Four-Sided Triangle

THE FOUR-SIDED

TRIANGLE

Amazing Stories, November 1939

by William F. Temple (1914-)

Three people peered through a quartz window.

The girl was squashed uncomfortably between the two men, but at the moment neither she nor they cared. The ob-ject they were watching was too interesting. The girl was Joan Leeton. Her hair was an indeterminate brown, and owed its curls to tongs, not to nature. Her eyes were certainly brown, and bright with unquenchable good hu-mour. In repose her face was undistinguished, though far from plain; when she smiled, it was beautiful.

Her greatest attraction (and it was part of her attraction that she did not realise it) lay in her character. She was soothingly sympathetic without becoming mushy, she was very level-headed (a rare thing in a woman) and completely unselfish. She refused to lose her temper over anything, or take offence, or enlarge upon the truth in her favour, and yet she was tolerant of such lapses in others. She possessed a brain that was unusually able in its dealing with science, and yet her tastes and pleasures were simple.

William Fredericks (called ‘Will’) had much in common with Joan, but his sympathy was a little more disinterested, his humour less spontaneous, and he had certain prejudices. His tastes were reserved for what he considered the more worthy things. But he was calm and good-tempered, and his steadiness of purpose was reassuring. He was black-haired, with an expression of quiet content. William Josephs (called ‘Bill’) was different. He was completely unstable. Fiery of hair, he was alternately fiery and depressed of spirit. Impulsive, generous, highly emotional about art and music, he was given to periods of gaiety and moods of black melancholia. He reached, at his best, heights of mental brilliance far beyond the other two, but long bouts of lethargy prevented him from making the best of them. Nevertheless, his sense of humour was keen, and he was often amused at his own absurdly over-sensitive character; but he could not change it. Both these men were deeply in love with Joan, and both tried hard to conceal it. If Joan had any preference, she concealed it just as ably, although they were aware that she was fond of both of them.

The quartz window, through which the three were looking, was set in a tall metal container, and just a few feet away was another container, identical even to the thickness of the window-glass.

Overhead was a complex assemblage of apparatus: bulbous, silvered tubes, small electric motors that hummed in various unexpected places, makeshift screens of zinc, roughly soldered, coils upon coils of wire, and a network of slung cables that made the place look like a creeper-tangled tropical jungle. A large dynamo churned out a steady roar in the corner, and a pair of wide sparkgaps crackled continuously, filling the laboratory with a weird, jumping blue light as the day waned outside the windows and the dusk crept in.

An intruder in the laboratory might have looked through the window of the other container and seen, standing on a steel frame in a cubical chamber, an oil painting of

‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, delicately illuminated by concealed lights. He would not have known it, but the painting was standing in a vacuum. If he had squeezed behind the trio at the other container and gazed through their window he would have seen an apparently identical sight: an oil painting of ‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, standing on a steel frame in a vacuum, delicately illuminated by concealed lights.

From which he would probably not gather much.

The catch was that the painting at which the three were gazing so intently was not quite the same as the one in the first container—not yet. There were minute differences in colour and proportion.

But gradually these differences were righting themselves, for the whole of the second canvas was being built up atom by atom, molecule by molecule, into an exactly identical twin of the one which had felt the brush of Francis Boucher. The marvellously intricate apparatus, using an adaption of a newly-discovered magnetic principle, consumed only a moderate amount of power in arranging the lines of sympathetic fields of force which brought every proton into position and every electron into its respective balancing orbit. It was a machine which could divert the flow of great forces without the ability to tap their energy.

“Any minute now!” breathed Will.

Bill rubbed his breath off the glass impatiently.

“Don’t do that!” he said, and promptly fogged the glass over again. Not ungently, he attempted to rub a clear patch with Joan’s own pretty nose. She exploded into laughter, fogging the glass hopelessly, and in the temporary confusion of this they missed seeing the event they had been waiting days for—the completion of the duplicate painting to the ultimate atom.

The spark-gaps died with a final snap, a lamp sprang into being on the indicator panel, and the dynamo began to run whirringly down to a stop. They cleaned out the window, and there stood ‘Madame Croignette’ looking rather blankly out at them with wide brown eyes that exactly matched the sepia from Boucher’s palette, and both beauty spots and every hair of her powdered wig in place to a millionth of a millimetre.

Will turned a valve, and there was the hiss of air rushing into the chamber. He opened the window, and lifted the painting out gingerly, as if he half-expected it to crumble in his hands.

“Perfect—a beauty!” he murmured. He looked up at Joan with shining eyes. Bill caught that look, and unaccountably checked the impulsive whoop of joy he was on the point of letting loose. He coughed instead, and leaned over Joan’s shoulder to inspect ‘Madame Croignette’ more closely.

“The gamble’s come off,” went on Will. “We’ve sunk every cent into this, but it won’t be long before we have enough money to do anything we want to do-anything.”

“Anything—except to get Bill out of bed on Sunday mornings,” smiled Joan. and they laughed.

