Time After Time (9 page)

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Authors: Karl Alexander

BOOK: Time After Time
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“What's his name?”
“Leslie John Stephenson. Step-hen-son. He's a surgeon. A rather tall and dark chap.”
“Oh, yes, Dr. Stephenson was here. I guess it's pretty obvious you both just arrived.” She blushed. “Anyway, if it's any help, I recommended the Jack Tar Hotel on Geary Street. You might find him there.”
H.G. smiled with immense satisfaction. “Is it very far from here?”
“Nothing's far from anywhere in San Francisco.”
“You've been so very kind and helpful, Miss Robbins. Thank you ever so much.” He took her hand again, only this time he kissed it. She bubbled with laughter. He stood, but he knew he couldn't just dash off. That would be rude. Besides, this girl was extremely vivacious. After the business with Stephenson was properly resolved, who knew what might happen? “Perhaps we should have lunch together in a day or so.”
“I'd love to.”
He leaned over to her—one hand on the desk frightfully close to her right breast—and smiled. “I found the most marvelous restaurant not far from here. Scottish, I believe.”
“What's the name of the place?”
“McDonald's.”
And then he was gone. She stared after him, mouth open. Neither of them immediately noticed that he had forgotten his traveler's checks.
H.G. pushed through the bank's glass doors and once again found himself out on the street. The aura of Amy's presence still surrounded him, the result being that he glowed like the cherubic altar boy he wasn't. He strolled along, beaming foolishly and thinking about how wonderful it was to be alive. Then he walked into a parking meter, and the sudden pain in his chest brought him to his senses. After all, he wasn't on a bloody holiday, he was in pursuit of a depraved killer. Women and wanderlust would have to wait.
He quickened his pace, moving toward the intersection of Post Street and Grant Avenue. He dodged and vaulted ahead of the other pedestrians, his jaws resolutely clamped shut. Stephenson would soon be within his grasp; justice would be served.
When he reached the corner, the signal light abruptly changed, and the machines accelerated across the intersection as one roaring metal phalanx. Their fumes briefly enveloped him, and he recalled the unpleasantness of London's underground. He wondered, where is San Francisco's?
A well-dressed, gray-haired lady carrying a stack of Christmas packages leaned into the street, raised an arm and extended a finger as if she were pointing at something strange in the sky. H.G. looked
up and saw nothing but gray overcast. He frowned. Could the lady be testing the wind?
A drab yellow vehicle with prices emblazoned on its doors stopped by the lady.
The lady got inside and said something to the driver. He nodded and took off.
H.G. smiled. What could have been more logical? The ugly yellow machine was obviously the descendant of the English hansom.
Then he pursed his lips and frowned. So far in 1979 his view of the internal-combustion-engine-driven vehicles had alternated between admiration and suspicion. But that didn't matter, for he was going to have to make use of one of the modern cabs if he ever hoped to catch up with Leslie John Stephenson. He hesitated. He cursed himself. Now was no time for second thought. After all, if he had the courage to strap himself into a time machine, why the sudden apprehension about getting into another kind of machine?
He shook his head and stepped to the curb. Half hidden by a lamppost and a sign, he timidly raised his arm and pointed one finger skyward.
The light turned yellow, and Wells saw a cab a half block away hurtling toward the intersection. Then, at the last moment, the vehicle swerved across Grant Avenue's three one-way lanes—horn blasting—and smoked to a stop inches from H.G.'s left foot. He gasped and jumped back, arm still raised, finger still pointing. He glared indignantly at the driver. What cheek!
“You want a cab?” The driver pointed at Wells's upstretched arm. “Or are you bidding on a street sign?”
H.G. opened the rear door and gingerly got into the cab. He was immediately disappointed by the cheap interior, the collapsed seat springs and the odor of carbon monoxide. The inside of the machine
was utterly primitive, with no handmade British touches to offset its unattractive nature.
“Where to?”
“The Jack Tar Hotel.”
H.G. saw the driver press a pedal with his foot. The cab jerked up to the intersection.
The brief acceleration lurched H.G. forward, then tossed him back against the seat. He smiled and suppressed a giggle. The cab was obviously in disrepair. He had always assumed that the technology of the future would be clean and in perfect operating condition. Not so. If a hansom can rust and rot, why not a Yellow Cab? He conjured up an image of all the new and marvelous things he had seen, and they were heaped into a gigantic mountain of waste. Bent, broken and twisted, the mechanical creations of man cooked under a hot sun that would eventually dissolve them. Nearby, a man of the future, wearing a dirty loincloth and holding an ancient section of pipe as a club, scratched himself and wondered what god the huge pile of junk was a monument to.
H.G. could no longer contain himself. He burst out laughing.
The driver swiveled his head around like a bald eagle. “What's so funny?”
“Nothing.” He became curious. “My good man, how often do you take your vehicle into the shop?”
“The garage? It was there last week.”
The light changed. The driver pressed down hard, and the cab leaped forward, taking H.G.'s breath away.
