Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (34 page)

He heard the whistling and he looked up. He had been looking down at the flowers. The prison garden was a carpet of blues, oranges and light greens. Butterflies darted to and fro; the blend of scents was heady. The Warden was very proud of the garden, and rightly so.

“
I’ll leave you two to your own devices,” said the orderly. “I’ll be right there.” His little finger indicated a bench fifty feet away. A strange finger to point with, Saul remarked. There was probably a story behind this little quirk. Later he would ask. He liked to find out the answers to all the tiny mysteries he encountered.

He watched the orderly walk away and then looked at Angelica. She looked impossibly old, her wrinkles were as deep as scars. He looked down at her damaged legs.

“
I heard you jumped,” he said. “Tried to kill yourself after the world didn’t end. Odd way of celebrating.”

She was staring at him and enjoying the sound of his voice. Words had long ago ceased to have meaning for her. Some voices soothed her and others terrified her. Some voices made her happy and his was one of those. It made her smile for the same reason that the orderlies whistling had.

“
I wanted you to cry,” Saul said. “I wanted you to apologise for the things you had done. I wanted to scream at you. You have no idea how many times I have imagined this conversation.”

A butterfly drawn by a gleam landed on the armrest of Angelica’s wheelchair.

“
This is the last thing I imagined.”

She was still smiling at him. Faces were like words too. She never saw a face and matched it with a name. Faces were just clusters of geometric shapes to her. Saul’s face made her smile even more than the sound of his voice. It made her feel safe.

He reached out a hand and touched the blotchy surface of her forehead. “I guess this is better,” he whispered.

Whistlin’ Sam rushed over. “She doesn’t like when people touch her,” he began but then he saw her smiling face. “Guess she likes you,” he said.

“
Guess she does at that,” Saul replied. He stayed for two more hours. He wheeled her through the garden, told her stories about the world outside and whistled along with Sam.

Toowee. Toowee.

by Desmond Warzel

International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum

Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War

Page 263

11/15/2104

At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:

Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:

Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:

Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:

Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?

11/16/2104

At 10:15:44, JudgeDoom wrote:

Good news! I just left a French battlefield in October 1916, where I shot dead a young Bavarian Army messenger named Adolf Hitler! Not bad for my first time, no?
Sic semper tyrannis!

At 10:22:53, SilverFox316 wrote:

Back from 1916 France I come, having at the last possible second prevented Hitler’s early demise at the hands of JudgeDoom and, incredibly, restrained myself from shooting JudgeDoom and sparing us all years of correcting his misguided antics. READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!

At 15:41:18, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Point of order: issues related to Hitler’s service in the Bavarian Army ought to go in the World War I forum.

11/21/2104

At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:

Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:

All right; that’s it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I’m looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:

PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren’t worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint’s still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

11/26/2104

At 18:26:18, Jason440953 wrote:

SilverFox316, you seem to know a lot about the rules; what are your thoughts on traveling to, say, Braunau, Austria, in 1875 and killing Alois Hitler before he has a chance to father Adolf? Mind you, I’m asking out of curiosity alone, since I already went and did it.

At 18:42:55, SilverFox316 wrote:

Jason440953, see Bylaw 7, which states that all IATT rulings regarding historical persons apply to ancestors as well. I post this for the benefit of others, as I already made this clear to young Jason in person as I was dragging him back from 1875 by his hair. Got that? No ancestors. (Though if anyone were to go back to, say, Moline, Illinois, in, say, 2080 or so, and intercede to prevent Jason440953’s conception, I could be persuaded to look the other way.)

At 21:19:17, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Point of order: discussions of nineteenth-century Austria and twenty-first-century Illinois should be confined to their respective forums.

12/01/2104

At 15:56:41, AsianAvenger wrote:

FreedomFighter69, JudgeDoom, SneakyPete, Jason440953, you’re nothing but a pack of racists. Let the light of righteousness shine upon your squalid little viper’s nest!

At 16:40:17, BigTom44 wrote:

Well, here we frickin’ go.

At 16:58:42, FreedomFighter69 wrote:

Racist? For killing Hitler? WTF?

