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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59515 ***
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+                                   Z
+
+                        BY CHARLES L. FONTENAY
+
+             _Time reversal exists at the sub-atomic level
+            according to Feynman's Theory--and according to
+            that same theory any entity can exist in three
+             places at one time.... Does this explain, the
+            strange co-existence of Summer, Mark and Wyn?_
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+               Worlds of If Science Fiction, June 1956.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+What scientific or supernatural principle is behind the mysterious
+appearances recorded some years ago by Mr. Charles Fort, I'm sure I
+don't know. It could, of course, be the same as that behind the sudden
+appearance of Wyndham Storm in Central Park, but I don't believe I've
+heard of a case that exactly paralleled this one.
+
+I gather from a perusal of Mr. Fort's works that it is not uncommon for
+these unheralded visitors to come onstage without the formality of
+clothing; but I don't believe it's customary for them to bring their
+wives along.
+
+I got caught in a thunderstorm that night in Central Park--not New
+York's Central Park, but Allertown's Central Park, which isn't as big.
+Having no raincoat--the skies had appeared clear when I left home for
+the movies--I took refuge in the big octagonal bandstand.
+
+The storm was brief, but spectacular; one of those violent affairs that
+often mark the arrival of a cold front to dispel an unusually intense
+midsummer heat wave. The rain slashed across the park in wind-whipped
+sheets, managing to drench me even in my shelter. Big trees bowed
+low and reluctantly hurled away leaves and limbs. Thunder rolled
+incessantly and the lightning made an eerie daylight of the blackness.
+
+Suddenly, there was a terrific clap of thunder and a fiery flash that
+blotted out everything around me. Shaken, I picked myself up from the
+floor of the bandstand, still not sure I hadn't been struck. Blue smoke
+was boiling away from a wrecked tree about thirty feet away, in the
+midst of a clump of charred, waving shrubbery.
+
+And like Venus rising from the foam the naked woman stepped out of the
+shrubbery, followed by the naked man.
+
+My first impulse was to laugh at these two whom the storm had chased
+from their hiding place and to be astonished at their brashness in
+disrobing completely in the heart of the park. Then it occurred to me
+that the lightning must have stripped them. They might be hurt.
+
+I jumped from the bandstand and walked swiftly over to them. To my
+utter amazement, the young woman promptly threw her arms around my neck
+and said:
+
+"Whatever has just happened, Don, I want you to know it's you I love."
+
+Then she kissed me.
+
+"What on earth!" I exclaimed, disengaging myself. The man was looking
+from one to the other of us, mutely.
+
+"I'm Summer Storm and this is my husband, Wyn Storm, and we live at 138
+March Street," she said, all in a rush. "Oh, Don, I'm sorry you don't
+know us any more, but I should have known from the way Wyn was acting
+and everything that's going to happen...."
+
+"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" I interrupted. "I don't know you. How
+did you know my name?"
+
+She didn't answer, but just stood there, looking at me intently. I
+averted my eyes. I was beginning to recover from shock enough to be
+embarrassed.
+
+"How about this?" I asked the man. "Why should I know you, and where do
+you come from?"
+
+"I'm afraid I don't know," he replied, sounding perfectly honest about
+it. "I'm afraid I don't remember anything. Do you suppose I have
+amnesia?"
+
+"That's possible," I said. "But your wife seems not to be bothered with
+it. All right. Summer Storm and Wyn Storm it is--but the names are too
+trite in these circumstances not to be false. Both of you had better
+get back in the shrubbery while I get some help."
+
+I found the policeman on the Main Street beat. As I thought, it was my
+old friend, Gus Adams. He accompanied me back to the park, the rain
+gleaming on his slicker.
+
+"They picked a good address to lie about," he said, when I had
+explained the situation to him on the way. "The house at 138 March
+Street is vacant."
+
+"They're probably spooners who got caught by that lightning bolt and
+are too ashamed to give their right names," I said. "If they had any
+clothes, I don't know what happened to them. I didn't see any in those
+bushes."
+
+"What do you figure I ought to do with them, Mr. Gracey?" he asked.
+
+"They look like decent youngsters," I said. "If it's all right with
+you, we'll take them out to my house until they're ready to let me help
+them get back where they came from."
+
+"You're taking a chance," he grunted. But we wrapped the woman in his
+slicker and tied my best suit coat around the man's waist. Gus called
+the town's only patrol car and had them drive us out to my house.
+
+I suppose nudists and doctors eventually reach the point where they
+look on nakedness as normal. But, to me, my "orphans of the storm"
+looked a lot more like human beings when I had them clothed in a couple
+of my old sweaters and some slacks.
+
+They might have been twins. For all I knew, they were, in spite of the
+woman's claim that they were man and wife. Their eyes were an identical
+sky-blue, their hair an identical pale, wavy gold. Her hair was cut
+short, his needed cutting, so they were a good match. I judged their
+ages to be about 23, although I've been over-estimating young women's
+ages since I passed 30.
+
+"Now, suppose you tell me where you're from and what this is all
+about," I said sternly, when they had finished eating the meal I had
+rustled up for them.
+
+The man spread his hands and, for the first time, he smiled. It was the
+smile of an archangel. Whatever the failure of his memory, his smile
+was that of wisdom and patience. I was to find, not much later, that
+the woman's smile was its feminine counterpart.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't remember anything before standing in the park in
+the rain," said the man.
