Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine Read online

  He named the creature “George” in honor of the old English kings, and like those men of the primitive world, he reigned supreme, like a god who embodied all living things. When he straightened those jointed limbs, George stood a full three meters tall and resembled a shimmering willow tree. That inner light of his had been more than the glow of life, The Time Traveler learned, and after those tiny mechanical crabs had coated his body with a new rubbery layer of skin, he glowed as well. That new flesh kept him warm even in a world that had been forsaken by an aged sun, and as the Earth plunged into a deeper slumber, the two of them glowed more brightly, and they shared not only a physical warmth, but a warmth of understanding.

  The Time Traveler thought of himself as a pet, at first. George had kept him alive, he had no doubt of that, and the creature that had terrified him became his salvation. The yellow pills he swallowed kept him strong and freed him from hunger, and George had fashioned a cave of stone and ice for them with a machine that apparently reorganized matter with sound. Through all this, they communicated with actions rather than words, and The Time Traveler wondered whether George could speak at all, and if there were more of its kind. If this world had been the creature’s kingdom, then his was an empty reign, and perhaps, The Time Traveler imagined, George had been the last intelligent being on Earth until the time machine had provided him with an ancient ancestor. As for The Time Traveler’s own intelligence, he felt humbled by the miracles of George’s science, such that his machine, though dead and powerless, was the only thing that prevented him from feeling, at best, like a glorified ape.

  The Eloi and the Morlocks had been products of distant centuries, though in most ways, even the English, with all their arrogance and murderous imperialism, had been more advanced. Eventually, The Time Traveler imagined that the species had dwindled with its ebbing intellectual abilities, leaving only those monstrous crabs on the beach. The Earth had been dying since Weena’s time, and George, being the magnificent creature that it was, seemed like an outsider in this place. The Time Traveler tried to explain his machine to George, and although his language was lost on the creature, his love came across, and George wept, bleeding mercuric tears from the bowls of its eyes. This was a creature of heart as well as intelligence, and when The Time Traveler asked him whether he was the last of his kind, George touched his shoulder, and within that touch passed understanding.

  They were two of a kind.

  The true meaning of George’s communication lay encased in ice, no more than one hundred meters from where the time machine had died. Those castles of ice along the beach had apparently grown naturally, but George climbed inside, and his lofty frame was dwarfed by spectacular crystal spires. The creature caressed those crystalline structures as The Time Traveler had caressed his machine, and then they shared the warmth of that castle so that the Englishman would know, at last, what George was. This was no structure of ice, but of a soft, cool glass, and it had carried George here, to the end of the Earth.

  Although George had originated from an era far in advance of the old warring Earth, the creature had been unable to repair his machine, because the death of the planet signaled the death of machines as well. It had something to do with shifting magnetic fields, George explained through the touch of flesh and glass, and even in one so advanced as this creature, curiosity had been his undoing. They were, indeed, two of a kind, though The Time Traveler still felt the sting of his own inferiority, particularly in the size and depth of his own heart.

  Their world had consisted of the two of them, but after a new machine sputtered and melted into the frozen sand, George had a fresh life to save, and the Englishman helped as much as he could, given his knowledge of Nineteenth Century medicine. The stranger looked more conventional to The Time Traveler than George had, and, in fact, it resembled a Morlock. Its machine looked uncomfortably like his own, and The Time Traveler wondered what the Morlocks might have learned while they had held his invention within the white sphinx.

  They pulled the Morlock from its machine, and it struggled as The Time Traveler had, but then George put the tiny crabs to work, and before long the creature had a new pair of lungs. There was something wrong behind its yellow eyes, and the creature gasped and tore at its chest, but before George could make things right, the Morlock convulsed, then stopped moving. They tried to get its heart pumping again, and even made use of The Time Traveler’s archaic notions of medicine, but in the end the Morlock suffered the same fate as his machine. Earlier in his journey, The Time Traveler might have killed such a creature with little remorse, but George had taught him something of the value of life, and so they burned a hole in the sand for their new companion.

  The Time Traveler knew that George had done what he could for the Morlock, and that sometimes even the efforts of such an advanced being could prove inadequate. The creature was only human, after all, a fact that aggravated even The Time Traveler, at first, despite his deep respect for the theories of Darwin. The Morlocks had adapted to a subterranean existence, just as George’s people had adapted to a future Earth. A renaissance of thought had flowered after the docile Eloi had fashioned their intellectual wasteland, and The Time Traveler could imagine George’s kind building upon the ruins of those who had come before, burying England and Eloi alike beneath a new technology that operated hand in hand with love.

  They said their good-byes to the creature who they never knew, and then they moved on, stopping to watch the horizon.

  The sun was growing larger.

