The sun had broken through, sucking moisture from the damp garden. It was now unmistakably autumn. She rounded the corner of the house, stepped round the rose bed, and looked into her husband’s study.
Shaken, she saw he leaned half over the table. His hands were over his face, blood ran between his fingers and dripped onto an open magazine on the table top. She was aware of Stackpole sitting indifferently beside the electric fire.
She gave a small cry and ran round the house again, to be met at the back door by Mrs. Westermark.
“Oh, I was justJanet, what is it?”
“Jack, Mother! He’s had a stroke or something terrible!”
“But how do you know?”
“Quick, we must phone the hospital1 must go to him.”
Mrs. Westermark took Janet’s arm. “Perhaps we’d better leave it to Mr. Stackpole, hadn’t we. I’m afraid”
“Mother, we must do what we can. I know we’re amateurs.
Please let me go.”
“No. Janet, we’reit’s their world I’m frightened. They’ll come if they want us.” She was gripping Janet in her fright.
Their wild eyes stared momentarily at each other as if seeing something else, and then Janet snatched herself away. “I must go to him,” she said.
She hurried down the hall and pushed open the study door.
Her husband stood now at the far end of the room by the window, while blood streamed from his nose.
“Jack!” she exclaimed. As she ran towards him, .a blow from the empty air struck her on the forehead, so that she staggered aside, falling against a bookcase. A shower of smaller volumes from the upper shelf fell on her and round her. Exclaiming, Stackpole dropped his notebook and ran round the table to her. Even as he went to her aid, he noted the time from his watch: 10.24.
Aid after 10.24 and the tidiness of bed Westermark’s mother appeared in the doorway.
“Stay where you are,” Stackpole shouted, “or there will be more trouble! Janet, you see what you’ve done. Get out of here, will you? Jack, I’m right with youGod knows what you’ve felt, isolated without aid for three and a third minutes!” Angrily, he went across and stood within arm’s length of his patient. He threw his handkerchief down onto the table.
“Mr. Stackpole” Westermark’s mother said tentatively from the door, an arm round Janet’s waist.
He looked back over his shoulder only long enough to say, “Get towels! Phone the Research Hospital for an ambulance and tell them to be here right away.”
By midday, Westermark was tidily in bed upstairs and the ambulance staff, who had treated him for what after all was only nosebleed, had left. Stackpole, as he turned from closing the front door, eyed the two women.
“I feel it is my duty to warn you,” he said heavily, “that another incident such as this might well prove fatal. This time we escaped very lightly. If anything else of this sort happens, I shall feel obliged to recommend to the board that Mr.
Westermark is moved back to the hospital.” .
Current way to define accidents
“He wouldn’t want to go,” Janet said. “Besides, you are being absurd; it was entirely an accident. Now I wish to go upstairs and see how he is.”
“Just before you go, may I point out that what happened was not an accidentor not as we generally define accidents, since you saw the results of your interference through the study window before you entered. Where you were to blame”
“But that’s absurd” both women began at once. Janet went on to say, “I never would have rushed into the room as I did had. I not seen through the window that he was in trouble.”
“What you saw was the result on your husband of your later interference.”
In something like a wail, Westermark’s mother said, “I don’t understand any of this. What did Janet bump into when she ran in?”
“She ran, Mrs. Westermark, into the spot where her husband had been standing 3.3077 minutes earlier. Surely by now you have grasped this elementary business of time inertia?”
‘ When they both started speaking at once, he stared at them until they stopped and looked at him. Then he said, “We had better go into the living room. Speaking for myself, I would like a drink.”