The Seeds of Time

Opposite Number

SEEING the couple when I did was simply a matter of chance. Probably I should have run across them just a little later, anyway, but the results could have been quite different. It simply happened that I turned into the cross corridor when they were up the other end of it, with their backs towards me, and I noticed them peering up and down the far main-passage in the manner of people making sure that the coast was clear. Jean I recognized at once; even the distant glimpse of her profile was enough. Of the man, with his back towards me, I registered only that there was something familiar about him.

But for the furtive, scouting look about them I doubt whether I should have paid much attention-at least, I should not have followed them-but once I had noticed that, it occurred to me that there was only one place they could have come from, and that was old Whetstone’s room-it is ‘ still known as ‘old Whetstone’s room’ although he died more than two years ago.

There wasn’t any reason why Jean shouldn’t go there if she wanted to. After all, since Whetstone was her father, all the stuff in the room is, legally speaking, hers-although in point of fact it just stays there under dust-sheets because nobody has liked to start taking it to pieces. The old man was always greatly respected for his work-his official work -in the labs, up above, and although he was undoubtedly a bit-well, let’s say obsessed, by his own project, and in spite of the fact that the project never did, nor ever seemed likely to do, what he wanted it to; yet, somehow, his prestige still protects the room and the apparatus. It is a kind of temporary memorial to him.

Besides, there is an idea among the several of us who helped him at different times that he really was on to something.

There were some results, of a kind, enough, anyway, to suggest that if the old mule hadn’t been so stubborn on his own theory he might have got somewhere by following them up. So this feeling, that some day someone with the time and inclination might find something there, has helped in keeping the room and the stuff just as he left it.

But I couldn’t imagine any reason why Jean should want to be furtive about visiting the room-except, of course, that whoever her companion was, he wasn’t her husband….

I shall have to admit that when I turned off my intended way and followed them, it was out of sheer snooping curiosity. After all, it was Jean, not anybody else, and I couldn’t imagine her having the kind of hole and corner affair that had to be conducted in a dusty workroom among sheet-shrouded apparatus; so why … ?

When I looked round the corner they were well along the passage; not exactly furtive now, but still circumspect. I noticed him catch her hand, and press it encouragingly. I let them get round the next corner, and followed.

When I reached the door they were half-way across the quadrangle in the direction of the canteen; not furtive at all now, but looking about them at all the people in sight as though they might be searching for someone. I was still too far off to identify the man. They went into the canteen, and I followed.

They hadn’t sat down at a table; they were standing a little way up the hall, with their backs to me, and from the way they were turning their heads there could be no doubt that they were searching. One or two people waved to them, and they waved back, but they didn’t go to join them.

I began to feel a little foolish-and a trifle mean, too. Indeed, their business was none of mine, and there was nothing whatever clandestine about them now. I had just made up my mind to back out when I caught my first good look at the man’s face, in one of the wall-mirrors. There was something quite startlingly familiar about it, yet I failed to place it immediately: in fact, several seconds must have elapsed before I realized that it was the face I was accustomed to see every morning while I shaved.

The likeness was so exact that I sat down on the nearest chair, with an odd weakness in my knees, and feeling, for some reason I didn’t understand, a little scared.

He was still looking over the other people. If he had seen me through the looking-glass he’d not been interested. They both walked slowly on up the room, searching it as they went. Finally, they left by the door at the other end. I slipped back by the door behind me, and worked round the outside of the building. They had come to a stop on the gravel spread, a few yards from the door, and were deep in discussion.

I was tempted to go up to them, but-well, it was some time since Jean and I had been on chatting terms: and there is something rather fatuous about the idea of going up to a perfect stranger simply to announce: ‘I say, you look just like me, you know!’ So I waited.

Presently they came to a decision, and turned along the path that leads to the main gate. Jean was pointing things out, and seemed amused by them, though I couldn’t see why they should amuse her. She moved closer to him, and linked her arm in his as they walked along.

I must say I considered that unwise. The Pleybell Research Institute holds together one of those intra-regarding, not to say ingrowing, communities where nothing is missed. The unemployed wives can follow scents that would baffle a bloodhound, and the turn of an eye, let alone a hand on the arm, is enough to start people building law courts in the air.

