CHAPTER V

The Time Twins

It's funny how, in moments of stress, dejection, or great elation, your mind will focus upon some tiny, relatively unimportant point.

I should have been whooping with joy to look upon a set of familiar faces, even though those faces were our own. But do you know, my first conscious reaction was one of rage? And why? Because, naturally, the first guy I looked at was myself--and there I was, sitting in that other ship, calmly munching on a great big rosy apple!

I said, "Why, you damn glutton! You ought to be ashamed! I've got half a notion to--"

I grinned at me ... I mean, _he_ grinned at me ... or I mean I grinned at he ... oh, hell, you know what I mean! The other Jim Blakeson grinned at me and said, "What's the fuss, pal? Hungry? We figured you might be. Here, catch!"

And he tossed the remainder of his apple at me. I clutched at it greedily. But of course it fell right into and through my grasping fingers, through my lap and the base of the time-ship, and into the emptiness below. I've often wondered what became of that apple. At that particular moment, we had just lifted ourselves from a weird America where the ruling class was made up of magicians, necromancers and students of demonology. I've often wondered if the apple came tumbling out of the sky to smack some son of a witch on the head.

Then the other Hank leaned forward and yelled to our Hank. "Got here soon as I could, Cleaver. I had to get the machine finished proper so they wouldn't be no mess this time!"

And our Hank nodded. "Figgered as much," he replied. "Kinda thought you'd come atter us, but I didn't know whether you'd find us or not. How'd you trail us?"

Hank Number 2 looked sort of modest. He said, "Why, I had to fix up a new type o' gadget. 'Peared like since me an' you was almost identical the same person, so to speak, we ought to have sort of psychic bonds. You know, like this E.S.P. they talk about? So I whipped up a psychic trailer an'--an' it seemed to work right well."

If I had needed any further proof that these Hanks were, fundamentally, the same person, I had it now. Both of them were 'scientific pioneers'. They had a native, inborn ability to create, seemingly at a moment's notice, gadgets of such scientific scope that no other man would have believed them possible. But neither of them could ever give a plain, coherent reason as to how their invention worked or why they had dared think it would work in the first place!

My Hank accepted the statement as if it were quite commonplace.

"Nice goin'!" he said calmly. "You gonna lead us back where we belong?"

The other Hank shook his head.

"It's a leetle more complicated than that," he demurred. "I been figgerin' it out, an' it works oney up to a certain point. You see, I c'n oney take you back to where I was where I fust seen you. If I take you back to your place, I don't exist. But you _do_ exist in my place, because you was in it once, see? So--"

"Mmm-hmm!" nodded our Hank gravely. And he glanced at Helen and me speculatively. "Did you tell them the rest of it?"

"Why, no, I didn't. I figgered whut they don't know won't disturb 'em. O' course there'll be a leetle bit o' confusion at first, but--"

"What," demanded both Helens simultaneously, "are you two talking about?"

* * * * *

The query silenced both Hanks suddenly. Then Hank Number 2 said, "Well, come on. Follow me. I'll go slow an' call the stud settin's for you so's you can follow. One-oh-four--"

"One-oh-four!" repeated our Hank dutifully, and he pushed a button. So off we went again!

Even I could see that this time our journey was a shorter, more direct and more logical one than the haphazard voyage on which our incomplete time-machine had borne us. I began to recognize a certain form, a certain coherence, to the unfolding "historic" or pseudo-historic stops we made from time to time to check our course.

Out of the scramble of heterogeneous possibilities we merged into a "history" which was based on certain fundamentals every American schoolchild knows. We left those impossible Americas where foreign nations ruled, settled into a background approximating that I was accustomed to. There were still differences. Once we bumped into a political meeting of a party known as the "Bull Moose"; Helen said, "Why, I remember reading about that party! Theodore Roosevelt--"

"In 1912," finished the other Helen. "We must be getting close, Hank."

"Yes, sweety-pie," said our Hank abstractedly, and blushed a brilliant crimson as he saw our Helen glare at him.

We had one frightening experience. We came to a Time wherein we looked out upon our little college town--we had set the positional stops by now, and were hovering above the possibilities of that place--to find it a smouldering pile of wreckage and ruin. We were so horrified by this that we had to stop and discover the reason. It took some little doing, but finally we succeeded in learning the whole story. This desolate scene was my fault!

In one of my possible existences I had made the horrible mistake of paying my favorite tailor the money I owed him. Overcome by this unexpected fortune, he had gone out on a big drunk. As a result, he had come home and set his shop on fire. The fire, getting swiftly out of control, had laid the entire city to ruin, killing hundreds and making thousands homeless.

My double and I shuddered when we heard this awful tragedy. Helen shuddered, too, and stared at me severely.

"Let that be a lesson to you, Jim Blakeson! Never run up bills like that again!"

"It is a lesson," I promised her. "I swear I will never pay any tradesman every cent I owe him so long as I live!"

