Original art by anderton - Deviant Art Site · Used with permission.
Part the First
Someone once said that if time travel were possible, we would have seen people from the future popping up all over the place by now.
Other people have said that people from the future are responsible for helping build the Pyramids and Stonehenge.
I generally don't bother to listen to those people, because they tend to talk a load of twaddle. I know that time travel is possible, because I've done it. I didn't mean to—it wasn't something that was on my to-do list for the day, and it's certainly not something that I want to do again. Truth be told, it was a moment of weakness and insanity on my part. Although, it turns out that the insanity thing worked in my favour, in the end.
There are a few things you should know about time travel before you consider doing it yourself. I didn't know these things at the time, because no one had ever done it before. I think. Sort of? That's the thing with time travel—it really buggers up your sense of chronology. And verb conjugation.
Anyway, so far as I know, no one had travelled through time before the first of September last year. My friend Charlie, who is a lot smarter than he lets on, had built a time machine. It's the kind of thing he does. At first I didn't know how to deal with his habit of doing the seemingly impossible in his free time, but hey, you get used to just about everything in the end.
So he'd built a time machine. I asked him what he wanted to do with it. He said that he wasn't sure, and he'd only built it to see if he could. He hadn't really thought about what he would do afterwards.
"This could turn the scientific world upside down!" I said. "I think so, anyway. I don't really know that much about science. Or not the kind of science that would be affected by this, at least."
"That's not true," Charlie said. "You study history, right? That'd be affected by this, I suppose."
"Yes, it would, which is why it can't be used for history, so history won't be affected." I'm not the most eloquent person in the world, or even the most understandable, but Charlie is used to me and knew what I meant.
"Ah, I see. Oh well. I only invited you over to see it because I thought you might want to use it. I wanted to tell someone about it before I took it to pieces again."
"What?" Really, that should have an exclamation mark behind it. I practically screamed at him. I was so shocked by what he said that I flung myself at the machine (which he had fashioned into a simple doorway in the middle of the room) and wrapped my arms around it defensively. Before that, I'd been a little bit terrified of the thing, and had kept a safe distance. "You can't do that! This . . . this changes everything! Everything we've ever known!"
"Which is why I should get rid of it. I can always build another one."
All the while he was sitting at the table in his workshed, drinking coffee spiked with gin. He was peering at the crossword in the newspaper. He was terrible at crosswords—smartest person I'd ever met, but dreadful when it came to cryptograms and the like.
"You've kept the notes?" Luckily, I have never had much dignity. My voice was practically dripping desperation.
"No, but I remember where all the bits go." And that was Charlie's fantastic mind in a nutshell: he remembers where all the bits go. I think that once an intellect becomes so huge that it goes off the scale, the owner of said intellect has to talk like a bloody simpleton. In Charlie's case, it was because there is no human language that can fully express the weird ways in which his mind moved. I say this because he doesn't have a sense of humour and doesn't appreciate how funny the concept of a monosyllabic supergenius is. I doubt he'd dumb down his speech for a laugh.
"But yeah, I thought you might want to go somewhere before I took it apart. You being a historian and all."
I stared at the door. It really was just a door, in a doorframe, in the middle of the room. It had a boring old brass doorknob, and the whole thing was in sore need of a lick of paint. I had no idea where all the wiry bits were, although I suspected that they might well have been hidden in the battered-looking shoebox that sat a foot away from the whole machine.
"I . . . I don't know what to say. That's very nice of you."
Charlie shrugged.
"But, you see, the thing is, I don't know where to start. There are so many places I want to go! There's so much to do, so much to see. There are so many decisive moments in history that we know next to nothing about. There are so many things I'd like to witness. I can't just choose."
"Well you don't have to choose just one," Charlie said. He drained his coffee and put the kettle on again.
"But you want to take it apart, and knowing you, you want to do it sooner rather than later."
Charlie gave me a blank stare. He usually didn't have to try to make other people feel stupid, as everyone was stupid compared to him, so if he did, he'd have a full-time job on his hands. I must have been missing something glaringly obvious. Unfortunately, my brain was too overwhelmed by the concept of having the whole of history at my fingertips to function properly. I made a noise at him, that sort of sounded like a question without words.
"You can go wherever you want, and I can get rid of the machine in a few minutes' time."
