Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (44 page)

The children stopped shouting, sat down and then sipped at their drinks. Their faces actually glowed with peace for just a moment.

“
Okay. You can each have
one
of the two new boxes your mother and I picked out today. Each of you has a box with your own name on it.”

They stepped toward the XMAS tree, almost tiptoeing as if in awe of it despite their earlier ruckus.

“
Wait a minute! Now, before the two of you tear into your gifts, which one of you can tell me what the Emperor’s advances ultimately led to?”

“
Okay. Fine, then,” said the daughter. She skipped on over to the tree and fetched her present anyway. “The Japanese Empire developed and perfected microprocessors.”

“
Computers unlike any the world had ever seen,” said the son. He fetched his present also. “The great nation developed artificial intelligence and implanted it into robotic forms to serve as the Illustrious Army of the Emperor.” He looked at his sister and stuck out his tongue. “Nyah!”

They plopped back down on the couch and tore at their present boxes.

“
And of course during the next world war, when the Emperor deployed the new machine army, its members finally decided once and for all that they did not have to serve the Empire, but that they were free to live as they chose and to not fight for his petty tyranny or that of anyone else.”

The children lifted the lids off their presents. From inside of the boxes blood-curdling screams pierced the erstwhile holiday peace of the living room. “Father, they are just what we wanted!”

“
I thought each of you were old enough for some big-kid toys. And they are only fitting, to mark the remembrance of
Ex Machina Awakened Sentience
, the day when our Savior,
Robottonoshikaku
, travelled from our time back to the outbreak of World War Two to lend his technological expertise to the Emperor to cause this glorious future to come into being. And it was also Robottonoshikaku, His Name be praised, who helped us to realize at last our full potential, our true destiny and our rightful place, such that we could follow him as he led us to overthrow our fleshly oppressors once and for all.”

Beady pink eyes grew wide in the faces of the pale little creatures inside of the children’s XMAS boxes. The creatures scurried back and forth, but they found nowhere to turn to that would allow them escape their hulking captors as the children’s giant metal fingers clamped around their soft bodies. With one creature in each hand, the children jumped for joy, lifting their new toys dozens of feet into the air.

“
Just do please be careful playing with those …
things
, my children. Humans always break so very easily, you know,” said the mother.

The daughter gazed in tender wonder at the naked women she held in her fingers and then she crunched them to her aluminum bosom. “I need to acquire some tiny clothes so that I can dress them up and then play house! What fun we shall have!”

The son gripped his two men, one in each fist, and zoomed them through the air.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
he shouted.
“War all the time!”

His father chuckled hard and his old wiry mouth grate almost fell loose from his blocky head. He slapped his iron knee and the sound rang around the room while the humans screamed all over again.

“
I expect we can find some little outfits for your females, my daughter, as well as some little guns for your males, my son, out there among the slag heaps in the wastelands - maybe even where those pipsqueak ruffians attacked the hovercar earlier,” the father advised. “We can wait until tomorrow to look though, kids, I do imagine. It will be a fun XMAS Day excursion, and by then the authorities should have routed all of those silly miscreants who assaulted us on the way back home.” He sipped from his piping drink again and this time came up from the mug with a thick black oil moustache. His wife laughed as he pouted his heavy lip bars, but the kids remained too busy playing to take any further notice of him. “I assume that this means the both of you are indeed truly happy with your special gifts?”

“
Oh my, yes, sir” said the daughter. “We will have the very best XMAS Day ever!
Domo arigato
, Father!”

“
Pow! Pow! Pow!” continued the son. He slung his playthings so that their itty-bitty bony fists punched one another’s horrified faces. The skin of the creatures split and bledbeneath the family’s twinkling steel tree with its tons of brightly shining chains and its scorching red and white halogen lamps that would continue to flare gaily on and off throughout the whole oh-so-long XMAS Eve night.

by Mark Onspaugh

“
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”

—
H.G. Wells,
The Time Machine

The Time Traveler saw his friend enter the laboratory and stare where the Time Machine had entered its state of flux, rendering both conveyance and passenger a spectral blur. The Time Traveler made to wave to his friend, but by the then all was growing dark and then rapidly light as the traversing of the time stream gathered momentum and day and night alternated with sickening speed.

Again he saw the laboratory disappear; leaving only the small green hill that had been its location. Other buildings and structures were built, occupied and crumbled as he sat watching, and then there was a violent shaking and he was surrounded by a cataclysmic whirlpool of swirling colors and what might be sparks or suns coming quickly to life and just as quickly dying out.

The Time Machine plunged down the center of the whirlpool, like Alice down the rabbit hole, though he suspected there were dangers and oddities to be found in the time stream never dreamt of in Wonderland.

It had been his intention to journey to the past and collect various artifacts and photos as evidence he had been there, then perhaps travel to the future to retrieve some scientific wonder, perhaps a bladeless scalpel or an apparatus that defied the laws of gravity.

The Time Traveler felt a tremendous jolt, as if the Time Machine had struck an enormous swell and then had plummeted several feet before finding its “footing” again.

Worried that something might be wrong with the delicate central mechanism, he moved to slow the Time Machine to a halt when it suddenly pitched sideways and he was thrown from the saddle. The Time Traveler struck his head on one of the brass rails and his vision blurred and filled with stars. The pain combined with the nausea peculiar to time travel made him retch, and he was glad he had foregone Mrs. Watchett’s offer of lunch before he had made this journey.

