Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine Page 2

  “Do we get to play doctor at breaktime?” asked Chris. She batted her eyes at Jon and gave her lips a flirty lick.

  “You should be so lucky,” said Will with a smirk.

  “So should you,” she snapped.

  Jon clucked his tongue at them. “First,” he said, “the history lesson.” His voice took on the same tones he used when giving lectures to the undergrads. “Who knows what used to stand here?”

  Tom glanced around. “The couch was there, wasn’t it? When you had the telly over there.” He pointed to the far wall.

  “At this address,” clarified Jon. “What used to be on this spot?”

  Chris glanced around. “It’s a converted warehouse, isn’t it? They made lots of them into flats back in the ’80s.”

  “Further back.”

  “My family used to live right over in Richmond,” said Sylvester. “Most of this area was flattened during the Blitz. Pretty sure it was all just houses before then.”

  “Correct,” said Jon. “And records are damned spotty from back then, let me tell you. The house that was on this spot was vacant for almost thirty years, and there’s almost no record of the person who lived in it before then. I know it was a bachelor who was an amateur scientist, that’s about it.”

  It was Tom’s turn to smirk again. “How d’you know that?”

  Jon grabbed a slice of mushroom pizza. “I had to research around it, if that makes sense. A lot of the actual records are gone, but there were a few professional men who lived in this area. A doctor, a psychologist, the local mayor. A lot of them kept journals that make off-hand references to the man who lived in the house here. It was that social obligation of the time, gentlemen meeting every week for drinks and cigars and hours of talking.”

  “Not at all like today,” grinned Sylvester, raising his bottle. They all toasted again.

  “So who was he?” Chris said.

  “I don’t know.” Jon shrugged. “Like I said, spotty records. Can’t find any direct trace of him.”

  “Is that what you were doing when I saw you at the Hall of Records?” asked Will. “A few weeks back, when we ran into each other that time?”

  “Right. The house was owned by a Mr. Smythe out in Kent, but leased to the same gentleman for twenty-five years. In fact, it looks like he wasn’t even living there for the last nine. He’d just paid up in advance.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Again, no one knows. A couple of the journals even mention their acquaintance being absent. After a few months, they all assume he moved away, perhaps to America, and that’s that. What few signs there are of him completely vanish from the record. And the house stood empty until it got hit by a bomb in 1941.”

  Will tried to cut in, but their host waved the interruption aside and continued on. “Now,” Jon said, “show and tell.” He smiled again and darted across the room to his workbench. He opened a drawer, pulled out something wrapped in black fabric, and unfolded the cloth as he carried it back to his friends.

  Chris cooed at the sight of it. “What is it? It’s beautiful.”

  The thing across his palm was an oversized Christmas ornament, a glittering framework of metal the size of a small shoe. He shifted his hands, settled the little apparatus on top of the stack of books next to the pizza boxes, and the others bent in to examine the small device.

  At the heart of it was a small seat carved from wood, almost a saddle, and before it was a tiny console, barely two inches across, decorated with levers of what looked like glass and bone. A horizontal bar, like a throttle, stretched across the middle of the console, and the iridescent material gave it a blurry appearance, as if it were somehow unreal. Stiff wires of silver and brass criss-crossed around the saddle and the controls, forming an egg-shaped lattice.

  Tom glanced up from the apparatus. “Is this what you’ve been working on all this time?”

  “Sort of, yeah,” said Jon.

  “Is that gold, all those spirals?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Real gold?”

  Their host nodded.

  “How’d you afford this thing?” asked Chris. “It must’ve cost a bundle.”

  “We’ll get to that in a bit.”

  Sylvester reached out a hand but couldn’t bring himself to touch it. He flexed his fingers twice, stretching the tips out an inch from the curved wires. “It’s got a charge,” he commented, watching the hair on his knuckles rise.

  “Oh, yes,” said Jon.

  “Is it powered or just static electricity?”

  “We’ll get to that in a bit, too.

