The Two-Timers by Bob Shaw

Author:Bob Shaw [Shaw, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9780441835515
Google: MpBtswEACAAJ
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1968-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

When John had returned to the office, Jack waited hungrily for Kate to come downstairs to him, but she appeared dressed in a tweed suit with tied belt and a high fur collar.

“Going out?” He tried to mask his disappointment.

“Shopping,” she said in a businesslike voice which hint him in some obscure fashion.

“Don’t go.”

“But we still have to eat.” Her voice carried what he recognized as a trace of antagonism, and he suddenly realized she had been virtually avoiding him since their single physical encounter. The idea that she might be feeling guilt—and associating him with it—filled Breton with an unreasoning panic.

“John’s talking about pulling out.” He was unable to prevent himself blurting the lie like a love-sick adolescent, in spite of his awareness of the need to prepare her mind for John’s disappearance more carefully than he had ever done anything in his entire life. Kate hesitated between him and the door. The down on her cheekbones caught the light like frost, and he seemed to see the mortuary drawer supporting her on its efficient cantilever. He became afraid.

“John’s entitled to leave if he wants,” she said finally, and went out. A minute later he heard her MG booming in the garage. He waited at the window to see her go by, but the car was fitted with its hardtop and Kate’s face was an impersonal blur behind the chiseled sky-fragments of the windows.

Breton turned away from the window, suddenly filled with a sense of outrage. Both his creations—the people he had brought into being as surely as if he had stalked the Earth amid Biblical lightnings, putting breath into inert clay—had lived independently of him for nine years. Now, in spite of what they had learned, they were insisting on pursuing their courses, ignoring him when necessary, leaving him alone in a house where he hated to be alone. Breton moved with clenched fists through the silences of the empty rooms. He had been prepared to wait a week, but things had changed and were still doing so. It would be necessary to act more quickly, more decisively.

From a rear window he glimpsed the silvery dome of the observatory beyond the beech trees, and felt a grudging curiosity about its construction. Right from the moment of his arrival there had been a tacit, instinctive agreement that nobody outside the house should get any clue about the existence of the two Bretons—so he could not justify going outside. But the rear garden was well shielded from the neighboring houses, and it would take him only a few seconds to reach the observatory and get inside.

He went down into the kitchen, peered through the curtained door and went out onto the roofed patio. The lemon-tinted sunlight of an October afternoon streamed through the trees in slowly merging beams, and from the distance came the patient, regular sound of a lawn mower. Breton walked towards the observatory.

"Ho there! Not working today?”

Breton spun as the voice came from behind him. The speaker was a tall, fit-looking man of about forty who had just come around the side of the house.

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