Part 2

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?