The gesture, though possibly innocent, became almost flamboyant bravado in our milieu. I was not the only one to observe it. Indeed, people seemed to be in a rather observing mood that afternoon: several of them gave me an intense and rather puzzled look as we met.

Outside the gates the pair turned left, and I let them get a little further ahead-not that it greatly mattered, for even if Jean should look back and notice me, what more natural than that I should be found on a part of my regular homeward route? They had just turned the second corner to the right, which is that of the road in which my house stands, when there came a thudding of feet behind me, and a voice gasping: ‘Mr Ruddle! Mr Ruddle, sir!’ I turned to find one of the lab. messengers. Through gasps he said:

‘The Director saw you leaving, sir. He sent me to remind you that he must have your figures for the final coordination by five. He thought you might have forgotten it, sir.’

Which was what I had done. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was getting on for four-thirty already. That drove Jean and her friend out of my mind, and I hurried back towards the Institute.

There were only a couple of minor calculations to finish off, and I had the results in the Director’s office by four fifty-five. He looked at me rather hard.

‘I am sorry to intrude business upon your-ah-domestic arrangements, Ruddle, but it is quite necessary that all these findings should be assembled tonight,’ he said, rather coldly, I thought.

I apologized for leaving it until the last minute. He received that somewhat coldly, too, considering that I was the right side of the last minute. It was not until I was outside his room that a possible explanation occurred to me. Even I had been surprised by the extraordinary likeness of Jean’s companion to myself: it was scarcely a matter where I could make a mistake as to which was which, but others might… I recalled the arm-in-arm progress in full public view….

The best thing to do seemed to be to get home as quickly as possible, hoping to put my word in before gossip said hers….

There was only another twenty yards before I should reach my house, when I encountered Jean and her companion turning out of my own gateway, and we came face to face. Jean was looking flushed and embarrassed, and he was looking embarrassed and angry. Their expressions changed with astonishing speed as they recognized me.

‘Oh, there you are! Thank goodness,’ said Jean. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

It was not the kind of opening I was prepared for. After all, it was nearly three years since we had exchanged anything more than a necessary politeness. While I was trying to collect myself I took refuge in a touch of dignity.

‘I don’t think I quite understand,’ I said, and looked from her to her companion. ‘Perhaps you will introduce me to your friend ?’ I suggested.

‘Oh, don’t be so stiff and silly, Peter,’ she told me impatiently. But the man was looking at me closely. There was a rather curious expression on his face: I did not greatly wonder at it; very likely the expression on my own was no less curious. For the similarity-no, it was more than that-the duplication, was uncanny. The clothes were different, certainly. I had none like those he was wearing, but apart from that… I suddenly caught sight of his wrist-watch: it, and the metal bracelet that held it were the exact double of mine. I felt my own wrist to make sure that it hadn’t somehow got transferred. My own was still there, all right. He said: ‘I’m afraid this is a bit complicated. And we’ve both pulled a most frightful gaff in your house. Both feet, right up to the neck. I’m terribly sorry. We just didn’t know.’

‘Oh! That woman!’ said Jean, furiously. ‘Oh, I could strangle her, cheerfully.’

With a feeling of drowning slowly, I grasped.

‘What woman?’ I enquired.

‘The one in your house. That dreadful Tenter woman.’

I stared at them.

‘Look here!’ I said. ‘This is going a bit far. My wife is ‘

‘She is? She said she was, but I couldn’t believe it. Oh, Peter, not really! You couldn’t marry her! Oh, you couldn’t!’

I looked at her hard-clearly there was something much more than ordinarily wrong somewhere. I don’t say that half the people you meet may not be thinking like that about other people’s wives; but it is a thing that doesn’t get said, not in the second person, at any rate. One can only meet it with anger-or compassion.

‘I’m afraid you aren’t well,’ I suggested. ‘Suppose you come indoors and lie down for a little while I ring-up for a taxi. I’m sure …’

Jean stared at me.

‘Ha! Ha!’ she said, in a decisively mirthless way.

