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

by Jw Schnarr

  He tapped away a pinkie-long flurry of ash and added, “Just between you and me of course, kiddo.” The smoke made his words thicker, and when he breathed, Angela could see something white and angry stretch in his lungs.

  “What’s a Doxy, Oliver?” Angela had asked her mother once. Her mother had told her it was nothing a little girl needed to learn. But Oliver didn’t need to know that.

  Oliver grinned. “The work of some enterprising punster, I imagine. We’re all paradoxes, you know…people who shouldn’t exist.” Another puff of smoke. “It was also a Middle English word for a mistre…for a peasant girl that an important man kept secret from his wife. Which is how we all got here, I suppose.”

  “Angela!” Her mother clopped up behind her. “Honestly, running off like that! Excuse me, Andrea.” Andrea’s shadow waved goodbye and disappeared into a gloomy alley where the moonlight wasn’t.

  “But Mom, you said—”

  “Thank you for watching her, Oliver,” said Angela’s mother, fumbling with the buttons of her coat and making an utter mess of it.

  “Night Bella. Angela.”

  “Night, Oliver!” Angela called, as her mother dragged her by the arm down the crack-scarred sidewalk. Irritated, Angela stepped on every one of them she could.

  “Mom, I’m tired. Can’t I now?”

  “I bought you those awful shoes for a reason, Angela.”

  “But Mom…”

  “Oh, fine!” her mother snapped, glancing down both ends of the sidewalk.

  Angela felt the slits in the back of her blouse fluttering open, and the tingle of night wind against her back.

  She couldn’t understand why her mother was so funny about this. Her mother said it would upset the group, but her voice was green and twitchy when she said it.

  Angela had her own ideas.

  Maybe her mother was afraid Angela wasn’t old enough. Maybe she thought Angela would get lost and never come back. Maybe she thought Angela would forget to look both ways before crossing the sky and be hit by an airplane.

  Or maybe Oliver was right.

  Maybe they were just jealous of her wings.

  Conditional Perfect

  by Jason Palmer

  Paitin waited with his fingers curled over the windowsill, enjoying the charged night air. He watched the Friday Night Invasion skylights probing the underbellies of clouds as though a full-scale air raid were in progress. One of them caught the curve of a shark-like shape approaching from the direction of the city: Drew Petrarchson’s fan-tailed hover car, approaching his dorm window, stopping with a whine of air-cooled nitros.

  Drew grinned. His crew lounged around him with arms hanging on the seatbacks and heels up on the dash. “Get in, Pait, we’re going back!” said Drew, following this with an obligatory yip-yip-yoooooo that echoed off the dorm walls.

  Paitin didn’t like giving up control to Drew, but he vaulted out the window into the hover’s back seat. A cheer rose around him, hands slapping his shoulders, all the more so because he’d hesitated, at first.

  Drew gunned the jets and the dorm buildings fell away behind them.

  Poison-bright clouds reflected the glow of an asteroid field of hover cars ahead, thousands hanging in the air before the great arch of the portal. Waves of blaring horns rippled through the vast ball of vehicles, and within them were the yips and hoarse bellows of drunken hoodlums waiting for the stroke of midnight.

  Drew took them into the roiling, steely cloud. The hovers were mostly boxy first cars piloted by regular kids out for some fun. Those with something to hide jockeyed for space in the middle, far from the periphery where the boom cops strobed the herd with eerie green naked-rays.

  “Check this,” said Drew’s best friend, Nickthanial. Paitin blanched when Nick flashed something small and metal in his hand.

  “Holy shit,” said a kid named Chiraz. “Is that a Rainbow?”

  Paitin felt Drew watching the side of his face, willing him to feel the same enthusiasm, thinking he was only being coy. Then Drew’s elbow was digging his ribs. “I’m gonna get this guy laid if it’s the last thing I do!” He honked the horn and shouted, setting off waves of answering honks.

  Paitin pursed his lips and bobbed his head agreeably, but in reality, the fumes and the steady whump of a dozen competing thumper boxes made him almost physically sick. Did they really imagine that he was somehow sharing the moment with them?

