night, and there was a letter to him in it, and he wrote one to her. He said quite calmly that the barrier between them seemed to be growing thinner. That at least once, when he went to bed, he was sure that there was one more cigaret stub in the ashtray than had been there earlier in the evening.
They were very near indeed. They were separated only by the difference between what was and what might have been. In one sense the difference was a pebble or a drop of water. In another, the difference was that between life and death. But they hoped. They convinced themselves that the barrier grew thinner. Once, it seemed to Jimmy that they touched hands. But he was not sure. He was still sane enough not to be sure. And he told all this to Haynes in a matter-of-fact fashion, and speculated mildly on what had started it all . . .
Then, one night, Haynes called Jimmy on the telephone. Jimmy answered.
He sounded impatient.
“Jimmy!” said Haynes. He was almost hysterical. “I think I’m insane! You know you said Tony Shields was in the car that hit me?”
“Yes,” said Jimmy politely. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s been driving me crazy,” wailed Haynes feverishly. “You said he was killed—there. But I hadn’t told a soul about the incident. So—so just now I broke down and phoned him. And it was Tony Shields! That near-crash scared him to death, and I gave him hell and—he’s paying for my fender! I didn’t tell him he was killed.”
Jimmy didn’t answer. It didn’t seem to matter to him.
“I’m coming over!” said Haynes feverishly. “I’ve got to talk!”
“No,” said Jimmy. “Jane and I are pretty close to each other. We’ve touched each other again. We’re hoping. The barrier’s wearing through. We hope it’s going to break.”
“But it can’t!” protested Haynes, shocked at the idea of improbabilities in the preposterous. “It—it can’t! What’d happen if you turned up where she is, or—or if she turned up here?”
“I don’t know,” said Jimmy, “but we’d be together.”
“You’re crazy! You mustn’t—”
“Goodbye,” said Jimmy politely. “I’m hoping, Haynes. Something has to happen. It has to!”
His voice stopped. There was a noise in the room behind him; Haynes heard it. Only two words, and those faintly, and over a telephone, but he swore to himself that it was Jane’s voice, throbbing with happiness. The two words Haynes thought he heard were, “Jimmy! Darling!”
Then the telephone crashed to the floor and Haynes heard no more. Even though he called back frantically again, Jimmy didn’t answer.
HAYNES sat up all that night, practically gibbering, and he tried to call Jimmy again next morning, and then tried his office, and at last went to the police. He explained to them that Jimmy had been in a highly nervous state since the death of his wife.
So finally the police broke into the house. They had to break in because every door and window was carefully fastened from the inside, as if Jimmy had been very careful to make sure nobody could interrupt what he and Jane hoped would occur. But Jimmy wasn’t in the house. There was no trace of him. It was exactly as if he had vanished into the air.
Ultimately the police dragged ponds and such things for his body, but they never found any clues. Nobody ever saw Jimmy again. It was recorded that Jimmy simply left town, and everybody accepted that obvious explanation.
THE thing that really bothered Haynes was the fact that Jimmy had told him who’d almost crashed into him on the Saw Mill Road, and it was true. That was, to understate, hard to take. And there was the double-exposure picture of Jimmy’s front door, which was much more convincing than any other trick picture Haynes had ever seen. But on the other hand, if it did happen, why did it happen only to Jimmy and Jane? What set it off? What started it? Why, in effect, did those oddities start at that particular time, to those particular people, in that particular fashion? In fact, did anything happen at all?
Now, after Jimmy’s disappearance, Haynes wished he could talk with him once more—talk sensibly, quietly, without fear and hysteria and this naggingly demanding wonderment.
For he had sketched to Jimmy, and Jimmy had accepted (hadn’t he?) the possibility of the other now—but with that acceptance came still others. In one, Jane was dead. In one, Jimmy was dead. It was between these two that the barrier had grown so thin . . .
If he could talk to Jimmy about it!
There was also a now in which both had died, and another in which neither had died! And if it was togetherness that each wanted so desperately . . . which was it?
These were things that Haynes would have liked very much to know, but he kept his mouth shut, or calm men in white coats would have come and taken him away for treatment. As they would have taken Jimmy.
The only thing really sure was that it was all impossible. But to someone who liked Jimmy and Jane—and doubtless to Jimmy and to Jane themselves—no matter which barrier had been broken, it was a rather satisfying impossibility.
Haynes’ car had been repaired. He could easily have driven out to the cemetery. For some reason, he never did.
OPERATION PEEP
John Wyndham
When the people from the Future started visiting their ancestors, there was no privacy left. Like mothers-in-law, the problem was how to get rid of them!
When I called round at Sally’s I showed her the paragraph in the Westwich Evening News.
“What do you think of that?” I asked her.
