Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 2 — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

62 vitals, carefully turn them inside out in some fourth dimension, and replace them neatly in your shaken body, A _horribie sensation? | suppose so; but at the moment it was beautiful to me, It meant that some- thing had happened. Even Tim Givens looked beautiful to me, too. He was my partner on the greatest enterprise of the century—of the centuries. 1 had insisted on his presence because I wanted a witness for my assertions later; and he had assented because, I think, he foresaw a mint of money to be earned in television lectures by The Man Who Traveled in Time, I adjusted the handset to a high accelera- tion so that we might rapidly reach a point sufficiently past to be striking. (Givens’ handset was telesynchronized with mine; I did not trust his own erratic impulses.) At the end of ten minutes | was frowning per- plexedly. We were still in the stationary machine and we should by now have passed the point at which | constructed it. Given did not notice my concern, but casually asked, “O.K. yet, M. S.?” He thought it humorous to call me “M. S.,” which was, indeed, one of my degrees but which he insisted stood for Mad Scientist. Whatever was wrong I would not find it out by staying there. Perhaps nothing whatsoever had happened, And yet that curious wrenching sensation surely indi- cated that the temporomagnetic field had had some effect. I beckoned to Givens to follow me, and we stepped out of the machine. Two men were backing away from it in the distance. Their presence and their crablike retrograde motion worried me, and reminded me of those other two whom we had only glimpsed. To avoid them, we hastily slipped oat the rear door, and into a world gone mad, For a moment I had the absurd notion that some inconceivable error had cata- pulted us into the far distant future. Surely nothing else could account for a world in which men waiked rapidly backwards along sidewalks and conversed in an unheard of gibberish. : But the buildings were those of - 1971. The sleek atomic motorcars, despite their fantasic reverse motion, were the familiar 1972 models. I realized the enormity of our plight just as Tim Givens ejaculated: “M. S., everything’s going backwards.” “Not everything,” I said succinctly, and added none too grammatically, “Just us.” I knew now who the two crab-backing men were that we had seen in the labora- tory: ourselves. And I recognized, too, what conspicuous figures we must now be, walking backwards along the sidewalk. Already we. were receiving curious stares, which seemed to us, of course, to come just before the starers noticed us. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION - “Stand still,” I said. “We're attracting attenuon. We don’t want to advertise our Siiuation, whatever it is.” We stood there for an hour, while I alternately experimented with the hand- seis and wrestied with the problem of our exisience. The former pursuit 1 soon found compieiely fruiiless. Obviously the hand-ets exerted no efiect whatsoever upon our status. The latter was more rewarding, for in that hour I had fixed several of the rules necessary to our reversed existence. It had been early morning when we eniered the stationary machine, and by now the sun was already setting in the east—a phenomenon to which I found per- haps more diihculty in adjusting myself than anything else that befell us. “As Il recall,“ I said, “last night, which we are now reapproaching, was exceedingly coud. We need sheiter. [The laboratory was un- occupied last night. Come.” Followed, or rather preceded, .by the stares of passersby we returned to the laboratory, and there for a moment found peace. The disturbingly arsy-versy. normal world was shut off from us, and nothing reminded us of our perverse condition save the clock which persistently told off the minutes counterclock wise. -“We shall have to facé the fact,” I said, “that we are living backwards.” “I don’t get it,” Givens objected. “I thought we was going to go time-traveling.” “We are,’ I smiled ruefully, and yet not without a certain pride. “We are traveling backwards in time, something that no one in the history of our race has hitherto accomplished. But we are doing so at the rate, if I may put it somewhat paradoxically, of exactly one second per second; so that the apparent result is not noticeable travel, but simply reverse living.” “O.K.,” he grunted. “Spread on the words any way you want. But this is what's bothering me the most: When are we doing to eat?” | I confess, that I myself was feeling a certain nervous hunger by now. “There’s always food in this small icebox here,” I said. I was exceedingly fond of scrambled eggs at midnight when working on a prob- lem. “What would you say to beer and eggs?” I took out a plastic beer-tainer, pressed down the self-opener, and handed it to Givens as it began to foam. I took another for myself. It felt good and reassuringly normal as it went down. Then I .set down the beer-tainer, found a frying pan, and put it on the small electric range. I fetched four eggs from the icebox and returned to the stove to find no frying pan. I reached out another—it looked like the same one—but handling frying pans while holding four eggs is difficult. Both eggs and pan escaped my grip and went rolling off to a corner of the lab. I hastened — GCOMIIGDOOKS C@