To my mind, the most impressive crime that the old man ever pulled off is impressive mostly for how terrifyingly excessive it was. Although perhaps I’m biased, as it was partially my fault.
One time when I was going up against the Doctor – this would have been maybe ’38 or ’39, I think. It was in Vienna, after the Aunschluss. Anyway, the Doctor was attempting to kidnap some physicist – something about using quantum indeterminacy as a vector for his disease, and I intervened. No particular merit in that – like the physicist, I was in town for a conference on physics.
In the course of our struggle, my technology interacted badly with that of the physicist in question, and I accidentally dumped the Doctor in the late 14th century. From here, still in Vienna, he concocted a plague I still don’t quite understand, and basically wiped out almost every human being (and numerous other primates) in Europe, Asia and Africa before I found him, ten years up time from where I’d lost him.
It didn’t rewrite our timeline (the uncertainty principle also applies to whether a change a history rewrites the future or merely splits off another timeline, although it can be rigged a bit. Also, the people in the alternate timeline who died would probably object to me saying merely back there.), but it did open a massive can of temporal worms for me, and I spent a year and a half of experienced time trying to fix it. The Doctor I left in prison, but he escaped without too much difficulty.
The reason I call this excessive – and yes, genocide is always excessive, but this is particularly so – is that the Doctor’s motive for doing this was to get even with a nobleman whose carriage splashed him with mud in passing.
It’s memories like these that make it hard to feel too sorry for Doctor Armageddon. He wasn’t kidding with that name.
“You’re a fool, Tyme” he said.
“It’s been said before,” I replied.
“What do you expect to acheive by this?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You. I thought you knew the future.”
“There’s a lot of future, old man. No one can think of it all at once.”
“Don’t crack wise with me. You know what I meant.”
“I do. But honestly, I don’t know. I’m operating on intuition here.” He gave me a long, speculative look.
“Intuition,” he said at last. “Careful boy. You wouldn’t want to stray into mad scientist territory there.” I shrugged.
“It’s just something I feel that I have to do, and I’ve learned not to ignore these feelings.”
“Oh, tell me you’re not prolonging my suffering for the greater good,” he said, sneering on the last three words.
“‘Fraid so,” I told him. “You’re going to do something worthwhile with what’s left of your life if it kills us both.”
“You hope,” he muttered, but I could see he was worried. Despite his scoffing, he knew as well as I did how good my intuitions usually were.
They came out slowly.
Mr. Cyanide, the man with the death touch, was the first. Even at his advanced age, he still feared absolutely no one, and so he ventured into my lair to visit his old comrade in villainy.
Continue reading The Evil Old Days
It’s a professional hazard for time-travellers, a never-ending temptation. I’m talking, of course, of skipping to the end of the book.
Continue reading A Bad Habit
I’m not completely stupid, of course.
As soon as the Doctor approved one of the nurses, I stepped out (temporally speaking) and went to do some more checking up on her. I didn’t know what to expect, so I looked at absolutely everything I could think of. I checked for connections to the Doctor, to other science villains, to any science heroes even.
Nothing. Not so much as a grand-parent who’d witnessed a crime fifty years before her birth. She was clean.
And then that made me suspicious, so I checked her background in general. No one, I thought, could be that clean. But it appeared she was. A good citizen, paid her taxes on time, didn’t speed when driving, even returned her library books on time. This, it will probably not surprise you to hear, only made me more suspicious.
I wound up testing her (covertly, of course) in every way I could think of. I even devised a couple of new tests involving exposure to chronal radiation which hopefully will not mutate her future children too badly.
She still came up clean.
I owned myself defeated, and hired her. Either she was as good as she appeared to be, or the Doctor had got one over on me. But if the latter, at least I’d made the old bastard work for it.
One of the mistakes people tend to make about time travel is to assume that only we in the present or the future can do it. Sure, the occasional cave man is going to kill some hapless chrononaut and get pulled into today or tomorrow by an autopilot function on the time machine, but that’s about all.
Not so much. People in the past weren’t any dumber than us, they just had less technology than we do. But my, my, my, did they have a lot more magic. It was, inevitably, Tim Crowley who first told me about time travel magicks, although it was somewhat implicit in the cause of the conversation, which was our first official team-up. We had to send Ulysses back to his odyssey – he and his men had taken a wrong turn on the way out of Hades, apparently – but that was relatively straightforward.
The ones Tim warned me about were the deliberate time travelers, the ones who used magick to get a look at the future, and occasionally to steal a few choice items from it. We’re talking about guys like Merlin and St Germain here, although when I say guys like I mean just that – the really dangerous ones were the ones smart enough to not appear in the history books at all, and they numbered as many women as they did men. They were sly and menacing – although there was one who just wanted to settle down somewhere quiet and out of the way. We set her up in a nice cottage on Krakatoa a century before the eruption, and she left no evidence after it.
