"Uncle Johnson will have them for _his_ old age," she said sadly. "And
we'll be lucky if we have _anything_."
I felt a pang of resentment. Uncle Johnson! It seemed that every time I
acquired something, Uncle Johnson soon came into possession of it. We'd
been kids together, although he was quite a few years older, a hulking
lout in the sixth grade while I was in the first, and I graduated from
grammar school a term ahead of him. Of course I went on to high school
and had a college degree at fifteen, being a prodigy. Johnson went to
work in his uncle's pawn shop, sweeping the floor and so on, and that's
when we started calling him Uncle.
This wasn't much of a job because Johnson's uncle got him to work for
almost nothing by promising he would leave him the pawn shop when he
died. And it didn't look as if much would come of this, because the
uncle was not very old and he was always telling people a man couldn't
afford to die these days, what with the prices undertakers were
charging.
* * * * *
Before I had even started to shave, I had a dozen papers published in
scientific journals, all having to do with the nature of time. Time
travel became my ambition and I was sure I saw a way to build a time
machine. But it took years to work out the details, and nobody seemed
interested in my work, so I had to do it all myself. Somehow I stopped
working long enough to get a wife, and we had to eat. So we ran this
little hash house and lived in the back room, and at least we got our
food wholesale.
And Johnson's uncle fell down the cellar stairs and split his skull
open. So Johnson became the owner of a thriving business after giving
his uncle a simple funeral, because he knew his uncle wouldn't have
wanted him to waste any more money on that than he had to.
"But we have a time machine," Marilyn said fondly. "That's something
Johnson would give us a lot on--if it worked."
"We _almost_ have a time machine," I said, looking around at my life's
work. Our kitchen was the time machine, with a great winding of wires
around it to create the field I had devised. The doors had been a
problem that I solved by making them into switches, so that when they
were closed the coils made the complete circuit of the room.
"Almost," I repeated. "After twenty years of work, I am through except
for a few small items--"