+
+"What's wrong? What's wrong, Don?" demanded the woman, a note of
+hysteria in her voice. "What's happening to us?"
+
+"It's just that I don't understand this situation at all," I said. "You
+say you're husband and wife. Then you won't mind both sleeping here in
+the den, and tomorrow we'll see what we can find out."
+
+In this remarkable fashion began a remarkable fifteen years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Looking back on it, I suppose I loved Summer Storm from the time I saw
+her. I've been trying to decide what that makes me. Incestuous? Just
+narcissistic? Or, perhaps, Jovian?
+
+She was alone in the den when I looked in the next morning before
+breakfast. Wyn--short for "Wyndham," I learned later--was wandering
+around in the back yard, looking lost.
+
+Summer had a pair of my scissors in her hand, evidently preparing to
+trim her hair. Somewhat to my surprise, she looked contrite when she
+saw me.
+
+"I just thought I might look better with short hair," she explained.
+
+"Good Lord, it's too short now!" I exclaimed. "I like women with long
+hair."
+
+She hesitated, then reached up to begin clipping. Somewhat nettled, I
+turned on my heel and walked out.
+
+That incident is noteworthy for its strange sequel. At breakfast, I was
+thunderstruck to observe that Summer Storm's hair was long--at least
+shoulder length, for it was done up in a neat bun behind her head.
+Where in my house had she found a wig to match her own hair? And how
+long must the wig have been originally, for her to have cut from it the
+long tresses I found later in the wastebasket?
+
+After breakfast, I took Wyn with me to check on the house at 138 March
+Street. I left Summer at home. Although she claimed to remember things
+and Wyn said he couldn't, I could make nothing of her "memories." There
+was a strangeness about talking with her, too, something I couldn't
+quite put my finger on yet.
+
+As Gus had said, the house at 138 March Street was vacant. It was for
+rent. The owner, old Albert Meecham, lived next door, and I made an
+impulsive decision on the spot.
+
+"Your wife insists you live here, so you two must be connected with
+this address in some way," I told Wyn. "I'll rent the place for you
+while we're trying to run down some information on your background. If
+you decide to stay in Allertown, you can pay me back after you get a
+job."
+
+The only way I knew to probe the origins of Wyn and Summer was through
+the customary channels. That afternoon, I went down to the police
+station to talk with my friend, Gus, before he started on his beat.
+
+The Allertown police station is nothing but a room in the ancient city
+hall, a block off Main Street, but it does have a separate outside
+entrance. Gus was sitting on a bench in the shade by the entrance,
+fanning himself with his cap. The perspiration pasted his dark blue
+shirt to his well-padded arms and chest. The relief the storm had
+brought hadn't lasted long.
+
+I sat down on the other end of the bench.
+
+"Gus," I said, "can you fellows help me find out who those people
+are we picked up in the park last night? It's funny, but the man has
+amnesia, and I think the woman's a little strange in the head."
+
+Gus looked at me a little reproachfully. He laid the cap down, to pull
+his handkerchief from his hip pocket and mop his brow.
+
+"You mean that story you told me was the truth?" he asked. "I thought
+they might be some relatives of yours, that had got into some sort of a
+scrape. Both of them look a lot like you."
+
+"Do they? Well, they're no relatives of mine. I'd like to know just who
+they are. Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham Storm, she says."
+
+"They don't come from Allertown," he said. "I'd know them if they was
+from Allertown. But they was raised around in this country somewhere."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"There's a way of talking folks have around here. You don't hear it
+outside these three or four counties, and you wouldn't notice it if you
+wasn't watching for it. Take my word for it, those folks was born and
+raised not fifty miles from here."
+
+"Well, just to be on the safe side, you'd better check to see that
+they're not wanted criminals," I said. "Amnesia would make a good dodge
+for a criminal."
+
+"I've already done that," he said quietly. "They're not."
+
+Wyn and Summer weren't missing persons from anywhere in our section of
+the state, either. Gus looked into that angle very thoroughly during
+the next few weeks, and reported failure.
+
+Wyn got a job as clerk at McClellan's Dry Goods Store and, for reasons
+he did not confide to me, enrolled in night classes at Slayden College.
+He and Summer soon were established in the neighborhood as "that nice
+young couple that Don Gracey brought in from somewhere out West." How
+the townspeople got started on that Western origin theory, I don't
+know; I suppose it's natural for people to tack some sort of an origin
+on strangers.
+
+I confess that their origin soon became a matter of minor importance
+to me, although I remained curious about it. I found Wyn extremely
+likeable; we became very close friends, although I estimate that I am
+ten to fifteen years older than Wyn. And, as I say, I was in love with
+Summer, although it was a long time before I admitted that to myself.
+
+I told myself I felt about Summer as I would my own daughter, if a
+bachelor like me could say such a thing; and I felt toward Wyn as
+though he were my son. There was a good deal of accuracy to that
+description of my feelings, but there was a mystery about Summer that
+drew me powerfully.
+
+I think the unattainable in woman is always irresistible. Summer
+had the most peculiar air of unattainability about her I ever have
+experienced. It was as though, when I touched her, it was a fleeting
+touch; when I looked at her, I was constantly beset by the feeling that
+she would, the next instant, shimmer into insubstantiality.
