"Hardly." There was a trace of sadness in her voice. Then, "A Jane
Austen villain is an attractive, powerful, good-natured male who rides
through life roughshod, interested only in himself, completely unaware
of his effect on those unlucky souls whose existences become entangled
in his."
"And I am a Jane Austen villain?" He was puzzled, disturbed that
anyone--Eve or anyone--should think of him as a villain. Mentally he
began to search for kindnesses, for unselfishnesses. He found
generosities, yes, but these, he supposed with sudden dreadful clarity,
had been little more than balm to his ego.
"You are perhaps a classic example, Banning," she told him. Her face, in
shadow, was exquisitely beautiful. "When you left Lincolnville twenty
years ago, without seeing me, without letting me see you, you destroyed
me."
"Good God!" Coulter exclaimed. "But how? I know it was rude, but I did
mean to come back. And when things moved differently it seemed better to
keep a clean break clean." He hesitated, added, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry that you destroyed me?" Her tone was acid-etched.
"Dammit, do you want me down on my knees?" he countered. "How the devil
did my leaving destroy _you_?" Anger, prodded by fear, was warming his
blood.
"I was sensitive--aware of the collapse of my family, of my own
shortcomings, of my lack of opportunity," she said, staring with immense
grey eyes at the wall behind him. "I was just beginning to feel I could
be somebody, could mean something to someone I--liked--when you dropped
me and never looked back.
"I took a job at the bank. For twenty years I've sat in a cage, counting
out money and putting little legends in bank-books. I've felt myself
drying up day by day, week by week, year by year. When I've sought love
I've merely defiled myself. You taught me passion, Banning, then
destroyed my capacity to enjoy it with anyone but you. You destroyed me
and never even knew it."
"You could have gone out into the world," he said with a trace of
contempt. "Other girls have."
"Other girls are not me," Eve replied steadily. "Other girls don't give
themselves to a man as completely as I gave myself to you."
"What can I do now?" Coulter asked, running a hand through his newly
crew-cut hair. Recalling Eve at dinner, seeing her in the doorway,
holding her briefly in his arms--he had almost decided that in this new
life she was the partner he would carry with him.
Now, however, he was afraid of her. It was Eve who had, in some strange
way, brought him back twenty years for purposes she had yet to divulge.
One thing he knew, logically and intuitively--he could never endure life
with anyone of whom he was frightened.
She was no longer looking at the wall--she was looking directly at him
and with curious intensity. She said, "Do you have to ask?"
She was testing him, of course. Sensitive, brilliant, she might be--yet
she was a fool not to have judged the effect of his fear of her. He
walked around the table, took hold of her shoulders, turned her to face
him, said, "What has this particular evening to do with bringing
me--us--back?"
"Everything!" she said, her eyes suddenly ablaze. "_Everything_,
Banning! Can't you understand?"
He released her, lit himself a cigarette, seeking the calmness he knew
he must have to keep his thinking clear. He said, "Perhaps I understand
why--a little. But how, Eve, _how_?"
She got up and walked across the wide hearth, kicked a fallen log back
into place. Its glowing red scales burst into yellow flame. She turned
and said, "Remember my father's last work? His efforts to discover the
secrets of Time?"
"I remember he threw away what should have been your inheritance on a
flock of crackpot ideas," he told her.
"This wasn't a crackpot idea," she said, eyeing him as if he were
another log for the fire. "His basic premise that Time is all-existent
was sound. Time is past, present and future."
"I might have argued that with you--before today," he replied.
"It was like everything else he tried." She made an odd little gesture
of helplessness. "He went at it wrong-end-to, of course. Not until after
he died and Jim got back from M.I.T. did we get to work on it. I was
merely the helper who held the tools for Jim. And when we completed it
_he_ lacked the courage to try it out." There was the acid of contempt
in her voice at her brother's poltroonery.
"I don't blame him," said Coulter. "After all ..." He changed the
subject, asked, "Where _is_ Jim?"
"He was killed at Iwo Jima," she told him.
"What's to keep him from walking in here tonight--or to keep _you_ from
walking in on us?" he asked.
"Jim's in Cambridge, studying for exams," she replied. "As for my
meeting myself, it's impossible. It's hard to explain but in coming back
here I became reintegrated with the past me. Just as you are both a
present and a past you. You must have noticed a certain duplication of
memories, an overlapping? _I_ have."