“See? Really gets out and moves, don't it? You want a better pickup than this, you got to get into a race car. Like the '72 Plymouth I used to run at the track back in Decatur.”
H.G. grew accustomed to the motion and speed of the vehicle very quickly. Unlike his reaction to the time machine, he did not
become sick and disoriented. He guessed that was true because the Yellow Cab was motoring linearly, whereas his time machine moved centrifugally and at a much higher speed. He found this ground travel pleasant, even exhilarating, and wondered if there were some law of physics which he could adapt in order to make travel along the fourth dimension more agreeable. Nothing immediately came to his mind, so he decided that that was a problem for future afternoons in the laboratory. Right now, the cab was idling at another red light, and suddenly he longed for more speed and maneuvers.
“How fast will this vehicle go?”
“Around ninety. Ninety-five.”
“Oh, really?” H.G.'s eyes widened.
The driver assumed that Wells was challenging him. “Yeah. Really.” He grabbed a small metal device with an attached cord from the center of the dashboard, pressed it into his face, pushed a button on it and began barking. “Breaker, breaker, this is Kojak-the-Hack going west on Grant. Any CHiPs between my wheels and the deep blue? Over?”
H.G. gawked at the driver. It wasn't the device that impressed him, for he'd already seen the telephone in operation; rather it was the language. It sounded like a combination of Scottish and Gaelic with an added touch of Prussian, all delivered with an American twang.
“Negative, Hack, negative. All the CHiPs I seen is on their way to a 10–49 in Daly City. Happy RPMs. You gotta clean slate to the Golden Gate.”
The driver ended his conversation, then hunched over the steering wheel and glowered at the street ahead.
The light turned green.
The driver pushed his foot to the floor, and the vehicle roared across the intersection. In eight seconds Kojak-the-Hack had slammed
through the gears, and his yellow juggernaut was flying down Grant Avenue at sixty, lurching through traffic like a supercharged tank. He bounced in the seat and rode the wheel with his entire bulk, applying body English when needed. He also used his horn frequently—in most cases where a more prudent and sane motorist would apply the brakes.
At first H.G. just stared at the driver with awe and didn't know what to make of the man's antics. Then he discerned that the driver was engaged in a very personal activity, one that seemed vaguely familiar, yet out of place. The grunts and groans of the driver were quasi-erotic, and H.G. realized that the man was in the middle of a private, sexual form of ritual, and he was so carried away that he seemed to have forgotten that H.G. was in the backseat. He talked to his cab as if it were an enthusiastic woman bucking under his squat, sweaty frame. H.G. had read with both scientific and prurient interest about certain activities common to lonely shepherds, but never before had he heard of lascivious behavior between a man and a machine. What would one term such an impropriety? It wasn't onanism because a machine was involved. H.G. thought hard, then coined it “technophilia.” H.G. blushed and looked away. True, the sensations of speed, power and acceleration were exhilarating, but in his view, sexual relations brought on an entirely different set of emotions. Or was it that along with advanced technology came depersonalization? Had sex, too, become mechanical? The driver ran a red light, then swung onto Columbus Avenue doing a good seventy-five. The tires squealed and smoked, and the cab almost turned over, but he deftly jerked the wheel back to the right, straightened out and increased speed.
“Come on, show me, baby! Come on! Faster, Faster!”
H.G. was left gasping and giddy by the turn; he laughed with excitement. The continued high-speed swerves were thrilling to him, and he found that he, too, was becoming emotionally involved with
the cab. He gripped the front seat with both hands and silently urged the vehicle to even greater mechanical feats.
The driver suddenly braked and turned onto Union Street. Then he accelerated again, and the cab sped up a very steep hill, every bolt and joint shuddering. At the top of the rise, the vehicle shot into the air and floated for thirty feet before nosing down and slamming to the pavement. Surprised, H.G. let out a whoosh of air, then clapped his hands in delight.
“Again!” he cried. “Again!”
The driver obliged. He did six more hill jumps and was about to attempt a seventh when the cab overheated and popped its loosely locked radiator cap. He cursed as the temperature-gauge needle bounced into the red, then stopped his beloved machine. He got out, lifted the hood and backed away as the clouds of steam billowed up and dissipated. The engine groaned and ticked.
While the cab rested, and cooled, H.G. sighed and leaned back in the seat. The wild ride had left him drained and devoid of tension. He uttered a giggle. Had he, too, just experienced “technophilia”?
The driver closed up the hood, got back inside the cab and started the engine. He slowly pulled away from the curb, a serene smile on his otherwise blank face.
The rest of the trip was staid and uneventful, but H.G. didn't notice, for he had his head back on the seat, his eyes closed, and was smiling. His imagination was back there rocketing off concrete summits in quiet residential areas. When he reluctantly climbed out of the cab, he was no longer the same.
H.G. Wells had fallen inexorably in love with the automobile.
 
