Altering the Apocalypse: and Other Short Stories About Humans and Time Travel

by Fred Phillips

  I looked around – no tall buildings, no street lights, nothing that looked familiar. I quickly got out of the street, found a newsstand and gave the proprietor a nickel and got back three cents for change. The date at the top of the paper read: July 11, 1921. Jesus, this couldn’t be.

  I looked for a local saloon, but could find one damn bar, and then I remembered that Prohibition started in 1920 and any bars would be hidden from sight. I found a small lunch place and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee for thirty cents. My money was going to last a long time here.

  I looked at the bulge of money in my wallet and had a thought.

  I asked the nearest person, “Hey, which way to the train station?”

  I made my way to the Santa Fe train depot, bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles and never looked back. I made my way by train to Los Angeles, and then took the Golden State from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then the 20th Century Limited to New York. First class sleeping accommodations across the entire country barely put a dent in my bulge of early twentieth-century money. I spent those long, lonely days contemplating what I was going to say, but I never came up with the right words.

  Ten days after appearing out of nowhere into the middle of an early Hollywood film or a museum, I trod up the steps of a lower East Side Manhattan walk-up and knocked on the door. Mild detective work had brought me to this address. Luckily, the person I was looking for was still alive. Though I had never figured out the right words to say, it was the only place I knew that had any meaning in this time.

  The door was opened by a slender, pretty woman of a certain age with streaks of gray highlighting her auburn hair which brushed against her shoulders. She was wearing a simple checked cotton dress and low heels.

  “May I help you?” She asked.

  “Hi. My name is um, Bill Michaels, a, ah, San Diego detective.”

  “My, you’ve come along way, my dear. I can’t imagine what you could want with me.”

  “Are you Stacy?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Stacy Delgado?”

  I’ve seen women faint in the movies, especially the old black and white ones, but I had never witnessed one faint in person. Stacy Jones never imaged anyone would ever again call her Stacy Delgado.

  What do you do when a woman faints? Why, you pick her up in your arms like a gentleman and carry her into her nicely appointed living room. Then you wait for her to wake up so you can have a nice chat about the good old days, you know, the ones nearly a century in the future.

  I’m thinking that after she wakes and we reminisce about the future, I’ll look in to joining a police force. Maybe a small-town force where the cases are easy and my 21st century law enforcement knowledge will impress my boss. Maybe the Breckenridge case won’t be the last one of my career after all.

  The Conception of Phillip Donner

  It’s not a pleasant thought to think about your parents having sex. But, if my mom and dad had not gotten down and dirty, I would not be here. It’s the same for you, too. And everyone.

  As a quantum physicist working for NASA, I had been toiling away for one of their secretly funded divisions – the one involved with clandestine research and experiments. Invisibility, speed of light travel, Iron Man suits, Maglev vacuum technology, and time travel were just a few of the futuristic concepts we were involved with. Some were grounded in physics, some in pure imagination.

  Why I was chosen to be one of the first three chrononauts, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was my experience as a team player in NASA, perhaps it was my fascination with time travel, or perhaps it was due to the time I found the head of our department going at it with his secretary, who was not his wife, on his desk after hours in a darkened office with a mistakenly unlocked door.

  The next day I had been called into his office. “You have a top-secret clearance. That means you know how to keep a secret and understand the ramifications of not keeping a secret.”

  “Sir, I have worked for NASA for twenty years, ten of them in this department. I have no interest in losing my job over some salacious gossip.”

  “Good. Keeping secrets, government and otherwise, gets you promotions in my department.”

  I don’t gossip or tell secrets about my work. As promised, I had been promoted to assistant director of Project HGW (named for H.G. Wells), a serious quest to design and build a working time machine. Then I was chosen to be one of the first chrononauts.

  Our training was extensive. It involved both physical and mental conditioning. Push ups, pull ups, jogging, zero-gravity work, math, memory games, and quantum mechanics. The math and science were easy, the pull ups not so much. The training was grueling yet necessary. No one knew the effects that time travel would have on the body and mind. Preparation was essential.

  We made several minor trips back in time. Five minutes, ten minutes, and up to one hour. Our leaps backwards and then forward worked every time. I can’t tell you exactly how we created a time machine because I was only involved in one small area of the machine’s development. I was involved with the math of time travel and curved space-time. I was the resident expert on non-Euclidean geometry, and yes, as you would imagine, that type of knowledge acts more of a female repellent than an attractant.

  Our department worked on the theory that time and spaced were curved, and that wormholes could be created to go from one side of the curve to the other. We also developed ways to manipulate the curvature. I did the math, others did the science, and still others built the machine. A more pronounced curve, one in which time was almost folded over on itself, would lead to a small jump in time. A less severe curve, one in which the arc was broader and wider, led to greater jumps in time.

