Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (9 page)

After five minutes, it hasn’t happened yet. He gets up on achey legs and goes to the wall of the garage, where there hangs the hubcap of a 1956 Studebaker, in the same place where it was hung by The Time Traveler’s father and where it has hung for all of the Time Traveler’s life. He has never touched it before. It looks like the infant of a UFO and he examines his oblong reflection in the decayed chrome of the hubcap’s flying saucerian face.

It takes him quite a while to notice it, but The Time Traveler comes to realize that he is slightly taller, about three quarters of an inch or so, and that his eyes have changed from blue to light hazel.

Fascinating
, he thinks.

The Time Traveler assassinates his paternal great grandmother, a plump hausfrau in Bell Point, New York, and his hair darkens by two shades and he is suddenly diabetic.

He decommissions one of his great-great-great-grandfathers just to see what happens, and although he stares into the mirrored surface of the hubcap for a long, long time, he records no observable differences, but he will never notice that his teeth have become much, much worse.

He executes his grandfather, a mean and sullen old man who he had known and never liked him, and The Time Traveler, all at once gains an exceptional musical ability, and he’s never had any before. He listens to the Top Forty on the gummy old ghetto blaster with the broken tape deck on the tool bench near the socket wrenches, and he nods along appreciatively, tasting elements he had never known were there before, seeing the music in intertwining curlicues of pastel pointillism.

He murders grandmaw too, because it hardly matters anymore really, and he gains a Roman nose and a much nicer chin, but loses a couple of IQ points. Not many, maybe two or three at most, but he can no longer remember the capital of Surinam.

This ought to do the trick
, thinks The Time Traveler.

His mother looks almost the same as she always did. He has so far avoided slaughtering her side of the family, due to some lingering, unscientific affection. She is in the backyard of this very same house, only forty-four years previously, before she had him. She is hanging up sheets to dry on a clothesline with those wooden, springless clothespins that aren’t made anymore. He wonders if they still make the springy kind, thinks
sorry, mommy,
and splatters her all over a dust coverlet.

He doesn’t recognize a single bit of himself in the hubcap anymore, not the eyes or the mouth or the ears. His name has changed, and he is having a difficult time recalling what it was before.

The Time Traveler is inventing a Time Machine of some sort. He is unbending coathangers and hot-gluing them into some sort of misbegotten web, like a spider with a birth defect. As The Time Traveler flits around with the pliers and the glue gun, in a dim corner of the garage behind him, an orangey emanation shutters open, making the cobwebs around it tremble wispily.

The Time Traveler is inside of the orangeness too, and he raises a hunting rifle, the barrel of which cannot extend through the Time Window but the bullet of which can and does and it blasts the earlier Time Traveler’s head apart like a hammered cantaloupe, and The Time Traveler slumps and crashes over into the half-made Time Machine. The Time Traveler burns his inner arm with the nozzle of the hot glue gun, but by that time The Time Traveler isn’t there to notice it.

And suddenly The Time Traveler is black.

This isn’t working
, he thinks, but an experiment is only verifiable if it is repeatable. And he reloads.

The Time Traveler suicides his earlier self again, and he’s white again. He looks somewhat Greek.

Again, and he’s a fifty-six year old divorcee named Vivian with pendulous breasts.

Again, and he’s a nine year old Hindu boy.

Again, and he’s a Chinese guy, maybe a Korean.

He tries again, thinking, maybe if I only wing myself, maybe I won’t be able to build the Time Machine, and instantaneously after he fires he is a one armed Chinese guy, maybe a one-armed Korean, and he can shoot just fine, amazingly well, in fact, with only his left hand.

Oh
, thinks The Time Traveler.

