Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (14 page)

Romal expressed his amazement at how swift automobiles had become, in fact, how fast life had become in this the post-modern age, with superhighways, cell phones, jets soaring above us over the buildings even taller than the ones he had seen in 1931.

Still, despite the marvels and horrors of our time, the time traveler seemed mainly interested in only one thing—Connie.

One morning, after Connie had gone shopping to the closest supermarket about ten miles from the farmhouse, I brought up the obvious. That his interest in my sister seemed to be causing a deviation from his mission. He had already remained with us a month.

“
How many have you had over the years?” I asked. “Women, I mean?”

Perhaps this sudden, sharp attack had more to do with a desire to protect my sister from getting hurt by him. He was destined to leave, in the end, and that would leave her eternally alone, pining after a lover who would not awaken again until she was long dead and turned to dust.

Romal took a sip of coffee, then looked up at me with a curl of a smile over the top of the morning newspaper. It had amazed me how fast he had become acclimated to our time. He was already following the major league box scores, and was especially interested in the New York Yankees, having become a fan of the game in general, and the Yankees in particular, after his awakening in 1931.

“
In ten thousand years,” he said, and thought for a time. “Three. Your sister is the fourth.”

I held a stern look.

“
Can I tell you something else?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“
Each time I made the mistake of reentering the vessel and leaving them behind.”

“
So,” I said with a laugh, “what are you telling me. This time, you won’t? You won’t continue your mission because of her? Constance?”

The time traveler’s eyes narrowed. Finally, they focused on me.

“
Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps its time for the time vessel to remain empty.”

“
Has you mission succeeded, then?” I asked. “Do you think humanity is ready for Atlantean ways?”

He looked up at me with doubt in his eyes.

“
I am beginning to wonder if that will ever become possible,” he said. “We are a legend among the moderns. Perhaps it is best for Atlantis to remain so.”

My heart raced as I considered what I was about to say.

“
So why not let me take your place,” I blurted. “Continue your mission and go forward into the future, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of seeing what the world and mankind had come to.”

“
You, Damian?” he asked. “You want to do this—to become a time traveler.”

“
I don’t know,” I said, equivocating momentarily. “No,
yes
. I mean, the idea of it, waking every seventy-three years in the future, in a new world, does have a fascinating appeal.”

He let the idea sink in, then added:

“
It did for me once, Damian, but now I must admit that I have grown tired of it. I want—I want a life.”

“
You love my sister. That’s what this is about.”

His eyes brightened momentarily at the thought of her.

“
Yes,” he said. “She reminds me…” but then, he trailed off, perhaps thinking of someone whose body had gone to dust eons ago.

My mouth had gone dry. To change places with him. To become the time traveler.

What was my life worth anyway? I had no wife. No children. No one to love, or love me. I had quit my job after the vessel had opened and had no desire to return to it or do anything except remain in care of the time traveler. I had recognized six months ago when father had revealed on his deathbed the secret of the stone sarcophagus that my life had been stuck in neutral until the time traveler awakened. And now, perhaps, I had found that the true purpose of my life was to exchange places with him and become myself, the time traveler.

He looked straight at me, and said: “Why don’t you sleep on it, Damian. Consider what it means. What you must give up. Then we can talk about it again in the morning.”

There was no more talk of it that day.

“
Yes,
” I blurted first thing the next morning. “I want to do it.”

I stood in the doorway of the kitchen. Romal was sitting next to Connie at the kitchen table, eating scrambled eggs she had cooked for him. They both looked up at me.

“
My answer is yes.”

“
Yes to what?” Connie gave me a queer, sideways look.

“
To taking Romal’s place in the time vault,” I told her.

Connie looked at him.

“
Damian proposed yesterday taking my place in the vessel,” Romal told her. Then, he added: “It was after I told him that I wanted to remain here with you, in this lifetime.”

Connie’s eyes widened. After some moments, she stood, came over, sat on his lap, and hugged him. Then, she looked over at me with a quizzical frown.

Suddenly, I knew, that I must do it right now, at that moment. Go downstairs, enter the secret chamber, step into the gel of the time vat, slowly immerse myself until I felt it all around me from head to toe like a warm, soothing bath overtaking my soul.

And sleep.

Without a word, I started toward the landing to the basement.

“
Damian,” Connie said with some alarm. I heard from behind me the time traveler push her off him, his chair grinding across the kitchen floor.

“
Damian,” Romal said, as he started after me. “No. You are not ready.”

I was already half way down the basement stairs when I stopped and looked back at him up at the landing.

“
You must give it more thought than just one night,” he said.

“
You want to stay here, don’t you?” I asked. “With her.”

Romal looked back at Connie.

“
Don’t you?”

He nodded and reached for her hand.

“
And have a child that you can watch grow up to manhood?”

“
Very much,” he said, gazing into Connie’s eyes, “that is what I want.”

“
Then you must promise to name him after his uncle,” I said. “And tell him to care for me when I wake up seventy-three years from today.”

Romal nodded. There was no mistaking my resolve. I had nothing to live for except this, entering the stone vessel and becoming the time traveler.

They followed me downstairs into the secret chamber. I stood for time at the brink of the time vault, its lid open, brimming with the magic gel that preserved the body.

“
If you enter it,” the time traveler warned, “your life will be over. You will wake up every seventy-three years, once a generation, desperately alone each time. A few times you will venture out and remain a few weeks, months, and sometimes, you will fall in love.” He looked at Connie, then continued: “But something inside you, the vow you have made to yourself to carry on the mission no matter what, will compel you to leave, no matter how much you fall in love with that place, that time,” and he sighed, and gazed longingly into Connie’s eyes, before finishing, “that woman.”

