boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

88 Anthony Boucher
I cannot say that I liked him. But he was recommended to me through remote
family connections; he had a shiftily alert mind; and he had picked up, in the course
of his many brief jobs, a surprising mechanical dexterity and ingenuity. The deciding
factor, of course, was that the skilled technicians I should have wished to employ were
reluctant to work with a man who had left the WIPR under something of a cloud.
So I took Givens on as my handyman and assistant. Personal relationships had
never formed a major element in my life. I thought that I could tolerate his narrow
selfishness, his occasional banal humor, his basic crassness. I did not realize how
lasting some personal relationships may be.
And I went on working on the theory of reversed entropy. My calculations
will be found in my laboratory. It would be useless to give them here. They would
be meaningless in 1941; so much depends upon the variable significance of the
Tamirovich factor—discovered 1958—and the peculiar proportions of the alloy
duralin—developed in the 1960’s—and my own improvement on it which I had
intended to christen chronalin.
The large stationary machine—stationary both in space and in time—was to
furnish the field which would make it possible for us to free ourselves from the “normal”
flow of time. The small handsets were to enable us to accelerate and decelerate
and eventually, I trusted, to reverse our temporal motion.
This, I say, was the plan. As to what ultimately happened—
I am sure that Tim Givens substituted a cheaper grade of duralin for the grade
which had met my tests. He could have netted a sizable profit on the substitution,
and it would have been typical of his petty opportunism. He never admitted as
much, but I remain convinced.
And so what happened was this:
We entered the large machine. For a moment I had been worried. I thought I
had seen two suspicious-looking figures backing into the room by the rear door, and
I feared vandalism. But a checkup indicated nothing wrong and no sign of intruders;
and I pressed the control.
I cannot describe that sensation to anyone who has not experienced it. A sudden
wrenching that seems to take all your vitals, carefully turn them inside out in
some fourth dimension, and replace them neatly in your shaken body. A horrible
sensation? I suppose so; but at the moment it was beautiful to me. It meant that
something had happened.
Even Tim Givens looked beautiful to me, too. He was my partner on the greatest
enterprise of the century—of the centuries. I 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 acceleration 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 I was
frowning perplexedly. We were still in the stationary machine and we should by now
have passed the point at which constructed it.
Givens 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