+
+Talking with her heightened this illusion, rather than lessening it. A
+conversation with Summer was a unique experience. It was a little like
+two people trying to talk at once, each talking, then each hesitating
+to let the other have his say. Our words crossed each other, like
+scissor blades that do not quite meet. She might answer a question
+before it was asked, or take the conversation off on tangent after
+tangent. Disconnected, discontinuous--those adjectives describe our
+conversations.
+
+Except for his amnesia, dating back to the night in the park, Wyn
+was perfectly normal. After some time, he confided that he, too,
+was concerned about Summer's strangeness. I got the impression from
+him--though he did not go into great detail--that it extended beyond
+her conversation, to her actions.
+
+"It seems to me that I ought to know what's wrong with Summer," he told
+me, very puzzled about it. "I mean, it seems I ought to remember. But I
+don't. I've gone so far as to talk it over with her."
+
+"What did she say?" I asked.
+
+"She said she wasn't going to tell me now. She said she'd tell me one
+of these days, but that when she did, I'd leave her. She smiled all the
+time she was saying it, in the strangest way."
+
+Well, we had Summer examined. Old Doctor Lodge is no psychiatrist,
+but a man isn't a general practitioner for as long as he's been at it
+without learning something about the way a person's mind ticks. He said
+there was nothing wrong with Summer, mentally.
+
+"She acts like she's still suffering a little from some sort of shock,"
+he said. "If she was right next to a lightning bolt when it struck, I'm
+not surprised. It's lasting a little longer than such things usually
+do, but it'll clear up."
+
+It didn't clear up, but Wyn and I got used to it.
+
+Amateurs, they say, shouldn't fool around with hypnosis, and I suppose
+there's a sound reason behind that admonition. But I'm a little better
+than the average amateur hypnotist. I've not only done a good deal
+of it at club benefits and what not, but I've read pretty heavily in
+psychology. I decided to see if hypnotizing Wyn would give me any clue
+to his past and Summer's.
+
+Summer sat beside me that night at their home, as I went through the
+familiar motions and Wyn sank into hypnotic trance.
+
+Under hypnosis, Wyn recalled easily everything that had happened since
+that night in the park. But attempts to regress him past that night
+brought only a death-like silence, in which he sat pale and immobile.
+I tried several times, and at last succeeded in getting him in an
+extremely deep hypnotic state.
+
+Suddenly, Summer interrupted with an exclamation.
+
+"That's me!" she exclaimed. "That's what I told him four years ago!"
+
+"Quiet, Summer," I commanded, looking at her curiously. "I think I may
+be able to get something out of Wyn now."
+
+Despite total lack of response when regressed to ages 22 and 20, I
+regressed him to age 18. He stirred and murmured. His eyelids fluttered.
+
+"What do you see?" I asked eagerly. "What are you doing?"
+
+"Wyn?" he exclaimed. His voice was clear and treble, the voice of a
+woman, as he called his own name. He clenched his fists, and moved his
+head from side to side. "Wyn, I'm going to have a baby!"
+
+"What!" I exploded, amazed. "Wyn, what do you see?"
+
+He opened his eyes.
+
+"Why, I see you, Don," he said in his normal hearty voice. "What else
+should I see?"
+
+With a suddenness I never have seen before or since, he had come out
+of the hypnotic state. I was afraid to delve any deeper. I didn't try
+hypnosis again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During these first few years, Wyn and Summer gradually lost that
+identity of appearance which had made them look so much like twins the
+night I found them in the park. Wyn aged, not excessively but as any
+adult man would age in a few years. Summer, on the other hand, seemed
+to have found the secret of eternal youth. She grew ever more delicate
+and beautiful, and her fair skin seemed to take on a translucent glow.
+
+I was a close friend of the couple, and I found that I was alone with
+Summer a good deal. Summer had shown an interest in schooling, too.
+She started in college with Wyn, then dropped back to high school,
+and finally fell back on studying at home. It wasn't that she wasn't
+bright. She seemed to recognize the facts she was studying almost at
+once, but tests and examinations were her downfall. She never could
+remember enough of the things she had studied to make a passing grade.
+
+So I went to the house at 138 March Street often in the early evenings,
+to help Summer in her studies.
+
+Their son was born about six years after they came to Allertown. It was
+a peculiar thing. There was no noticeable sign of pregnancy. Summer was
+sure she was pregnant, but Doctor Lodge scoffed at her, right up to the
+time of the birth.
+
+"Sure, she has milk," he told Wyn and me, tugging at his white mustache
+and giving us a wise smile. "It's not unusual. She isn't carrying a
+child, though. It's a false pregnancy."
+
+But the child was born. Then Doctor Lodge reversed himself and insisted
+she was carrying an unborn twin. Again he was wrong. Summer gradually
+but steadily recovered from the effects of the birth and regained her
+slender figure.
+
+I still do not attempt to excuse Wyn for leaving his wife and newborn
+son. He was overwrought, it's true, but he should have taken them with
+him.
+
+Instead, he came to me, his suitcase packed, when the child was about a
+month old. His face showed his agitation.
+
+"Don, I'm leaving Summer," he said abruptly.
+
+"Wyn! Why? What's happened?"
+
+"I found out yesterday why she acts and talks so strangely. She
+told me. I couldn't sleep last night, and I've decided I must leave
+Allertown. Somewhere there may be people who can help me, but I can't
+find the help I need here."
+
+"Was it so terrible?" I asked, trying to calm him. "What did she tell
+you, Wyn?"
