Life–Work of Professor Muntz, The

The Life–Work of Professor Muntz by Murray Leinster - Multiple time-tracks lead to the Ajax Brewery! Nobody would ordinarily have thought of Mr. Grebb and Professor Muntz in the same breath, so to speak, yet their careers impinged upon each other remarkably. Mr. Grebb was a large, coarse person, with large coarse manners and large coarse pores on-an oversized nose. He drove a beer truck for the Ajax Brewing Company, and his ene dominant desire was to get something on Joe Hallix, who as head of the delivery service for Ajax, was his immediate boss. Professor Muntz, on the other hand, was the passionately shy and mouselike author of "The Mathematics of Multiple TimeTracks," who vanished precipitately when he found himself famous. In that abstruse work he referred worriedly to experimental evidence of parallel time-tracks, and other physicists converged upon him with hopeful gleams in their eyes, and he fled. Professor Muntz couldn't talk to people. But they wanted to know about his exp?riments. They couldn't make any. They didn't know how to start, and to them the whole thing had been abstract theory. But he had made experiments and they wanted to ask about them, so he ran away in an agony of shyness. That was that. No one human being could seem less likely to be affected by Professor Muntz' life-work than Mr. Grebb, and no life-work could seem more certainly immune to Mr. Grebb than Professor Muntz'. But life is full of paradoxes, and the theory of multiple time-cracks is even fuller. Therefore...