"Is time travel that fast?" When I gave that query some thought (not until after I'd already set it loose upon Charlie's ears, obviously) it made my head hurt.
"Look, you travel somewhere, then you travel back. But you can travel back to the moment immediately after you've left. You could spend years somewhere else, and still only be gone a second."
"Oh, like that."
I've never considered myself much of a historian. I'm more of a rabid enthusiast who happens to write very accessible articles. They're not ground-breaking by any means, but they're good for people who don't feel like wading through the dreary mess usually found in the journals. This has made me popular with students all over the world, but it has also made me something of the village idiot among my peers.
Most people would probably be glad if their PhD dissertation was one of the most widely-read texts on one particular subject. I would have been, too, if it had been popular because it was important, rather than an easy read.
What I really wanted was to come up with something that was new. Something that would get me recognition. Charlie knew this, and his inviting me to try out his time machine probably had something to do with that.
No, what I really wanted was to move into another field. To be blunt, historians piss me off to no end. I'd been to a few palaeontology congresses though, and everyone there had been nice.
Well, that settled it for my first trip.
"I want to go back sixty-five million years!" I declared.
"See how the dinosaurs died out?"
"Yes! History can go fuck itself. I want to see what happened before it was around."
"Okay." Charlie lifted the lid off the shoe box, did something that resulted in a bleep, and the put the lid on again. "I've set it up so you come back a second after you leave. Make sure you remember where the door is. Have fun. There'll be a cup of tea waiting for you when you get back."
"Jolly good!" I cried. I don't usually say things like that. I always laughed at my Gran because she had a penchant for phrases that sound like they come straight from a Jeeves & Wooster caper. I can't really explain why it was that I suddenly started talking like that, other than that my mind had become a little unstuck.
I wasn't consciously thinking about the fact that space and time were much more, well, malleable than I had previously thought, thus uprooting all my ideas about life and the universe in general (limited as they had been). But some part of my head must have been mulling it over, and that had resulted in me being slightly displaced from my rocker.
Again, thank goodness. If it wasn't for that bit of insanity, I don't think I would have survived the trip through time.
TO BE CONTINUUMED
Part Two
THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!!!
I swung the door open with reckless abandon and bounded into prehistory. It was like walking through a very short but utterly mind-blowing tunnel. I saw colours that don't exist, I heard movement inside and behind myself (as in, inside and behind at the same time), and I could smell the meaning of life.
If my mind had been functioning properly, I think my skull would have dissolved and my brain would have turned itself inside out.
Anyway, that was all over quickly enough, and I found myself standing in prehistoric Devon.
Prehistoric Devon is a lot like modern-day Devon, only there are no cottages to be seen, and there is (presumably) less inbreeding. Oh, and there's no grass, only ferns.
The door was behind me, looking every bit as dull as before. Seeing a doorway in the middle of nowhere was probably quite odd, but my mind didn't register that.
What it did register, however, was a small group of odd little bipeds standing around twenty feet away from me. They looked to be about knee-high, and an odd mix of fish and monkey.
I tried to remember whether monkeys even existed sixty-five million years ago, but I came up with nothing. Clearly, I had a lot of work to do before diving into palaeontology.
Anyway, they looked like giant scaly bushbabies with toad mouths slapped over their gobs.
"Bugger me," I muttered. You see, even though my brain wasn't working very well, it doesn't take much cerebral activity to realise that you've discovered a race previously unknown to science. Who cared whether I knew about the history of monkeys? This discovery was going to launch me to the top of the paleontological food chain.
I strolled over to the group, which didn't see me coming at all. They were all huddled together, bent over something that was apparently so engrossing that they didn't bother to keep an eye out for predators. Even I knew that the Cretaceous was the time of the big scary meat eaters. No wonder this species had died out.
"Hello," I chirruped. Insanity and all that.
The fish-monkeys turned and stared at me. They looked bloody creepy, I can tell you. If someone had told me to think of a cross between a fish and a monkey before seeing those, I would have thought of something endearingly stupid, with arms and scales and big eyes and a look of constant surprise. These things looked like hyper-intelligent piranhas, only armed with um, arms. And legs. And even thumbs.
I said a little prayer to St Jude that the doorway was so close.
But I apparently didn't pose much of a threat, because the fish-monkeys went back to whatever it was they were doing.