She read it, standing, and with an impatient frown on her pretty face.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, finally.
Sally’s principles of belief and disbelief are a thing I’ve never got quite lined up. How a girl can dismiss a pack of solid evidence as though it were kettle steam, and then go and fall for some advertisement that’s phoney from the first word as though it were holy writ, I just don’t . . . Oh well, it keeps on happening, anyway.
This paragraph read:
MUSIC WITH A KICK
Patrons of the concert at the Adams Hall last night were astonished to see a pair of legs dangling knee-deep from the ceiling during one of the items. The whole audience saw them, and all reports agree that they were bare legs, with some kind of sandals on the feet. They remained visible for some three or four minutes, during which time they several times moved back and forth across the ceiling. Finally, after making a kicking movement, they disappeared upwards, and were seen no more. Examination of the roof shows no traces, and the owners of the Hall are at a loss to account for the phenomenon.
“It’s just one more thing,” I said.
“So what?” said Sally. “What does it prove, anyway?” she added, apparently forgetful that she wasn’t believing it.
“I don’t know—yet,” I admitted.
“Well, there you are then,” she said.
Sometimes I get the feeling Sally doesn’t go a lot on logic.
Most people, if they’d noticed it at all, would be thinking the way Sally was then. I was acting cagey on account of experience has shown me that a lot of threads can fit screws that don’t belong, but already it looked like there were things happening that ought to be added together.
The first guy to bump up against it—the first I can find on record, that is—was one Patrolman Walsh. Maybe other fellows saw things before that and just put them down as a new kind of pink elephant. But Patrolman Walsh’s idea of a top-notch celebration rated around a couple of bottles of coke, so that when he found a head sitting up on the sidewalk on what there was of its neck he stopped to look at it pretty hard. The thing that upset him, according to the report he turned in when he’d run half a mile to the section-station and stopped gibbering, was that it looked back at him.
Well, it’s not good to find a head on the sidewalk, and 2 a.m. makes it kind of worse, but as for the rest, you can get a reproachful look from a cod on a slab if your mind happens to be on something else. Patrolman Walsh didn’t stop there, however. He said the thing opened its mouth “like it was trying to say something.” If it did, he shouldn’t have mentioned it; it just naturally brought the pink elephants to mind. On the other hand, why say it unless he thought it was so? But nobody in a respectable section-station wanted to hear a thing like that. However, he stuck to it, so after they’d bawled him out a bit and taken disappointing sniffs at his breath, they sent him back with another man to show just where he’d found the thing. Of course there wasn’t any head—nor blood—nor signs of cleaning-up marks. Nor did anyone later report the loss of a head, white race, sallow complexion, clean-shaven’, and mid-brown hair which was what he said it was. And that’s all there was about the incident—save, doubtless, a few curt remarks on the conduct-sheet to dog his future career.
But Patrolman Walsh hadn’t a big lead. Two evenings later an apartment house was curdled by searing shrieks from a Mrs. Rourke in No. 35, and simultaneously from a Miss Farrell who lived above her. When the neighbours arrived, Mrs. Rourke was hysterical about a pair of legs that had been dangling from her bedroom ceiling, and Miss Farrell the same about an arm and shoulder that had stretched out from under her bed. But there was nothing to be seen on the ceiling, and nothing under the bed beyond a discreditable quantity of dust.
There were some other little incidents, too.
It was Jimmy Lindlen who works, if that isn’t too strong a word for it, in the office next to mine who drew my attention to the whole thing. Jimmy’s hobby is collecting facts. In this he is what you might call the reductio ad opposite absurdum of Sally. For him, everything that gets printed in a newspaper is a fact—poor fellow. He doesn’t mind much what subject his facts cover so long as they look screwy. I guess he once heard that the truth is never simple, and deduced from that that everything that’s not simple must be true.
He’s not the only one. There was a fellow called Fort who was the arch collector of the improbable. From the time he was a kid Jimmy has revered this Fort as the savant of the era. Right on at an age when most fellows are getting more improbability than they want from their girl friends, Jimmy’s desire to be baffled, bogged and bewildered never flags.
Now this Fort guy’s method was to labour mightily with scissors and paste, present the resulting collation, and leave it to a largely indifferent world to judge whether nearly everybody wasn’t wrong about most everything. But Jimmy’s technique was different—and less cautious. I’ve never actually seen him at work on it, but at a guess I’d say he dealt himself a hand of cuttings in which there was one constant factor, discarded the awkward ones, and then settled down to astonish himself as much as possible with theories about the rest. I got used to him coming into my room full of inspiration, and didn’t take much account of it. I knew he’d shuffle and deal himself another hand that evening and stagger himself all over again. So when he brought in the first batch about Patrolman Walsh and the rest I didn’t ignite much.
