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the bodies first.
    Water had moved them, too, for the last of the big snow melted suddenly, and for a couple of days at least there must have been a small river raging through that gorge. The head of what they are calling the “lunatic” got rolled downstream, bashed against rocks, partly buried in silt. Dogs had chewed and scattered what they speak of as “the man’s fur coat.”
    It will remain a lunatic in a fur coat, for they won’t have it any other way. So far as I know, no scientist ever got a look at the wreckage, unless you glorify the coroner by that title. I believe he was a good vet before he got the job. When my speech was more or less regained, I was already through trying to talk about it. A statement of mine was read at the inquest—that was before I could talk or leave the hospital. At this ceremony society officially decided that Harper Harrison Ryder, of this township, shot to death his wife Leda and an individual, male, of unknown identity, while himself temporarily of unsound mind, and died of knife injuries received in a struggle with the said individual of unknown, and so forth.
    I don’t talk about it because that only makes people more sorry for me, to think a man’s mind should fail so, and he not yet sixty.
    I cannot even ask them: “What is truth?” They would only look more saddened, and I suppose shocked, and perhaps find reasons for not coming to see me again.
    They are kind. They will do anything for me, except think about it.

THE HERMIT GENIUS OF MARSHVILLE
    Tom Tolnay
    WARNING: This exclusive report is fully protected by copyright and appears in this magazine for the first time anywhere.
    EDITOR’S NOTE: The documents, tape recordings, articles, and investigative accounts herein represent, to our knowledge, the first published effort to draw into an intelligible whole the emerging story of Griswold Masterson, popularly known as “The Hermit Genius of Marshville.” While admittedly incomplete, these materials provide a framework through which our readers may gain an impression of the ideas and life of the secretive, eccentric, self-made philosopher/scientist.
    EQMM ( Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine ) became aware of the Hermit Genius the way many scientific discoveries are made—by chance. Last summer an editorial assistant, on vacation in Maine, went fishing in a ten-foot powerboat near the mouth of the Peace River. The young man got caught in a squall, and it looked as though he was going to be swamped, when a returning lobster boat spotted him and pulled his craft to safety. Afterwards, the assistant insisted the lobsterman join him for something to eat and drink. In a local tavern the two men had their tongues loosened by several mugs of ale, and that’s when the strange doings at Marshville first came up.
    When the story of the Hermit Genius got back to us, naturally we were highly skeptical. But having let more than one major story get away from us over the years, we reluctantly decided to send a reporter † up to Maine to check it out. The decision proved to be well worth the investment, for she uncovered a story of international—we might even say, universal—implications.
    At a very early age—three or four—legend has it that Griswold Masterson got hold of several science fiction magazines and within a period of months had taught himself to read. By five or six, it is said, he had gone through much of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells at a local lending library outside Marshville. Masterson apparently was greatly moved by the realization that each of us is stuck in our own time—that our finiteness precludes our partaking of the scientific advantages of succeeding ages. And at some point he must have made a childhood pledge to himself that one day he would overcome such limitations in his own life.
    Before attaining maturity, Masterson began conducting experiments in the basement of the house in