The Two Timers by Bob Shaw Page A

trip. The big trip. He had made it -- the thought brought a flicker of

satisfaction -- eight years of continuous work had had their brief

reward. He had breasted the implacable river of time and --

Kate!

The incredible realization fountained through him, bringing the first

involuntary movement of his limbs. He brought his hands up under

his shoulders and pressed hard against the ground. The process of

getting to his feet was an extended one, involving getting his arms to

raise his body, resting on his heels, then grimly forcing his legs to

accept weight. He unslung the rifle, put it under his coat and began

to walk. There was nobody near the three elm trees, but this was not

surprising. The man he had shot would have been found and taken away

eight years earlier, and as for Kate -- she must be at the house.

A woman's place is in the home, he thought inanely as he began to run,

swaying grotesquely as his knees orbited at every step. His wild elation

lasted until he was close to the park's entrance, and could see the

milk-white globes on their twin pillars. Until a thought ended it.

But, a voice suddenly whispered, if Kate's at home -- why are you out

in the park with a rifle?

If she's alive -- how can you remember her funeral?

Later, while sanity still lingered, he drove past house. The new owners

had not yet moved in, and the FOR SALE sign was still standing in the

garden, reflecting stray beams from the street lights. Breton experienced

a yearning impulse to go into the house and make sure, but instead he

pressed down hard on the gas pedal. The old Buick faltered for a moment,

then surged away down the quiet avenue. There were lights in all the

other houses.

Breton drove to a bar on the city's north side, right on the edge of

the prairie, where tumbleweeds sometimes came nuzzling at the door like

hungry dogs. Seated at the long bar, he ordered a whiskey -- his first

since the nightmare binge of eight years earlier -- and stared into its

amber infinities. Why had he not deduced what was bound to happen? Why

had his mind gone so far along its lonely road, only to stop short of

the final, obvious step?

He had gone back in time, he had shot a man -- but nothing was

going to alter the reality of Kate's death. Breton dipped a finger in

the whiskey and drew a straight line on the smooth plastic of the bar

top. He stared at it for a moment, then added another line forking out

from the first. If the first line represented the stream of time as

he knew it, and in which nothing had changed, then the few seconds he

had wrested from the past had taken place on the divergent line. When

his brief moment of death-dealing was over, he had snapped back to the

present in his own time-stream. Instead of bringing Kate back to life

in his own line he had prevented her death in the divergent track.

Breton took another sip from his glass, trying to assimilate the idea that somewhere Kate was alive. He looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Kate

might be in bed, or having a last cup of coffee with her husband -- the

other Jack Breton. For Breton's trip into the past had, when it set up

a new time-stream, created another universe in its entirety, complete

with a duplicate of himself. That other universe would have its own

cities, lands and oceans, planets and stars, receding galaxies -- but

none of these things were important beside the fact that he had bought

Kate another life, only to have her share it with another man. And it

was wrong to say that the other man was himself, because an individual

is the sum of his experiences, and that other Breton had not looked on

Kate's dead face, endured the guilt, or surrendered eight years of his

life to the monomania which had recreated Kate Breton.

The forked line he had drawn on the bar was fading away into the air.

Breton stared at it somberly. He had a feeling he had used up something

inside himself, that he would never again be able to summon up