Temponauts

His parents being out for the day, the youth is lounging in his father's den, flicking through a Penthouse magazine he found hidden in the desk, when there comes a crash from the basement like a drawer full of cutlery upended onto tiles.

There, under the buzzing strip-light, in the middle of the concrete floor, is a machine as sleek and gleaming as a space-cycle from Captain Video, something built for heroes. An old man, who looked like the youth's grandfather of memory, is struggling to dismount.

The man presses a trembling hand to his chest. Who can he trust with the time-engine now but himself?

Enrico Fermi, on his lunch break from building the H-bomb, was struck by the oddness of finding us alone in the universe. Where is everybody? he wondered.

In 2012, Stephen Hawking announced a party for time travellers, but nobody came.

Surely there would be time tourists thronging the decks of the Titanic and queuing up to shoot Hitler. Wouldn't they give themselves away recording videos of the Crucifixion, taking selfies with Shakespeare at the Globe, training binoculars on the grassy knoll?

Hawking thought time travel was impossible, but I know where the time travellers go.

This is the late Pleistocene, millennia before the Clovis people shiver down through Canada, far south of the Laurentide ice sheet, in the milder airs of the Gulf of Mexico.

A row of time engines are parked along the base of the dunes, like a '58 Chevy owner's convention, all with the same careful driver. Not mass produced so they look the same, these are the same machine. Each has that identical ding in the chrome that’s always been there, the same toggle switch with homefelt-tipped next to it that we try when everything else fails.

As it gets dark, driftwood fires are lit on the shore, and in the firelight around each one gather small groups. There are bottles, cigarettes, joints. The gatherings are exclusive, conforming to the hierarchy amongst time travellers, based on knowledge of the other’s future. It’s like being surrounded by mirrors, catching endless reflections of ourselves, reminders of every mistake we've ever made.

When the youth walks out of the dark for the first time, he looks stricken and scared, though we feel no sympathy. It was a rite of passage for us all.

I catch his attention, and before he can say anything I tell him: You were in the house on your own when you heard the time engine drop in. And there was an old guy who looked like your grandad, except your grandad's dead.

Isn't that how it was, give or take? It's been a while now. Or about 20000 years uptime, looked at another way.

The kid stares at this poor impersonation of himself. He's wondering how I could possibly know all this.

There is a brief torrent of sparks from logs collapsing into a fire. The answer is already forming. I was a bright kid. He takes it well, the dying time traveller story, the old man not wanting his invention to fall into the wrong hands.

Unutterably weary, the old man had begun explaining how the engine stayed in the same location unless instructed otherwise, how these particular settings allowed a brief jaunt into tomorrow and back.

The youth barely listened; he couldn't wait to try it out. Half astride the seat, he glanced up.

"You’ll be OK, right?"

The old man was slumped on a chair, one hand pressed to his chest.

But when the youth bounces back from tomorrow the basement has a pool table and a battered sofa and a big TV like he always wanted as a kid. Upstairs, the kitchen and his bedroom are different and there’s no sign of the old man anywhere.

Feeling like a burglar in his own house, he creeps back down to the basement. As his hands hover over the controls of the time engine, he begins to sweat, struggling to remember what the old man told him.

It's like learning to drive and turning the wheel too much. His father shouting at him, miming small movements. Something about positive feedback loops

Other times the basement is dark and dusty; sometimes it's his father's obsessively tidy workshop. Once, he hears voices raised in alarm and footsteps on the stairs. But the old man has tricked him. Alternate timelines are spawned by time-travelling itself and there’s no way back.

In the end, he tries the switch on the controls, the one labelled home in felt-tip. The setting which brings you here. Timelines are different as snowflakes, there's this place, and this day. Our histories still cohere this long ago.

He’s heard enough and storms off. He wants answers. More than that, he wants to go home. Out in the dark there is the dull whump of his departing time engine.

I recall it was a difficult couple of months, discovering what was possible. Anybody with access to the future can coin wealth, but he keeps on trying to go back. There are timelines so close you can't tell the difference, except for the copy of yourself living there, complaining about school or moping over Jenny Chen.

Right on cue, he stalks into the firelight, looking older and wearing that stupid leather jacket with the collar turned up. We all bear the marks of fads, haircuts and bad decisions made long ago.

If the kid knew how it turns out, he might accidentally annihilate us all, so we let it happen the way we remember.

"Make sure you get the gun," murmurs someone round the fire. Identical personalities, we collude in reinforcing our faults with every meeting.

That first time the kid didn’t understand what was going on, now he's here to sort things out. He stands with his hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket, a scowl on his face.

"So you're all older versions of me."

He thinks he sees something move, some creature of possibility sniffing at the edges of the firelight, but when he looks again it's gone.

"Are there any others like us?"

Mostly we’ve stopped believing that temponauts from uptime will step through shining portals to save us. It looks like ours is the only engine rattling round the timelines.

His fingers will be curling round the revolver in his pocket now. The one he found in a compartment behind the saddle of the time engine. The gun was full of sand and grit and he had to learn how to clean and oil it.

"That old guy," he says casually. "The one like my grandfather, the one who was ill?"