+
+He leaned forward intensely, pointing a finger at me, and opened his
+mouth to speak. Then he shut it and sat back. He shook his head.
+
+"No," he said. "Maybe it wouldn't affect you as it has me, but you
+couldn't feel comfortable about it. All I want from you, Don, is the
+promise that you'll take care of Summer and little Mark for me until I
+come back."
+
+"You know I'll do that. They can move in here right away. But I think
+you're making a mistake, running away from whatever it is."
+
+"I'm not running away," he replied. "I told you, I've got to have help."
+
+That's all he would say. He left on the mid-afternoon train for Mayer
+City, and I went around to 138 March Street to help move his wife and
+child into my own home.
+
+I didn't recall until three days later that Summer had predicted--or so
+Wyn had said--that when she told him why she acted as she did, he would
+leave her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If I can't excuse Wyn for leaving his wife and child, I have even less
+excuse for becoming his wife's lover. The fact that the interlude
+may have been necessary to his very existence--and hers--is no
+justification, for I did not know that then. Nor do I know it certainly
+now.
+
+But picture the plight of a man who has in his home a young and
+beautiful woman, the realization growing on him, day by day, that he
+has loved her for six years. And it was Summer's fault, as much as my
+own. Perhaps more. Despite Wyn's words, I could not be sure that he
+would return to her, and certainly she must have known that he would.
+Despite this, she did more than merely encourage me.
+
+I have wondered often about the philosophical implications of this
+fact. If Summer had not encouraged me, I wouldn't have been bold enough
+to make any advances on my own account ... and where would that have
+left Summer?
+
+On the other hand, it was the most natural thing in the world that
+Summer should encourage me. She knew.
+
+Wyn had been away only about two months when Summer, rousing herself
+from a deeply pensive mood one night, sat down by my side on the sofa
+and snuggled up close to me. I couldn't bring myself to pull away from
+her, but I exclaimed:
+
+"Summer, this isn't right. What about Wyn?"
+
+"I don't understand this coolness toward me, Don," she said, laying
+her head on my shoulder. "People who love each other shouldn't act so
+aloof."
+
+I was thunderstruck at this admission. But I couldn't help saying what
+I said then.
+
+"I do love you, Summer," I confessed, almost choking.
+
+At once she arose and left me. I thought I had offended her, and I was
+almost relieved that I had. It was best that she should be discouraged
+about any ideas she might have about me.
+
+But thirty minutes later she gave me a smile that made me not so sure
+she was offended. And the incident seemed to increase, rather than
+dampen, the warmth of her attitude toward me.
+
+It was unpardonable, with Wyn gone so short a time, but I had no
+strength to resist the inexorable attentions of a woman I loved. When
+she came to me in negligee late one night a week later, I became
+Summer's lover.
+
+I have said it was partly Summer's fault, and the sequence of events
+would make it appear almost entirely her fault. This is not true; and I
+found out several years later why it is not true.
+
+My inexcusable affair with Summer lasted for about a year, before the
+conversation occurred which caused me to terminate it abruptly. I
+had just entered the parlor, where Summer was curled in a big chair,
+reading.
+
+"I don't see any reason for our not loving each other, if we really do,
+Don," she said petulantly. "Wyn says he's my husband, but I don't feel
+that he is. Why should I be tied by a marriage ceremony I don't know
+anything about yet?"
+
+I could not answer, for I was looking at her through new eyes. Her tone
+of voice had been so like that of an indignant child that it awakened
+me to something I should have seen before.
+
+How like an adolescent girl she was, really! The pale gold hair framed
+a young face. Despite the rondures of her figure, there was a looseness
+about the way her legs were attached to her pelvis, giving her frame
+that impression of hollowness that is frequent among slender young
+virgins.
+
+In the seven years I had known her, how could I ever have built up in
+my mind the picture of her as a mature woman?
+
+When I thought about that sudden protestation of hers, made after we
+had lived as man and wife for a year, it seemed to me that it could
+only have arisen from remorse at such a situation. But it was neither
+this nor the fact that I was wronging her and Wyn that caused me to
+resolve then and there that never again would I so much as kiss her. It
+was that she was too young!
+
+I did not waver in that resolve, from that time on.
+
+But I thought a great deal about this matter: I had known Summer for
+seven years and she had been a woman when I first saw her. Yet her
+youthful appearance now made it impossible that she should have been
+adult then. Surely my memory did not play me wrong in picturing the
+Summer Storm I had seen that night in the park; indeed, the picture of
+her was burned indelibly on my mind. She must have, in the interim,
+become slighter, even smaller.
+
+Oddly, this slenderizing process, once I noticed it, seemed reluctant
+to stop. The bathroom scales proved that she was losing weight slowly,
+but in her appearance the decline progressed much more rapidly.
+She began to get leggy and angular and she completely lost the
+once-voluptuous contours of her body, despite all the milk and starchy
+foods I could feed her. Nor was it that she lost appetite. She ate
+voraciously.
+
+At the same time, I became convinced she was losing her memory. Chance
+remarks dropped at odd times indicated that her recollection of Wyn, of
+the events before Mark's birth, of all her past life in Allertown, was
+extremely faulty; she never had shown signs of remembering any events
+before she came to Allertown.
+
+As a matter of fact, it became increasingly apparent that she no
+longer accepted Mark as her son. The boy was growing out of babyhood
+with that speed which is so remarkable in children. She cared for him
+solicitously, but seemed to look on him as her little brother.
