But more and more one aspect of the paranormal began to absorb me. I concentrated on it, devouring everything I could obtain in fact or fiction, until I was recognized as the WIPR’s outstanding authority upon the possibilities of chronokinesis, or time travel.
It was a happy day when I hit upon that word chronokinesis. Its learned sound seemed to remove the concept from the vulgar realm of the time machines cheapened by fiction fantasists. But even with this semantic advantage, I still had many prejudices to battle, both among the populace and among my own colleagues. For even the very men who had established extra-sensory perception upon a scientific basis could still sneer at time travel.
I knew, of course, of earlier attempts. And now, I realize, Mr. O’Breen, why I was inclined to trust you the moment I saw your card. It was through a fortunately preserved letter of your sister’s, which found its way into our archives, that we knew of the early fiasco of Harrison Partridge and your part therein. We knew, too, of the researches of Dr. Derringer, and how he gave up in despair after his time traveler failed to return, having encountered who knows what unimaginable future barrier.
We learned of no totally successful chronokinetic experiment. But from what we did know of the failures, I was able to piece together a little of what I felt must be the truth. Surely the method must involve the rotation of a ternporomagnetic field against the “natural” time stream, and Hackendorf’s current researches would make the establishment of such a field a simple matter.
It was then that I hit upon my concept of reversed individual entropy—setting, so to speak, the machinery of the individual running in an order opposite to the normal, so that movement along the “contrary” direction of the time stream would be for him natural and feasible.
This was what brought about the break. There were some among my colleagues who thought the notion ridiculous. There were others, those hyperserious scientists who take upon themselves the airs of hierophants, who found it even sacrilegious and evil. There were a few practical souls who simply feared it to be impossibly dangerous.
There was not one who would tolerate my experiments. And that is why, Luciferlike, I severed my connection with the WIPR and retired to America, to pursue by myself the chronokinetic researches which would, I was sure, make Hull a name to rank with the greatest in all the history of science.
It was at this time that Tim Givens enters into the story. My own character I think you will have gathered sufficiently from these pages, but of Givens I must give a more explicit picture.
He was almost twenty years older than I, and I was then thirty. This was in 1971, which meant that he was just a boy fresh out of high school at the time of the war. His first experience of life was to find himself in an aircraft factory earning highly impressive sums. He had no sooner adjusted himself to a wonderful and extravagant life than he was drafted and shortly engaged in slaughtering Japanese in the Second Malayan Campaign.
He came back from the war pitiably maladjusted. It was difficult enough for most young men to return to civilian life; it was impossible for Tim Givens, because the only civilian life he had known, the lavish boom of war industry, was no more. We skillfully avoided a post-war depression, true, but we did not return to the days when untrained boys in their teens could earn more in a week than their fathers had hoped to see in a month.
Givens felt that he had saved the world, and that the world in return owed him the best. He took part payment on that debt when and where he could. He was not a criminal; he was simply a man who took short cuts whenever possible.
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
