One Small Ripple

Allen woke up underneath the pier again. The waves soaking his boots and bottom end of his pants before he noticed where he was. He got up and brushed the sand from his back. He made his way up the winding path that led up to the main road along the beach. He looked down at the squishing inside his boots, no socks again. He didn’t understand why he could never remember the socks when he traveled.

Allen had made lots of progress in his past few trips to Belfast, the small town where the ship was being built. He managed to locate where the supervisor of welding lived. The night before he had snuck into the home of supervisor Brian Kelly, and stolen a uniform. The outfit was unlike the other workers at the shipyard, distinct with its deep blue shirt and gray pants. Most of the other men, the fabricators and welders, wore burlap pants and thin cotton shirts. The welders with burns up and down their arms and necks. None of this would be allowable in today’s workplace, Allen thought. But he wasn’t in Belfast as a safety inspector, he’d come there for a different reason.

He made his way over to the stacked rocks where he hid the uniform after taking it. He quickly slipped into it. The real supervisor of welding Brian Kelly, was off for the day, and Allen was to fill his position. He tucked in the deep blue shirt into the dark gray pants and laced up his boots, pulling the pants over the boots to hide the fact that he had no socks.

Allen arrived at the shipyard. The men already busy with their torches and welding rods, showering the ground below in orange red drops of molten steel. The final section of the Titanic was being assembled, the front end.

“ Attention men!” , shouted Allen, as he attempted to deepen his voice. “ I am here as a representative of Harland and Wolff. I have been instructed to inform you, that the front half of the Titanic shall have a double steel plate. So after you finish welding up this first layer, you are to add a second steel layer to the front side of the boat. I understand that the labor will require extra hours, you will have an additional two days to complete the task.”

The men shouted and groaned. They were nearing the end of the welding of the ships outer hull. Now this man, whom they had never seen before, ordered them to overlay a second layer of steel on the front end of the nearly completed ship.

“ I understand this is a significant amount of extra weld work, so I was also asked to inform you that your wages for this front end reinforcement, will be doubled,” explained Allen.

The groaning dissipated quickly as most men acknowledged the fact that double pay, was double pay. Everyone in Belfast could use the extra money. Especially the welders, since they consumed most of the alcohol in the town.

Allen was surprised, and relieved, that the men obliged his request without hesitation. The uniform had been enough. The real shock, would come from Harland and Wolf, the ship fabrication company, when the men would ask for their double pay in the next few days. The company wouldn’t have any recollection of this added protective measure on the front end of the Titanic.

Alan hoped that the double wall on the front end would keep the iceberg from penetrating, and sinking the ship. A little fact that only Allen was aware at this time.

See the truth was, that Allen had been on board of the Titanic when it sank. An unborn fetus still clinging to his umbilical cord. His mother Mary, had been one of the first allowed onto the small lifeboat, because she was pregnant.

Allen’s father Robert, never made it off the Titanic. And was never recovered from the icy water.

Allen grew with the knowledge that the Titanic tragedy had taken his father. 20 years later, after Allen had perfected the gift given to him by the universe. He attempted to change the past. Allen had the unique gift of space time synesthesia . A condition where a person sees time as a physical, tangible space. Only it wasn’t just a visual, physical representation of time that his mind was able to project onto the real world. It was something he had managed to control. He had discovered that at night when he slept, he could move along the timeline into the past. He developed the ability to prime his mind during the day, and at night when he fell asleep, travel through this timeline into the past.

All he ever wanted in life was a father. Allen decided he needed to alter the past, in order to grow up with a father. He understood that the only way to do this, was to save the Titanic from sinking. In his 20 years of life, he had done enough engineering studies to come to the conclusion that the titanic could have been saved with a second layer of steel. A second layer of three-quarter inch thick steel welded to the front lining of the boat.

The idea struck him after he realized that he could manipulate the physical past. With one experiment, he proved it. One night he traveled three days before his real time. He poured bleach into one of the house plants. The next morning when he woke, the plant was mysteriously dead. An occurrence that appeared to have happened overnight. But Allen knew the reality was that he poisoned the plant three days before, when he traveled back in the timeline. He altered the past. Allen began to travel further and further into the past. One day he walked past a shipyard, and the thought struck him.

Now here he was, adding a protective layer to the boat that killed his father. The only issue was that the real inspector Kelly, would be back on the job tomorrow, and he would notice the men adding a second layer to the front of the boat. Something that was not in the original plans. Something that no one at Harland and Wolff had approved. Allen had to keep supervisor Kelly from returning to work for two more days.

After leaving the Harland and Wolff shipyard, he located supervisor Kelly. He was out in the market shopping for vegetables with his wife and what appeared to be a small young boy, his son.