+
+Of course, I took her to Doctor Lodge. He, in turn, went with us to
+consult doctors at Mayer City. He could find nothing wrong with Summer
+physically, nor could they.
+
+They seemed to think we were faking. They heard my assurances, and
+those of Doctor Lodge, that Summer must be approaching the age of
+thirty, with obvious skepticism.
+
+"There is nothing wrong with this girl except an unfortunate emotional
+aberration," one doctor told me flatly. "Physiologically she is a girl
+of about fourteen, and it is difficult for me to believe that her
+chronological age is any higher."
+
+"As I told you before, she has a son nearly four years old," I said.
+
+"I don't say that's impossible at her age, for it isn't," he retorted.
+"But this girl has never been a mother. She's a virgin."
+
+I should have realized what all this meant. I believe there have been
+such cases in medical history before. But I suppose I was too close to
+it. I didn't understand, even when Summer reposed childish confidence
+in me.
+
+"I know what's going to happen, you know, because it's already happened
+to me," she said. She was a skinny girl now, with enormous blue eyes.
+"You know what's happened, because it's already happened to you. Isn't
+it funny?"
+
+Fortunately, Wyn returned not long after that. Wyn had the answer to
+the questions that had been puzzling me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wyn gave no warning of his return. He just walked into the house one
+afternoon, carrying a suitcase and smoking a pipe.
+
+When I found Wyn and Summer in the park, they had appeared to be twins.
+During Wyn's absence his hair had begun to gray--prematurely, I'm
+sure--and now he looked like Summer's father. The change in her must
+have been even more noticeable to him than it was to me, because he had
+been separated from her during its most remarkable development. But he
+showed no surprise at it.
+
+"I knew what the trouble was before I left," he said soberly. "You see,
+as Summer's husband I was much closer to her than you could be, even
+since she and the boy have been living with you."
+
+I could feel my ears turning red. I asked hurriedly:
+
+"What is wrong with Summer, Wyn?"
+
+"She lives backwards," he said. "Time is reversed for her. It isn't
+only a physiological reversal. Everything goes backwards in time for
+her. The future is the past to Summer, and the past is the unknown
+future. She remembers the future, Don--she remembers it, because she
+has seen it happen."
+
+"That's impossible!" I exclaimed. "How can she? It hasn't happened yet!"
+
+"To her it has," he replied. "It may upset your conception of the
+future as a fluid thing of limitless possibilities, but Summer's
+experience is pretty good evidence that it is as frozen and stable as
+the past. As the Orientals say, what is to be will be."
+
+I thought about that, and I thought I detected a flaw.
+
+"Oh, no!" I said. "Wait a minute here, Wyn. If she can't remember
+the past even a minute ahead, you couldn't even talk with her. She'd
+remember what you were going to say, instead of what you had said. Not
+only that, she'd talk backward! You'd never be able to understand her."
+
+"People are adaptable," he replied. "She evidently learned to talk
+backward--to her; correctly, to us. People learn to talk so others can
+understand them. And as for conversation, do you remember Summer ever
+answering a question directly?"
+
+I started to say I did, for it seemed that I did. But a moment's
+reflection changed my mind. Not a direct question; and her
+participation in a conversation always had been a jumpy and disturbing
+thing.
+
+"But we can talk with Summer," I protested. "For years we've been able
+to understand each other."
+
+"Like writing letters that cross in the mails," he said. "And I think
+people do have some knowledge of the immediate future, even you and I.
+Summer would develop that faculty more than the average person."
+
+Certainly. No wonder she had been so affectionate to me that it had
+been impossible for me to resist her. To her, at that time, we had
+already been lovers. By the same token, my own knowledge when the
+affair was concluded that we had been lovers must have created in me an
+attitude that was a strong incentive for her to yield to me at the end
+of our relationship--the beginning, to her.
+
+What a way to live! Always trying to guess, from the conversation of
+those around her, what (to her) was going to happen, so she could react
+intelligently.
+
+"But," I protested, still unwilling to accept it, "if the past is the
+future to her, her actions could affect the past."
+
+"Exactly," he said. "I told you, this means you have to accept the
+principle that the past is just as mallable as the future, and the
+future is no more mallable than the past."
+
+Wyn had known all this before he left. He had gone, not just to avoid
+seeing his wife revert to childhood before his eyes, but to delve into
+studies on the nature of time itself. Where he had been, how he had
+supported himself I didn't know. I still don't know.
+
+Summer, her age now about thirteen, was old enough to understand that
+she was Wyn's wife, but he did not resume his position as husband to
+her. Instead, he acted toward her and Mark both as a father. Me? I
+suppose I was something in the nature of a benevolent uncle now.
+
+As a matter of fact, Wyn plunged so deeply into work that the task
+devolved upon me to be both father and mother to Summer and her child.
+Mark, developing apace into a vigorous young specimen, looked like both
+his parents--since their features were so much alike, he could not be
+said to resemble one more than the other.
+
+Wyn did not return with his family to the house at 138 March Street. It
+had long been occupied by someone else. He moved in with us and, with
+my tacit consent, made my home both his home and the headquarters for
+his work.
+
+His work actually was double. He got a good job, this time as engineer
+at the Allertown Mill Industries. During all his spare time, he worked
+at converting my precious den and my basement into something completely
+beyond my understanding.