  Chris hadn’t brought herself to touch the model yet either, but her nose was a hair from the metal latticework. Her bangs were hovering in the cloud of static electricity. “This is really amazing,” she said, giving Jon an approving glance.

  He smiled again. He was all smiles tonight. “Now, finally, physics class.” He took a drink from his own beer, followed it with a bite of the pizza slice he hadn’t touched yet, and then another sip. “Let’s talk about time travel.”

  A groan danced across the group, with a few smiles. “Hang on,” said Tom. “I need to use the loo before we start the debate.” He slipped the empty bottle back into the six-pack and marched across the flat.

  “Time travel,” repeated Jon when his friend returned. “A fine group of minds like this one must have a few thoughts on it.”

  “I thought David Tennant was the best Doctor Who ever,” said Chris.

  “Agreed,” said Will. They tapped their bottles across the table and drank.

  Sylvester reclined on the couch. “Time travel’s possible, but it’s only possible in that air-turning-into-gold way.”

  “Which really means it’s not possible,” said Tom, drying his hands on his pant legs. He dropped back on the couch, bouncing Chris into the air. “It’s just a trick of the math, not real physics.”

  Chris shrugged. “Isn’t all physics just a trick of math?”

  “No, that’s statistics,” said Will with a smile. They all laughed and clinked their bottles again.

  “Seriously, though,” said Jon, “saying it isn’t possible means gravity isn’t possible, and I think we all agree on gravity, yes?”

  Chris snapped her fingers. “What about a Tipler cylinder?”

  “Exactly,” said their host. “Tipler proved it’s entirely possible to build a time machine. We just don’t have the engineering know-how to do it right now.”

  “Hawking says time travel is bollocks,” emphasized Tom, “even with Tipler cylinders.” He pulled the last beer and popped the cap.

  “Hero of Alexandria was the most brilliant man of his age,” said Jon. “A certified genius who thought the steam engine was just a useless toy for kids.”

  “Point being?”

  “Almost every credible physicist will tell you there’s nothing in physics that says time travel can’t happen,” said their host. “They just don’t know any practical way of making it happen and they don’t like the implications. Two hundred years ago they said powered flight was impossible. Then they said man could never go faster than the speed of sound. Hell, sixty years ago you needed a computer the size of a gymnasium just to do addition.”

  Tom shook his head again. “Still bollocks. So says the chronology protection conjecture.”

  Will coughed out a laugh. “The what?”

  “Try reading a book with no pictures sometime, mate,” said Tom. “A simple proof. If time travel is—or ever will be—possible, where are the time travelers? Every moment of history should be mobbed with them, so where are they?”

  “Well,” said Sylvester, “I think Jon’s telling us they’re right here.” He drummed out a quick fanfare on the tabletop with his knuckles and gestured at the metal latticework on the table.

  They all looked at the gleaming model again, then back up their host. They’d reached the crux of the lecture. “So, one night about nine months ago, I was sitting right where you are, Chris. It was a T
hursday, I had the TV on, and something appeared right there on the coffee table next to my feet.”

  They all paused in their dinner, except for Tom who was busy draining the last of his third beer. He let the bottle drop away from his face. “What d’you mean, something appeared?”

  “To be exact,” said Jon, “it appeared about seven inches above the coffee table and fell next to my foot. If there hadn’t been a few copies of The Observer there it probably would’ve broken on impact.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, it appeared?” he repeated.

  “I mean one minute it wasn’t here and the next minute it was. There was a little breeze, like someone slammed the front door, and this thing was there.”

  The corners of Sylvester’s mouth tugged up a bit. Chris tilted her head and pulled her hand back. She hadn’t brought herself to touch it yet. “Like someone put it here when you weren’t looking?”

  “No,” he said. “It appeared. Right out of thin air.”

  “Bollocks,” said Tom with a grin. “It’s a toy.”

  “It’s a stealth rugby ball,” said Sylvester. “What are you getting at here, Jon? Just say it and get it over with.”

  Their host cleared his throat and set down his bottle. “What I’m saying is back in 1895 somebody brilliant lived here. Somebody years ahead of his time. He lived in a house which stood right where this apartment is now. And that man figured out how to travel in time.”

