Dazed, I returned to my beer. And there was no beer.
I got another beer-tainer out of the icebox, and sipping from it I drew a most important conclusion. Physical objects which we wore or held were affected by our fields and remained with us. Anything which we set down went on its normal course—away from us forever.
This meant that cooking was impossible for us. So would be eating in a restaurant, for we and the waiter would be going in temporally opposite directions. I explained this to Givens while we ate cheese.
“It’s just a sample,” I said, “of the problems we have ahead of us. If it weren’t for the bare chance of achieving a reversal sometime, I should be tempted to shuffle off this coil now.”
It took him a moment to gather my meaning. Then he guffawed and said, “Uh uh, M.S. Not for little Timmy. Life’s the one thing to hold on to—the one thing worth living. And even if it’s a screwy wrongwayround life, I’m holding on.”
Authors of your time, Mr. O’Breen, have occasionally written of time in reverse; but have they ever realized the petty details that such a life involves? All contact with other humanity is impossible. I have, through thirty years of practice, developed a certain ability to understand reverse speech, but no one can understand me in return. And even by written messages, how can an exchange be carried on if you ask me a question at 12:00 o’clock and I answer it at 11:59?
Then there is the problem of food. Not only this question of cooking; but how is one to buy food? How, as one’s own clothes wear out, is one to replace them? Imagine yourself speeding along on an empty train, while another train laden with all the necessities of life passes on the parallel track in the opposite direction.
The torture of Tantalus was nothing to this.
I owe my life, such as it is, to Tim Givens, for it was his snide ingenuity which solved this problem. “It’s a cinch,” he said, “we just steal it.”
We had by now learned to walk backward, so that we could move along the streets without exciting too much comment. Visualize this, and you will see that a man walking backward from 12:00 to 11:55 looks like a man walking forward from 11:55 to 12:00.
Visualize it further: A man moving in this wise who enters a store empty-handed at 12:00 and leaves loaded with food at 11:50 looks like a normal man who comes in with a full shopping bag at 11:50 and leaves without it at 12:00—a peculiar procedure, but not one to raise a cry of “Stop thief!”
My conscience rebelled, but necessity is proverbially not cognizant of laws. So we could live. We could have whatever we wanted, so long as we kept it on our persons. There was a period when Givens ran amok with this power. He plundered the city. For a time he possessed an untold fortune in banknotes and gold and precious gems. But their weight tired him in the end; crime has no zest when it is neither punishable nor profitable.
Work was impossible. I tried to do the necessary research and experiment to reverse our courses, but nothing could be achieved when all inanimate objects departed on another time stream as soon as I ceased to hold them. I could read, and did read inordinately, plundering libraries as eagerly as food stores. Sometimes I thought I saw a glimmering of hope, but it was the false daylight at the mouth of an endless and self-extending tunnel.
I missed music, although after some twenty years I did succeed in cultivating a taste for the unthinkable progressions of music heard in reverse. Givens, I think, missed knavery; at last the world was giving him gratis the living which it owed him, and he was bored.
So we took to travel—which was accomplished, of course, by climbing backward onto a boat or train at its destination and traveling back with it to its origin. In strange foreign lands the strangeness of reversal is less marked. And a magnificent mountain, a glinting glacier is free from time.
The best part of travel was waterfalls—perhaps the one advantage of our perverse state. You cannot conceive the awesome stateliness of a river leaping hundreds of meters in the air. We even made a special trip to British Guiana to see Kukenaam; and beholding it, I felt almost reconciled to my life.
I was most tormented when I despairingly abandoned any scientific research and took to reading novels. Human relationships, which had seemed so unnecessary to my self-absorbed life, now loomed all-significant. I wanted companionship, friendship, perhaps even love, as I had never wanted fame and glory.
And what did I have? Givens.
The only man with whom I could communicate in all the universe.
We tried separation occasionally, but never without appointing a meeting place and time for which we were always both early. Loneliness is a terrible thing, as no one else of my race can fully know.
We were inseparable. We needed each other. And we hated each other.
I hated Givens for his banal humor, his cheap self-interest.
He hated me for my intellect, my pride.
And each laid on the other the blame for our present fate.
And so, a few days ago, I realized that Givens was planning to kill me. In a way, I think it was not so much from hatred of me as because he had missed for thirty years the petty conniving of his old life and now at last saw that a grand crime was possible for him.
He thought that he was hiding it from me. Of course he could not. I knew every bulge of the possessions that he wore, and easily recognized the revolver when he stole it and added it to his gear.
We were in Los Angeles because I had come to look at myself. I found an odd pleasure in doing that occasionally,