+
+There are some people who accept misfortune and live with it--or die
+with it. Others battle it angrily to the bitter end, even when there
+is no evidence that anyone ever conquered their particular misfortune
+before. Admittedly, there was little precedent for Summer's case;
+and this made the prognosis even less optimistic. Still, Wyn was
+constitutionally the latter type of person.
+
+"I don't know how much longer she lived in the past before you found
+us," he told me. "Nothing I could do has helped my amnesia for that
+period. She may have lived to a ripe old age, for all I know.
+
+"But we know that she has only a few years to live, the way she is
+now--perhaps twelve or thirteen. That's her physical age, and she is
+living backwards toward babyhood."
+
+"What will she do?" I asked curiously. "Just fade away?"
+
+"She has to be born," he answered solemnly. "My guess is that, a few
+years in the future, there will occur the most unique birth ever known
+to man--a birth in reverse. Some couple, somewhere--perhaps someone
+we know here in Allertown--will live through the experience of the
+daughter they never knew reentering the mother's womb and retracing her
+steps through the embryo stage to the moment of conception."
+
+"Fantastic!" I exclaimed.
+
+"It must be true;" he insisted. "It has to be true, unless she
+reversed ... will reverse ... her direction in time after birth. In
+that case, perhaps some baby girl here even now is Summer, living
+coexistently with her reversed self."
+
+"If you're going to reverse her direction in time again and make her
+live normally," I said, for he already had told me this was his aim, "I
+don't see how you can prevent a paradox. She has already lived in the
+past as an adult woman. If you reverse her existence at this stage,
+then she can't be born, because she'd be living from her present age
+on, both forward and backward in time."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "Perhaps it can't be done. Perhaps it would
+involve a parallel time stream, if there is such a thing. All I know is
+that I must try. If I can, she might still consent to be my wife later,
+if the difference in our ages isn't too great. That would be up to her."
+
+"I don't see how you even know where to start on such a project," I
+confessed.
+
+"The chances are slim," he admitted, "but I have some hope. The only
+actual time reversal we know, scientifically, is at the sub-atomic
+level. The theory was advanced by Feynman that annihilation of an
+electron-positron pair upon contact might be, not actual annihilation,
+but a 'time reversal' of the electron. The emission of a photon of
+energy, in such cases, is powerful enough to cause a recoil in time,
+and the positron is merely the electron traveling backward through time
+after the energy explosion."
+
+I looked extremely blank.
+
+"Look," said Wyn, taking up a pencil. He drew a big "Z" on a piece of
+scrap paper, labelling the two arms "E" and the connecting line "P".
+The angles he marked "A" and "B:"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The flow of Time is from left to right," he explained. "At left is the
+past, at right the future. This electron, E, is moving normally along
+at the top of the diagram when it runs into an energy explosion at A.
+It reverses itself, going back through time as the positron, P, until
+it hits another energy explosion at B. Then it is reversed again into
+the right time direction, continuing as the electron E, at the bottom.
+You follow the line, as the pencil point does in making the Z, and it's
+a single body."
+
+        E
+    ---------
+            /A
+           /
+          /
+         /P
+        /
+       /
+      /   E
+    B ---------
+
+"But," and he drew a vertical line through the Z, "we move always
+forward in time. To us, the energy explosion at B happens before the
+one at A. Suddenly at B, a positron and an electron are created out
+of nothing. The electron at the top apparently has nothing to do with
+either of them. But the positron moves along and collides with it at A,
+leaving nothing there again--except, once more, an apparently unrelated
+electron, the one at the bottom of the diagram."
+
+"But you're saying the same thing can exist in three places at once," I
+objected.
+
+"Exactly, but in one of those places, it's traveling backward in time.
+So, if Summer's time reversal occurred or will occur after birth, she
+may be existing somewhere else, as a younger girl, right now; besides
+being here in the house with us."
+
+"Your example is, as you say, at the atomic level," I said. "How can
+you transfer that into terms of human beings?"
+
+"The only thing I know to do," he said, "is to create an energy
+explosion which I know won't hurt Summer physically, but may reverse
+her back to a normal direction. It would be like the energy explosion
+that meets the positron at B and forces it to continue existence as an
+electron."
+
+"It appears to me," I said slowly, trying to grasp the concept, "that
+your explosion at B would have to have happened already if it were
+going to happen at all."
+
+The amazing thing about it is that Wyn, the man who had studied all
+this thoroughly, apparently didn't understand what I meant. It just
+goes to show that he must have been right, when he said the future is
+as fixed as the past.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took Wyn four years to get his equipment ready for a test. He
+explained to me what it was supposed to do, but I never did get more
+than a general idea of the principle involved. The heart of the thing
+was a heavily wired chamber in the basement.
+
+"The human body can take a lot of electricity, if it's administered in
+the right way," he said. "If it's administered in the wrong way, you've
+electrocuted somebody.
+
+"I still don't know whether I've probed the secrets of the space-time
+fabric deeply enough to make this work, but I think it will reverse
+the charge of every atomic particle in the body of whatever is in that
+cubicle. I'm going to put a cat in it, as our first time-traveler.
+
+"We may turn up with a cat and an anti-cat, the latter traveling
+backward in time. We may end with no cat at all. If so, maybe we've
+created an anti-cat in the past or maybe we've just electrocuted a cat."
+
+"I don't see how you expect to interpret your results," I commented
+drily.
