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

  He doesn’t recognize a single bit of himself in the hubcap anymore, not the eyes or the mouth or the ears. His name has changed, and he is having a difficult time recalling what it was before.

  The Time Traveler is inventing a Time Machine of some sort. He is unbending coathangers and hot-gluing them into some sort of misbegotten web, like a spider with a birth defect. As The Time Traveler flits around with the pliers and the glue gun, in a dim corner of the garage behind him, an orangey emanation shutters open, making the cobwebs around it tremble wispily.

  The Time Traveler is inside of the orangeness too, and he raises a hunting rifle, the barrel of which cannot extend through the Time Window but the bullet of which can and does and it blasts the earlier Time Traveler’s head apart like a hammered cantaloupe, and The Time Traveler slumps and crashes over into the half-made Time Machine. The Time Traveler burns his inner arm with the nozzle of the hot glue gun, but by that time The Time Traveler isn’t there to notice it.

  And suddenly The Time Traveler is black.

  This isn’t working, he thinks, but an experiment is only verifiable if it is repeatable. And he reloads.

  The Time Traveler suicides his earlier self again, and he’s white again. He looks somewhat Greek.

  Again, and he’s a fifty-six year old divorcee named Vivian with pendulous breasts.

  Again, and he’s a nine year old Hindu boy.

  Again, and he’s a Chinese guy, maybe a Korean.

  He tries again, thinking, maybe if I only wing myself, maybe I won’t be able to build the Time Machine, and instantaneously after he fires he is a one armed Chinese guy, maybe a one-armed Korean, and he can shoot just fine, amazingly well, in fact, with only his left hand.

  Oh, thinks The Time Traveler.

  At this point The Time Traveler has killed, according to his tally, 3,323 people, including his mother, his father, many great-great-grandpappys, distant ancestors, rumored progenitors, rusty foregoers, pater familiae, and fifty-six different versions of himself. He has wads of cotton plugged deep into his ears and a massive hematoma, a Jupiterian shade of purple, the size of a dinner plate on his shoulder, and every twenty kills or so he puts another layer of damp washcloths over it to cushion himself for the next blast. His face is pitted with tiny, sweet burns from carbon embers and his right eye is somewhat eclipse-blind from the many thousands of muzzle flashes it has seen. There are two-hundred and seven boxes of ammunition left, bought in bulk an unremembered number of hours ago for a forgotten price. The slugs, by the gross, are stacked on his tool bench and on an abused Nautilus machine and in the cargo bed of his boyhood, yellowy-dented Tonka dump truck.

  The Time Traveler finds it weird that he is not hungry or thirsty or sleepy or particularly in pain or not in pain, except for his poor shoulder, nor hot nor cold nor even slightly ashamed of himself, just disappointed. And just a low, toothless, unangry variation of disappointment, a variation for which there is no word that he knows. The same kind one has upon the first five seconds of waking every time; the same kind one has when one remembers the gravity is still on. The Time Traveler thinks, is almost sure, that he has not eaten or drank or slept since he killed Hitler, but this can’t be true because that must be several weeks ago now, although he hasn’t kept track. He can’t recall the month, but that is partially because the names of the months keep changing and are always impermanent. It might be February or Thermidor or Five Crocodile or Shahrivar or The Month of the Sacred Plum.

  The Time Traveler thinks he might be a little insane now; he thinks undo/redo, undo/redo, undo/redo. The experiment must be negated and the universe must be dismantled and unboxed post haste. The Time Traveler has not made the world a better place, no matter how many men he has unmade. He knows he must reformat his hypothesis because the current one is incorrect.

  And, swabbing Bactine into the cratery, moon-pit burns on his cheek, The Time Traveler has his Eureka. The problem, it comes to him at once, is not men.

  The problem is man.

  The Time Traveler flips the dial, bored, and through the orange scrim of the Time Portal, It takes a while to find what he’s looking for. It takes four point five million years. The Time Traveler dismisses the Cro Magnon, the Neanderthal, the Homo Erectus, the Australopithecus Africanus. The brows thicken and the arms grow longer and the thumbs shorter, they sprout pelts and, in reverse time, extinguish their fires and scour the images of mammoths and sabertooth cats off the walls of caves.