I don't recall having much of a plan back then, just to force the Old Man to undo what he'd done.

The Old Man is the legendary last of us. There's a notion that time travel is harmful, that each trip damages our bodies. And our souls, if the eyes of the Fifties tell us anything. We listen to each other, knowing it's all been said before, by ourselves, older and stranger, or younger and more stupid.

The kid glances up and down the beach, eyes aflame with firelight. "I've a couple of questions to ask him."

"We don't think he comes here."

His lips take on that petulant twist I've noticed becomes a habit with us.

"My dad said if I could fix up his old bike, I could have it. But I barely managed to take the carburettor out. So how come—"

What he means is how did we build the time engine. Then he remembers who he's talking to.

"But you already knew that. About the bike."

As we understand it, the Old Man, knowing he was dying, jumps back to some innocent version of his youth and tempts him into jaunting into tomorrow. The Old Man is left in an alternate that there's no finding again. That youth astride the time engine begins it all.

Though that’s no answer to the question that nags at us. It's like the dent in the chrome that none of us are responsible for.

Casually, he wonders what we do with our time machines.

Only the Teens travel up and down the millennia spying on peoples we don't understand and whose fates don't concern us. It's the Twenties who begin tinkering. We dismiss them as the Shooting Hitleryears. Eventually they accept they're only branching off more timelines.

You begin to think differently. Even if you could stop someone taking that fatal car trip, it's harder to convince Cousin Frank not to enlist because the VC blow his legs off. In one timeline, someone dies, in another they don't, but both happen. Pulling the trigger is like switching points on a rail track. It's not a moral act.

I hold out my hand.

"Now give me the gun."

It's us Thirties that stalk ourselves across the timelines, obsessed with how different it might have been had we not been so unlucky, had we made better choices. We secretly watch the few versions of ourselves who marry Jenny Chen, though it never turns out well. Things repeat themselves. It seems we find it hard to settle on a career. Mostly we end up on our own. Always a disappointment to our father.

In the timelines that work out best, our alternate selves settle down with Elsie Trent, that plain girl who had a thing for us in high school, though they never have kids, no matter how many timelines you try.

Later, someone steps into the firelight and tells me I handled the youth well.

Few of these Forties come here. We think they choose a good timeline, put a tarp over the engine and settle down. The problem is what happens to the fellow whose life it already was. Best steer clear of the Forties.

Does he have any advice?

This older self has a habit of absent-mindedly rubbing his chest. He's overweight and his hair is thinning. Hard to see how I could become him in just a few years.

"Ask Elsie Trent," he grunts.

The older you get, the more difficult it is to remember whether you said something or heard it spoken by an older self.

The Forty walks away from the firelight, unsure what to do next, and finds an old man leaning against his time engine.

"Elsie left you," he says. "You're only here because you've got nowhere else to go."

If he's bluntly unsympathetic, it's because this forty-year-old is a killer, the one insane enough to hide the body and impersonate himself. Simmering with plans for a better life, a bigger house, a shinier car, the compartment behind the saddle of the time engine full of cash from lottery wins or playing the market.

Ten years after, Elsie would say you aren't the man I married.

"You get over it," the man adds. "And stay off the engine, it's killing us."

The Forty isn't listening. The gun bumping against his leg is the one taken from from the youth all those years ago, a constant reminder, like a bad conscience.

"I suppose you remember this conversation," says the Forty, with a calculating look.

Somebody watching might think they see an old man and his grown-up son, one made gaunt by illness, the other overweight and still a disappointment.

"You're the Old Man. You start it all off by leaving the kid your time engine," says the Forty, pulling the gun from his pocket. "Unless I stop it."

"I’m a Fifty and I know you don't pull that trigger."

We've all been incensed by the voice of the future, by fate belittling our choices. The Forty clenches with rage then abruptly drops to his knees, his face twisted in pain and surprise.

Behind him, an older man lowers a taser. He shakes his head. "Don't remember being that stupid."

"Are you the Old Man?"

"I think so."

The Old Man recalls they had nothing much to say after that.

Painfully, he kneels to scoop up the gun from the sand and puts it in the container on his time engine. He closes his eyes and with shaking hands, touches the controls one last time.

The time engine drops into the basement with a noise like a drawer full of cutlery upended onto tiles. There, in the harsh glare of a buzzing strip-light, a terrible weakness sweeps through him.

A moment or two later, a younger self clatters down the stairs, wide-eyed and gawping. There’s so much to explain, but the youth hardly listens, stroking the gleaming machine like the skin of a girl. He can't wait to try it out.

"I'll only be a minute," he grins, not knowing he is about to vanish forever. "You’ll be OK, right?"

This is why the Old Man is here, very weary now and just wanting it all to stop. It takes him a long time to climb the stairs, and when he slumps down on the front doorstep, his heart is an erratic thunder. He wonders if this is what it is to be free, to be ignorant of what happens next.

He blinks at the blurred machine pulling into the driveway. Does he know this couple? Their voices seem familiar.

Jesus, for a second I thought it was my dad sitting there.

Yes, temponauts have come to save him at last.

THE END

Bio: David Barber lives anonymously in the UK. His ambition is to continue doing these things...

E-mail: David Barber

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