Free Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine by Jw Schnarr

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.
     
    At this point, The Time Traveler has killed 356 dictators, despots, demagogues, demigods, bureaucrats, plutocrats, democrats, megalomaniacs, egomaniacs, psycho-maniacs, presidents, prime ministers and god-kings, antichrists and false messiahs, moguls of industry, emperors and fuhrers, caesars, kaisers and czars, sultans, sheiks, tyrants, tycoons and generalissimos, vice-superintendents, misunderstood philosopher-kings, fatally ambitious duchesses and misguided boy-pharaohs.
    And it isn’t working, the total death toll keeps going up.
    211 million dead, mostly starved, in the Second Crimean War.
    576 million dead by strangulation in the Thugee Uprising of 1964.
    1.2 billion dead during World War Eight in 1925.
    Nowhere, in not one single variance, has The Time Traveler found an acceptable ultimate body count under the original total of 55 million, and he isn’t about to make up for the difference. It goes against the Law of Averages and all Newtonian math, but it is true. One must reset the universe. If not Hitler, then him, and The Time Traveler is not and does not seek to be Adolph Hitler.
    Oh, no. Oh, no. I categorically refuse , he thinks.
    It is time to abort the experiment.
    Abort the whole can of worms.
    Abort.
     
     
    In 1908, Gustav Abelson, a barley farmer, is tinkering with an ancient McCormick Reaper, cursing it softly in Norwegian. He kicks the machine with a hobnail boot when a floating orange moon blobs open behind him, over his west field. Mr. Abelson curses the machine when the engine doesn’t turn over, damning it and all of its offspring for a thousand generations to wander without rest in a wilderness of bears and broken tractor parts. There is a brief crack in the sky, and his head explodes.
    Gustav Abelson is The Time Traveler’s great-great-grandfather.
     
     
    The Time Traveler turns off the Time Machine and it warbles down. He is expecting to de-exist in a minute and he closes his eyes and waits for it to come. He thinks his life will wink out, perhaps with a pop and a flatulent poof and the musty air of the garage will fill the vacuum of where he no longer is, and the world will go back to Hitler and 55 million dead.
    After five minutes, it hasn’t happened yet. He gets up on achey legs and goes to the wall of the garage, where there hangs the hubcap of a 1956 Studebaker, in the same place where it was hung by The Time Traveler’s father and where it has hung for all of the Time Traveler’s life. He has never touched it before. It looks like the infant of a UFO and he examines his oblong reflection in the decayed chrome of the hubcap’s flying saucerian face.
    It takes him quite a while to notice it, but The Time Traveler comes to realize that he