Timelines: Stories Inspired by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine

Who ever heard of one lousy hairdryer blacking out all of the East Coast?

The Time Traveller asked him whether he was the last of his kind, George touched his shoulder, and within that look passed understanding.

She was a walking paradox, her mother said. And she must never make waves, never draw attention, never accomplish something or participate or pop her head out, for even a second. If she changed the future, her father might not exist, and neither would she.

Haven’t you noobs read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler?!

I suppose you remember that young writer, H.G. Wells—Bertie, we called him—who used to come to Hammersmith for the meetings of the old Socialist League. He seemed quite taken with News from Nowhere, my vision of the future.

The man chuckled at himself because of the bewilderment on Saul’s face. “The fuckin’ messiah and you don’t even know it.”

Paitin shook his head. Civics 101: conditional perfects are neither citizens nor their ancestors. Therefore, they are not real.

The hard part was figuring out what to say. I needed something that would matter enough to the inventors of time travel that they would want to come visit me, right along with Jesus and Galileo and Heinlein.

At the heart of it was a small seat carved from wood, almost a saddle, and before it was a console, barely two inches across, decorated with levers of what looked like glass and bone.

Even so, he grew nervous each time he left the pod—ever since that encounter with the Fascist Government of Greater Britannia in the twenty-second century. Not to mention the alligator population that plagued London after the Great Flood in the twenty-third. That had caught him completely unawares.

Static past. Unmoving. Like wandering around in an old, overexposed photograph.

What this mean, Howard explained, was that the traveler could only jump to a time and place where they had previously existed. The traveling version of the person would take the place in the world of the old version, with all the knowledge they had gained since that time kept intact.

It was then that he devined a solution to his new-found problems: he would travel back in time and stop himself from disturbing Miss Bonsoir in the first place—on any level, molecular or otherwise. Yes, that ought to do it. While he was there, he might even return those now-overdue library books.

He looked at the sole red logo and decided it was the on button. He thought about where he’d like to be, and pushed.

The Time Traveler tinkers with the pitcher, increasing the torque and velocity of its engine and by the little, sickly hours of the early morning he is finally able to successfully launch three Major League regulation baseballs into the late Mesozoic Era.

In those trials he saw her die more than a dozen times, and it nearly drove him mad. If he was not sure he could rescue her, he might have set the controls for the far distant future when the sun would engulf the Earth.

“When you stopped me from stopping me,” Reggie-B said, “you ceased to exist because I never became you. But if I never became you then you never existed to stop me from stopping me.

I thought you were old enough for big-kid toys.