I felt almost offended. I was a highly advanced being from the future! They should have been worshipping me or something along those lines. Failing that, they should have been trying to kill me. The last thing I deserved was indifference.
I moved closer and bent over the chittering crowd. They were busy arranging and re-arranging stones.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw the pebbles and rocks. They weren't just junk they had found; there were engravings on them. And, by the looks of the recurring and fairly simple figures, the carvings were actual writing.
Writing! Sixty-five million years ago! My head began to spin again, but in a much less insane way. If I took one of those stones back, and it could be Uranium-lead dated, I would bloody murder those bastards who looked down on me as nothing more than a pop-science writer. This wouldn't just rewrite history, it would force biologists to . . . do stuff. Whatever they do when they discover a new strain of sentient life on Earth. Other than lose their shit, obviously.
But would the stone be able to be Uranium-lead dated? If I took it through the time machine, wouldn't it skip the aging process? I hadn't turned into an amoeba or anything when I came back. Blast!
I crouched down to examine the stones further, but then something unexpected happened.
Well, to be honest, I can't really say that. I didn't have any expectations because, well, I had just travelled back sixty-five million years and discovered what appeared to be sentient pre-human life. But I don't know, words like 'odd' and 'weird' don't really seem to cover it.
Anyway, a load of tentacles shot up from the ground and almost ate my face.
I screamed, fell backwards, and gibbered a bit. I had no idea what was going on. Tentacles aren't supposed to spontaneously sprout from the ground. If they spontaneously sprout at all, they generally do so from water.
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but somewhere in between all the panic and fear and general madness, I congratulated myself on not only discovering sentient fish-monkeys, but also land-dwelling squids or octopods or whatever the hell that was.
The land began to shake and split open. I managed to get to my feet, but as I tried to run to the door, I bumped into a person.
"What?" I yelled in the guy's face. Looking back, this was rather rude, but I think he understood my reaction, given the circumstances.
"I'm here to save the world, get out of my way." He had an American accent, and in my bizarrely tranquil mind, I wasn't surprised. People who save the world are always American.
The white-haired, bespectacled man walked purposefully over to the group of fish-monkeys, who were now dancing around like maniacs, weaving in and out of the tentacles. One of them got in his way, and he booted it. It sailed through the air and landed on its head with a pathetic little splat.
I was so impressed by the guy's nonchalant manner that I forgot that all hell was breaking loose and just watched in fascination as he picked up the engraved stones, completely ignoring the tentacles waving about.
The tentacles, by the way, were impossibly huge. You know you've got giant squid, right? Well, you've also got something bigger, called (and I shit you not) the colossal squid. If these tentacles came from anything, it would be the fucking ginormous squid.
One of those tentacles was about to wrap itself around the guy and presumably do something unspeakably horrible to him, but he just did this thing with his hands, and suddenly there was a flash of light and all the carved stones turned to lumps of molten rock. The ground, which up until that point had still been shaking and splitting open and doing all sorts of things that the ground generally isn't supposed to, went back to normal. The tentacles started flailing. Apparently, the fucking ginormous squid knew a bad thing when it felt one.
The guy made is way over to me and took me by the shoulders. His hands were still impossibly hot.
"Listen," he said to me, "I am going to have to do something to make sure that Cthulhu does not rise yet a-fucking-gain. So, if you can, go away."
I nodded. Or my head just lolled, I don't remember.
He turned away from me and started waving at the sky. At first I thought that my crazy was contagious and he had decided that the best way to fight the tentacles was to do a rather paltry impersonation of them, but then I looked up.
A really, and I mean really huge lump of burning rock was racing towards the Earth. Not the part I was standing on, but it was definitely going to connect with the planet somewhere.
"Oh," I said to myself as I opened the door and stepped through. Once again thanked St Jude for my state of mind. "That makes sense, I suppose," I said as I closed the door behind me on the other side.
"What does?" Charlie asked. He was just pouring me a cup of tea.
"I now know why you don't see time travellers all over the place," I said, and dumped a load of his gin into my mug. I then turned and stomped on the shoe box. It made a very sad bleep sound.
"I see," Charlie said. He went back to his crossword and I drained my cup.
After a few minutes, he looked up. "Find anything that'll help you make a name for yourself amongst historians?"
I'm still not sure how to answer.