Note : This short contains a very brief oblique reference to another set of stories, but this is only tangential and can be overlooked
Summary : The events of the 1979 Movie Time After Time collide with the ST:TOS episode, Wolf In The Fold, as H.G. Wells is sent a letter.
Dear Herbert
by Rob Morris
From: Doctor John Lesley Stephenson, M.D.
To: Herbert George Wells, Author and Philosopher
Herbert, let it be known I bear you no ill will for what you did. Being a just man, I see you had no choice but to try and destroy me. I think I even wanted you to succeed. I almost wish you had.
But you didn't. Oh, Mister Wells, my dear friend. How little you understood your marvelous creation. A time-travel machine. It took the two of us forward to that wonderfully fetid and corrupt city by the Bay, in that tortured year counted by some as 1979. It found me a world where I belonged, and you were wrong, so very wrong, about the emergent utopia. Did you know that certain folk there tried to create another utopia, not ten years prior? Like yours, all talk of free love and equality. Like yours, an utter failure that is chuckled at and derided.
At our denouement, I can see you standing there, having rescued your little whore from the bank. I can see you deactivate the mechanism that permits focused passage from one time to another. The light is tearing me to pieces. Yet I do not die. Scattered across time and space, I find my own focus. Herbert, thank you. Its actually easier, not having to maintain a body of my own. Entering the bodies of others is so very much more efficient.
I slipped about the timestream as I willed, for a time. In 1932, I thought I might seek out your older self. But location, as they say, is everything. Locked into China, I found that the whores of Cathay scream as well and as loudly as those of Brittania.
I tried to perhaps intercept you in 1979, mucking about with the events of our confrontation. But the Kiev of 1974 was too delicious. Imagine a society with a twisted copy of your high ideals, and that claimed to have eliminated prostitution. The girls could have told them otherwise, Herbert. I gut them, but I do not call them brainless things, to be brushed aside by proclamation.
I gadded about for a while after that. I think that my attempt to disrupt events related to my own history caused a diminishment in my capacity to inhabit others. But still I found things to do. Some fertilizer in the colonies' heartland. A plane ride or two to New York City. No, I won't claim complete credit. I'm not that sort. But when the deciding moment came, I made certain that nerve and steely determination won out over the concerns for tiny little lives.
As man moved out into space, I moved with him. I was still weak, and on occasion I slipped so far back, it must have seemed to some like I have existed forever. Who knows? Perhaps I have. Perhaps John Lesley Stephenson was merely a poor stupid vessel I became lost in. Perhaps it was you that freed me, Herbert.
I began to finally grow stronger. From warlike Mars in 2105. In a series of caves in 2151, I was certain that one fool would strangle the Vulcan woman-- with her tight, tight suit. From Deneb 2 to Rigel 4, and on past Argelius. Captain Kirk thought he could destroy me, as well. He also thinks his utopia is untouchable, easily cleansed by his matter/energy machine. But the universe--or perhaps at least this one alternate cosmos I stumbled upon in my wanderings, has a dark and grimy secret. It is perhaps what spawned me, initially. I won't describe it to you, Herbert. We are both rational men, and the physical dimensions of this threat are simply ridiculous. But on the upside, it lives for no other purpose than to chew utopias to small and crumbly bits. One frozen little boy can't stop this.
I did try for Kirk again, using another form, and another, subtler tactic. I would have won, but he and his temporary Klingon ally dared laugh at me. I won't have that. But Kirk's tormented boy will eventually waken, trying in his feeble way to right his sorry universe. Hmm. Perhaps I'll have him and his fated girl go at it. She is a Vulcan like that tease T'Pol, so it would suit me to see that.
Whatever else happens, Herbert, you have my well wishes, as you write the violent books that will be remembered far longer than your philosophies of peace. I wish I could tell you of how wonderfully vivid the sequences of the Martian blood factories became in my mind. You destroyed London as I might have. The germs were a bit overdone as an ending, but such is to be expected. Beware of false prophets like yourself, Herbert. And beware--of me.
