A few seconds later the time machine exploded with a disappointingly small thump. I wondered what it had been getting so excited about.
A moment later, several jumbojets touched down, one after the other, on the briefcase. Then an airport dog ran onto the runway, picked up the flattened briefcase and shook it. I went over, chased the dog off, then kicked what was left of the briefcase to pieces. It didn’t make much sense, but I felt why am I the only person who doesn’t get to wreck it?
When I got back to my house I took the figurine off the mantel and started to go back out. Halfway out the door I remembered that I probably should check in with Professor Groggins and let him know that I had kind of bunged up his time machine a little bit, and which runway he could scrape it off.
I put in a call to him and sketched out what had happened, trying to make the whole thing sound a little humorous, so maybe he’d decide he was kind of glad it had turned out the way it did because of the huge laugh he got out of it.
He didn’t get the humor of the situation at all. I’ve got to work on my delivery, I guess. Timing is important too, darnit. Once he’d heard the whole story, the thing that worried him most was the possibility that I might have done something, maybe something that seemed inconsequential at the time, that might have altered history.
I admitted that during the police chase through time I had done a couple of things that I regarded as iffy. “I married my own mother and ran over myself as a small boy.
“What!?!
“And I also stepped on something that was trying to evolve into me. But that was much earlier.”
“Good God, man! Do you realize what this means? It means you were never born! You don’t exist. Nothing you ever did in your life has happened now.”
“Then how did I run over myself as a small boy?”
“Uh…”
“And if I don’t exist, who are you talking to?”
After a moment’s thought he said: “Look, I can show you the numbers, if you like.”
I like science as much as the next guy, but this whole topic was starting to bore me. “I don’t feel any different. What do I care about the paperwork? Anyway, I wrecked a lot more important stuff than my I.D. cards. Remind me to tell you about Ford’s Theater.”
Before I hung up I asked him to explain something that was puzzling me. Why was it that, after the past had been altered, we both still kind of remembered what it had been like before? Scientifically, how did that work?
Groggins confidently started to explain this phenomenon, but soon realized he had already gone way past what he actually knew on the subject, and was now in the magical realm of bullshit. At that point he stopped trying to explain it and just said he didn’t know. So don’t ask me how it works. But there’s probably a simple explanation. You can probably find it in some other book.
A little later, I arrived at the gutter and handed Mandible the figurine. “Here you go, Chief.”
Mandible delightedly grabbed the figurine and looked at it. It was a little the worse for wear, but it was his figurine all right. “I’ve got it! Now everything is back the way it was before and I’m rich again!”
He looked at the city skyline. All the museums and libraries were back, but there was something wrong. He couldn’t identify what it was at first, but then the wind picked up a little bit and the rags he was wearing flapped in the breeze. He glanced down at his tattered clothes, then looked at me with a confused expression.
“What trickery is this? The city is back to the way it was, but I still seem to be poor. How is that possible?”
“You’ll be even poorer when you pay my bill. My fee is $500 a day, as we discussed when you hired me. And even though only a couple of weeks have passed for you, I’ve been working on this case for over two years by my watch.”
I handed him his bill and walked off. Mandible sat down on a heap of rubbish, took a long pull of some cheap wine, and started trying to figure out what had happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
I got into my Rolls Royce, which was parked in front of the Burly Science Museum, drove past the Burly Library and the fabulous Burly Convention Center and pulled up to my office in the Burly Building. It’s located on the corner of Burly and Burly, so it’s an easy address to remember. All of the parking places in front of the building were reserved for me, so I could take my pick. Today I decided to park in the extra big one. I got out of the car, walked past the line of statues of me and went into the building.
I walked into my office, and looked around with satisfaction. All the photos and wise sayings I had on the wall were now framed in 14 carat gold. Neither one of my crappy chairs would ever fall over again now. I had used some of my vast wealth to get the leg on that one chair fixed.
My secretary was looking around the office, frowning, more confused than usual. On her head was a hat that was completely unknown to her.
“What happened to the office? It’s different,” she said. “And where did I get this hat?”
I sat back in my chair, confident that it wouldn’t tip over, and gave her a quick summary of what I’ve told you, then told her what I hadn’t told Mandible about my last visit to 1941.
I had wanted to use the figurine to get the city back to the way I remembered it, law abiding and peaceful, with no corrupt cops chasing me through time, but I didn’t want Tom Mandible to get off Scot free. So on my last trip to 1941, I took the figurine to my grandfather and told him it was valuable evidence that he could use to blackmail the city’s wealthy District Attorney. I said if he used it right he could make a fortune with it. The only condition was that he had to build libraries, museums etc, and stick my name prominently on each one.
It took awhile to explain all this to him, because we Burlys have never been very smart, but he finally got it. And once he understood the concept, he turned out to be a real first class blackmailer. He managed to bleed Tom Mandible so dry, that the D.A., infuriated at the way he was robbed of his ill-gotten gains, clamped down even harder on crime in the city. So the city ended up becoming even nicer and safer than it had been before.
Of course, nothing in life works perfectly. The Burly family was never very good with money, so the bulk of our family fortune got pissed away in one way or another, a lot of it in trying to blackmail other public officials with other figurines. But there was still a comfortable amount left over when I came along.
Elizabeth didn’t believe very much of this story. It made me sound smart, which she knew I wasn’t. But she liked the office better. And the hat was okay. So she didn’t press the matter. She didn’t have time to talk about it anymore today anyway. She had to go home now. That part in her hair was bothering her again.
