The Time Machine Did It (9 page)

Thinking about this gave me the
answer. I could make money here the same way I had been making it in 2003. They
had plenty of crime in 1941, if motion pictures were accurate sources of
information. I’d just set myself up as a detective here, and wait for the
space/time continuum to make a mistake and give me an opportunity to get back
home.

I looked at my watch. It was too
late to start being a detective today. The sun was going down and people were
heading for home. They wouldn’t need any detectives until tomorrow morning at 5
a.m. at the earliest. So what was I going to do for food and shelter tonight? I
saw a drunk across the street weaving into a particularly rundown and
inexpensive looking hotel called The Colossal-Majestic.

The roof of The Colossal-Majestic
was sagging and a lot of the windows were out, and while I was looking at it an
entire layer of paint peeled off and a bed slid out of a window and landed in
the alley. A sign out front of the hotel said “Rooms With Heat: $2 a night.
Rooms Without Heat: $1. Rooms Without Anything: Ten Cents a night.” Another
sign said “We Don’t Examine Money Very Closely”. This was the hotel for me.

I woke up the next
morning cold and cramped. The room, as advertised, was a miracle of understatement.
No heat, no lights, no blankets, no bed, just me. I washed my face in some snow
that had drifted in through the window, and dried it on a handy rodent. Then,
refreshed, disheveled, smelly, and hopeful, I headed out to make my mark in
prewar America.

I found a likely looking street
corner, one with lots of foot traffic and no competing detectives, and began
accosting passersby, asking them if they had any crimes that needed solving
today.

“Detective?” I yelled. “Crime
solved, mister? Trace something for you, ma’am? Who else wants a detective?”

Business was bad at first.
Everyone was evidently satisfied with their current detective. But I finally
attracted the attention of a man who, as luck would have it, was actually on
his way downtown to hire a detective. This chance meeting would save him some
shoe leather, he informed me, rubbing his hands. He asked me if I came highly
recommended and I said I sure as hell did. That was all he needed to know, and
he started explaining his problem to me.

Unfortunately, the lunch hour was
just starting and the foot traffic on my street corner suddenly increased.
Pedestrians kept pushing their way between us, and a street vendor rolled up
and set up shop next to us, yelling out the good news that he had peanuts for sale.

My prospective client asked me:
“Do you have someplace else we could talk? Someplace quieter? Like an office?”

I told him yes, I did have an
office, but we couldn’t use it right now. He asked me why not and we stared at
each other until both of us started to go to sleep. Finally he realized I was
never going to answer him.

“Well, we’ll do it here then,” he
said. “The thing I want you to investigate is connected with the Danielson
Case.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, the ferry boat scandal
over in Marina City.”

“Where’s that?”

“Never mind.”

So I lost my first client. I
realized I was going to have to bone up on the current events and geography
around here if I was ever going to be of any value to my clients. I made a
mental note to see if there was a library in this town.

While I was making, and admiring,
this mental note, a cop nudged me with his nightstick.

“Move along,” he said. “You can’t
be a detective here.”

I didn’t want any more trouble
with the police, so I moved to an area where no pedestrians were walking, which
satisfied the cop, but made it harder for me to conduct my business. I could
yell and wave at passersby to come over to where I was in the flowerbed, but no
one seemed to want to do that. If anything, they moved farther away from me the
louder I shouted and the more I waved and made faces at them.

I reassessed my situation. It was
clear that if I was going to be a successful detective here, I needed an
office. That would cost money. And I’d need furnishings; a desk, file cabinets,
a client chair, and so on.

That meant that at least for
awhile, I was going to have to get some other kind of job, a less glamorous
job, until I could build up some capital. This was a little depressing for me,
because I like the power and prestige that goes with being a shamus more than
the power and prestige that goes with, say, pushing a mop. But I cheered up
when I remembered that I was the Man From The Future. I was 62 years ahead of
these pre-1950 yokels mentally. I’d wow em back here in the primitive past.

The first thing I did was check
out the want-ads in the paper. But I was in for a disappointment there. Every
job seemed to require some experience or skills I lacked. Do you know how to be
the comptroller for a canning company? Or how to build infernal machines for
Anarchists? I don’t.