At this point The Time Traveler has killed, according to his tally, 3,323 people, including his mother, his father, many great-great-grandpappys, distant ancestors, rumored progenitors, rusty foregoers,
pater familiae
, and fifty-six different versions of himself. He has wads of cotton plugged deep into his ears and a massive hematoma, a Jupiterian shade of purple, the size of a dinner plate on his shoulder, and every twenty kills or so he puts another layer of damp washcloths over it to cushion himself for the next blast. His face is pitted with tiny, sweet burns from carbon embers and his right eye is somewhat eclipse-blind from the many thousands of muzzle flashes it has seen. There are two-hundred and seven boxes of ammunition left, bought in bulk an unremembered number of hours ago for a forgotten price. The slugs, by the gross, are stacked on his tool bench and on an abused Nautilus machine and in the cargo bed of his boyhood, yellowy-dented Tonka dump truck.

The Time Traveler finds it weird that he is not hungry or thirsty or sleepy or particularly in pain or not in pain, except for his poor shoulder, nor hot nor cold nor even slightly ashamed of himself, just disappointed. And just a low, toothless, unangry variation of disappointment, a variation for which there is no word that he knows. The same kind one has upon the first five seconds of waking every time; the same kind one has when one remembers the gravity is still on. The Time Traveler thinks,
is almost sure
, that he has not eaten or drank or slept since he killed Hitler, but this can’t be true because that must be several weeks ago now, although he hasn’t kept track. He can’t recall the month, but that is partially because the names of the months keep changing and are always impermanent. It might be February or Thermidor or Five Crocodile or Shahrivar or The Month of the Sacred Plum.

The Time Traveler thinks he might be a little insane now; he thinks
undo/redo, undo/redo, undo/redo
. The experiment must be negated and the universe must be dismantled and unboxed post haste. The Time Traveler has not made the world a better place, no matter how many men he has unmade. He knows he must reformat his hypothesis because the current one is incorrect.

And, swabbing Bactine into the cratery, moon-pit burns on his cheek, The Time Traveler has his
Eureka
. The problem, it comes to him at once, is not men.

The problem is man.

The Time Traveler flips the dial, bored, and through the orange scrim of the Time Portal, It takes a while to find what he’s looking for. It takes four point five million years. The Time Traveler dismisses the Cro Magnon, the Neanderthal, the Homo Erectus, the Australopithecus Africanus. The brows thicken and the arms grow longer and the thumbs shorter, they sprout pelts and, in reverse time, extinguish their fires and scour the images of mammoths and sabertooth cats off the walls of caves.

What a horrible people they will inevitably become
, thinks The Time Traveler,
me among them
. Someday these monkey-children will shave the heads of their gassed-to-death cousins, and use the hair to stuff pillows and tan their flayed skins for lampshades. Those clever baby hands will invent the guillotine and the iron maiden and the disposable diaper and the F-86 Apache Gunship. Those bulbous skulls are the cocoons of monsters, they walk upright only because they know that some sunny day they will get to wear jackboots and goosestep in parade for the inspection of whichever one of them is the worst. They must be stopped at any cost. They must be prevented from contaminating the universe with the evil nougat center hidden in their dino-nucleic acid.

At last The Time Traveler finds what he is looking for. He finds it in the Serengeti, in a copse of trees. He finds it eating thorny fruit and looking only the slightest bit human. He finds that it still has a tail, a tiny little waggly one. He finds the Missing Link.

There you are, my pretty
, thinks The Time Traveler.

Fire rains down from heaven and apes fall from the trees like spoiled fruit. In their chirping language of hoots and barks, they ask the Sun God what they had done to anger him so and The Sun God clacks another round into the chamber.

The dry grass of the savanna rustles like paper. When it is over, the blowflies descend.

In the year 847, R.S., His Massiveness, Emperor Rhinocerian the Ninth comes to the throne of the Oonogerian Empire. Although a boy of tender years and gentle manners, Rhinocerian nonetheless soon displays signs of towering ambition and ruthless powermongery. Only three months in office and he personally gores to death sixteen members of the Senate and banishes the rest of them, eternally, to the Hell Countries.

