Time Travel Omnibus, page 812
In spring 1892 came the crisis. Winnie wanted to go out more, especially to political meetings, and unchaperoned. The Traveller forbade that.
“Then I will go away,” she said calmly. “I love you, Periu, but no man tells me what I must or must not do. We did not live so in my country.”
Welles came to her rescue. He got her to marry him. At first that idea also outraged her, but he explained that only the form was necessary to make her respectable. “I won’t in fact own you, Wini. Of course you may love whom you like.”
“I should hope so!” she said.
“But I hope,” he said softly, “that I may mean a little more to you than all the rest.”
She kissed him fervently. “Abio—Bertie—you know you will always be my taleyeno and tapereno—best lover, best friend.”
So, after a brief civil ceremony, and now with a gold ring on her finger, she moved in with him, in his Putney lodging. There, at last, those two consummated their love.
It was in every sense a wonderful love; for both of them rich and strange. She found him gentle, but stronger and more serious than any Eloi man. She liked that. And he—he once confided: “Hillyer, she’s not quite human. But better!”
She was faithful to him, in her own fashion. He was certainly always her best friend, as he was, in our world, her first lover.
But not by any means the last . . . I, too, have held her lovely, perfect nakedness in my arms.
Not much now remains for me to record, except the triumphs of Winnie-Wiyeni, and how they affected our world.
During the summer of 1892 she began to be famous. She remained friends with the Traveller, and often visited him at Richmond; but she also gladdened the hearts of many other people—including William Morris, whose last years she cheered considerably. He liked to call her “Jane Welles”. But Jane Welles argued with him that Marxist Communism was a dreadfully bad idea. She was utterly opposed to class hatred, and she thought socialism could only work with very small-scale communes. “The workers must all be friends and lovers,” she insisted.
In late 1893, in circumstances I shall describe later, she did in fact set up a small commune, and it flourished. When I married, a year later, my wife and I moved in to the same establishment, and lived there very happily. People came to call it “The Welles-Hillyer Place”. Many years later, we also bought an estate in Essex, which became our main headquarters. Within our House, and the Houses other people founded in imitation, sex was a matter of free choice. Winnie sometimes persuaded men to join by making love with them; but she never went to bed with a man she really disliked. By now, she realized that men and women of our time were much more possessive and jealous than the Eloi. She shrugged her little shoulders, and made allowances and adaptations. “A House can be as small as one woman and one man,” she said, “so long as it is friend to the other Houses.”
In 1895, of course, I published The Time Machine, which made me famous—especially, I think, the illustrated edition, which used the Traveller’s photographs. That book brought in plenty of money, and really launched our brand of socialism. Some people called us “the anti-Morlock movement”. The Marxists hated us, but many of the Fabians came over, and Chesterton was also very friendly.
The rest is history. “Winnie Welles” became a world figure—long before her husband won his Nobel prize for atomic physics. She charmed most of the influential men in Europe and America; and also went to bed with many of them. Among her conquests, reputedly, were the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas. The Kaiser launched a famous saying: “When is socialism not socialism? When it’s in bed with Winnie Welles!”
She was also very active in the feminist movement and the Federal Peace Movement. When the Pan-European Alliance was signed in Brussels, August 4, 1914, she was present as the guest of both the Kaiser and the Tsar. That was the same year that the Liberal government in Britain gave votes to women, and Home Rule to Ireland, and passed the second round of bills establishing the welfare state. At Christmas that year, Winnie said: “Bertie, George—I think we’ve done it. There won’t be any Morlocks in our future!” I am sure she will be proved right.
By then she was one of the most beloved women in the world—and not only by her lovers. Of course it helped that she remained so amazingly young and amazingly beautiful. Hollywood made her huge offers, the British government offered her a peerage in her own right—but she turned all such things down. We had enough money, partly from my writings and Welles’s scientific work, to be comfortable in Richmond and Essex—and Winnie preferred before any other title to be known as the house-mother of Easton Glebe.
