To prevent the human race from enjoying what he would never enjoy. To destroy humanity by killing the first man.
Of course, he told himself, that would obliterate, along with the rest of mankind's history and comedy and tragedy, the first forty-five years of his own life. But those years didn't matter. By and large, they were the hard years. They were the years of toil and struggle, to give him the position and wealth he now had. Position and wealth—which he never would enjoy. Let them be obliterated then! With the rest of humanity, not in any sudden catastrophe, but quickly and without pain, at the instant First Man is killed....
A week later, he got the crash program underway. Since the world's scientists, like most of the world's intellectuals, were underpaid, it was comparatively simple hiring them, especially since this was a time of international calm. At first the physicists were dubious. Yes, the theoreticians said, time travel was a possibility. No, the engineers said, it couldn't be executed.
Execute it, he said. Here's money. Here are facilities. Here is everything you will need. If what you need doesn't exist, make it, buy it, steal it—but get it. Our time is limited. We have a year. One year to make it possible for one man to travel back in time.
After three months, they were shaking their heads.
After six months—when the first terrible twinges of pain had begun—they began to work feverishly.
Jason Wall went regularly to his physician at this time for the drugs that could ease his terrible suffering. They spoke, the doctor with no greater objectivity than Jason Wall himself, of his disease. It was absolutely incurable. Even a crash program to find a cure wouldn't help Jason Wall. The damage done to his body was irreversible. And, the doctor mentioned in passing, it was hereditary. That is, the germ of the disease, or a predilection for it, or both, were carried in the blood of mankind like a scourge, had been so carried, as far as medical science knew, from the dawn of history and before.
If the murder he had planned ever bothered Jason Wall, which is doubtful, it certainly did not bother him now. What was killing him—hereditary! Why, the First Man he sought might himself be responsible. Killing him would almost be a pleasure....
After eight months something began to take shape. It was a little box. "For hamsters," one of the scientists said.