“They’ve kept me here for who knows how long…”
“Two weeks,” I said.
“I’ve completely lost track of time.”
“Two weeks.”
“Bush was president when they put me in here.”
“Two weeks ago.”
He complained about the treatment he’d received since he had arrived, especially the Sunday Brunch, which he felt was uninspired, and all the evil laughing in this place was keeping him awake at night. He probably would have kept complaining indefinitely, but I reminded him that I didn’t work there, and if I did work there I probably wouldn’t be working in the Complaints Department. I’d more likely have some kind of lifting job.
I asked him what he had invented for them so far. He said nothing had been completed yet, but they had him working on a machine that fixes horse races so the dishonest horse wins every time, a machine that makes their enemies nine feet tall, so they can see them coming, and a milk-shake machine. “I just bought them one of those,” he said.
Then Groggins told me about the time machine; what it looked like, how it worked, and so on. After 35 or 36 hours of explanation I figured I understood what the thing was. “A briefcase,” I said.
“Yes.”
I won’t bore you with the technical aspects of the machine, because, like me, you’re probably too stupid to understand most of it. You’re good looking though. Damn good looking. Don’t forget that. But basically the way it worked was this: the time mechanism itself was contained in an ordinary businessman’s briefcase. All you had to do was open the briefcase, turn the machine on, fast forward past the welcoming messages and the advertisements for other of Groggins’ inventions, set the dials for the year you wanted to travel to, then wait to be blasted into the void.
When the machine made a connection with another time period, a five foot square opening opened up in both the current time period and the period you were going to. This hole closed back up when your journey was complete. While the hole was open, people in both time periods could look in and see what was going on in the other time period and shout abuse at each other. “1958 Sucks! 1743 Rules!”, that sort of thing.
Only the briefcase was needed to travel through this hole, but Groggins said you should always remember to duck into a phone booth, or an elevator or some other small walled-in space before turning on the machine.
“You want to be in an enclosed space when you travel through time. Otherwise you’ll be hit by rocks, bottles and other debris,” he said.
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s a jealousy thing probably, resentment. Who knows why people throw things?”
I more or less understood the science of the thing now, but I still couldn’t figure out what crooks would want with a time machine. What would they use it for? Historical research? That seemed pretty unlikely to me. Don’t make me laugh. I mean, who are they trying to fool? This is bullshit. Groggins explained that if you’re a criminal, having mastery over time is very useful in a number of ways.
“It’s good for extremely quick getaways, for example,” he said. “One second after committing a crime you can be 1000 miles and 4 years away. And it can help you establish a terrific alibi. You can rob a bank in broad daylight, writing your name all over all the people you’ve just robbed, then prove conclusively that you were in five other places when the robbery occurred. No one with an alibi like that has ever been convicted in the United States. You can also go back in time and steal things and then return to the present with no danger of being prosecuted. Because the statute of limitations will have run out on the crime. I understand they’ve already stripped 1995 of every penny it had. And you can go back in time and win bar bets from people in the past who don’t know, for example, that Lincoln is about to be assassinated. That’s why Lincoln died broke. His estate had to pay out millions to gamblers. It was his own fault. He should have smelled something fishy with all those bets going down on Friday Apil 14th. He should have laid some of the bets off.”
After hearing all this I agreed that a time machine could be very useful to a criminal. I also agreed that Lincoln should have stuck to politics.
Then I suggested Groggins must be pretty upset that the criminals were using his wonderful machine for evil purposes. He said not really. Some of the things he’d planned on using it for were kind of evil too. What irritated him was that they weren’t being more careful with it. They left it in cloakrooms, in the back seats of taxicabs, tossed it in dumpsters, and so on. Sheer carelessness. Sometimes it would be days before it turned up in some lost and found somewhere. They had no respect for the machine at all.
“And they exercise no care when they’re time traveling,” he said. “They could inadvertently cause all sorts of time paradoxes and incongruities in the space/time continuum.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
He went on and on about how delicate space and time was, but frankly I didn’t buy it. I mean, if you think it’s so easy to change the course of world events, try it. You don’t need a time machine. You’re already living in somebody’s past and somebody else’s future. Just step on a bug or something and see what that gets you. See if now you were never born, or suddenly now there’s fifty Hitlers in your bathroom, crapping all over everything. It ain’t going to happen. Anyway, that’s what I figured.
Now that I knew what the time machine looked like, all I had to do was escape and find it. Then I could probably take the rest of the day off.
CHAPTER TEN
It was harder to break out of that place than I thought it would be. Now I know how nuclear bombs feel. Those walls are thick. Damn thick. The old Burly Shove didn’t work at all. Neither did the Burly Nose Ram. So I decided to get tricky.
First I tried going through the ventilation duct, but I just ended up inside a huge air conditioner. I’m told they could hear my screams all over the building, coming out of all those little vents, and that many people in the building found this annoying. A number of them had to turn their TVs up. I try to keep it down in situations like that, but sometimes you just can’t.
