The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

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 which had met my tests. He could have netted a sizable profit on the substitution, and it would have been typical of his petty opportunism. He never admitted as much, but I remain convinced.

  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 no frying pan either, and no eggs.

  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, as you will have realized from my “ghosts,” a bitter sort of joy. So now I stood in the Queen of the Angels Hospital peering through glass at my red-faced yowling two-day-old self. A nurse smiled at me with recognition, and I saw she thought I was Gramps. There, looking at my beginning life, I resolved to save my life, however tortured and reversed it was.

  We were then living in the room you know on West Adams. For some time we had developed the technique of watching for people moving into a place. After that—before, from the normal viewpoint—the place is untenanted and safe for our abode for a while.

  I returned to the room to find Tim Givens’ body on the bed. Then I knew that death had the power to stop our wanderings, that the dead body resumed its normal movement in time. And I knew what else I must do.

  The rest of that scene you know. How I took your card, gave your official-looking friend my confession, and backed out—when you thought me entering.

  When I next visited the room, Givens was there alive. It was surprisingly simple. Underestimating me in practical matters, he was not on his guard. I secured the revolver with no trouble. Just before I pressed the trigger—for the bullet, freed from my field, moved for a moment in normal time—I saw the bullet strike.

  I pressed hard, and gave him release.

  Now I seek it for myself. Only death can end this Odyssey, this voyage of loneliness and pain compared to which The Flying Dutchman sailed on a luxury cruise. And when this manuscript is type
d, I shall swallow the cyanide I stole yesterday.

  This manuscript must reach the World Institute for Paranormal Research. They will find my notes in my laboratory. They must know that those who foretold danger were right, that my method must not be used again save with serious revision.

  And yet this cannot reach them before the experiment; for they would stop me and I was not stopped. Seal it, then. Place it in the hands of some trustworthy institution. And inscribe on it:

  To be delivered to the World Institute for Paranormal Research, Basle, Switzerland, F.E.D., February 3, 1971.

  Perhaps the name of Hull may yet not be forgotten.

  Fergus O’Breen swore comprehensively for a matter of minutes. “The egotist! The lowdown egocentric idiot! Think what he could have told us: How the war came out, how the peace was settled, how atomic power was finally developed—! And what does he give us? Nothing that doesn’t touch him.”

  “I wish that’s all I had to worry about,” said Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson morosely.

  “There are hints, of course. Obviously a United Nations victory or he wouldn’t have been living in such a free world in 1971. And that F.E.D. in the address—”

  “What would that mean?”

  “Maybe Federated European Democracies—I hope. But at least we’ve learned a wonderful new word. Chronokinesis—” He savored it.

  Jackson rose gloomily. “And I’ve got to get down to the office and try to write a report on this. I’ll take this manuscript—”

  “Uh uh. This was given me in trust, Andy. And somehow it’s going to get to the WIRP on the appointed date.”

  “O.K. I’m just as glad. If the inspector saw that in the files— Want to come down with me and see what we can cook up?”

  “Thanks no, Andy. I’m headed for the Queen of the Angels.”

  “The hospital? Why?”

  “Because,” Fergus grinned, “I want to see what a two-day-old murderer looks like.”