Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  The Time Traveler suicides his earlier self again, and he’s white again. He looks somewhat Greek.

  Again, and he’s a fifty-six year old divorcee named Vivian with pendulous breasts.

  Again, and he’s a nine year old Hindu boy.

  Again, and he’s a Chinese guy, maybe a Korean.

  He tries again, thinking, maybe if I only wing myself, maybe I won’t be able to build the Time Machine, and instantaneously after he fires he is a one armed Chinese guy, maybe a one-armed Korean, and he can shoot just fine, amazingly well, in fact, with only his left hand.

  Oh, thinks The Time Traveler.

  At this point The Time Traveler has killed, according to his tally, 3,323 people, including his mother, his father, many great-great-grandpappys, distant ancestors, rumored progenitors, rusty foregoers, pater familiae, and fifty-six different versions of himself. He has wads of cotton plugged deep into his ears and a massive hematoma, a Jupiterian shade of purple, the size of a dinner plate on his shoulder, and every twenty kills or so he puts another layer of damp washcloths over it to cushion himself for the next blast. His face is pitted with tiny, sweet burns from carbon embers and his right eye is somewhat eclipse-blind from the many thousands of muzzle flashes it has seen. There are two-hundred and seven boxes of ammunition left, bought in bulk an unremembered number of hours ago for a forgotten price. The slugs, by the gross, are stacked on his tool bench and on an abused Nautilus machine and in the cargo bed of his boyhood, yellowy-dented Tonka dump truck.

  The Time Traveler finds it weird that he is not hungry or thirsty or sleepy or particularly in pain or not in pain, except for his poor shoulder, nor hot nor cold nor even slightly ashamed of himself, just disappointed. And just a low, toothless, unangry variation of disappointment, a variation for which there is no word that he knows. The same kind one has upon the first five seconds of waking every time; the same kind one has when one remembers the gravity is still on. The Time Traveler thinks, is almost sure, that he has not eaten or drank or slept since he killed Hitler, but this can’t be true because that must be several weeks ago now, although he hasn’t kept track. He can’t recall the month, but that is partially because the names of the months keep changing and are always impermanent. It might be February or Thermidor or Five Crocodile or Shahrivar or The Month of the Sacred Plum.

  The Time Traveler thinks he might be a little insane now; he thinks undo/redo, undo/redo, undo/redo. The experiment must be negated and the universe must be dismantled and unboxed post haste. The Time Traveler has not made the world a better place, no matter how many men he has unmade. He knows he must reformat his hypothesis because the current one is incorrect.

  And, swabbing Bactine into the cratery, moon-pit burns on his cheek, The Time Traveler has his Eureka. The problem, it comes to him at once, is not men.

  The problem is man.

  The Time Traveler flips the dial, bored, and through the orange scrim of the Time Portal, It takes a while to find what he’s looking for. It takes four point five million years. The Time Traveler dismisses the Cro Magnon, the Neanderthal, the Homo Erectus, the Australopithecus Africanus. The brows thicken and the arms grow longer and the thumbs shorter, they sprout pelts and, in reverse time, extinguish their fires and scour the images of mammoths and sabertooth cats off the walls of caves.

  What a horrible people they will inevitably become, thinks The Time Traveler, me among them. Someday these monkey-children will shave the heads of their gassed-to-death cousins, and use the hair to stuff pillows and tan their flayed skins for lampshades. Those clever baby hands will invent the guillotine and the iron maiden and the disposable diaper and the F-86 Apache Gunship. Those bulbous skulls are the cocoons of monsters, they walk upright only because they know that some sunny day they will get to wear jackboots and goosestep in parade for the inspection of whichever one of them is the worst. They must be stopped at any cost. They must be prevented from contaminating the universe with the evil nougat center hidden in their dino-nucleic acid.

  At last The Time Traveler finds what he is looking for. He finds it in the Serengeti, in a copse of trees. He finds it eating thorny fruit and looking only the slightest bit human. He finds that it still has a tail, a tiny little waggly one. He finds the Missing Link.

  There you are, my pretty, thinks The Time Traveler.