“No sensible millionaire would get out of bed any morning,” said Bill. The steel and glass factory of Art Replicas, Limited, shone like a diamond up in the green hills of Surrey. In a financial sense, it had actually sprung from a diamond—the sale of a replica of the Koh-i-noor. That had been the one and only product of Precious Stones, Limited, an earlier company which was closed down by the government when they saw that it would destroy the world’s diamond market. A sister company, Radium Products, was going strong up in the north because its scientific necessity was recognised. But the heart of the three company directors lay in Art Replicas, and there they spent their time.

Famous works of art from all over the world passed through the factory’s portals, and gave birth to innumerable replicas of themselves for distribution and sale at quite reasonable prices.

Families of only moderate means found it pleasing to have a Constable or Turner in the dining room and a Rodin statuette in the hall. And this widely-flung ownership of objets d’art, which were to all intents and purposes the genuine articles, strengthened interest in art enormously. When people had lived with these things for a little while, they began to perceive the beauty in them—for real beauty is not always obvious at a glance—and to become greedy for more knowledge of them and the men who originally conceived and shaped them.

So the three directors—Will, Bill, and Joan—put all their energy into satisfying the demands of the world for art, and conscious of their part in furthering civilisation, were deeply content.

For a time.

Then Bill, the impatient and easily-bored, broke out one day in the middle of a Directors’ Meeting.

“Oh to hell with the Ming estimates!” he cried, sweeping a pile of orders from the table.

Joan and Will, recognising the symptoms, exchanged wry glances of amusement.

“Look here,” went on Bill, “I don’t know what you two think, but I’m fed up!

We’ve become nothing but dull business people now. It isn’t our sort of life. Repetition, repetition, repetition! I’m going crazy! We’re research workers, not darned piece-workers. For heaven’s sake, let’s start out in some new line!”

This little storm relieved him, and almost immediately he smiled too.

“But, really, aren’t we?” he appealed.

“Yes,” responded Joan and Will in duet.

“Well, what about it?”

Will coughed, and prepared himself.

“Joan and I were talking about that this morning, as a matter of fact,” he said.

“We were going to suggest that we sell the factory, and retire to our old laboratory and re-equip it.”

Bill picked up the ink-pot and emptied it solemnly over the Ming estimates. The ink made a shining lake in the centre of the antique and valuable table.

“At last we’re sane again,” he said. “Now you know the line of investigation I want to open up. I’m perfectly convinced that the reason for our failure to create a living duplicate of any living creature was because the quotiety we assumed for the xy action—”

“Just a moment, Bill,” interrupted Will. “Before we get on with that work, I—I mean, one of the reasons Joan and me wanted to retire was because—well—”

“What he’s trying to say,” said Joan quietly, “is that we plan to get married and settle down for a bit before we resume research work.”

Bill stared at them. He was aware that his cheeks were slowly reddening. He felt numb.

“Well!” he said. “Well!” (He could think of nothing else. This was unbelievable!

He must postpone consideration of it until he was alone, else his utter mortification would show.)

He put out his hand automatically, and they both clasped it.

“You know I wish you every possible happiness,” he said, rather huskily. His mind seemed empty. He tried to form some comment, but somehow he could not compose one sentence that made sense.

“I think we’ll get on all right,” said Will, smiling at Joan. She smiled back at him, and unknowingly cut Bill to the heart.

With an effort, Bill pulled himself together and rang for wine to celebrate. He ordered some of the modern reconstruction of an exceedingly rare ’94. The night was moonless and cloudless, and the myriads of glittering pale blue points of the Milky Way sprawled across the sky as if someone had cast a handful of brilliants upon a black velvet cloth. But they twinkled steadily, for strong air currents were in motion in the upper atmosphere.

The Surrey lane was dark and silent. The only signs of life were the occasional distant glares of automobile headlights passing on the main highway nearly a mile away, and the red dot of a burning cigarette in a gap between the hedgerows. The cigarette was Bill’s. He sat there on a gate staring up at the array in the heavens and wondering what to do with his life.

He felt completely at sea, purposeless, and unutterably depressed. He had thought the word ‘heartache’ just a vague descriptive term. Now he knew what it meant. It was a solid physical feeling, an ache that tore him inside, unceasingly. He yearned to see Joan, to be with Joan, with his whole being. This longing would not let him rest. He could have cried out for a respite.

He tried to argue himself to a more rational viewpoint.

“I am a man of science,” he told himself. “Why should I allow old Mother Nature to torture and badger me like this? I can see through all the tricks of that old twister. These feelings are purely chemical reactions, the secretions of the glands mixing with the bloodstream. My mind is surely strong enough to conquer that? Else I have a third-rate brain, not the scientific instrument I’ve prided myself on.”

He stared up at the stars glittering in their seeming calm stability, age-old and unchanging. But were they? They may look just the same when all mankind and its loves and hates had departed from this planet, and left it frozen and dark. But he knew that even as he watched, they were changing position at a frightful speed, receeding from him at thousands of miles a second.

