“What happened to them?” Twain said.
“Perhaps there are freedom fighters,” Beadle said. “People working from the shadows, like us.”
“It’s not that shadowy right now,” Twain said.
They wound down amongst broken, smoking stones, along damaged walls and trampled gardens, and finally came to a row of houses. The homes had all suffered damage, but appeared to be in reasonable condition.
Verne pointed at the largest of the row. “That is Herbert’s home. We’ll check.”
“Careful he doesn’t shoot you for a looter,” Twain said.
Rikwalk crouched in the courtyard, a sharp eye out for machines, as the others tried the door.
It came open.
They went inside.
Verne slumped. Though the house looked fine from the outside, inside the back wall had been knocked down, and the interior had been gutted by fire. The floor was littered with charred remains.
“Damn,” Verne said. “Our last hope. Another friend gone. God. Is life worth living anymore?”
“It hasn’t been for me for a long time,” Twain said. “Until now. Until we banded together. With a cause. We have a reason, Jules. I almost forgot it’s better to go down fighting than to not fight at all.”
“Right now, I am all out of fight,” Verne said.
Rikwalk yelled out from the courtyard.
Twenty-three/Epilogue: From the Journal of Ned the Seal: The End of It All, Almost
When we went outside, me on the cruiser, the others on foot, to respond to Rikwalk’s cries, we were surprised to see that above the courtyard a triangular machine was wobbling in the air.
“We have to flee,” Verne said.
“No,” Rikwalk said. “Watch. It’s lost control.”
The machine vibrated violently, sailed past us, dipped into a house across the way, exploded in a ball of fire. The heat from the explosion made my whiskers curl.
“Something is happening to them,” Verne said.
“No shit,” Twain said. “Microbes.”
We wheeled at the sound of the voice.
Standing at the back of the courtyard was a stocky, mustached man.
“Herbert,” Mr. Verne said.
“I am surprised, but glad to see you, my friend,” the man said. “Your head is bandaged.”
Mr. Verne said, “It’s nothing, Herbert.” Then to us: “This is H. G. Wells, gentlemen.”
I wrote:
I READ THE TIME MACHINE.
“Holy shit,” Mr. Wells said. “A seal that can write.”
“A long story,” Mr. Verne said.
IT WAS A GOOD BOOK.
“Alas, a bit of reporting on my part, Mr. Seal, and part of a greater concern, that story is. But that is not a story for this moment.”
We paused at this mysterious reply, but Mr. Wells offered no more explanation.
“We saw the house,” Mr. Verne said. “We thought you were dead.”
“Come. We are still not safe. This ape, is he trained?”
“Oh my, yes,” Rikwalk said. “But I don’t do tricks.”
“My God,” Mr. Wells said. “He talks. A seal that writes, and an ape that talks. And a big ape he is.”
“It’s a convoluted story,” Mr. Verne said. “These are my friends: Mr. Beadle, and John Feather, Ned the Seal, and Rikwalk, from an alternate Mars; this is Samuel Clemens, better know as Mark Twain.”
“Amazing,” Mr. Wells said. “We will share our stories. But not here. Come, the back way.”
We went through the courtyard gate, around to the back of the house where it had been knocked down.
Mr. Wells said, “I see that the fuel cell worked in Passepartout’s design for the cruiser… Where is Passepartout?”
Mr. Verne hung his head. Mr. Twain said, “Rubbed out.”
“I am sorry. Your family, Jules?”
I thought: The family jewels? Now is that a proper question?
“My wife and child left me long ago.”
Oh. Never mind, I understood now.
“They felt I was too preoccupied with stories and reporting the events around me. They ran off with Phileas Fogg.”
“I never liked him,” Mr. Wells said. “Too, I don’t know… Too too. Come. Look at this.”
Mr. Wells bent down and pulled back a large piece of wood, and underneath it were stairs.
