Time and Time Again | Page 6

minutes."
* * * * *

That was a ten-minute under-estimate, and it was another quarter-hour before the
detective-sergeant who returned the Luger had finished congratulating Blake Hartley and
giving him the thanks of the Department. After he had gone, the lawyer picked up the
Luger, withdrew the clip, and ejected the round in the chamber.
"Well," he told his son, "you were right. You saved that woman's life." He looked at the
automatic, and then handed it across the table. "Now, let's see you put that firing pin
back."
Allan Hartley dismantled the weapon, inserted the missing part, and put it together again,
then snapped it experimentally and returned it to his father. Blake Hartley looked at it
again, and laid it on the table.
"Now, son, suppose we have a little talk," he said softly.
"But I explained everything." Allan objected innocently.
"You did not," his father retorted. "Yesterday you'd never have thought of a trick like this;
why, you wouldn't even have known how to take this pistol apart. And at dinner, I caught
you using language and expressing ideas that were entirely outside anything you'd ever
known before. Now, I want to know--and I mean this literally."
Allan chuckled. "I hope you're not toying with the rather medieval notion of obsession,"
he said.
Blake Hartley started. Something very like that must have been flitting through his mind.
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it abruptly.
"The trouble is, I'm not sure you aren't right," his son continued. "You say you find
me--changed. When did you first notice a difference?"
"Last night, you were still my little boy. This morning--" Blake Hartley was talking more
to himself than to Allan. "I don't know. You were unusually silent at breakfast. And come
to think of it, there was something ... something strange ... about you when I saw you in
the hall, upstairs.... Allan!" he burst out, vehemently. "What has happened to you?"
Allan Hartley felt a twinge of pain. What his father was going through was almost what
he, himself, had endured, in the first few minutes after waking.
"I wish I could be sure, myself, Dad," he said. "You see, when I woke, this morning, I
hadn't the least recollection of anything I'd done yesterday. August 4, 1945, that is," he
specified. "I was positively convinced that I was a man of forty-three, and my last
memory was of lying on a stretcher, injured by a bomb explosion. And I was equally
convinced that this had happened in 1975."
"Huh?" His father straightened. "Did you say nineteen seventy-five?" He thought for a
moment. "That's right; in 1975, you will be forty-three. A bomb, you say?"

Allan nodded. "During the siege of Buffalo, in the Third World War," he said, "I was a
captain in G5--Scientific Warfare, General Staff. There'd been a transpolar air invasion of
Canada, and I'd been sent to the front to check on service failures of a new lubricating oil
for combat equipment. A week after I got there, Ottawa fell, and the retreat started. We
made a stand at Buffalo, and that was where I copped it. I remember being picked up, and
getting a narcotic injection. The next thing I knew, I was in bed, upstairs, and it was 1945
again, and I was back in my own little thirteen-year-old body."
"Oh, Allan, you just had a nightmare to end nightmares!" his father assured him, laughing
a trifle too heartily. "That's all!"
"That was one of the first things I thought of. I had to reject it; it just wouldn't fit the facts.
Look; a normal dream is part of the dreamer's own physical brain, isn't it? Well, here is a
part about two thousand per cent greater than the whole from which it was taken. Which
is absurd."
"You mean all this Battle of Buffalo stuff? That's easy. All the radio commentators have
been harping on the horrors of World War III, and you couldn't have avoided hearing
some of it. You just have an undigested chunk of H. V. Kaltenborn raising hell in your
subconscious."
"It wasn't just World War III; it was everything. My four years at high school, and my
four years at Penn State, and my seven years as a reporter on the Philadelphia Record.
And my novels: 'Children of the Mist,' 'Rose of Death,' 'Conqueror's Road.' They were no
kid stuff. Why, yesterday I'd never even have thought of some of the ideas I used in my
detective stories, that I published under a nom-de-plume. And my hobby, chemistry; I
was pretty good at that. Patented a couple of processes that made me as much money as
my writing. You think a thirteen-year-old just dreamed all that up? Or, here; you speak
French, don't