For the whole blasted world, Jason Wall told himself.
He'd made his own world, fashioned it with the sweat of his brow and the cunning of his brain. But ultimately, it did not matter. He was going to die, to die in great pain. It wasn't fair that the rest of the world should go right on living, enjoying the life that Jason Wall had barely begun to taste. They'd see an article in the newspaper, perhaps. Famous Tycoon Dies. In a day, a week, they would forget. They would go on living out their little lives, enjoying their little enjoyments. But the sum total of them—three billion men, women, and children on Earth, was it?—added up to considerable enjoyment. Jason Wall envied them with a desperate, passionate envy.
When his thinking evolved to the next stage, he knew with petty triumph that only Jason Wall would have taken that step. He had an incurable disease. He was going to die. But the world would go right on, generations after generations. It wasn't fair. They had no right to enjoy what he, Jason Wall, would lose forever.
He toyed—seriously toyed for some weeks—with the idea of destroying the world. It could be done: he never doubted it for a minute. To develop the atomic bomb, the governments of the free world had pooled their resources in a crash program costing two billion dollars, and had succeeded in a very few years. Two billion dollars—that was the kind of figure Jason Wall understood. For two billion dollars, couldn't he hire all the world's top scientists to build a super-bomb which would utterly destroy Earth?
He could, of course. In theory, such a crash program, with Jason Wall's money and industrial know-how behind it, was a possibility. But for another reason, for a very simple reason, it was quite obviously impossible.
The scientists wouldn't do it.
Suicide? Never. He decided that firmly, two months after the prognosis. World-destruction? Impossible. Then what?
It was Eve who, trying to flaunt an intellectual prowess she really did not have, told him about time travel. There was this article she had read in the newspaper Sunday supplement, about the possibility of moving backwards through time. There was absolutely no natural law which said it could not be done, the article said. It was merely a question of probability. For, while in theory time travel was possible, it was practically impossible—unless, as the article suggested and Jason Wall thought in triumph, you pushed it. If you pushed it, the improbability became a possibility, then a probability, then a reality.
Crash program, he thought.