Click

... and then it was done.

Dr. Marvin Ledbetter took a step back from the machine and smiled broadly in satisfaction. A screwdriver held loosely in one hand, he ran the other through his Einsteinian halo of wavy white hair and let himself relax. Finally, all of the diagnostics had been clear, and all that had remained was to attach the brass plate to the side of the instrument panel.

She was ready to go.

He placed the screwdriver on a nearby workbench and clambered into the machine, lowering himself into the old leather armchair that formed the centre of the contraption. His fingers moved over the polished brass, tracing the letters of 'Mary' with his fingers and he looked up at the picture that sat above it. Green eyes smiled at him from a captured moment of the past and he smiled back. Still smiling, he leapt from his seat with an energy that belied his frail appearance and started grabbing items from the workbenches that surrounded him.

"Right: laptop, check. Bottled water. Check."

Moving frenetically around his lab, he mumbled his way through a mental list, collecting various things. He looked over at the machine called Mary, the car-sized metal framework barely visible under the miles of wiring, sensors, and equidistantly spaced energy field cones and cast a final careful eye over the machine. And then, once he was ready, he sat back in the chair, connected up his laptop, and sat for a few seconds with his eyes closed, savouring the moment. With a quick indrawn breath, he leapt from the machine again and grabbed a small plastic dinosaur skeleton.

"Malcolm! Check. Couldn't forget you now old boy could we?"

Grinning madly, he plonked himself back into the chair and propped Malcolm up by his laptop. He tapped a couple of keys, punched a large green button with 'Don't Panic!' written on it, and sat gripping the arms of the chair as the machine powered up, his knuckles white and eyes wide. With a barely audible whine, the energy fields established themselves, a spider's web tracery of white light creeping like frost from the cones, and the lab around him dimmed slightly. With what sounded like a soft 'click', he detached from the known universe and sat suspended in his energy bubble, the soft hum of his machine whirring steadily in the background.

Permitting himself a little jig of joy in his seat, he whooped in triumph and then ran through a series of tests, tapping rapidly at the keyboard until he had confirmed that he'd truly done it. The Ledbetter field generator - as he'd decided to call it a few seconds previously - was working. He could move independently through time and space, the energy field utterly cutting him off from the universe as he knew it. Nothing could enter the field and nothing could leave. Picking up a small rubber ball, he threw it and watched with delight as it hit the floor, bounced solidly off the energy field, and back into his hand.

"Lovely, just like Steve McQueen." He grinned again, humming the theme tune to the Great Escape in an absent-minded fashion.

"Well Mary," he whispered. "What do I do now eh?" His gaze flicked over at the small skeleton of the dinosaur, and his fingers moved rapidly over the keys once more. With another faint 'click' the universe moved around him.

A few nanoseconds later, not that the time really made any difference, Marvin sat suspended in the air above a vast herd of sauropods, watching intently as they moved across an endless savannah that, many millions of years later, would become the south coast of Hampshire. He watched open-mouthed as the Hypsilophodon herd moved gracefully in sync with each other, almost like a flock of birds, seeming to know instinctively where each of their colleagues was and what they were about to do. A stealthy movement caught his eye as a small group of predatory carnivores separated off a weaker herbivore, the swiftly moving neoventors expertly herding it away from the larger bull males before taking it down and feasting on its still-warm carcass. Dinosaurs had always been Mary's area of expertise, but it was an interest he'd happily shared, his boyhood fascination with them reignited by his wife when they married. Malcolm had been one of the sillier presents he'd given her over the few short years they were together.

"Ah, but your kind didn't last very long after this did they, Malcolm?"

The small plastic skeleton thankfully didn't provide an answer and he reached once more for the keyboard as inspiration for his next destination struck.

...click...

Floating high in the atmosphere, he watched as the massive rock thundered through the sky, smaller asteroids calving from the huge iron and ice body as its surface glowed redly on re-entry. He followed it in and then stopped a few tens of miles away watching as the massive rock burst through the earth's crust, debris flying into the air as much of the area was simply vapourised through heat and pressure.

The dinosaur killer: the end of most of the life on the planet, but thankfully not all.

...click...

There was a massive tremor as an earthquake shook the ground and the rock wall separating the vast shallow basin and the Atlantic collapsed, water pouring through the gap in a waterfall that would last tens of thousands of years and that would one day form the Mediterranean sea.

...click...

Hitler shot himself; the body of Eva Braun slumped next to him.

