For a full week the sheer joy of simply being able to communicate with each other was enough.
The second week was not so good.
To know that Jane was alive was good, but to be separated from her without hope was not.
There was no meaning in a cosmos in which one could only write love-letters to one's wife or husband in another now which only might have been.
But for a while both Jimmy and Jane tried to hide this new hopelessness from each other. Jimmy explained this carefully to Haynes before it was all over. Their letters were tender and very natural, and presently there was even time for gossip and actual bits of choice scandal....
Haynes met Jimmy on the street one day, after about two weeks.
Jimmy looked better, but he was drawn very fine.
Though he greeted Haynes without constraint, Haynes felt awkward.
After a little he said,
"Er—Jimmy. That matter we were talking about the other day—Those photographs—"
"Yes. You were right," said Jimmy casually.
"Jane agrees.
There is more than one now.
In the now I'm in, Jane was killed.
In the now she's in, I was killed."
Haynes fidgeted.
"Would you let me see that picture of the door again?" he asked.
"A trick film like that simply can't be perfect!
I'd like to enlarge that picture a little more.
May I?"
"You can have the film," said Jimmy.
"I don't need it any more."
Haynes hesitated.
Jimmy, quite matter-of-factly, told him most of what had happened to date.
But he had no idea what had started it.
Haynes almost wrung his hands. "The thing can't be!" he said desperately.
"You have to be crazy, Jimmy!"
But he would not have said that to a man whose sanity he really suspected.
Jimmy nodded.
"Jane told me something, by the way.
Did you have a near-accident night before last?
Somebody almost ran into you out on the Saw Mill Road?"
Haynes started and went pale.
"I went around a curve and a car plunged out of nowhere on the wrong side of the road.
We both swung hard.
He smashed my fender and almost went off the road himself. But he went racing off without stopping to see if I'd gone in the ditch and killed myself.
If I'd been five feet nearer the curve when he came out of it—"
"Where Jane is," said Jimmy, "you were.
Just about five feet nearer the curve.
It was a bad smash.
Tony Shields was in the other car. It killed him—where Jane is."
Haynes licked his lips.
It was absurd, but he said,
"How about me?"
"Where Jane is," Jimmy told him, "you're in the hospital."
Haynes swore in unreasonable irritation.
There wasn't any way for Jimmy to know about that near-accident.
He hadn't mentioned it, because he'd no idea who'd been in the other car.
"I don't believe it!" But he said pleadingly,
"Jimmy, it isn't so, is it?