Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (12 page)

The stylus went on to detail the time traveler’s experiences in the single week of his “awakening” from April 24 to May 1, 1931. For the most part, he spent them in the safety of the old house, listening to my grandfather’s report of the events of the last seventy-three years. He also spent much time reading historical texts and a pile of newspapers which grandfather dutifully brought him.

Early one morning three days after his awakening, the time traveler ventured with my grandfather and father in grandfather’s brand new Ford
Model A
Roadster for the then, somewhat arduous hour long trip down old, narrow Route 219 which meandered through Colden and Boston Hills to the bustling downtown streets of Buffalo.

Upon approaching the city, the time traveler gawked upwards at the tall brick buildings which the invention of the elevator had spawned. He was equally intrigued by grandfather’s roadster, and other cars of the era–the outdated though numerous Model Ts, and the more “modern” Chryslers, Chevy’s, Plymouths, and Cadillacs–clogging the streets of Buffalo with constant beeping horns, and filling the air with exhaust. He commented that they resembled the land transports of Atlantis in some respects, except that the Atlantean vehicles were fueled by the sun and hence, ran silently and without fumes.

This burst of technology in the seventy-three years since his last slumber, highlighted not only by the skyscrapers and automobiles which had come into existence since 1858, but the many other inventions – radio, movies, and the electric lights which made even the nighttime streets blaze with brightness and life, pleased the time traveler.

Mankind is once again on the verge of magic
, was his odd comment.

It seemed an important duty of the caretaker to bring to the time traveler’s attention persons of renown in the period into which he had awakened – leading scientists, philosophers, politicians, kings, musicians, or entertainers. The time traveler would then determine whether it was worth the trouble and risk of meeting one or more of them. Though grandfather promptly fulfilled this duty and identified such persons – Albert Einstein being one of them, residing in Germany at the time - the time traveler decided, without explanation, against taking such a trip. However, the stylus recorded this note:

I would have liked to have met the base ball player, Babe Ruth. However, the trip to Washington, where his team, the New York Yankees, were playing part of that week, was much too onerous. Still, the game of base ball sounds wonderful in the news paper reports, and the godlike deference for this athlete, Ruth, was such that it reminded me of Pir’lian, the great ball player (though the game hardly resembles base ball in any way) on the fabled Atlantean fields of play.

After only a week, the time traveler announced that he was going back to sleep. I was reminded of my father’s sad report just last night of that event. At least, on that day in 1931, there had been the genuine hope of a second meeting. For my grandfather, however, the time traveler’s farewell would be permanent.

This man, and his family, have served me well for ten thousand years. Goodbye, old man, and Godspeed!

I spent the next hours at the kitchen table reading entry after entry forming in the gray liquid screen of the magical stylus. It was rare for the time traveler to spend more than a week or two in the time period in which he had awakened. To do otherwise, of course, would have resulted in the premature end to his mission. No matter how attached he became to his caretakers and the people of the era into which he had awakened, he had to keep in mind that his life had a finite span. Only when he emerged from the stone time machine, did he age.

I must constantly remind myself of my mission, my vow,
he wrote in one of his entries following his introduction to a young woman who had ignited a romantic passion within him,
to continue onward into the far reaches of time and watch humanity attain a high level of magic matching that which Great and Fair Atlantis attained ten thousand years ago.

Those rare times when the time traveler chose to remain more than a few days in a particular epoch was due either to his swooning over some woman with whom he had become romantically involved (although he always seemed able, eventually, to break free of that spell and return to the tomb to resume his mission); or, because he had decided to meet some personage in the epoch into which he had awakened.

In 1638, for instance, the caretaker–my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Leonides Zithriades, told the time traveler about a renowned scientist, Galileo, who had used a kind of eyeglass for looking deep into the heavens–the telescope; and, who had printed a treatise just seven years earlier, in 1631,
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
, claiming to prove that the earth revolved around the sun, just as Copernicus had claimed. The book had so enraged Pope Urban VIII that Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial for heresy. After many delays, the trial finally began on April 13, 1633, and was ultimately concluded when, in exchange for his life, Galileo confessed to heresy and was sentenced to house arrest for life at his villa in Arcetri near Florence.

It was in late September, 1638, after an arduous three weeks journey from Macedonia, when the time traveler finally arrived at Galileo’s villa. After two days of interesting conversation with the old, now blind astronomer, the visit was interrupted by the arrival of the English poet, John Milton. A subsequent entry in the stylus marveled that Milton had incorporated several of the time traveler’s suggestions into his epic poem,
Paradise Lost
, composed only some months after their chance meeting at Galileo’s villa.

One hundred seventy-six years before that, in 1491, the time traveler had also remained awake some weeks in order to seek out a famous artist of that time, Leonardo da Vinci, and a renowned sailor, Christopher Columbus.

Some five hours after trekking upstairs with the stylus and reading report after report of the time traveler’s fascinating awakenings, I could no longer keep my eyes open and was forced to take a break. My knees cracked as I rose from the kitchen table, and after stretching my back and taking a long, deep yawn, ventured back downstairs. Back in the secret chamber, I stared at the stone tomb for a time, wondering if it could really be possible that a time traveler from Atlantis with bronze colored skin, thick wavy hair, and deep blue eyes, was sleeping within it protected by an ancient gel which magically suspended the process of aging. Finally, I pulled myself away from the mystery and trudged upstairs. Finding that it was nearly sunset, I decided to spend the night. I went up to my old bedroom and took a forty minute nap before waking and resuming the time traveler’s stylus reports back down the ages of history. I did not go to sleep until midnight, just after a report on his awakening in the year 469 AD.