  Tom rolled his eyes. They all shifted in their chairs.

  “I’m serious,” said Jon. “He figured out how to do it and he even built a model time machine as an experiment, to see if it would work. Then one day, once it was done, he pushed the little white lever there and sent this machine over a century into the future.”

  Chris tilted her head. “Why 1895?”

  “What?”

  “You said the building was leased to the same person for twenty-five years. Why say he did it in 1895?”

  Jon grinned. He crouched next to the table and oh-so-carefully took the thin framework of the machine into his hands, ignoring the sparks that leaped to his palms. The machine rolled in his grip, and his index finger came down awkwardly across the brass plate that made up the base of the model. Etched into the metal were bold Roman numerals, overlined by his slim finger.

  MDCCCXCV

  “Come on,” said Tom. “This is nonsense.”

  “Oh, no,” said Jon. “Nonsense would be if I reverse-engineered this thing and spent the past two months building a full-sized one down in the garage.”

  They froze.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “You want to see it?”

  Tom laughed first, and Will joined him. Sylvester chuckled. “Christ, for a moment there I almost believed you.”

  “It’s right downstairs. I’ve made a few adjustments from the model, but I think it will work.”

  Tom coughed back his laughs. “So what are you going to do with your machine, Jon? Travel through time and space righting wrongs?”

  “I thought I’d start with the obvious,” he said. “I figured I’d go back and see who the guy was who invented this.”

  Will laughed again and saluted their host with the last of his beer.

  “Well, if this is it for tonight’s entertainment,” said Sylvester, “I should get going. I’ve got a pile of quizzes to grade from a friend’s class I’m covering.” He gave Jon an arched eyebrow.

  “Yeah, true that,” agreed Tom. “I’ve still got half a dozen papers to go through.”

  Will vanished to the bathroom while Sylvester piled the pizza boxes and the empties together. He took a last look at the glittering apparatus and shook his head. “It is a nice piece of work.”

  Jon bowed his head. “Thanks.”

  “Now get your damned arse back to classes before Herbert decides he doesn’t need you.”

  Tom had paused by one of the family photos at the door. It showed a lean, sideburned man in well-worn clothes standing with a delicate, narrow-hipped woman. Her hair was a wild mane which spilled across her shoulders and tickled the head of a six-year old Jon standing between them. All three smiled at the camera.

  He nodded at the picture. “Who is she again, Jon? Your aunt or something?”

  “Something like that. Only met her once. I think they were more distant friends of the family or something.”

  “She’s a hottie, for sure. Got a real Eurasian Keira Knightley thing going for her, you know?”

  “You do realize she’s almost twenty years older than you, right?”

  “So she’s a hottie milf, so what? Your uncle’s a lucky man. He paid for your uni, too, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” said Jon. “He thought I’d do well in physics.” He gave a little chuckle of his own.

  Sylvester, Tom, and Will made their way out the door, giving sly winks as Chris offered to stay behind a bit longer and finish cleaning up. Jon stashed half a pizza in the fridge while she set the bottles by the trash. He ducked into the bathroom himself, and when he came back she was crouched in front of the model again. She glanced up at him, standing with the easy smile on his face.

  “Would you like to hold it?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You won’t hurt it. It’s a bit more solid than it looks.”

  She flinched for a moment as the latticework sparked in her hands. It had a good weight. It felt solid. Real. She tilted it in her hands, holding it like an oversized eggshell, and examined the small time machine from new angles. “Jon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you show us this?” She’d turned it enough to see the baseplate, and all the engraving there.

  J.M.W.

  MDCCCXCV

  She met his eyes. “Aren’t these your initials?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you hide them?”

  “Like all this wasn’t hard enough to believe?”

  “So you made this thing yourself. It’s just a joke?”

  Jon smiled. It was a bright, Christmas morning smile. “It’s not a joke.” He took the apparatus from her, wrapped it back in its black cloth, and set it down in the drawer. “Getting late, and tomorrow’s a big day. Lots to do.”

