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

is slightly taller, about three quarters of an inch or so, and that his eyes have changed from blue to light hazel.
    Fascinating , he thinks.
     
     
    The Time Traveler assassinates his paternal great grandmother, a plump hausfrau in Bell Point, New York, and his hair darkens by two shades and he is suddenly diabetic.
    He decommissions one of his great-great-great-grandfathers just to see what happens, and although he stares into the mirrored surface of the hubcap for a long, long time, he records no observable differences, but he will never notice that his teeth have become much, much worse.
    He executes his grandfather, a mean and sullen old man who he had known and never liked him, and The Time Traveler, all at once gains an exceptional musical ability, and he’s never had any before. He listens to the Top Forty on the gummy old ghetto blaster with the broken tape deck on the tool bench near the socket wrenches, and he nods along appreciatively, tasting elements he had never known were there before, seeing the music in intertwining curlicues of pastel pointillism.
    He murders grandmaw too, because it hardly matters anymore really, and he gains a Roman nose and a much nicer chin, but loses a couple of IQ points. Not many, maybe two or three at most, but he can no longer remember the capital of Surinam.
     
     
    This ought to do the trick , thinks The Time Traveler.
    His mother looks almost the same as she always did. He has so far avoided slaughtering her side of the family, due to some lingering, unscientific affection. She is in the backyard of this very same house, only forty-four years previously, before she had him. She is hanging up sheets to dry on a clothesline with those wooden, springless clothespins that aren’t made anymore. He wonders if they still make the springy kind, thinks sorry, mommy, and splatters her all over a dust coverlet.
    He doesn’t recognize a single bit of himself in the hubcap anymore, not the eyes or the mouth or the ears. His name has changed, and he is having a difficult time recalling what it was before.
     
     
    The Time Traveler is inventing a Time Machine of some sort. He is unbending coathangers and hot-gluing them into some sort of misbegotten web, like a spider with a birth defect. As The Time Traveler flits around with the pliers and the glue gun, in a dim corner of the garage behind him, an orangey emanation shutters open, making the cobwebs around it tremble wispily.
    The Time Traveler is inside of the orangeness too, and he raises a hunting rifle, the barrel of which cannot extend through the Time Window but the bullet of which can and does and it blasts the earlier Time Traveler’s head apart like a hammered cantaloupe, and The Time Traveler slumps and crashes over into the half-made Time Machine. The Time Traveler burns his inner arm with the nozzle of the hot glue gun, but by that time The Time Traveler isn’t there to notice it.
     
     
    And suddenly The Time Traveler is black.
    This isn’t working , he thinks, but an experiment is only verifiable if it is repeatable. And he reloads.
     
     
    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