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Title: The Other Now
Author: Murray Leinster
Release Date: February 2, 2016 [EBook #51112]
Language: English
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THE OTHER NOW
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by PHIL BARD
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction March 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew his wife was dead, because he'd seen her buried.
But it was only one possibility out of infinitely many!
It was self-evident nonsense. If Jimmy Patterson had told anybody
but Haynes, calm men in white jackets would have taken him away for
psychiatric treatment which undoubtedly would have been effective. He'd
have been restored to sanity and common sense, and he'd probably have
died of it. So to anyone who liked Jimmy and Jane, it is good that
things worked out as they did. The facts are patently impossible, but
they are satisfying.
Haynes, though, would like very much to know exactly why it happened
in the case of Jimmy and Jane and nobody else. There must have been
some specific reason, but there's absolutely no clue to it.
It began about three months after Jane was killed in that freak
accident. Jimmy had taken her death hard. This night seemed no
different from any other. He came home just as usual and his throat
tightened a little, just as usual, as he went up to the door. It was
still intolerable to know that Jane wouldn't be waiting for him.
The hurt in his throat was a familiar sensation which he was doggedly
hoping would go away. But it was extra strong tonight and he wondered
rather desperately if he'd sleep, or, if he did, whether he would
dream. Sometimes he had dreams of Jane and was happy until he woke
up, and then he wanted to cut his throat. But he wasn't at that point
tonight. Not yet.
As he explained it to Haynes later, he simply put his key in the door
and opened it and started to walk in. But he kicked the door instead,
so he absently put his key in the door and opened it and started to
walk in--
Yes, that is what happened. He was half-way through before he realized.
He stared blankly. The door looked perfectly normal. He closed it
behind him, feeling queer. He tried to reason out what had happened.
Then he felt a slight draught. The door wasn't shut. It was wide open.
He had to close it again.
That was all that happened to mark this night off from any other, and
there is no explanation why it happened--began, rather--this night
instead of another. Jimmy went to bed with a taut feeling. He'd had the
conviction that he opened the door twice. The same door. Then he'd had
the conviction that he had had to close it twice. He'd heard of that
feeling. Queer, but no doubt commonplace.
He slept, blessedly without dreams. He woke next morning and found his
muscles tense. That was an acquired habit. Before he opened his eyes,
every morning, he reminded himself that Jane wasn't beside him. It was
necessary. If he forgot and turned contentedly--to emptiness--the ache
of being alive, when Jane wasn't, was unbearable.
* * * * *
This morning he lay with his eyes closed to remind himself, and instead
found himself thinking about that business of the door. He'd kicked
the door between the two openings, so it wasn't only an illusion of
repetition. He was puzzling over that repetition after closing the
door, when he found he had to close it again. That proved to him it
wasn't a standard mental vagary. It looked like a delusion. But his
memory insisted that it had happened that way, whether it was possible
or not.
Frowning, he went out and got his breakfast at a restaurant and rode
to work. Work was blessed, because he had to think about it. The main
trouble was that sometimes something turned up which Jane would have
been amused to hear, and he had to remind himself that there was no use
making a mental note to tell her. Jane was dead.
Today he thought a good deal about the door, but when he went home he
knew that he was going to have a black night. He wouldn't sleep, and
oblivion would seem infinitely tempting, because the ache of being
alive, when Jane wasn't, was horribly tedious and he could not imagine
an end to it. Tonight would be a very bad one, indeed.
He opened the door and started in. He went crashing into the door. He
stood still for an instant, and then fumbled for the lock. But the
door was open. He'd opened it. There hadn't been anything for him to
run into. Yet his forehead hurt where he'd bumped into the door which
wasn't closed at all.
There was nothing he could do about it, though. He went in. He hung
up his coat. He sat down wearily. He filled his pipe and grimly faced
a night that was going to be one of the worst. He struck a match and
lighted his pipe, and put the match in an ashtray. And he glanced in
the tray. There were the stubs of cigarets in it. Jane's brand. Freshly
smoked.
