"Oh, no!" I said. "Wait a minute here, Wyn. If she can't remember
the past even a minute ahead, you couldn't even talk with her. She'd
remember what you were going to say, instead of what you had said. Not
only that, she'd talk backward! You'd never be able to understand her."
"People are adaptable," he replied. "She evidently learned to talk
backward--to her; correctly, to us. People learn to talk so others can
understand them. And as for conversation, do you remember Summer ever
answering a question directly?"
I started to say I did, for it seemed that I did. But a moment's
reflection changed my mind. Not a direct question; and her
participation in a conversation always had been a jumpy and disturbing
thing.
"But we can talk with Summer," I protested. "For years we've been able
to understand each other."
"Like writing letters that cross in the mails," he said. "And I think
people do have some knowledge of the immediate future, even you and I.
Summer would develop that faculty more than the average person."
Certainly. No wonder she had been so affectionate to me that it had
been impossible for me to resist her. To her, at that time, we had
already been lovers. By the same token, my own knowledge when the
affair was concluded that we had been lovers must have created in me an
attitude that was a strong incentive for her to yield to me at the end
of our relationship--the beginning, to her.
What a way to live! Always trying to guess, from the conversation of
those around her, what (to her) was going to happen, so she could react
intelligently.
"But," I protested, still unwilling to accept it, "if the past is the
future to her, her actions could affect the past."
"Exactly," he said. "I told you, this means you have to accept the
principle that the past is just as mallable as the future, and the
future is no more mallable than the past."
Wyn had known all this before he left. He had gone, not just to avoid
seeing his wife revert to childhood before his eyes, but to delve into
studies on the nature of time itself. Where he had been, how he had
supported himself I didn't know. I still don't know.
Summer, her age now about thirteen, was old enough to understand that
she was Wyn's wife, but he did not resume his position as husband to
her. Instead, he acted toward her and Mark both as a father. Me? I
suppose I was something in the nature of a benevolent uncle now.
As a matter of fact, Wyn plunged so deeply into work that the task
devolved upon me to be both father and mother to Summer and her child.
Mark, developing apace into a vigorous young specimen, looked like both
his parents--since their features were so much alike, he could not be
said to resemble one more than the other.
Wyn did not return with his family to the house at 138 March Street. It
had long been occupied by someone else. He moved in with us and, with
my tacit consent, made my home both his home and the headquarters for
his work.
His work actually was double. He got a good job, this time as engineer
at the Allertown Mill Industries. During all his spare time, he worked
at converting my precious den and my basement into something completely
beyond my understanding.
There are some people who accept misfortune and live with it--or die
with it. Others battle it angrily to the bitter end, even when there
is no evidence that anyone ever conquered their particular misfortune
before. Admittedly, there was little precedent for Summer's case;
and this made the prognosis even less optimistic. Still, Wyn was
constitutionally the latter type of person.
"I don't know how much longer she lived in the past before you found
us," he told me. "Nothing I could do has helped my amnesia for that
period. She may have lived to a ripe old age, for all I know.
"But we know that she has only a few years to live, the way she is
now--perhaps twelve or thirteen. That's her physical age, and she is
living backwards toward babyhood."
"What will she do?" I asked curiously. "Just fade away?"
"She has to be born," he answered solemnly. "My guess is that, a few
years in the future, there will occur the most unique birth ever known
to man--a birth in reverse. Some couple, somewhere--perhaps someone
we know here in Allertown--will live through the experience of the
daughter they never knew reentering the mother's womb and retracing her
steps through the embryo stage to the moment of conception."
"Fantastic!" I exclaimed.
"It must be true;" he insisted. "It has to be true, unless she
reversed ... will reverse ... her direction in time after birth. In
that case, perhaps some baby girl here even now is Summer, living
coexistently with her reversed self."
"If you're going to reverse her direction in time again and make her
live normally," I said, for he already had told me this was his aim, "I
don't see how you can prevent a paradox. She has already lived in the
past as an adult woman. If you reverse her existence at this stage,
then she can't be born, because she'd be living from her present age
on, both forward and backward in time."
He shook his head.
"I don't know," he said. "Perhaps it can't be done. Perhaps it would
involve a parallel time stream, if there is such a thing. All I know is
that I must try. If I can, she might still consent to be my wife later,
if the difference in our ages isn't too great. That would be up to her."
"I don't see how you even know where to start on such a project," I
confessed.
"The chances are slim," he admitted, "but I have some hope. The only
actual time reversal we know, scientifically, is at the sub-atomic
level. The theory was advanced by Feynman that annihilation of an
electron-positron pair upon contact might be, not actual annihilation,
but a 'time reversal' of the electron. The emission of a photon of
energy, in such cases, is powerful enough to cause a recoil in time,
and the positron is merely the electron traveling backward through time
after the energy explosion."