Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (10 page)

For a couple of million years, The Time Traveler scans the snotty, gelatinous shore of the primordial sea, and every once in a while, something pokes its head up out of the soup, makes a few awkward squirms towards the tempting mud, and The Time Traveler picks them off, one by one.

No, my little friends,
he thinks,
don’t come out of the water, there’s nothing up here for you. Your grandbabies will only occupy their time building incinerators and ovens, which they will use to cook their young, and will bring immortal shame upon your families.

He guards the border faithfully. One day a yard-long and monstrous poppa crayfish waddles out of the goo, makes a run for the low, sludgy dunes on the beach. It’s skin is transparent and through it the Time Traveler sees its open circulatory system, its inner ganglia, its fishnet webbing of nervous system, which has a big, six ounce brain in the fetus stage, capable of immense evil. The Time Traveler shoots it through the crude idea of its heart, which he can see through the glassy hide, and the blue laser light boils it inside out and it slumps dead in the surf. In a little while, the tide will wash it out to sea again and redistribute its nutrients.

I think not
, thinks the Time Traveler.
I think not
.

The Time Traveler reads, in the waterproof pages of the Encyclopedia Pacifica, that in the year Thirty-thousand Twenty-one, Emperor Kragor the Devourer waged the bloodiest campaign in history among the once happy forests of the Great Barrier Reef. His long-fanged shock-troops pillaged and raped and murdered at will, feasting on the egg-sacs of their enemies, laying waste to their spawning grounds, desecrating their coral churches and de-boning their brave young men. Sixty-seven trillion died.

This cannot be tolerated
, thinks the Time Traveler, and punches in the Time Coordinates. Through the waterlogged orange of the Time Vortex, there appears Emperor Kragor as a young tadpole-princeling, flitting lazily in the warm currents of The Gulf Stream. The Time Traveler wraps his tentacle around the laser rifle’s trigger and aims it precisely at Kragor’s gills.

We must see the matter through
, thinks the Time Traveler. Someday, some far flung epoch, he’ll get it right. Someday he would get to the last kill, the last and necessary correction of the Time Stream, and the world would be bright and new and undigusting. He thinks that there is a perfect variance of the world and it will just take the magic number of kills to get there. It doesn’t matter how many. He doesn’t have to sleep, he has not slept for ten to the power of ten to the power of ten years, he is not hungry or thirsty and he does not have to go to the bathroom and he will get to the correct world eventually.

And if that didn’t work, he would reach so very very far back, to when the Earth was just forming, just a baseball sized lump of cooling space dust, just the thought of the idea of congealing helium atoms, and, before it had a chance to go bad, he will blast it to smithereens, and watch the world begin anew.

He fires away.

by Vincent L. Scarsella

I

Late October, 2004: A Deathbed Revelation

On his deathbed, my father finally revealed the secret of the stone sarcophagus.

For ninety years, the hulking tomb had lain against the far wall of a locked chamber in the low, dank cellar of our family’s sprawling five-bedroom country home. My grandfather had built the place in a rural hamlet about forty miles southeast of Buffalo, New York after immigrating to America in 1914 from his ancestral home in Macedonia. It was his plan to grow grapes and raise goats on the gentle rolling hills on which the house was built. When it was finished, he sent for my grandmother, and his four young children (two boys and two girls, excluding my father, who wasn’t born until 1925). They took a steamship on a three-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean to join him.

Shipped with them, at considerable expense, was the stone tomb.

Long after his older brothers and sisters had left home, father remained behind to take care of his parents as they grew old and sick. Grandmother died in 1947, three years after Grandfather had passed, and father naturally inherited the house.

And years later, even after my older sister, Constance, and I had grown up and left home, father stubbornly refused to sell the house although it was clearly too big for mother and him.

I knew this steadfast refusal to leave was because of the stone tomb.

I was at a conference in San Antonio when a secretary from my firm left a grim message on my hotel room telephone that my father had suffered another stroke. Reaching his doctor, I was given little hope. He might be gone by the time I made it back home.

I booked the next available flight and arrived at the hospital around midnight.

“
He’s been asking for you,” said the plump matronly RN at the nurse’s station with a tired smile. The ward was eerily quiet.

“
How’s he doing?”

She shook her head,
not good,
then pointed down a long hallway.

I hurried to his room but stood back in the doorway for a time. There was no one at his bedside. Mother had died three years ago and my older sister, Constance, had left for parts unknown twenty years before that. All my father’s brothers and sisters were long dead, and whatever family remained in the old country had grown estranged from their American kin.

Finally, I stepped into the room. At his bedside, I found him awake, his eyes wide open. Seeing me, he smiled.

“
Damie,” he whispered.

“
Hi, Dad.” I kissed his forehead. He was cold as ice. His gaunt, pale appearance made it obvious that he was weak, close to death.

“
I must tell you something,” he whispered with sudden urgency. “A secret. Before I die. Something I should have told you years ago.”

“
Father, please,” I said to him. “Save your strength.”

“
The tomb,” he went on, “in the cellar.”

I nodded.

“
I must tell you what it is,” he said, then sighed. “I have not been given enough time to complete my duty. And I fear that Constance…” He trailed off momentarily, remembering something. “I fear she is never coming back.”

I edged closer to him, frowning.

“
The tomb,” he said, swallowing, his gaunt eyes boring down upon me now, “what it is, Damie, is a time machine.”

It took a moment for what he said to register.

“
Time machine?”

“
Yes, Damie,” he said. “Not like the kind in science fiction movies. The tomb is a vessel for transporting a person through time–
day-by-day
.” Father swallowed, drew in a breath, then continued in a raspy, tired voice: “Inside it, there is a substance, a kind of gel that stops you from aging. It is programmed to awaken the time traveler every seventy-three years, the length of a generation.”