“Nature is a twister, full of illusions,” he repeated…

There started a train of thought, a merciful anaesthetic in which he lost himself for some minutes.

Somewhere down in the deeps of his subconscious an idea which had, unknown to him, been evolving itself for weeks, was stirred, and emerged suddenly into the light. He started, dropped his cigarette, and left it on the ground. He sat there stiffly on the gate and considered the idea. It was wild—incredibly wild. But if he worked hard and long at it, there was a chance that it might come off. It would provide a reason for living, anyway, so long as there was any hope at all of success.

He jumped down from the gate and started walking quickly and excitedly along the lane back to the factory. His mind was already turning over possibilities, planning eagerly. In the promise of this new adventure, the heartache was temporarily submerged.

Six months passed.

Bill had retired to the old laboratory, and spent much of that time enlarging and reequipping it. He added a rabbit pen, and turned an adjacent patch of ground into a burial-ground to dispose of those who died under his knife. This cemetery was like no cemetery in the world, for it was also full of dead things that had never died—because they had never lived.

His research got nowhere. He could build up, atom by atom, the exact physical counterpart of any living animal, but all such duplicates remained obstinately inanimate. They assumed an extraordinary life-like appearance, but it was frozen life. They were no more alive than waxwork images even though they were as soft and pliable as the original animals in sleep.

Bill thought he had hit upon the trouble in a certain equation, but re-checking confirmed that the equation had been right in the first place. There was no flaw in either theory or practice as far as he could see.

Yet somehow he could not duplicate the force of life in action. Must he apply that force himself? How?

He applied various degrees of electrical impulses to the nerve centers of the rabbits, tried rapid alternations of temperatures, miniature ‘iron lungs’; vigorous massage—both external and internal—intra-venous and spinal injections of everything from adrenalin to even more powerful stimulants which his agile mind concocted. And still the artificial rabbits remained limp bundles of fur. Joan and Will returned from their honeymoon and settled down in a roomy, comfortable old house a few miles away. They sometimes dropped in to see how the research was going. Bill always seemed bright and cheerful enough when they came, and joked about his setbacks.

“I think I’ll scour the world for the hottest thing in female bunnies and teach her to do a hula-hula on the lab bench,” he said. “That ought to make some of these stiffs sit up!”

Joan said she was seriously thinking of starting an eating-house specialising in rabbit pie, if Bill could keep up the supply of dead rabbits. He replied that he’d already buried enough to feed an army.

Their conversation was generally pitched in this bantering key, save when they really got down to technicalities. But when they had gone, Bill would sit and brood, thinking constantly of Joan. And he could concentrate on nothing else for the rest of that day.

Finally, more or less by accident, he found the press-button which awoke life in the rabbits. He was experimenting with a blood solution he had prepared, thinking that it might remain more constant than the natural rabbit’s blood, which became thin and useless too quickly. He had constructed a little pump to force the natural blood from a rabbit’s veins and fill them instead with his artificial solution. The pump had not been going for more than a few seconds before the rabbit stirred weakly and opened its eyes. It twitched its nose, and lay quite still for a moment, save for one foot which continued to quiver. Then suddenly it roused up and made a prodigious bound from the bench. The thin rubber tubes which tethered it by the neck parted in midair, and it fell awkwardly with a heavy thump on the floor. The blood continued to run from one of the broken tubes, but the pump which forced it out was the rabbit’s own heart—beating at last. The animal seemed to have used all its energy in that one powerful jump, and lay still on the floor and quietly expired.

Bill stood regarding it, his fingers still on the wheel of the pump. Then, when he realised what it meant, he recaptured some of his old exuberance, and danced around the laboratory carrying a carboy of acid as though it were a Grecian urn.

Further experiments convinced him that he had set foot within the portals of Nature’s most carefully guarded citadel. Admittedly he could not himself create anything original or unique in Life. But he could create a living image of any living creature under the sun.

A hot summer afternoon, a cool green lawn shaded by elms and on it two white-clad figures, Joan and Will, putting through their miniature nine-hole course. A bright-striped awning by the hedge, and below it, two comfortable canvas chairs and a little Moorish table with soft drinks. An ivy-covered wall of an old red-brick mansion showing between the trees. The indefinable smell of new-cut grass in the air. The gentle but triumphant laughter of Joan as Will foozled his shot. That was the atmosphere Bill entered at the end of his duty tramp along the lane from the laboratory-it was his first outdoor excursion for weeks-and he could not help comparing it with the sort of world he had been living in: the benches and bottles and sinks, the eye-tiring field of the microscope, the sheets of calculations under the glare of electric light in the dark hours of the night, the smell of blood and chemicals and rabbits.

And he realised completely that science wasn’t the greatest thing in life. Personal happiness was. That was the goal of all men, whatever way they strove to reach it. Joan caught sight of him standing on the edge of the lawn, and came hurrying across to greet him.