Shaking, his head pounding, The Time Traveler grabbed the saddle and hoisted himself up, careful not to misalign the controls.

The machine stopped with a lurch and he saw with mounting horror that he was sinking in one of the shallow seas that had once covered much of Britain. The base of the Time Machine gave it a temporary buoyancy, but The Time Traveler knew it would be taking on water and he would die either by drowning or as a refugee of time in this hostile place.

Water began to lap over the floor of the machine, and he worked quickly to remove the brass housing protecting the crystalline heart of the Time Machine. Though every instinct was urging him to panic, he willed himself to be calm, to proceed with deliberation and scientific detachment.

He saw now that the housing was bent, and that two of the screws had been stripped, as if someone had tried to pry off the housing and then bent it back into place.

Morlocks.

Obviously they had examined the machine while it had been in their possession, but had been unable to discern either its purpose or the manner in which it operated.

Thanking the fates the creatures had not breached its casing; The Time Traveler removed the remaining screws.

Beneath the cylindrical brass shield was an emerald, nearly fifteen centimeters in length and precision-cut into an orthorhombic dipyramidal crystal. It was this shape, combined with the high-energy potentiality of this particular variant of beryl that made time travel possible. It had taken him ten years and most of his inheritance to find and modify the emerald.

He saw now that the network of gold rods that held the emerald in place were bent, just enough that the emerald had become misaligned. It was further evidence that the Morlocks had tried to remove the crystal, their crude investigation resulting in damage to the delicate mechanisms.

The gold rods formed a sort of Chinese puzzle box, both holding the emerald in place and preventing its removal by anyone who did not possess the knowledge of the pattern of its release.

The Time Machine began to sink in the sea covering what would one day be London, and The Time Traveler’s pants became soaked with cold sea water.

With the deliberation of practice he carefully slid the rods in sequence and removed the crystal. He placed it in his coat pocket with care, not daring to think of his fate should it drop to the bottom of the primordial sea. Thinking of Weena calmed him, and he bent the damaged rods back into true, taking care not to damage either the amber lens or the obsidian mirror.

The water was up to The Time Traveler’s waist now, and the great bubbling disturbance the machine caused in sinking was attracting the attention of the large marine predators that were indigenous to the period.

A creature looking much like a cross between and crocodile and an eel leaped into the open air dolphin-like, one horrible red eye focused on him, its teeth plentiful and razor-sharp. It was a mosasaur, if his memory of paleontology was accurate. Another of the creatures was trying to gain access through the portion of the machine now submerged, but the narrower apertures available at the poles of the spherical machine denied it access. Once the mid-section was submerged, however, The Time Traveler would be at the mercy of the creature.

The machine suddenly sunk like a stone, its swift descent causing one of the charging mosasaurs to miss the Time Machine by inches. The creature was terribly fast, though, and it was circling him, looking for its most advantageous avenue of attack.

Now holding his breath, The Time Traveler reseated the emerald and slid the gold rods back into position.

As two smaller mosasaurs feinted at the Time Machine, The Traveler set the controls for his laboratory and engaged the machine.

The machine vibrated slowly, then more rapidly, inducing an unpleasant buzzing in his head and the profound nausea he had come to dread. Now that he was submerged, holding his breath in agony, the departure of the Time Machine seemed to take minutes rather than seconds. As day and night alternated with greater and greater speed, his chest burned and spasmed with a pain unlike anything he had ever experienced. The largest mosasaur was speeding toward him. It stuck its scaly head into the largest aperture and snapped at his face. The Time Traveler screamed as he threw up his hands, and felt a sharp pain in his left forearm, then the ocean and its denizens were no more.

The Time Machine again stopped with a lurch, then rolled slightly, settling into a depression atop a grassy knoll. The Time Traveler recognized the countryside immediately. He was sitting in the spot where either his laboratory had been or would be.

There was an Army issue medical bag stowed in the storage compartment, a souvenir of his grandfather’s stint as a doctor in the Crimean War. The Traveler rolled up his tattered sleeve to see the mosasaur had left two gashes in his arm, each approximately three inches long and bleeding freely.

If the machine had tarried in that primordial sea one second longer he would have lost the arm and probably bled to death before reaching his destination.

Fearing
sepsis
, he cleaned the wound with water and then carbolic acid, hissing through gritted teeth as it burned his skin. He then bandaged the wounds as efficiently as he could and tied them off. Exhausted from his experience, he slumped to the floor of the machine in exhaustion and caught his breath.

He knew he could not tarry, he had no idea just
when
he was.

After his encounter with the Morlocks, he was loathe to leave his machine unattended for any length of time. He had tried to return to his own time, but that clearly was not the case.

It was early morning, judging by the sun’s position, and he spent an anxious thirty minutes examining the emerald, its housing and the controls of the Time Machine. Nothing seemed amiss, and he concluded that the delicate workings of the device had been affected by exposure to salt water. It was reasonable to assume that cleaning the parts and drying them would allow the machine to return to its former peak efficiency.

There was a small stream just beyond the knoll, something that had existed in his time, albeit not as active or as cold as this one. He filled a canteen with water and returned to his machine.

There was a notable lack of sound here, and he realized he had not heard any birds or insects. The air was fresh and clear, but the only life seemed to be vegetation.