I was about to say something to stop my father’s bizarre narrative. But he never gave me an opening:

“
The tomb was invented ten thousand years ago, Damie, by a civilization that was far more advanced, more magical, than ours. That civilization was what is now called Atlantis.”

Frowning, I gazed down at him, not knowing what to say. Surely, this delusion, whatever he was telling me, must be the result of some kind of dementia, a symptom of his latest stroke.

“
There is more, Damie,” father continued, “we are descendants of that race. Like so many others in our family the past ten thousand years, I inherited the duty of becoming caretaker for the time traveler once he finally awakens from his long sleep.

“
That is to occur, Damie, only six months from now. For seventy-three years I have waited to perform that duty.” Father sighed and anguish filled his eyes. “But the Almighty has not granted me time enough.”

He drew a breath and grasped my hand.

“
That duty, Damie, must now fall to you. As it will be your duty to pass that task onto someone else. A son, perhaps.”

Duty? A son? I knew nothing of this duty, and I did not have a son. I wasn’t even married anymore. Karen and I had been divorced ten years already.

“
At least,” father continued, gasping momentarily, “I saw him, Damie. The time traveler. I met him. I was only six years old.” He chuckled to himself, marveling, and it caused a brief coughing fit. “Seventy-three years ago.

“
He had just awakened,” he went on, gazing forward, lost in recollection. “Your grandfather took me downstairs into the vault which only the day before had been a place forbidden to me. But that morning, in the dim light of that dark, secret room, I finally saw it, Damie–the tomb. And it was open, Damie. The lid was up.

“
Finally, I gazed upon the time traveler himself. He was a shadow hunched over on your great-grandmother’s old rocking chair next to the tomb. One of her shawls was draped over him. At long last, he looked up at me with kind blue eyes that sparkled even in the dim light. His hair was a thick wave, and his jaw was square and handsome. And his skin, Damie, it was bronze. Bronze! He looked no more than thirty-five–and he was built like some Greek warrior from the old epics, Hector or Achilles.

“
This is my son, the next caretaker,
grandpa introduced me, and I crept forward and stood before him. The time traveler’s smile was gentle, kind. He put his hand upon my shoulder and asked my name. I noted a foreign edge to his voice, an utterly strange accent.
Kosta
, I told him. The time traveler patted my head.
I am Romal,
he said.
I think you and I shall become friends.

“
But he did not stay with us long enough so that we might truly become friends–only a week. He had last awakened in 1858, in Macedonia, and had stayed awake only three days back then.” Father sighed, deep in memory. “I saw him every day that week,” he finally went on. “We talked about the present times and the times he had seen.” Then father again sighed. “I remember how sad it was on the day when he reentered the vessel, and was sucked up into the purplish gel. Then, the stone lid lowered, shutting him off from us for a lifetime, not to be awakened again for another seventy-three years.”

Father swallowed and seemed close to tears. After a breath, he continued: “As he went back into the vessel, I remember him smiling and and telling me that when he next awoke and would see me again, I would be an old man. He hoped that I could tell him that I had led a good and happy life.”

I tried without much success to imagine a man sleeping in the stone tomb in that secret, dark room in the basement of the old house.

“
So you must promise me, Damie,” father whispered with some urgency, “that you will be here when the vessel opens six months from now, on the first of May. He will be weak after his long sleep and will need your help. He will also need you to guide his way in this age.”

Doubtless, in the throes of his impending death, father had become delusional. That this odd fantasy must have settled in his mind to help him make sense of his eccentric father’s incredible waste of money in transporting the massive, gray stone across the ocean all the way from Macedonia and then tending to it so secretively in the long years ever since. I speculated that father had snuck down there one afternoon as a six year old and, in the darkness, fell into a dream in which he had met an imaginary time traveler upon his imaginary exit from the tomb.

“
I promise, father,” I said, deciding to humor a dying man his last wish. “I will be here.”

Having revealed the secret at long last, father closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.

While father slept, I sat on a chair at the foot of his bed recalling that Saturday afternoon many years ago when Connie and I had entered the forbidden chamber after mother and father had left for the day to visit her sick cousin in Rochester. It had been Connie’s bold idea to defy the ancient family decree and sneak downstairs to have a look at the stone tomb, or whatever it was, that had been locked up all these years in that secret room. We had, in truth, always been drawn to it like children are always drawn to forbidden things.

“
How can we get inside?” I had chided Connie after she proposed the mission. She was seventeen, five years my senior, and a constant source of annoyance.

There was a heavy combination lock looped through the steel bolt of the room’s thick metal door. No hammer would break it open, and, anyway, to do that would surely doom us, sure to bring our father’s wrath down upon our heads.

“
I watched him opening the lock,” Connie said. “I was downstairs last week when Daddy went inside. I pretended to help mother with laundry but all the while I snuck up and secretly watched him him opening the lock. Somehow, he did not notice me and by sheer luck, I was able to figure out the combination: 44 to the right, 17 to the left, and 25 to the right again. And after two more complete turns—the lock opens.”

“
How do you know you got it right?” I snickered.

“
Because it worked, Damie” she answered defiantly. “I opened it.”

“
You’ve been inside the room?”

Constance shook her head. Long, ravenous hair, sashayed momentarily across her shoulders while her dark, brown eyes bore upon me. Though I would never admit it to anyone, I was proud to have such a darkly beautiful sister. “No,” she said. “I only opened the door and peeked inside. I did not go in. I–
I
decided to be nice and wait for you so that we could both go inside together.”