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

  It was Muriel who proposed. She asked that he make them legitimate. It was only after he said no that she confessed she missed her period.

  “You seem so distant lately,” Jameson’s mother said. “Is everything okay?” They were eating Shepherd’s Pie.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, moving mashed potatoes, browned with mutton, around his plate.

  “A woman can tell when another woman is causing trouble, especially when that women is your mother,” she said.

  “It’s just-”

  “Do you love her?” his mother asked.

  “I think so.” He said.

  “If you’re not sure you don’t. You love me, right?”

  “Of course!” he said, lifting his head. She shuffled over to him, put her hands on his shoulder.

  “Of course you do. You’re a good boy. Some naughty girl just has her hooks in you, doesn’t she?”

  When Jameson’s mother died, he decided to hide his grief in the past, with Muriel. He had enough in her will to buy the place he had always lived in, the family home. Jameson never married her, but they lived together for a while. When their son was born, she named him “Jameson,” the son of James. She got a job as a secretary at the firm where he was an accountant. He hoped he could have a future here, found an old box, and took apart the time machine, prying up a board in the attic to hide it.

  Muriel made him dinner every night. She had lunch with him every day at work, and shooed away all other co-workers who tried to sit with them. She bought his clothes, starched his shirts, and watched him sleep. If he had to work late, she’d sit outside his office and pretend to be his secretary, smiling through the glass at him. She bought him gifts, planned special surprises, told him constantly how much she loved him. She begged Jameson to read to her, to rock her in her chair as she knit booties for baby Jameson. Finally he had enough. He said words like ‘suffocating’ and ‘needy.’ He said words like ‘crazy’ and ‘sociopath’ after she hit a woman that brought Jameson a late night memo at work, and he left. He left her, he left baby Jameson, he left the Legoland Time Machine, and walked away from it all.

  Spree

  by John Medaille

  The math is impeccable and inexplicable. The numbers fit themselves precisely, row by row, with no remainders. The numbers know where they come from: some numerological breeding ground of infinitely complex forms, and know where they go: some incalculable afterlife. The math encompasses everything at once, accurately, down to the hundred-thousandth decimal place.

  And the math enables The Time Traveler to build the Time Machine. Its construction is a simple affair and uses common household items. Vinegar and baking soda are both crucial components and they generate the catalytic energy necessary to open the Time Vortex, much in the same way that one can wire a lemon to a light bulb and cause a feeble glow. The Time Traveler connects this to a spindly web of coat hangers and aluminum foil, and hooks the whole contraption to a rewired Texas Instruments calculator as a control panel. When finished, the Time Machine only takes up a small corner of his garage.

  The Time Traveler switches the Time Machine on and it makes a low, burbley hum, and after punching in various atomic weights, universal constants and certain angles of descent, The Time Traveler is able to see through the faintly orange mish-mash of the Time Window to all things future and past. He sees the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Niels Bohr’s dirty apartment.

  The Time Traveler raises his hand and attempts to reach out through the distant orangenesses of the Veil of Time, but crackling discharges of electroshock prevent him and singe his hand, turning the fingernails a little brown. The Time Traveler takes some elementary readings and finds that time is a particle-wave and his hand cannot go through the Veil because it is asynchronous to the wave. But The Time Traveler knows that time is a function of speed and, theoretically, if something should be going fast enough to pass between the crests of the Time Wave, then that thing might penetrate the Borders of Time, and becomes a Traveler Through Time. With this in mind, The Time Traveler goes and buys an automatic baseball pitching machine.

  Dragging the box in through the garage door, cutting the tape and shoveling through the burial mound of styrofoam nubbins, The Time Traveler realizes that the baseball pitcher is now the most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the laboratory, possibly including the Time Machine itself.

  Plugging in the electronic pitcher, The Time Traveler attempts a series of experiments, shooting balls against the Time Vortex, but even at the pitchers maximum setting of 150 miles per hour, they fail to puncture the Time Wave and ricochet off, leaving only a smell of scorched stone and a pile of smoking baseballs. The Time Traveler tinkers with the pitcher, increasing the torque and velocity of its engine and by the little, sickly hours of the early morning he is finally able to successfully launch three Major League regulation baseballs into the late Mesozoic Era.

