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

by Jw Schnarr

“Take me with you. I could help. We can try again, a different way—reformers in the Age of Change.”

  His hand was gentle on my arm. I could feel the strength in that hand, and the weakness in the biceps he held. It was tempting, his offer. A second chance. Or perhaps I should say a third.

  “You wouldn’t want to do that,” I said presently. “You’d be helping to put the Party in the position it enjoys today.”

  “Damned politics,” he growled.

  There was but one thing for me to do then, Georgie.

  After seeing the future, I knew I could not trust my own failing vision to decide what is best for humankind. I had to step back in time. I had to visit myself in 1894.

  I argued with myself bitterly over this. But the quest had never been about my own happiness. I would have to hold staunch and true to the ideals that brought me here in the first place—to the honor that had carried me through the most difficult passages of my life.

  I landed a few days before the Time Machine would have been assembled in the attics. I had chosen a moment when I knew I’d be alone in my study, with Janey and my daughters out visiting. Bertie had warned me about setting foot in a year when I already existed; actually meeting myself face to face would be far worse. That close, I might only have a moment.

  I rushed down the stairs. Each step drove a spike of pain through my leg. I forced myself down the hall. The closer I got to the study, the worse it was: I could feel his presence, sharp as the gout.

  And then I saw him—that high forehead, the springy mass of hair and beard, the broad nose. Myself at 60. He stood frozen in front of the wide deal table as I clutched the doorframe.

  “You!” we cried. Our voices blended, a low, rich harmony. We each flung out an arm, pointing. All the hair on my body stood on end.

  “We haven’t time,” I gasped. “Bertie’s going to offer you something that seems too good to be true. Don’t trust it!”

  But my disjointed words could tell him nothing, and already I had a strange, giddy feeling. I could feel myself slipping away.

  We walked closer, paces matched. We clasped each other’s hands. All at once, it rushed toward us: a barrage of knowledge and sight, feelings and thoughts and time … a whirlwind of madness and life. I forced myself to stand though the waves battered my heart. My vision swam. I was dying—but his breath was as choked as mine.

  Sick with the doubling, dying and living—two of me for every breath. We embraced. Time buffeted me till I bent double with the pain. Alone.

  Only myself. I huddled on hands and knees, trying to breathe, to slow my heart. Only me. But I held all the knowledge I’d ever had—past, present, future.

  When Bertie came, I warned him, with all that I knew. By his sad look, I saw I spoke too late. Before he had ever given me his machine, he had tried and failed.

  It was my vision of the new 2120, blooming beside my other memories, that so dispirited me. While I will never abandon hope for the Cause—for all men should treat each other as kin—I can no longer fight in this life with any passion for something that I know cannot come to pass.

  I have decided to leave well enough alone.

  I did not think my heart could break any harder than it already has. But then, I did not think I would ever give you up, if once we found a way to be together. Ned, dear Ned, died in the summer of 1898. And you and I—

  We were inseparable, Georgie. Once loyalties and honor allowed. We knew a sweet period of perfect harmony that only I can remember now. I am so sorry that I never told you, dearest.

  My love that shall never be.

  It had all happened so fast. Georgie stood stunned by the graveside, watching while they rained dirt on Ned’s coffin. She had loved him truly, loved him enough that she could forgive him endlessly, despite her common sense. Despite Marie Zambaco, and all the young women who followed. There was a childlike simplicity about Ned, that he could somehow accommodate so much love and so much pain, without any hypocrisy.

  But Topsy’s death—that was a blow Ned could not endure. It had been scarcely a year and a half since they had laid their dear friend in the ground. And now, standing over Ned’s grave, she could not help seeing that other funeral as well, like a stained glass window shining through its reflection in plain glass. A simple cart had carried Topsy’s body to St. George’s Church near the Manor, festooned with vines and willow boughs and carpeted with moss. The storms had blown off and on all day, and the mourners walked through meadows that still shone silver with rain. Family and friends, workers from Merton Abbey and Oxford Street, fellow Socialists, and the Kelmscott villagers in their work clothes had all come to see him laid to rest.

