He was right about the city. It certainly had changed. I guess I should have noticed. What are people paying me for, anyway? Gone were all the things the Mandible family had built: the sports stadiums, the libraries, the civic auditoriums, the roller skating rinks, in fact every fun or interesting thing people did in this town. All of it had been replaced by whorehouses, gambling hells, opium dens, and all manner of other unsavory things. The only thing left for a decent person to do on Saturday night was to get robbed. And robbed they were. Sometimes as often as twenty times an hour. Criminals were completely out in the open now. Policeman not only weren’t arresting them, they were actually joining them.
“This is now a city where the police are as bad as the criminals,” said Mandible “And where honest private investigators like you are harassed by corrupt policemen.”
That was certainly something I had noticed. I frowned. He had a good point there. We’ve got to do something about that last thing, I thought.
I suggested Mandible go back in time and do all the dirty work himself. That would be better. I didn’t like 1941, and it didn’t like me. So he could go. I would stay here, sort of standing guard. He asked what he was paying me for? I reminded him that he hadn’t actually paid me anything yet. He dismissed this as mere wordplay. He said he was too old to go gallivanting around time and space. I was young and strong and resourceful. Besides, there might be dangers. He needed to send someone who was expendable. I had to admit I was pretty expendable all right, now that I thought about it. Damned expendable.
He finally clinched the deal by upping the amount of money he was theoretically going to pay me, to double my normal rate. That sounded like money I could theoretically use, so I agreed.
But this time I was going to go back prepared. I went home and loaded up with all the things I’d wished I’d had the first time around. I started with a lot of cash, making sure that all the bills were printed before 1941. I got a nice warm coat, an almanac so I could win bar bets, and I also wrote down a good answer to give some guy I had been having an argument with back there. Then I took a shower, because I remembered that someone in 1941 had suggested I do so. Once I was absolutely sure I had packed everything, that nothing had been overlooked, I reached for the briefcase. It was gone. Someone had broken into my home and stolen it.
I probably should have noticed the muddy footprints on my floor before. They were all over the house. You practically couldn’t see anything else. They led through the broken window, up to where I had stashed the briefcase, then into the kitchen. Following the muddy tracks, I saw that the intruder had made some lunch for himself, then doubled back to the living room where he apparently watched some of my videotapes, then into my bedroom for some jumping on the bed, then back to the living room where he left by a different broken window.
I would have been concerned, but since I knew what the burglar had stolen, I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult for me to find it again.
I took a walk down the street, looking for something inexplicable. Sure enough, a couple of blocks from my house I saw an elevator suddenly appear on the sidewalk and a crook come out pulling a horse that had a medieval knight on it. About thirty crooks, and a few crooked cops were standing in line, waiting their turn with the machine.
I didn’t hesitate. ‘Always take time travelers by surprise’, they say. While the crook was wrestling with the horse and dodging the lance blows of the knight, and telling the knight to either quit calling him a varlet or tell him what it meant, I hurried up to the elevator and, ignoring the line entirely, dove in and closed the door.
There was general outrage about this line-cutting. The crooks began pounding on the door. The cops in the line began blowing their whistles.
As quickly as I could, I set the dials for October 12, 1941, turned on the machine, and began hurtling back through time.
On an impulse I mooned most of the 1950’s as I went by. I don’t know what makes me do these things. I guess it’s just part of my charm.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The elevator shimmered to a stop. I got out and checked my watch. I had arrived, as planned, fifteen minutes before Pellagra was due to show up with the figurine. I didn’t want him to see me when he did arrive, so I ducked behind a convenient pile of lumber.
After awhile I noticed there were two other detectives back there with me. They were watching some suspects across the street. One of the detectives made a motion to me. I returned the motion and that’s when the scrap started. Nobody motions to me like that. In the ensuing struggle we knocked over some of the lumber and everyone in the street kind of knew we were there now. The suspects took off, and the two detectives ran after them, cussing. My fault, I guess.
I turned my attention back to the elevator just in time to see it disappear. I had failed to set the emergency brake again, but this time on purpose. The machine had to be available for Pellagra to use. I looked at my watch. Just a couple more minutes.
At this point I had a crisis of conscience. My conscience was telling me if I went through with this, I would be preventing a corrupt city official from paying the just penalty for his crimes. And that, my conscience stressed, practically waggling its finger, was wrong.
If you’ve read this much of my story you’re probably wondering where the hell this conscience of mine came from all of a sudden? Where has it been all this time? I was wondering the same thing. Just what a detective needs in the middle of a difficult case is a complex ethical problem. I thought about it for a minute, then told my conscience to take the rest of the day off, go watch a movie or something. If it bothered me again, I’d beat its brains in. That’s the way you have to deal with things like that. A firm hand. Otherwise you’ll be taking orders from everybody.
Suddenly the elevator returned. Pellagra stepped out and started across the street, carrying the figurine exactly as he had before.
