“I suppose not,” his double said grudgingly. “Pour me one while you’re about it.”
“Okay,” Wilson assented, “then I’ll explain.” It was going to be much, much too difficult to explain until he had had a drink, he felt. As it was, he couldn’t explain it fully to himself.
“It had better be good,” the other warned him, and looked Wilson over carefully while he drank his drink.
Wilson watched his younger self scrutinizing him with confused and almost insupportable emotions. Couldn’t the stupid fool recognize his own face when he saw it in front of him? If he could not see what the
situation was, how in the world was he ever going to make it clear to him? It had slipped his mind that his face was barely recognizable in any case,
being decidedly battered and unshaven. Even more important, he failed to take into account the fact that a person does not look at his own face, even in mirrors, in the same frame of mind with which he regards another’s face. No sane person ever expects to see his own face hanging on another.
Wilson could see that his companion was puzzled by his appearance, but it was equally clear that no recognition took place. “Who are you?” the other man asked suddenly.
“Me?” replied Wilson. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“I’m not sure. Have I ever seen you before?”
“Well—not exactly,” Wilson stalled. How did you go about telling another guy that the two of you were a trifle closer than twins? “Skip it
—you wouldn’t know about it.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name? Uh—” Oh, oh! This was going to be sticky! The whole situation was utterly ridiculous. He opened his mouth, tried to form the words “Bob Wilson,” then gave up with a feeling of utter futility. Like many a man before him, he found himself forced into a lie because the truth simply would not be believed. “Just call me Joe,” he finished lamely.
He felt suddenly startled at his own words. It was at this point that he realized that he was in fact, “Joe,” the Joe whom he had encountered once before. That he had landed back in his own room at the very time at which he had ceased working on his thesis he already realized, but he had not had time to think the matter through. Hearing himself refer to himself as Joe slapped him in the face with the realization that this was not simply a similar scene, but the same scene he had lived through once before—save that he was living through it from a different viewpoint.
At least he thought it was the same scene. Did it differ in any respect? He could not be sure as he could not recall, word for word, what the conversation had been.
For a complete transcript of the scene that lay dormant in his memory he felt willing to pay twenty-five dollars cash, plus sales tax.
Wait a minute now—he was under no compulsion. He was sure of that. Everything he did and said was the result of his own free will. Even if he couldn’t remember the script, there were some things he knew “Joe” hadn’t said. “Mary had a little lamb,” for example. He would recite a
nursery rhyme and get off this damned repetitious treadmill. He opened his mouth— “Okay, Joe Whatever-your-name-is,” his alter ego remarked, setting
down a glass which had contained, until recently, a quarter pint of gin, “trot out that explanation and make it snappy.”
He opened his mouth again to answer the question, then closed it. “Steady, son, steady,” he told himself. “You’re a free agent. You want to recite a nursery rhyme—go ahead and do it. Don’t answer him; go ahead and recite it—and break this vicious circle.”
But under the unfriendly, suspicious eye of the man opposite him he found himself totally unable to recall any nursery rhyme. His mental processes stuck on dead center.
He capitulated. “I’ll do that. That dingus I came through—that’s a Time Gate.”
“A what?”
“A Time Gate. Time flows along side by side on each side—” As he talked he felt sweat breaking out on him; he felt reasonably sure that he was explaining in exactly the same words in which explanation had first been offered to him. “—into the future just by stepping through that circle.” He stopped and wiped his forehead.