Jaclyn the Ripper (4 page)

“Amy?” he called. “Are you here, Amy?”

He listened. Nothing. Not even a sound from the pendulum clock on the fireplace mantel. He automatically wound and set it—already a quarter past three, his pocket watch read—then took comfort in the rhythm of its ticking, his fingers drumming counterpoint on the mantel. His brow furrowed. The more he dwelled on the silence, the more certain he became that she'd been here. He went into the kitchen hoping to see a lukewarm teapot and marmalade on crusts of toast. Amy always left the crusts, but, no, the counters were spotless and the dishes in their cupboard. He turned.

The door to the back stairs yawned open. Had he left it that way his last time here? Never. An open door was like an unfinished thought, especially the door to his laboratory. He crossed the room in three giant strides and looked down the stairs, his jaw working furiously. The basement door was also ajar, an incandescent yellow glow shining through, but that wasn't what he saw first. Like a rose dropped for remembrance sake, a paisley-pink envelope lay faceup on the third step down. Heart pounding, he picked it up, tore it open.

Dearest Bertie—

This is the hardest thing I've ever done, for I dearly love you and Gip and Frank, and I always will. But you know those nights when I wake up sobbing and don't know why? Well, I finally figured out it's because I never said good-bye to my mother or Daddy. (I never said a world of things to Daddy.) I never told them how much I love them, and I can't stand them thinking I'm dead somewhere and not knowing how I feel about them! Yes, I know it's been thirteen years, but you understand, don't you? You see, I never got to tell them about you, Bertie. They never had a chance to say that we were okay, to give us their blessings. That might sound rather absurd and traditional to you, but love and respect and kindness for all people is important to me.

And all those insufferable times there's been a wall between us, and we can't get the magic back, and you are at a loss because life is going so swimmingly well for us? I figured that out, too. I think that for sake of our marriage, we need to separate for a while . . . let the warm and tender memories gather themselves so that we will desire more of them. As you would say, we need to escape our “domestic claustrophobia.” I know that I will miss you terribly, but if I don't go home, I won't miss you at all, and that is worse. I'm sorry, I cannot allow our love to die without doing something. I hope you're not too terribly angry, Bertie, but I refuse to grow old in a marriage that has gone cold.

Furthermore, what about the earthquakes? I could never live with myself if I didn't try to save my family. Honestly, I don't think we can rationalize or ignore that seismologist after he predicted the San Francisco earthquake last April. You probably don't believe that an even bigger one is going to hit San Francisco in 2010, but I can't take that chance. My family lives there!

Yes, my dear, I am coming back to you, the boys and Spade House, but just in case something happens, I'll never forget you, my ‘Bits and Bins.'

 

All My Love,

Amy

p.s. Be good to the boys.

 

He felt weak, sagged against the wall, slid down until he was half-sitting on a stair.
Great Scott, she's nipped my time machine!

H.G. read the letter again, deliberately ignoring her comments on their marriage because the truth was too painful, and he was in no mood for self-criticism. Rather, he focused on her last paragraph, then looked off, furious. “An even bigger earthquake in 2010?” Rubbish. That blasted drunken fool of a seismologist had filled her head with such unconscionable drivel—some heretofore unknown scientific discovery about earthquakes, no doubt—that she had bolted from her life.

Once again, he recalled Amy in the library with Chichester, hanging on his every word, a pale and wan Amy counting years on her fingers, no doubt from 1979 to 2010. And he had told Dorothy Richardson they were practicing a new charade. He was about to crumple up her letter when he remembered that seminal night thirteen years ago when he'd told his friends about his
own
heretofore unknown scientific discovery. They laughed derisively at his theory: time is not absolute; time functions according to the laws of the Gaussian coordinates; therefore, time is flexible in boundless universes of parallel realities stacked like cordwood along the fourth dimension. They had jeered at his vision, his logic: because the universes are in constant states of flux, one can hopscotch through the years if the mechanics exist. If time is like space
or a dimension, he supposed, why can't we go forward or backward like we can in the other three? When they demanded proof, he asked them if they could recall specific moments from their own past lives. They could, of course, so—
quod erat demonstrandum
—their memories proved that they themselves had traveled through time.