“They didn’t destroy the basement. I’ve been hiding down there. I was down here when the house was attacked. Come. I have lights controlled by the same type of fuel cell that runs the cruiser. It’s quite comfortable, actually.”
“You clever rascal,” Mr. Verne said.
“Of course.”
We went downstairs, me by cruiser, Rikwalk narrowing his shoulders. Fortunately, it was a wide opening, and he was able to make it, though the stairs creaked in a frightening manner under his weight.
Mr. Wells pushed the board back over the hole, and we remained in the dark until Mr. Wells managed his way downstairs and hit a switch.
The room lit up.
Above us and along the walls were long bars that generated light.
The room was huge. Packed with rows and rows of books. They rose all the way to the ceiling and there was a rolling ladder that went around the room to give access to them. There was also a lot of fine, comfortable looking furniture. Through a doorway I could see a lab, and beyond that, another open doorway and another room.
“Please, sit,” Mr. Wells said. “Rest.”
There was plenty of space. I climbed down from the cruiser and stretched out on a lounge. I lay there as if I had been harpooned. The events of the last few days were catching up with me. Mr. Twain and Mr. Verne sat and sighed, feeling the years creep up on them. Until that moment, they really hadn’t had time to be old, and I hadn’t actually noticed how elderly they seemed. Mr. Verne’s beard, which I presume had been dyed black, now showed silver at the roots near his face, and it was the same for his hair. Mr. Twain had grown a bit of a beard, and it matched the white hair on his head. The lines on his face were as deep as ditches.
Beadle and John Feather found soft chairs. They sat back and stretched out their feet. Rikwalk curled on the floor, rested his head on his arm.
“I feel like an old dog crawled up my ass and died,” Mr. Twain said.
“That is unique,” Mr. Wells said.
“If I was any more tuckered out, I’d have to be buried,” Mr. Twain said.
“We will try to hold off on that,” Mr. Wells said.
“This is incredible,” Mr. Beadle said. “All that destruction above, and here you are, safe and sound, thank goodness.”
“It is quite the haven,” Mr. Wells said. “But I have had my adventures on the outside as well. I was out scrounging for more food today. I have a large supply set in. I even have a refrigeration machine that is run by the fuel cell I discovered that operates the cruiser. It is amazing stuff. It is not an invention, I might add, but a discovery. Anyway, I was out scrounging, and I saw more and more of the machines crashing. Martians dying. I took one of the machines apart one night, and I found many things of interest inside. I have them in the laboratory. They are very advanced technologically. But that aside, they are not as smart as one might suspect.”
“You said something about microbes,” Mr. Verne said.
“Exactly,” Mr. Wells said. “Fate has stepped in to weigh on our side. The Martians do not have our immunity to such simple things as a summer cold. All manner of diseases that we deal with every day are little devils to them. They are over-laden with our microbes, and now they are dying. It is just a matter of time, and it is all over.”
“My God,” Verne said. “That is why they are starting to collapse, why there were so many dead Martians lying about.”
“Correct,” Mr. Wells said. “It started a day or so ago, and I’ve been waiting them out. Though, foolishly, I went about trying to secure even more food today. It was an unnecessary chance, and, alas, I had no real luck. Within
a week, I predict, the invaders will be no more.”
“Then all we do is wait,” Mr. Twain said.
“Of course,” Mr. Beadle said, “happy as that all is, we have the problem of the rips.”
Mr. Wells nodded. “Yes. The rips. The tears in time.”
“You know about all this?” Mr. Verne said. “How did you know what they were? Beadle and John Feather told us. They are from another time. As is Rikwalk. But how did you know?”
“Because of the Time Traveler. The star of my book The Time Machine. I reported his adventures as he told them to me. He was my friend once upon a time. I fear he is the cause.”
“He is,” Beadle said, and told Mr. Wells the story he had told us.
“It appears it is too late to do anything,” John Feather said, “if there is anything that can be done.”