  What a horrible people they will inevitably become, thinks The Time Traveler, me among them. Someday these monkey-children will shave the heads of their gassed-to-death cousins, and use the hair to stuff pillows and tan their flayed skins for lampshades. Those clever baby hands will invent the guillotine and the iron maiden and the disposable diaper and the F-86 Apache Gunship. Those bulbous skulls are the cocoons of monsters, they walk upright only because they know that some sunny day they will get to wear jackboots and goosestep in parade for the inspection of whichever one of them is the worst. They must be stopped at any cost. They must be prevented from contaminating the universe with the evil nougat center hidden in their dino-nucleic acid.

  At last The Time Traveler finds what he is looking for. He finds it in the Serengeti, in a copse of trees. He finds it eating thorny fruit and looking only the slightest bit human. He finds that it still has a tail, a tiny little waggly one. He finds the Missing Link.

  There you are, my pretty, thinks The Time Traveler.

  Fire rains down from heaven and apes fall from the trees like spoiled fruit. In their chirping language of hoots and barks, they ask the Sun God what they had done to anger him so and The Sun God clacks another round into the chamber.

  The dry grass of the savanna rustles like paper. When it is over, the blowflies descend.

  In the year 847, R.S., His Massiveness, Emperor Rhinocerian the Ninth comes to the throne of the Oonogerian Empire. Although a boy of tender years and gentle manners, Rhinocerian nonetheless soon displays signs of towering ambition and ruthless powermongery. Only three months in office and he personally gores to death sixteen members of the Senate and banishes the rest of them, eternally, to the Hell Countries.

  After that, Rhinocerian begins a reign of terror and bloodshed that will not desist for more than a century. He enslaves the Elephant People, commits a thorough genocide against the Buffalo Tribes, has the entire continent of Gundrivaal burned, irradiated and salted with a poisonous defoliant that makes it so that nothing would ever grow there again. Really. Nothing. Ever.

  Twenty-seven billion dead. Twenty-seven billion.

  Twenty-seven billion minus fifty-five million is a lot.

  The Time Traveler thinks to himself, in a language that he has simultaneously never heard before and yet has spoken all his life, you are unfit to lead, Emperor Rhinocerian, and the biological predispositions of your species will not be stood for. You must leave, to make way for a less violent lifeform.

  The Time Traveler itches a mosquito at the thick gray burlappy skin on his flank, and knocks his enormous nose-tusk against the ground in the expression of virulent disgust among the people who are suddenly his. He goes flipping through the channels of the Time Vortex, looking for Emperor Rhinocerian’s, and his own, ancient ancestral forerunners, whom he will dispatch to the dung heap of history.

  The Time Traveler will have another people soon.

  The Time Traveler no longer has the muzzle glare semi-blindness because at some point during the recent spree, the rifle changed into a laser rifle. He thinks he killed off an entire species of six foot tall salamanders with opposable thumbs before he even noticed the change. He prefers the laser rifle to the old Smith & Wesson he had before, which grew unbearably hot after only six shots, whereas the laser rifle just gives a steely coolness and doesn’t make a deafening report in the close garage, it just makes a calm, jazzy snap. And instead of the dirtily sexual reek of cordite, this gun only smells vaguely of lilacs.

  But, and this is odd, the v
inegar and baking soda have not changed at all. On the Arm and Hammer baking soda box, it still has a picture of a human arm in a rolled up shirtsleeve, and a clearly man-made hammer. The Time Traveler examines his own arm, and it is now a three-toed, prehensile, lizardskin nightmare, iguana-green and sleek. He compares it to the big fat mammalian pink appendage on the box and thinks, that’s not right at all, that doesn’t make any sense. Very strange. Very very strange.

  Oh well, he thinks. And then he exterminates the Kingdom of Chameleons.