  In lab experiments, we started slowly, as manipulating more severely folded curves was easier, and creating wormholes for these less distant jumps required far less energy. But, the ultimate objective was to travel back in units of years, not minutes. Thirty years, forty years, and fifty years were chosen as three destination points. I was given the opportunity to select my destination first as I was the most experienced chrononaut, and because I held the key to my director’s marital happiness and avoidance of divorce court.

  I selected to go back in time fifty years.

  A little background on me now. You would think that because I am a scientist with NASA, that I’m an intelligent guy. You would be correct. It had always been a smooth ride through math and science classes, and I turned four years at Cal Tech into a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and then a career at NASA. You would also think that because I’m an exceptionally brainy guy and a success in life that I came from at the minimum, a secure, middle class background. But on that assumption, you would be wrong.

  Fifty years ago, my mother was a prostitute. The proper term is escort, as she worked the finer hotels of the Los Angeles area, and stayed off the streets. She moved in and out of the life as she tried to raise her baby boy, but eventually I entered the foster care system. At the age of sixteen, I moved back in with my mom. She had gone through rehabilitation and recovery, had found a nine-to-five job, joined a church, and gotten her life together. A few years later, while I was attending Cal Tech, she told me the story of my conception.

  I said in the beginning, no one wants to hear about their parents having sex, but most parents have sex in a loving and consensual manner. Even if it’s hot, sweaty sex in the backseat of a car, at least it is consensual. My parents didn’t have loving, passionate sex. Nor did they have consensual sex. My mom was raped by a customer. She was beaten and left for dead. My dad was a monster.

  I overcame these abhorrent beginnings because of my brain and a few wonderful foster parents that kept me engaged and in line. But, the news of my conception would haunt me, and perhaps it has prevented me from having any positive and loving relationships in my life. Except for a few male friends, work is my only positive relationship. I love my work and it has sustained me – serving as my substitute lover for most of my life.


  Now that you know my background, you will understand why I elected to go back fifty years. I wanted to be in the exact time and place of my conception. Sounds like a curious desire to most, but I needed to see who my father was. Though my mom was far from stupid, she did not possess a superior intellect and she had no propensity for math or science. Where did I get my intelligence? Was I just the result of pure chance, a random pairing of an average sperm with an average egg to create an Einstein fetus? Or, was my monster of a father a demented genius?

  Over the years I had spoken to my mom several times about her encounter with my father. It was uncomfortable for her to speak about that gruesome night, but she did her best to appease me. It was surprising how much she remembered – I suppose some people block out horrific events while others remember every detail as if it happened yesterday. She was open and honest with me until the day she died.

  My mom worked for an escort agency at the time. The agency would call her when they had a “date” for her and she would head out to the man’s hotel room. Since they only went to nice hotels, my mom felt it was much safer than working the streets.

  “I remember the angles of his face, the brown of his eyes, the alcohol on his breath.” She told me. “I can still hear the words he whispered in my ear as he was, um, as he was on top of me. I can still feel his fingers wrapped around my neck. I sometimes reach for my neck, even now, all these years later, thinking there’s something on my neck.”

  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, what she told me next would turn out to be crucial for my trip back in time. “I can still see the clock on the bed stand. It wasn’t digital, but there was one light on and I could clearly see the hands of the clock. It said 10:25 when I looked. Exactly. Room 422, I’ll never forget that, either.”

  She told me that after the rape, though it was his room, he quickly dressed and left, but before he opened the door, he turned back to her and threatened. “Bitch, if you say one word, I will track you down and kill you, you stupid whore.”

  It took my mom a long time to process what had happened. Why would someone rape her when she was there to have sex anyway? Why would someone brutally force himself on her when she was a willing sex partner? Why would anyone believe a prostitute who cried rape?

  If you ever wonder why women don’t always report rape, especially vulnerable women like prostitutes and the poor, my mom is a living example of that reluctance. She had forced herself to report the rape to the hotel front office and to the police. Her customer and rapist had registered under a false name and had paid in cash, but that is as far as the investigation went. When they found out she was a prostitute, the investigation halted. She was vilified, laughed at, and ignored.

  I was lucky that the hotel was still there and had not been through a major renovation since my mom had been raped. New carpets, updated décor in the lobby, restaurant, and the rooms, but the design and layout had not been altered. The rooms were still in the same place and the numbers were still the same. The prices were probably much higher, but price was not a pertinent factor. When I rented Room 422, at $420 plus tax, I did my best to draw an exact diagram of the room and record the correct coordinates. I used my GPS device to make several coordinate recordings – of the hallway, the room, and the bathroom. I was most interested in the bathroom, and made recordings while standing by the sink, sitting on the toilet, and standing in the shower. I averaged these recordings and came up with the necessary numbers.

  I knew exactly where I wanted to be fifty years earlier.

  As the first chrononauts, and because we were volunteering for a potentially dangerous mission, they allowed us to choose our time and destination. Throw us a bone so we are committed to a mission that might kill us or erase us from the present time forever. You know why I choose my destination, but none of the technicians could figure it out. A hotel in Los Angeles? A bathroom in a hotel in Los Angeles? But they weren’t paid to think; they were paid to run tests, assess the viability of the machine, make final adjustments, prepare the brave chrononauts, and then send me through a wormhole to my destination. I gave them the exact coordinates and the exact time – 10:25 PM on January 6th, fifty years ago. I, of course, was born almost nine months later.