“Possibly,” Mr. Wells said. “But it would involve traveling in time. I feel almost responsible. I made a hero out of him, and a hero he was not.”
“You could not have known,” Mr. Verne said.
“We have the Time Traveler’s diary in the machine we abandoned,” John Feather said. “It might help.”
“Yes,” Mr. Wells said, “it might. The last time I saw the Time Traveler he had grown quite mad. He left, and I never saw him again. But now, Mr. Beadle, I understand what has happened to him.”
“Yeah,” John Feather said, “we fucked him over good. But he had it coming.”
“No doubt,” Mr. Wells said. “But once he was my friend. And whole. A good man. I must give him that.”
“You don’t get as bad as he was without some character flaw somewhere,” Beadle said. “And I doubt it was just bad bathroom habits. Early on, he was askew. It just took stress to show his true character.”
“Perhaps, but what matters is this,” Mr. Wells said. “If we can travel the paths he made in time, reversing the energy on the machine, we can pull the corridors back together as we travel through. Tighten up the universe. Stop this collapse. I think.”
“If that is true,” Mr. Beadle said, “If it can be done, we would need a time machine to make it work. And we would have to know all the paths the Time Traveler took.”
“Right you are,” Mr. Wells said. “Remember, he was my friend. I know a lot about him. A lot I did not report in the book. As for where he went, and how to follow, a companion machine would naturally be pulled into those corridors. The idea is to follow the paths, then reverse them. Close the time tunnels off.”
“He traveled so much,” Mr. Beadle said.
“Then,” Mr. Wells said, “so will we. But not until this Martian menace is certainly defeated by our heroic microbes.”
“And how will we travel through time?” John Feather said.
“In this room, I have the plans my friend used for his machine, and I have applied them to the very structure of this room. There are still a few things to be done. Areas to be sealed. But in the very comfort of this room, these rooms, in fact, we, sirs, can travel through time.”
I wrote:
THAT IS SOME REALLY NEAT SHIT.
“Yes, Ned,” Mr. Wells said. “It is.”
A week later, living off the supplies Mr. Wells had put aside, we ventured out one day near evening. London was in flames, but there were people trying to put out some of the fires. A fire engine drawn by four huge, tired horses clunked by, wearing men hanging on the sides of it. It was somehow reassuring to see vestiges of civilization returning. Soon, I presumed fish markets would be back in business, and fish could be purchased at most any time of day. The idea of that intrigued me. Any time of day without swimming about for them. A very merry idea, indeed.
The wrecked Martian machines were everywhere.
So were a lot of people.
They had come out to finish off the few Martian survivors, beating them with bats and clubs. And they looted anything of interest they could find in the machines.
In a huge pile near Big Ben, near where Steam still stood, they had piled Martian bodies and were burning them.
We joined in, dragging the invaders to the pile.
Well, I actually watched. I wasn’t suited for moving too swiftly over the streets on my belly. I rode about in my cruiser.
I wrote a lot of notes about what people should be doing.
No one gave me any mind.
Maybe it was becoming too dark to read my signs.
No one asked about me or about Rikwalk, who was carrying the stinking Martians by the armload to the pyre. They had other concerns and had become accustomed to strange things coming through the time and space rips. And it was obvious to them that Rikwalk and myself were helping dispose of the Martians.
I did see one dead dinosaur lying nearby. A long very big thing with tree trunk legs that looked something like the Brontosaurus I had seen in books, but his head was different. And he was brightly colored, like a bird. He had started to decay. It was my guess the creature had come through a rip and gotten into a battle with a Martian machine, and had lost to a death ray. Part of his chest was gone. The tip of his nose, about the size of Rikwalk’s head, was rolled up against a wall and was covered in happy flies.
The body of Passepartout, or what remained of it, was pulled out of Steam, stinking and dissolving, and put on the pyre along with the invaders. It was all that could be done under the circumstances. The diary of the Time Traveler was rescued and kept by Mr. Beadle.