  She tried, as she often did, to tug at the buttons of his shirt. “I could make sure you get to bed.”

  He stopped her hands, as he often did, and gave her forehead a kiss.

  “Aren’t American college boys supposed to be completely sex-crazed? You’re setting a horrible example for your countrymen.”

  “Out!”

  She gave a loud, dramatic sigh and marched to the door. Jon opened it for her and she paused to look at the photo.

  “You know, I always thought you looked a lot like him.”

  “Yeah,” said Jon. “I do, don’t I?”

  Love and Glass

  by Michael Scott Bricker

  The creature held The Time Traveler’s lungs as the incisions healed beneath the touch of the thing’s organic machines. Like this being, the Morlocks had been children of technology, but they had been fumbling, unsophisticated monsters, so unlike the graceful soul who shared his company at the end of the world. Curiosity had driven The Time Traveler forward, beyond England and the old wars, beyond the Morlocks and his dear, sweet Weena, beyond that desolate beach with its scuttling crabs, and he found himself here, teetering at the edge of human existence under a dying umber sun. It had been foolish to come so far, but his successes had coloured his judgment, such that he had never considered that the machine might cease to function within the confines of some distant future. This business of traveling within the fourth dimension had gifted The Time Traveler with a godlike power, but with it came the ease associated with omnipotence. In Weena’s world, his intelligence had been supreme. Now, in this alien land of ice and desolation, he was a prisoner, and his time machine lay frozen in the sand, cold and dead as the Earth itself.

  He had watched from his machine as the days grew longer, and as the rot
ation of the planet slowed, complex life vanished in favour of that which suited a dying world. Those monstrous crabs had ruled the beach during the twilight years of Earth, when the fat and feeble sun crept across the sky in century-long arcs, but life feeds upon life, and when that sun could no longer support most of the lingering vegetation, the crabs succumbed, leaving only the dull lichen that clung to rocks along the seashore. Those rocks had grown smooth and mirrored from eons of pounding surf, but eventually even the sea lay still, disturbed only by a rare breeze; the final breaths of Earth against its ice-caked surface. It had snowed here before The Time Traveler moved on for the last time, and those delicate flakes had reminded him of home, and of how, so long before, this dim, dying land, had been the realm of Queen Victoria.

  Without widespread vegetation, the oxygen started to go, yet The Time Traveler moved forward again, gasping for air as pinpoint stars blossomed through the eternal twilight above. Even as he adjusted the levers of the time machine, frantically attempting to reverse his journey as his breaths grew dangerously short, he admired the beach, and how a group of ice crystals had grown into towers and arches, like a city of glass; empty, silent, and alone. The Time Traveler wondered if he had lost his reason, but when the machine began to fail, all his thoughts were upon his beautiful monstrosity of glass and steel. The machine had become his child, and although he loathed technology, he realized that he was a product of the machine as surely as the machine had been a product of his own mind. The Morlocks were the offspring of the science harnessed here, by the man who might conceivably have fathered them all.

  The Time Traveler climbed from the machine as it took its place in the dying Earth, and he kissed its cold surface, then said goodbye to the friend that had sealed his fate. He first saw the creature, then, scurrying along the beach with insect-like precision, and against the endless dusk, the thing glowed with a weird internal energy. Everything about the creature looked exaggerated, from its long triple jointed limbs to its colourless saucer eyes to the nose that dominated its placid face. It stopped, and they shared a moment of mutual wonderment. The Time Traveler’s memories grew fuzzy after that. There had been the electric touch of its spidery fingers, the cool injections, and those tiny machines, crawling over his body like a cloud of miniature crabs. He knew that his lungs would be insufficient in such a world, and just as he was pondering his death by suffocation, or by the hands of that improbable creature, he watched, numb and motionless, as his glistening lungs were pulled from the cavern of his chest. There had been no blood spilled, no pain; only vague nightmares come alive. Something warm and alive took the place of his lungs, and it crawled within him and nested at the base of his throat, where it offered him life in exchange for the shelter of his ruined body.