“Where have you been all this time?” she asked. “We’ve been dying to hear how you’ve been getting on.”

“I’ve done it,” said Bill.

“Done it? Have you really?” Her voice mounted excitedly almost to a squeak. She grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him across to Will. ”He’s done it!” she announced, and stood between them, watching both their faces eagerly. Will took the news with his usual calmness, and smilingly gripped Bill’s hand.

“Congratulations, old lad,” he said. “Come and have a drink and tell us all about it.”

They squatted, on the grass and helped themselves from the table. Will could see that Bill had been overworking himself badly. His face was drawn and tired, his eyelids red, and he was in the grip of a nervous tension which for the time held him dumb and uncertain of himself.

Joan noticed this, too, and checked the questions she was going to bombard upon him. Instead, she quietly withdrew to the house to prepare a pot of the China tea which she knew always soothed Bill’s migraine. When she had gone, Bill, with an effort, shook some of the stupor from him, and looked across at Will. His gaze dropped, and he began to pluck idly at the grass.

“Will,” he began, presently, “I—” He cleared his throat nervously, and started again in a none too steady voice. “Listen, Will, I have something a bit difficult to say, and I’m not so good at expressing myself. In the first place, I have always been crazily in love with Joan.”

Will sat, and looked at him curiously. But he let Bill go on.

“I never said anything because—well, because I was afraid I wouldn’t make a success of marriage. Too unstable to settle down quietly with a decent girl like Joan. But I found I couldn’t go on without her, and was going to propose—when you beat me to it. I’ve felt pretty miserable since, though this work has taken something of the edge off.”

Will regarded the other’s pale face—and wondered.

“This work held out a real hope to me. And now I’ve accomplished the major part of it. I can make a living copy of any living thing. Now-do you see why I threw myself into this research? I want to create a living, breathing twin of Joan, and marry her! ”

Will started slightly. Bill got up and paced restlessly up and down.

“I know I’m asking a hell of a lot. This affair reaches deeper than a scientific curiosity. No feeling man can contemplate such a proposal without misgivings, for his wife and for himself. But honestly, Will, I cannot see any possible harm arising from it. Though, admittedly, the only good thing would be to make a selfish man happy. For heaven’s sake, let me know what you think.”

Will sat contemplating, while the distracted Bill continued to pace. Presently, he said, “You are sure no physical harm could come to Joan in the course of the experiment?”

“Certain—completely certain,” said Bill.

“Then I personally have no objection. Anything but objection. I had no idea you felt that way, Bill, and it would make me, as well as Joan, very unhappy to know you had to go on like that.”

He caught sight of his wife approaching with a laden tray. “Naturally, the decision rests with her,” he said. “If she’d rather not, there’s no more to it.”

“No, of course not,” agreed Bill.

But they both knew what her answer would be.

“Stop the car for a minute, Will,” said Joan suddenly, and her husband stepped on the foot-brake.

The car halted in the lane on the brow of the hill. Through a gap in the hedge the two occupants had a view of Bill’s laboratory as it lay below in the cradle of the valley.

Joan pointed down. In the field behind the ‘cemetery’ two figures were strolling. Even at this distance, Bill’s flaming hair marked his identity. His companion was a woman in a white summer frock. And it was on her that Joan’s attention was fixed.

“She’s alive now!” she whispered, and her voice trembled slightly. Will nodded. He noticed her apprehension, and gripped her hand encouragingly. She managed a wry smile.

“It’s not every day one goes to pay a visit to oneself,” she said. “It was unnerving enough last week to see her lying on the other couch in the lab, dressed in my red frock—which I was wearing—so pale, and—Oh, it was like seeing myself dead!”

“She’s not dead now, and Bill’s bought her some different clothes, so cheer up,”

said Will. “I know it’s a most queer situation, but the only possible way to look at it is from the scientific viewpoint. It’s a unique scientific event. And it’s made Bill happy into the bargain.”

He ruminated a minute.

“Wish he’d given us a hint as to how he works his resuscitation process, though,” he went on. “Still, I suppose he’s right to keep it a secret. It’s a discovery which could be appallingly abused. Think of dictators manufacturing loyal, stupid armies from one loyal, stupid soldier! Or industrialists manufacturing cheap labour!

We should soon have a world of robots, all traces of individuality wiped out. No variety, nothing unique—life would not be worth living.”

“No,” replied Joan, mechanically, her thoughts still on that white-clad figure down there.

Will released the brake, and the car rolled down the hill toward the laboratory. The two in the field saw it coming, and walked back through the cemetery to meet it. They reached the road as the car drew up.

“Hello, there!” greeted Bill. “You’re late—we’ve had the kettle on the boil for half an hour. Doll and I were getting anxious.”

