real.
He had seen it somewhere, and it meant something -- but what?
When the coffee had percolated, he opened the refrigerator and found there
was no cream or milk. His stomach moved uneasily at the thought of black
coffee, but a search of the depleted kitchen showed that the oniy other
liquid available was in a pickle jar where several pieces of dill swam
mistily like surgical specimens. Breton poured a cup of the black brew,
flat gray spirals of vapor swirling close to its surface, and went back
to the living room. He sat down, sipped some coffee, and tried vaguely
to think about taking control of his personal affairs, but the room was
growing dim and he felt tired. One week of treatment and rest had not
been enough to repair the damage his extended binge had caused.
Breton awoke in near-darkness several hours later. A wan, violet-tinted
light was filtering into the room from a street lamp, and tree shadows
were moving uneasily on the innermost wall. Repressing a shiver and a
surge of self-pity, Breton sat up and decided to go out to eat. As he was
getting out of the chair he noticed the vacillating shadow of branches
on the dead gray face of the television set -- and he remembered where
he had seen the three elms.
During a newscast one of the local channels had carried a still photograph
of the spot where Kate's body had been found -- right by three elms.
The only trouble was that the elms he had seen on his trip had not been
frozen to stillness by the camera. They had been moving . . . arranging
and rearranging their black-etched limbs to the dictates of the night
winds. They had been -- Breton hesitated before applying the adjective
--
real.
Its use meant there had been a shift in his attitude towards
the trips, that some part of his mind had found it necessary to believe
he had actually seen Kate that very afternoon. Could it be, Breton
wondered coldly, that his lonely, guilt-ridden consciousness had defied
every law in nature -- to travel back through time? Suppose the age-old
human desire to do the impossible, to go back into the past and correct
mistakes, had been the psychic driving force behind all the trips he
had ever made? That would explain why the recreated scenes were always
crisis points, times when the course of his life had taken a disastrous
turn. Could it be that he was a frustrated time traveler, anchored in
the present by the immovable reality of his corporeal body, but managing
to release some immaterial aspect of his identity to look back through
time and hammer on the invisible walls of the past? If that was the case,
then -- God help him -- he was going to relive that awful, final scene
with Kate until he died. And the three elm trees had begun to loom. . . .
I've got to get out of here, Breton thought, and find a good noisy diner
with a juke box, checkered table cloths, huge vulgar plastic tomatoes
on the tables, and normal human beings arguing about the things normal
human beings argue about.
He put on lights all over the house, freshened himself up, changed his
clothes and was going out through the front door when a slightly shabby
sedan swung in the gateway and wallowed up the snow-covered drive. The
passenger door opened and Hetty Calder got out, surveyed the snow with
obvious disgust, and blew some cigarette ash onto it in a gesture of
retaliation.
"Going out? Harry and I came over to see if there was anything we
could do."
"There is." Breton was amazed at just how much pleasure the sight of her
thick, tweedy figure was able to inspire in him. "You can be my guests
at dinner. I'd be glad of your company."
He got into the rear seat and exchanged brief greetings with Harry Calder,
a balding, bookish man of about fifty. The clutter of shopping bags,
scarves and magazines around him on the broad seat gave Breton a
comforting feeling of being securely back in the world of uncomplicated
normalcy, He studied the pre-Christmas store displays as they drove across
the city, absorbing every detail, leaving no room for thoughts of Kate.
"How're you feeling now, Jack?" Hetty peered back into Breton's homely
little kingdom. "You didn't look too good when I dropped you off today."
"Well, I wasn't feeling too wonderful right then, but I'm fine now."
"What was wrong?" Hetty persisted.
Breton hesitated, and decided to experiment with the truth. "As a matter
of fact, I wasn't seeing very well. Sort of colored lights had spread
over most of my right eye.
Unexpectedly, Harry Calder turned his head and clucked sympathetically.
"Prismatic, zigzag patterns, eh? So you're another one?"
"Another one? What do you mean, Harry?"
"I get them too -- and then the pain starts," Harry Calder said. "It's
a common preliminary symptom of migraine."
"Migraine!" Breton felt something heave convulsively in his subconscious.
"But I never get headaches."
"No? Then you must be one of the lucky ones -- what I go through after
those pretty colors start marching isn't ordinary. You wouldn't believe
it."
"I never knew there was any coiniection between that sort of thing and
migraine," Breton said. "As you say -- I must be one of the lucky ones."
Even to his own ears, his voice did not carry much conviction.
Breton's belief in the possibility of time travel was born painfully,
over a period of months.
He returned to his business, but found himself unable to make valid
judgments on even the most clear-cut administrative issues, while
technical decisions had receded to another plane of comprehension
altogether. With the assistance of the three staff engineers, Hetty
guided the consultancy into something approximating its normal channels
of operation. At first, Breton sat at his desk staring at meaningless
drawings for hours at a stretch, unable to think of anything but Kate
and the part he had played in her death. There were times when he tried
to write poetry, to crystallize and perhaps depersonalize his feeling
about Kate. The heavy snows of the Montana winter buried the world in
silence, and Breton watched it silt across the arrays of parked cars
beyond his window. Its silence seemed to invade his own body so that
he could hear its blind workings, the constant traffic of fluids, the
subdividing incursions of air, the patient radial rain of cholesterol
in his arteries. . . .
And at intervals of six or seven days he made trips, always to that final
scene with Kate. Sometimes the elm trees would be so translucent as to
be almost nonexistent; at other times they reared up black and real,
giving him the impression he would be able to see two figures moving
at their bases were it not for the overlaid light of store windows and
automobile headlights.