  He had his own reasons for coming.

  Another vehicle scraped up dangerously close, stopping so suddenly that a woman standing on her seat was nearly thrown out. She righted herself and turned drunkenly to Drew. “Drew!” she yelled. Her voice was hoarse as though she’d been shouting all night. She held up a small black object with a purple arc of current dancing between two tines. “We’re going to shave ‘em! Shave those fuckers!”

  Drew was clearly delighted at this. “That’s fantastic!” he said, and punched down on his horn.

  The other driver honked a quick retort and jerked the hover away, nearly spilling the woman again.

  Paitin fingered the secret objects in his pocket, outwardly smiling and bobbing his head while the ambient drumbeat thickened the air. Rafts of hot exhaust and cold downdrafts alternately drifted across him like sheets of tissue paper breaking over his face, distorting the moon.

  He watched a succession of vehicles crawl by seeking places at the front or just showing off.

  A loner hovered past in a long old coffee-brown boat with grinning grills and crimson lights. He wore a leather mask criss-crossed with zippers. He seemed to look directly at Paitin as he floated by, his huge bicep shining in the moonlight, and silence followed in his wake.

  A man on another hover wore nothing but a pair of beer-soaked underwear. He held a gigantic sword over his head—a real sword—bellowing when people honked at him. He had a tiny Quick stuck through the band of his underwear; that’s how he would subdue them before the sport began.

  Other people showed off tranquilizers and nets and whips and leather shackles; they had paddles; they had balloons full of explosive fuel; they had harpoon-tipped drag chains already hooked through their bumpers. An improvised hover platform chugged by laden with a homemade catapult. The driver was older and had a lazy sort of accent. “Going to see how far these bastards’ll fly,” he said with a grin.

  Paitin tapped his fingers on his knee, feeling useless and uncertain.

  The past was open for business, and everybody was doing it.

  The stroke of midnight fell, and all hell broke loose. A massive invisible plume of exhaust struck Paitin in the face as every engine roared and every horn rose wailing at once, and the entire armada bucked forward into the greatest victimless crime in the history of the world. A typical Friday night.

  A temporal envelope the size of a football field suddenly displaced the air with a dull “whump” and swallowed the armada of recreational vehicles that sped beneath the arch.

  Paitin nearly left his stomach behind when Drew ramped the hover. The tail end buoyed drunkenly and they popped forward like a shot. They emerged into a beautiful blue and white afternoon sky in some conditional past, a reality plucked at random from a spectrum of parallel pasts, and the armada swooped off in wings like an attack fleet. They instinctively moved away from each other like whisps and coils of smoke, diminishing with distance.

  Paitin shut his eyes a moment and focused on why he’d come. As he sat there in his own peaceful bubble, it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might not return at all. He might stay with Sandra forever. He smiled with his eyes shut, the cold high wind moving gently over his eyelids, imagining them together.

  Drew spotted something on radar almost immediately and crowed with joy. Paitin’s eyes popped open and he clutched the side of his door so hard his knuckles popped and he felt his fingernails scratch the paint. He felt Drew accelerate to attack velocity; Nickthanial pulled a separator cannon, a really cheap Lord Vav only good for one thing, out from under the seat
and put it to his shoulder.

  The ancient 747 deafened them with its thunder until Drew pulled a bit above and ahead of it. Paitin opened his mouth to say something, but Drew shouted: “Doitdoitdoit!” and Nickthanial leaned over and sprayed light all over the plane. The Lord Vav turned it into a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces began to separate with horrible piglike grunts. Paitin looked over the side, and it was funny how he could faintly hear the people screaming but couldn’t actually make out a single distinct human form, falling.

  Paitin shook his head. Civics 101: conditional perfects are neither citizens nor their antecedents. Therefore, they are not Real.