My point is that time isn’t just one way, and neither is time travel. Keep that in mind, and the rest of this will probably make more sense.
I knew when I took him in that the old man was going to be a target. He’d made a lot of enemies over the years. Not a few of them were my friends, in fact – although in a broader sense, every living being was his enemy. Fortunately for him – and for me as his keeper – very few of them had the requisite combination of resources, vengefulness and motivation to get to us.
Continue reading The Attempts: 1/4
The doctor’s been more chatty lately. Mostly with his nurse – he seems a little smitten with her, in all honesty – but also a bit with me. He told me a story the other day that bothered the Hell out of me.
About a week ago, he said, while you were all distracted with screening my nurse here – don’t try to pretend otherwise, Jack, I’ve known you too long – you took advantage of your distraction to pay me a debt you owed me.
I knew what he meant straight away, of course. I took advantage of me? He meant that Future-Me took advantage of Present-Me. It wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility, although I knew full well that I owed the Old Man nothing right now, and even my imagination was hard pressed to imagine how that might change. He waited until he was sure I’d figured it out – I’ve never had a good poker face – and then continued.
Yes, Jack, you from a few decades uptime. You came and got me – naturally, you know all your passwords and such, and circumventing your own security was easy enough for you – and took me downtime several million years. And might I say, the improvements you’re going to make in your technology are superb – the precision of the navigation, the comfort of the ride – but I digress.
We went back about 66 million years. Yes, I see you recognize that figure. Don’t worry, I didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs.
My relief must have shown on my face. Although an important element of not going completely crazy as a time traveler is trusting not just yourself, but all your past and future selves too, I couldn’t deny that I was a little dubious about this particular Future-Me.
Of course I didn’t. You’d never let me do such a thing, old boy. Perish the thought. I didn’t wipe out those damned reptiles.
No, I wiped out the Martians.
“What?” I shouted.
Oh yes. Future-You was a little inattentive. I managed to release a virus that he thought was harmless – but he only checked it against terrestrial life-forms. Not against extra-terrestrials. The Martians contracted it, and many of them died but don’t worry – the incubation period is long enough that some of them will have made it home to spread the disease.
“How can you be sure of that?” I demanded.
Because they dropped dead right on schedule in 1898 when they came back, didn’t they? Did you honestly think that aliens would be vulnerable to terrestrial diseases? Of course they’re not. Not, that is, until my virus rewrote their RNA to make them vulnerable.
You can thank me now, Jack.
I just stared at him, stunned into silence. I couldn’t disprove anything he said – oh, I could travel back and look for him and Future-Me, but the odds of finding them weren’t great. A million years is a wide span to search, and anyway, the Martian satellite network surrounding Earth back then always screwed with my instruments.
The Martian satellite network… Oh crap.
Oh yes, he said, that’s right. I did kill the dinosaurs, after all.
It’s easy to get cocky when you have my abilities – easy to forget that I’m not the only one with access to the past and future, or even just that mine isn’t the only way to access them. My old friend Tim Crowley could see the future better than I could. He was dead by then, of course, but that hadn’t stopped him. He’d arranged to send me a letter posthumously.
I wasn’t the first person he’d arranged for a posthumous letter to reach. He’d used a wide variety of means to deliver the letters, which I approved of – it made it harder for anyone to find any of the letters before they were delivered. The future needs to have its secrets kept until it becomes the present, and Crowley understood that. Most of the recipients were science heroes, although he’d also sent some to science villains, and even one to President Truman. That one he’d given to the custody of the Secret Service, telling them only to leave it on the Reliant desk on April 13, 1945. Mine he’d simply given to me, and told me to send it to myself on a particular date, then watched me send it.
The contents of these letters differed depending on the recipient, but were inevitably important. The first letter he sent to a villain – Mad Runyon, I think it was – had been ignored, with pretty awful consequences for the villain. Later villains had been more prudent. Most of the heroes never spoke of their letters except among ourselves – the general assumption, due to my own powers and my closeness to Crowley, that I knew what was in most of them had meant I’d been confided in on such matters more than once – as Tim no doubt foresaw. Truman had never spoken of his letter, so far as I knew.
My own letter from Crowley was brief, which was somewhat at odds with his often discursive manner of speech, but it told me exactly what I needed to know right then. All it contained was a date, a time, a place and the words “See you then. Bring the old man.”
I began preparations at once, of course. It wouldn’t be easy to move the old man while keeping him properly secure, but it could be done. If Tim Crowley said it needed to be done, then it needed to be done. Even two decades after his death, there wasn’t another man on Earth I trusted half as much as I trusted Tim.