‘I’m sorry to say that is just where we put the feet in,’ her companion explained. ‘You see, we very much wanted to get hold of you, and there was nobody at home, so we thought we’d just sit and wait there until you came in. But then it wasn’t you who came, it was Miss Tenter. We hadn’t expected her at all, and then she wouldn’t believe that I wasn’t you, and she behaved atrociously-I’m sorry to say it, but it was atrociously-to Jean, and-oh, well, it all became very unpleasant and difficult….’ He kind of ebbed away, in confusion.

There certainly was something up the pole about this.

‘Why on earth do you say “Miss Tenter”?’ I said. ‘Jean, at any rate, knows perfectly well that she’s been Mrs Peter Ruddle for more than two years now.’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Jean. ‘It is so confusing. But I never, never could have imagined that you’d marry her.’

It wasn’t easy to keep tolerantly in mind that she must be a bit off her rocker. Her manner was as normal as could be.

‘Indeed!’ I said coldly. ‘And who, may I ask, did you think I would marry?’

‘Why, me, of course,’ said Jean.

‘Look here ‘ began her companion, in a rather desperate way, but I cut him off.

‘You pretty firmly shut the door on any chance of that when you took up with Freddie Tallboy,’ I reminded her and not without a touch of bitterness: the skin on the old wound was still a little more sensitive than I had thought.

‘Freddie Tallboy?’ she repeated. ‘Who’s he?’

That was too much for my patience.

‘Mrs Tallboy,’ I said. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the reason for this fooling-but I’ve had enough of it.’

‘But I’m not Mrs Tallboy,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Peter Ruddle.’

‘I suppose you find that amusing,’ I told her, bitterly, ‘but to me it isn’t very funny,’ I added. And it was not: there had been a time when what I hoped for above all else was to hear Jean call herself Mrs Peter Ruddle. I looked at her steadily.

‘Jean,’ I said. ‘This is not your kind of joke-it’s a cruel kind.’

She looked as steadily back at me for some seconds. Then I saw her eyes change; they glistened a little.

‘Oh!’ she said, as if she had seen something there. ‘Oh, this is dreadful!… Oh, dear! … I-Oh, Peter, help me,’ she said-but the appeal was to the other man, not to me. I turned to him, too.

‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what’s going on, but ‘

‘Oh,’ he said, as if suddenly enlightened. ‘No, of course you don’t. I’m Peter Ruddle.’

There was a longish pause. I decided I had had enough of being made to look a fool, and started to turn away. He said:

‘Isn’t there somewhere we can go and talk? You see, we’re both of us Peter Ruddle, that’s what’s making it all so difficult.’

‘I look on “difficult” as an understatement,’ I said, coldly, and started to walk off.

‘But you don’t see,’ said his voice behind me. ‘It’s old Whetstone’s machine, man. It works!’

My own house was evidently barred to us, and the only nearby place that I could think of at the moment was the upstairs room of the Jubilee Cafe. Most of the people who worked at the Institute would be knocking off about now, and still trickling out for an hour to come. I had no desire to confirm the impression of my private affairs that had already reached the Director, so I went ahead to the cafe, found there was no one in the upstairs room, and beckoned through the window to them. The girl who brought us tea was not a bright type. If she noticed our likeness at all, it made no perceptible impression on her. When she had left, Jean poured out, and we started to get down to things.

‘You’ll remember,’ said my double, leaning forward earnestly, ‘you’ll remember old Whetstone’s concept of time? He used to give that rough analogy about the sea freezing. The present was represented by the leading edge of the ice, gradually building up and advancing. Behind it was the solid ice that represented the past: in front, the still fluid water represented the future. You could tell that a given number of the moving molecules which represented the future would become frozen in a given space of time, but you couldn’t predict which, nor in what relationship they would be to one another.

‘About the solid stuff behind, the past, he thought you could probably do nothing; but he reckoned that somehow or other you ought to be able to find a way of pushing out a little ahead of the main freezing line, which is the present. If you could do that, you would be creating little advanced bridgeheads of frozen-that is to say, factualized-matter. This must, in due course, be overtaken by, and thus become part of, the advancing present. In other words, by going a little ahead you would create a bit of future which would have to come true. You couldn’t choose which molecules you would bind together, but those that you found would be solidified by your finding them, and therefore become inevitable.’

‘Yes, I remember that well,’ I told him. ‘It was cockeyed.’

