Time Travel Omnibus, page 1060
“He was dashing,” his mother would say on occasion, running her arthritic fingers through Jameson’s hair. “And smart, like you. He used big words and I liked that. Made me feel smart.”
He still worked, still cared for his mother and listened to her stories and sang to her during the commercials.
Jameson liked the park near his new apartment. There was a fence of twisted black metal entwined in morning glory. Inside, it always seemed to be green or in bloom. The park wasn’t big, encompassing one small block amidst the apartment buildings that allowed only slivers of the sun to come through. However, at noon, when the sun was directly overhead, the flowers within the park practically glowed. Pink and yellow roses reflected the light and attracted bees and butterflies and ivy wound around the four park benches that lined the little walkway through the park.
He never thought of himself as a park-goer, but there he was, every Saturday afternoon after he brought mother home from physical therapy, every Sunday before he brought her to church, and every other moment he could slip away from work or mother.
One day she was there. Black hair cascading down her back, the wind blowing soft tendrils across her cheeks pink with the slight bite in the breeze. Winter was coming, its voice heard in the crackle of the leaves as they began to fall from the trees, in the crunch of frozen morning dew and the ice felt on the breeze.
Jameson didn’t mean to fall in love, but he thought it was the only word encompassing how he felt.
“I see you here a lot,” the woman said. He was reading the paper—history. “Mind if I sit here?” she asked, gesturing next to him. The morning air covered the blush that sprung to his cheeks. He looked over at her; she was dressed simply, in jeans and a corduroy jacket. In her hand, a book.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“Beowulf,” she said. “Well, trying too. It’s not really a book I can understand, which is why I wanted to give it a try.”
“I like the quiet,” Jameson said. “It’s so quiet here.”
“Is the rest of your life loud?” she asked.
Jameson thought of his days, work where his boss yelled at him in a drunken stupor, home where he had to sing to his mother during commercials lest she get upset.
“My name is James,” he said. She sat down next to him and he turned to face her. She was sitting with one leg bent under her, the other swinging off the bench.
“Muriel,” she said, putting the book on her lap and holding out her hand.
“Mother, what would you think if I got a nurse to come in and look after you some days?” Jameson asked. He was rocking her during a commercial break. She was watching Jerry Springer.
“Oh sweetie, you do a good enough job. I don’t need anyone else,” she replied, her voice gurgling with phlegm from some unknown virus that had taken hold of her. She reached a hand up, the skin loose and spotted with age, and patted his hand.
“I was just thinking, it might be better for you. I can’t be home all the time. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
A spasm of coughs racked through her body. She stood up, her joints creaking more than the rocking chair.
“Now you know very well I can take care of myself,” she said, reaching for her cane. Jameson handed it to her. It was simple silver metal with rubber grips. “I don’t need you here. If you want to run off and be a man, sow some wild oats, then go do it. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You being like your father, running off on me?”
With his mother’s health worsening, she clung to her son while berating him for wanting to be free. The more she yelled, the more he clung to his Legos and fled into the past, to speak with Muriel on the park bench. She had already given up on Beowulf and moved to A Tale of Two Cities instead.
“I really like it,” she said.
“Why don’t you go to college?” he asked.
“Oh no,” she said, turning her head down. “That’s not going to happen. I am going to secretarial school though. We just can’t afford college. Not for me, not like this.”
Jameson found out that her parents had died in a car accident and she lived alone with her sister, Martha. Martha was older, had started school on scholarship but was now a legal secretary. Muriel had wanted to be a schoolteacher, but was now working on getting her secretarial skills in order to find a job.
“Did you go to college?” she asked, her brown eyes examining him.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m an accountant.”
Muriel took his hand. “That’s a good job,” she said. “A real good profession. Do you like to read?”
Jameson nodded and Muriel handed him the book, pointing to a passage. He read it to her and she leaned in against him, her warmth fighting off the encroaching winter.