After X-rays came in, Doctor Browne gave her a really searching internal examination. He found that she had no appendix, and there were one or two other things which made him pronounce: “Really, she should be classified as a different species—not Homo (so-called) sapiens, but Homo amabilis.”
We had suspected that before, especially as the years went by with no child. But in 1900 she did bear her single child—easily, with hardly any labour—a daughter whom she called Amber. Welles was certainly the father. Amber is beautiful, too, with her mother’s blue-green eyes, and gold-brown hair. She is now a fine biologist, and with her special knowledge she declares that she is a sterile hybrid: she will never have children. Instead, she has adopted two, a boy Anthony and a girl Amy. Amber Welles is now thirty-four, but looks not a day over twenty.
We do not know if she will die in the same manner as her mother. Yes, that sad event happened four years ago now. There was hardly any visible change in Winnie, but one day she told us all that she was going. “Do not grieve too much, Abio,” she said. “We have had a good life, thanks to you. I was a slave of the Morlocks, and you set me free to work in this world. And Amber will comfort you.” Then, one fine summer’s evening, she lay down in that garden in Essex, quietly closed her eyes, and did not open them again.
Her funeral was attended by an enormous number of celebrities—including the old Kaiser and the famous German painter Adolph Hitler. Hitler was a great man in the world peace movement; he was visibly in tears all through the ceremony. “She was followed to her grave,” said one newspaper, “by a procession of her lovers: an exceedingly long procession.”
What would the world have been like today without Winnie-Wiyeni? Impossible to say—but surely a much worse place. Over the last forty years, through our mixture of socialism, capitalism and distributism, the gap between rich and poor has narrowed wonderfully. And now with the World Federation strongly established, and no major war possible, I think it is safe to tell the world the truth about Time Travel. But even so, perhaps it is better that the actual invention is lost—forever, unless a genius comes on the scene again the equal of Peregrine Driver.
For that was the Traveller’s name. We lost him, and his Machine, one day in October 1892. He vanished from his laboratory, one Thursday morning, leaving a note to say that he had gone in quest of “the real, the one and only Weena”.
He also left a will which stipulated that, if he had not returned by the same date in 1893, he was to be presumed dead, and all his property was to be made over to Winifred Jane Welles. That was how, in October 1893, we acquired our first commune in Richmond.
One cannot choose but wonder: where did he go? To yet another version of the year 802,701—to meet, perhaps, his end at the hands of some super-Morlocks? Or did he go back into the past, as a preliminary—to establish a time-line in which Welles would not be a possible rival for the affections of Weena?
Welles once suggested to me: “He may have messed us up thoroughly—so that in that world, Bertie Welles is the writer, and George Hillyer—I don’t know what.” I once wrote a story somewhat like that. In my tale, Professor Driver returned first to the second Thursday morning, October 8 about 10 A.M. There he picked up one version of himself and other Time Machine; then the two of them went back to the first Thursday dinner, October 1—the dinner at which Welles was not present. In that time-line, the second dinner-party on October 8 never took place at all, Welles was therefore eliminated, and the raid on the far future was made by three Travellers on three Machines . . . That was fiction; but I do suspect that something like that may well have happened. If so, of course the Traveller disappeared completely from our own time stream.
For in our world, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
TIME GYPSY
Ellen Klages
1
Friday, February 10, 1995. 5:00 p.m.
As soon as I walk in the door, my officemate Ted starts in on me. Again. “What do you know about radiation equilibrium?” he asks.
“Nothing. Why?”
“That figures.” He holds up a faded green volume. “I just found this insanely great article by Chandrasekhar in the ’45 Astrophysical Journal. And get this—when I go to check it out, the librarian tells me I’m the first person to take it off the shelf since 1955. Can you believe that? Nobody reads anymore.” He opens the book again. “Oh, by the way, Chambers was here looking for you.”
