Something about Eve's tone, some urgency, disturbed him. He looked at her quickly. She was standing by the fireplace, watching him, watching him as if he were doing something important. The fright within him renewed itself. Quickly he turned back to the album, flipped further pages.
He was close to the end of the album. What he saw was a newspaper clipping, a clipping showing himself and Harvey MacIlwaine of Consolidated Motors shaking hands at a banquet table. The headline above the picture read, AUTHOR AND AUTO MAGNATE CELEBRATE BIOGRAPHY.
Above the headline was the date: _January 16, 1947_.
With hard-forced deliberation, because every nerve in his body was singing its song of fear like a banjo string, Coulter closed the album.
The honeymoon, if that was the right term for it, was over. He knew now which was the dream, which the reality.
He said, "All of this is your doing, Eve." It was not a question.
She said quietly, "That's right, Banning, it's my doing." She looked at him with a cool detachment that added to his bewilderment--and to his fright.
He said, "Why, Eve? _Why_ have you done this?"
She said, "Banning, do you know what a Jane Austen villain is?"
He shook his head. "Hardly my pitch, is it?"
"Hardly." There was a trace of sadness in her voice. Then, "A Jane Austen villain is an attractive, powerful, good-natured male who rides through life roughshod, interested only in himself, completely unaware of his effect on those unlucky souls whose existences become entangled in his."
"And I am a Jane Austen villain?" He was puzzled, disturbed that anyone--Eve or anyone--should think of him as a villain. Mentally he began to search for kindnesses, for unselfishnesses. He found generosities, yes, but these, he supposed with sudden dreadful clarity, had been little more than balm to his ego.
"You are perhaps a classic example, Banning," she told him. Her face, in shadow, was exquisitely beautiful. "When you left Lincolnville twenty years ago, without seeing me, without letting me see you, you destroyed me."
"Good God!" Coulter exclaimed. "But how? I know it was rude, but I did mean to come back. And when things moved differently it seemed better to keep a clean break clean." He hesitated, added, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry that you destroyed me?" Her tone was acid-etched.
"Dammit, do you want me down on my knees?" he countered. "How the devil did my leaving destroy _you_?" Anger, prodded by fear, was warming his blood.
"I was sensitive--aware of the collapse of my family, of my own shortcomings, of my lack of opportunity," she said, staring with immense grey eyes at the wall behind him. "I was just beginning to feel I could be somebody, could mean something to someone I--liked--when you dropped me and never looked back.
"I took a job at the bank. For twenty years I've sat in a cage, counting out money and putting little legends in bank-books. I've felt myself drying up day by day, week by week, year by year. When I've sought love I've merely defiled myself. You taught me passion, Banning, then destroyed my capacity to enjoy it with anyone but you. You destroyed me and never even knew it."
"You could have gone out into the world," he said with a trace of contempt. "Other girls have."
"Other girls are not me," Eve replied steadily. "Other girls don't give themselves to a man as completely as I gave myself to you."
"What can I do now?" Coulter asked, running a hand through his newly crew-cut hair. Recalling Eve at dinner, seeing her in the doorway, holding her briefly in his arms--he had almost decided that in this new life she was the partner he would carry with him.
Now, however, he was afraid of her. It was Eve who had, in some strange way, brought him back twenty years for purposes she had yet to divulge.
One thing he knew, logically and intuitively--he could never endure life with anyone of whom he was frightened.
She was no longer looking at the wall--she was looking directly at him and with curious intensity. She said, "Do you have to ask?"
She was testing him, of course. Sensitive, brilliant, she might be--yet she was a fool not to have judged the effect of his fear of her. He walked around the table, took hold of her shoulders, turned her to face him, said, "What has this particular evening to do with bringing me--us--back?"
"Everything!" she said, her eyes suddenly ablaze. "_Everything_, Banning! Can't you understand?"
He released her, lit himself a cigarette, seeking the calmness he knew he must have to keep his thinking clear. He said, "Perhaps I understand why--a little. But how, Eve, _how_?"
She got up and walked across the wide hearth, kicked a fallen log back into place. Its glowing red scales burst into yellow flame. She turned and said, "Remember my father's last work? His efforts to discover the secrets of Time?"
"I remember he threw away what should have been your inheritance on a flock of crackpot ideas," he told her.
"This wasn't a crackpot idea," she said, eyeing him as if he were another log for the fire. "His basic premise that Time is all-existent was sound. Time is past, present and future."
"I might have argued that with you--before today," he replied.
"It was like everything else he tried." She made an odd little gesture of helplessness. "He went at it wrong-end-to, of course. Not until after he died and Jim got back from M.I.T. did we get to work on it. I was merely the helper who held the tools for Jim. And when we completed it _he_ lacked the courage to try it out." There was the acid of contempt in her voice at her brother's poltroonery.
"I don't blame him," said Coulter. "After all ..." He changed the subject, asked, "Where _is_ Jim?"
"He was killed at Iwo Jima," she told him.
"What's to keep him from walking in here tonight--or to keep _you_ from walking in on us?" he asked.
"Jim's in Cambridge, studying for exams," she replied. "As for my meeting myself, it's impossible. It's hard to explain but in coming back here I became reintegrated with the past me. Just as you are both a present and a past you. You must have noticed a certain duplication of memories, an overlapping? _I_ have."
"I've noticed," he said. "But _why_ only we two?"
"I'll show you," she said. "Come." She led him down rough wooden cellar stairs to a basement, unfastened with pale and dexterous fingers a padlocked wooden door behind the big old-fashioned furnace with its up-curving stovepipe arms, under which he had to stoop to avoid bumping his head.
The sharp sting of dead furnace-ashes was in his nostrils as he looked at the strange device. The strange cage-like device, the strange jerry-built apparatus was centered in a bizarre instrument panel that seemed to hang from nothing at all. He said, eyeing a bucket-seat for the operator, "It looks like Red Barber's cat-bird seat, Eve."
"And we're sitting in it, just you and I, darling," she replied. "Just you and I out of all the people who ever lived. Think of what we can do with our lives now, the mistakes we can avoid!"
"I'm thinking of them," said Coulter. Then, after a brief pause, "But how in hell did you manage to get _me_ into the act?"
She stepped inside the odd cage, plucked things from a cup-like receptacle that hung from the instrument panel, showed them to him.
There were a lock of hair, a scarf, what looked like fingernail parings.
At his bewilderment her face lighted briefly with the shadow of a smile.
She said, "These are _you_, darling. Oh, you _still_ don't understand!
Lacking the _person_ or _thing_ to be sent back in Time, something that is part of the person or thing will work. It keys directly to individual patterns."
"And you've kept those things--those pieces of me--in there all this time?" He shuddered. "It looks like voodoo to me."
She put back the mementos, stepped out of the cage, put her arms fiercely around him. "Banning, darling, after you left me I _did_ try voodoo. I wanted you to suffer as I suffered. But then, when the Time machine was finished and Jim was afraid to use it, I put the things in it--and waited. It's been a long wait."
"How did it reach me while I was still miles away?" he asked.
"Jim always said its working radius was about five miles," she said.
"When you drove within range, it took over.... But let's go back upstairs, darling--we have our lives to plan."
To change the subject Coulter said, when they emerged from the basement, "You must have had a time picking the right moment for this little reunion--or was it hit or miss?"
"The machine is completely accurate," she said firmly. She stood there, the firelight making a halo of her dark hair. There was urgency in her, an expectation that the remark would mean something to him. It didn't.