Jameson figured out a schedule. He could stay for long stretches in the past and then go back to his own time just moments after he left. The trouble was, he was sick of his mother, he was sick of her ire now fully unleashed on him, how he was ungrateful for all she did for him. He was sick of his boss having him do all the work, while he took all the glory and bonuses. He began spending even more time in the past, taking Muriel out for walks, to shows, reading to her in the park.
It was Muriel who proposed. She asked that he make them legitimate. It was only after he said no that she confessed she missed her period.
“You seem so distant lately,” Jameson’s mother said. “Is everything okay?” They were eating Shepherd’s Pie.
“It’s nothing,” he said, moving mashed potatoes, browned with mutton, around his plate.
“A woman can tell when another woman is causing trouble, especially when that women is your mother,” she said.
“It’s just—”
“Do you love her?” his mother asked.
“I think so.” He said.
“If you’re not sure you don’t. You love me, right?”
“Of course!” he said, lifting his head. She shuffled over to him, put her hands on his shoulder.
“Of course you do. You’re a good boy. Some naughty girl just has her hooks in you, doesn’t she?”
When Jameson’s mother died, he decided to hide his grief in the past, with Muriel. He had enough in her will to buy the place he had always lived in, the family home. Jameson never married her, but they lived together for a while. When their son was born, she named him “Jameson,” the son of James. She got a job as a secretary at the firm where he was an accountant. He hoped he could have a future here, found an old box, and took apart the time machine, prying up a board in the attic to hide it.
Muriel made him dinner every night. She had lunch with him every day at work, and shooed away all other co-workers who tried to sit with them. She bought his clothes, starched his shirts, and watched him sleep. If he had to work late, she’d sit outside his office and pretend to be his secretary, smiling through the glass at him. She bought him gifts, planned special surprises, told him constantly how much she loved him. She begged Jameson to read to her, to rock her in her chair as she knit booties for baby Jameson. Finally he had enough. He said words like ‘suffocating’ and ‘needy.’ He said words like ‘crazy’ and ‘sociopath’ after she hit a woman that brought Jameson a late night memo at work, and he left. He left her, he left baby Jameson, he left the Legoland Time Machine, and walked away from it all.
SPREE
John Medaille
The math is impeccable and inexplicable. The numbers fit themselves precisely, row by row, with no remainders. The numbers know where they come from: some numerological breeding ground of infinitely complex forms, and know where they go: some incalculable afterlife. The math encompasses everything at once, accurately, down to the hundred-thousandth decimal place.
And the math enables The Time Traveler to build the Time Machine. Its construction is a simple affair and uses common household items. Vinegar and baking soda are both crucial components and they generate the catalytic energy necessary to open the Time Vortex, much in the same way that one can wire a lemon to a light bulb and cause a feeble glow. The Time Traveler connects this to a spindly web of coat hangers and aluminum foil, and hooks the whole contraption to a rewired Texas Instruments calculator as a control panel. When finished, the Time Machine only takes up a small corner of his garage.
The Time Traveler switches the Time Machine on and it makes a low, burbley hum, and after punching in various atomic weights, universal constants and certain angles of descent, The Time Traveler is able to see through the faintly orange mish-mash of the Time Window to all things future and past. He sees the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Niels Bohr’s dirty apartment.
The Time Traveler raises his hand and attempts to reach out through the distant orangenesses of the Veil of Time, but crackling discharges of electroshock prevent him and singe his hand, turning the fingernails a little brown. The Time Traveler takes some elementary readings and finds that time is a particle-wave and his hand cannot go through the Veil because it is asynchronous to the wave. But The Time Traveler knows that time is a function of speed and, theoretically, if something should be going fast enough to pass between the crests of the Time Wave, then that thing might penetrate the Borders of Time, and becomes a Traveler Through Time. With this in mind, The Time Traveler goes and buys an automatic baseball pitching machine.
Dragging the box in through the garage door, cutting the tape and shoveling through the burial mound of styrofoam nubbins, The Time Traveler realizes that the baseball pitcher is now the most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the laboratory, possibly including the Time Machine itself.