There would be no explaining to this man why he could not return to work for two more days. Allen had decided that the only way to keep Kelly from the shipyard, was to abduct him. Allen would safely return him in a couple of days of course.

After following them for a few hours, they headed back to their home. Allen was familiar with the neighborhood, since he’d been there stealing clothes a day before. He waited until nightfall. He watched as supervisor Kelly stepped outside his home to smoke a cigarette.

Allen approached him. “ Hello sir, my name is Allen. I don’t think we’ve met before, but I live in the neighborhood. My father informed me that you work for Harland and Wolff.”

“ Why yes son, I do. It’s one hell of a project we got”, Kelly replied.

“ My father has sent me over to possibly ask you for some employment, or at least a good reference. I am a very handy young man, and I’m sure I could complete any task with little supervision,” said Allen.

Kelly was surprised, “well of course, I could put in a good reference for you. It be nice to see someone else from this neighborhood working in that shipyard. I’m glad to see your father has instilled good work ethic into you boy. Most people in this neighborhood want nothing to do with the shipyard.”

“ I will be right back,” Alan said, “let me grab something,” he ran off around the corner. Allen had purchased a bottle of liquor and two glasses earlier, and stashed them in a bin around the corner. In one of the glasses he had poured in a small amount of sedative that he picked up at the local pharmacy.

“My father suggested I bring over a small drink, as a token of our appreciation.” Alan explained, as he poured liquor into both cups, making sure to give the one with the sedative to supervisor Kelly.

The men drank, and sat on the front porch of the home until supervisor Kelly dozed off to sleep. Allen picked him up over his shoulder and carried him down the street. He walked over to a small cart that someone had left in front of their home, and placed him into it. He wheeled supervisor Kelly down the street toward the road that led back to the pier, where Allen had initially woke up. He pulled the small wagon down the winding pathway and over to where he had woken up that morning. He lay supervisor Kelly underneath the pier, and bound his hands and feet with rope. He would keep supervisor Brian Kelly there for the next two days, checking on him periodically to give him water and food. The work would be completed on the Titanic. His father would be saved by the added steel to the front of the ship.

Allen laid down next to the unconscious man. When Allen awoke, he was back in his current time of 1932. He opened his eyes and looked around his room, remembering everything he had done that night to the past. Thinking about supervisor Kelly bound underneath the pier. He would check on him the following night, to make sure that he was okay. Eventually return him back to his family.

As Allen made his way out of his room, he heard a voice that was not familiar to him. It was a man’s voice. He slowly made his way into the kitchen to see the figure of a man that he had only seen in pictures.

“ Hello my boy, how did you sleep?”, the man asked.

Allen was frozen, unable to speak. The slight change he had made to the Titanic must’ve been enough to keep it from sinking. His father was in the kitchen speaking to him, and he couldn’t let out a word. Allen ran up to him and hugged him tightly. The memories slowly began to trickle into his mind of the altered past. The memories of his father throughout his entire life. Every memory altered. His father had always been there. The house they were in had been his grandfather’s, on his mother side. They were in that same house, only it was completely remodeled. The interior was completely different than just a day ago.

A knock at the front door shook Allen from his trance. It was the milk delivery.

“ Son, can you grab the milk, and pay the man please. Money is on the counter,” his father ordered, now sitting at the table reading his newspaper.

Allen walked over to the table and grabbed the change, and headed towards the front door. The door was also a different color now. When he opened the door, he dropped the change in his hand from the shock. The man standing in front of him was Brian Kelly, supervisor Kelly, the man he left tied up underneath the pier.

“ I’ll get that,” said the man holding the milk. He picked up Allen’s change off of the floor, and handed Allen two bottles of milk.

Before the man had a chance to walk away, Allen asked, “is your last name Kelly by any chance?”

The man looked confused, and answered politely, “ yes it is.”

“ Is your father Brian Kelly?”, Allen asked.

“My father‘s name was Brian Kelly, he died when I was a small boy. I don’t have any recollection of him,” the man replied.

Allen dropped the bottle of milk from his right hand, it shattered on the floor. Standing in a pool of milk, no socks on, he realized what he had done. Allen had altered the past to allow his father to survive the Titanic. But in doing so, he left Brian Kelly bound under the pier. The 20 years had passed when he returned to real time, when he woke up. The timeline moved to the present. He couldn’t have been there to release him, unless he stayed in the past for 2 days entirely, without returning to the present before releasing Kelly. Time continued when he left. He never returned to give him water or food. Allen accidentally killed Brian Kelly to save his own father.

And now, standing there, both he, and Brian Kelly’s son, knew what it was like to grow up without a father.