"I've noticed," he said. "But _why_ only we two?"
"I'll show you," she said. "Come." She led him down rough wooden cellar
stairs to a basement, unfastened with pale and dexterous fingers a
padlocked wooden door behind the big old-fashioned furnace with its
up-curving stovepipe arms, under which he had to stoop to avoid bumping
his head.
The sharp sting of dead furnace-ashes was in his nostrils as he looked
at the strange device. The strange cage-like device, the strange
jerry-built apparatus was centered in a bizarre instrument panel that
seemed to hang from nothing at all. He said, eyeing a bucket-seat for
the operator, "It looks like Red Barber's cat-bird seat, Eve."
"And we're sitting in it, just you and I, darling," she replied. "Just
you and I out of all the people who ever lived. Think of what we can do
with our lives now, the mistakes we can avoid!"
"I'm thinking of them," said Coulter. Then, after a brief pause, "But
how in hell did you manage to get _me_ into the act?"
She stepped inside the odd cage, plucked things from a cup-like
receptacle that hung from the instrument panel, showed them to him.
There were a lock of hair, a scarf, what looked like fingernail parings.
At his bewilderment her face lighted briefly with the shadow of a smile.
She said, "These are _you_, darling. Oh, you _still_ don't understand!
Lacking the _person_ or _thing_ to be sent back in Time, something that
is part of the person or thing will work. It keys directly to individual
patterns."
"And you've kept those things--those pieces of me--in there all this
time?" He shuddered. "It looks like voodoo to me."
She put back the mementos, stepped out of the cage, put her arms
fiercely around him. "Banning, darling, after you left me I _did_ try
voodoo. I wanted you to suffer as I suffered. But then, when the Time
machine was finished and Jim was afraid to use it, I put the things in
it--and waited. It's been a long wait."
"How did it reach me while I was still miles away?" he asked.
"Jim always said its working radius was about five miles," she said.
"When you drove within range, it took over.... But let's go back
upstairs, darling--we have our lives to plan."
To change the subject Coulter said, when they emerged from the basement,
"You must have had a time picking the right moment for this little
reunion--or was it hit or miss?"
"The machine is completely accurate," she said firmly. She stood there,
the firelight making a halo of her dark hair. There was urgency in her,
an expectation that the remark would mean something to him. It didn't.
Finally she burst out with, "Banning, are you really so forgetful? Don't
you remember what tonight was ... _don't_ you?"
Coulter did some hasty mental kangaroo-hopping. He knew it was important
to Eve and, because of the incredible thing she had accomplished, he
felt a new wave of fright. From some recess of his memory he got a
flash--Jim was in Cambridge, the housekeeper asleep in the rear ell of
the old farmhouse, he and Eve were alone.
He drew her gently close to him and kissed her soft waiting lips as he
had kissed them twenty years before, felt the quiver of her slim body
against him as he had felt it twenty years before. He should have
known--Eve had selected for their reunion the anniversary of the first
time they had truly given themselves to each other.
He said, "Of course I remember, darling. If I'm a little slow on the
uptake it's because I've had a lot of things happen to me all at once."
"The old Banning Coulter would never have understood," she said, giving
him a quick hug before standing clear of him. Her eyes were shining like
star sapphires. "Banning, you've grown up!"
"People do," he said drily. There was an odd sort of tension between
them as they stood there, knowing what was to happen between them. Eve
took a deep unsteady breath and the rise and fall of her angora sweater
made his arms itch to pull her close.
She said, before he could translate desire into action, "Oh, I've been
so _wrong_ about so many things, darling. But I was so _right_ to bring
you back. Think of what we're going to be able to do, you and I
together, now that we have this second chance. We'll know just what's
going to happen. We'll be rich and free and lord it over ordinary
mortals. I'll have furs and you'll have yachts and we'll ..."
"I'm a lousy sailor," said Coulter. "No, I don't want a yacht."
"Nonsense, we'll have a yacht and cruise wherever we want to go. Think
of how easy it will be for us to make money." Her eyes were shining more
brightly still. "No more standing in a teller's cage for me. No more
feeling the life-sap dry up inside me, handling thousands of dollars a
day and none of it mine."
She stepped to him, gripped him tightly, her fingernails making
themselves felt even through the heavy material of his jacket. She
kissed him fiercely and said in a throaty whisper, "Darling, I'm going
upstairs. Come up in ten minutes--and be young again with me."