  The Time Traveler discovers that 824 is the magic number, just above the sound barrier. Anything travelling at or in excess of 824 miles per hour is able to pass through the Veil of Time. So one might, in theory, travel through time if one could accelerate a projectile to the Time Barrier speed, one can pass that object through the Time Vortex and the projectile, in essence, becomes a Time Traveler.

  Like a bullet, for instance.

  A little man with a long leather coat and a perfectly rectangular mustache like a black dash beneath his nose is standing on an onion crate on a street corner of a city that is damp and European, smelling of coal smoke and wet iron. The man is yelling at a small congregation of street corner people; a butcher, a baker, a legless veteran blinded by chemicals who pushes himself around on a trolley with a stick. The little man contorts his face into many funny shapes: a death pang shape, a difficult orgasm face, a bowel movement face. He chops his hands into the air many times as he speaks.

  The man is Hitler.

  Fifty feet above Hitler and one hundred feet diagonal to him, a wobbly orange circle, about the size of a large pizza, dimensionalizes open. Hitler sees it for a second, then stammers in German. To him it looks like a weak, fetal sun, and seems to have a person somewhere in it, and then Hitler sees a flash, and then Hitler’s skull separates and divides and Hitler’s brain, the finger-sized shrapnel of it still carrying, for a millisecond, rushing electrical lightnings that are the thoughts of his thoughts, bounces on the cobblestone street and Hitler is dead and falls down.

  It is the first time The Time Traveler has ever fired a gun.

  Subtract one.

  Add fifty five million.

  Simple math.

  The Time Traveler turns the Time Machine off with a quiet splat of diodes, and feels a light blue bruise on his shoulder where the butt of the sniper rifle smacked him. His garage has not changed in the least. There is still a pile of flaccid bicycle tires on the floor and many grease stains. Hanging above him there is still an automatic garage door opener that has not worked since 1988 and has become a small city of spiders. There are still cans of paint and varnish under his tool bench that still emit faint gamma rays of unfulfilled sadness.

  The Time Traveler had partially expected the universe to implode when he killed Hitler, had, in fact, calculated that there was a 36.875% chance of that happening. That answers that. He records the finding in his notebook. “11:18 AM. No implosion.”

  The Time Traveler finds the set of Encyclopedia Britannica in a box marked ‘Teddy’s Things’ in the back of the garage. They are the set he was given for his eighth birthday and he remembers unwrapping them and immediately looking up his favorite things in the world when he was precisely eight: Anklyosauruses and giant bats. Now the books are a little bloated with old mold and he goes to the volume marked G through K and tries to look up Hitler, and who is not there. Not even a wizened paragraph, no grainy photo of a scowling Austrian. No Hitler, Adolph. 1889-1928. Failed Artist and soapbox maniac, de-brained by an unidentified assailant one nasty and overcast morning. Nothing. The Time Trav
eler looks up Nazi and it doesn’t exist either; he can’t find it anywhere between narwhale and Neanderthal. He looks up swastika and it says An equilateral cross with arms bent at right angles comprising a symbol thought to have originated circa 2000 BC in proto-India, generally believed to be a good luck charm.

  The Time Traveler is about to put the encyclopedias back into the box, slide the box into a crawlspace, take two antacids and go to bed when he decides to look up World War Two, just in case, and found that it was still there, forty-seven pages of it.

  In 1945, Xavier Mobuto, an epileptic silver mine foreman, had risen from obscurity in the Congo, uniting Africa and chasing all European powers screaming off the continent and had then become the head of a cult with apocalyptic overtones, and embarked on a campaign of global domination, devastating southern Europe, pulverizing Persia, and even successfully invading and occupying Florida for a decade before the Allies: the U.S., U.S.S.R., Japan and Germany, finally vanquished Mobuto in 1955 after a long and bitter struggle. Mobuto was shot sixty-six times and every inch of Africa was burned down. Seventy-nine million people died.