I watched her go and got out a cigar. It’s not often that I do something smart, but it happens sometimes, and when it does I like to celebrate. I started to light the cigar with a twenty dollar bill, then changed my mind and lit it with a stamp.
Then I noticed a stack of dust covered correspondence on my desk that appeared to have been waiting there for me since 1941. There were overdue hotel bills, thank you notes from my grandfather and the Andrews Sisters, offers to join the “Wire Recorder Spool Of The Month Club” etc. I threw them all away. Too late to answer them now.
Then a very old dust-covered mechanic came into my office. It was that guy who had tried to build a time machine for me in 1941. I remembered now that I had never paid him. He remembered it too.
“You owe me 8 bucks,” he said.
He held out a dust covered bill. I examined it for a moment, then shrugged and paid him. It was only eight dollars. It would have cost more than that to fight him in court or hire someone to kill him. We rich guys always have to look at things from the financial angle. That’s our curse. He took the money and shuffled off, as happy as a really old guy with eight dollars can be.
Then a representative of our federal government showed up and presented me with a bill for WWII. I told him there must be some mistake. Thi
s bill couldn’t be for me. This must be one of those rare instances, that comes along maybe once in a generation, when the government is full of shit.
He insisted it was a legitimate obligation, owed by me because of that telegram I hadn’t sent. We did a lot of back and forth about “what telegram?” “you know what telegram!” for quite a while – I was starting to have a pretty good time - when I suddenly remembered what telegram he was talking about.
I had made several attempts during my stay in 1941 to send telegrams to the future. Every time someone new started working at the telegraph office, I gave it another try. But nothing ever came of it. One of the times, an agitated Japanese man was in line behind me. He was trying to get off an urgent telegram to the Imperial Japanese Fleet. He kept trying to move in front of me, but every time he did, I just gave him the old Burly Get-Back-There.
Finally he changed his tactics and tried to get me to send the message for him. He handed me the scrawled message. I took it, promised I would send it when I was done with what I was doing, unless I forgot about it, stuck the message in my pocket and forgot about it.
Now that I remembered the telegram, I was curious as to what it said. I walked over to a trophy case that had, among other prized items, a pair of heavily worn trousers labeled “Time Travel Pants”. I reached in the back pocket, pulled out the yellowed telegram and read it. It said “Don’t Attack Pearl Harbor”.
I walked back to my desk and looked over the itemized list of expenses I was being billed for. It said I was responsible for the loss of 139,000 tanks, 2800 ships, 268,000 airplanes, and was expected to pay for 60 million funerals.
I put the bill down and shook my head. “I admit I’m solely to blame for the war in the Pacific, but Hitler handled the European end of the thing, so he’s at least as responsible for WWII as I am. Can’t you bill him for some of these expenses?”
The government official shook his head. “He’s dead.”
“Shit.”
We haggled for awhile, then I agreed to give them $80 a month until it was all paid off. I figured I got off easy.
I thought that tied up all the loose ends until Mandible came in one day with his tramp lawyer. They said they were suing me. I asked what for? The lawyer said I was liable for changing the course of human events in a way that was detrimental to his client. They had a pretty good case, being so right and everything, but I didn’t think the case would ever get to trial. The tramp life had gotten to them both and pretty soon they had mostly forgotten about me and were fighting over my cigar butt. I gave them a bottle of cheap wine, then I waited until they were unconscious and settled the matter out of court by pushing them out of a window.
There’s not too much left to tell. Professor Groggins, I’ve heard, is working on a machine that talks about the weather but doesn’t do anything about it. That will save everybody a lot of time. At my request, he used his Mark VI time machine to go back in time and fix up most of the past that I had wrecked. He said there were a couple of things he couldn’t change back, because I’d just screwed them up too bad. So if you’re upset that we had a depression in the 1930’s and that Richard Nixon was elected President twice, instead of being Lou Costello’s partner in the movies. I guess you can blame me for that.
As for me personally, the only real change in my life, aside from the increase in my bank account, is that there are now fourteen of me living around town in different apartments. We avoid each other when we see each other on the street, maybe just a nod, but nothing more. It’s a little unnerving, but doesn’t seem to cause any harm otherwise. Except, of course, that now I’ve got a lot more competition in the detective business in this town. That’s just what I need at this point.
BOOKS BY
JOHN SWARTZWELDER
THE TIME MACHINE DID IT (2004)
DOUBLE WONDERFUL (2005)
HOW I CONQUERED YOUR PLANET (2006)
THE EXPLODING DETECTIVE (2007)
DEAD MEN SCARE ME STUPID (2008)
EARTH VS. EVERYBODY (2009)
THE LAST DETECTIVE ALIVE (2010)
THE FIFTY FOOT DETECTIVE (Spring 2011)
Copyright © 2002 by John Swartzwelder
Published by:
Kennydale Books
P.O. Box 3925
Chatsworth, California 91313-3925
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
First Printing June, 2004
ISBN 13 (paperback edition) 978-0-9755799-0-9
ISBN 13 (hardback edition) 978-0-9755799-1-6
ISBN 10 (paperback edition) 0-9755799-0-8
ISBN 10 (hardback edition) 0-9755799-1-6
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004093998
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
THE TIME MACHINE DID IT
JOHN SWARTZWELDER
Kennydale Books.
Chatsworth, California
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The Time Machine Did It Page 10
