The Retroactive Time Machine: The Third Thursday The Invaded The Time Machine

by Ted Reynolds, H.G. Wells

The Third Thursday The group has gathered every Thursday evening for years. Last Thursday their host demonstrated for them what he claimed to be a time travelling device. This Thursday he claims to have actually travelled into the future and back in it. Now he and his contraption have vanished again -- into time?. His guests are determined to show up at the next Thursday session and find out the truth of his claims. But what happens next is beyond the ability of even H. G. Wells to predict.Phillip Filby manages to purloin a prototype of the time machine only to lose it by starting it in the wrong direction. The manservant, Miles, has firm faith in the reality of time travel, and his master has promised him the first time trip into the past to propose more effectively to his lost love. Griffin, the young albino, is eager to use the machine in many ways, not all legal. The mayor begins spending all his time asleep, where his dreams give him insights into the twists and turns of time. The editor refuses to entertain the slightest belief, while his reporter is afraid of missing the greatest news scoop of 2000 years. The doctor and the philosopher unearth numerous improbabilities and contradictions in the so-called time traveller’s story. Garth, the coachman, perhaps due to being the only one of them who can actually drive anything, seems to have a better grasp of the workings of the time machine than the others. Can the differentiation of species in the 9028th century really be attributed to the economic structure of Great Britain in the 19th? Could the time traveller be distorting the real nature of the future? And is it possible that now the time machine is no longer in the control of humans? The InvadedThe Eloi are a telempathetic population who pleasantly monitor the weather, life forms, and general well-being of what used to be the British Isles. The Morlocks are a separate population of “engineers,” living in underground communities and providing energy and material products for all alike. The two peoples coexist in amiable proximity, but being respectively day-folk and night-folk, seldom meet each other directly.When an unannounced time traveler appears among them, the Eloi take him in. They tolerate his attempts to teach them his primitive vocal language, and his occasional fits of aggressive temper; in an attempt to protect him from dangers of which he is oblivious, (such as solar power shafts), the Eloi delegate one of their number (Weena) to accompany him and to try to relate to him as an “individual,” an uncongenial role they seldom have to assume. However, it is expected that this eccentric visitor will depart as soon as his primitive time machine has been fully repaired (and improved} by the Morlock engineers.However, the visitor, ignoring Weena’s attempts to prevent him, invades an underground power plant. His life is saved only by the self-sacrifice of an engineer’s life, and his subsequent panic (“Open flames in a power plant? That’s . . . ignorant”) almost leads to much worse disaster. Now the Morlocks and the Eloi want only to return the visitor’s time machine at once and let him leave their time peacefully.But immediately, without explanation, the visitor departs across the countryside, taking the reluctant Weena with him as hostage. Worse, he is taking Weena directly to the Mathomhouse, a collection of ancient artifacts within which an Eloi is highly unlikely to survive. Gnost, a Morlock with a normal distaste for the upper world and a disinclination to risk his life for one of the silly Eloi, is nevertheless volunteered to lead the rescue mission. These two novellas are the opening to Retrograde Time Machine, an distorted epic for all who enjoy human idiosyncrasies, temporal anomalies, the pitfalls of encountering the "other", . . and crumpets.The original Time Machine of H. G. Wells, to which these are in a peculiar way sequels, is included in this volume.

178 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2017