I took off after him. I wasn’t planning to do anything tricky. I was just going to knock him down, grab the figurine, get back to the elevator and warp out of there before he knew what hit him. It probably would have worked like a charm too, except halfway across the street I ran into myself from the last time I was there and started fighting with myself, punching myself in the belly and getting punched in the belly in return. The fight, predictably, ended in a draw, and I ran off in different directions.
Later I asked Professor Groggins about this fight. He said it couldn’t have happened and showed me a bunch of equations to prove it. I ran the numbers a couple of times on my pocket calculator and they checked out. So I guess it didn’t happen. But sometimes, when Groggins isn’t around, when I’m alone in my room with the lights out, and my calculator’s in the other room, I wonder if it did.
Because of this fight I thought I had, I was delayed in stopping Pellagra. So once again he had gotten into the police station with the figurine. The idea of going back to 2003 so I could come back and try the whole thing again just made my head hurt. The logistics of these things is what gets to you after awhile. I decided to just stay in 1941 and try to get the figurine away from the cops, using some tricky method I hadn’t tried last time. That meant all I needed now was a trick to pull. Some kind of great trick. I thought for a minute, then pulled out my gun and marched into the police station.
Pointing a gun at the cops turned out to be a pretty good trick. Simple, yet effective. It saved everybody a lot of time and cut down on the backtalk. I had everybody in the police station reaching for the sky in no time. Pellagra too. He didn’t seem very happy to see me there, but then no one ever seems to be, so my feelings weren’t hurt. I picked up the figurine off the sergeant’s desk and started to back out of the station, also grabbing a couple of other things that looked interesting.
“You’ll never get away with this,” said the desk sergeant.
“Yes I will. I’ve got the perfect alibi. I haven’t been born yet.”
The cops looked at each other. They were impressed. That was some alibi all ri
ght.
I ran out of the police station with the figurine. No one was pursuing me because I had told them that if any of them moved, or even lowered their hands, the bomb would explode. It was quite awhile before they realized, hey what bomb?
Just as I was nearing the elevator, I saw a cop standing there writing a ticket and looking for the machine’s license plate. I ducked behind a parked car. Maybe he’d be gone in a minute, I thought. It doesn’t take very long to write a ticket. Before that minute could pass, however, a strange looking machine shimmered into existence next to the elevator. It looked like it had started out life as a particularly large and menacing phone booth. But now it had a flashing red light on top of it and many guns sticking out of its gunports. It said “Time Machine - Mark VI” on it.
I found out later that Sgt. Dodge had gotten tired of only being able to pursue me when I happened to be in the year 2003. He had grabbed Professor Groggins and forced him to quickly slap together another time machine. One that was even bigger and faster than the one I was using. But then he loaded it down with all kinds of heavy armament, so in the end it was a little slower than the Mark V.
The door opened and Dodge and his boys emerged.
“Burly!” called Dodge. “Oh Burly boy! It’s your old friend, Dodgy!”
I was trying to decide whether I should answer or not, when a cat halfway up the street coughed and Dodge and his boys whirled and lambasted it with automatic weapons fire, keeping it spinning in the air for over three minutes. I decided maybe it would be better for me to remain quiet for awhile. We were all a little too jumpy right now. And our aim was too good.
Dodge and his boys fanned out and started looking for me. I couldn’t run anywhere without being seen immediately, and Dodge’s men were getting close to my hiding place, so it looked like it wouldn’t be long before they picked me up by the ears and said something like “Well well well, look what we’ve got here,” which is a phrase I’ve learned to hate.
But before they could get to me, the police station across the street emptied out and a large contingent of 1941 cops ran up. The two groups of cops stared at each other. Dodge tapped his badge in a meaningful way.
“21st Century police,” Dodge said. “We’re looking for a fat guy named Burly.”
“So are we,” said the desk sergeant. “He just held up the police station.”
“He’s from our time period,” said Dodge. “So we’ll take it from here, if it’s all right with you.”
The desk sergeant frowned. “You can’t do that. We’ve got jurisdiction here. This is our time period.”
Dodge said: “Jurisdiction is a nice thing to have. But we’re better equipped to handle this. We’re the Cops Of The Future. We’ve got more sophisticated weapons and more advanced crime detection techniques at our disposal than you have.”
“Yes,” retorted the desk sergeant, “but you’re weaker physically and you look stupid with those overdeveloped heads. No crook will take you seriously here. And let go of my face.”
I watched, fascinated, as the two police forces argued about who was best equipped to bring me to justice. This was starting to get interesting. So instead of trying to escape like I should have, I poked my face over the fender of the car to get a better look at what was going on, and started eating a candy bar.
As I watched, the two groups of cops quickly went from showing each other their equipment, to test firing each weapon, to beating each other over the heads with their weapons. Pretty soon they were just tearing each other to pieces, rolling around and fighting, yelling “ya bastard! ya bastard!”.
This was my chance. I bolted from my hiding place and headed for the elevator. I didn’t say ‘So long, suckers!’ or ‘See you in the funny papers’, but I was thinking those things.
