But they brought new hope to Fergus’ face and a triumphant glint to his green eyes. “Perfect, Andy! I couldn’t have asked for better. That rounds it off.”
Jackson looked up wide-eyed. “You mean it makes sense? O.K., maestro; what’s the answer?”
“I don’t know,” said Fergus coolly. “But I know where the answer is: in the drawer of my desk.”
He stubbornly refused to say a word until they were in his room. Then he said, “Look at all the little things we saw: How Hull turned to you just before you spoke to him; how he registered amazement, and then looked at the corpse; above all, how he wrote that note. And the wording of the note too: ‘I will have succeeded,’ and how we must already understand because of something he just thought of. There’s only one answer to it all:
“Jonathan Hull is living backwards. ”
Jackson burst out with a loud “Nonsense!”
“It even explains the absence of the cuffs. They’re trousers from next year, when we’ll be in the war and Sergeant Marcus’ prophecy will come true.”
“Then you mean that the other stiff too—?”
“Both of’em.”
“O.K. Grant you that much, and I suppose in some cockeyed way it explains the prints of a corpse on a murder weapon. But that kid out at Lockheed—”
“—is your second stiff. But don’t trust me: Let’s see what Hull himself has to say.” Fergus reached for the drawer.
“Hull left a message before he bumped himself off?”
“Don’t you see? If he’s living backwards, he came into my room, sat at the typewriter, wrote a message, and then killed himself. I just saw it being reeled off hindsideto. So when I ‘saw’ him taking an envelope out of this drawer, he was actually, in his own time-sequence, putting it in.”
“I’ll believe you,” said Jackson, “when I see—”
Fergus had pulled the drawer open. There lay a fat envelope, inscribed:
FOR FERGUS O’BREEN
FROM JONATHAN HULL.
“All right,” said the lieutenant, “so your conclusion is correct. That still doesn’t mean your reasoning is. How can a man live backwards? You might as well ask the universe to run in reverse entropy.”
“Maybe it does,” said Fergus. “Maybe Hull just found out how to go forwards.”
Jackson snorted. “Well, let’s see what he says.”
Fergus read: “ ‘The first indication of my strange destiny was that I could see ghosts, or so I then interpreted the phenomena.’ ”
Jackson groaned. “Ghosts we have again! Fergus, I will not have the supernatural. The parascientific is bad enough, but the supernatural—no!”
“Is there necessarily any difference?” Fergus asked. “What we haven’t found the answer to, we call supernatural. Maybe Jonathan Hull found an answer or two. Subside, Andy, and let’s settle down to this.”
They settled.
THE NARRATIVE OF JONATHAN HULL
The first indication of my strange destiny was that I could see ghosts, or so I then interpreted the phenomena. The first such episode occurred when I was five years old and came in from the yard to tell the family that I had been playing with Gramps. Since my grandfather had died the previous year in that mysterious post-war epidemic, the family was not a little concerned as to my veracity; but no amount of spanking shook me from my conviction.
Again in my twentieth year, I was visited in my lodgings near the Institute by my father, who had died when I was fifteen. The two visitations were curiously similar. Both apparitions spoke unintelligible gibberish and walked with awkwardly careful movements.
If not already, you will soon recognize these two traits, Mr. O’Breen. When I add that the Hulls are noted for the marked physical resemblance between generations, you will readily understand the nature of these apparent ghosts.
On neither of these occasions did I feel any of the conventional terror of revenants. In the first case, because I was too young to realize the implications of the visit; in the second, because I had by my twentieth year already reached the conclusion that my chief interest in life lay in the fringes of normal existence.
Too much of scientific work, by the time I reached the Institute, was being devoted to further minute exploration of the already known, and too little to any serious consideration to the unknown or half-known, the shadowy blurs on the edges of our field of vision. To pursue the work as mathematical physicist for which I was training myself meant, I feared, a blind alley of infinite refinement and elaboration.
To be sure, there was the sudden blossoming of atomic power which had begun after the war, when peacetime allowed the scientists of the world to pool their recent discoveries with no fear lest they be revealing a possible secret weapon. But the work that needed doing now in that field was that of the mechanic, the technician. Theory was becoming fixed and settled, and it was upon my skill in theoretical matters that I prided myself.
Yes, I was the bright young lad then. There were no limits to my aspirations. The world should glow with the name of Hull. And behold me now: a ghost even to myself, a murderer, and soon a suicide. Already, if my understanding of the reversal is correct, my body lies in that corner; but I cannot turn my eyes to it to verify my assumption. And I was always more satisfied with the theory than with the fact.
I was the prodigy of the Institute. I was the shining star. And Lucifer was a shining star, too.
When the United Nations established the World Institute for Paranormal Research at Basle, I recognized my niche. My record at the local institute and my phenomenal score in the aptitude test made my admission a matter of course. And once surrounded by the magnificent facilities of the WIPR, I began to bestow upon the name of Hull certain small immortalities.
Yes, there is that consolation. The