  Seventy-nine million from World War 2.2 minus fifty-five million from World War 2.1 is twenty-four million. An unacceptable remainder.

  The Time Traveler realizes, of course, that time was not only a function of speed but of concurrent temporal stresses and personality and that they exert fully measurable tendrils of need and urge and that the diminishing of history in one Time Unfolding will be rectified by compensation in another.

  This was correct. This was fine.

  There would, there must, be a Time Eventuality where Hitler dies and was not replaced. There had to be an acceptable outlier on the probability curve.

  The math told him so.

  Luckily, the Time Traveler has accounted for this possibility, and is not so very tired, and has purchased an entire box of bullets.

  The Time Window opens over a green bacterial jungle, there is a crack and the wasp whine of a speeding bullet, and a large man pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones crumbles into mud, made all of the sudden boneless by a distant god.

  By 1948, the New Aztec Empire had subjugated the entire Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Rim. Human sacrifice returned to fashion. Emperor Teknozuma and his whole high command dined on human hearts and cognac in a photo from the Associated Press. The White House was demolished and a sixty-story pyramid was erected on its foundation. Death squads from the Order of the Winged Serpent cleaved open the chests of the Windsors with blades of black volcanic glass. China invented Atomic Weapons and turned Mexico into a glowing pit.

  Ninety-three million dead.

  Recalibrate Time Coordinates.

  The Time Traveler assassinates Teknozuma when he is sixteen, five years before his coronation as Quetzecoatl Returned. Blood dribbles upon the Jaguar Throne.

  Then the Americans came. By 1952, hungry and lean and absolutely furious from a twenty year long Great Depression and under the leadership of President Ickes they invaded Europe, South America, Japan and West Africa. They established what they considered to be a benevolent monopoly, while shipping back to the States uranium, cocaine, Rembrandts, uncut diamonds, domestic servants and bullion by the cubic ton. The entire Coliseum was transported, stone by stone, to Coogan’s Bluff, Virginia.

  Unimaginable wealth and splendor collapsed after a decade under its own decadence and ultra inflation. The U.S.S.R. invaded and relieved America of its treasure. The second Great Depression is still going on today. 103 million died.

  Recalculate.

  The Time Traveler kills Mao, Mussolini, Tojo, Kennedy, Khruschev, Khomeni, Castro and Che. He kills Churchill, Idi Amin, Nixon, de Gaulle, Jim Jones, Charles Manson and Queen Elizabeth II. He kills Timothy Leary, Oswald, the Rosenbergs, the Arch-Duke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, Ronald Reagan, Orson Welles, Josef Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Einstein, Franco and George Bernard Shaw. And scores and scores of people he’s never heard of until the day he kills them. There was Bill Plimpton, President of the Reconfederated States of America, Marcos Dominguez, the Butcher of Brazil, Aba Disrabi, who would someday be worshipped as God by half the population of the Earth and Archibald Itzker, who was the one and only King of the World for two and a half years. The Time Traveler sees the rise and fall, by his own doing, of the most brutal administrations in history, until the next history is made: The Blood Cross Republic, The Yaku Dynasty, The People’s Republic of Australia, The Free Love Party, the Exxon Guard and the Brotherhood of Satan. And they all find nukes. If they don’t, they find something worse: The Ion Bomb, the Death Ray or the Scarlet Wobblies. And if they can’t find those, they become crafty at making pikes exactly the right size for heads. The Irish burn Manchester to the ground and the fires don’t die down for three months. The Chippewa take Minnesota first while the Canadians ravage the Eastern Seaboard. The Zulus take Capetown but it is wired to self destruct. Hong Kong invades China. Hawaii and Alaska bash each others brains in. Siberia is the last place left on earth that doesn’t glow in the dark. It is pandemonium. And The Time Traveler shoots and shoots and shoots.