As soon as I broke cover, all fighting stopped and the two groups of cops lit out after me. I got to the elevator first, ran in and shut the door. Then I opened it again and stuck my head out to see how far away the cops were, and several of them ran into the elevator with me.
Somehow, in the ensuing struggle, the time machine started up and off we went into the void. The rest of the cops jumped into the Mark VI and disappeared into time to give chase.
As we hurtled through the eons, the cops in my elevator were bashing me with billy clubs and stunning me with tasers, while the elevator was being fired on by the time machine that was following us. The figurine was on the floor of the elevator, forgotten by everyone, being kicked from one side of the elevator to the other and occasionally stepped on .
I won’t bore you with a full account of my adventures through time and space because I know you are primarily interested in the crime solving aspects of this case. You are a student of criminology. And I respect you for that. But during the roughly nine months the chase went on, a number of interesting things happened that I probably should mention here.
The first time the time machine stopped and I was able to get out and make a run for it was in the year 1865.
The cops caught up to me at Ford’s Theater. When they drew their guns and started to shoot, I ducked behind Abe Lincoln. Now, I know what you’re going to say: faux pas. I won’t deny it. But I mean, what the heck, he was going to die anyway, right? As it turned out, he wasn’t much of a shield. The automatic weapons fire practically tore both him and John Wilkes Booth in half.
While the cops were arguing with Secret Service Men and historians, I ran back to the time machine. Some of my pursuers dove in just as I was pulling away and resumed wrestling with me for control of the machine.
We next arrived in Hollywood in 1919, and they chased me all over that town. There were a lot of filmmakers roaming the streets in those days looking for something cheap and interesting to film so, without knowing we were doing it, we inadvertently made some pretty good Keystone Kops pictures. I’ve got a stack of royalty checks on my desk right now for work I didn’t really do. I mean, I wasn’t really trying to entertain anybody. I was just trying, in my own way, to escape.
At one point I managed to get the elevator to myself and, trying to throw the cops off the scent, I traveled far into earth’s future, where all was peace and harmony and everyone was perfect and snotty. I didn’t fit in too well there. They viewed me as some kind of Neanderthal, because my forehead didn’t weigh 80 pounds like theirs did, so they chucked me into a cage. I guess they figured I wouldn’t be able to pull any of my Neanderthal tricks on them from in there. To my surprise, the cops who had been chasing me were already in the cage, so I guess I hadn’t thrown them off the scent as completely as I had thought.
We spent four months there, with our keepers treating us as if we were brutal Neanderthals. We tried to convince them we were humans of great sophistication and cultural advancement, just like them, but they weren’t buying it.
In the end we managed to escape by being brutally Neanderthal and bashing their overdeveloped heads in, getting so excited while we were doing it that we screamed and jumped around like monkeys. I’m not proud of that. It kind of makes their point that we were on a lower level than them mentally.
During our prolonged chase though time we accidentally altered the chronology of world history a little bit, I’m embarrassed to report. For example, the Civil War now happened BEFORE the Civil War. And when the Titanic sank it landed on the Bismarck. With Noah’s Ark on top of the pile. Don’t ask me how these things are possible. I just wreck history, I don’t explain it. But I do know that this is what happens when sophisticated machinery like that is operated by unqualified personnel, like me.
The final stop in the chase was back in good old 1941. I jumped out of the elevator, clutching the battered figurine, and ducked down an alley. Thanks to my familiarity with the period, I managed to successfully elude their searches by hiding under the Andrews Sisters. The cops knew I would have to come back to the elevator sooner or later, so they finally decided to just wait there.
When I did go back to the elevator, I no longer had the fig
urine. And the Mark VI was no longer there. And Dodge and his boys were gone. While the 1941 cops were milling around trying to figure out why they were all out on the street together, with torn uniforms and bloody noses and foot long beards, I strolled past them into the elevator and headed for home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I arrived safely back home in my own time, but due to being in a rush to get away from 1941, I had set some of the dials inaccurately. It was the correct date, but the location was slightly off. Instead of appearing on the sidewalk near my home, I appeared on Runway 35E at the airport.
I got out and looked around. It was going to be a long walk home. I decided to just correct the mistake I had made when I set the destination dials on the machine. I opened the briefcase and started fiddling with the dials and punching some buttons.
I guess I hit a wrong button somewhere and accidentally activated some special defense mechanism, because suddenly the briefcase started screaming. “Auto-destruct engaged!” it yelled wildly. “Glue applied to handle! Emitting poison gas! Die! Die! Everybody Die!”
I struggled with the briefcase for a moment, trying to get the damn thing to let go of me. Then I heard a growing roar and noticed that a jumbojet was about to land on me. To add to my problems, the briefcase was emitting noxious gas, ticking like a bomb, and cursing like a sailor. It was a situation that I had never been in, but I instinctively knew what to do. When in doubt, start breaking things.
Using all the burly strength at my command, I snapped off the handle, heaved the remainder of the briefcase as far out onto the runway as I could, then dove off to one side out of harm’s way.
The Time Machine Did It Page 9
