A Journey on Board a Timecraft

Book excerpt: While still a little boy Delham Yorg loses both his parents in a rail accident. His unscrupulous aunt avails herself of the opportunity and manages to inherit the whole of his grandfather’s wealth, leaving him without a penny to live on. Being fond of sports cars and speed driving he is delighted to see on T.V. a science-fiction ‘time craft’ that can go faster than light. While apprenticed as a mechanic in a garage, he is fired for damaging a client’s car by driving faster than normal in trying it. He works as a salesman in a bookshop, becomes a self-taught philosopher among books, but soon has to lose his new job because he makes love to a female client inside the shop during the absence of his employer. Meanwhile his aunt falls and dies on the steps of the grandfather’s house she has usurped. Being the next of kin and the only relative of the old woman he inherits all the fortune she has stolen. Some of her servants charge him with killing her. Also he is suspected of having committed a number of crimes, including the use of carbombs to blow up schools and hospitals. His girl friend, too, is in trouble: she is accused by her brother-in-law of having murdered her husband. Both lovers take to flight on what his imagination saw as a ‘time craft’. The outcome: a tragedy he could neither forecast nor help.