Yours Truly,
Jack The Ripper
Summary : The events of the 1979 Movie Time After Time collide with the ST:TOS episode, Wolf In The Fold, as H.G. Wells is sent a letter.
Dear Herbert
by Rob Morris
From: Doctor John Lesley Stephenson, M.D.
To: Herbert George Wells, Author and Philosopher
Herbert, let it be known I bear you no ill will for what you did. Being a just man, I see you had no choice but to try and destroy me. I think I even wanted you to succeed. I almost wish you had.
But you didn't. Oh, Mister Wells, my dear friend. How little you understood your marvelous creation. A time-travel machine. It took the two of us forward to that wonderfully fetid and corrupt city by the Bay, in that tortured year counted by some as 1979. It found me a world where I belonged, and you were wrong, so very wrong, about the emergent utopia. Did you know that certain folk there tried to create another utopia, not ten years prior? Like yours, all talk of free love and equality. Like yours, an utter failure that is chuckled at and derided.
At our denouement, I can see you standing there, having rescued your little whore from the bank. I can see you deactivate the mechanism that permits focused passage from one time to another. The light is tearing me to pieces. Yet I do not die. Scattered across time and space, I find my own focus. Herbert, thank you. Its actually easier, not having to maintain a body of my own. Entering the bodies of others is so very much more efficient.
I slipped about the timestream as I willed, for a time. In 1932, I thought I might seek out your older self. But location, as they say, is everything. Locked into China, I found that the whores of Cathay scream as well and as loudly as those of Brittania.
I tried to perhaps intercept you in 1979, mucking about with the events of our confrontation. But the Kiev of 1974 was too delicious. Imagine a society with a twisted copy of your high ideals, and that claimed to have eliminated prostitution. The girls could have told them otherwise, Herbert. I gut them, but I do not call them brainless things, to be brushed aside by proclamation.
I gadded about for a while after that. I think that my attempt to disrupt events related to my own history caused a diminishment in my capacity to inhabit others. But still I found things to do. Some fertilizer in the colonies' heartland. A plane ride or two to New York City. No, I won't claim complete credit. I'm not that sort. But when the deciding moment came, I made certain that nerve and steely determination won out over the concerns for tiny little lives.
As man moved out into space, I moved with him. I was still weak, and on occasion I slipped so far back, it must have seemed to some like I have existed forever. Who knows? Perhaps I have. Perhaps John Lesley Stephenson was merely a poor stupid vessel I became lost in. Perhaps it was you that freed me, Herbert.
I began to finally grow stronger. From warlike Mars in 2105. In a series of caves in 2151, I was certain that one fool would strangle the Vulcan woman-- with her tight, tight suit. From Deneb 2 to Rigel 4, and on past Argelius. Captain Kirk thought he could destroy me, as well. He also thinks his utopia is untouchable, easily cleansed by his matter/energy machine. But the universe--or perhaps at least this one alternate cosmos I stumbled upon in my wanderings, has a dark and grimy secret. It is perhaps what spawned me, initially. I won't describe it to you, Herbert. We are both rational men, and the physical dimensions of this threat are simply ridiculous. But on the upside, it lives for no other purpose than to chew utopias to small and crumbly bits. One frozen little boy can't stop this.
I did try for Kirk again, using another form, and another, subtler tactic. I would have won, but he and his temporary Klingon ally dared laugh at me. I won't have that. But Kirk's tormented boy will eventually waken, trying in his feeble way to right his sorry universe. Hmm. Perhaps I'll have him and his fated girl go at it. She is a Vulcan like that tease T'Pol, so it would suit me to see that.
Whatever else happens, Herbert, you have my well wishes, as you write the violent books that will be remembered far longer than your philosophies of peace. I wish I could tell you of how wonderfully vivid the sequences of the Martian blood factories became in my mind. You destroyed London as I might have. The germs were a bit overdone as an ending, but such is to be expected. Beware of false prophets like yourself, Herbert. And beware--of me.
Yours Truly,
Jack The Ripper