With the continued in-growing of his perceptions, he became more aware of
the phenomena he had learned to identify as preludes to the trips. There
would be the gradual intensification of his nervous activity, leading him
to think he had escaped from despair as it culminated in a heady sense of
well-being. Close on that came the first visual disturbances, starting
with a furtive glimmer and spreading all over his right eye. As soon as
it began to abate, reality
shifted
-- and he was back in the past
The discovery that the visual phenomena were familiar to others surprised
Breton, because as a boy he had attempted to describe them to his friends
and had never achieved any reaction. Even his parents had shown nothing
more than indulgent mock-interest and he had never been able to convince
them he was not talking about afterimages caused by bright lights. He had
learned not to talk about the trips or anything associated with them,
and over the years the conviction had grown on him that his experience
was unique, private to Jack Breton. But the chance conversation with
Harry Calder had changed all that; and the interest it had stirred in
him was the only genuine stake he had in the bleak, bitter present
Breton began spending his afternoons in the public library, aware he was
following an idea beside which his former fantasy about Kate's murderer
was a working blueprint, but unable to ignore its feverish pounding
in his mind. He read the scanty literature on migraine, then went on
to general medical works, biographies of famous migraine sufferers,
anything his instincts told him might lead in the direction he wanted
to go. Never having connected himself with migraine before, Breton had
a vague idea it was a recent product of high-pressure civilization. His
reading showed him it had been known to ancient cultures, one of them that
of the Greeks, who had named it hemicrania -- the hall-headache. In the
great majority of cases, the visual disturbances were followed by severe
headaches affecting one side of the head, then nausea. Some people were
lucky enough to escape one or other of these symptoms, and there was a
rare category of individual who avoided both. Their condition was known
as
hemicrania sine dolore.
One of the most intriguing things, as far as Breton was concerned, was
the amazing exactness with which his own visual experiences had been
described by other men in other times. The medical terms were various --
teichopsia, scintillating scotoma -- but the one he preferred for its
aptness was "fortification figures." It had first been used by an 18th
century doctor, John Fothergill, who had written:
" . . . a singular kind of glimmering in the sight, objects swiftly
changing their apparent position, surrounded by luminous angles like
those of a fortification."
Fothergill had attributed it to eating too much buttered toast at
breakfast time -- an explanation Breton found only slightly less
satisfactory than up-to-the-minute theories which spoke vaguely about
temporary irritations of the visual cortex. One dark brown afternoon,
when he and the others in the old building were sitting quietly like
objects in the bottom of a petrifying well, he turned the pages of an
obscure health magazine and was chilled to find accurate drawings --
not of the fortification figures, which would have defeated any artist --
but of the black star which sometimes appeared in their place.
One of the drawings was by the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal,
and another had been done as far back as the 12th century by Abbess
Hildegarde of Bingen.
"I saw a great star," the Abbess had written, "most splendid and beautiful
and with an exceeding multitude of falling sparks with which the star
followed southwards ... and suddenly they were all annihilated, being
turned into black coals and cast into the abyss so that I could see them
no more."
Breton read on quickly but, as was the case with all the other recorded
accounts, there was no mention of a subsequent vision of the past. In that
respect, it appeared, he really was unique.
A year later Breton pedantically wrote in his notebook:
"I now incline more than ever towards the theory that all migraine
sufferers are frustrated time travelers. The power which provides temporal
motivation is the desire to return to the past, possibly to relive periods
of extreme happiness, but more probably to correct mistakes which are
seen in retrospect to have had a malign effect on the course of events.
"Prior to Kate's death my own case was a freakish example of someone who
almost
could
go back, not because of greater motivation, but though
a lower threshold, a chance configuration of the nervous system. (The
visual disturbances may be caused by some degree of temporal displacement
of the retina -- which is, after all, an extension of the brain, and
therefore the sense organ most intimately associated with the activity
of the central nervous system.)
"Since Kate's death my retroactive potential has reached an abnormally
high level, resulting in frequent trips. Leaving aside the problem
of constructing a philosophical edifice capable of accommodating the
physical implications, the question remains of how to put theory into
practice. Ergotamines, methysergide, diuretics -- all these things are
in use to minimize the effects of hemicrania, which is hardly what I
have in mind. . . ."
And after five years:
"The monthly check from Hetty arrived today. It was larger than usual,
making it possible for me to clear my account at the Clermont Scientific
Company -- which was a relief. I have no wish to impair my credit rating
with them at this stage, although I still have the house in reserve
and its capital value has appreciated considerably. (What a good idea
it was for me to assign formal control of my business to Hetty and that
new man Tougher. My only worry is a nagging suspicion that she sometimes
augments my check with money of her own.)
"There is some cause for excitement today. My work has finally passed from
the investigatory to the constructively experimental stage. I could have
reached this point sooner but for following several false trails. All of
them were suggested by Dr. Garnet at the migraine clinic, and I am glad
my association with that organization is coming to an end.
Prodromal
symptoms and cerebral blood flow, response to various drugs, metabolism
of the amines -- red herrings, the lot of them. (As far as my work is
concerned, anyway. I must not be too unkind to Garnet.)
"To think that my big breakthrough came as a result of using a badly
designed screwdriver!
"I don't know what prompted me to withdraw the fluid from that huge
blister on the palm of my right hand, unless it was that I had been
thinking a lot about the possible use of hemicranial pain as a trigger
mechanism to augment chronomotive impulses. Work at the clinic had
established that a substance called kinin was produced in the region of
the head arteries during migraine attacks in people not fortunate enough
to be afflicted with
hemicrania sine dolore.
"Blister fluid itself does not cause pain, but I have proved that when
it is withdrawn and put in contact with glass it develops kinin, which --
when put into the blister again -- certainly does cause pain. By injecting
kinin at the first onset of teichopsia heralding my last three trips I
was able to experience genuine hemicrania, and -- for the first time --
I