‘Certainly it was cockeyed,’ he agreed promptly. ‘Everyone who ever tried to give him a hand came to that conclusion sooner or later, and cleared out. But he wouldn’t see it. Obstinate as a mule over that, he was.’ He glanced at Jean.

‘It’s all right. I know,’ she said, sadly. He went on: ‘He would keep on trying to make that machine of his support his theory-which, of course, it couldn’t possibly do with a theory that was all up the pole. And because of that he wouldn’t follow up the leads that the thing did give. Nothing would loosen him up on that theory, with the result that he overworked and worried himself by trying to pin down the impossible.

‘And so he died-sooner than he need have done-and his stuff just stayed there, with no one quite liking to disturb it.

‘Now, shortly after Jean and I got married ‘

I felt the fog beginning to come down on me again.

‘But Jean didn’t marry you. She married Freddie,’ I objected.

‘Wait a minute. I’m just coming to that. As I said, not long after we were married I had an idea, quite a different idea about this time business. Jean agreed that I should use her father’s apparatus-as much of it as could be useful to see if I could work the idea out, if possible. To some extent I have succeeded, and this is the result.’ He paused.

‘I’m in just about as thick a fog as I was before,’ I told him.

‘Well, here’s the basis-mind you, I don’t claim that it may not be misconceived in some ways, but the empirical result is that I’m talking to you now.

‘Now, time is something similar to a quantum-radiation. The atoms of time are not dissimilar from radio-active atoms -that is to say, they are in a continual state of disintegration, or fission, and they throw off quanta. There must, presumably be a half-life, but, so far, I’ve not been able to determine it. Obviously it has to be something very, very much smaller than a second, so let’s just call it an “instant” for illustration.

‘So every “instant” an atom of time splits. The two halves then continue upon different paths and encounter different influences as they diverge-but they don’t diverge as constant units; each of them is splitting every instant, too. The pattern of it is the radiating ribs of a fan; and along each of the ribs, more fans; and along the ribs of those, still more fans; and so, ad infinitum.

‘So, here we have Peter Ruddle. An instant later, that atom of time in which he exists is split, and so there are two Peter Ruddles, slightly diverging. Both those time-atoms split, and there are four Peter Ruddles. A third instant, and there are eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two. Very shortly there are thousands of Peter Ruddles. And because the diversion must actually occur many, many times in a second, there is an infinite number of Peter Ruddles, all originally similar, but all different by force of circumstances, and all inhabiting different worlds-imperceptibly different, or widely different; that depends chiefly on the distance from the original point of fission. And, of course, there is also an infinite number of worlds in which Peter Ruddle never managed to get born at all….’

He paused a little to let me stop whizzing, and get the hang of it. When I thought I had, several points for argument immediately presented themselves. I shelved them for the moment, however, and let him continue:

‘Well, then, the problem ceased to be that of travelling in time, as old Whetstone had supposed it to be. You obviously can’t put split atoms together again to reconstruct a past: nor can you observe the result of fission among atoms that have not yet split-at least, I think not, though it would appear that multiple futures must be latent in the present.

‘So the place of that problem was taken by another-was it possible to move from one’s own branch of descent to one of the, so to speak, cognate branches? Well, I went into that -and here we are to show that, within certain limits, one can…’

He paused again for me to take it in.

‘Yes,’ I admitted, at length. ‘I see it in plan, all right. But what I’m finding it really hard to feel is that we-you and Iare both equally-er-valid. I have to accept the theory, at least in the rough, since you are here, but I still feel that I am the real Peter Ruddle, and that you must be the Peter Ruddle I might have been. I suppose that’s a natural subjective view.’

Jean looked up and joined in for the first time.

‘That’s not how I see it, at all. We are the real Peter and Jean. You are what might have happened to Peter….’ She sat looking at me for a long moment, then: ‘Oh, my dear! Why, oh why, did you do it? And you aren’t happy with her, either. I can see that.’

‘This ‘ began the other Peter. Then he broke off as the door opened. Somebody looked in. A woman’s voice said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ and the door shut again. It was hidden from me where I sat. I looked enquiringly at Jean.

‘Mrs Terry,’ she told me.

