Arin Hellstroem was—well, let’s not mince words, he was a genius. Indeed, one of the brightest intellectual lights ever to gleam in the long and too-often dark history of mankind. Unsurprisingly, he also suffered from those afflictions which so often accompany genius: arrogance and oddity.

His early life was remarkably easy and followed the typical pattern. First published theoretical works at ten, completed graduate school at 12, nominated for the Nobel Prize at 15, awarded same at 17. But while science continued to reveal its secrets to him, Life remained entirely unfathomable.

He hadn’t published much in the past few years. Again, an understatement: his “latest” articles were more than a decade in the past, and the University was getting anxious. Hellstroem was tenured, of course (since age 14), so there was no direct fear for his job; but without any results to tout, his public relations value was nearly nil. The administration seemed more and more hesitant to give him the resources he needed, and he began to feel the first stirrings of the squeeze that might send him to obscurity.

Some say he simply wasn’t well liked. Others might argue that it was his affair with a trustee’s wife that endangered his career. But the consensus was that it was embarrassing to have to keep funding Hellstroem’s time-travel experiments.

Hellstroem himself never spoke with the press, or even other academics, but it was common knowledge that he’d been chasing this impossible dream for the past ten years, frittering away his reputation at the same time. No one understood his theories or even his basic approaches, and most thought he’d simply given up the fight and submitted to insanity.

Only Hellstroem knew that it would work; and boy, would he show them.

After one particularly bad meeting with the University’s chancellor, he decided it was time to make his move. A month later, at midnight, he was in the lab. Standing before his apparatus, to which he alone had the codes, he experienced a moment of doubt.

The ma