The Time Traveler

Untitle10,718 BC to 1931 AD

 I have awakened into Year 10,645, which the current inhabitants have designated, AD 1931. It seems like an interim time between great turmoil. Only 14 years ago, a great War ended involving the major powers at considerable loss of life due to technological advances since I last awoke. But the end of that war does not seem to have resolved the political discord preceding it. And to make matters worse, the economy of the world is in depression.

Nicolas brought his son, Kosta, the next caretaker, down with him to meet me. The boy is pleasant and bright, and follows me around like a puppy. After I was up and alert, Nicolas led me upstairs and introduced me to his wife, Maria, as a friend from the old country. She is a simple but competent woman who smiled continuously at me and did not dare question her husband's bringing me up into their home. She went back to her chores somewhere else in the house and left us to talk in the kitchen.

I spent the next hours learning about the long trip of the vessel across the Great Ocean to America during the Sleep, and how much the world had changed since my last awakening. Much technological advancement has been achieved, more than in any other epoch in human history since Atlantis was doomed. Mankind seems once again on the verge of magic.

The entry went on to detail the time traveler's awakening from April 24 to May 1, 1931. For the most part, he spent that week in the old house, listening to my grandfather's report of the events of the last seventy-three years, reading historical texts, newspapers, and listening with awe and interest to radio broadcasts.

Early one morning three days after his awakening, the time traveler took a ride with my grandfather and my father in grandfather's Ford Model A Roadster. It took them an hour and a half to negotiate the narrow, bumpy country roads from the old house to the bustling streets of Buffalo. Once in the city, the time traveler gawked up at the tall brick buildings which the invention of the elevator had spawned. He was equally intrigued by grandfather's roadster, and other cars of the era, clogging the streets with gurgling motors, blaring horns and lung-choking exhaust. The time traveler commented that these vehicles resembled the land transports of Atlantis in certain respects, except that the Atlantean vehicles were fueled by the sun and hence, ran silently and without fumes.

After a week, the time traveler's entry in the stylus reported his return to the stone tomb to resume his journey through time, and I recalled my father's unhappy deathbed account of that event. At least, on that day on the morning of May First, 1931, he had hope of meeting him again.

For the next three hours, I remained at the kitchen table reading the time traveler's entries on the screen of the stylus describing his experiences during his awakenings in the many years before 1931. From these reports, I learned that he rarely spent more than a week in the time period into which he had awakened. To do otherwise would have resulted in the premature end to his ultimate mission. Only when he emerged from the stone time machine, did he age. Therefore, no matter how attached he became to his caretakers and whomever he met during a particular era, he had to keep in mind that his life had a finite span even if his time machine didn't.

I must constantly remind myself of my mission, my vow, he wrote in one of his entries in the sixteenth century, following his introduction to a young woman who had ignited a romantic passion within him, to continue onward into the far reaches of time and watch humanity attain a high level of magic matching that which Great Atlantis has attained.

After some hours, I could no longer keep my eyes open. My knees cracked as I rose from the kitchen table, and after stretching my back and taking a long, deep yawn, I ventured back down to the secret chamber. For a time, I stared at the stone tomb, wondering again if it was really possible that a time traveler from Atlantis with bronze colored skin was sleeping within it protected by an ancient gel that magically suspended the process of aging.

Pulling myself away from the tomb, I trudged upstairs. I spent the night at the house and in the morning, dutifully attended my father's funeral. The priest presided over the somber mass in an empty church. Then, I followed the hearse in a lone car to the cemetery where father was put into the ground.

Over the next weeks, I spent every free moment at my father's house, reading entry after entry in the time traveler's stylus back down the long years even before the time of Christ. By April Fool's day, five months after my father's death, and only a month before the time traveler's anticipated reawakening, I had read the stylus entries all the way back to the day he first entered the tomb in 10,718 B.C.

Twice, the time traveler had remained awake for longer than a year, always for the benefit of a woman. With one of them, he had fathered a child, a son, whose progeny might still exist today among the descendants of mankind. Yet, even after he had become a father, the time traveler felt compelled to return to the tomb to continue his one-way journey forward in time. That made me wonder - was the lure of pursuing the future more enticing than raising a son with the woman who bore him?

With each passing day, the prospect of the tomb's opening, and the emergence of the time traveler from within it, drove me to distraction. By the end of April, I could barely sleep.

Perhaps what I feared most was that this was some kind of cruel family hoax, and that my father was having a wonderful laugh from eternity at my expense. Despite my reservations, on April twenty-eighth, I took two weeks' vacation from the firm and starting spending even more time down in the chamber anticipating the wondrous opening of the tomb. On April twenty-ninth, I started sleeping on an old cot in the middle of the dank room only a few feet from the stone coffin.

On the evening of April thirtieth, I was down there, in that dank, dark chamber, when my sister Constance returned home.