Dead Men Scare Me Stupid

by John Swartzwelder

  “Will our lips droop like that?” asked one of the ghosts.

  I decided I shouldn’t try to make the deal sound too good. Otherwise they might smell a rat. “More,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Though it had been privy to some unusual sights over the past few months, Central City had never seen a ghost army parading down the street led by a half-dead detective with a droopy eye and a floppy lip. So we were something new. A crowd gathered to watch us. A few took shots at us, and our boys let loose a couple of deafening cannon blasts in return, but neither side could actually hurt the other. So the firing quickly ceased and we continued our march in peace.

  When we got to the government facility we found we were strangely unopposed. No one tried to stop us. No one checked our ID to make sure we were the right army or anything. There were no sentries in sight. I took us around to where the sleeping guard had been, so I could show everybody my trick for getting in, but he was gone too. That kind of pissed me off. When you don’t know much, you like to show off the few things you do know.

  “This was the only way to get in before,” I told the ghosts. “Through here.”

  “Let’s go in the main gate,” said Fred.

  “All right, but this side gate used to be important. Remember that.”

  “Yeah, yeah, let’s go.”

  We went around to the front.

  I marched the army into the facility’s main building, then down the empty corridors, pointing out where each guard used to be, and how hard it used to be to get past this point here, and how mean the guard was down that hallway, and so on, to the uninterested ghosts, until we got to the room the Clarence machine was in.

  I tried the door, but it was locked. The army tried a few cannon blasts, but the shells just went right through the door and out of the building. We had no idea where the shots ended up, but after we had fired four or five of them a phone next to us started ringing. We didn’t answer it.

  I told the ghosts I thought I knew where the key to the door was. They said I’d better. I laughed and said “good joke”, then started leading them to Albert Conklin’s office.

  The door to Conklin’s office was open, so we trooped in without knocking. Conklin was surprised to see us, but not very.

  “Figures,” he said, and resumed cleaning out his desk and putting everything into boxes.

  I asked what was going on. Why was the building so empty? Even my guard was gone. He stopped packing and looked at me for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to bother to answer me or not, while the ghosts waited patiently, with only a few occasionally saying “boo” and the others saying “quiet”.

  “We’re being shut down,” he said finally. “We couldn’t provide our service anymore so they’re closing the facility.”

  “What service? What the heck do you do here, anyway? What’s it all about?”

  “Well, as you might have guessed, the Clarence machine wasn’t designed just to make it so you were never born. The government doesn’t spend that kind of time and money on anything so trivial as…well…you.”

  “I guessed that,” I lied.

  “Its primary purpose was to undo governmental mistakes before any nosey voters found out about them.”

  I said I had guessed that too. Everyone in the room suggested I be quiet for awhile and let the man talk, before something bad happened to me. That sounded like good advice, so I became quiet.

  “You’ve got the floor, Conklin,” I said.

  “The machine was completed eight months ago,” Conklin said. “To test it, we corrected a few governmental mistakes from the past. We got Pancho Villa off of the Supreme Court, and detonated the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, instead of Carnegie Hall in New York. The machine worked perfectly. Those original blunders just faded away, like they never happened. Old timers who could have sworn they saw Jascha Heifetz and his violin blown through the side of the Chrysler Building just think they saw a hallucination now. Then, just for the hell of it, we sank the Bismarck. And lucky for Johnny Horton we did. His ‘Let’s All Take A Ride On The Bismarck’ had been a flop.”

  “I’ve never heard that song now,” I said.

  “Quiet,” said everybody.

  “We quickly realized that we had a powerful tool in our hands. We could call anything in history a mistake, and then just fix it. We could make our political party the only party that ever existed, because it was a mistake that there were others, or make any one of us here in the department the hereditary King Of The United States, because it was a mistake that we were clerks.”

  He opened one of the boxes he had packed and looked wistfully at a crown. Then he put it back and closed up the box. “But we soon learned we shouldn’t meddle in the past, not even for a good cause. History is complicated, and altering any part of it can cause unforeseen problems. The Lusitania can’t sink if you’ve just fixed it so it was never built. And if it didn’t sink you’ve got a whole shipload of people - who should be lying safely on the bottom of the ocean - wandering around the planet for fifty or sixty years altering world events in ways you can’t imagine, much less control. And then they have kids they shouldn’t have had, who alter even more events. And the kids have cats you don’t know about. And so on. It’s a mess, believe me.”

  “Why would the government care about problems caused in the past?” I asked. “No skin off their nose. They live here in the good old present with us.”

  No one told me to be quiet. Everyone seemed to feel that was a pretty good question.

  Conklin sighed. “Because by altering the past we ended up affecting the present. Members of our research team suddenly started disappearing. We didn’t know why at first. We didn’t connect it with anything we had done. But then we discovered that one of our men disappeared because his grandfather had been killed in a bar fight with the crew of the battleship Maine in 1911. He had said their battleship was crap, and they had said it wasn’t. A fight followed, resulting in his death. That bar fight should never have happened. The Maine should have gone down in 1898. But because of our meddling, it hadn’t. After several more of our people disappeared, including the head of the department, word came down from the new head of the department that all meddling with the past had to stop. It was putting all of us in danger.”

