‘And,’ he went on, ‘when I continue to insist I have solved time travel and that I was indisputably pronounced dead and was not indisputably alive, orthodox scientists will heatedly denounce me as a fraud. Why, in one week, I will have become a household name to every man on Earth. They will talk of nothing else. I will offer to make a demonstration of time travel before any group of scientists who wish to see it. I will offer to make the demonstration on an intercontinental TV circuit. Public pressure will force scientists to attend, and the networks to give permission. It doesn’t matter whether people will watch hoping for a miracle or for a lynching. They will watch! And then I will succeed and who in science will ever have had a more transcendent climax to his life?’
I was dazzled for a moment, but something unmoved within me said: Too long, too complicated; something will go wrong.
That evening, his assistants arrived and tried to be respectfully grieving in the presence of the corpse. lwo more witnesses to swear they had seen Lancelot dead; two more witnesses to confuse the issue and help build events to their stratospheric peak.
By four the next morning, we were in the cold-room, bundled in overcoats and waiting for zero moment.
Lancelot, in high excitement, kept checking his instruments and doing I-know-not-what with them. His desk computer was working constantly, though how he could make his cold fingers jiggle the keys so nimbly, I am at a loss to say.
I, myself, was quite miserable. There was the cold, the dead body in the coffin, the uncertainty of the future.
We had been there for what seemed an eternity and finally Lancelot said, ‘It will work. It will work as predicted. At the most, disappearance will be five minutes late and this when seventy kilograms of mass are involved. My analysis of chronous forces is masterly indeed.’ He smiled at me, but he also smiled at his own corpse with equal warmth.
I noticed that his lab jacket, which he had been wearing constantly for three days now, sleeping in it I am certain, had become wrinkled and shabby. It was about as it had seemed upon the second Lancelot, the dead one, when it had appeared.
Lancelot seemed to be aware of my thoughts, or perhaps only of my gaze, for he looked down at his jacket and said, ‘Ah, yes, I had better put on the rubber apron. My second self was wearing it when it appeared.’
‘What if you didn’t put it on?’ I asked tonelessly.
‘I would have to. It would be a necessity. Something would have reminded me. Else it would not have appeared in one.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Do you still think something will go wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled.
‘Do you think the body won’t disappear, or that I’ll disappear instead?’
When I didn’t answer at all, he said in a half-scream, ‘Can’t you see my luck has changed at last? Can’t you see how smoothly and according to plan it is all working out? I will be the greatest man who ever lived. Come, heat up the water for the coffee.’ He was suddenly calm again. ‘It will serve as celebration when my double leaves us and I return to life. I haven’t had any coffee for three days.’
It was only instant coffee he pushed in my direction, but after three days that, too, would serve. I fumbled at the laboratory hot-plate with my cold fingers until Lancelot pushed me roughly to one side and set a beaker of water upon it.
‘It’ll take a while,’ he said, turning the control to ‘high.’ He looked at his watch, then at various dials on the wall. ‘My double will be gone before the water boils. Come here and watch.’ He stepped to the side of the coffin.
I hesitated. ‘Come,’ he said peremptorily.
I came.
He looked down at himself with infinite pleasure and waited. We both waited, staring at a corpse.
There was the phfft sound and Lancelot cried out, ‘Less than two minutes off.’
Without a blur or a wink, the dead body was gone.
The open coffin contained an empty set of clothes. The clothes, of course, had not been those in which the dead body had been brought back. They were real clothes and they stayed in reality. There they now were: underwear within shirt and pants; shirt within tie; tie within jacket. Shoes had turned over, dangling socks from within them. The body was gone.
I could hear water boiling.
‘Coffee,’ said Lancelot. ‘Coffee first. Then we call the police and the newspapers.’
I made the coffee for him and myself. I gave him the usual level teaspoon from the sugar bowl, neither heaping nor deficient. Even under these conditions, when I was sure for once it wouldn’t matter to him, habit was strong.
I sipped at my coffee, which I drank without cream or sugar, as was my habit. Its warmth was most welcome.
He stirred his coffee. ‘All,’ he said softly, ‘all I have waited for.’ He put the cup to his grimly triumphant lips and drank.
Those were his last words.
Now that it was over, there was a kind of frenzy over me. I managed to strip him and dress him in the clothing from the coffin. Somehow I was able to heave his weight upward and place him in the coffin. I folded his arms across his chest as they had been.
I then washed out every trace of coffee in the sink in the room outside, and the sugar bowl, too. Over and over again I rinsed, until all the cyanide, which I had substituted for the sugar, was gone.
I carried his laboratory jacket and other clothes to the hamper where I had stored those the double had brought back. The second set had disappeared, of course, and I put the first set there.
Next I waited.
By that evening, I was sure the corpse was cold enough, and called the undertakers. Why should they wonder? They expected a dead body and there was the dead body. The same dead body. Really the same body. It even had cyanide in it as the first was supposed to have.
I suppose they might still be able to tell the difference between a body dead twelve hours and one dead three and a half days, even under refrigeration, but why should they dream of looking?
They didn’t. They nailed down the coffin, took him away, and buried him. It was the perfect murder.
As a matter of fact, since Lancelot was legally dead at the time I killed him, I wonder if, strictly speaking, it was murder at all. Of course, I don’t intend to ask a lawyer about this.
Life is quiet for me now; peaceful and contented. I have money enough. I attend the theater. I have made friends.
And I live without remorse. To be sure, Lancelot will never receive credit for time travel. Someday when time travel is discovered again, the name of Lancelot Stebbins will rest in Stygian darkness, unrecognized. But then, I told him that whatever his plans, he would end without the credit. If I hadn’t killed him, something else would have spoiled things, and then he would have killed me.
No, I live without remorse.
In fact, I have forgiven Lancelot everything, everything but that moment when he spat at me. So it is rather ironic that he did have one happy moment before he died, for he was given a gift few could have, and he, above all men, savored it.