  Fire rains down from heaven and apes fall from the trees like spoiled fruit. In their chirping language of hoots and barks, they ask the Sun God what they had done to anger him so and The Sun God clacks another round into the chamber.

  The dry grass of the savanna rustles like paper. When it is over, the blowflies descend.

  In the year 847, R.S., His Massiveness, Emperor Rhinocerian the Ninth comes to the throne of the Oonogerian Empire. Although a boy of tender years and gentle manners, Rhinocerian nonetheless soon displays signs of towering ambition and ruthless powermongery. Only three months in office and he personally gores to death sixteen members of the Senate and banishes the rest of them, eternally, to the Hell Countries.

  After that, Rhinocerian begins a reign of terror and bloodshed that will not desist for more than a century. He enslaves the Elephant People, commits a thorough genocide against the Buffalo Tribes, has the entire continent of Gundrivaal burned, irradiated and salted with a poisonous defoliant that makes it so that nothing would ever grow there again. Really. Nothing. Ever.

  Twenty-seven billion dead. Twenty-seven billion.

  Twenty-seven billion minus fifty-five million is a lot.

  The Time Traveler thinks to himself, in a language that he has simultaneously never heard before and yet has spoken all his life, you are unfit to lead, Emperor Rhinocerian, and the biological predispositions of your species will not be stood for. You must leave, to make way for a less violent lifeform.

  The Time Traveler itches a mosquito at the thick gray burlappy skin on his flank, and knocks his enormous nose-tusk against the ground in the expression of virulent disgust among the people who are suddenly his. He goes flipping through the channels of the Time Vortex, looking for Emperor Rhinocerian’s, and his own, ancient ancestral forerunners, whom he will dispatch to the dung heap of history.

  The Time Traveler will have another people soon.

  The Time Traveler no longer has the muzzle glare semi-blindness because at some point during the recent spree, the rifle changed into a laser rifle. He thinks he killed off an entire species of six foot tall salamanders with opposable thumbs before he even noticed the change. He prefers the laser rifle to the old Smith & Wesson he had before, which grew unbearably hot after only six shots, whereas the laser rifle just gives a steely coolness and doesn’t make a deafening report in the close garage, it just makes a calm, jazzy snap. And instead of the dirtily sexual reek of cordite, this gun only smells vaguely of lilacs.

  But, and this is odd, the vinegar and baking soda have not changed at all. On the Arm and Hammer baking soda box, it still has a picture of a human arm in a rolled up shirtsleeve, and a clearly man-made hammer. The Time Traveler examines his own arm, and it is now a three-toed, prehensile, lizardskin nightmare, iguana-green and sleek. He compares it to the big fat mammalian pink appendage on the box and thinks, that’s not right at all, that doesn’t make any sense. Very strange. Very very strange.

  Oh well, he thinks. And then he exterminates the Kingdom of Chameleons.

  The Time Traveler has multiple sets of eyes now, some twitching far out of his body on long, chopsticky stalks. Some merely peep morosely from the back of his head or the joints of his many knees. And he doesn’t have to blink anymore, not even once. He is omniscient. He can see the whole garage, all eight corners of it at once, without interruption. I see you, grossly reconfigured Huffy bicycle. I see you, roach motel. You’re not going anywhere.

  This is enjoyable, thinks The Time Traveler, but not nearly enough.

  Sometime on towards midnight or noon, The Time Traveler checks his count. He believes that he has killed 53,786 living beings, including
humans, proto-humans, primates, the primogenitors of many species of highly-evolved felines, canines, equines, bovines and lupines, a fascinating but fundamentally unlikeable form of non-aquatic dolphin, an infinity of mice-people, rat-people, mole-men and bat-people, an extraordinarily perverted civilization of hyper-intelligent kangaroos, a race of lithe and beautiful poet-priests evolved from seagulls who seemed wise and kind but were secretly hypocritical, a psychic species of flowering vine (a close relative of the grape) who were capable of unimaginable cruelty, the Reptiloids, the Dinosaurians and the bees.

  It isn’t turning out right. Land-based lifeforms just seemed preordained to lives of exotic nastiness, scrabbling and rending and tearing and flaying one another alive, the most important and usually the first ingredient to all of their societies is fire, from which they quickly develop the brand, the red hot pincer, the flamethrower and the H-Bomb.