I drop my armload of books on my desk with a thud. Dr. Raymond Chambers is the chairman of the Physics department, and a Nobel Prize winner, which even at Berkeley is a very, very big deal. Rumor has it he’s working on some top secret government project that’s a shoe-in for a second trip to Sweden.
“Yeah, he wants to see you in his office, pronto. He said something about Sara Baxter Clarke. She’s that crackpot from the 50s, right? The one who died mysteriously?”
I wince. “That’s her. I did my dissertation on her and her work.” I wish I’d brought another sweater. This one has holes in both elbows. I’d planned a day in the library, not a visit with the head of the department.
Ted looks at me with his mouth open. “Not many chick scientists to choose from, huh? And you got a post-doc here doing that? Crazy world.” He puts his book down and stretches. “Gotta run. I’m a week behind in my lab work. Real science, you know?”
I don’t even react. It’s only a month into the term, and he’s been on my case about one thing or another—being a woman, being a dyke, being close to 30—from day one. He’s a jerk, but I’ve got other things to worry about. Like Dr. Chambers, and whether I’m about to lose my job because he found out I’m an expert on a crackpot.
Sara Baxter Clarke has been my hero since I was a kid. My pop was an army technician. He worked on radar systems, and we traveled a lot—six months in Reykjavik, then the next six in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Mom always told us we were gypsies, and tried to make it seem like an adventure. But when I was eight, mom and my brother Jeff were killed in a bus accident on Guam. After that it didn’t seem like an adventure any more.
Pop was a lot better with radar than he was with little girls. He couldn’t quite figure me out. I think I had too many variables for him. When I was ten, he bought me dresses and dolls, and couldn’t understand why I wanted a stack of old physics magazines the base library was throwing out. I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved. I told Pop I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, but he said scientists were men, and I’d just get married.
I believed him, until I discovered Sara Baxter Clarke in one of those old magazines. She was British, went to MIT, had her doctorate in theoretical physics at 22. At Berkeley, she published three brilliant articles in very, very obscure journals. In 1956, she was scheduled to deliver a controversial fourth paper at an international physics conference at Stanford. She was the only woman on the program, and she was just 28.
No one knows what was in her last paper. The night before she was supposed to speak, her car went out of control and plunged over a cliff at Devil’s Slide—a remote stretch of coast south of San Francisco. Her body was washed out to sea. The accident rated two inches on the inside of the paper the next day—right under a headline about some vice raid—but made a small uproar in the physics world. None of her papers or notes were ever found; her lab had been ransacked. The mystery was never solved.
I was fascinated by the mystery of her the way other kids were intrigued by Amelia Earhart. Except nobody’d ever heard of my hero. In my imagination, Sara Baxter Clarke and I were very much alike. I spent a lot of days pretending I was a scientist just like her, and even more lonely nights talking to her until I fell asleep.
So after a master’s in Physics, I got a Ph.D. in the History of Science—studying her. Maybe if my obsession had been a little more practical, I wouldn’t be sitting on a couch outside Dr. Chambers’s office, picking imaginary lint off my sweater, trying to pretend I’m not panicking. I taught science in a junior high for a year. If I lose this fellowship, I suppose I could do that again. It’s a depressing thought.
The great man’s secretary finally buzzes me into his office. Dr. Chambers is a balding, pouchy man in an immaculate, perfect suit. His office smells like lemon furniture polish and pipe tobacco. It’s wood-paneled, plushly carpeted, with about an acre of mahogany desk. A copy of my dissertation sits on one corner.
“Dr. McCullough.” He waves me to a chair. “You seem to be quite an expert on Sara Baxter Clarke.”
“She was a brilliant woman,” I say nervously, and hope that’s the right direction for the conversation.
“Indeed. What do you make of her last paper, the one she never presented?” He picks up my work and turns to a page marked with a pale green Post-it. “ ‘An Argument for a Practical Tempokinetics?’ ” He lights his pipe and looks at me through the smoke.