Then I convinced all the other prisoners to help me build a big fire, explaining that we would all be able to escape when the criminals smelled the smoke, panicked, and opened the door. I forgot how airtight those Civil Defense places are. Nobody smelled any smoke except us. And we smelled it too well.
The other prisoners didn’t have anything else to put out the fire with, so they used me. Then they stubbed me out and tossed me in the corner. That’s what you get for trying to be a leader. Sometimes I don’t know why we leaders bother.
By this time I was pretty much out of escape ideas. That’s the way it usually is with me. Once I’ve climbed into something and set fire to something else, I’m done. I always read about people in these situations suddenly saying “I’ve got a plan”. And they do! And it’s great! Where do they get all these plans, that’s what I want to know. I never have any plans. And why didn’t they think of a plan before, so they wouldn’t be in this fix? I don’t get it.
I checked with Groggins to see if he could think of anything. Maybe he was one of those guys with all the plans. To my amazement, he not only had a plan, he already had an escape device built. I was impressed. This was just outstanding.
The crooks had set up a small lab down there for Groggins to work on inventions for them. In his spare time he had been secretly working on an escape device for himself. It was a teleporting machine like they have in Star Trek. In fact, he said he got the idea and the design by watching an episode of Star Trek. He said he did most of his research in this way - by reading science fiction books and watching monster movies, and so on. I looked at him like he was nuts. He noticed the look and immediately got defensive.
“I realize my methods are unconventional. Some people think I’m mad. But you don’t, do you?”
“Sure.”
He felt I might not be looking at the thing from the right angle. “I m
ight just be ahead of my time. People often mistake genius for insanity. That might be what’s happening here.”
“You’re the screwiest guy I’ve ever met.”
He decided I didn’t fully understand how his technique worked. That was the problem. He took a moment to explain.
“All the real worthwhile inventions have already been thought of by hack science fiction writers,” he informed me. “I’m surprised no one has actually sat down and tried to build any of the stuff they write about. A lot of it is really easy to make. Disintegrating rays, invisibility potions, time machines; the hard thing isn’t developing these inventions, it’s coming up with the concept in the first place. The hack writers of the world are the real geniuses. But they’re bad businessmen. They think up the idea, figure out how the machine would have to work, then sell the whole concept to whoever wants it for a few dollars. Plus they give you an exciting story too. All the inventor has to do is experiment around to find the missing pieces of the puzzle. And if you steal one of their ideas and make a fortune off it they’re completely happy and swagger around saying they “forsaw it”. If they’re satisfied with that, fine. I wouldn’t be. I’d be suing everybody’s asses off.”
He said he got the time machine right on the fifth try. The first four didn’t so much travel in time as they burned down his house. But he said this first version of his teleporter looked to him like a winner.
Against my better judgment, I let him talk me into sitting down in his teleporter and giving it a try. But aside from scorching my clothes and blowing off some of my hair, it didn’t do anything. He said no problem. He told me to go get some coffee and read a magazine over and over. He’d have his Teleporter Mark II finished in less than a year.
I didn’t want to wait that long so I quit being cute about the whole thing and just launched myself out of a missile silo.
I’m not very ballistically shaped, so I only flew about eighty yards before I landed on top of a restaurant.
As I limped home, I saw a long line of criminals impatiently waiting their turn to get into a photo booth. That seemed odd to me. Criminals are vain, but not that vain. At the most they get their pictures taken maybe once a month. And usually they have it done at the police station where it’s free. While I was puzzling about this, the booth shimmered and went out of focus briefly, then the door opened and a crook came out carrying some loot and a briefcase. He handed the briefcase to the next crook, who went inside and the booth started shimmering and going out of focus again. I figured I knew what was going on. I had heard about this.
As I watched, one criminal apparently traveled into the future, because he came out of the booth with a silver foil suit, an overdeveloped forehead, and 8000 dollars in currency that was no good here. He had a futuristic ray gun, which he tried out on a pedestrian, instantly blasting him into fragments. Everyone laughed except the pedestrian. And I didn’t laugh for long. It’s actually not very funny, when you think about it. The next crook came out of the booth dragging a bucket full of Crown Jewels. Hey, I thought, these guys are doing all right.
I wanted to keep an eye on all this, but I didn’t want to attract attention, so I pretended to be reading a newspaper. My act looked even more convincing when a newspaper blew up against my leg which I then used as a prop. It was evidently a newspaper brought back by one of the crooks from a different time period. It said it was from the year 2156 and the headline was “Apes Become Our Masters”. The subhead was “Hollywood Right Again.” And inside there was an editorial blasting the whole deal. Apparently, the apes took over after a series of increasingly violent peace demonstrations led to our unspeakably savage and bloody Universal Brotherhood and Love Thy Neighbor Wars.