She left him standing alone in front of the fire....
Coulter filled his pipe and lit it. His mother had said _we_ when she
talked of her plans, as if her son were merely an object to be moved
about at her whim. _Pick up my lighter at MacAuliffe's ... going to take
a trip abroad this summer ... not going to be foolish about her...._ He
could see the phrases as vividly as if they were written on a video
teleprompter.
And then he saw another set of phrases--different in content, yet
strangely alike in meaning. _Nonsense, we'll have a yacht ... lord it
over ordinary mortals ... a long wait._ He thought of the voodoo and the
fingernail parings, of the savage materialism of the woman who was even
now preparing herself to receive him upstairs, who was planning to
relive his life with him in _her_ image.
He thought of his wife, foolish perhaps, but true to him and never
domineering. He thought of the Scarborough house and the good friends he
had there, hundreds of miles and twenty years away. He wondered if he
could go back if he got beyond the five-mile radius of the strange
machine in the basement.
He looked down with regret at his slim young body, so unexpectedly
regained--and thought of the heavier, older less vibrant body that lay
waiting for him five miles away. Then swiftly, silently, he tiptoed into
the hall, donned coat and hat and gloves, slipped through the front door
and bolted for the Pontiac.
He drove like a madman over the icy roads through the dark. Somehow he
sensed he would have to get beyond the reach of the machine before Eve
grew impatient and came downstairs and found him gone. She might, in her
anger, send him back to some other Time--or perhaps the machine worked
both ways. He didn't know. He could only flee in fear ... and hope....
At times, in the years that had passed since his abrupt breaking-off of
his romance with Eve Lawton, he had wondered a little about why he had
dropped her so quickly, just when his mother's death seemed to open the
path for their marriage.
Now he knew that youthful instinct had served him better than he knew.
Somehow, beneath the charm and wit and beauty of the girl, he had sensed
the domineering woman. Perhaps a lifetime with his mother had made him
extra-aware of Eve's desire to dominate without its reaching his
conscious mind.
But to have exchanged the velvet glove of his mother for the velvet
glove of Eve would have meant a lifetime of bondage. He would never have
been his own man, never....
He could feel cold sweat bathe his body once more as he sped past the
Brigham Farm. According to his wristwatch just eight and a quarter
minutes had elapsed since Eve had left him and gone upstairs. He felt a
sudden urge to turn around and go back to her--he knew she would forgive
his attempt to run away. After all, he couldn't even guess at what would
happen when he reached the outer limit of the machine's influence. Would
he be in 1934 or 1954--or irretrievably lost in some timeless nowhere at
all?
He thought again of what Eve had said about yachts and world traveling
and wondered how she could hope to do so if the radius of influence was
only five miles. Eve might be passionate, headstrong and neurotic, but
she was not a fool. If she had planned travel on a world of two decades
past she must have found a way of making his and her stay in that past
permanent, without trammels.
If she had altered the machine ... But she wouldn't have until he was
caught in her trap when, inevitably, he returned to look at the scenes
of his childhood. He tried to recall what she had done, what gestures
she had made, when she demonstrated the machine. As nearly as he could
remember, all Eve had done was to pluck out his nail parings, the bit of
hair and scarf, then return them to their receptacle.
Voodoo.... She was close to mad. Or perhaps he was mad himself. He wiped
his streaming forehead with a sleeve, barely avoided overturning as he
rounded a curve flanked by signboards....
He felt a bump....
And suddenly he was in the big convertible again, guiding it over to one
of the parking lanes at the side of the magnificent two-laned highway.
He looked down at his sleek dark vicuna coat, visualized the rise of
plump stomach beneath it, reached in his breast pocket for a panatella.
* * * * *
He noticed the tremble in his hand. _No, no cigars now_, he thought.
_Not with the old pump acting up like this. Too much excitement._ He
reached for the little box of nitroglycerin tablets in his watch-pocket,
got it out, took one, waited.
Maybe his life wasn't perfect, maybe there wasn't much of it left to
live--but what there was was his, not his mother's, not Eve's. The
unsteadiness in his chest was fading. He turned on the ignition, drove
slowly back through the housing developments, the neon signs and
clover-leaf turns and graded crossings toward the city....
When he got back to the hotel he would call Connie in Scarborough. It
would be heavenly, the sound of her high, silly little voice....
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ May 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.