The other Peter started again: ‘Obviously we’re all equally real: it’s just that you and I normally exist on well, different ribs of the fan.’ He went on expanding that a bit, then he said: ‘Although I’ve done it, I’ve only a very crude notion of how I’ve done it. So I had this idea: you know how one’s mind tends to work in a groove-well, it occurred to me that if I could start one of my “doubles” working on this thing, too, it might lead to a better understanding of it. Obviously our minds must be like enough to be interested in the same kinds of things, but since part of our experience has been different they aren’t like to run in exactly the same grooves of thought-that’s obvious, really, because if our lines of thought were exactly similar you would have made the same discoveries as I have, and you’d have made them at the same time.’

Certainly his tracks of thought were very similar. I have never had a swifter, clearer understanding of what another person was attempting to convey. It was due to more than the mere words. I asked:

‘When do you reckon, in our case, that this fission took place?’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he told me. He held out his left hand. ‘It must have been less than five years ago. We’ve both got the same watch, you see.’

I thought. ‘Well, it must be more than three years ago, because that’s when Freddie Tallboy first showed up here; and, judging by Jean’s question, he doesn’t seem to have shown up at all on your level.’

‘Never heard of him,’ he agreed, shaking his head.

‘You’re lucky,’ I told him, with a glance at Jean.

We thought again.

‘It must have been before your father died, too, because Tallboy was here by then,’ I said to Jean.

But my double shook his head. ‘The old man’s death isn’t a constant. It could have occurred earlier or later in different streams.’

That point had not occurred to me. I tried again: There was a row,’ I said, looking at Jean.

‘A row?’ enquired Jean.

‘You can’t have forgotten that,’ I said, incredulously. “That was the night that finished things between us. After I said I wasn’t going to help your father any more.’

Her eyes opened widely.

‘Finished things!’ she repeated. ‘That was the night we got engaged.’

‘Of course it was, darling,’ my double supported her. I shook my head. ‘It was the night I went and got dead drunk because the world didn’t have any bottom any more,’ I said.

‘Now we’re getting warm,’ observed the other Peter, leaning forward, with the light of the chase in his eye. I did not share his enthusiasm. I was remembering one of the more painful occasions in my life.

‘I told you I’d had enough of helping your father because he would cling pig-headedly to a demonstrably absurd theory,’ I reminded her.

‘And I said you must at least pretend to believe in it because he was getting to be an old man, and another disappointment might do him harm, and the doctor was worried about him anyway.’

I shook my head, decisively.

‘I remember exactly what you said, Jean. You said: “So you’re just as callous as the rest of them; you’re just going to walk out on a poor old man and leave him in the lurch.” Those were your exact words.’ They were both staring at me. ‘We went right on from there,’ I recalled, ‘until I said obstinacy seemed to run in your family, and you said that you were glad to have discovered in time the sort of selfishness and callousness there was in mine.’

‘Oh, no, Peter, never ‘ Jean began.

My double broke in excitedly:

‘That must have been it-that was the moment! I never said anything about obstinacy in Jean’s family. I said I’d give it another trial and do my best to be patient with him.’

We sat silent for a bit. Then Jean said, in a shaky voice: ‘Just that! And so you went and married her instead of me!’ There were almost tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, how dreadful! Oh, Peter, my dear!’

‘You were engaged to Tallboy before I proposed to her,’ I said. ‘At least, I suppose I mean not you, of course. The other Jean.’

She stretched out her left hand and took her husband’s. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said again, in a half-frightened voice. ‘Oh, think of that poor, poor other me….’ She paused a moment. ‘Perhaps we oughtn’t to have come at all. It was all right to begin with,’ she added. ‘And, you see, we thought that if we went to our house-your house, on this level, I mean we thought we’d find you and the other me there, and that’d be all right. I ought to have known sooner. The moment I saw those curtains she’s put in the windows I had a feeling something was wrong. I’m sure I wouldn’t have chosen them-and I don’t think the other me would, either. And the furniture-that wasn’t a bit like me. And then that woman …! And this has all happened wrong, just because … Oh, this is dreadful, Peter, dreadful…!’

She pulled a handkerchief out of her bag, dabbed at her eyes, and blew her nose; then she leant earnestly towards me again, her eyes still swimming a little.