  In our short-term tests, the math and science worked like a finely tuned Swiss watch. I had no idea if it would work so well when traveling over fifty years in the past. I had my fingers crossed, and even prayed to a god that science often deems unnecessary.

  The experience of traveling through time is like having a metal pail placed over your head, and then having someone hit it as hard as possible with a hammer. Your ears ring, your brain vibrates, you black out, and then wake up in a completely different location. It took me a few moments to process what had happened; to realize that I was in the bathroom I had measured a few weeks ago. Or fifty years later?

  Was it fifty years earlier? I didn’t know at first if the experiment had succeeded.

  I heard noises in the other room – the noise of the bed, the heavy breathing, and the muffled sobbing and protests of a woman. I was unsure of what to do. If it was not fifty years earlier, I was about to barge in on two people I didn’t know. If the machine had worked as planned, I was listening to my mom being raped. Thinking about your parents having sex is nothing compared to being in the same room when your dad is raping your mom.

  Though I wanted to rush in, pull the rapist off my mom, and knock him out, I resisted the urge. I had to wait. I would remain in the bathroom until I heard the recognizable sounds of a climax or the silence of completion. Then I would make my entry and hope my dad didn’t kill me.

  With the muted light from the other room, I saw a pair of pants on the floor. I picked them up and felt the pockets. I pulled the wallet out and slid the drivers’ license out of the sleeve. I used my small transmitter light to see the name. John Larkin, DOB of 11-10-30, and a Santa Monica address. Jackpot. I didn’t need to even interrupt them now. I could just hit the call button on my transmitter and request a return trip through time.

  I moved to put the pants down before I activated my transmitter, but as I moved my foot, it hit something and that something spilled its contents on the floor. Though it wasn’t clamorous, it made enough noise to be heard in the other room. I heard a man’s voice, some rustling in the bed, footsteps, and then I was bathed in white light.

  “Who the fuck are you?” He bellowed.

  All I could do was stare. Here was the rapist. Here was my father. He was tall like me with black hair like me. He was naked. Like a momma bear, he was poised to attack. I was frozen with fear.

  He turned and looked back into the room. “Who the hell do you have in that room, bitch?”

  I heard my mom say something, but I couldn’t make out her words.

  He turned back to me. “You son-of-a bitch.”

  I saw him clench his fist, but I didn’t even see the punch coming.

  When I awoke, I was lying on a bed. I heard the shower in the bathroom. I got up and stood at the doorway. “Excuse me?”

  She turned off the shower and I could hear her weeping. “I’ll be out in a moment, please.”

  I saw my transmitter on the floor next to the toilet. I reached down and picked it up, and scurried out of the room before I got a glimpse of my mom in all her glory.

  When she came out, clad in a red dress, she sat down next to me. She looked so much younger than I remember. Her hair long and blonde. Her figure still youthful and shapely. “I-I don’t know who you are or what you were doing in that bathroom, but I think you saved my life.”

  “He wouldn’t have killed you.”

  “You d-don’t know that. He was, just, just horrible.” She laid her head on my chest and I put my arms around her. She cried uncontrollably for what seemed like hours. I didn’t try to stop her: I just held her close.

  When she stopped, I asked, “Are you going to report that?”

  She brought her head up, looked me in the eye and said, “Do you know
what I do?”

  Of course I knew what she did, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m an escort. A prostitute. What am I gonna report? A rape. A rape of a prostitute?” She laughed and wiped her eyes. “Well, you made me laugh, and I guess that’s a good thing.”

  It was time to go back. I had seen what I needed to see. “His name is John Larkin. He’s from Santa Monica. His drivers’ license is on the sink in the bathroom. Report him.” I gave her my most serious stare and then excused myself to go to the bathroom. I wanted to stay longer and help my mom. I wanted to hug her forever and make her life better, but I couldn’t remain. I had already done too much.

  After shutting the door, I activated my transmitter, worried that the light wouldn’t turn green. It was possible that I had altered the present so much that our entire division didn’t even exist. But, the light did turn green; I prepared to blackout and wake up in another millennium.

  I knew I had screwed up. I knew that I had made the mistake of interfering with the past, but I had to see for myself. The clumsy chrononaut effect was probably as bad, if not worse than the butterfly effect.

  When I appeared in the time machine chamber, no one knew who I was. Everything appeared to be the same as when I left. It proved that I didn’t make much difference to the world of science or the development of the first time machine – the world progressed just fine without me.

  The man they had sent away was named James Gruber. My name was Phillip Donner. No one knew who I was. No one had ever seen me before. I was questioned, quarantined, and questioned some more, but we all knew the one answer that mattered. We all knew what had happened. I had changed my timeline; in fact, I had completely erased it.