...click...

Elvis died. No aliens.

...click...

There was another gunman when JFK was shot, but he was disposed of shortly afterward by CIA hitmen.

...click...

Genghis Khan was short and really enjoyed sex.

...click...

Chewing on an apple, a bottle of water at his elbow, he sat watching Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival, his foot tapping away to one of his favourite tunes. Mary had always loved Hendrix, particularly his live performances. He glanced at the photograph of his long-dead wife.

"I wish you could see this love," he whispered, tears forming in his eyes. "We could've shared so much."

He sighed and then grabbed at the arms of the chair as the field abruptly flickered and the machine lurched, Malcolm leaning drunkenly against the laptop screen. A rapid blur of rainbow hues flashed across the inside of the energy bubble and then it stabilised, the field generator settling back to its low hum.

"Okay Mary, perhaps it's time to get you home, I can take a hint. We can have another jaunt through history another day. There's just so much to see."

He leant forward to tap a sequence of keys, but as he did so, his arm brushed an empty water bottle which dropped to the metal floor by his feet and rolled towards the field.

"Oh shite," he muttered in annoyance, his eyes watching as seemingly in slow motion the bottle rolled into the field, eventually stopping with half in and half outside the junction with reality.

Nothing happened.

The upper portion of the bottle was faintly visible beyond the infinitesimally thin energy field and he cautiously reached over and withdrew it. It seemed unchanged initially but as he watched in wonder, it crumbled and turned to dust. Eyes wide with astonishment, he moved to his computer and rapidly tapped away, analysing readings from the sensors, his brain whirring with excitement.

"It's changed," he muttered, and then carried on talking to himself – or sometimes Malcolm or Mary – a habit he'd developed over long years of working alone.

"The field polarity has changed somehow. It's still intact or we wouldn't be here, but the bottle clearly passed through the field which should be impossible. Hmm, we haven't got much time, energy levels are getting low, but I wonder..."

He tapped in a new series of commands and the machine reappeared instantaneously in his lab. Maintaining the field, he moved the machine close to one of his workbenches and then lifted a pen from his pocket. Cautiously reaching toward the field, he poked the pen through the multicoloured barrier and carefully prodded an apple that sat on the wooden surface.

The apple moved, tipping over before rolling away from the pen. As he withdrew the pen he watched intently, noting that after a few seconds it changed to dust.

"My word!" he said. "Well Mary, it seems like we've had a bit of an unexpected result there..." His words trailed off and his head snapped around to look at the ever-smiling face of his wife.

"Oh God, Mary..." he cried hoarsely, throwing himself into the chair. Feverishly, he punched the keys that would take him when and where he wanted to go, his fingers flying over the keyboard. With a trembling hand, he struck the green button.

...click...

And there she was.

"Mary..." he whispered.

It was dark. He remembered the rain, remembered the cold, and all over again he remembered the pain, the loss, the anguish. The train! There she was; crouched over the fallen deer on the tracks, the heavy rain drowning out the sounds of the approaching train, the car headlights illuminating her shrouded form. The decision was instantly made, he stood, reached, and pushed, the shove tumbling her off her feet away from the body of the deer which dissolved in a cloud of bloody spray and gore as the train plowed through where she had been mere moments before. The sound that he'd heard in decades of nightmares send him stumbling back to his chair, the brakes of the train screaming into the night as it passed invisibly through Marvin and his machine and onwards down the tracks.

He watched as his hand and forearm gently crumbled before his eyes. No pain, how strange. But then he only had eyes for one thing. His Mary, wet and shaking, pale in the evening light and the illumination from the car headlights as she pulled herself to her feet. She was reaching for him, reaching for him and embracing him.

A younger him.

Not him.

His younger self had seen her destroyed, but now another younger Marvin embraced his Mary, holding her as she cried, stroking her hair, and murmuring calm words as time changed and a new future unfolded.

"Mary..." he whispered.

With his remaining hand, he typed.

...click...

He watched as the new timeline flowed past his eyes. An alternate universe where he and Mary grew older, had children, spent their lives inventing, talking, loving, and being together. He slumped back into his chair, tears of joy and pain streaming down his cheeks, but a small smile twisting the wrinkles on his face.

He looked at the picture of his Mary, the energy meter next to it blinking a dull red and then fading to black as his own private little universe came to a close.

"It was worth it. Live and be well. I love you..."

...click...

The End