“I’m only going back a couple of minutes.”
“Yes, but…”
I hung up and started setting the dials the way he had said to set them. Unfortunately I had to hurry because the police were banging on my door demanding entrance and the surrender of the time machine. I didn’t know how they found out that I had it. Maybe one of those criminals had blabbed it. I saw Dodge’s foot come through the bottom of the door, then his forehead come through the middle of the door. I didn’t have much time.
I quickly punched in some numbers, then pressed the button. My office suddenly looked all shimmery and out of focus. I rubbed my eyes, which made everything more out of focus, so I stopped doing that. I was going back in time all right. The ride was pretty bumpy at first, until I stopped shaking the briefcase. I have these nervous habits.
The machine had a speaker and a voice kept coming out of it yelling frantically “you are going back in time! back in time! back in time!” until I found the button to turn the speaker off.
After awhile I was pretty sure I was going a lot farther back than I’d intended, but I didn’t know enough about the machine to chance stopping it mid-trip. I figured wherever I ended up, I would just come right back. No problem. Who could stop me? No one could, that’s who could. I was the Master Of Space And Time. Ha-ha.
When the world around me stopped shimmering and sharpened into focus again I figured my trip was over. That feeling was confirmed when the time machine stopped vibrating and printed out an invoice. I took a look at the bill and then tore it up. I’m not going to pay that. I looked around. I was still in my office, but it looked a lot newer. Also it was full of typists banging away on manual typewriters. They stopped typing for a moment and stared at me, then resumed their work. I didn’t remember having all those typists. You’d think I’d remember something like that. I looked at the door. It said “International Radium Watch Dial & Asbestos Corporation. America’s Fastest Growing Company.” Never heard of it. Sounded like I should buy some stock in it though.
My desk had been moved to a different spot in my office and my 3000 gas bills, which had traveled back in time with me, were now in a pile on the floor. I guessed that was what Groggins was talking about, those “unforeseen consequences”. I didn’t see what was so terrible about it. The gas bills were just as likely to get paid on the floor as they were on my desk. I left them there. Later I asked him if this is what he had meant by “unforeseen consequences” and he said “yes”.
I walked out of the office and took the elevator down to the street. The same guy was running the elevator, but instead of being an old geezer he was four years old. That gave me an uncomfortable feeling.
When I walked out of the building, I saw that the street was filled with old-fashioned cars and equally old-fashioned people. A calendar boy came by.
“Calendars!” he called. “Get your current calendars!”
I flagged him down. “Hey calendar boy!”
I bought the least expensive calendar he had - the pictures were disturbing and made you vaguely ill, hence the bargain price - and looked at the year. It said it was 1941. I didn’t believe it. I turned to the month of February. It was 1941 on that page too.
I started walking down the street, still half checking out the calendar pages and accidentally bumped into Joe Dimaggio and Whirlaway. They were both from 1941, I remembered. That looked like confirmation, but I still couldn’t really believe it.
So I spent the next half hour walking around asking people what year it was, and they kept telling me, and I kept saying “get outta here! It is not!” but they kept insisting it was.
I walked up to some people who were filming a movie on the street and asked Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart what year it was and they both confirmed the date I had been told before. When I was leaving, shaking my head with amazement, I heard the director say: “Wait, maybe we should leave it in. Maybe it’s great.” But then some other guy said: “Naw, it stinks”. And they started re-shooting the scene.
I went back up to my office and got there just in time to see the briefcase shimmer and then fade away. I had forgotten to set the emergency brake as I was carefully warned to do by Professor Groggins about fifty times. If you don’t set the emergency brake, he warned me fifty times, the machine will return to its default time period after awhile. I nodded fifty times while he was saying this, but when the time came to actually set the emergency brake, I forgot. So I guess I dropped the ball there.
I stood around for a moment, feeling the empty air where the time machine had been. I waited patiently for it to come back, but, to make a long story short, it didn’t. That meant I was stuck here more than half a century from home, with no way to get back. I didn’t like the sound of that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I took a walk around town. It was like I was living in a history book. A stinking history book. I never did like history when I was in school, and this wasn’t increasing my fondness for the subject. History is over, I’ve always felt, let’s move on. I suppose some people would have found it charming to suddenly find themselves in an earlier, simpler time, where everyone was friendly and stupid, but I didn’t. Try getting your mail in a situation like that. It can’t be done. The one thing that made me feel better was knowing that I had screwed up cases a lot worse than this before.
As I walked, I calmly took stock of my situation. Number one: I didn’t have the time machine anymore. So, number two: I was doomed. I calmly tried to think of a number three. There wasn’t a number three. Then I remembered something that had gotten me out of a lot of tight spots before – hysteria. It might work in this situation. I would give it a try. So I ran down the street screaming and waving my arms, then curled up in a ball on the sidewalk and rolled all over the place, yelling and gibbering. All this accomplished nothing. Hysteria, I discovered, didn’t work in a situation like this. Make a note of that.
When I calmed down enough to get my tongue out of my windpipe, it came to me that a person in my situation needed the help of a scientist. Since I didn’t have access to Professor Groggins, I went to a nearby physics laboratory and asked to talk to the guy with the biggest brain. There was a whispered conference amongst the physicists, tape measures, skull saws, and forceps were brought out, then finally one of them came forward to talk to me with a slight smirk on his face.