After that, Rhinocerian begins a reign of terror and bloodshed that will not desist for more than a century. He enslaves the Elephant People, commits a thorough genocide against the Buffalo Tribes, has the entire continent of Gundrivaal burned, irradiated and salted with a poisonous defoliant that makes it so that nothing would ever grow there again. Really. Nothing. Ever.

Twenty-seven billion dead. Twenty-seven billion.

Twenty-seven billion minus fifty-five million is a lot.

The Time Traveler thinks to himself, in a language that he has simultaneously never heard before and yet has spoken all his life,
you are unfit to lead, Emperor Rhinocerian, and the biological predispositions of your species will not be stood for. You must leave, to make way for a less violent lifeform.

The Time Traveler itches a mosquito at the thick gray burlappy skin on his flank, and knocks his enormous nose-tusk against the ground in the expression of virulent disgust among the people who are suddenly his. He goes flipping through the channels of the Time Vortex, looking for Emperor Rhinocerian’s, and his own, ancient ancestral forerunners, whom he will dispatch to the dung heap of history.

The Time Traveler will have another people soon.

The Time Traveler no longer has the muzzle glare semi-blindness because at some point during the recent spree, the rifle changed into a laser rifle. He thinks he killed off an entire species of six foot tall salamanders with opposable thumbs before he even noticed the change. He prefers the laser rifle to the old Smith & Wesson he had before, which grew unbearably hot after only six shots, whereas the laser rifle just gives a steely coolness and doesn’t make a deafening report in the close garage, it just makes a calm, jazzy snap. And instead of the dirtily sexual reek of cordite, this gun only smells vaguely of lilacs.

But, and this is odd, the vinegar and baking soda have not changed at all. On the Arm and Hammer baking soda box, it still has a picture of a human arm in a rolled up shirtsleeve, and a clearly man-made hammer. The Time Traveler examines his own arm, and it is now a three-toed, prehensile, lizardskin nightmare, iguana-green and sleek. He compares it to the big fat mammalian pink appendage on the box and thinks, that’s not right at all, that doesn’t make any sense. Very strange. Very very strange.

Oh well
, he thinks. And then he exterminates the Kingdom of Chameleons.

The Time Traveler has multiple sets of eyes now, some twitching far out of his body on long, chopsticky stalks. Some merely peep morosely from the back of his head or the joints of his many knees. And he doesn’t have to blink anymore, not even once. He is omniscient. He can see the whole garage, all eight corners of it at once, without interruption. I see you, grossly reconfigured Huffy bicycle. I see you, roach motel. You’re not going anywhere.

This is enjoyable
, thinks The Time Traveler,
but not nearly enough
.

Sometime on towards midnight or noon, The Time Traveler checks his count. He believes that he has killed 53,786 living beings, including humans, proto-humans, primates, the primogenitors of many species of highly-evolved felines, canines, equines, bovines and lupines, a fascinating but fundamentally unlikeable form of non-aquatic dolphin, an infinity of mice-people, rat-people, mole-men and bat-people, an extraordinarily perverted civilization of hyper-intelligent kangaroos, a race of lithe and beautiful poet-priests evolved from seagulls who seemed wise and kind but were secretly hypocritical, a psychic species of flowering vine (a close relative of the grape) who were capable of unimaginable cruelty, the Reptiloids, the Dinosaurians and the bees.

It isn’t turning out right. Land-based lifeforms just seemed preordained to lives of exotic nastiness, scrabbling and rending and tearing and flaying one another alive, the most important and usually the first ingredient to all of their societies is fire, from which they quickly develop the brand, the red hot pincer, the flamethrower and the H-Bomb.

It will be better under the sea,
thinks The Time Traveler.
Those are our kind of people under the sea, the
incombustible
kind, the kind that appreciate quietness and stillness and saturation
. The Time Traveler flips on the Time Monitor to the Devonian, and through the orange squishiness of the screen, he sits back in his battered folding chair, his wormy, glistening, segmented tale oozing juice onto the cement floor, and watches the unfolding epoch.