  Even the lichen that had clung to the rocks before it, too, had died, had carried the scent of living things, but here, there was nothing but the scent of The Time Traveler himself, and of George, a creature who kept himself clean with the aid of small metallic box. This was just another facet of the creature’s behavior that assured The Time Traveler’s feelings of inferiority. He was bound to the old ways of doing things, but eventually he relented to the use of George’s device, and learned that the metallic box was not only an efficient tool, but pleasurable as well. As for more private matters, The Time Traveler continued to perform in the traditional manner, and he would adjourn to a secluded area of the beach when nature called.

  Life might have gone on like this for some time had it not been for the arrival of other time travelers. It seemed that the closer that they drew to the death of the Earth, the more often that new explorers would arrive. George and the Englishmen would wait on the beach, and in the distance there might be a flash or a puff of smoke, followed by devices that, at times, could scarcely be recognized as time machines at all. There were castles of glass and metallic cubes, as well as ridiculous spidery contraptions and organic machines that gasped for a final breath just as their masters had done upon arriving in this land of shattered dreams. George was able to save some of The Time Travelers, but others resisted his administrations as madness overtook them, then they escaped across the surface of the sea, only to be swallowed as the ice gave way. Their forms varied just as their machines had, and the Englishman found it remarkable how the human race would evolve through the Eons. He doubted that even Darwin himself could have imagined such fanciful creatures, and the beach became a bestiary of humankind.

  This once desolate world grew populated not only with the creatures who George had saved, but with many who survived without his help. It seemed that the Englishman was, by far, the most primitive human of the dying Earth, and despite the realization that he had invented time travel prior to these other creatures, he realized that he would never survive without George’s help. This fact also set him apart from the other creatures, as those who had survived initially, with or without George, lived independently. Many of them were occupied with their machines, but their efforts to get them operational accomplished nothing. The Englishmen could read fear and frustration upon their faces, and a few of the creatures died of exposure. George would peel their frozen bodies from their machines then bury them beneath the ice. This world became a cemetery world, and Geor
ge and the Englishman were the final pallbearers for the glories of humankind.

  The Time Traveler thought it strange that these beasts of future Earth were not more like George. While generosity was a common trait, selfishness was more universal when matters of life and death were involved. It was this that made these creatures human, for better or worse, and George and the Englishman found themselves alone despite the influx of new arrivals. While The Time Traveler, being of primitive stock, needed George to survive, the others had their own methods of providing themselves with food, clothing, and shelter. At times, their methods seemed cryptic, or worse, barbaric. This became particularly apparent upon the arrival of a creature that The Time Traveler would later call the “Queen of Hearts.”

  While the Englishman had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he had not truly come to appreciate the author’s imagination until his final journey had brought him here. This was a world that might have sprung from the pages of a children’s book, albeit a nightmarish one, or perhaps more appropriately, from the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Before the others had arrived, The Time Traveler had begun to find a certain odd beauty within the desolation, but later, as the beach filled with all manner of fantastic creatures, he was reminded of the bustling streets of London, and of what he had once thought of as the “modern world.” It had been a city of crimes and cruelties, and he had hoped to escape into better times, only to find Morlocks, or worse, a creature who literally stole human hearts.

  The Queen of Hearts was no Morlock, but a survivor that apparently cannibalized organs in order to keep itself alive. It bore no resemblance to any of Lewis Carroll’s characters beyond its odd appearance, and even that surpassed the most perverse fancies of any author. The Queen had great, crystal wings that hung motionless from its scaly back, and sharp claws like nutcrackers. Its skin appeared to be transparent, and within its massive chest all those stolen organs could be seen, pumping and quivering and digesting the bones of those who had gotten in its way. The Englishman had witnessed those executions, and while the primitive urge to fight boiled within The Time Traveler, George told him in so many ways that he needed to be strong, and that there were other arts to master than those of hostility.

  The attacks continued, and the new inhabitants of Earth fell victim, in one way or another, to the Queen. In its own technologically barbaric manner, this monster was trying to survive, and The Time Traveler imagined a future populated with such creatures, when morality would be set aside to make way for matters of survival. The others did fight back as the Queen added their mass to its own, but aside from a few minor victories, the Earth, ever hopeless, became more so for those who struggled for a new glimpse of the old world. It was entirely possible that the Queen was best suited for life here, and the Englishman imagined that despite the battles and brutalities of his own time, there would be no colder land than that which they inhabited, here, under that ailing sun.