  The morning that Topsy had showed her the letter, she’d wanted so badly to believe it. She’d felt his eyes upon her as she read. She could not stop the tears that slipped down her face as she reached the end; seeing hers, his own flowed freely.

  And so they had said their goodbyes; and at the end, it was as chaste and true a love as it had always been. She thought about the last words of the letter, scrawled hastily in postscript—”There will be something else to prove all this to you, that I cannot hang in a bed curtain. Ask Ned.”

  But by the time Ned had arrived that afternoon, Topsy’s eyes had already begun to cloud, and he raved about things neither of them could understand. Georgie sat by his side, shocked numb by the revelations and her grief.

  The next day, Topsy had slipped away from them, gentle as a lamb. She had sat beside him and held his hand till the last, but Jane was there, and May, along with many of his closest friends, and there was nothing more that Georgie and Topsy could say.

  She didn’t know what to think, what to believe. She locked herself in her room. Wretched. She lay on the floor and wept, for her best friend, for all the dreams gone by. She could not tell which hurt worse: that he’d given up this chance, or that he might have imagined it all.

  She had reined in her passion at last, and done the only thing she knew—lived the expected, honorable life. Ned had looked at her blankly when she asked if Topsy had given him anything she ought to see. So there had not been any proof.

  But now poor Ned had died when Topsy said he would. So soon. The finality of the loss of both of them cut her to the bone. She remembered the day, so long ago, when the Morris and Burne-Jones families had gone together to the beach, and buried Topsy to the neck in the shingle. It seemed they’d laughed the whole day long.

  But as she went through the clutter in Ned’s workshop, she found a surprising thing. Topsy had been true to his word. And it seemed she would have to forgive Ned one last time.

  In a plain brown wrapper, she found an unknown book from the Kelmscott Press. She lifted the cover and turned the pages reverently. Her fingers rested lightly on the impressions of the type. The drawings were in her husband’s style. She recognized some of them—he’d been working on them before Topsy died. The Press had hoped to finish the book afterwards, but Ned had given up, it pained him so. But here it was, and the engravings of Ned’s drawings bore the stamp of Topsy’s hand.

  The story itself was one Topsy had shown them on several occasions, in different forms. But she had never seen it finished with such confidence. The date on the colophon at the end was 1900—two years from now.

  She had to set the book down several times for sheer emotion. Pacing in the gardens, she felt as though Topsy held her hand.

  Ned had kept this from her because he recognized the same thing she did: these characters were she and Topsy, the story of a love fulfilled. As she lingered on the final page, she felt a fierceness rise in her heart, a fire born of anger and love.

  The book scarcely left her hand as she put on her coat and gathered Topsy’s letter.

  When she knocked, H.G. Wells himself ushered her inside.

  Georgie looked nervously about the chaos of the rooms, seeking any odd shape that might conceal the Time Machine.

  “What is this about, Lady Burne-Jones?”

  “Ple
ase, call me Georgie. We were both his friends.”

  His face changed. He stood straighter, more alert.

  “I have to know the truth,” she said. “What does the future look like now?”

  He offered her a chair. “You’re talking about the Time Machine?”

  She nodded, scared suddenly of saying anything more. He might refuse to tell her. She reached into her bag and placed Topsy’s last letter reverently into his hands.

  Wells read silently, carefully, turning back a page or two and reading them again. When he was done, he looked up at her. She felt a jolt. Aside from Topsy’s that final day, she had never seen eyes so sad.

  “It’s bad, Georgie,” he said. “Far worse than what I put into the book. The entire world, convulsed in war, grinding up so many people. The weapons burn away lungs, wipe out whole cities, poison the people and the countryside for miles. Genocide. Mass torture and incarceration. Starvation around the globe. They’ve cured diseases only to create new ones to use against each other. After so many depredations, Earth will scarcely support the smallest enclave of human life. I’ve thought about destroying the Time Machine, it haunts me so.”

