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

by Jw Schnarr

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.

  “Stone.”

  “Stone? Not some exotic metal?” I asked.

  “It was good enough for Gilgamesh,” Patrick said. “What are you going to do about language?”

  “Hope they know English. Either they’re smart enough to figure it out or there’s not much point. We’re not dealing with simple concepts like ‘Yes, we know what prime numbers are,’ or ‘Stay off the nuclear waste.’ I want to talk.”

  The hard part was figuring out what to say. I needed something that would matter enough to the inventors of time travel that they would want to come visit me, right along with Jesus and Galileo and Heinlein. My temporal mechanic might work for a government or a corporation, might be a mad genius alone in a basement or part of some institution that I couldn’t imagine. Hell, he might be on a Fulbright. Knowing only that something drove him to want to touch history, and able to send only a single letter to get his attention, I needed to make him a friend.

  “To the Time Traveler,” I began. I spoke first of the details of my time—not merely the events of the newspapers, but the way it felt to be living at my particular cusp of progress. I placed myself at the dawn of genetics, with all our uncertainty over what humanity itself could and should become. I placed us in the midst of ecological crisis, torn between fear of our own power and hope that our power could save ourselves and our world. I described the drought of the space age and the sheer density of information. I touched on the politics that would be labeled “history” only briefly, as they added to the experience of living in uncertainty.

  I listed my qualifications for time travel. I read science fiction and could think sanely about change. I also knew the dangers of temporal paradox; I was willing to keep any necessary secret. I knew that they could only take me on if I was not historically important (and I was quite humble about the place in the scientific edifice of experiments where people try to remember what color sock they saw). I knew the difference between the laws of nature and the laws of my tribe.

  Finally, I begged. “I yearn, as much as you do, to speak to other times and learn other ways of thought. Most of all, I need to know what happens next—at least that we survive.

  “With hope, Dena Feinberg, scientist and forever a student.”

  The carving cost more than I cared to think about, and I covered a good portion of it in barter. I didn’t relish the idea of helping Patrick cater pseudo-medieval feasts for the next three years, but if I was lucky I would fit those years in around years doing real medieval studies. He and the stonemason would both have waived fees entirely to know if my plan worked, but I knew that if I was willing to tell even one person, I could never be told myself.

  I buried the stone for the archeologists and tried to forget about it. I had done what I could, and if it never worked, I had a life to live. More importantly, I had a dissertation to complete. I spent days in the lab with the windows closed, nights praying for miracles from my spreadsheets. The spreadsheets supported my thesis about the nature of memory for objects in rooms: I rejoiced and no one else gave a damn. The twenty-first century was less than a decade old, and I was steadily becoming more eager to leave it.

  I took a weekend in the White Mountains, in a
cheap cabin without luxuries like newspapers and television. The windows were stuck open, and I woke on Saturday caressed by mountain breezes. The only good thing about living on Long Island was how much I appreciated other places. If you had teleported me with my eyes closed, I would have known I was away from the city by the feel and smell of real air. I hiked Mount Lafayette, something I hadn’t done since before college. Just short of the main summit, the lesser peak overlooks a valley misted over with tall grass and goldenrod. It took six hours of steady hiking to get there from the base, and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich tasted like manna. At the summit I looked across the lower mountains, down the cliffs, until I had to close my eyes because they were full. I felt that I was in my right place, in my right time. Millennia had crumpled the mountains up from the earth like paper and would wear them away to plains; I had been lucky enough to see them like this.

  Still, that night I dreamed of airships.

  When I returned, two wars had started and several governments were threatening others with the creations of their own mad scientists. There was an editorial about the risks to human nature of immortality, and another about the economic benefits to undeveloped nations of low wages and bad health care. Even a block from the ocean, the air in my apartment felt stifling. It had been a warm winter, and it would be a hot summer. I taught social psychology from my advisor’s notes and learned how to cook venison. My dreams were full of silver cities, omniscient-but-benevolent computers, and gentle childlike people with British accents. In July, I received a package.

  The package arrived by Western Union, in a miniature wooden chest with my name and address engraved on a brass plate. It was delivered by a teenager with acne, who made me feel old and glad of it.

  “They’ve had this for over a century,” he told me. He looked like he’d rather be somewhere else.

  “You’re full of it,” I told him. “People don’t say things like that.”

  “My boss said to tell you. I’m just working there for the summer. I’m with you—I don’t believe it. I think he got it from a movie.”

  “I saw that one,” I said, surprised that he was old enough to remember. “I don’t think it would work. Even Western Union would lose something after a hundred years.”

  “Actually, my boss said there was supposed to be a key, and they did lose it, and not to tell you. Sign?”

  I put the chest on the coffee table. It scared me. It reminded me of the little envelopes I got back when I applied to grad school. I never wanted to open them and find out that they weren’t what I wanted. If they were what I wanted, that was scary too. Sometimes the unknown was safer.

  I went into the kitchen and tried to do the dishes. My hands shook: I chipped a plate and got water all over my shirt. I told myself I wouldn’t be any good until I let myself get disappointed. I would cry hysterically for about five minutes, take a shower and get on with worrying about post-doctoral positions.

  The lock didn’t look too strong. I broke the latch with a hammer, and opened the chest. Inside was a single paper, worn at the edges and a little discolored.

  My Dearest M. Feinberg, it began.