  I noticed a sign on the wall put out by the Government Printing Office that had a drawing of a monkey writing in a history book, with the slogan: “Only A Monkey Monkeys With The Past.”

  “Is that why that sign is up there?”

  “Yes. That should have been an end to it, but a little while later, at an office party, one of the funnier bureaucrats in our department, who had a lampshade on his head at the time if I remember correctly, suggested having Amelia Earhart make a surprise attack on Japan in 1937. She was heading that way anyway on her round the world flight. Why not divert her? Maybe take out the Japanese leadership before the war even started. The Japanese aren’t the only people who can make sneak attacks, he reminded us. Us Yanks can do it too. Well, I guess everybody had had a little too much to drink. We decided to do it.”

  “You’d forgotten what the monkey said,” I said, pointing at the sign.

  “Yes, well, we’d been drinking, as I said. Anyway, she never completed her mission. We know now that she was shot down and crashed on the lawn of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and died crawling towards the Emperor with a knife in her teeth. There was a big diplomatic uproar about the whole thing. It made the Japanese so mad they attacked Pearl Harbor, of all places.

  “We tried to undo what we’d done, but only succeeded in blowing up the Hindenburg and making Lou Gehrig sick. On top of that, three more of our technicians vanished without a trace, and I’ve got a Hitler mustache now.”

  “I’d shave that off if I were you,” I recommended.

  “I do shave it off, but it keeps growing back.”

  I thought about this. “Try shaving it off. See if that helps.”

&nb
sp; Conklin ignored this advice. “At the time, we didn’t know where Earhart’s body had ended up. We assumed it would never be found. She was lost in 1937, and presumably they’d been looking for her ever since. If they hadn’t found the body by now they probably never would. Then one of our guys yelled ‘Hey! Some guy just found Earhart! And he’s on TV! Shit!’

  “Everyone crowded around the TV saying ‘shit’. Then the big boss came in and saw what was going on. After awhile he left without saying anything except ‘shit’.

  “We knew it would only be a matter of time before everything came out in the open, including the existence of the Clarence machine.”

  “So what?” I asked. “That’s not such a big scandal. The government has weathered bigger scandals than that before.” I tried to think of an example, but all I could think of were airports.

  “Like airports,” I said.

  He looked at me like I was stupid. Okay, maybe I am stupid, but I don’t like people looking at me that way. I started to ball up my fist.

  “If everything came out,” he explained, “voters would realize that their representatives weren’t brilliant men, but in fact were idiots with a machine that could fix their mistakes for them. We couldn’t let that happen. We liked it that people thought we were smart. So we solved the problem by simply removing you from the equation. If you didn’t exist, you could never find Earhart’s body, and everyone would be in the clear.”

  “Slick,” I said, impressed. “That could work.”

  “It did work,” he reminded me. “And since then we’ve been very careful to only use the machine for the purpose it was originally designed. We’ve left the past completely alone and concentrated on fixing current governmental mistakes - everything from major problems, like global flattening, to minor embarrassments, like some county dog catcher catching the wrong dog. In every case the machine has worked perfectly. Each mistake has been erased, and the voters have never known anything about them.”

  “So… everything’s all right then?” I asked. I was getting a little lost.

  “No. A couple of weeks ago, we came in to work and found that the Clarence machine had been broken. It looked like someone had been messing around with it, kicking it and spilling mustard on it. They had even taken some of the pieces off and lost them, then tried to replace them with pieces from a typewriter and that old refrigerator over there.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Hi, everybody,” I said.

  “Since the machine was broken,” Conklin went on, “the problems the politicians brought in to us that day couldn’t be fixed. And the public, which was used to seeing brief hallucinations by now - and in fact had started to like them, to view them as a new kind of cheap entertainment - was suddenly confronted with hallucinations that didn’t go away: real nuclear explosions, genuine collisions with other planets, and all-conquering foreign armies that took our land and didn’t give it back three seconds later. These sorts of things did not sit well with the public. Everyone began demanding explanations. Newspapers called for investigations. All hell was breaking loose.

  “The government, of course, was frantic. They demanded the Clarence machine be put back into operation this instant – it was the first time I had ever seen the federal government actually stamp its feet - but they were told it wasn’t possible. The machine needed a complete overhaul, and wouldn’t be operational again for months.”

  I didn’t see what the big problem was with all this. “So what’s a few months more or less?” I asked. “Whenever the machine is fixed, you can just change all this back. It’ll be like it never happened.”

