Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 2 — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

THE CHRONOKINESIS OF JONATHAN HULL 63 t after them, cloth im: hand, to clean up the mess. There was no mess. There was no frying pan either, and no eggs. Dazed, 1 returned to my beer. And there was no beer. ] get another beer-tainer out of the ice- box, and sipping from it I drew a most important conclusion. ‘Physical objects which we wore or held were affected by our fields and remained with us. Anything which we set down went on its normal course—away from us forever. This meant that cooking was impossible for us. So would be eating in a restaurant, for we and the waiter would be going in temporally opposite directions. I explained this to Givens while we ate cheese. » “It’s just a sample,” I said, “of the problems we have ahead of us. If it weren’t for the bare chance of achieving a reversal sometime, I should be tempted to shuffle off this coil now.” It took him a moment to gather my meaning. Then he guffawed and said, “Uh uh, M. S. Not for little Timmy. Life’s the one thing to hold on to—the one thing worth living. And even if it’s a screwy wrongwayround life, I'm holding on.” Authors of your time, Mr. O’Breen, have occasionally written of time in reverse; but have they ever realized the petty details that such a life involves? All contact with other humanity is impossible. I have, through thirty years of practice,. developed a certain ability to understand reverse speech, but no one can understand me in return. And even by written messages, how can an exchange be carried on if you ask me a question at 12:00 o’clock and I answer it at 11:59? Then there is the problem of food. Not only this question of cooking; but how is one to buy food? How, as one’s own clothes wear out, is one to replace them? Imagine yourself speeding along on an empty train, while another train laden with all the necessities of life passes on the parallel track in the opposite direction. Bh torture of Tantalus was nothing to this. I. owe my life, such as it is, to Tim Givens, for it was his snide ingenuity which solved this problem. “It’s a cinch,” he said, “we just steal it.” We had by now learned to walk back- ward, so that we could move along the streets without exciting too much com- ment. Visualize this, and you will see that a man walking backward from 12:00 to 11:55 looks like a man -walking forward from 11:55 to 12:00. Visualize it further: A man moving in this wise who enters a store empty-handed at 12:00 and leaves loaded with food at 11:50 looks like a normal man who comes in with a full shopping bag at 11:50 and leaves without it at 12:00—a peculiar pro- cedure, but not one to raise a cry of “Stop thief!” My conscience rebelled, but necessity is proverbially not cognizant of laws. So we could live. We could have whatever we wanted, so long as we kept it on our persons. There was a period when Givens ran amok with this power. He plundered the city. For a time he possessed an untold fortune in banknotes and gold and precious gems. But their: weight tired him in the end; crime has no zest when it is neither punishable nor profitable. Work was impossible. I tried to do the mecessary research and experiment to re- verse Our courses, but nothing could be achieved when all inanimate objects de- parted on another time stream as soon as I ceased to hold them. I could read, and did read inordinately, plundering libraries as eagerly as food stores. Sometimes I thought I saw a glimmering of hope, but it was the false daylight at the mouth of an endless and self-extending tunnel. I missed music, although after some twenty years I did succeed in cultivating a taste for the unthinkable progressions of music heard in reverse. Givens, I think, missed knavery; at last the world was giv- ing him gratis the living which it owed him, and he was bored. : So we took to travel—which was ac- complished, of course, by climbing back- ward onto a boat or train at its destination and traveling back with it to its origin. In strange foreign lands the strangeness of re- versal is less marked. And a magnificent mountain, a glinting glacier is free from time. The best part of travel was waterfalls— perhaps the one advantage of our perverse state. You cannot conceive the awesome stateliness of a river leaping hundreds of meters in the air. We even made a special trip to British Guiana to see Kukenaam; and beholding it, I felt almost reconciled to my life. I was most tormented when I despairingly abandoned my scientific research and took to reading novels. Human relationships, which had seemed so unnecessary to my self-absorbed title, now loomed _all- significant. I wanted‘ companionship, friend- ship, perhaps even love, as I had never wanted fame and glory. 7 And what did I have? Givens. The only man with whom I could com- municate in all the universe. We tried separation occasionally, but never without appointing a meeting place and time for which we were always both early. Loneliness is a terrible thing, as no one else of my race can fully know. We were inseparable. We needed each other. And we hated each other. I hated Givens for his banal humor, his cheap self-interest. Ccomicoooxs.com