In the morning, I dutifully attended my father’s funeral. Father Tobias presided over the somber mass in an empty church. Afterwards, I followed the hearse in a lone car to the cemetery where father was put into the ground.

Over the next weeks, I spent every free moment at my father’s house, reading entry after entry in the time traveler’s stylus back down the long years even before the time of Christ. (To my chagrin, the time traveler had been asleep between 4 B.C. and 29 A.D., when Jesus supposedly lived). His descriptions of the times into which he awakened were pure windows into history.

By April Fool’s day, some five months after my father’s death, and only a month before the time traveler’s anticipated reawakening, I had read the stylus entries all the way back to 6743 B.C. Three times, the time traveler had remained awake for longer than a year, always for the benefit of a woman. With one of them, he had fathered a child, whose progeny might still exist among the descendents of mankind. And, yet, even then, he was compelled to return to the tomb to continue his one-way journey through time.

With each passing day, the prospect of the tomb’s opening, and the emergence of the time traveler from within it, drove me to distraction. By the end of April, I could barely sleep. In fact, on April 26, I started sleeping on an old cot in the middle of the dank room only a few feet away from the stone coffin.

Perhaps what I feared most was that all this was some kind of cruel family hoax, and that my father, and grandfather perhaps, were having a wonderful laugh at my expense from some vantage point in the afterlife. Or that it merely was a fabulous fantasy, a symptom of a family madness stretching back thousands of years.

Despite these reservations, I took two weeks’ vacation starting April twenty-eighth, and spent nearly all day long down in that room waiting for the wondrous, fated event, killing time by reading more entries from the stylus, going further back into history, reaching into the seventieth century before the birth of Christ.

In fact, it was down there, in that dank, dark room, on the evening of the twenty-eighth day of April, where my sister, Constance, found me.

III

The Prodigal Sister

“
Hello?”

I had fallen asleep on the cot and sat up fearing that I had missed the opening of the stone vessel and the voice was that of the time traveler. I blinked at the tomb a moment. It was still closed, a solid gray lump.

“
Hello? Damian?” A woman’s voice came from the doorway.

I turned and saw Constance. She was still darkly beautiful. Her hair was long and black along her shoulders without a streak of gray, and she had remained thin and supple.

“
Constance? Connie?”

All I could do was gaze at her. Why she had abandoned us years ago had never been made clear to me. I remember mother calling me in tears while I was away at college to report that Connie had gone crazy and left home. She had not even left a note. I suspected even back then that the stone tomb had something to do with her disappearance.

At last, I pushed myself off the cot and went to her. We embraced and I held her in my arms for a time. My long lost sister had returned home.

“
What are you doing down here?” she asked, finally stepping away from me. “In this room?”

I nodded to the stone tomb. “Waiting to see if it will really open,” I told her.

She replied with a nod of her own: “It will.”

We went upstairs and I brewed a pot of coffee. It was early afternoon, but gray and cold outside, another late spring in Buffalo. With coffee steaming from the cups before us on the kitchen table, Connie explained why she had left.

“
After our little adventure that Saturday afternoon in the secret room,” she began, “I started sneaking down there every chance I got. That tomb, and the living creature I knew lay within it, drew me down there, became an obsession.

“
I told you that day I had felt something when I touched it – and I had - a living presence. A
soul
. The soul of a man. A wonderful, profoundly lonely man who in the moment of that touch had instinctively reached out and entered into my mind and into my soul. By some magic I do not understand, the man living in the tomb and I had somehow communicated, connected, however briefly.

“
And so I kept going down there again and again and again to renew that feeling, that fusion of mind to mind and soul to soul. To satisfy my addiction for the being encased in that tomb.

“
Until one afternoon, father caught me, with my hand at the tomb. He flew into a rage and demanded to know what I was doing down there. He seemed as possessive about that ugly tomb as I had become.

“
We had words, and he ordered me out of the room, forbade me from ever going down there again. He demanded that I promise I would stay away from the room.

“
The next day, father caught me frantically hammering at the new lock he had placed on the door. He grabbed me until I settled down. He wasn’t angry anymore. I had discovered the secret and there was no use denying it any longer.

“
So, he told me everything. Who the time traveler was, and the course of his long journey through time. He also told me that I would have to wait another twenty-seven years to meet him. That he was the caretaker, but that I—and you—might have to assume that obligation and honor in the event he wasn’t alive when the time traveler awakened.

“
But twenty-seven years! That was too much for me. I couldn’t wait that long. And I knew that I could not go on living in this house. That the tomb would, in the end, drive me mad.

“
Father and I agreed that it would be best for me to leave. Go someplace and try and forget the tomb and start a life.”

She sighed and smiled.

“
Of course,” she said. “I was never able to do that—start over. I tried, I even married two decent men, but in the end, I was always distracted by the mystery of the stone tomb and the being sleeping within it. I always knew that I would be drawn back to meet him on the day he awakens.”

“
It’s supposed to open day after tomorrow,” I said.

She nodded, knowing that, and sipped her coffee.

We sat for a long time hashing over our lives while the afternoon turned to dusk.

She had drifted those twenty-seven years away from home. She had married twice but had never fallen in love. She had borne no children. There had been many jobs—secretary, bookkeeper, maid, nursemaid, store clerk. There seemed many other things about herself that she decided not to tell.