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 which he insisted stood for Mad Scientist.
Whatever was wrong I would not find it out by staying there. Perhaps nothing whatsoever had happened. And yet that curious wrenching sensation surely indicated that the temporomagnetic field had had some effect.
I beckoned to Givens to follow me, and we stepped out of the machine. Two men were backing away from it in the distance. Their presence and their crablike retrograde motion worried me, and reminded me of those other two whom we had only glimpsed. To avoid them, we hastily slipped out the rear door, and into a world gone mad.
For a moment I had the absurd notion that some inconceivable error had catapulted us into the far distant future. Surely nothing else could account for a world in which men walked rapidly backwards along sidewalks and conversed in an unheard-of gibberish.
But the buildings were those of 1971. The sleek atomic motorcars, despite their fantastic reverse motion, were the familiar 1972 models. I realized the enormity of our plight just as Tim Givens ejaculated: “M.S., everything’s going backwards.”
“Not everything,” I said succinctly, and added none too grammatically, “Just us.”
I knew now who the two crab-backing men were that we had seen in the laboratory: ourselves. And I recognized, too, what conspicuous figures we must now be, walking backwards along the sidewalk. Already we were receiving curious stares, which seemed to us, of course, to come just before the starers noticed us.
“Stand still,” I said. “Were attracting attention. We don’t want to advertise our situation, whatever it is.”
We stood there for an hour, while I alternately experimented with the handsets and wrestled with the problem of our existence. The former pursuit I soon found completely fruitless. Obviously the handsets exerted no effect whatsoever upon our status. The latter was more rewarding, for in that hour I had fixed several of the rules necessary to our reversed existence.
It had been early morning when we entered the stationary machine, and by now the sun was already setting in the east—a phenomenon to which I found perhaps more difficulty in adjusting myself than anything else that befell us. “As I recall,” I said, “last night, which we are now reapproaching, was exceedingly cold. We need shelter. The laboratory was unoccupied last night. Come.”
Followed, or rather preceded, by the stares of passersby we returned to the laboratory, and there for a moment found peace. The disturbingly arsy-versy normal world was shut off from us, and nothing reminded us of our perverse condition save the clock which persistently told off the minutes counterclockwise.
“We shall have to face the fact,” I said, “that we are living backwards.”
“I don’t get it,” Givens objected. “I thought we was going to go time-traveling.”
“We are,” I smiled ruefully, and yet not without a certain pride. “We are traveling backwards in time, something that no one in the history of our race has hitherto accomplished. But we are doing so at the rate, if I may put it somewhat paradoxically, of exactly one second per second; so that the apparent result is not noticeable travel, but simply reverse living.”
“O.K.,” he grunted. “Spread on the words anyway you want. But this is what’s bothering me the most: When are we going to eat?”
I confess that I myself was feeling a certain nervous hunger by now. “There’s always food in this small icebox here,” I said. I was exceedingly fond of scrambled eggs at midnight when working on a problem. “What would you say to beer and eggs?”
I took out a plastic beer-tainer, pressed down the self-opener, and handed it to Givens as it began to foam. I took another for myself. It felt good and reassuringly normal as it went down.
Then I set down the beer-tainer, found a frying pan, and put it on the small electric range. I fetched four eggs from the icebox and returned to the stove to find no frying pan. I reached out another—it looked like the same one—but handling frying pans while holding four eggs is difficult. Both eggs and pan escaped my grip and went rolling off to a corner of the lab. I hastened after them, cloth in hand to clean up the mess.
There was no mess. There was