“Preposterous!” they hooted at his claim to have built a working time machine. Someone asked how it was possible to travel to a time before his so-called machine existed, and he replied that the rules of causality did not necessarily apply to the fourth dimension or translate from one universe to another. They shouted him down, and ironically, as their uproar went on, Leslie John Stephenson aka Jack the Ripper stole that very same time machine to escape Scotland Yard, upstaging them all.

Suddenly, he wondered if he was reacting to Chichester the same way his friends had responded to him. In truth, he had been away from his lab—not to mention Amy—writing “realism” for so long that he could've become closed-minded. Though he wasn't yet forty, maybe he was already suffering from the dawn of middle age. Perhaps there was a shred of truth in Chichester's prediction. More importantly, what about Amy?

She couldn't have taken the time machine, he told himself, suddenly recalling the day they came back in 1893.
I didn't tell her about the bicycle lock. I didn't tell her that I put it on the central gearing system so that no one would ever use my time machine again.
He rushed downstairs into his laboratory, automatically slowing when he saw his monolithic creation in the center of the room and smiling with relief that apparently Amy hadn't gone anywhere. He mistakenly touched the cover to the engine compartment.

“Ouch!”

He jerked his hand away, put his fingers in his mouth.
Good bloody Christ, the machine's hot.
Then he saw his diagrams messed about on the workbench, and—speaking of paperweights—his simple bicycle lock on top with a pink rose poked through its hasp. He was wrong. Damnably wrong. Amy had taken his machine—except she must have forgotten about the special key. If the key were left in the control panel,
the machine automatically returned to its home hour after a ninety-second delay. What's more, she'd left the lights on in the lab. Scowling, he circled
The Utopia
, examined its steel plates, bolts and rivets, the glass windowpanes he would replace if there were a more durable, flexible alternative, all of it. He saw nothing glaringly wrong and assumed that she'd made it back to her future in one piece—as long there hadn't been any reformulation errors.

He climbed up and peered in the windows as if a child looking in an old classroom. Indeed, the special key in the control panel confirmed his suspicions, meaning Amy was stuck in 2010, and if he ever wanted to see her again, he'd have to go and get her. He opened the cabin door, reached in for the key and pulled, but couldn't get it loose. He lifted his eyebrows in surprise—
Good Lord, did she bend it trying to get it out?
—then got his pliers from the workbench, clambered back up inside the cabin and tugged on the damned thing till it popped loose and he sprawled back in the chair.

“Where on earth have we been?” he whispered to the key, for it was badly corroded a sinister black-green.

Back at the workbench, he delicately filed the burrs off the key, then buffed it with a wire brush. He sighed and looked off, wondering if she'd actually planned her journey or had gone off impetuously. No, this was no spur-of-the-moment trip, he fumed, this wasn't merely because of Chichester's predictions. Just weeks ago on a cold, rainy night he'd come to bed expecting only the warmth of the covers, but she had scooted close to him and started talking about time travel. He was pleased with her waxing nostalgic about their one great adventure together, her words in his ear lulling him to sleep. Now he realized she hadn't been sharing memories so much as she had been sharing dreams. Dreams without him. He bit his lip to keep himself from crying.
For her sake, I hope she had sense enough to take the greenbacks she'd brought back from 1979.

When the key was shiny brass again, he glanced at the diagrams Amy had pulled out, was pleased she'd at least looked at them. He read, “By its peculiar rotation, the time machine must reduce the time traveler to a
spirit
or body with no intrinsic mass and move it through endless
universes of flux to a date predetermined by speed and real time traveled.” He remembered writing those words in 1893, twelve years before Einstein published his theory of relativity, and was proud of Amy for having the courage to use the machine despite knowing that she would be vaporized.
Yes, but where the devil is the diagram of the declinometer and my cautionary note? Had she read it? Had she read it before she took the machine . . . ?