+
+"If there's no cat, I won't risk it," he answered. "If we double our
+cats, I think we're on the way to something that may help Summer."
+
+We picked our way through the mess of wiring and went upstairs. He had
+torn my bookcases out of one wall of the den and installed a control
+board with a television screen where the fireplace had been.
+
+"The experiment will be controlled from here," he said. "The energies
+that are going to run around all over the basement would make it
+pretty dangerous for anyone down there. I'm sorry you can't watch, but
+somebody's got to keep the children away from here."
+
+When he said "children," he meant Summer and Mark. Summer now looked as
+much a twin to her nine-year-old son as she had looked to her husband
+when I first saw them. At the last two Christmases, we had bought toys
+for both of them, and she played happily with Mark. She called Wyn
+"daddy" and me "Uncle Don," just as Mark did.
+
+Making them look even more like twins as we entered the living room on
+the day of Wyn's experiment was the fact that they were dressed alike.
+She wore a pair of Mark's overalls, and both had on T-shirts.
+
+At the moment, the two were trying to put doll clothes on Thomas, the
+stray yellow cat Wyn had picked up for his experiment. We had had
+Thomas about six months now. Wyn and I had dubbed the animal "Tom,"
+unaware of its sex--it had borne kittens during its stay with us--but
+the children thought the cat too dignified for the nickname. It was,
+except when they were trying out their various original ideas on it.
+
+"Thomas is our first heroine--or martyr," said Wyn, and swept the cat
+up from the floor. Over the protests of the children, he stripped off
+the doll clothing. "You youngsters go out on the side lawn and play.
+Uncle Don will take care of you for a while."
+
+Caring for the children had been my chore for so long I was accustomed
+to the peculiarities involved. Mark was as much a problem as any
+normal, active boy--no more. But Summer's reverse living, her reverse
+memory, made her even more difficult to deal with as she reverted to
+childish habits and attitudes.
+
+For some weeks now, she had indulged in the fantasy that she was Mark
+and Mark was she, a game Mark rebelled at strenuously. At the same
+time, her manner of speaking had become so confused and tangled that
+it was often incoherent. If Wyn failed in his experiment, the next nine
+years threatened to be trying indeed.
+
+The children left the house with me docilely enough, but as soon as we
+reached the lawn Mark burst into tears.
+
+"What's the matter with you, young fellow?" I asked in surprise.
+
+"What's Daddy going to do to Thomas?" he demanded. "Daddy's going to
+hurt Thomas!"
+
+"Don't worry, Thomas isn't going to be hurt," I reassured him, aware
+that I might not be telling the truth.
+
+The boy looked at me straight.
+
+"I know what a martyr is," he said indignantly, his sobs subsiding. "I
+studied Joan of Arc in school."
+
+"Daddy ... Thomas in big furnace put," Summer informed us in her
+labored fashion. "Thomas all burnt up was going to. Him ... but I him
+saved. Saved him, Summer and I."
+
+"Neither one of you is going to do anything about Thomas right now,"
+I said brusquely, recognizing Summer's use of the past tense as an
+expression of intention. "When Daddy's through with Thomas, you may
+play with him again."
+
+Mark subsided, but he retained on his face a rebellious expression
+which had by now become familiar to me. Summer, although she said
+nothing for a few moments, became more excited. She alternately flushed
+and paled, breathing hard, until I began to fear she was ill.
+
+Now a deep, powerful hum arose from the house. Wyn had switched on the
+power and was ready for his experiment.
+
+It was a tremendous volume of sound, a physical thing that throbbed
+through the ground under our feet and caused the leaves of the trees to
+tremble as in a breeze. An electric tension filled the air and seemed
+to intensify Summer's agitation. Her eyes dilated in fright and her
+teeth began to chatter.
+
+"Away got I but!" she cried suddenly in a shrill voice. "Up blew it
+before away ran he and Thomas saved I! Me with up blew it and fire of
+full furnace big a was it! Furnace a in Thomas had they!"
+
+"Here, child!" I shouted above the increasing roar of the generators.
+"You're hysterical. Nothing's going to happen to Thomas."
+
+She quieted abruptly, glaring at Mark in affright. He stared back,
+equally alarmed.
+
+"He isn't, Summer he's?" she asked me plaintively. "Boy a be Summer
+could how? Mark I'm know I."
+
+I didn't understand this at all, especially when Summer began feeling
+her arms and legs and inspecting herself all over, carefully.
+
+The sound of the machinery in the basement reached a shrieking
+crescendo that must have put the teeth of everyone in the neighborhood
+on edge. Mark came to life. His eyes shining fiercely, he grasped
+Summer by the arm.
+
+"Are they going to hurt Thomas?" he demanded intently. "Are they,
+Summer?"
+
+She looked at me, not the boy, and suddenly she was calm as though in
+the grip of profound shock. I could hardly hear her quiet, childish
+voice through the noise from the basement.
+
+"Where ... know ... don't," she began haltingly. "Gone ... Summer's
+but. Furnace the in him had they. Thomas saved I."
+
+Her voice trailed to a gurgle and then she began to chant, "Burn Thomas
+burn Thomas burn Thomas...."
+
+The boy suddenly broke from her and began to run for the house.
+
+And, BACKWARD, she ran after him.
+
+Caught by surprise, it was a moment before I could gather my wits and
+follow, shouting at them. They had disappeared around the corner of
+the house, and I rounded it in time to see them tug open the outside
+basement door and vanish inside. An eerie blue light flickered from the
+open door.