  And yet he suddenly needed to throw up. “Down!” he shouted, cupping his palm over his mouth to show Drew what was wrong. “Down!” The others chuckled among themselves, and then they pitched downward like a stone, yowling and hooting as Drew corkscrewed around the plummeting scraps and vapor trails of the dismembered 747. Nickthaniel went to blast it some more, but Chiraz took the Lord Vav away from him and stood with one foot on the back of the seat in front of him, eyes crazed, ready instead to burn the sprawling anonymous city that rushed up to meet them.

  During the plummeting and the yowling Paitin felt the idea of staying with Sandra solidify with remarkable clarity in his mind, the air rushing up his neck and cheeks and seeming to wash away the repetitive violent release of the Invasion. But he mustn’t let on. His hand wandered to his pocket, to a picture he kept of her, and he managed to keep the loose, oily sensation of premature vomit in the back of his throat.

  Another hover pulled in above them, a brutal old Scudthunder riding twisting chains of obsidian smoke, terrifying, packed with wolfish men who must have come through much earlier. The Scudthunder matched Drew’s rate of descent, and shouts and howls of macho ecstasy flew back and forth between the cars.

  Paitin felt himself drifting right out of his seat because of the reckless nose dive; he clutched the seat bottom and closed his eyes just as he saw the men in the other hover hefting something that looked dark and shapeless in the high glare of the sun. Then a great heap of something landed in Paitin’s lap.

  It was a woman. A conditional. Her eyes looked huge because her head had been shaved, probably with a knife to judge by the scalp, which was criss-crossed with cuts. Paitin saw her mouth working furiously for a moment in front of his face, and then she flew away. He reached out for her, but it was too late. He had to hook his legs under the seat in front of him to keep from flying off himself. He tried to scream as the woman bumped off the rear of the hover and disappeared but wind filled his mouth and cheeks and brought tears from his eyes. Another human form thumped on the hood and went spinning end over end to thud on the street below in a fan of blood. The other hover sent down a third woman in a torn dress.

  Party favors. Chiraz and Rayton hooted in a kind of wordless ecstasy of animal approval, and Paitin felt himself growing cold and small as Chiraz picked up the third girl, held her high over his head, and threw her to her death.

  Not real. Conditional perfect, figment of a troubled past that had gone nowhere. Except—

  The ground rushed up, a suburb dreaming just outside the ancient urban gridiron, and a submerged shout came out of a bubble in Paitin’s throat. “Let me out!” He opened his door and dropped the remaining five feet to the street, slamming his knees, and vomited a tight painful spray.

  Nickthanial started them hooting again at explosions in the distance, low and rocking, and in the orange glare he looked mad to be nearer the flame.

  Drew leaned over his door trying to play sympathetic, but he couldn’t stop laughing. He actually looked terrified, eyes bulging, chest convulsing. He looked like a clown.

  Paitin stood with his hands resting on his knees, breathing. He shook his head. “Go ahead without me.”

  “What?” Said Drew. Then comprehension dawned in his face. “Oh, not again.” He darkened. “I wouldn’t have taken you if I knew you would do this. I wouldn’t have taken you.”

  “Go.”

  “You’re going to miss everything! And for what?”

  “Go.”

  “How will I find you, you goddam pooz?”

  “I’ll chirp.”

  Drew was shaking his head, muttering, pulling away. He accelerated along the ground a few hundred yards then made a sharp arc into a sky already acrid with yellow smoke.

  He thought: Sandra. She was short, not even six feet tall. Skin like warm chestnuts. Soft, yielding woman of antiquity. He focused his thoughts on her while the shock of the initial invasion wore off. His fingers shook as he took a scrubber from his pocket and stuck it between his lips and put a cigarette in it. He could still detect a hint of vomit in his sinuses.

  He knew the city mostly from above, but the nomenclature of the streets he also knew from the days spent exploring the ruin with Sandra. He stood at 21st Street. Sandra lived at 44th, and the numbers rose to the east. Paitin’s breathing and his heartbeat slowed when he recognized one of the taller buildings visible to the south and instantly knew his relative position. Of course he’d find her. He always had before, hadn’t he?

  It was midnight at home, but here the sun had just begun to set. Fuel rainbows colored puddles in the street, and everything seemed fresh and full of possibility. The explosions of the rotorcraft that rose like mayflies from the city seemed crisp and healthy.