He advanced into the road, and the woman in the white frock lingered hesitantly behind him. Joan tightened her lips and braced herself to face this unusual ordeal. She got out of the car, and while Will and Bill were grasping hands, she walked to meet her now living twin.

Apparently Doll had decided to face it in the same way, and they met with oddly identical expressions of smiling surface ease, with an undercurrent of curiosity and doubt. They both saw and understood each other’s expression simultaneously, and burst out laughing. That helped a lot.

“It’s not so bad, after all,” said Doll, and Joan checked herself from making the same instinctive remark.

“No, not nearly,” she agreed.

And it wasn’t. For although Doll looked familiar to her, she could not seem to identify her with herself to any unusual extent. It was not that her apparel and hairstyle were different, but that somehow her face, figure and voice seemed like those of another person.

She did not realise that hitherto she had only seen parts of herself in certain mirrors from certain angles, and the complete effect was something she had simply never witnessed. Nor that she had not heard her own voice outside her own head, so to speak—never from a distance of some feet.

Nevertheless, throughout the meal she felt vaguely uneasy, though she tried to hide it, and kept up a fire of witty remarks. And her other self, too, smiled at her across the table and talked easily.

They compared themselves in detail, and found they were completely identical in every way, even to the tiny mole on their left forearm. Their tastes, too, agreed. They took the same amount of sugar in their tea, and liked and disliked the same foodstuffs.

“I’ve got my eye on that pink iced cake,” laughed Doll. “Have you?”

Joan admitted it. So they shared it.

“You’ll never have any trouble over buying each other birthday or Christmas presents,” commented Will. “How nice to know exactly what the other wants!”

Bill had a permanent grin on his face, and beamed all over the table all the time. For once he did not have a great deal to say. He seemed too happy for words, and kept losing the thread of the conversation to gaze upon Doll fondly.

“We’re going to be married tomorrow!” he announced unexpectedly, and they protested their surprise at the lack of warning. But they promised to be there. There followed an evening of various sorts of games, and the similar thought-processes of Joan and Doll led to much amusement, especially in the guessing games. And twice they played checkers and twice they drew. It was a merry evening, and Bill was merriest of all. Yet when they came to say goodnight, Joan felt the return of the old uneasiness. As they left in the car, Joan caught a glimpse of Doll’s face as she stood beside Bill at the gate. And she divined that under that air of gaiety, Doll suffered the same uneasiness as she. Doll and Bill were married in a distant registry office next day, using a fictitious name and birthplace for Doll to avoid any publicity-after all, no one would question her identity.

Winter came and went.

Doll and Bill seemed to have settled down quite happily, and the quartet remained as close friends as ever. Both Doll and Joan were smitten with the urge to take up flying as a hobby, and joined the local flying club. They each bought a single-seater, and went for long flights, cruising side by side.

Almost in self-protection from this neglect (they had no interest in flying) Bill and Will began to work again together, delving further into the mysteries of the atom. This time they were searching for the yet-to-be-discovered secret of tapping the potential energy which the atom held.

And almost at once they stumbled onto a new lead.

Formerly they had been able to divert atomic energy without being able to transform it into useful power. It was as if they had constructed a number of artificial dams at various points in a turbulent river, which altered the course of the river without tapping any of its force—though that is a poor and misleading analogy. But now they had conceived, and were building, an amazingly complex machine which, in the same unsatisfactory analogy, could be likened to a turbine-generator, tapping some of the power of that turbulent river. The ‘river’ however, was very turbulent indeed, and needed skill and courage to harness. And there was a danger of the harness suddenly slipping. Presently, the others became aware that Doll’s health was gradually failing. She tried hard to keep up her usual air of brightness and cheerfulness, but she could not sleep, and became restless and nervous.

And Joan, who was her almost constant companion, suddenly realised what was worrying that mind which was so similar to hers. The realisation was a genuine shock, which left her trembling, but she faced it.

“I think it would be a good thing for Doll and Bill to come and live here for a while, until Doll’s better,” she said rather diffidently to Will one day.

“Yes, okay, if you think you can persuade them,” replied Will. He looked a little puzzled.

“We have far too many empty rooms here,” she said defensively. “Anyway, I can help Doll if I’m with her more.”

Doll seemed quite eager to come, though a little dubious, but Bill thought it a great idea. They moved within the week.

At first, things did improve. Doll began to recover, and became more like her natural self. She was much less highly strung, and joined in the evening games with the other three with gusto. She studied Will’s favourite game, backgammon, and began to enjoy beating him thoroughly and regularly. And then Joan began to fail.

She became nerveless, melancholy, and even morose. It seemed as though through helping Doll back to health, she had been infected with the same complaint. Will was worried, and insisted on her being examined by a doctor. The doctor told Will in private: “There’s nothing physically wrong. She’s nursing some secret worry, and she’ll get worse until this worry is eased. Persuade her to tell you what it is—she refuses to tell me.”