‘You can’t, Peter…. It wasn’t meant to be this way…. It’s all wrong…. That other me, the other Jean-where is she?’

‘She’s still here,’ I told her. ‘She lives a little outside, along the Reading road.’

‘You must go to her, Peter.’

‘Now, look here ‘ I began, with some bitterness.

‘But she loves you, Peter, and she needs you. She’s me, and I know how she must feel…. Don’t you see that I know?’

I looked back at her, and shook my head.

‘What you don’t seem to know,’ I told her, ‘is how it feels to have the knife turned. She is married to someone else, I am married to someone else, and there’s an end of it.’

‘Oh, no-no!’ she said. Her hand sought her husband’s again. ‘No. You can’t do that to her, or to yourself. It’s ‘ She broke off and turned in distress to the other Peter. ‘Oh, darling, if only we could make him understand somehow what it means. He doesn’t-he can’t understand, how should he?’

The other Peter’s eyes rested on mine.

‘I think he does-well enough,’ he said.

I got up.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me now,’ I said to them. ‘I’ve had about as much of this as I can stand.’

Jean got up quickly, too. Contritely she said:

‘I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t want to hurt you. I only want you to be happy-you, and the other me. I… I…’ she choked a little.

The other Peter put in quickly: ‘Look, if you can spare half an hour or so, do come over to old Whetstone’s room. It’ll be much easier there to give you a rough idea of the adaptations his stuff needs. That’s what I really came for, after all.’

‘What did you come for?’ I asked Jean.

She had her back towards me now, and did not turn.

‘Curiosity,’ she said, in an unsteady voice.

I hesitated, but he was right about the similarity of our minds-what had caught his interest caught mine, too.

‘All right,’ I agreed, more than half reluctantly. The street was almost empty when we came out into the dusk, and turned towards the Institute. The grounds beyond the gates were quite deserted: the building itself showed a few lighted windows where there were some people still at work. We walked along, with Jean silent, and Peter talking about time quantum-radiation, and explaining how the scope appeared to have quite natural limits at present-how it was possible, for instance, to move on to another rib of the fan only if there happened to be the space for you to do so. One could, for instance, move only to a line of existence where old Whetstone’s room was arranged in such a way that there was a clear area ready to receive what he called the transfer chamber. If there were something else occupying that space it would be destroyed, so there must always be a preliminary practical test to ensure that it would return intact. That established quite a narrow limit: go too far round the fan, so to speak, and you would hit a time-sequence in which the room did not exist at all because the Institute had never been built. The consequences to a transfer chamber trying to occupy an already occupied space, or making its debut in the new time-sequence in mid air, would be quite disastrous.

When we reached the room everything looked as usual except for the transfer chamber itself, standing in the middle of the sheeted apparatus. It looked rather like a sentry-box with a door added.

We cleared the covers off some of the rest of the stuff, and the other Peter started explaining to me what he had done in the way of altering circuits and introducing new stages. Jean dusted off a chair and sat on it, smoking a cigarette patiently. We should have got along more quickly had we been able to refer to the old man’s notes and diagrams, but unfortunately the steel filing-cabinet which held them was locked. Nevertheless, he was able to give me the general theory and a fair working idea of how to set about making the necessary changes.

After a time Jean looked pointedly at her watch, and got up.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but we really must get back. I told the girl we’d not be later than seven-and it’s half-past already.’

‘What girl?’ enquired my double, absently. That baby-sitter girl, of course,’ she told him. Somehow that brought me up more sharply than anything yet.

‘You-you’ve got a baby?’ I asked, stupidly.

Jean looked at me. ‘Yes,’ she said, gently. ‘And she’s a lovely little baby, isn’t she, Peter?’

‘Definitely quite the best baby known to us,’ agreed Peter.

I stood there, blankly.

‘Oh, don’t look like that, my dear,’ Jean said. She came closer. She put her right hand on the left side of my face, and pressed my other cheek against hers. ‘Go to her, Peter. Go to her. She wants you,’ she whispered close to my ear.

The other Peter opened the door of the transfer chamber, and they got in. It was a close fit for two. Then he got out again, and indicated a piece of the floor.