  Paitin’s posture straightened and his shuffle became a strut. He was glad he’d come. It was worth it. Didn’t it always turn out to be worth it? He was at that moment walking a world where Sandra could be found and touched.

  But first came the naked people.

  Gabled row houses walled in one side of the street, brick apartment buildings ranged to different heights along the other, broken by charcoal-toned alleys. Paitin had perhaps a quarter mile when he heard the rising slap and gabble coming around the corner. Then the wall of pink burst out of one of the alleys.

  Around a corner and straight at him came a flailing throng, and the street was curb-to-curb with naked running people.

  Paitin stopped, abashed but unafraid. He stood head and shoulders above most of them, turning slightly to let them pass, and none touched him. The nude pygmies were men and women of all ages, stampeding after being set loose from some brief but shocking captivity. The slap of their bare feet on the street and sidewalk was sharp and distinctive, the pale faces wild and bewildered. Their pubic hair formed a dark river rather close to the ground, and Paitin found it suddenly difficult to believe they could be homo sapiens separated from himself only by superstitious beliefs and poor diets.

  Hover bikes followed behind them with the yuck and stutter of hard ammo guns driving them onward, keeping them senseless. The kids on the hover bikes would swarm up close, their faces blank, and throw people down by the backs of their necks. Then they’d pull off a little and strafe them with little pocks of gunfire.

  Paitin’s cigarette shot out of his lips as a nude girl lost her balance and collapsed against him.When he didn’t throw her down immediately one of the hover bike kids zoomed up close and screamed, “WHOOOOOO! Go fer yours, buddy!” And then resumed his position above and behind all of the flashing skin, pursuing them out of sight, guns pocking and splitting flesh like warm butter.

  Paitin trapped the exhausted girl’s flailing arms and shoved her into a pile of garbage near the mouth of an alley, where she either passed out or played dead. He wiped his palms against his sides, spun in a slow circle, and walked on, chewing the end of the scrubber in his teeth.

  More explosions thumped in the distance, and somewhere the crash of antique pistols briefly answered the neat little chirp and twitter of lasers and stutterguns before being silenced. Men and women burst randomly in and out of the row houses and alleyways, or they slipped in and out of dumpsters or ancient road-bound cars. Paitin felt bigger and bigger as he walked along. Warm breezes scattered paper trash and puffed memories of flame up his collar.

  Half an hour later, Paitin stood before
the steps to Sandra’s house. Relief overcame him, and he laughed to himself. As always, he’d harbored the fear that Sandra might not exist in this past, or that she might exist in altered form. A stranger would answer her door. This had been a subject of frequent nightmares in which she revealed, too late, a variant face; she’d once sported a large penis in one of his more disturbing dreams. But his Sandra had been in all previous pasts except one (two, including his own, the Real past), and as he took in the familiar flowerpots on the second-storey windowsill and the the chipped red brick of the façade, he knew he would not be disappointed. A feeling of having arrived on the edge of a far ocean washed over him, a positive feeling of floating away. He wanted to rush inside, and he wanted to creep silently away. He stood on the shore of a dream.

  The destruction only seemed to add romance and a sense of destiny to his reunion with Sandra. Let the bombs burst and walls crumble around them. It wouldn’t matter. Paitin could hardly wait to hold her, to feel the hot flesh of her arms beneath his fingers. He would have to wait, of course, for her to accept him, but invasion and war had the wondrous effect of speeding everything up. He rarely had to wait long for her surrender.

  For miles around, archaic war jets plummeted like rocket bombs into the sprawling city as the future’s children brought them down. It lent a breathless quality to the quiet of Sandra’s street. A cat’s feet blurred as it scuttled from one side of Chestnut Street to the other. Dead hands and feet stuck out of the pucker in the caved roof of a car where a human bomb had struck.

  Paitin imagined showing these things to Sandra, looking deep into her eyes, and saying, “Not you. Never you.” And she would be his. Perhaps heaven and hell sometimes conspired to bring people together, as they seemed to do tonight.