She also refused to tell Will, despite his pleadings. And now Doll, who knew what the secret was, began to worry about Joan, and presently she relapsed into her previous nervous condition. So it continued for a week, a miserable week for the two harassed and perplexed husbands, who did not know which way to turn. The following week, however, both women seemed to make an effort, and brightened up somewhat, and could even laugh at times.

The recovery continued, and Bill and Will deemed it safe to return to their daily work in the lab, completing the atom-harnessing machine. One day Will happened to return to the house unexpectedly, and found the two women in each other’s arms on a couch, crying their eyes out. He stood staring for a moment. They suddenly became aware of him, and parted, drying their eyes.

“What’s up, Will? Why have you come back?” asked Joan, unsteadily, sniffing.

“Er—to get my slide-rule: I’d forgotten it,” he said. “Bill wanted to trust his memory, but I think there’s something wrong with his figures. I want to check up before we test the machine further. But—what’s the matter with you two?”

“Oh, we’re all right,” said Doll, strainedly and not very convincingly. She blew her nose, and endeavoured to pull herself together. But almost immediately she was overtaken by another burst of weeping, and Joan put her arms around her comfortingly.

“Look here,” said Will, in sudden and unusual exasperation, “I’ve had about enough of this. You know what Bill and I are only too willing to deal with whatever you’re worrying about. Yet the pair of you won’t say a word—only cry and fret. How can we help if you won’t tell us? Do you think we like to see you going on like this?”

“I’ll tell you, Will,” said Joan quietly.

Doll emitted a muffled “No!” but Joan ignored her, and went on: “Don’t you see that Bill has created another me in every detail? Every memory and every feeling?

And because Doll thinks and feels exactly as I do, she’s in love with you! She has been that way from the very beginning. All this time she’s been trying to conquer it, to suppress it, and make Bill happy instead.”

Doll’s shoulders shook with the intensity of her sobbing. Will laid his hands gently on them, consolingly. He could think of nothing whatever to say. He had not even dreamt of such a situation, obvious as it appeared now.

“Do you wonder the conflict got her down?” said Joan. “Poor girl! I brought her here to be nearer to you, and that eased things for her.”

“But it didn’t for you,” said Will, quietly, looking straight at her. “I see now why you began to worry. Why didn’t you tell me then, Joan?”

“How could I?”

He bit his lip, paced nervously over to the window, and stood with his back to the pair on the couch.

“What a position!” he thought. “What can we do? Poor Bill!”

He wondered how he could break the sorry news to his best friend, and even as he wondered, the problem was solved for him.

From the window there was a view down the length of the wide, shallow valley, and a couple miles away the white concrete laboratory could just be seen nestling at the foot of one of the farther slopes. There were fields all around it, and a long row of great sturdy oak trees started from its northern corner. From this height and distance the whole place looked like a table-top model. Will stared moodily at that little white box where Bill was, and tried to clarify his chaotic thoughts.

And suddenly, incredibly, before his eyes the distant white box spurted up in a dusty cloud of chalk-powder, and ere a particle of it had neared its topmost height, the whole of that part of the valley was split across by a curtain of searing, glaring flame. The whole string of oak trees, tough and amazingly deep-rooted though they were, floated up through the air like feathers of windblown thistledown before the blast of that mighty eruption.

The glaring flame vanished suddenly, like a light that had been turned out, and left a thick, brown, heaving fog in its place, a cloud of earth that had been pulverised. Will caught a glimpse of the torn oak trees falling back into this brown, rolling cloud, and then the blast wave, which had travelled up the valley, smote the house. The window was instantly shattered and blown in, and he went flying backwards in a shower of glass fragments. He hit the floor awkwardly, and sprawled there, and only then did his laggard brain realise what had happened. Bill’s habitual impatience had at last been his undoing. He had refused to wait any longer for Will’s return, and gone on with the test, trusting to his memory. And he had been wrong.

The harness had slipped.

A man sat on a hill with a wide and lovely view of the country, bright in summer sunshine, spread before him. The rich green squares of the fields, the white ribbons of the lanes, the yellow blocks of haystacks and grey spires of village churches, made up a pattern infinitely pleasing to the eye.

And the bees hummed drowsily, nearby sheep and cattle made the noises of their kind, and a neighbouring thicket fairly rang with the unending chorus of a hundred birds.

But all this might as well have been set on another planet, for the man could neither see nor hear the happy environment. He was in hell. It was a fortnight now since Bill had gone. When that grief had begun to wear off, it was succeeded by the most perplexing problem that had ever beset a member of the human race.

Will had been left to live with two women who loved him equally violently. Neither could ever conquer or suppress that love, whatever they did. They knew that. On the other hand, Will was a person who was only capable of loving one of the women. Monogamy is deep-rooted in most normal people, and particularly so with Will. He had looked forward to travelling through life with one constant companion, and only one—Joan.