He found diagram and note lost at the bottom of the stack. Obviously, Amy hadn't looked at them. Yet his time machine had come home by mistake, meaning that she could have panicked and pulled the declinometer. He sincerely hoped she hadn't, for if she had, then his machine would've gone to infinity before coming home.
And that would explain the badly corroded key
, he thought ominously.

He looked to the machine for answers, carefully removed the prism-shaped declinometer and wiped it clean of an extratemporal residue that never failed to remind him of a pointillist watercolor glowing from within. He inspected it for telltale scratches and found none, so there was no way of knowing whether
The Utopia
had gone to yesterday or infinity.

He replaced the declinometer, then went in the engine compartment with his tools, rags and a liter of grease. He checked the Rotation Reversal Lock circuitry, made sure the insulation wasn't cracked, then inspected the Interstices Vaporizing Regulator. Like a space-time weather vane, if it detected danger, it kept the machine from stopping until the nearest safe landing date.
Jolly good. It hadn't overheated.
He lubricated the engine proper, going from the buffers of industrial diamonds to the pulse generator to the stainless-steel gears, adjusting every part so like a fine Swiss watch, the engine would have a precise symphony of movement. Not that it needed tuning—it didn't need tuning at all—he was merely avoiding the inevitable.

“Blasted dust everywhere,” he muttered, wiping off the components, shaking more extratemporal residue from his rag. He worked his way to the heart of the engine: those twisted crystalline bars that juxtaposed and concentrated electromagnetic fields which in turn created high-energy rotation enabling the machine to rocket along the fourth dimension.
When he had first come back from 1979, awash and glorious in timetravel afterglow, he'd hypercharged the engine, thanks to his brief immersion in late-twentieth-century technology, so it could go three years a minute instead of two. Not satisfied, he had also added an autoclock to the Time-Sphere Destination Indicator which self-adjusted for changes in time zones, should
The Utopia
still be on a world tour. Like a fat man in a circus, he mused sardonically.

He eased back out of the engine compartment. Despite his stubborn conviction that someday a world-state would reign supreme, he wasn't anxious to time-travel again. It wasn't merely the journey itself, a headlong rush that reduced one to quantum foam; rather, it was the fear of a reformulation error—that he wouldn't be reconstituted correctly at the destination hour. And even if the trip went smoothly, what would 2010 be like? 1979 had been a dismal potpourri of hurried, alienated men creating more and more advanced technology as if they, themselves, were machines. Ironically, those men depended on that very same technology, so one wasn't certain who was serving whom. Since coming home, he had lived with the new hope and idealism of the Edwardian Age, and had regained confidence in science and technology and the inherent goodness of man. Still, it was one thing to write speculative essays and books and quite another to go witness the reality. Conceivably by 2010 some genius would have synthesized a collective mind. Or the United Nations he so eagerly read about in 1979 would have moved closer to his dream of a world-state and a lasting peace for all mankind, and he would prove himself wrong about an egocentric mankind with a sinister technology.

Will you quit your infernal procrastination? For better or worse, Amy is the love of your life.
He took the bicycle lock off the workbench, though he didn't need it. He'd bring Amy back before they left, and the lock would still be on the central gearing wheel keeping
The Utopia
safe from “the tomb robbers of the future,” for lack of a better term. However, if
The Utopia
was on a world tour in 2010 and he
forgot
to lock the central gearing wheel while searching for Amy, there was a slim chance some errant child could slip past the barriers and accidentally propel himself through time, but that was a risk he would take. If Malthusian
predictions held true in the twenty-first century and the world had a serious population problem, the loss of a thoughtless child was not necessarily a bad thing. He sighed and did not recall his own childhood. He slipped Amy's pink rose in his lapel and took a stack of hundred-pound notes sterling from the safe, then went to the basement door and switched off the lights.