The Two Timers Read Free Page B

Before I was married."

"Uh-huh. It's a high velocity job, isn't it?"

"Yes." Breton could feel the bewilderment building up inside him to an

almost physical pressure. What had happened?

"Ugly things," Convery commented casually. "They destroy animals.

I don't know why people use them."

"It's a good machine, that's all," Breton replied. "I like good machines.

Oh, I forgot -- it isn't working."

"Why not?"

"I dropped the bolt one day and I think it jammed the pin."

"Uh-huh." Convery removed the rifle's bolt, examined it, smelt the breech,

peered through the barrel at a table lamp, then handed the weapon back

to the patrolman. "That the only rifle you own?"

"Yes. Look, Lieutenant, this has gone on long enough. Why are you here?"

Breton hesitated. "Has anything happened to my wife?"

"I thought you'd never ask." Convery's blue eyes roved Breton's face.

"Your wife is all right. She was foolish enough to walk through the park

tonight, without company, and a man attacked her -- but she's all right."

"I don't understand. How . . . how can she be all right if she was attacked?"

"Well, she was very lucky, Mr. Breton. Another man, who incidentally

looked like you, stepped out from behind a tree and blew the attacker's

head off with a rifle."

"What? You don't think . . . Where's the man now?"

Convery smiled. "We don't know that, as yet. He seems to have

vanished. . . ."

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. . . .

"Look at that guy drink," Gordon Palfrey was saying. "He's really going

into orbit tonight."

The others turned to look at Breton, who -- desperately needing time

to reorient himself -- smiled wanly and sat down in a deep armchair. He

noticed a speculative look in Kate's eyes and wondered if there was any

way for a casual observer to detect that he had been blacked out.

An analyst called Fusciardi had, after an unsatisfactory investigation,

assured him the lapses were unnoticeable, but Breton had found it

difficult to believe because the trips often occupied several hours of

subjective time. Fusciardi's explanation was that Breton had an unusual,

but not unique, capacity for flashes of absolute recall occupying only

split seconds of objective time. He had even suggested referring the

case to a university psychological team, but at that point Breton had

lost interest.

Breton relaxed further into the big old chair, enjoying the comfort of

its sane solidity. That particular episode was cropping up more often

lately and he found it depressing, even though Fusciardi had warned

him that key scenes in his life -- especially those involving emotional

stress -- would be most liable for reclamation. Tonight's trip had been

unusually long, and its impact increased by the fact that he had had so

little warning. There had been none of the visual disturbances which

Fusciardi had told him were commonly the prelude to a migraine attack

in other people.

Chilled by his brush with the past, Breton tried to increase his hold on

the present, but Kate and the Palfreys were still absorbed in the unusual

sample of automatic writing. He listened for a moment as they went through

the ritual of trying to identify the author, then allowed his mind to

drift in a warm alcoholic haze. A lot seemed to have happened in an

evening which had started off in an atmosphere of distilled dullness. I

should have stayed in the office with Carl, he thought. The Blundell

Cement Company survey had to be com pleted in less than a week, and had

been going slowly even before the unlikely twenty milligal discrepancies

in the gravimeter readings showed up. Perhaps they had not been corrected

properly. Carl was good, but there were so many factors to be considered

in gravity surveying -- sun and moon positions, tidal movements,