The Other Now by Murray Leinster (bts book recommendations TXT) 📗

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