  He folded the letter tenderly and handed it back. “If Topsy’s future is half as good as he describes—”

  He hesitated, letting the words hang between them.

  Georgie stood up. “Yes,” she said breathlessly.

  “Go back and convince him. You’re the only one who can.”

  “And the Time Machine?” Georgie hesitated. She was not sure how to ask this sacrifice of him, the inventor. She only knew that there must be some way to safeguard the future, once all was done.

  He waved his hand. “Take it. I’m through with time machines. This one has already turned me into a bitter old man, and I’m only 32.”

  “And you—you won’t miss it?”

  “I can discern how to move through time—a straightforward scientific problem, with a concrete mathematical answer. But I can’t discover the right combination to save the world. Topsy was a far better dreamer than I in that regard. All I could see were nightmares.”

  That very afternoon, she went to visit Janey at Kelmscott Manor. The two women, while not close, had seen so much of one another through the years that they found comfort in each other’s company. With Ned’s funeral just past, Janey agreed to let her stay for several days.

  When Bertie showed up that night at Kelmscott Manor, Janey cast a veiled glance at Georgie before drifting off to bed, the folds of her heavy damask robe whispering along the ground. Once she’d gone, Georgie helped Bertie carry the Time Machine up to the attics, piece by delicate piece.

  Once he positioned the last bar and screwed in the final rod, Bertie stood back, admiring his craftsmanship one last time. When he spoke to her, he kept his eyes on the machine, as though afraid it would slip away before he noticed, out of his life and into another story altogether.

  Then he gave her a crimped smile, whose pain she didn’t understand until he said, “Say goodbye to him for me, would you? Send him my love.”

  At last she stood alone in the attics, staring at the machine that glinted by the light of the lantern. So full of promises.

  Gingerly, she climbed into the saddle. She knew exactly where to go. A place where Topsy still remembered everything he’d told her. A time when she herself had been far from Kelmscott—far enough away that she could stay long enough to convince him. She would bear the pain. If she made haste, she could spirit him away to a future where the cures had become far simpler than the diseases.

  She had the letter and the book tucked tight into her bodice. There was still hope. There would always be time. Even if paradise on earth was an impossible dream, hope still lay in other people, to change what they could of their lives.

  For her part, she knew what she would change.

  Comrade Morris is not dead. There is not a Socialist living would believe him dead, for he Lives in the heart of all true men and women still and will do so to the end of time.

  —Lancashire Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, 1896

  *The title of this story was inspired by the platinum prints of Frederick H. Evans. In 1896, Evans visited the ailing poet and obtained his permission to photograph Kelmscott Manor. When Morris died soon afterwards, Evans’s images were published along with an article commemorating Morris’s life and art. Suffused with light, the clean, bright spaces of the attics seem to symbolize the creative spirit of the man who loved Kelmscott so much he made it the entrance to a better world in his utopia, News from Nowhere.

  Cast of

  Contributors

  Paul J. Nahin is professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the University of New Hampshire. In his retirement he writes math/history books for Princeton University Press; his newest book, Number-Crunching, will be published in 2011 (it reprints his Omni Magazine time travel story “Newton’s Gift,” describing what happens after a time traveler gives Isaac Newton a modern pocket calculator). During the 1970s and 1980s he wrote more than two dozen short stories that appeared in Analog, Omni, and Twilight Zone magazines. His story “The Man in the Gray Weapons Suit” appeared in the first volume (Thor’s Hammer) of the three-volume anthology The Future at War. His 1997 Writer’s Digest book Time Travel: a writer’s guide to the real science of plausible time travel, will be reprinted in 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. He is an avid Xbox360 player, and currently he is holding his own in the time travel video game Singularity (although he did only just barely survive the boss fight with the train monster).