  “We don’t have a few months. The administration is really going to take it on the chin in the coming elections, if the polls are right. The public views us as incompetents who can’t do anything right. The Clarence machine won’t be on line again until after the election. So the administration will be swept out of office and our opponents will have the machine.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yes. That’s why they’ve ordered the machine to be dismantled, the blueprints shredded, and everyone in the facility reassigned. They don’t want their political opponents to be able to use any of this stuff. And that’s why the facility was nearly empty when you arrived with your friends.”

  Everyone in the room was quiet for a moment.

  “I told you I’d find out in the end,” I said.

  “Yes, you did. I remember.”

  “Score one for me.”

  He nodded and made a small mark on a piece of paper.

  The ghosts had been listening to all this very politely, showing remarkable patience. Finally one of them cleared his throat pointedly.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, “there’s another problem. There are all these ghosts here.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that,” said Conklin.

  “You’re sorry? You mean it’s your fault?” asked Ed.

  Conklin sighed and nodded. “I’m afraid it is. Each mistake the government made got people killed who shouldn’t have died yet. And when we fixed the mistakes, we tended to kill even more. That’s bureaucracy for you. Hence all the ghosts, I’m told.”

  “Fix it back,” said Fred, quietly.

  “Can’t,” shrugged Conklin. “As I said, the machine is broken, and it’s being dismantled as we speak.”

  The ghosts were crestfallen. They stood there sadly for a moment, then started loading up their cannon and swiveling it around so it would be pointing at both Conklin and myself.

  That gave me an idea. “Follow me everybody.”

  I edged past the ghosts out into the corridor. Conklin followed, wondering. Then the ghosts looked at each other, shrugged, and started following me too.

  Everyone wondered what my idea was. My idea was it would be harder to kill me out in the corridor. I would have more running room out there.

  As soon as I got outside the door, I started running like hell, but my feet slipped on the highly polished floor. I landed on my face and, legs still churning, skidded into a room full of experimental machines.

  Everyone followed me into the room and looked around at all the gadgets.

  “This is your idea?” asked Fred, dubiously.

  “Uh…yeah,” I said, legs still churning.

  There was a long pause.

  “Explain your idea to us,” said Ed.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Er...” I looked around the room for an idea. Suddenly, to my surprise, I got one. “Hey, yeah!” I said to myself. “That could work. And even if it didn’t, at least it would buy me some time, and I could make a run for it later.” At this point I realized I had been talking to myself out loud all this time - really loud. Some of the ghosts had their hands over their ears. I stopped talking. I’d already said too much.

  “What could work?” asked Fred.

  I explained my idea to the ghosts.

  It had suddenly occurred to me that if ghosts couldn’t be alive, the next best thing would be if they could at least operate as if they were living people. Some of these new gadgets might be able to help them do that.

  The first thing they needed was substance, of course. I’d been a ghost myself, so I knew what a strong gust of wind could do.

  One of the inventions stacked up in the corner of the room was a suit designed to help soldiers who had been blown to bits stay on the job and keep fighting for Freedom, or against Freedom, depending on who the President was at the time. It was an intricate exoskeleton suit that responded to the thoughts of the wearer.

  I had a couple of the ghosts try on the suits. They were dubious at first, but soon they were prancing around like real humans, making all kinds of noise with their feet and leaving footprints all over the place. Then they had an impromptu race to the end of the hall. Then they fought. All the ghosts watching this got very excited and clamored for suits of their own. Conklin, who was turning out to be not such a bad sort, handed out the suits, while I looked over the oth
er inventions in the room.

  There was a gadget that kept your face in place and kept the features on that face from drifting around. It was designed to help politicians keep a straight face when they made campaign promises. Conklin said it was intended to be a gag, but Washington had ordered 100,000 of them. A device like that would be handy for ghosts too, I thought, so I had Conklin start handing out some of those. Then I found some oversized artificial digestive tracts which had been invented so government bigwigs could eat twenty times more than a normal human. Ghosts would certainly be able to use a digestive tract, even if it was comically big. So each ghost got one of those too.

  Some of the gadgets I found weren’t of any use to us, like the machine that made lies be true, and the machine that would squeeze votes out of us and then blow our heads off, but they were the exceptions. Most of the stuff would come in handy in one way or another.

  Since everybody else was getting something, I felt I should get something too. So I grabbed one of those machines that makes all the evil people in the world six inches tall. With a machine like that, my job would be a snap. I turned it on to test it, and Conklin and I both became really short. I turned the knob back to where it was before, then put the machine back where I found it. I decided I didn’t want it anymore.

  When I had successfully outfitted all the ghosts with everything they would need to rejoin the land of the living, we happily exited and let Conklin get back to his packing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I always like to end my exciting stories pretty much back where they started, so readers will get the feeling that whatever happens in this crazy world of ours, old Frank Burly will always be right back where he started. He’s not going anyplace. So I guess I should stop here, and not move on to being hanged by those vigilantes out West. That belongs in another adventure.

  As this story ends, everything has pretty much gotten back to normal in Central City. The hallucinations have stopped, thanks to my intervention. Now when something bad happens, it’s real.