  When George lost his own battle to the monster, the Englishman was again reminded of his own primitive nature. The Queen worked quickly, and in an instant, the thing severed one of George’s legs below the knee, then immediately used the amputated portion to extend one of its own freakish limbs. The Queen then cauterized the wound, and left George crippled, but alive. This was how it did things. The Queen relied utterly upon weapons of technology to perform its duties, and so the beach became littered with writhing creatures, helpless and half alive, as if the monster was building a farm from which it could harvest those unfortunate souls. It seemed to prefer maiming to murder, although many had died while attempting to preserve the integrity of their own bodies.

  The technology of death worked both ways, and the other time travelers had used it, with little avail, to fend off the attacks of the Queen. At any given time, there might have been a flash of blue light, or a stream of liquid ice, but the monster was seldom slowed by the discharge of defensive weapons, and in the end, the thing would grow with the fruits of its victory. The Englishman had no such technological weapons to rely upon, nor had George, but The Time Traveler had been a child of the Nineteenth Century, and as such, he knew something of self-defense. His anger had been nurtured by a world obsessed with war, and although he prided himself on being a man of peace, he proved to be no more civilized than those he loathed. The Time Traveler’s weapons were simple ones, just as those of prehistoric man had been, and he found himself tearing rocks from the ice, then flinging them at the Queen. Blood stained the ice, and to The Time Traveler’s amazement, he learned that it had not been his own, nor that of George. The Englishman had wounded the creature, and had done so without the aid of the new technology.

  Some of the other time travelers had witnessed the activities of the Englishman, and before long, it became evident that he had seeded this land with a fresh mode of destruction. Until then, those creatures on the beach had worked independently, each concentrating almost entirely upon the unattainable dream of escaping backwards through time, but the Englishman’s example had left them with a new goal, and with a very old manner in which it might be attained. They huddled together, communicating in murmurs and screams and the touch of odd chemicals, and then they overwhelmed the Queen with stones and their naked fists, but most of all with anger.

  The Queen of Hearts stained the ice, then joined the ghosts of its people. George, being a creature of limitless love, had pulled himself along the surface, but by the time he reached the Queen, the work of the others had been completed. The Englishman knew what to do next, George had taught him well, and together they laid the Queen to rest within that cold necropolis. As for the remaining time travelers, those who were healthy enough went back to their dead machines, and those who were sick or maimed waited for the end to come, until, one by one, they permitted George to help.

  His efforts rarely succeeded, and so the beach became more dead than alive.

  Inhumanity is what had made these creatures human. The future would be peopled by Morlocks, each bound to its machine, each with a soul of steel and ice. Perhaps the Earth would be better off without the complications of love or anger, but then, that had been the world of the Eloi. There had been no easy answers for the human race, but at that time, it hardly mattered.

  They sat on the beach, taking stock of George’s remaining food supply. Time travelers continued to arrive, now and then, but more often than not, the beach began to empty. Some creatures moved on, giving up hope that their useless machines would run again, some died of starvation or exposure, and a few had ended their own lives, opting not to witness what the future would bring. As for the Englishman, he learned to care for George as the creature had cared for him, and he continued to learn even as the world ran down.

  Six food pills remained, more than enough for the two of them, because the sun had just risen over the ancient world, and the Earth rained with melting ice.

  Perpetual Motion Blues

  by Harper Hull

  The Last Trip, Day 2

  The taller old man in the group opened his backpack, pulled out a ragged,

  yellow rain slicker and quickly pulled it over his arms, up onto his

  shoulders. Behind him, his three equally elderly comrades followed suit and wriggled their weary bodies into their own waterproof clothing of different fabrics and colors.

  “I hope Howard found new coats this time,” said one of the women, pulling her hood over her yellow-grey hair and tightening the cords below her neck.

  “He’ll never find new coats, Jenna! Surely you realize this by now.” The yellow-clad man snorted, throwing a withering look back across his shoulder towards his elderly wife. “Like he’ll never find that part.”

  The second woman in the group shook her head slowly and slipped her thin arm through that of the man beside her. He was leaning heavily on a thick, slightly curved stick of weathered wood. He was breathing raggedly and every step seemed to cause a grimace across his leathery, sun-beaten face. He stopped a moment and stared into the sunny blue skies above and
beyond, the woman beside him smiling at him in a mournful way and rubbing his elbow with bony fingers.

  “This is our last time, Eric.” She projected her voice to reach the man in yellow.

  “You always say that,” said Eric, turning around to face her. “It’s never the last time. You’ll travel again. Both of you! If he makes it, that is.” Eric waggled a derisive finger at the wheezing man.

  A short way off along the dusty road where the sun-scorched hills dipped to meet a narrow, dirty river a baton of lightning arrowed from the sky; a solitary black cloud was rumbling over the near horizon, a dismal blot in a canvas of blue.

  “Why, it looks like a flash storm! How unexpected!” Eric said in a sarcastic tone, rolling his eyes.