I outlined my problem for him, as best as I knew how. We quickly got into a shouting match, with him saying time travel couldn’t be done, and me saying then explain my presence here asshole. So he said make me. And I said I sure would in just about a minute. Then he punched me in the stomach. When I got my breath back, we agreed to disagree, and I left. So much for the scientific approach.
I knew at the time that it didn’t make a lot of sense, but I was getting kind of desperate and I needed to talk to Professor Groggins, so I went to a telegraph office with the idea of sending a telegram to 2003. I figured the worst that could happen would be I’d be out a couple of bucks and the rest of the telegram sending public would give me the horselaugh. Which is what happened, so I was right in a way. Score one for me.
The people behind the counter didn’t know what I was talking about at first. And they still didn’t know what I was talking about a couple of hours later. They said they didn’t know where to send my telegram.
While I was trying to get them to give it a try anyway - what the heck, I pointed out - the line behind me got really long and angry. It has always amazed me how angry people can get at my stupidity. How do they think I feel? They only have to be around me a couple of hours at a time. I’ve got me all day.
In the end, they flatly refused to send my telegram. I told them I was going to complain to somebody and they said that’s what they’d do, so we left it like that.
While I was fuming outside of the telegraph office, debating whether or not to go back in and try it again, maybe this time claiming I had a gun, or claiming that I had had a gun the last time, but didn’t now, I suddenly remembered th
e long and tedious explanations I had received from Professor Groggins about how the time machine worked. This opened up a whole new line of thought. Maybe I could describe the time machine well enough so that a local artisan here in this time period could build one for me.
I walked to a nearby gas station and discussed the matter with a likely looking mechanic. I had made a crude drawing of the briefcase and its contents. I showed it to the mechanic and asked him if he could build it.
“It’s shaped like a briefcase,” I told him, “but that’s only part of the story. It’s also got all sorts of wheels and blinking lights and things inside. As illustrated here. Because it’s a time machine as well as a briefcase. It’s two things in one.”
He looked my drawing over and frowned. “Well I can build the briefcase easy enough, but I can only guess about what to put inside it. Some of these shapes you’ve drawn don’t exist in nature.”
“Do the best you can,” I told him. “That’s all anyone can ask.”
With me looking over his shoulder and kind of rooting him on and shouting words of encouragement, and reminding him to hurry up, he fashioned something that looked a lot like my time machine. It had the same kind of blinking lights, dials to indicate the passage of years and so on. I didn’t know how tricky stuff like this was, but I figured if the space/time continuum wasn’t paying much attention today, if it was looking out the window or chatting on the phone with the fourth dimension or something, this might work.
I took the time machine outside, found a phone booth and got inside. Normally at this point I would have set the dials for September 14th, 2003, but this version didn’t have dials like that. There was just a space for me to write the date in with a grease pencil. I did so and turned on the machine.
The blast shot me out of the phone booth and halfway down the street, where I banged off a parked car.
When I regained consciousness, I asked the nearest gawker what year it was. He told me that it was 1941. March 14th . The same day it had been when I had left. I looked at my watch. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. That meant five hours had passed. I was pretty satisfied with that. Five hours closer to home, I thought. It’s a start. Hot dog.
But my excitement faded when a street urchin who was sitting on the curb next to me blowing bubbles informed me that I had been laying on the asphalt bleeding for five hours. So the machine hadn’t actually propelled me forward in time, it had just knocked me out for most of the day. A hammer could have done that. I went back to the gas station, full of righteous indignation and buyer’s remorse.
I slapped the “time machine” down in front of the “mechanic” and informed him that it didn’t work. I mean, not at all. He said he was sorry.
“Sorry doesn’t get me back to 2003,” I said, waggling a finger at the man. “This is a lemon. I’m not paying you for this. Do they have a Better Business Bureau in this time period?”
He hesitated for a moment, moved sideways to the left to block my view of something, then said no, there wasn’t one. Lucky for him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was getting late in the day, and was starting to turn cold. I realized I had a more immediate problem than just getting home someday. I needed food and shelter, kind of nowish. I checked in my pockets to see how much cash I had with me. No problem there. I had $180 in bills, a pocket full of coins, and my credit cards and checkbook. And your money goes farther in the past, I’ve been told. So I figured I was set.
I approached the registration desk at the nearest five star hotel - unaccountably named the PreWar Hilton - and explained that I wished to get a room. They asked how long I would be staying and I said no more than 62 years, hopefully less.
While I was signing in the clerk was eyeing my clothes, which looked a little out of place in this era and had been kind of blown up recently. He said he would have to ask me for an advance deposit. This was no problem. When you have a causal attitude towards fashion, as I do, you get used to the better class of people, like clerks, treating you like garbage. Besides, I had nothing to worry about. I was loaded.
I handed the clerk a hundred dollar bill. He started to put it in the till, then looked closer at it. After a moment, he called some other people over to look at it. I was glad everyone in the hotel was finding out how well-heeled I was. You get better service that way. Next the assistant manager and then the manager were called over to examine the bill. The manager glanced at it, then studied it more closely, hissing slightly.