I did a little of the crossword puzzle, (most of the answers were “Banana” or “Pretty Banana”, so it was fairly easy) then looked up in time to see the last of the criminals coming out of the photo booth. Everyone else had had their turn and gone away with their spoils. This last one came out struggling under the weight of a small printing press that had “If Found Return To Johannes Gutenberg, 15th Century” painted on it.
The criminal was having trouble carrying both the printing press and the briefcase, so he just tossed the briefcase off to one side. It landed on the hood of a parked car. This was exactly the sort of careless behavior that Groggins had been complaining about, and that I had been waiting for.
I watched the criminal lug his burden into the nearest pawnshop, which already had Watt’s Steam Engine and George Washington’s face in the window. Then I sprinted across the street, grabbed the briefcase off the hood of the car and made a beeline for my office.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I sat down at my desk with a small, but measurable, and statistically significant, feeling of accomplishment. I hadn’t solved the case I was working on, I had had my brains beaten out more times than I could remember, and I hadn’t made any money in a month, but at least I got this damn thing. “I’ve got you anyway, PeeWee”, I thought. You’ve got to take pleasure in whatever little triumphs you can in this life. Somebody on a bus told me that.
I was curious about what the time machine looked like, so I opened the briefcase. Inside was a very sophisticated looking machine that looked like a cross between a computer and something else, maybe another computer. I’m not sure what it was a cross between, but it sure looked like more than just one thing to me.
I fiddled with it a little bit, on the off chance that I might know what I was doing, but I didn’t, and nothing happened. Then I started punching buttons at random, mostly just to have something to do. I was whistling and looking out the window as he punched them.
At some point I accidentally activated the machine and it started creating all kinds of time anomalies and time paradoxes. Those things that Groggins was worried about.
Somehow the time machine, as it vibrated across my desk, was moving backwards and forwards slightly in time and taking me with it. So, without meaning to, I was making copies of myself. There was the Me From A Minute Ago, the Me From A Minute From Now, the Me That Was Trying To Turn Off The Time Machine, the Me That Was Starting To Get Pissed, Me’s all over the place. More Me’s than were strictly necessary, or than you could ever use. I was also duplicating a gas bill that was on the desk near the machine.
After an hour or so, I had 3000 gas bills on my desk, and I was locking future and past versions of myself in the closet. “I’ll let you all out when I get this sorted out,” I told them. Another Me appeared, hand outstretched to shake, and I shoved him in the closet too.
I had to stop this or pretty soon I would need to rent a bigger office. I kept punching different buttons, turning the machine on an off, banging it on the table, and so on, but nothing worked.
I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was running in all sorts of directions, directions nobody ever heard of. Time was all screwed up. I made one last attempt to fix the machine. I got out my screwdriver and made a needlepoint adjustment to the biggest and reddest, and therefore most important looking, valve. Then I stepped back to see if that had solved the problem, bumping into three more Me’s who were dancing by waving straw hats. I picked up the time machine, tossed it in the corner and walked out. I didn’t give a damn anymore.
I went down to the bar on the ground floor to drink. I wasn’t getting paid enough to sort all this out. It wasn’t my job to make the universe work right. If it was my job, where was my uniform? See what I mean? It didn’t figure. I ordered half a dozen bourbons. That’s how to deal with things you don’t understand. Drown them. There were five more of me at the bar. We didn’t look at each other.
After awhile I calmed down and returned to my office. I called up the Civil Defense Shelter and asked to talk to Groggins. They asked how I got out. They thought I was still in there.
“Well I’m not,” I told them.
“Your dinner’s getting cold.”
“I don’t care. Let me talk to the professor.”
They conne
cted me and, with the criminals craftily listening in on the extension, I explained to Professor Groggins what I had inadvertently done. He was concerned about all the time paradoxes I had created. He warned me to be careful. I said it was a little late for careful. What we needed now was damage control, some story we could give to the press, and a fall guy.
While Groggins was cussing me out and telling me a lot of things about my character that I already knew, and if you really want to bore me that’s the way to do it, I noticed about a dozen copies of me were next to the phone trying to listen in.
One of them said: “What is he saying? Is it about us?”
“Piss off,” I told them. They looked stunned, then filed out of the office with identical hurt expressions on their faces. Hey, I can’t be nice to everybody.
I told Groggins to relax. This could all be fixed easily enough.
“Just tell me how to use the machine. I’ll go back in time a couple of minutes and sort this all out. I’ve got to at least get rid of some of these gas bills. So how do you operate this thing?”
A criminal’s voice came over the phone. “First you…“ Then he stopped talking immediately, as if he had been told to shut up by some friends.
“What was that?” asked Groggins.
“I don’t know. Sounded like someone telling someone else to shutup.”
We listened to see if we could hear anything more, but aside from some heavy breathing, and a couple more shutups, the line was quiet. Groggins gave me a quick tutorial in the use of the machine; which buttons to push, how to set the dials, which fingers to cross, and so on.
“Remember to get in a phone booth or some similar confined space so you won’t take things from the present back in time with you. It could have unforeseen consequences.
The Time Machine Did It Page 5