* * * * *

And then, finally, the last stud had been pressed, the last instruction given and taken. And for the final time our two ships were hovering in the gray mists which are above Time's passageways, and our two pilots were preparing for the move which they seemed to believe would solve our difficulty. And Hank Number 2 said, "You've got it straight, now, Hank! You sit perfectly still. I'll guide my machine into yours, an' at the moment of impact, you and I will both press our temporal landin' studs--right?"

"Right!" said our Hank. "I guess it's the oney way to do it, huh?"

"Oney way I c'n see. We got to make a merger--"

"A _what_?" I yelled, sitting bolt upright.

Hank said, "Now, ca'm down, Jim. Me'n me figgered this all out, an' it's the oney way we can get back to normal. You see, we an' ourselves in the other ship is almost identical. Within five minutes or so of each other we got the same brains, mem'ries an' bodies.

"It's absolutely impossible for us here in this car to ever get back to _exactly_ the sitchyation we left. Because under them circumstances, the ship wasn't never completed.

"So we got to do the next best thing. That is, we got to merge with ourselves an' become the same person again except that we will never have made this trip? Get it?"

"If I do," I howled wildly, "I'm crazy--and if I don't, I'm crazy anyhow. I lose whether I win or lose. But if you think I'm going to become part of that silly-looking ape over there--"

The other me was howling with equal frenzy. "Silly-looking ape yourself! Let me out of here, Hank! I'm not going to let _him_ be part of _me_--"

And the two Helens were squawking, too. Neither of them entirely fancied the other. Now both began yammering at the same time. The two Hanks looked at each other. And our Hank said, "Now?"

"_Now!_" said the other Hank.

I saw the two machines drifting together. I cried aloud. I felt the hulls contact ... then there came a moment of brilliant dizziness ... a jolting sense of concussion ... and a prickling sense of motion....

Helen eyed with disdain the wavering, nebulous egg-shaped machine standing before us. "And what," she demanded, "do you call _this_?"

"It--it's a time-machine, honey," said Hank. Then a strange look dawned in his eyes. "Hey!" he said. "Hey--_it worked_!"

* * * * *

I couldn't answer him. Because momentarily I was a riot of mental confusion. My thoughts were so wild, and so chaotic, that they simply didn't make sense. Here I was, Jim Blakeson, standing in a room before Hank Cleaver's brand-new time-machine. Helen had just entered the room a moment ago. And yet--and yet my memory told me that hours had passed in this room, and that Helen and Hank and I had not only talked about the machine, but had stepped into it, had gone places in it, seen incredible things....

Then it all came back to me in a flash. Just as it came back to Helen and Hank. And the three of us stood there like wide-eyed cretins, trying to arrange our minds to fit an impossible situation.

It was Helen who spoke first. She moaned weakly,

"I--I'm her, now!"

"And if you're her," I quavered, "I'm him! What a mess! I'm that heel who was eating the apple ... I mean, I'm that wise-cracking guy who was hungry ... I mean, I'm both of me!"

Only Hank retained a vestige of self-control. He put his arms around Helen, placed one warm hand on my shoulder. "Now, don't git all het up, Jim. You're both of 'em--that's right. But it don't make no diff'rence, you see, because the time lapse was so small. Atter the merger we became both ourselves, which was lost in Time, an' ourselves which, atter seein' ourselves, went out an' rescued us. Do you understand?"

"Only too well," I moaned. "I understand that the biggest mistake of my life was finding you in that Westville turnip-patch. Oh, if I'd only left you there--"

I tottered toward the medicine cabinet. It was after I groped for the missing bottle that I remembered having handed it to me and breaking it before. I buried my face in my hands, clinging tightly to one reassuring sanity in a mad world. At least I had only one personal history up to a few minutes ago!

Then Hank disengaged Helen gently and moved to the side of his machine. He stared at it long and mournfully--then picked up a screwdriver.

"I promised me," he said, "I'd dismantle this here thing. An' I'm agonna do it, too, afore my good intentions weaken. It's too dangerous f'r a man to have around. Seein' other time-possibilities, experiencin' twin memories--" He stopped suddenly, stared at us. "Twin memories: the ideers o' two minds! I wonder--"

"Wonder what?"

"Them mental cases in hospitals, Jim. You know--them what do you call 'ems?--schizophrenics? Fellers with split personalities. I wonder if maybe somehow or other them poor guys ain't just fellers which somehow or other managed to git shunted off their own proper time-track into another one? An' got their personalities so balled up that they go plumb loco tryin' to straighten 'em out again? It could be. It's logical enough...."

I groaned and lurched out.

Behind me boomed the merry clank of metal on metal. Hank was cheerfully dismantling his machine. He had already chosen to forget our recent adventure. Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow he would be off on still another dark quest down the mysterious byways of law and logic.

And why not? For he was the scientific pioneer--Horsesense Hank. And who ever heard of a horse with nerves?