He looked at me. “Where did you get this ‘money’?”
“I dunno. What does it matter as long as its money?”
“It’s not money.”
I scratched my head. “We’re saying different things.”
The manager said my bill wasn’t redeemable in lawful money. It couldn’t be exchanged for silver or gold, according to the words printed on the bill. It was just fiat currency. It wasn’t good here, or anywhere.
“Bullshit,” I said.
The manager shook his head. “It’s not bullshit, I assure you, sir. Far from bullshit.”
The assistant manager chimed in: “Mr. Jorgenson doesn’t bullshit customers unless he absolutely has to. That’s a credo he lives by.”
A tough looking bellhop came up, angrily balling up his fists. “Who’s questioning Mr. Jorgenson’s integrity?” he asked.
The manager tried to defuse the situation, to get us all to calm down. “That’s all right, John. I can handle this.”
Then they noticed the date on the bill. It had been printed in 1994. Now they really didn’t like it. 1994 hadn’t happened yet, they felt. I hopefully laid out the rest of my money on the counter, and invited them to take their pick. They didn’t like any of those bills either. Then, after they had called the bank about the check I tried to write them and were told that my checking account didn’t exist on this planet, and had stared at my American Express card for several minutes without comprehension, they began to lose all confidence in me as a customer.
They had a brief meeting, to which I was not invited, then gave me the bum’s rush out into the street, hinting I should never return.
While I was picking myself up off the pavement and dusting myself off, a couple of policemen arrived and asked if I was Frank Burly, the guy trying to pass the funny money. I said I was, and asked their names. They grabbed one of my arms each and escorted me to their squad car.
They kept me in a cell for a couple hours, during which time I learned from another inmate how to kill a man with a walnut. No time spent with a man who knows his craft is wasted. Then they pulled me out for interrogation. I sat down in the interrogation room. Somebody had been eating their lunch in there and there was, among other things, a walnut on the table. I picked it up. You never know.
Fortunately, the police lieutenant who was questioning me was a science fiction fan, so he was eager to believe my story. After I told him all about the world of the future, with it’s death rays, rocket cars and flying nuns, he was putty in my hands. I knew the kinds of things he wanted to hear.
He asked if the Martians were ever going to attack the Earth. I nodded and said 1958. I said the Martians were tougher than the Crab Monsters and the Ghost Robots From The 2ND Dimension (Width), but that we managed to beat them in the end by tying their feelers together and screaming in their floppy ears until their brightly colored asses blew off. That satisfied him a lot. It gave him a real good feeling about Man’s Fighting Future. I also told him that in the future all the women wore really short pants, shorter than was safe, a fashion development which I was prepared to sketch for him. He ate it up. This was great. All his suspicions were confirmed. Hooray for me and the future.
He agreed to let me go if I would write down all the World Series winners for the next 62 years for him. I tried to look reluctant and said I kind of owed it to the space/time continuum not to divulge important crap like that. His face fell and it looked like he was about to toss me back in the can again, so I communed with myself and said
I guessed it would be all right. As long as he didn’t share this important information about the future with other people at the casino. He agreed enthusiastically.
I wrote down all the winners for him, neglecting to write down the fact that I don’t remember that kind of stuff very well. I’m not even sure there is a baseball team named the Blue Pants. And I didn’t tell him that I knew he was destined to get killed a year later in one of those police station cave-ins. I’ve always thought people shouldn’t know too much about their future. Especially people who are about to let me go.
I handed over the list and was released immediately, with profuse apologies. They expressed the hope that I held no hard feelings towards them. They pointed out that they were only doing their jobs, and that this was a career their parents had chosen for them. They had wanted to grow up to be nice men, like me. I said that far from having hard feelings, I planned to name my first child after their police department – Coppertina if it was a girl, Fuzzy if it was a boy.
So we parted on amicable terms. The lieutenant shook my hand and got his picture taken with me, making out in the photograph like we were great buddies who went everywhere together. We vowed to visit each other often in the future, not just when I was being arrested. Then he hurried off towards a casino.
I sat down on a park bench to enjoy my freedom and mull over my financial situation. This, I could see, was going to be a problem. All my money was either paper that couldn’t be redeemed in lawful money, or “silver” that wasn’t made of silver. The only money in my pocket that was worth what it said it was, that had any intrinsic value, was a nickel and eight pennies. At least they were made of the metal they claimed to be. But 13 cents won’t buy much, not even in 1941. And the coins I had were all minted in the 1980’s and 90’s anyway. I might be able to con a blind man out of something with them, but I could probably do that with a handful of gravel.
That 13 cents was probably going to have to last me a long time, unfortunately. No matter how I doped out the situation it looked like I was going to have to get back to 2003 the hard way, by living the whole 62 years. Which meant I’d be about 100 years old when I got back to my detective business. I might not be so burly by then. Might have to change my name. Frank Rickety, or Frank Coughy, or something. I’d still be frank with my clients though, so my first name wouldn’t have to change.
The Time Machine Did It Page 6
