will stay quietly in the temporal chamber for the interval. There are toilet facilities and I can bring in enough sandwich fixings to keep me.'
He added regretfully, 'I'll have to make do without coffee, though, till it's over. I can't have anyone smelling unexplained coffee here while I'm supposed to be dead. Well, there's plenty of water and it's only three days.'
I clasped my hands nervously and said, 'Even if they do find you, won't it be the same thing anyway? There'll be a dead "you" and a living "you" -' It was myself I was trying to console, myself I was trying to prepare for the inevitable disappointment.
But he turned on me, shouting, 'No, it won't be the same thing at all. It will all become a hoax that failed.
I'll be famous, but only as a fool.'
'But Lancelot,' I said cautiously, 'something always goes wrong.'
'Not this time.'
'But you always say "not this time" and yet something always-'
He was white with rage and his irises showed clear all about their circle. He caught my elbow and hurt it terribly but I dared not cry out. He said, 'Only one thing can go wrong and that is you. If you give it away, if you don't play your part perfectly, if you don't follow the instructions exactly, I-I-' He seemed to cast about for a punishment. 'I'll kill you.'
I turned my head away in sheer terror and tried to break loose, but he held on grimly. It was remarkable how strong he could be when he was in a passion. He said, 'Listen to me! You have done me a great deal of harm by being you, but I have blamed myself for marrying you in the first place and for never finding the time to divorce you in the second. But now I have my chance, despite you, to turn my life into a vast success. If you spoil even that chance, I will kill you. I mean that literally.'
I was sure he did. 'I'll do everything you say,' I whispered, and he let me go.
He spent a day on his machinery. 'I've never transported more than a hundred grams before,' he said, calmly thoughtful.
I thought: It won't work. How can it?
The next day he adjusted the device to the point where I needed only to close one switch. He made me practice that particular switch on a dead circuit for what seemed an interminable time.
'Do you understand now? Do you see exactly how it is done?'
'Yes.'
Then do it, when this light flashes and not a moment before.'
It won't work, I thought. 'Yes,' I said.
He took his position and remained in stolid silence. He was wearing a rubber apron over a laboratory jacket.
The light flashed, and the practice turned out to be worth while for I pulled the switch automatically before thought could stop me or even make me waver.
For an instant there were two Lancelots before me, side by side, the new one dressed as the old one was but more rumpled. And then the new one collapsed and lay still.
'All right,' cried the living Lancelot, stepping off the carefully marked spot. 'Help me. Grab his legs.'
I marveled at Lancelot. How, without wincing or showing any uneasiness, could he carry his own dead body, his own body of three days in the future. Yet he held it under its arms without showing any more emotion than if it had been a sack of wheat.
I held it by the ankles, my stomach turning at the touch. It was still blood-warm to the touch; freshly dead. Together we carried it through a corridor and up a flight of stairs, down another corridor and into a room. Lancelot had it already arranged. A solution was bubbling in a queer all-glass contraption inside a closed section, with a movable glass door partitioning it off.
Other chemical equipment was scattered about, calculated, no doubt, to show an experiment in progress.
A bottle, boldly labeled 'Potassium cyanide' was on the desk, prominent among the others. There was a small scattering of crystals on the desk near it; cyanide, I presume.
Carefully Lancelot crumpled the dead body as though it had fallen off the stool. He placed crystals on the body's left hand and more on the rubber apron; finally, a few on the body's chin.
'They'll get the idea,' he muttered.
A last look-around and he said, 'All right, now. Go back to the house now and call the doctor. Your story is that you came here to bring me