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headlights were shining right through them. The grouping of

the trees was still filling him with dread, yet at the same time he was

drawn towards them.

And all the time, Kate was walking away, and a voice was telling him he

couldn't let her go through the city at night looking as she did.

He fought the same battle with his pride, then turned in the opposite

direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly. . . .

A sense of aching vastness, shifting of perspectives and parallax,

unthinkable transitions in which the curvatures of space-time writhe

between negative and positive, and infinity yawns at the mid-point --

numinous, illusory, poignant. ...

Breton gripped the arms of his chair and held on tightly until the sound

of his breathing died away into the silence of the room. He got up,

went to the fireplace and wound the old oak-cased clock. The heavy key

was cool in his fingers, cool and real. Outside the windows the snow

was coming down again in small, dry crumbs, and cars with their lights

switched on early ghosted past beyond the trees. The house was filled

with patient brown shadows.

He went into the kitchen and began to make coffee while his mind slowly

released itself from the stasis induced by the trip. The ensuing lack of

nervous energy was another familiar feature of the excursions into the

past, but this time the drain had been greater than ever before. Waiting

for the water to boil, Breton realized belatedly that the trip had

been unusual in other respects -- one of them being the introduction

of an element of fantasy. Those elm trees growing in the middle of 14th

Street had surprised him, but there was more to his sense of shock than

an awareness of their incongruity. They had been semi-transparent, like

images projected on a more vivid background, but that ragged archway

was real. He had seen it somewhere, and it meant something -- but what?

When the coffee had percolated, he opened the refrigerator and found there

was no cream or milk. His stomach moved uneasily at the thought of black

coffee, but a search of the depleted kitchen showed that the oniy other

liquid available was in a pickle jar where several pieces of dill swam

mistily like surgical specimens. Breton poured a cup of the black brew,

flat gray spirals of vapor swirling close to its surface, and went back

to the living room. He sat down, sipped some coffee, and tried vaguely

to think about taking control of his personal affairs, but the room was

growing dim and he felt tired. One week of treatment and rest had not

been enough to repair the damage his extended binge had caused.

Breton awoke in near-darkness several hours later. A wan, violet-tinted

light was filtering into the room from a street lamp, and tree shadows

were moving uneasily on the innermost wall. Repressing a shiver and a

surge of self-pity, Breton sat up and decided to go out to eat. As he was

getting out of the chair he noticed the vacillating shadow of branches

on the dead gray face of the television set -- and he remembered where

he had seen the three elms.

During a newscast one of the local channels had carried a still photograph

of the spot where Kate's body had been found -- right by three elms.

The only trouble was that the elms he had seen on his trip had not been

frozen to stillness by the camera. They had been moving . . . arranging

and rearranging their black-etched limbs to the dictates of the night

winds. They had been -- Breton hesitated before applying the adjective

-- real. Its use meant there had been a shift in his attitude towards

the trips, that some part of his mind had found it necessary to believe

he had actually seen Kate that very afternoon. Could it be, Breton

wondered coldly, that his lonely, guilt-ridden consciousness had defied

every law in nature -- to travel back through time? Suppose the age-old

human desire to do the impossible, to go back into the past and correct

mistakes, had been the