He touched them with his fingers. They were real. Then a furious anger
filled him. Maybe the cleaning woman had had the intolerable insolence
to smoke Jane's cigarets. He got up and stormed through the house,
raging as he searched for signs of further impertinence. He found
none. He came back, seething, to his chair. The ashtray was empty. And
there'd been nobody around to empty it.
It was logical to question his own sanity, and the question gave him a
sort of grim cheer. The matter of the recurrent oddities could be used
to fight the abysmal depression ahead. He tried to reason them out,
and always they added up to delusions only.
But he kept his mind resolutely on the problem. Work, during the
day, was a godsend. Sometimes he was able to thrust aside for whole
half-hours the fact that Jane was dead. Now he grappled relievedly with
the question of his sanity or lunacy. He went to the desk where Jane
had kept her household accounts. He'd set the whole thing down on paper
and examine it methodically, checking this item against that.
* * * * *
Jane's diary lay on the desk-blotter, with a pencil between two of its
pages. He picked it up with a tug of dread. Some day he might read
it--an absurd chronicle Jane had never offered him--but not now. Not
now!
That was when he realized that it shouldn't be here. His hands jumped,
and it fell open. He saw Jane's angular writing and it hurt. He closed
it quickly, aching all over. But the printed date at the top of the
page registered on his brain even as he snapped the cover shut.
He sat still for minutes, every muscle taut.
It was a long time before he opened the book again, and by that time
he had a perfectly reasonable explanation. It must be that Jane hadn't
restricted herself to assigned spaces. When she had something extra to
write, she wrote it on past the page allotted for a given date.
Of course!
Jimmy fumbled back to the last written page, where the pencil had been,
with a tense matter-of-factness. It was, as he'd noticed, today's date.
The page was filled. The writing was fresh. It was Jane's handwriting.
"_Went to the cemetery_," said the sprawling letters. "_It was very
bad. Three months since the accident and it doesn't get any easier.
I'm developing a personal enmity to chance. It doesn't seem like an
abstraction any more. It was chance that killed Jimmy. It could have
been me instead, or neither of us. I wish--_"
Jimmy went quietly mad for a moment or two. When he came to himself he
was staring at an empty desk-blotter. There wasn't any book before him.
There wasn't any pencil between his fingers. He remembered picking up
the pencil and writing desperately under Jane's entry. "_Jane!_" he'd
written--and he could remember the look of his scrawled script under
Jane's--"_where are you? I'm not dead! I thought you were! In God's
name, where are you?_"
But certainly nothing of the sort could have happened. It was delusion.
That night was particularly bad, but curiously not as bad as some
other nights had been. Jimmy had a normal man's horror of insanity,
yet this wasn't, so to speak, normal insanity. A lunatic has always an
explanation for his delusions. Jimmy had none. He noted the fact.
Next morning he bought a small camera with a flash-bulb attachment and
carefully memorized the directions for its use. This was the thing that
would tell the story. And that night, when he got home, as usual after
dark, he had the camera ready. He unlocked the door and opened it. He
put his hand out tentatively. The door was still closed.
He stepped back and quickly snapped the camera. There was a sharp flash
of the bulb. The glare blinded him. But when he put out his hand again,
the door was open. He stepped into the living-room without having to
unlock and open it a second time.
* * * * *
He looked at the desk as he turned the film and put in a new
flash-bulb. It was as empty as he'd left it in the morning. He hung up
his coat and settled down tensely with his pipe. Presently he knocked
out the ashes. There were cigaret butts in the tray.
He quivered a little. He smoked again, carefully not looking at the
desk. It was not until he knocked out the second pipeful of ashes that
he let himself look where Jane's diary had been.
It was there again. The book was open. There was a ruler laid across it
to keep it open.