“I’d certainly love to read it,” I say, taking a gamble. I’d give anything for a copy of that paper. I wait for the inevitable lecture about wasting my academic career studying a long-dead crackpot.
“You would? Do you actually believe Clarke had discovered a method for time travel?” he asks. “Time travel, Dr. McCullough?”
I take a bigger gamble. “Yes, I do.”
Then Dr. Chambers surprises me. “So do I. I’m certain of it. I was working with her assistant, Jim Kennedy. He retired a few months after the accident. It’s taken me 40 years to rediscover what was tragically lost back then.”
I stare at him in disbelief. “You’ve perfected time travel?”
He shakes his head. “Not perfected. But I assure you, tempokinetics is a reality.”
Suddenly my knees won’t quite hold me. I sit down in the padded leather chair next to his desk and stare at him. “You’ve actually done it?”
He nods. “There’s been a great deal of research on tempokinetics in the last 40 years. Very hush-hush, of course. A lot of government money. But recently, several key discoveries in high-intensity gravitational field theory have made it possible for us to finally construct a working tempokinetic chamber.”
I’m having a hard time taking this all in. “Why did you want to see me?” I ask.
He leans against the corner of his desk. “We need someone to talk to Dr. Clarke.”
“You mean she’s alive?” My heart skips several beats.
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Then—?”
“Dr. McCullough, I approved your application to this university because you know more about Sara Clarke and her work than anyone else we’ve found. I’m offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity.” He clears his throat. “I’m offering to send you back in time to attend the 1956 International Conference for Experimental Physics. I need a copy of Clarke’s last paper.”
I just stare at him. This feels like some sort of test, but I have no idea what the right response is. “Why?” I ask finally.
“Because our apparatus works, but it’s not practical,” Dr. Chambers says, tamping his pipe. “The energy requirements for the gravitational field are enormous. The only material that’s even remotely feasible is an isotope they’ve developed up at the Lawrence lab, and there’s only enough of it for one round trip. I believe Clarke’s missing paper contains the solution to our energy problem.”
After all these years, it’s confusing to hear someone taking Dr. Clarke’s work seriously. I’m so used to being on the defensive about her, I don’t know how to react. I slip automatically into scientist mode—detached and rational. “Assuming your tempokinetic chamber is operational, how do you propose that I locate Dr. Clarke?”
He picks up a piece of stiff ivory paper and hands it to me. “This is my invitation to the opening reception of the conference Friday night, at the St. Francis Hotel. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend. I was back east that week. Family matters.”
I look at the engraved paper in my hand. Somewhere in my files is a xerox copy of one of these invitations. It’s odd to hold a real one. “This will get me into the party. Then you’d like me to introduce myself to Sara Baxter Clarke, and ask her for a copy of her unpublished paper?”
“In a nutshell. I can give you some cash to help, er, convince her if necessary. Frankly, I don’t care how you do it. I want that paper, Dr. McCullough.”
He looks a little agitated now, and there’s a shrill undertone to his voice. I suspect Dr. Chambers is planning to take credit for what’s in the paper, maybe even hoping for that second Nobel. I think for a minute. Dr. Clarke’s will left everything to Jim Kennedy, her assistant and fiancé. Even if Chambers gets the credit, maybe there’s a way to reward the people who actually did the work. I make up a large, random number.
“I think $30,000 should do it.” I clutch the arm of the chair and rub my thumb nervously over the smooth polished wood.
Dr. Chambers starts to protest, then just waves his hand. “Fine. Fine. Whatever it takes. Funding for this project is not an issue. As I said, we only have enough of the isotope to power one trip into the past and back—yours. If you recover the paper successfully, we’ll be able to develop the technology for many, many more excursions. If not—” he lets his sentence trail off.
“Other people have tried this?” I ask, warily. It occurs to me I may be the guinea pig, usually an expendable item.