According to Mr. Beadle, it was lucky it had not been destroyed, as much of the machine’s interior had been sabotaged and stripped of anything worthy by looters. Even Passepartout had been stripped of his shoes, jacket, and pants.
Mr. Verne said a prayer for Passepartout, and we watched his remains climb to the sky in smoke.
And that was that.
When the day was done, we made our way back to Mr. Wells’ home, avoiding others lest they might want to follow us and take our food. People had worked together on this day, but there was an air of anarchy, and we did not want to be recipients of it.
It wasn’t really much trouble, our going our own way without interference. We had Rikwalk with us. No one wanted to mess with him. And Mr. Verne had returned Mr. Beadle’s rifle, which Mr. Beadle carried with an air of authority.
Still, we came to the street where Mr. Wells lived, and snuck into his basement cautiously. Just as I was about to drop downstairs on my cruiser, I looked up and saw a dragon fly across the face of the partial moon.
Not a good sign.
A Week Later — Ned’s Journal Continued
And now I sit me down to write on the night we leave. Mr. Wells says we can move through time, and we can move through space, so we will actually change locations, not just travel through time.
That being, coming back could, I presume, result in complications.
Shit. I don’t know. I am a Fez-wearing seal. Not some goddamn mathematician or scientist. I can barely boil water.
The room has been sealed and a special door has been fastened above the stairway where before there was only a large gap and a board to cover it.
The door is huge so that Rikwalk can come and go.
Out there, the world is coming apart.
We have water and food in here. Enough to last for some time. Even some canned fish, which is a good thing.
When the last bit of work is done on the machine — and this is being supervised by Mr. Verne and Mr. Wells, and the actual work is being accomplished by Mr. Beadle and John Feather — we will set asail on the seas of time.
If fate is with us, we will fix that which needs fixing.
If fate is not with us.
Then we will die trying.
Not on purpose, mind you. I mean, I’m going to try and live. Even if the world is full of harpooners and dinosaurs and pigs that fly and venomous snakes the size of Big Ben and a dragon that can fly across the face of the moon.
But you get the idea. This is heroic dime novel stuff.
And maybe you don’t get the idea.
br /> Maybe no one will read this.
That bothers me. I have used my best penmanship.
Of course, if the journal is in the machine with me, how will anyone read it?
Maybe later it will be read.
If we survive.
Even if we don’t survive.
Maybe a flying pig will read it over our dead bodies. It could happen. Provided the pig can read, of course.
I really must rest.
I have been awake for way too many hours.
Ah, Mr. Verne is calling to me. They need me for some last-minute repairs. (I don’t know what I can do, but I’m glad to do it.) And then, after we eat, canned fish, I hope, we’re off.
I’M BACK
Damn thing wouldn’t start up.
Isn’t that typical. Someone crossed a wire or something.
But, hey, we haven’t given up. A short break. A nap. And we’ll try again.
And if there was someone out there who could wish us luck, someone who could read what I write as I write, I would want them to do that right now.
Wish us luck, I mean.
Luck is always good.
It would be nice if the machine worked, of course. That would be pretty handy, actually.
I have faith it will. And when it does, it will plunge us backward and forward through time, plugging holes like the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike. (I read that story in Doctor Momo’s library long ago, and I am very proud of my reference to it. I think it is very appropriate, don’t you?)
Ah, they call again. The nap is out. They are certain they have it, now.
Someone dropped a fish down there in the wall wiring, they say. They’re not naming names, but they have an idea. The fish shorted out the wires. But now all is good. I hope they didn’t toss the fish away.
We are going to gather in the main room, sit on the couch, the control box in Mr. Wells’ lap. He will flip a switch, twist a dial, and off we will go, a chuggy-whuggy through time.
By God, it will be a great adventure.
Joe R. Lansdale, Flaming Zeppelins