But now there were two Joans, identical in appearance, feeling, thought. Nevertheless, they were two separate people. And between them he was a torn and anguished man, with his domestic life in shapeless ruins. He could not ease his mental torture with work, for since Bill died so tragically, he could not settle down to anything in a laboratory. It was no easier for Joan and Doll. Probably harder. To have one’s own self as a rival—even a friendly, understanding rival—for a man’s companionship and affection was almost unbearable.

This afternoon they had both gone to a flying club, to attempt to escape for a while the burden of worry, apparently. Though neither was in a fit condition to fly, for they were tottering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. The club was near the hill where Will was sitting and striving to find some working solution to a unique human problem which seemed quite unsoluble. So it was no coincidence that presently a humming in the sky caused him to lift dull eyes to see both the familiar monoplanes circling and curving across the blue spaces between the creamy, cumulus clouds.

He lay back on the grass watching them. He wondered which plane was which, but there was no means of telling, for they were similar models. And anyway, that would not tell him which was Joan and which was Doll, for they quite often used each other’s planes, to keep the ‘feel’ of both. He wondered what they were thinking up there…

One of the planes straightened and flew away to the west, climbing as it went. Its rising drone became fainter. The other plane continued to bank and curve above. Presently, Will closed his eyes and tried to doze in the warm sunlight. It was no use. In the darkness of his mind revolved the same old maddening images, doubts, and questions. It was as if he had become entangled in a nightmare from which he could not awake.

The engine of the plane overhead suddenly stopped. He opened his eyes, but could not locate it for a moment.

Then he saw it against the sun, and it was falling swiftly in a tailspin. It fell out of the direct glare of the sun, and he saw it in detail, revolving as it plunged so that the wings glinted like a flashing heliograph. He realised with a shock that it was but a few hundred feet from the ground.

He scrambled to his feet, in an awful agitation.

“Joan!” he cried, hoarsely. ”Joan!”

The machine continued its fall steadily and inevitably, spun down past his eye-level, and fell into the centre of one of the green squares of the fields below. He started running down the hill even as it landed. As the sound of the crash reached him, he saw a rose of fire blossom like magic in that green square, and from it a wavering growth of black, oily smoke mounted into the heavens. The tears started from his eyes, and ran freely.

When he reached the scene, the inferno was past its worst, and as the flames died he saw that nothing was left, only black, shapeless, scattered things, unrecognisable as once human or once machine.

There was a squeal of brakes from the road. An ambulance had arrived from the flying club. Two men jumped out, burst through the hedge. It did not take them more than a few seconds to realise that there was no hope.

“Quick, Mr. Fredericks, jump in,” cried one of them, recognising Will. “We must go straight to the other one.”

The other one!

Before he could question them, Will was hustled between them into the driving cabin of the ambulance. The vehicle was quickly reversed, and sped off in the opposite direction.

“Did—did the other plane—” began Will, and the words stuck in his throat. The driver, with his eye on the road which was scudding under their wheels at sixty miles an hour, nodded grimly.

“Didn’t you see, sir? They both crashed at exactly the same time, in the same way—tailspin. A shocking accident—terrible. I can’t think how to express my sympathy, sir. I only pray that this one won’t turn out so bad.”

It was as if the ability to feel had left Will. His thoughts slowed up almost to a standstill. He sat there numbed. He dare not try to think. But, sluggishly, his thoughts went on. Joan and Doll had crashed at exactly the same time in exactly the same way. That was above coincidence. They must have both been thinking along the same lines again, and that meant they had crashed deliberately!

He saw now the whole irony of it, and groaned.

Joan and Doll had each tried to solve the problem in their own way, and each had reached the same conclusion without being aware what the other was thinking. They saw that one of them would have to step out of the picture if Will was ever to be happy. They knew that that one would have to step completely out, for life could no longer be tolerated by her if she had to lose Will. And, characteristically, they had each made up their minds to be the self-sacrificing one.

Doll felt that she was an intruder, wrecking the lives of a happily married pair. It was no fault of hers: she had not asked to be created full of love for a man she could never have.

But she felt that she was leading an unnecessary existence, and every moment of it was hurting the man she loved. So she decided to relinquish the gift of life. Joan’s reasoning was that she had been partly responsible for bringing Doll into this world, unasked, and with exactly similar feelings and longings as herself. Ever since she had expected, those feelings had been ungratified, cruelly crushed and thwarted. It wasn’t fair. Doll had as much right to happiness as she. Joan had enjoyed her period of happiness with Will. Now let Doll enjoy hers. So it was that two planes, a mile apart, went spinning into crashes that were meant to appear accidental—and did, except to one man, the one who most of all was intended never to know the truth.

The driver was speaking again.

“It was a ghastly dilemma for us at the club. We saw ’em come down on opposite sides and both catch fire. We have only one fire engine, one ambulance. Had to send the engine to one, and rush this ambulance to the other. The engine couldn’t have done any good at this end, as it happens. Hope it was in time where we’re going!”

Will’s dulled mind seemed to take this in quite detachedly. Who had been killed in the crash he saw? Joan or Doll? Joan or Doll?

