Time After Time by Karl Alexander Page A

and devoid of tension. He uttered a giggle. Had he, too, just experienced “technophilia”?
    The driver closed up the hood, got back inside the cab and started the engine. He slowly pulled away from the curb, a serene smile on his otherwise blank face.
    The rest of the trip was staid and uneventful, but H.G. didn’t notice, for he had his head back on the seat, his eyes closed, and was smiling. His imagination was back there rocketing off concrete summits in quiet residential areas. When he reluctantly climbed out of the cab, he was no longer the same.
    H.G. Wells had fallen inexorably in love with the automobile.
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    Leslie John Stephenson sat at the dining table in his hotel suite and picked at the escargots he had ordered from room service. Although tired, he was satisfied with the progress he had made in the short time
since he’d arrived in 1979. After he had left the museum, it had taken him less than an hour to locate a free hot supper and a warm bed at the St. Vincent De Paul Rescue Mission east of the park. And just this morning he had gotten a free ride into the city and had exchanged some of the gold sovereigns he always carried in his money belt for several hundred dollars American. Then he had purchased several outfits of clothes and was now lounging in a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-per-day suite high above the annoying metallic sounds of the street. He smiled. Not bad for a fugitive from Scotland Yard.
    He pushed his lunch away and went back to a poem he was working on; he was impressed with the effortless way in which the modern pen with the internal source of ink moved across the Jack Tar stationery.

    â€œAn Ode to Joan of Arc”
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    You whom the flames twist around;
Smiling, you utter no sound.
Your mouth is hot with desire
To caress the inevitable fire …

    He put the pen down and poured another glass of Beefeater’s, then got up from the table and went out onto the balcony. He gazed at the overcast sky and the sweep of square buildings that sloped away from the hotel. The sight reminded him of the view of Bath from the library of his family’s country estate that now belonged to one of his simpering older brothers. He took a slug of gin.
    Aesculapius. That had been home once. That was the name his dictatorial father had given to the estate because he was a doctor, and he had three sons who he insisted become doctors, and he had a daughter who would no doubt marry a doctor. Stephenson, Sr.,
had envisioned himself as a latter-day Squire Allworthy, and once a month he would stage fox hunts, driving his intrepid hounds to the limit of their endurance, then hold forth for his friends in front of the great stone fireplace. On such occasions young Leslie and his siblings were banned from the front portion of the house, and their mother was reduced to the role of sniveling alewife.
    Aesculapius. Stephenson took another gulp of gin. That was where he had gone home to after his first year at the university. That was where his love for his dark-haired, ivory-skinned sister had matured and flowered. That was where he had seduced her—upon the meadow behind the caretaker’s house on a warm summer afternoon, the air heavy with pollen and sweet odors. He had interpreted her eagerness as a sign of true love and at the height of his passion asked her to run away with him and marry him. There had never been another woman. Just her. She replied without remorse that she was content where she was and that while she might like him at this particular moment, his passion had been preceded by others. “Who?” he cried with anguish. He learned that the caretaker had been first and that she had lain with their father—not once, but many times since.
    She had unleashed a demon.
    Aesculapius. Home. He took another quick swallow of liquor. The place where early in the evening that same day he had tried to kill his sister with a carving knife when he could no longer