Plugging in the electronic pitcher, The Time Traveler attempts a series of experiments, shooting balls against the Time Vortex, but even at the pitchers maximum setting of 150 miles per hour, they fail to puncture the Time Wave and ricochet off, leaving only a smell of scorched stone and a pile of smoking baseballs. 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.
The Time Traveler discovers that 824 is the magic number, just above the sound barrier. Anything travelling at or in excess of 824 miles per hour is able to pass through the Veil of Time. So one might, in theory, travel through time if one could accelerate a projectile to the Time Barrier speed, one can pass that object through the Time Vortex and the projectile, in essence, becomes a Time Traveler.
Like a bullet, for instance.
A little man with a long leather coat and a perfectly rectangular mustache like a black dash beneath his nose is standing on an onion crate on a street corner of a city that is damp and European, smelling of coal smoke and wet iron. The man is yelling at a small congregation of street corner people; a butcher, a baker, a legless veteran blinded by chemicals who pushes himself around on a trolley with a stick. The little man contorts his face into many funny shapes: a death pang shape, a difficult orgasm face, a bowel movement face. He chops his hands into the air many times as he speaks.
The man is Hitler.
Fifty feet above Hitler and one hundred feet diagonal to him, a wobbly orange circle, about the size of a large pizza, dimensionalizes open. Hitler sees it for a second, then stammers in German. To him it looks like a weak, fetal sun, and seems to have a person somewhere in it, and then Hitler sees a flash, and then Hitler’s skull separates and divides and Hitler’s brain, the finger-sized shrapnel of it still carrying, for a millisecond, rushing electrical lightnings that are the thoughts of his thoughts, bounces on the cobblestone street and Hitler is dead and falls down.
It is the first time The Time Traveler has ever fired a gun.
Subtract one.
Add fifty five million.
Simple math.
The Time Traveler turns the Time Machine off with a quiet splat of diodes, and feels a light blue bruise on his shoulder where the butt of the sniper rifle smacked him. His garage has not changed in the least. There is still a pile of flaccid bicycle tires on the floor and many grease stains. Hanging above him there is still an automatic garage door opener that has not worked since 1988 and has become a small city of spiders. There are still cans of paint and varnish under his tool bench that still emit faint gamma rays of unfulfilled sadness.
The Time Traveler had partially expected the universe to implode when he killed Hitler, had, in fact, calculated that there was a 36.875% chance of that happening. That answers that. He records the finding in his notebook. “11:18 AM. No implosion.”
The Time Traveler finds the set of Encyclopedia Britannica in a box marked ‘Teddy’s Things’ in the back of the garage. They are the set he was given for his eighth birthday and he remembers unwrapping them and immediately looking up his favorite things in the world when he was precisely eight: Anklyosauruses and giant bats. Now the books are a little bloated with old mold and he goes to the volume marked G through K and tries to look up Hitler, and who is not there. Not even a wizened paragraph, no grainy photo of a scowling Austrian. No Hitler, Adolph. 1889-1928. Failed Artist and soapbox maniac, de-brained by an unidentified assailant one nasty and overcast morning. Nothing. The Time Traveler looks up Nazi and it doesn’t exist either; he can’t find it anywhere between narwhale and Neanderthal. He looks up swastika and it says An equilateral cross with arms bent at right angles comprising a symbol thought to have originated circa 2000 BC in proto-India, generally believed to be a good luck charm.
The Time Traveler is about to put the encyclopedias back into the box, slide the box into a crawlspace, take two antacids and go to bed when he decides to look up World War Two, just in case, and found that it was still there, forty-seven pages of it.
In 1945, Xavier Mobuto, an epileptic silver mine foreman, had risen from obscurity in the Congo, uniting Africa and chasing all European powers screaming off the continent and had then become the head of a cult with apocalyptic overtones, and embarked on a campaign of global domination, devastating southern Europe, pulverizing Persia, and even successfully invading and occupying Florida for a decade before the Allies: the U.S., U.S.S.R., Japan and Germany, finally vanquished Mobuto in 1955 after a long and bitter struggle. Mobuto was shot sixty-six times and every inch of Africa was burned down. Seventy-nine million people died.