  It will be better under the sea, thinks The Time Traveler. Those are our kind of people under the sea, the incombustible kind, the kind that appreciate quietness and stillness and saturation. The Time Traveler flips on the Time Monitor to the Devonian, and through the orange squishiness of the screen, he sits back in his battered folding chair, his wormy, glistening, segmented tale oozing juice onto the cement floor, and watches the unfolding epoch.

  For a couple of million years, The Time Traveler scans the snotty, gelatinous shore of the primordial sea, and every once in a while, something pokes its head up out of the soup, makes a few awkward squirms towards the tempting mud, and The Time Traveler picks them off, one by one.

  No, my little friends, he thinks, don’t come out of the water, there’s nothing up here for you. Your grandbabies will only occupy their time building incinerators and ovens, which they will use to cook their young, and will bring immortal shame upon your families.

  He guards the border faithfully. One day a yard-long and monstrous poppa crayfish waddles out of the goo, makes a run for the low, sludgy dunes on the beach. It’s skin is transparent and through it the Time Traveler sees its open circulatory system, its inner ganglia, its fishnet webbing of nervous system, which has a big, six ounce brain in the fetus stage, capable of immense evil. The Time Traveler shoots it through the crude idea of its heart, which he can see through the glassy hide, and the blue laser light boils it inside out and it slumps dead in the surf. In a little while, the tide will wash it out to sea again and redistribute its nutrients.

  I think not, thinks the Time Traveler. I think not.

  The Time Traveler reads, in the waterproof pages of the Encyclopedia Pacifica, that in the year Thirty-thousand Twenty-one, Emperor Kragor the Devourer waged the bloodiest campaign in history among the once happy forests of the Great Barrier Reef. His long-fanged shock-troops pillaged and raped and murdered at will, feasting on the egg-sacs of their enemies, laying waste to their spawning grounds, desecrating their coral churches and de-boning their brave young men. Sixty-seven trillion died.

  This cannot be tolerated, thinks the Time Traveler, and punches in the Time Coordinates. Through the waterlogged orange of the Time Vortex, there appears Emperor Kragor as a young tadpole-princeling, flitting lazily in the warm currents of The Gulf Stream. The Time Traveler wraps his tentacle around the laser rifle’s trigger and aims it precisely at Kragor’s gills.

  We must see the matter through, thinks the Time Traveler. Someday, some far flung epoch, he’ll get it right. Someday he would get to the last kill, the last and necessary correction of the Time Stream, and the world would be bright and new and undigusting. He thinks that there is a perfect variance of the world and it will just take the magic number of kills to get there. It doesn’t matter how many. He doesn’t have to sleep, he has not slept for ten to the power of ten to the power of ten years, he is not hungry or thirsty and he does not have to go to the bathroom and he will get to the correct world eventually.

  And if that didn’t work, he would reach so very very far back, to when the Earth was just forming, just a baseball sized lump of cooling space dust, just the thought of the idea of congealing helium atoms, and, before it had a chance to go bad, he will blast it to smithereens, and watch the world begin anew.

  He fires away.

  STANDING STILL

  Donald J. Bingle

  “Are you sure you wanna do this, doc?”The patrol-man gestured across the lobby at the subject. “He’s got some sort of a device, with a trigger of some kind duct-taped to his hand. S.W.A.T. says it’s probably a dead-man switch.”

  Dr. Lefkowitz lowered his head to peer over the top of his glasses. The subject, a fit-looking Caucasian in his mid-thirties, sat on the floor, his back to an outside wall. Although his brow was furrowed and his eyes flicked about the room, intent, no doubt, on discerning any threat, he did not seem to be agitated. His hands were steady and his blue dress shirt was unstained by sweat, even under the arms.

  “Well, sergeant, the fact is that I am going to do this, whether I want to or not. First, it’s my job. Second, I’ve got my Kevlar vest on.” Lefkowitz jerked his head toward the subject. “Notice that the top two buttons of his shirt are open?”