  At this point, The Time Traveler has killed 356 dictators, despots, demagogues, demigods, bureaucrats, plutocrats, democrats, megalomaniacs, egomaniacs, psycho-maniacs, presidents, prime ministers and god-kings, antichrists and false messiahs, moguls of industry, emperors and fuhrers, caesars, kaisers and czars, sultans, sheiks, tyrants, tycoons and generalissimos, vice-superintendents, misunderstood philosopher-kings, fatally ambitious duchesses and misguided boy-pharaohs.

  And it isn’t working, the total death toll keeps going up.

  211 million dead, mostly starved, in the Second Crimean War.

  576 million dead by strangulation in the Thugee Uprising of 1964.

  1.2 billion dead during World War Eight in 1925.

  Nowhere, in not one single variance, has The Time Traveler found an acceptable ultimate body count under the original total of 55 million, and he isn’t about to make up for the difference. It goes against the Law of Averages and all Newtonian math, but it is true. One must reset the universe. If not Hitler, then him, and The Time Traveler is not and does not seek to be Adolph Hitler.

  Oh, no. Oh, no. I categorically refuse, he thinks.

  It is time to abort the experiment.

  Abort the whole can of worms.

  Abort.

  In 1908, Gustav Abelson, a barley farmer, is tinkering with an ancient McCormick Reaper, cursing it softly in Norwegian. He kicks the machine with a hobnail boot when a floating orange moon blobs open behind him, over his west field. Mr. Abelson curses the machine when the engine doesn’t turn over, damning it and all of its offspring for a thousand generations to wander without rest in a wilderness of bears and broken tractor parts. There is a brief crack in the sky, and his head explodes.

  Gustav Abelson is The Time Traveler’s great-great-grandfather.

  The Time Traveler turns off the Time Machine and it warbles down. He is expecting to de-exist in a minute and he closes his eyes and waits for it to come. He thinks his life will wink out, perhaps with a pop and a flatulent poof and the musty air of the garage will fill the vacuum of where he no longer is, and the world will go back to Hitler and 55 million dead.

  After five minutes, it hasn’t happened yet. He gets up on achey legs and goes to the wall of the garage, where there hangs the hubcap of a 1956 Studebaker, in the same place where it was hung by The Time Traveler’s father and where it has hung for all of the Time Traveler’s life. He has never touched it before. It looks like the infant of a UFO and he examines his oblong reflection in the decayed chrome of the hubcap’s flying saucerian face.

  It takes him quite a while to notice it, but The Time Traveler comes to realize that he is slightly taller, about three quarters of an inch or so, and that his eyes have changed from blue to light hazel.

  Fascinating, he thinks.

  The Time Traveler assassinates his paternal great grandmother, a plump hausfrau in Bell Point,
New York, and his hair darkens by two shades and he is suddenly diabetic.

  He decommissions one of his great-great-great-grandfathers just to see what happens, and although he stares into the mirrored surface of the hubcap for a long, long time, he records no observable differences, but he will never notice that his teeth have become much, much worse.

  He executes his grandfather, a mean and sullen old man who he had known and never liked him, and The Time Traveler, all at once gains an exceptional musical ability, and he’s never had any before. He listens to the Top Forty on the gummy old ghetto blaster with the broken tape deck on the tool bench near the socket wrenches, and he nods along appreciatively, tasting elements he had never known were there before, seeing the music in intertwining curlicues of pastel pointillism.

  He murders grandmaw too, because it hardly matters anymore really, and he gains a Roman nose and a much nicer chin, but loses a couple of IQ points. Not many, maybe two or three at most, but he can no longer remember the capital of Surinam.

  This ought to do the trick, thinks The Time Traveler.

  His mother looks almost the same as she always did. He has so far avoided slaughtering her side of the family, due to some lingering, unscientific affection. She is in the backyard of this very same house, only forty-four years previously, before she had him. She is hanging up sheets to dry on a clothesline with those wooden, springless clothespins that aren’t made anymore. He wonders if they still make the springy kind, thinks sorry, mommy, and splatters her all over a dust coverlet.