The Time Machine Did It (8 page)

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 the 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.

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.