Jimmy wasn't frightened, and he wasn't hopeful. There was absolutely no
reason why this should happen to him. He was simply desperate and grim
when he went across the room. He saw yesterday's entry, and his own
hysterical message. And there was more writing beyond that.
In Jane's hand.
"_Darling, maybe I'm going crazy. But I think you wrote me as if you
were alive. Maybe I'm crazy to answer you. But please, darling, if you
are alive somewhere and somehow--_"
There was a tear-blot here. The rest was frightened, and tender, and as
desperate as Jimmy's own sensations.
He wrote, with trembling fingers, before he put the camera into
position and pressed the shutter-control for the second time.
When his eyes recovered from the flash, there was nothing on the desk.
He did not sleep at all that night, nor did he work the next day. He
went to a photographer with the film and paid an extravagant fee to
have the film developed and enlarged at once. He got back two prints,
quite distinct. Even very clear, considering everything. One looked
like a trick shot, showing a door twice, once open and once closed, in
the same photograph. The other was a picture of an open book and he
could read every word on its pages. It was inconceivable that such a
picture should have come out.
He walked around practically at random for a couple of hours, looking
at the pictures from time to time. Pictures or no pictures, the thing
was nonsense. The facts were preposterous. It must be that he only
imagined seeing these prints. But there was a quick way to find out.
He went to Haynes. Haynes was his friend and reluctantly a
lawyer--reluctantly because law practice interfered with a large number
of unlikely hobbies.
"Haynes," said Jimmy quietly, "I want you to look at a couple of
pictures and see if you see what I do. I may have gone out of my head."
* * * * *
He passed over the picture of the door. It looked to Jimmy like two
doors, nearly at right angles, in the same door-frame and hung from the
same hinges.
Haynes looked at it and said tolerantly, "Didn't know you went in for
trick photography." He picked up a reading glass and examined it in
detail. "A futile but highly competent job. You covered half the film
and exposed with the door closed, and then exposed for the other half
of the film with the door open. A neat job of matching, though. You've
a good tripod."
"I held the camera in my hand," said Jimmy, with restraint.
"You couldn't do it that way, Jimmy," objected Haynes. "Don't try to
kid me."
"I'm trying not to fool myself," said Jimmy. He was very pale. He
handed over the other enlargement. "What do you see in this?"
Haynes looked. Then he jumped. He read through what was so plainly
photographed on the pages of a diary that hadn't been before the
camera. Then he looked at Jimmy in palpable uneasiness.
"Got any explanation?" asked Jimmy. He swallowed. "I--haven't any."
He told what had happened to date, baldly and without any attempt to
make it reasonable. Haynes gaped at him. But before long the lawyer's
eyes grew shrewd and compassionate. As noted hitherto, he had a number
of unlikely hobbies, among which was a loud insistence on a belief in a
fourth dimension and other esoteric ideas, because it was good fun to
talk authoritatively about them. But he had common sense, had Haynes,
and a good and varied law practice.
Presently he said gently, "If you want it straight, Jimmy ... I had
a client once. She accused a chap of beating her up. It was very
pathetic. She was absolutely sincere. She really believed it. But her
own family admitted that she'd made the marks on herself--and the
doctors agreed that she'd unconsciously blotted it out of her mind
afterward."
"You suggest," said Jimmy composedly, "that I might have forged all
that to comfort myself with, as soon as I could forget the forging.
I don't think that's the case, Haynes. What possibilities does that
leave?"
Haynes hesitated a long time. He looked at the pictures again,
scrutinizing especially the one that looked like a trick shot.
"This is an amazingly good job of matching," he said wrily. "I can't
pick the place where the two exposures join. Some people might manage
to swallow this, and the theoretic explanation is a lot better. The
only trouble is that it couldn't happen."
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 light-hearted. 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 five feet nearer the curve when he came out of it--"
"Where Jane is," said Jimmy, "you were. Just about five 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 near-accident. 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.
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