  Peter Clines is the author of Ex-Heroes and numerous pieces of short fiction which can be found in Cthulhu Unbound 2, The World is Dead, The Harrow, Timelines, and the upcoming Morons Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse. He grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and started writing science fiction and fantasy stories at the age of eight. He made his first writing sale at age seventeen and the first screenplay he wrote got him an open door to pitch story ideas at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager. After working in the film and television industry for almost fifteen years, he currently writes articles and reviews for Creative Screenwriting Magazine and its free CS Weekly online newsletter. He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California. http://thoth-amon.blogspot.com/

  Michael Scott Bricker has sold stories to numerous anthologies, and has recently completed a time travel novel which takes place, in part, during the Black Death . He lives in California, where he works at a public library, and buys and sells old and curious goods.

  http://sff.net/people/m.bricker/

  Harper Hull was born and raised in Northern England but now lives in a 19th century farmhouse in the American South with his much smarter and prettier Dixie wife. He has lived in London, San Antonio and Seattle and his favourite city is Florence. He grew up in a home crammed with classic sci-fi and horror books, and started writing his own stories in 2009. If you ever read one of his pieces, he just hopes you enjoy it.

  http://helloharperhull.blogspot.com/

  Victorya was named Miss Luna Landing runner-up 1969, Miss Garlic Festival 1977, and Miss Construed 1999. She likes to make up her biographies. Her work can also be seen in War of the Worlds: Frontlines (An NFP anthology), Necrotic Tissue, Shroud Magazine and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. That part’s true.

  John Medaille has been published in Pseudopod, Everyday Weirdness and the Three-Lobed Burning Eye. He is currently working on a short story collection called:

  Hideous Tales of Doomed Spacemen, Demonic Cameras, Protoplasmic

  Flesh-Eaters, The Supernatural, U.F.O.s, Interdimensional Beasts,

  Evil Children, Misunderstood Robots, Telephone Calls

  from Beyond the Grave, Mayhem, Murder

  AND THE MACABRE!

  Vincent L. Scarsella I have gained modest success in publishing my work in print magazines such as The Leading Edge, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Fictitious Force. Several of my short sto
ries have appeared in the online zine, Aphelion-Webzine, as recently as March 2009 (“Simulation Addicts”). In September, 2007, my short story, “Vice Cop” was included in the anthology, New Writings in the Fantastic, from Pendragon Press edited by award winning John Grant. In March 2008, my story, “Practical Time Travel,” was published in Bound For Evil - Books Gone Bad, by Dead Letter Press . Another story, “Homeless Zombies,” appeared in the April 2009 anthology, Dead Science, by Coscom Entertainment. My short story, “Killers,” was also selected for the companion volume to Timeliness, War of the Worlds: Frontlines, being published by Northern Frights Publishing.

  I have been an attorney for thirty years, am an adjunct professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law, and am currently employed as an investigative lawyer for the New York Department of Taxation and Finance. I have self-published a non-fiction book, The Human Manifesto: A General Plan For Human Survival, a self-help book for humanity, which can be purchased at: http://www.thehumanmanifestobook.com

  Ruthanna Emrys lives in Chicago with her wife, three neurotic cats, and a relatively stable boa constrictor. Her work has previously appeared in Analog and Strange Horizons. http://ashnistrike.livejournal.com

  Derek J. Goodman is the author of The Apocalypse Shift from Library of Horror Press and Machina from M-Brane Press. His stories have also appeared in publications such as Zombology II, Nossa Morte, and Letters From the Dead. He currently lives in Wisconsin.

  Eric Ian Steele is a produced screenwriter from Manchester, England. His sci-fi/action feature, Clonehunter was released by Pandora Machine Films on DVD in North America and Canada in August 2010. He has three more features optioned in Los Angeles and Europe, and is represented by Sue Giordano of the Hudson Agency in New York. As well as having several short films in production across the United States, he has had short stories published in anthologies such as POW!erful Tales, In Bad Dreams 2, Terror Tales and The Random Eye. After spending twelve years in the British police force, he is now qualified as an attorney.