+
+Trying to run too fast, I tripped over the garden hose and fell. I got
+to my feet, momentarily dazed.
+
+The explosion knocked me flat on my back, blinded by the flash that
+burst from the basement windows and through the cracking walls.
+
+The blast tilted the den up from the bottom. Its metal and concrete
+floor, reinforced for the experiment, buckled but remained unbroken,
+like a giant slide. Down that slide, through the smashed walls, Wyn
+catapulted, to fall unhurt into the grass.
+
+But the rest of the house crumpled in on the basement and caught fire.
+Under the blazing piles of ruins, I could only surmise, were trapped
+the children, both mother and son.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wept frantically. At my age, I must have been a pitiful spectacle.
+Neighbors put their arms around my shoulders, tried to comfort me.
+
+In contrast, Wyn was remarkably calm as he reported to Gus Adams.
+
+"Every precaution was taken, Mr. Adams," he said, staring morosely into
+the smoking embers of the house. "Both of them ran into the basement
+just before the explosion. There was nothing anyone could do after
+that."
+
+"Too bad, Mr. Storm, to lose your wife and son all at once," said Gus
+sympathetically, writing in his report book. We had kept Summer pretty
+well concealed behind the high board fence in recent years, so few
+people were aware of her retrogression. "If there's anything I can do
+to help, let me know."
+
+I upbraided Wyn for his apparent callousness when we got to a room at
+the City Hotel.
+
+"You may be right," he said. "But, first, I want to know something."
+
+He had me relate to him everything that had transpired with the
+children after we left the house. He made me repeat several points and
+questioned me closely. He was interested particularly in what Summer
+had said, how she had said it and how she had acted. The whole thing
+was so clearly impressed on my mind, as it is today, that I'm sure I
+made few errors.
+
+"Well," he said, when I had finished, "we'll never see either of them
+again, but I think I can say definitely they weren't killed in that
+explosion."
+
+"I don't see how you can say that!" I exclaimed.
+
+"You remember what I told you--that if Summer's existence had been
+reversed in time after she was born, she was existing somewhere else at
+the same time? Living normally as a younger child in one place, and as
+we knew her in reverse?"
+
+I did remember it.
+
+"Well, she was. But we thought she'd be a girl in both instances. When
+her time direction was reversed, so was her sex. _Mark and Summer were
+the same person!_"
+
+I gasped. Wyn took a piece of hotel stationery from the rickety desk
+and scratched a zigzag on it with his pen. It was a figure like the one
+he had drawn in the library of our home, except that the top arm of
+this Z was very short.
+
+He labelled the top arm of the Z "Mark," and the diagonal "Summer."
+
+"My mistake was that I thought my energy explosion would be at B,
+throwing Summer back into a normal time direction. Instead, it was at
+A, reversing the time direction of Mark's existence: and the reversed
+Mark was Summer."
+
+"But Mark was Summer's son." I exclaimed.
+
+"Curious, isn't it?" he agreed, smiling strangely. "She gave birth to
+herself, like the phoenix. Nor is that all. She conceived herself!"
+
+With a firm hand, he wrote "Wyn" above the bottom arm of the Z!
+
+The diagram looked like this:
+
+           MARK
+         --------
+                /EXPLOSION
+               /
+              /
+             /SUMMER
+            /
+           /
+          /    WYN
+    STORM ------------
+
+"The re-reversal!" His blue eyes were a little self conscious as they
+looked at me now. "Don, I was born Mark Storm. This explosion today
+reversed my time direction and I became Summer Storm, to give birth
+to myself nine years ago. And in a terrific burst of natural energy
+that you yourself saw, a crucible so fiery that it could wrench the
+very inner fabric and physical form of the body, the time flow for me
+was twisted back to its proper direction that night in the park and I
+became myself--to father myself six years later!
+
+"I was my mother. I am my own father and my own son!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There it is. Wyn believes he sprang from nothingness, from himself.
+Amid the wreckage of the laws of cause and effect that this whole thing
+involves, it's possible, I suppose. But a couple of details still
+bother me, details I haven't mentioned to Wyn.
+
+Oh, it isn't the coincidences. If the future is fixed as is the past,
+they wouldn't necessarily be coincidences: things like Summer--in the
+reversed time in which she lived--stripping off her clothes, donning
+Gus Adams' raincoat over her nakedness and going with us out to the
+park, to that rendezvous with the lightning and Wyn.
+
+One of the details I can't take is that it's hard to believe that,
+even in such strange twistings and turnings of time, any creature
+can initiate itself and, in effect, spring from nothing--though Wyn
+says it's done at the sub-atomic level in simple terms of conversion
+of energy to matter. But how about the fact that such a complicated
+creature as man is built by the action of the genes and chromosomes?
+
+The other is that year that I was Summer's lover. If she was living
+backward biologically, wouldn't that apply, too, to the growth of an
+unborn child while it was still part of her. And Wyn left Allertown
+right after Mark's birth.
+
+I've heard of virgin mothers. I'd rather believe in a "virgin father"
+than human creation from nothingness.
+
+I once had hair, and it was blond. My eyes are blue. I look in the
+mirror, and then I look at Wyn lounging at ease behind his newspaper.
+
+My son? My motherless son?
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Z, by Charles L. Fontenay
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59515 ***