The Time Machine Did It (11 page)

I probably should have mentioned
this to Mandible, but I really wanted to know what was going on, however
briefly. So I said he could rely on my discretion. He took a deep, reluctant
breath, then began telling me the story.

His grandfather, he told me, was
Thomas Dewey Mandible the 1st. Tom Mandible had only done one bad thing in his
life. But that one bad thing had made him a fortune.

He had been a low-level building
inspector for the city, when he was approached by the Pellagra Crime Family and
offered a series of gigantic bribes to look the other way and whistle when
building permits were issued to a group of disreputable firms that were
secretly owned by the Pellagras. These firms were known for their faulty
construction techniques, shoddy building materials, and spectacular profit
margins.

Their buildings were dangerous,
stupid, and surprisingly inexpensive to construct for something so stupid.
Among their most infamous creations were the futuristic looking, but doomed to
collapse, Skyscraper Of Cards, which was made entirely of giant slabs of
playing card material which were just kind of leaning against each other
hopefully, and the Balloon Building, which was made of 100% balloon alloy.
Their claim that balloon material was 50% stronger than tempered steel, which
explained why they had to charge the city 80% more, was 0% true. In the three
months following its dedication, the building kept slowly getting smaller and
losing its shape, until finally somebody stepped on it.

The Pellagras were at the
forefront of what has been called the Golden Age Of Criminal Architecture.
Their buildings didn’t stay up for long; some only lasted a couple of days
before the wind knocked them over, or some wise guy kicked the first story out
from under the building. But that didn’t bother the Pellagras. They’d already
gotten their money. And it certainly didn’t bother Thomas Dewey Mandible The
1st. He just took the money, stamped the permits, then chuckled all the way to
the bank. But not to a bank constructed by the Pellagra family.

He became very rich very fast.
After this, he never did another dishonest thing in his life, partly because he
didn’t have to, but mostly because of vanity. Now that he was rich, he wanted
to be respected, even beloved, by all.

So he built libraries, gave the
city art museums, erected statues of honest and semi-honest Americans, turned
worthless slum areas into money-making parks, and of course, made sure to put
his name on everything; Mandible Park, Mandible Library, Mandible Police
Station and so on.

And it worked. The people loved
him. He led every 4th of July and Founders Day parade, usually riding in a big
red fire engine. And when the people cheered, they weren’t cheering American
Independence or our city’s founding fathers, they were cheering him.

The only flaw in this idyllic
picture was that the town that loved Tom Mandible was an imperfect town. Crime
was rampant. It wasn’t safe to walk through Mandible Park at night, and you
couldn’t visit certain sections of Mandible Library without getting shot.

So, he decided to single-handedly
clean up the city. He used some of his ill gotten gains to finance his election
to the position of District Attorney. With the millions he had to spend, his
election was a walkover. His honest opponent bribed as many people as he could,
but he never really had a chance. Mandible’s pockets were too deep.

He then used his powerful position
to vigorously prosecute criminals of all kinds, sending them away for long
stretches in prison. He especially enjoyed prosecuting members of the Pellagra
crime family. He couldn’t get them for bribery in his case, because that was a
secret, shh!, but he could get them for everything else they did. And they were
into everything. In one memorable month - February 1941 - they had committed
every crime in the United States.

1941 was an election year in our
city, and with Tom Mandible up for reelection to the D.A. post, both the
criminals and the opposition politicians were howling that he was almost as
crooked as they were, and shouldn’t be reelected. Tom wasn’t worried. He was
the most revered man in the city. No one would believe these slanderous
accusations against him. And he knew his opponents had no proof of his previous
indiscretions. There was proof though.

He had always been a meticulous
man. He kept exact records of everything, including the bribes he had taken. He
had even had forms printed up to make the record keeping easier and more
precise. The forms had blanks for “Amount of Bribe Offered” “Bribee” “Briber”
“Bribe Accepted By”, “Magnitude of Crime”
etc.
All
carefully filled out. His opponents knew that someone as meticulous as he was
would retain those records, even though they could be a danger to him. They
decided to get their hands on them and expose him.

On the weekend before the
election, the four sneakiest and stupidest members of the Pellagra family broke
into Mandible’s office and hunted for the evidence, looking in the filing
cabinets under “C” for “Crooked politician”, “R” for “Our Agreements”, and “L”
for “What We’re Looking For”. They didn’t find what they were looking for.

When Tom Mandible came in to his
office on Monday morning and saw the whole place trashed, and all the file
cabinets rifled, he immediately realized what had happened and what the
criminals had been looking for. He took the evidence out of the “B” drawer,
toyed with the idea of burning the papers, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
They were all filled out so nice and neat, with no empty blanks or anything. So
he decided to keep them, but to disguise what they were.

He took the papers to an origami
shop and had them fashioned into a figurine of justice holding the scales. They
were then covered with a light coat of gold enamel. You could still see the
words on the folded papers, but no incriminating words were visible unless you
took the figurine apart. There was a sign forbidding that next to the figurine.

He put the completed figurine on
his desk and kept it there for the rest of his life, sometimes toying with it
or having it fight other figurines, but mostly just letting it sit there out in
the open, incriminating as hell. It amused him. Every time someone was in his
office, toying with or looking at the figurine, not realizing its significance,
he would laugh to himself. He became known as The Laughing To Himself D.A.

The family should have destroyed
the figurine after Tom died, but they liked his little joke as much as he did,
and didn’t see how it could hurt anything now. Not unless somebody invented a
time machine and took the evidence back to 1941 and gave it to the cops, which
they regarded as, at best, an 8 to 1 shot. So they kept it on the mantel in the
family mansion and laughed so uproariously when people looked at it that people
stopped looking at it.

But then a time machine was
invented and crooks did get hold of it. This happened during what started as a
routine burglary at Mandible Manor. One of the burglars, the current head of
the Pellagra family, Big Al Pellagra, found the figurine on the mantel. He
noticed his grandfather’s name, still visible under the gold enamel, realized
the figurine’s significance, and then used the time machine to take the
figurine back to 1941 and destroy Tom Mandible.

“And it did destroy him,” said
Mandible the 3rd, handing me an old yellowed newspaper clipping. I glanced over
the story.

It told how Tom Mandible had lost
his reelection bid by a wide margin, and was jailed for his now-revealed
crimes. And the scandal did more than just ruin Mandible. It threw the entire
anti-crime movement in the city into disrepute. Everyone in 1941 figured, well
law and order doesn’t work, let’s let crime give it a try.

“That’s why you must go back to
1941 and get that figurine before it’s handed over to the police,” Mandible
said. “Otherwise you’ll doom me to a life in the gutter, and I don’t think you
want that, and this city to a half century of rampant crime.”

He waved a hand at the city,
inviting me to look and see how the city had changed now that his grandfather
was not there to bust up the crime syndicate.

I said: “I don’t see anything
different. Are we looking at the same thing?”

Mandible sneered at me for being
an unobservant oaf, which, as I said before, I plead guilty to. There’s not
much that happens around this town that I notice. He said he would take me on a
tour of the town himself and show me what he meant.

As Mandible took me
around the town, showing me what had happened to it now that his grandfather
had never been in a position to nip the criminal syndicate in the bud, an
amusing thought occurred to me. I have this humorous side to my nature. I guess
this is as good a time as any to mention that. I had noticed that Mandible was
sort of like the Ghost of Criminal Future! Showing me around, and so forth. I
asked him if he’d read Dickens. He told me to shut my mouth. We didn’t talk
about literature any more after that. But I still think it was an amusing
reference.

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.

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.