Then suddenly it burst upon him that it was only the original Joan that he loved. That was the person whom he had known so long, around whom his affection had centred. The hair he had caressed, the lips he had pressed, the gay brown eyes which had smiled into his. He had never touched Doll in that way. Doll seemed but a shadow of all that. She may have had memories of those happenings, but she had never actually experienced them. They were only artificial memories. Yet they must have seemed real enough to her. The ambulance arrived at the scene of the second crash. The plane had flattened out a few feet from the ground, and not landed so disastrously as the other. It lay crumpled athwart a burned and blackened hedge. The fire engine had quenched the flames within a few minutes. And the pilot had been dragged clear, unconscious, badly knocked about and burned. They got her into the ambulance, and rushed her to a hospital. Will had been sitting by the bedside for three hours before the girl in the bed had opened her eyes.

Blank, brown eyes they were, which looked at him, then at the hospital ward, without the faintest change of expression.

“Joan!” he whispered, clasping her free arm—the other was in a splint. There was no response of any sort. She lay back gazing unseeingly at the ceiling. He licked his dry lips. It couldn’t be Joan after all.

“Doll!” he tried. “Do you feel all right?”

Still no response.

“I know that expression,” said the doctor, who was standing by. “She’s lost her memory.”

“For good, do you think?” asked Will, perturbed.

The doctor pursed his lips indicating he didn’t know.

“Good lord! Is there no way of finding out whether she is my wife or my sister-in-law?”

“If you don’t know, no one does, Mr. Fredericks,” replied the doctor. “We can’t tell which plane who was in. We can’t tell anything from her clothes, for they were burned in the crash, and destroyed before we realized their importance. We’ve often remarked their uncanny resemblance. Certainly you can tell them apart.”

“I can’t!” answered Will, in anguish. “There is no way.”

The next day, the patient had largely recovered her senses, and was able to sit up and talk. But a whole tract of her memory had been obliterated. She remembered nothing of her twin, and in fact nothing at all of the events after the duplication experiment.

Lying on the couch in the laboratory, preparing herself under the direction of Bill, was the last scene she remembered.

The hospital psychologist said that the shock of the crash had caused her to unconsciously repress a part of her life which she did not want to remember. She could not remember now if she wanted to. He said she might discover the truth from her eventually, but if he did, it would take months—maybe even years. But naturally her memories of Will, and their marriage, were intact, and she loved him as strongly as ever.

Was she Joan or Doll?

Will spent a sleepless night, turning the matter over. Did it really matter? There was only one left now—why not assume she was Joan, and carry on? But he knew that as long as doubt and uncertainty existed, he would never be able to recover the old free life he had had with Joan.

It seemed that he would have to surrender her to the psychologist, and that would bring to light all sorts of details which neither he, Joan, nor Bill had ever wished to be revealed.

But the next day something turned up which changed the face of things. While he was sitting at the bedside, conversing with the girl who might or might not be Joan, a nurse told him a man was waiting outside to see him. He went, and found a police officer standing there.

Ever since the catastrophe which had wrecked Bill’s laboratory, the police had been looking around that locality, searching for any possible clues. Buried in the ground they had found a safe, burst and broken. Inside were the charred remains of books, papers, and letters. They had examined them, without gleaning much, and now the officer wished to know if Will could gather anything from them.

Will took the bundle and went through it. There was a packet of purely personal letters, and some old tradesmen’s accounts, paid and receipted. These with the officer’s consent, were destroyed. But also there were the burnt remains of three of Bill’s experimental notebooks.

They were written in Bill’s system of shorthand, which Will understood. The first two were old, and of no particular interest: The last, however—unfortunately the most badly charred of the three—was an account of Bill’s attempts to infuse life into his replicas of living creatures.

The last pages were about the experiment of creating another Joan, and the last recognisable entry read:

This clumsy business of pumping through pipes, in the manner of a blood transfusion left a small scar at the base of Doll’s neck, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect copy of Joan. I resented…

The rest was burned away.

To the astonishment of the police inspector, Will turned without saying a word and hurried back into the ward.

“Let me examine your neck, dear, I want to see if you’ve been biting yourself,” he said, with a false lightness.

Wondering, the girl allowed herself to be examined. There was not the slightest sign of a scar anywhere on her neck.

“You are Joan,” he said, and embraced her as satisfactorily as her injuries would permit.

“I am Joan,” she repeated. kissing and hugging him back. And at last they knew again the blessedness of peace of mind.

For once, Fate, which had used them so hardly, showed mercy, and they never knew that in the packet of Bill’s receipted accounts, which Will had destroyed, was one from a plastic surgeon, which began:

“For removing operation scar from neck, and two days’ nursing and attention.”

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[found floating in cyberspace]

[rtf to html conversion with DL WordMagus and HTMLBookfixer. A few errors that appear to have been part of the orginal publication have been left alone.]

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