At 17:12:52, SaucyAussie wrote:

AsianAvenger, you’re not rehashing that whole Nagasaki issue again, are you? We just got everyone calmed down from last time.

At 17:22:37, LadyJustice wrote:

I’m with SaucyAussie. AsianAvenger, you’re making even less sense than usual. What gives?

At 18:56:09, AsianAvenger wrote:

What gives is everyone’s repeated insistence on a course of action which, even if successful, would only save a few million Europeans. It would be no more trouble to travel to Fuyuanshui, China, in 1814 and kill Hong Xiuquan, thus preventing the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century and saving fifty million lives in the process. But, hey, what are fifty million yellow devils more or less, right, guys? We’ve got Poles and Frenchmen to worry about.

At 19:01:38, LadyJustice wrote:

Well, what’s stopping
you
from killing him, AsianAvenger?

At 19:11:43, AsianAvenger wrote:

Only to have SilverFox316 undo my work? What’s the point?

At 19:59:23, SilverFox316 wrote:

Actually, it seems like a pretty good idea to me, AsianAvenger. No complications that I can see.

At 20:07:25, Big Chill wrote:

Go for it, man.

At 20:11:31, AsianAvenger wrote:

Very well. I shall return in mere moments, the savior of millions!

At 20:14:17, LadyJustice wrote:

Just checked the timeline; congrats on your success, AsianAvenger!

12/02/2104

At 10:52:53, LadyJustice wrote:

AsianAvenger?

At 11:41:40, SilverFox316 wrote:

AsianAvenger, we need your report, buddy.

At 17:15:32, SilverFox316 wrote:

Okay, apparently AsianAvenger was
descended
from Hong Xiuquan. Any volunteers to go back and stop him from negating his own existence?

12/10/2104

At 09:14:44, SilverFox316 wrote:

Anyone?

At 09:47:13, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Point of order: this discussion belongs in the Qing Dynasty forum. We’re adults; can we keep sight of what’s important around here?

by Matthew Johnson

Dabe glanced over his shoulder, leaned in close so that his body blocked the screen. He had been sifting through old TV comedies for weeks now, screening every episode frame by frame for inconsistencies, but today he had made a real find—a few lines of dialogue on
Family Ties
that referred to Richard Nixon.

There was no predicting where remnants like this would appear. The device that had changed time was more like a shotgun than a scalpel: it had established the present its makers wanted through hundreds of different changes to the timeline, some contradicting others. The result was a porous, makeshift new history that made little sense, but the old one had been thoroughly smashed to bits. It was those bits that remained that he and his whole department were tasked by the new history’s makers with finding and erasing.

Most of what he found was much more innocuous, references to things that had little ideological power but simply had not existed in the new history. This one, though, had meaning, a direct reference to a political event in the old history. He looked around again, drew a tape from the bottom drawer of his desk, slipped it into the second recorder and hit COPY. He could feel his heart beating more quickly as the seconds ticked by, felt the pressure of seen and unseen eyes on his back. Finally the inconsistency was over, ending as abruptly as it began, and he was able to breathe.

The danger past, he felt a rush of exhilaration. It had been more than a month since he had had anything to present to the group, but this would more than make up for the dry spell. Barely able to sit still, he decided it was no use trying to work for a while. He logged and erased the original clip, got up out of his chair and went to the kitchen.

Maura was there, biting open a bulb of milk and squeezing it into her coffee, a few strands of her long red hair loose and stuck to her mug. She looked up as he came in and smiled, and for a second he thought about reaching out and brushing her hair off the cup. Instead he simply gestured to it. She smiled again, her cheeks coloring a bit, and freed it with a toss of her head.

“
Working hard?” she asked.

He shrugged. “No harder than directed,” he said.

She laughed, threw him what he thought was a conspiratorial look. Maura was one of the few people in the office he could talk to at all: most of the others were either Party members striving to be noticed or else had been ground down to gray dullness by the endless frame-by-frame searches that filled their days. “Big plans for the weekend?” she asked.

“
Nothing too exciting. I might have to buy new shoes.”