“It’ll keep.”
“Not long, in this weather,” the lab man said. “It’s another corpse, out there in the garden.”
Gallegher exchanged horrified glances with Grandpa. He sat motionless even after the detective and his companion had tumultuously rushed out of the laboratory. Cries came from the back yard.
“Another one?” Grandpa said.
Gallegher nodded. “Looks like it. Come on. We’d better—”
“We’d better make a run for it!”
“No soap. Let’s see what it is this time.” It was, as Gallegher already knew, a body. It too had been killed by a narrow hole burned through the fabricloth vest and the torso beneath. A heat-ray blast, undoubtedly. The man himself gave Gallegher a poignant shock — with good reason. He was looking at his own corpse.
Not quite. The dead man looked about ten years older than Gallegher, the face was thinner, the dark hair sprinkled with gray. And the costume was of an extreme cut, unfamiliar and eccentric. But the likeness was unmistakable.
“Uh-huh,” Mahoney said, looking at Gallegher. “Your twin brother, I suppose?” Mahoney clicked his teeth together. He took out a cigar and lit it with trembling fingers.
“Now look,” he said, “I don’t know what kind of funny business is going on here, but I don’t like it. I got goose bumps. If this stiff’s eyeprints and fingerprints tally with yours, I…won’t…like…it. I’ll hate it like hell. I don’t want to feel that I’m going nuts. See?”
“It’s impossible,” the lab man said. Mahoney shepherded them into the house and televised Headquarters. “Inspector? About that body that was brought in an hour ago — Gallegher, you know—”
“Found it?” the inspector asked. Mahoney blinked. “Huh? I mean the one with the funny fingerprints—”
“I know what you mean. Have you found it or haven’t you?”
“But its in the morgue!”
“It was,” the inspector said, “up to about ten minutes ago. Then it was snatched. Right out of the morgue.”
Mahoney let that soak in briefly, while he licked his lips. “Inspector,” he said presently, “I’ve got another body for you. A different one this time. I just found it in Gallegher’s back yard. Same circumstances.
“what?”
“Yeah. A hole burned through the chest. And it looks like Gallegher.”
“Looks like him — What about those prints I told you to check?”
“I did. The answer is yes.”
“It couldn’t be.”
“Wait’ll you seethe newcorpse,” Mahoney growled. “Send the boys over, will you?”
“Right away. What sort of crazy business—”
The connection broke. Gallegher passed drinks and collapsed on the couch, manipulating the liquor organ. He felt giddy.
“One thing,” Grandpa said, “you can’t be tried for murdering that first body. If it’s been stolen, there’s no corpus delicti.”
“I’ll be — That’s right!” Gallegher sat up. “Isn’t that so, Mahoney?”
The detective hooded his eyes. “Sure. Technically. Only don’t forget what I just found outside. You can be gassed for his murder, once you’re convicted.”
“Oh.” Gallegher lay back. “That’s right. But I didn’t kill him.”
“That’s your story.”
“O.K. I’m sticking to it. Wake me up when the fuss is over. I’ve got some thinking to do.” Gallegher slipped the siphon into his mouth, adjusted it to slow trickle, and relaxed, absorbing cognac. He shut his eyes and pondered. The answer eluded him.
Abstractedly Gallegher realized that the room was filling, that the routine was gone over again. He answered questions with half his mind. In the end, the police left, bearing the second body. Gallegher’s brain, saturated by alcohol, was sharper now. His subconscious was taking over.
“I got it,” he told Grandpa. “I hope. Let’s see.” He went to the time machine and fiddled with levers. “Oh-oh. I can’t shut it off. It must have been set to a definite cycle pattern. I’m beginning to remember what happened last night.”
“About foretelling the future?” Grandpa asked.
“Uh-huh. Didn’t we get in an argument about whether a man could foretell his own death?”
“Right.”
“Then that’s the answer. I set the machine to foretell my own death. It follows the temporal line, catches up with my own future in articulo mortis, and yanks my body back to this time sector. My future body, I mean.”
“You’re crazy,” Grandpa suggested.
“No, that’s the angle, all right,” Gallegher insisted. “That first body was myself, at the age of seventy or eighty. I’m going to die then. I’ll be killed, apparently, by a heat ray. In forty years from now or thereabouts,” he finished thoughtfully. “Hm-m-m. Cantrell’s got that ray projector—”
Grandpa made a face of distaste. “What about the second corpse, then? You can’t fit that in, I bet.”
“Sure I can. Parallel time developments. Variable futures. Probability lines. You’ve heard that theory.”
“Nope.”
“Well — it’s the idea that there are an infinity of possible futures. If you change the present, you automatically switch into a different future. Like throwing a switch in a railroad yard. If you hadn’t married Grandma, I wouldn’t be here now. See?”
“Nope,” Grandpa said, taking another drink.
Gallegher went ahead, anyway. “According to pattern a, I’m going to be killed by a heat ray when I’m seventy or so. That’s one variable. Well, I brought back my dead body along the transport line, and it appeared in the present. And, naturally, it altered the present. Originally, in pattern a, there was no place for the eighty-year-old dead body of Gallegher. It was introduced and changed the future. We automatically switched into another time track.”
“Pretty silly, eh?” Grandpa mumbled.
“Shut up, Grandpa. I’m working this out. The second track — pattern b—is in operation now. And in that track I’m going to be killed by a heat ray when I’m about forty-five. Since the time machine’s set to bring back my body the minute it’s killed, it did just that — materialized my forty-five-year-old corpse. At which the eighty-year-old corpse vanished.”
“Hah!”
“It had to. It was nonexistent in pattern b. When pattern b jelled, pattern a simply wasn’t there any more. Likewise the first corpse.”
Grandpa’s eyes lit up suddenly. “I get it,” he said, smacking his lips. “Clever of you. You’re going to plead insanity, eh?”
“Bah,” Gallegher snarled, and went to the time machine. He tried vainly to turn it off. It wouldn’t turn off. It seemed to be fixed irrevocably in the business of materializing Gallegher’s future probable corpses.
What would happen next? Temporal pattern b had taken over. But the b corpse wasn’t intended to exist in this particular present. It was an x factor.
And b plus x would equal c. A new variable, and a new cadaver. Gallegher cast a harried glance into the back yard. As yet, it was empty. Thank God for small mercies.
At any rate, he thought, they couldn’t convict him of murdering himself. Or could they? Would the law about suicide hold? Ridiculous. He hadn’t committed suicide, he was still alive, but if he was still alive, he couldn’t be dead. Utterly confused, Gallegher fled for the couch, gulped strong drink and longed for death. He foresaw a court battle of impossible contradictions and paradoxes — a battle of the century. Without the best lawyer on Earth, he’d be doomed.