‘When you’ve got it working, come and find us,’ he said.

‘We’ll keep that area clear for you.’

‘Bring her with you,’ said Jean.

Then he got back, and pulled the door to. The last thing I saw as it closed was Jean’s face, with tears in her eyes….

While I was still looking at it the transfer chamber vanished: it did not fade, or dim, it went in a split second. It might never have been, but for four flattened cigarette ends by the chair where Jean had sat….

I was in no mood to go home. I hung about the room, going over the apparatus and memorizing what the other Peter had told me, trying to lose myself in the technicalities of it. The attention with which I went over the principles was rather grimly forced; I felt I should have had more of a chance to become absorbed if I had been able to get hold of the locked-up notes and diagrams.

After an hour or so I gave it up. I walked back home from the Institute, but I arrived with something more than a disinclination to go into the house. Instead, I got out the car.

And then, somehow, I was driving out along the Reading road….

Jean looked startled when she answered the doorbell. ‘Oh!’ she said, and went a little pale, and then a little flushed. In a carefully calm voice she said: ‘Freddie is working over in Number Four Lab.’

‘I don’t want Freddie,’ I told her. ‘I wanted to talk to you-about your father’s stuff in the room over there.’ She hesitated, and then opened the door wider.

‘All right,’ she said, in a non-committal voice. ‘You’d better come inside.’

It was the first time I had set foot in her house. I followed her to a large, comfortable sitting-room which looked out on the back-garden. The interview began with as much awkwardness as anything I’ve known. All the time I had to keep on reminding myself that she was another Jean from the one of the afternoon. This Jean was a person I had not spoken to for over three years except when some Institute function forced us to recognize one another’s existence. The more I looked at her, the more incredibly crass that barrier became.

I stumbled along, explaining that I had a new theory I would like to work on. I said that her father, in spite of his lack of success, had done a lot of groundwork which should not be wasted, and which I was sure he would not want wasted….

Jean listened as though she were extremely interested in the pattern of the rug before the fire. After a while, however, she looked up and met my eyes. I lost the thread of what I had been saying, and floundered about after it. I grasped wildly at a few phrases and laboured on with a curious feeling that I was talking a language I did not know. After a long time I reached the end, not knowing whether I had been coherent at all.

She went on looking at me for a moment, but not quite so distantly as before, then she said:

‘Yes, I think so, Peter. I know you fell out with him, like all the others, but the apparatus will have to be used “toy someone sooner or later, or dismantled-and I think he’d sooner it was you than any of the rest. You’d probably like me to give a written consent?’

‘It might be as well,’ I agreed. ‘Some of the stuff there cost a lot of money.’

She nodded, and crossed to a small bureau. Presently she came back holding a piece of paper.

‘Jean ‘ I began.

She stood, holding the paper out towards me.

‘What, Peter…?’

‘Jean ‘ I began once more. But then the wretched impossibility of the whole situation came home to me again.

She was watching me. I pulled myself together.

‘It’s-it’s just that I can’t get at his notes. They’re locked up,’ I said, in a rush.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, yes,’ as if she were somewhere a long way off. Then, in a different voice, she added:

‘Would you know the key if you saw it? There’s a box of his keys upstairs.’

I was pretty sure I should. I’d seen it often enough when I had been working with old Whetstone.

We went upstairs. One of the rooms was unfurnished, a lumber-room, with a lot of old junk and half-a-dozen trunks in it. The box of keys were in the second trunk she tried. There were two of them that might fit, so I pocketed both, and we went downstairs again.

We were half-way down the stairs when the front door opened, and her husband came in….

Well, there it is Twenty or thirty people, including the Director, saw us crossing the Institute grounds arm in arm. My wife, discovered me entertaining my ex-fiancee in my own house, during her absence. Mrs Terry intruded upon us in the upstairs room of the Jubilee Cafe. Other people saw us in other places-and nearly everybody, it turns out, has had longstanding suspicions. Finally, her husband surprised his wife descending from the bedroom storey of his house with her ex-fiance….

So…

And the nature of any evidence that I could produce to the contrary would, I think, sound somewhat unconvincing in court.

Besides, and rather importantly, we have both decided that nothing could be further from our wishes than to defend …