Otherworldly Maine by Noreen Doyle Page A

screaming. That night, the house went up in flames.
    In the aftermath of these events—the disappearance of Griswold Masterson, the discovery of the cylinder, the loss of Miss Ward’s grip on reality, the destruction of the house—and as news spread out into the world, scientists and sociologists and theologians hastily began postulating theories. A few of these ideas were incorporated into the summary presented at a recent meeting of the American Board of Science in Washington, D.C.:
    â€œDue to the absence of conclusive data, and the seclusion and secrecy in which Griswold Masterson chose to work throughout his life, and because so much of his research was destroyed, our inquiry, though arduous, has been, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it is our shared opinion that Mr. Masterson achieved the ability to project himself into the physical form and mental development of his own infancy, and that he used this means to renew his future. That is to say, he opened the door to what he called the ‘Theoretical Future’ not by achieving longevity, but by reducing his age as the framework of life around him progressed at its usual rate. This means that Masterson, who was sixty-three years old at the time of this experiment, by regressing, made available to himself another seventy-two years (based on current life expectancy for a male in this country) . . . . The idea seems to have been to enable himself to observe the future at least seventy years hence, with his records of his first sixty-three years meant to serve as the link between his lifetimes. Of course, this would leave open the possibility of his regressing to infancy again and again—a capability he may not have originally anticipated . . . . Tragically, however, we will probably never know precisely how he accomplished this, for the machine Beryl Ward found has disappeared, and the baby Griswold is dead.”
    While the theory of the American Board of Science has the weight of evidence behind it, the editors of this magazine must point out that there is an important consideration that has not yet been addressed: the human element. Beryl Ward had apparently fallen desperately in love with Griswold Masterson. And faced with the prospect of having to watch the man she loved slowly bloom into a youngster—and then into a young man—while she grew shriveled and weak (unaware of the universal implications of his experiments), she may have placed a pillow over the child’s mouth until it wailed and clawed no longer. (Miss Ward is locked behind bars in an institution for the criminally insane.) Thus a basic human emotion may have been responsible for our being separated forever from the full implications of Masterson’s experiments. This, as we see it, is the ultimate irony, the ultimate tragedy of the life and times of Griswold Masterson.
    The sheriff’s office is much too close to the real world to bend to the hypotheses of the intellectual community, so they have simply listed Griswold Masterson as a missing person. The child in the cylinder? From the pulpit Rev. Leopold Ossip has rendered the opinion, on more than one occasion, that the infant was the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Masterson and Miss Ward, and that in her madness she murdered her own son. The story she told to the sheriff, Ossip proclaimed, was the invention of an unholy “and therefore diseased” mind. While much of Marshville seems to have accepted the reverend’s view, the rest of the world does not agree—judging from the many interpretations that have surfaced on the significance of the child. The most remarkable aspect of the entire affair, however, may be the steel cylinder. While its whereabouts has never been firmly established, a newspaper article (no date was indicated) clipped from the Brattleboro Gazette , published in Saskatchewan, Canada, and sent to our offices by an anonymous reader, could well have some bearing on the