boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull 91
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
procedure, 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 necessary research and experiment to reverse
our courses, but nothing could be achieved when all inanimate objects departed
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 giving him gratis the living which it owed
him, and he was bored.
So we took to travel—which was accomplished, of course, by climbing backward
onto a boat or train at its destination and traveling back with it to its origin. In
strange foreign lands the strangeness of reversal 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 any scientific research and
took to reading novels. Human relationships, which had seemed so unnecessary to
my self-absorbed life, now loomed all-significant. I wanted companionship, friendship,
perhaps even love, as I had never wanted fame and glory.
And what did I have? Givens.
The only man with whom I could communicate 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.
He hated me for my intellect, my pride.
And each laid on the other the blame for our present fate.
And so, a few days ago, I realized that Givens was planning to kill me. In a way,
I think it was not so much from hatred of me as because he had missed for thirty
years the petty conniving of his old life and now at last saw that a grand crime was
possible for him.