  The Time Traveler has multiple sets of eyes now, some twitching far out of his body on long, chopsticky stalks. Some merely peep morosely from the back of his head or the joints of his many knees. And he doesn’t have to blink anymore, not even once. He is omniscient. He can see the whole garage, all eight corners of it at once, without interruption. I see you, grossly reconfigured Huffy bicycle. I see you, roach motel. You’re not going anywhere.

  This is enjoyable, thinks The Time Traveler, but not nearly enough.

  Sometime on towards midnight or noon, The Time Traveler checks his count. He believes that he has killed 53,786 living beings, including humans, proto-humans, primates, the primogenitors of many species of highly-evolved felines, canines, equines, bovines and lupines, a fascinating but fundamentally unlikeable form of non-aquatic dolphin, an infinity of mice-people, rat-people, mole-men and bat-people, an extraordinarily perverted civilization of hyper-intelligent kangaroos, a race of lithe and beautiful poet-priests evolved from seagulls who seemed wise and kind but were secretly hypocritical, a psychic species of flowering vine (a close relative of the grape) who were capable of unimaginable cruelty, the Reptiloids, the Dinosaurians and the bees.

  It isn’t turning out right. Land-based lifeforms just seemed preordained to lives of exotic nastiness, scrabbling and rending and tearing and flaying one another alive, the most important and usually the first ingredient to all of their societies is fire, from which they quickly develop the brand, the red hot pincer, the flamethrower and the H-Bomb.

  It will be better under the sea, thinks The Time Traveler. Those are our kind of people under the sea, the incombustible kind, the kind that appreciate quietness and stillness and saturation. The Time Traveler flips on the Time Monitor to the Devonian, and through the orange squishiness of the screen, he sits back in his battered folding chair, his wormy, glistening, segmented tale oozing juice onto the cement floor, and watches the unfolding epoch.

  For a couple of million years, The Time Traveler scans the snotty, gelatinous shore of the primordial sea, and every once in a while, something pokes its head up out of the soup, makes a few awkward squirms towards the tempting mud, and The Time Traveler picks them off, one by one.

  No, my little friends, he thinks, don’t come out of the water, there’s nothing up here for you. Your grandbabies will only occupy their time building incinerators and ovens, which they will use to cook their young, and will bring immortal shame upon your families.

  He guards the border faithfully. One day a yard-long and monstrous poppa crayfish waddles out of the goo, makes a run for the low, sludgy dunes on the beach. It’s skin is transparent and through it the Time Traveler sees its open circulatory system, its inner ganglia, its fishnet webbing of nervous system, which has a big, six ounce brain in the fetus stage, capable of immense evil. The Time Traveler shoots it through the crude idea of its heart, which he can see through the glassy hide, and the blue laser light boils it inside out and it slumps dead in the surf. In a little while, the tide will wash it out to sea again and redistribute its nutrients.

  I think not, thinks the Time Traveler. I think not.

  The Time Traveler reads, in the waterproof pages of the Encyclopedia Pacifica, that in the year Thirty-thousand Twenty-one, Emperor Kragor the Devourer waged the bloodiest campaign in history among the once happy forests of the Great Barrier Reef. His long-fanged shock-troops pillaged and raped and murdered at will, feasting on the egg-sacs of their enemies, laying waste to their spawning grounds, desecrating their coral churches and de-boning their brave young men. Sixty-seven trillion died.

  This cannot be tolerated, thinks the Time Traveler, and punches in the Time Coordinates. Through the waterlogged orange of the Time Vortex, there appears Emperor Kragor as a young tadpole-princeling, flitting lazily in the warm currents of The Gulf Stream. The Time Traveler wraps his tentacle around the laser rifle’s trigger and aims it precisely at Kragor’s gills.

  We must see the matter through, thinks the Time Traveler. Someday, some far flung epoch, he’ll get it right. Someday he would get to the last kill, the last and necessary correction of the Time Stream, and the world would be bright and new and undigusting. He thinks that there is a perfect variance of the world and it will just take the magic number of kills to get there. It doesn’t matter how many. He doesn’t have to sleep, he has not slept for ten to the power of ten to the power of ten years, he is not hungry or thirsty and he does not have to go to the bathroom and he will get to the correct world eventually.