  On reading this I fear you will be much disappointed, for the journey which was to bring me to you has failed. I have overtaken my goal and found myself immersed in the aging 19th rather than your youthful 21st. The currents we ride so far have carried bold persons only pastward; the yetward direction remains to be conquered in the age when I began. I therefore remain now, and likely no other journey shall seek your moment. I continue, with what resources are available to me, the research that may someday allow persons to meet the future other than in the ordinary course of living. I have friends whose discretion can be trusted and my living is strange but comfortable. Still I grieve the loss of your possibilities.

  I offer you this small assurance: that humanity survives your time at least as far as mine. We have our crises, which appear just as insoluble to us as yours to you. These persons of the 19th also fear that they shall prove civilization’s destruction: it may be the common terror of all generations. We may all take comfort, then, from the survival of the past as well as that of the future.

  I remain, with hope, The Time Traveler, scientist and adventurer and forever a student. The signature was an actual name, but in a different ink and illegible.

  I wanted to believe. Ever since an elementary school “friend” gave me notes from a non-existent secret admirer, I haven’t trusted letters, and I didn’t trust this one. It was exactly the sort of trick my ex would pull—except that he was looking for supernovae in a Japanese mineshaft and didn’t know I’d been writing to time travelers. Besides, if it were he, then the letter would have told me I was going to invent mind control satellites or at least said something snide. Patrick had the resources but he called me “the girl genius” and found me a bit intimidating. He wouldn’t try to play with my head like this.

  I lifted the paper carefully. It was brittle, and smelled like old books. For a moment, memory carried me to the antique store where I had pined over a first edition of Verne’s De La Terre A La Lune. The paper was of the same type, of the same age.

  Looking closer, I saw that the writing was not any sort normally found on such paper. Old printing presses and fountain pens are both a bit messy, and even the best handwriting has some variation in the way letters come out. Except for the signature, this had more the quality of laser printing.

  I lifted the letter again, holding it to my nose the way a Victorian lady might hold a letter that her lover had perfumed. I closed my eyes, and breathed in my friend’s perfume: the scent of must and decaying paper. It smelled like hope.

  I’ve received nothing further from the past. The next week I got a thick envelope by the more usual methods, and I made arrangements to leave New York for my post-doc. My new home has clean air and plenty of thunderstorms. Of course, in a couple of years I’ll have to start looking for professorships, and I could end up anywhere. The future is always uncertain.

  I wonder about The Time Traveler and his colleagues, all willing to leave their homes forever. Maybe humans of his time have regained the drive for adventure that seems lacking in ours. Maybe the future is even less pleasant than the early twenty-first century, and they find the past luxurious and civilized by comparison. Maybe they just want to live with problems they know will be solved, the only humans who don’t need to fear for their race’s survival within their own lifetimes. Except, of course, for me. When the speculations of those around me grow pessimistic, then sometimes…but no. My friend trusts my discretion.

  I hope, though, that I’m not the only one. So many people have written of worlds to come, or given predictions and warnings, or crafted inventions. So many have tried, one way or another, to reach into the future and touch lives there. I hope that each of them, some time before the end, entertained a mysterious visitor—or at least received a short letter—and knew that their efforts had mattered.

  The Woman Who Came to the Paradox

  by Derek J. Goodman

  Reggie stepped out of the light and onto the streets of Braunau am Inn, Austria. It was dark and the general look of the street seemed about right, but until he found a newspaper or something he couldn’t be certain that he’d arrived on the night he intended. He looked down at himself, making sure he hadn’t lost any part of his costume in his journey. It looked intact, but he really didn’t expect to need it for long. All he needed to do was walk down to the Gasthof zum Pommer and kill the newborn baby Adolf Hitler.

  He heard footsteps on the street somewhere behind him. Reggie turned, afraid that someone out late at night had seen his miraculous appearance, but it was an old woman just now coming onto the street. She was hunched over and walked very slowly, but she looked up briefly at him, nodded, and carefully sat herself down against the side of the nearest building. Reggie thought she looked vaguely familiar, but that couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t like he had time traveled before. This lady was just some a
nonymous footnote in history, and Reggie had no reason to pay her any more mind.

  He took a deep breath and looked around to get his bearings. He wasn’t nervous, not really. He was more excited than anything else. Here he was, only twenty-five years old and inventor of the first time machine. As soon as he had invented it, however, the government had swooped down like vultures off their perch and tried to regulate his brain child. He couldn’t have that. He’d used it before they had the opportunity to stop him, and he’d come here to prove his point.

  In truth, he really didn’t care about whether what he was about to do was right or wrong. Everyone always used this hypothetical scenario as a test of morals, but Reggie only cared about this point in history because it was high profile. He would be the first person to completely reshape history as he saw fit.

  The old woman made a noise that might have been a snort or maybe a snore. Reggie ignored it and started down the street in the direction of the gasthof.

  A light flashed five feet in front of him, and someone stepped out of it. Reggie blinked, not realizing who he was seeing at first. He recognized the clothes as the same ones he wore now, except they were ripped, dirty, and charred in a few places. The face was more difficult to recognize through the smudges and blood, but as the person fought to catch his breath, Reggie realized this was him.

  “Thank God I made it,” the other Reggie said (Reggie immediately in his mind labeled the other as Reggie-B). “You can’t do this.”

  “You’re me?” Reggie asked.

  “You from two weeks in your future,” Reggie-B said. “I’ve come to stop you. You can’t kill him.”

  “You can’t be me. Why would I try to stop myself?”

  “Because you have no idea what kind of changes you will cause. The destruction, it’s unimaginable. You see, if you actually go through with this…”