 
Leslie John Stephenson sat at the dining table in his hotel suite and picked at the escargots he had ordered from room service. Although tired, he was satisfied with the progress he had made in the short time
since he'd arrived in 1979. After he had left the museum, it had taken him less than an hour to locate a free hot supper and a warm bed at the St. Vincent De Paul Rescue Mission east of the park. And just this morning he had gotten a free ride into the city and had exchanged some of the gold sovereigns he always carried in his money belt for several hundred dollars American. Then he had purchased several outfits of clothes and was now lounging in a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-per-day suite high above the annoying metallic sounds of the street. He smiled. Not bad for a fugitive from Scotland Yard.
He pushed his lunch away and went back to a poem he was working on; he was impressed with the effortless way in which the modern pen with the internal source of ink moved across the Jack Tar stationery.
“An Ode to Joan of Arc”
 
You whom the flames twist around;
Smiling, you utter no sound.
Your mouth is hot with desire
To caress the inevitable fire …
He put the pen down and poured another glass of Beefeater's, then got up from the table and went out onto the balcony. He gazed at the overcast sky and the sweep of square buildings that sloped away from the hotel. The sight reminded him of the view of Bath from the library of his family's country estate that now belonged to one of his simpering older brothers. He took a slug of gin.
Aesculapius. That had been home once. That was the name his dictatorial father had given to the estate because he was a doctor, and he had three sons who he insisted become doctors, and he had a daughter who would no doubt marry a doctor. Stephenson, Sr.,
had envisioned himself as a latter-day Squire Allworthy, and once a month he would stage fox hunts, driving his intrepid hounds to the limit of their endurance, then hold forth for his friends in front of the great stone fireplace. On such occasions young Leslie and his siblings were banned from the front portion of the house, and their mother was reduced to the role of sniveling alewife.
Aesculapius. Stephenson took another gulp of gin. That was where he had gone home to after his first year at the university. That was where his love for his dark-haired, ivory-skinned sister had matured and flowered. That was where he had seduced her—upon the meadow behind the caretaker's house on a warm summer afternoon, the air heavy with pollen and sweet odors. He had interpreted her eagerness as a sign of true love and at the height of his passion asked her to run away with him and marry him. There had never been another woman. Just her. She replied without remorse that she was content where she was and that while she might like him at this particular moment, his passion had been preceded by others. “Who?” he cried with anguish. He learned that the caretaker had been first and that she had lain with their father—not once, but many times since.
She had unleashed a demon.
Aesculapius. Home. He took another quick swallow of liquor. The place where early in the evening that same day he had tried to kill his sister with a carving knife when he could no longer contain his rage and humiliation. He would have succeeded, too, if his father hadn't heard her screams, come into the room and beat him senseless with a fire poker.

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