The time traveler suddenly stepped forward and pushed past me. I watched in horror as, in the next moment, he inexplicably stepped into the vessel, back into the gel, and without another word, or even one final longing gaze at us, went under.

Connie screamed, but it was too late. The lid was already, irrevocably lowering, closing. As she rushed past me, I grabbed at her and held her back. She convulsed in my arms and by the time I looked back at the stone tomb, the lid had shut and the tomb was a solid gray lump of stone.

“
No!” she howled, wept. “No!”

After gulping air for a time, she lamented: “Fool! I am carrying your child!”

She named the boy, Romal, and we called him Rommie for short. We took up residence in the old house our grandfather had built ninety years ago. Over the years, our distant neighbors wondered at the odd brother and sister living there like hermits, and the strange, bronze-skinned child they were raising.

We seemed content, however, if not completely happy. And patient.

I wondered if technology would make it possible for Constance and I to live long enough so that we would outlast the time traveler’s sleep. I also wondered what the time traveler would think of Rommie, his son. It was oddly amusing to consider that by the time he awakened, Rommie would be older than him.

But there are many years ahead of us to contemplate that.

by Ruthanna Emrys

Behind the slatted blinds, lightning flashed. I caught my breath, resisting the urge to open the lab window, and glanced at my subject to be sure he hadn’t noticed. No, he tapped away at his response keys, completely oblivious to the storm.
If I’d gone into physics, I could be outside right now.
But a psychologist can’t simply look up from her particle accelerator and take a walk.

Morning had been bad enough—the first perfect spring day after a tepid but persistent winter. Now as evening drew on, the thunder began. Good storms were rare on Long Island. Even with the lab sealed, the prickle of ionized air made me want to run outside and dance around the courtyard. A subject held up his hand for the next questionnaire in the series; I sighed and fished it out of the pile. The other two bent over their desks, pecking at their keyboards. Three lousy data points, my reward for resisting temptation.

I’d run out of patience with my stack of research articles early in the day, so I spent most of the session rereading H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine
. It’s a short book, and I came back from the silent beach of Earth’s last days to the sound of thunder and voices outside, the slash of rain…and my self-imposed imprisonment in the lab. I had time to daydream while I gazed into the rich, velvet light of the storm.

I spent far too much time reading Victorian science fiction, more of it the further I got into my dissertation. The old futures and outmoded theories drew me in. Airships and crystal cities, ether theory and phrenology, mapped the mind-life of a lost age. It was an age deeply flawed and never as civilized as it thought itself, but sometimes I wished
I
wasn’t too modern to believe in what it wanted to be.

What drew me most was the idea of the scientist as an adventurer. When I went to the library to add to my stack of literature, I’d sometimes take a side trip to the mezzanine, where the oldest journals were archived. The pages were delicate and a little yellowed; the leather bindings soft but sturdy. A biology paper might begin with a description of savannahs and native bearers: more travel diary than dry description. My data might have been more valid, but my methods section seemed lacking.

“
It was in this frame of mind,” I scribbled in the margin of a paper on attentional capacity, “that I began to conceive of how I might partake in the wonders open to mad scientists while avoiding their tendency toward academic ridicule.” I nodded, pleased with the turn of phrase, too ornate for the modern ear. I wanted grand adventure, but tenure as a backup. Impossible, of course. I scribbled more—bullet points, diagrams, thoughts connected to one another by little arrows. I usually fleshed out my ideas this way. I didn’t plan on showing these notes to my advisor, though. In fact, I was going to have to white them out next time I had to Xerox the paper for a student. What the hell, it wasn’t like I was getting anything else accomplished.

The storm passed too quickly. As soon as my last subject left, I tore open the window and breathed deeply of the now dry wind. I ran downstairs to the courtyard, letting the past and future fall away in favor of the moment. It would be easy enough to let my fantasy slip away.

I thought of the Time Traveler racing to touch his machine, seeking reassurance that his memories were real and that he wasn’t crazy. I went back upstairs.

Humans produce ideas easily and prodigiously. Stuck on the World’s Longest Parking Lot, or daydreaming in front of my data analysis, I have thought of song lyrics, utopian social reforms, and plans for toilets that don’t overflow. By the time I have a spare moment, the thought is lost. The people who mark the world are those who, just once, manage to grasp an idea and follow it.

It probably said something about me that the idea I grasped and followed, if it worked, would change no life but my own, and in fact ensure that I would never do anything else of importance. The exact form of the idea also probably said something about me. In spite of my yearnings, I had never lived an adventurous life. I had never taken the most carefully controlled tour of England, let alone led my faithful retainers into the wilds of some unexplored land. The written word had been my only transport to the exotic. So when I personally sought to create a time machine, naturally I chose words for my vehicle.

I rarely found friends in the psychology department; people who knew the same things I did bored me. At need, I could call on a mathematician, a programmer, two physicists, a medical researcher, and way too many English majors. I didn’t know any temporal mechanics, but if I wanted to see the future I would have to find one. For what I needed now, I went to the mathematician. I wasn’t looking for Patrick’s expertise in fractal theory. I picked him because he was also an historical reenactor. He would know what materials were the most durable. He would also know someone
who knew someone
who could acquire and work whatever material I chose, and no one involved would think that I needed to be locked up.