  And if that didn’t work, he would reach so very very far back, to when the Earth was just forming, just a baseball sized lump of cooling space dust, just the thought of the idea of congealing helium atoms, and, before it had a chance to go bad, he will blast it to smithereens, and watch the world begin anew.

  He fires away.

  The Time Traveler

  by Vincent L. Scarsella

  I

  Late October, 2004: A Deathbed Revelation

  On his deathbed, my father finally revealed the secret of the stone sarcophagus.

  For ninety years, the hulking tomb had lain against the far wall of a locked chamber in the low, dank cellar of our family’s sprawling five-bedroom country home. My grandfather had built the place in a rural hamlet about forty miles southeast of Buffalo, New York after immigrating to America in 1914 from his ancestral home in Macedonia. It was his plan to grow grapes and raise goats on the gentle rolling hills on which the house was built. When it was finished, he sent for my grandmother, and his four young children (two boys and two girls, excluding my father, who wasn’t born until 1925). They took a steamship on a three-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean to join him.

  Shipped with them, at considerable expense, was the stone tomb.

  Long after his older brothers and sisters had left home, father remained behind to take care of his parents as they grew old and sick. Grandmother died in 1947, three years after Grandfather had passed, and father naturally inherited the house.

  And years later, even after my older sister, Constance, and I had grown up and left home, father stubbornly refused to sell the house although it was clearly too big for mother and him.

  I knew this steadfast refusal to leave was because of the stone tomb.

  I was at a conference in San Antonio when a secretary from my firm left a grim message on my hotel room telephone that my father had suffered another stroke. Reaching his doctor, I was given little hope. He might be gone by the time I made it back home.

  I booked the next available flight and arrived at the hospital around midnight.

  “He’s been asking for you,” said the plump matronly RN at the nurse’s station with a tired smile. The ward was eerily quiet.

  “How’s he doing?”

  She shook her head, not good, then pointed down a long hallway.

  I hurried to his room but stood back in the doorway for a time. There was no one at his bedside. Mother had died three years ago and my older sister, Constance, had left for parts unknown twenty years before that. All my father’s brothers and sisters were long dead, and whatever family remained in the old country had grown estranged from their American kin.

  Finally, I stepped into the room. At his bedside, I found him awake, his eyes wide open. Seeing me, he smiled.

  “Damie,” he whispered.

  “Hi, Dad.” I kissed his forehead. He was cold as ice. His gaunt, pale appearance made it obvious that he was weak, close to death.

&nbs
p; “I must tell you something,” he whispered with sudden urgency. “A secret. Before I die. Something I should have told you years ago.”

  “Father, please,” I said to him. “Save your strength.”

  “The tomb,” he went on, “in the cellar.”

  I nodded.

  “I must tell you what it is,” he said, then sighed. “I have not been given enough time to complete my duty. And I fear that Constance…” He trailed off momentarily, remembering something. “I fear she is never coming back.”

  I edged closer to him, frowning.

  “The tomb,” he said, swallowing, his gaunt eyes boring down upon me now, “what it is, Damie, is a time machine.”

  It took a moment for what he said to register.

  “Time machine?”

  “Yes, Damie,” he said. “Not like the kind in science fiction movies. The tomb is a vessel for transporting a person through time–day-by-day.” Father swallowed, drew in a breath, then continued in a raspy, tired voice: “Inside it, there is a substance, a kind of gel that stops you from aging. It is programmed to awaken the time traveler every seventy-three years, the length of a generation.”

  I was about to say something to stop my father’s bizarre narrative. But he never gave me an opening:

  “The tomb was invented ten thousand years ago, Damie, by a civilization that was far more advanced, more magical, than ours. That civilization was what is now called Atlantis.”

  Frowning, I gazed down at him, not knowing what to say. Surely, this delusion, whatever he was telling me, must be the result of some kind of dementia, a symptom of his latest stroke.