When people first find out that I can travel in time, it can takes them anywhere from 5 seconds to 180 seconds to ask me one particular question, and it’s always the same one. The question is, of course, why don’t I just travel back in time and kill Adolf Hitler, or prevent his conception, or otherwise cause him not to exist.
I don’t do this, of course, because I can’t. Temporal physicists used to claim that there were nodal points in history that were stable, because they could read something on their instruments and thought that was it. It certainly explained why these events seemed temporally stable, but it got the reason why wrong. There is no destiny, or fate, or any of that.
What there is, at certain highly influential points of history that are the subject of much attention from historians and time travelers alike, is traffic jams. Temporal traffic jams. The World Wars, Civil Wars, Revolutions, Assassinations – all of them are hopelessly clogged now (and due to the nature of simultaneous time travel, always have been and always will be).
You want to kill Hitler when he’s serving in the trenches in World War One? Good luck trying to get close enough. You’ll wind up just one more time traveler contributing to an ever larger traffic jam at that point, and you won’t achieve your goal of influencing history, because too many time travelers are trying to occupy the same points in time and space simultaneously with each other, meaning that no one can actually get solid enough to manage it.
If you wanted to kill Hitler, you’d have to go back at least three generations. But at that point, cultural inertia is so strong and genetic determinism so weak – and both effects go further in their respective directions with each generation back – that it’s close to impossible. You’re as likely to wipe out Hitler by killing some random tribesman of Arminius as you are by killing his grandfather.
So please, stop asking me about it.
The Phantom of the Moon was one of the unluckiest men I ever met. Like me, he was a time traveller, but unlike me, he wasn’t a temporal physicist. This is never a good combination.
I first met him on his arrival in my then-present, in 1941. My instruments had detected an incoming anomaly, and he certainly was that. The Phantom of the Moon – I never did learn his real name – was from several thousand years uptime. He’d come back to my time in a stolen time machine, intending to prevent his immediate past from becoming everyone’s future. Given that he’d stolen the time machine in fleeing the destruction of the Moon, and the deaths of millions who’d lived there, and billions more on Earth when the formerly-lunar debris landed on them, it was hard not to sympathise. Even his chosen name as a science hero was a reminder of what he was trying to prevent, although not many people knew that, and he did like to use his tech to play up the whole ghost angle.
But he was such a clumsy manipulator of history. His first mission was to prevent certain advances in rocketry being made to early by Americans, and he dealt with this by turning the lead engineer on the project into an alcoholic with some technology he’d brought with him. But it was messy – I had to get involved to help him out, and from there it all just spiralled out of control. Harvey – that was his name – committed the cardinal sin: he allowed himself to be detected by a present-timer. I helped him to straighten it out, but it took work – efforts on my part that could have been better spent elsewhere.
I also discovered that he couldn’t be trusted with my technology, although that turned out to be a self-correcting problem: Harvey inadvertantly discovered the date of his own death, twenty years up the line, but still way too close to know about, and spent most of his last two decades either wrestling with his mortality or throwing himself into the worst dangers he could find to defy it – I remember him fighting in Korea, and attempting to rescue fishermen who sailed too close to the nuclear tests at Enewetak – but mostly he stayed at home and drank himself into oblivion.
It’s too bad. He could have been one of the greats if he’d been better balanced, but he was always going to extremes. Poor bastard.
The second attempt on the doctor’s life was the least surprising. I’d known it was coming ever since I first told anyone about my idea to take in the doctor. It was always going to happen some full moon – the only question was which one.
I wasn’t fooled when Alice invited herself over on the new moon, because I knew that something would come up and we’d be forced to re-schedule. And it would so happen that neither of us would be available for at least a fortnight. But then I’d find something I had to do – like, for instance, not let her in that night – and the whole circus would repeat itself.
It was actually the old man who set me straight on that, about eight full moons after I’d taken him in. Let her get it over with, he advised me, adding: then we can both get some sleep. He had a point. So I made an appointment with her about six weeks in advance, timing it carefully so that it would be the Hunter’s Moon that night, and sure enough, she agreed to it. I spent those six weeks making sure that my defences were airtight.
On the night, it was actually kind of sad how easy it was to restrain her. I timed it for the moon rise, opening the windows to bring on the transformation, and then I dropped the entire room into a pit. The mad werewolf rage was upon her, of course, but I side-stepped through time to re-emerge about ten minutes after dawn. Enough time for her to be transformed back. I averted my eyes and handed her the clothes I’d prepared for her earlier. There’s no call to be ungentlemanly, after all.
|
Follow The Centre Cannot Hold
Trade Paperback Timelines
|
Feeds
@CentreCantHold