It works.
The movement in time anyway. Chronokinesis, Cleve calls it, or CK for short. CK . . . PK . . . sound like a bunch of executives initialing each other. Cleve’s achieved short CK. Hasn’t dared try rotation yet. Or taking me with him. But he’s sweating on my “psionic potential.” Maybe with some results: I lost only 2 bucks in a 2 hour crap game last night. And got so gleeful about my ps pot that I got me this hangover.
Anyway, I know what I’m doing. I’m resigning fr the County Committee at tomorrow’s meeting. No point futzing around w politics any more. Opposition Party has as much chance under the Senator as it did in pre-war Russia. And I’ve got something else to focus on.
I spent all my non-working time in politics because (no matter what my analyst might say if I had one) I wanted, in the phrase that’s true the way only corn can be, I wanted to make a better world. All right; now I can really do it, in a way I never dreamed of.
CK . . . PK . . . OK!
Tue Dec 11: Almost a month since I wrote a word here. Too damned magnificently full a month to try to synopsize here. Anyway it’s all down in Cleve’s records. Main point is development of my psionic potential (Cleve says anybody can do it, with enough belief & drive—wh is why Psionics Dept & Psych Dept aren’t speaking. Psych claims PK, if it exists wh they aren’t too eager to grant even now, is a mutant trait. OK so maybe I’m a mutant. Still . . .
Today I made my first CK. Chronokinesis to you, old boy. Time travel to you, you dope. All right, so it was only 10 min. So nothing happened, not even an eentsy-weentsy paradox. But I did it; & when we go, Cleve & I can go together.
So damned excited I forgot to close parenth above. Fine state of affairs. So:)
Sun Dec 30: Used to really keep me a journal. Full of fascinating facts & political gossip. Now nothing but highpoints, apptly. OK: latest highpoint:
Sufficient PK power can rotate the field.
Cleve never succeeded by himself. Now I’m good enough to work with him. And together . . .
He picked a simple one. Purely at random, when he thought we were ready. We’d knocked off work & had some scrambled eggs. 1 egg was a little bad, & the whole mess was awful. Obviously some alternate in wh egg was not bad. So we went back (CK) to 1 p m just before Cleve bought eggs, & we (how the hell to put it?) we . . . worked. Damnedest sensation. Turns you inside out & then outside in again. If that makes sense.
We bought the eggs, spent the same aft working as before, knocked off work, had some scrambled eggs . . . delicious!
Most significant damned egg-breaking since Columbus!
Sun Jan 20 85: This is the day.
Inauguration Day. Funny to have it on a Sun. Hasn’t been since 57. Cleve asked me what’s the inaugural augury. Told him the odds were even. Monroe’s 2d Inaug was a Sun . . . & so was Zachary Taylor’s 1st & only, wh landed us w Fillmore.
We’ve been ready for a week. Waited till today just to hear the Senator get himself inaugurated. 1st beginning of the world we’ll never know.
TV’s on. There the smug bastard is. Pride & ruin of 200,000,000 people.
“Americans!”
Get that. Not “fellow Americans . . .”
“Americans! You have called me in clarion tones & I shall answer!”
Here it comes, all of it. “. . . my discredited adversaries . . .” “. . . strength, not in union, but in unity . . .” “. . . as you have empowered me to root out these . . .”
The one-party system, the one-system state, the one-man party-systemstate . . .
Had enough, Stu? (Hist slogan current ca 48) OK: let’s work!
Damn! Look what this pencil did while I was turning inside out & outside in again. (Note: Articles in contact w body move in CK. For reasons cf Cleve’s notebooks.) Date is now
Tue Nov 6 84: TV’s on. Same cheerful commentator:
“. . . Yessir, it’s 1 of the greatest landslides in American history. 524 electoral votes from 45 states, to 69 electoral votes from 5 states, all Southern, as the experts predicted. I’ll repeat: That’s 524 electoral votes for the Judge . . .”
We’ve done it. We’re there . . . then . . . whatever the hell the word is. I’m the first politician in history who ever made the people vote right against their own judgment!
Now, in this brighter better world where the basic tenets of American democracy were safe, there was no nonsense about Lanroyd’s resigning from politics. There was too much to do. First of all a thorough job of party reorganization before the Inauguration. There were a few, even on the County and State Central Committees of the Free Democratic Republican Party, who had been playing footsie with the Senator’s boys. A few well-planned parliamentary maneuvers weeded them out; a new set of by-laws took care of such contingencies in the future; and the Party was solidly unified and ready to back the Judge’s administration.
Stuart Cleve went happily back to work. He no longer needed a busbarboy from the History Department. There was no pressing need for secrecy in his work; and he possessed, thanks to physical contact during chronokinesis, his full notebooks on experiments for two and a half months which, in this world, hadn’t happened yet—a paradox which was merely amusing and nowise difficult.
By some peculiar whim of alternate universes, Cal even managed to win the UCLA game 33—10.
In accordance with the popular temper displayed in the Presidential election, Proposition 13, with its thorough repression of all academic thought and action, had been roundly defeated. A short