Seventy-nine million from World War 2.2 minus fifty-five million from World War 2.1 is twenty-four million. An unacceptable remainder.
The Time Traveler realizes, of course, that time was not only a function of speed but of concurrent temporal stresses and personality and that they exert fully measurable tendrils of need and urge and that the diminishing of history in one Time Unfolding will be rectified by compensation in another.
This was correct. This was fine.
There would, there must, be a Time Eventuality where Hitler dies and was not replaced. There had to be an acceptable outlier on the probability curve.
The math told him so.
Luckily, the Time Traveler has accounted for this possibility, and is not so very tired, and has purchased an entire box of bullets.
The Time Window opens over a green bacterial jungle, there is a crack and the wasp whine of a speeding bullet, and a large man pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones crumbles into mud, made all of the sudden boneless by a distant god.
By 1948, the New Aztec Empire had subjugated the entire Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Rim. Human sacrifice returned to fashion. Emperor Teknozuma and his whole high command dined on human hearts and cognac in a photo from the Associated Press. The White House was demolished and a sixty-story pyramid was erected on its foundation. Death squads from the Order of the Winged Serpent cleaved open the chests of the Windsors with blades of black volcanic glass. China invented Atomic Weapons and turned Mexico into a glowing pit.
Ninety-three million dead.
Recalibrate Time Coordinates.
The Time Traveler assassinates Teknozuma when he is sixteen, five years before his coronation as Quetzecoatl Returned. Blood dribbles upon the Jaguar Throne.
Then the Americans came. By 1952, hungry and lean and absolutely furious from a twenty year long Great Depression and under the leadership of President Ickes they invaded Europe, South America, Japan and West Africa. They established what they considered to be a benevolent monopoly, while shipping back to the States uranium, cocaine, Rembrandts, uncut diamonds, domestic servants and bullion by the cubic ton. The entire Coliseum was transported, stone by stone, to Coogan’s Bluff, Virginia.
Unimaginable wealth and splendor collapsed after a decade under its own decadence and ultra inflation. The U.S.S.R. invaded and relieved America of its treasure. The second Great Depression is still going on today. 103 million died.
Recalculate.
The Time Traveler kills Mao, Mussolini, Tojo, Kennedy, Khruschev, Khomeni, Castro and Che. He kills Churchill, Idi Amin, Nixon, de Gaulle, Jim Jones, Charles Manson and Queen Elizabeth II. He kills Timothy Leary, Oswald, the Rosenbergs, the Arch-Duke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, Ronald Reagan, Orson Welles, Josef Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Einstein, Franco and George Bernard Shaw. And scores and scores of people he’s never heard of until the day he kills them. There was Bill Plimpton, President of the Reconfederated States of America, Marcos Dominguez, the Butcher of Brazil, Aba Disrabi, who would someday be worshipped as God by half the population of the Earth and Archibald Itzker, who was the one and only King of the World for two and a half years. The Time Traveler sees the rise and fall, by his own doing, of the most brutal administrations in history, until the next history is made: The Blood Cross Republic, The Yaku Dynasty, The People’s Republic of Australia, The Free Love Party, the Exxon Guard and the Brotherhood of Satan. And they all find nukes. If they don’t, they find something worse: The Ion Bomb, the Death Ray or the Scarlet Wobblies. And if they can’t find those, they become crafty at making pikes exactly the right size for heads. The Irish burn Manchester to the ground and the fires don’t die down for three months. The Chippewa take Minnesota first while the Canadians ravage the Eastern Seaboard. The Zulus take Capetown but it is wired to self destruct. Hong Kong invades China. Hawaii and Alaska bash each others brains in. Siberia is the last place left on earth that doesn’t glow in the dark. It is pandemonium. And The Time Traveler shoots and shoots and shoots.