  The cop shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Obviously, our perpetrator is not wearing a vest. So, unless he is suicidal, I don’t think he is going to blow up anyone, assuming . . .” He raised his eyebrows as he looked at the cop.

  “Yeah?” said the cop.

  “. . . assuming the S.W.A.T. guys don’t shoot him while I’m talking him down.” He lowered his eyebrows. “It is a dead-man switch, after all.”

  The cop gave him a tense, crooked smile. “Don’t worry, doc. I’ll make sure the macho squad doesn’t get trigger happy.”

  “Thanks, sergeant.” He turned to leave, mumbling to himself as he began to move in slow, sure steps toward the fanatic-of-the-day. “Just another day at the office.” He opened his palms and half-raised his hands, holding them away from his body, as he separated from the throng of police, onlookers, and emergency personnel watching the scene unfold, and continued to move toward the threat.

  When he was about fifty feet away, he got the usual response.

  “Stop,” yelled the man with the trigger. “Stay where you are. There’s a lot of people at risk here.” The man waved the duct-tapped trigger toward Lefkowitz as he spoke.

  “I’m not armed,” said Lefkowitz in a calm, practiced voice. He moved his hands up and interlaced the fingers behind his head and did a slow turn in place. “No gun, no cuffs, not even a wire, as you can see.” He completed his demonstration and faced the subject once again. “I could strip down to prove it, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make me. It’s a bit chilly in here, don’t you think?”

  The subject ignored his question and moved on to what was the typical next question according to the textbook on these things, a textbook that Dr. Lefkowitz had helped write. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “My name is Morris Lefkowitz and I’m a doctor, a crisis counselor of sorts. I work for the police department. My job is to keep everyone safe . . . including you.”

  The man bobbed his trigger-hand at Lefkowitz. “This is keeping me safe at the moment.”

  “I can see that. All of us can see that. What would happen if you were to let go of that trigger, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “A lot of people might die, including you, maybe.”

  The doctor tilted his head to one side. “Including you, too.”

  “The world might be a better place without me,” said the man. “Besides, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  Lefkowitz took a small step toward the man. “I see. I’d like to talk about why you feel that way, but I’d like to do it without shouting across the room. Can I come closer and we can sit and talk?”

  The man’s eyes flicked to a watch on his left wrist, the opposite hand from the one clutching the device. “Yeah, I guess. I’ve got some time to kill.”

  Lefkowitz started to walk toward the man.

  “Not too
close,” cautioned the subject. “You stop ten, twelve feet away and sit on the floor.” He seemed to consider something for a moment. “Cross-legged, with your palms on the floor at all times.”

  Lefkowitz nodded and did what he was told. “It’s not a very comfortable position,” he said lightly.

  The man actually smiled. “Life sucks,” he said. “And then you die.” The smile faded. “Or maybe not.”

  “Bad things happen,” agreed Lefkowitz as the cold from the floor began to cool his palms, “but I don’t think life sucks just because some bad things happen, do you . . . I’m sorry . . . I don’t know your name.”

  “That’s right, doc. You don’t know nothing about me or my life.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”

  The subject’s eyebrows popped up. “What could you possibly know about me? And don’t give me any of that ‘You’ve been hurt’ crap.”

  Lefkowitz pursed his lips. “I know that you’re not a lawyer.”

  Now the subject’s eyebrows popped down in confusion and consternation. “How would you know that?”

  Lefkowitz smiled. “My name is famous in legal circles. You didn’t remark on it. Lawyers always do.”

  He was drawing the subject in. “You a famous defendant or witness or something?”

  Lefkowitz shook his head. “No. But there’s a famous legal case about someone with my name, from years and years ago. Lefkowitz vs. Great Minneapolis Surplus Store.” One of the methodologies utilized with people on the edge was to have a conversation that was as normal as possible, with all the asides and trivialities that entailed. He’d used this bit before with success. “The case is always taught in contracts class, so lawyers have always heard of it. Contracts is taught in the first year of law school, when everyone is their most compulsive, so they read and summarize and digest all the facts of the case and then, ten or twenty or even fifty years later, they remember the name Morris Lefkowitz.” Now for the useful segue. “Funny how things in the past can affect us now, isn’t it?”