And the lowest level jobs were out
too, because they insisted that I not have some of the qualifications I did
have. Like they didn’t want me to have more than a third grade education,
because they felt that if I had a fourth grade education, or its equivalent, I
wouldn’t be carrying sewer pipes for them very long. It would just be a pit
stop for me professionally. So it seemed I was overqualified for some jobs, and
underqualified for the rest. The general impression I got was that 1941 could
get along perfectly well without me.

But if there’s one thing you can
say about us Burlys (okay, Torgesons. See chapter 1), it’s that we don’t give
up right away. We don’t give up for months. So I went out on a series of job
interviews and tried to bluff my way through them, saying yes I was a fully
qualified whatever-you-said, or no, I’ve never heard of the Union movement,
what’s that? - whatever I guessed they wanted to hear. Lying like this works
pretty well, I’ve always found. Because it allows you to tell a prospective
employer things you could never tell him if you were being truthful. But you
tell that to the youth of today and they won’t listen. They think they know it
all.

The only times I ran into trouble
were when I didn’t lie. Like when I inadvertently filled out employment
application forms with accurate information. My birth date, for example, raised
a lot of red flags.

“Born in 1965, eh?” some personnel
guy would say.

“Yes.”

“I guess that makes you about
minus 24 years old.”

“I’m more mature than my age would
indicate.”

Sometimes I’d get over all the
other hurdles and they’d take me out to the work site to see me in action
before they hired me. To see me demonstrate the expertise I had bragged about
on my application form. This was a problem, because it’s easier to bluff your
way through a written test than it is to bluff your way through real life.

They would ask me, for example, to
run along a steel girder 20 stories above the pavement carrying a bucket of
rivets. And I would, using this same example, fall off. So there goes that job.

But just when I was thinking I’d
never be able to make any money in this time period, I found exactly what I was
looking for. I was walking down the street, fingering the 3 cents I had in my
pocket and discovering that I now only had 2 cents because I had fingered one
of them to pieces, when I passed by a window with a sign in it that said “Day
Jobs: No Experience Necessary”. Other signs in the window were even more
encouraging. “No Experience? No Problem!”, “Prison Record? Hooray!”, “Can’t
Read? Read This!”

I went inside and in almost no
time I was earning real 1941 style money. My first job involved being set on
fire in a vacant lot so the fire department could practice putting people out.
I made five dollars doing that. And the sign in the window was right. No
experience was necessary. All I had to do was stand there and scream. Anybody
can do that.

Things were looking
up for me now. I had five dollars. But I felt I was making money too slowly and
painfully, and they hadn’t discovered antibiotics yet. This was what gave me my
big idea.

It occurred to me that the big
advantage I had here in the past was that I knew what the future was going to
look like. None of these jackasses did. I had been to the future, and even
taken a picture of it. I could use that advance knowledge to make myself rich
overnight. All I had to do was pick out something that was common in my time
but wasn’t available here yet, and then “invent” it. It would be hard luck on
whoever was destined to really invent the thing, but I figured screw him.

I got some sheets of writing paper
from the lobby in my hotel, then started writing down all the things I’d
noticed weren’t available in these primitive days. The list was surprisingly
long, starting with the ball point pen I asked the guy behind the registry desk
for. He’d never heard of such a thing and looked at me like I was a witch. So I
settled for a pencil.

1941, I wrote, didn’t have ball
point pens, transistors, long playing records, TV dinners, electric
toothbrushes, push button telephones, tubeless tires, microwaves, penicillin,
VCRs, or almost anything made out of aluminum or plastic. Those were still
exotic materials in this time period. Practically everything in 1941 was made
of iron, wood, glass, or mud.

For the next few nights I worked
feverishly, spending all my spare time and all the money I was making on my day
jobs, trying to build a high definition television. Finally I gave up on that
and switched to a ball point pen. After my prototype had flown to pieces for
the fourteenth time, embedding the little ball in my cheek for the ninth time,
I pushed all my inventing equipment out of the window and went out to get
drunk. At least I had the skill to do that.

I hadn’t realized that I never
actually had a clue as to how any of the inventions of my era worked. Why
hadn’t somebody told me I was ignorant? What was the big secret?

After I’d had a few beers, and had
taken out my anger and frustration on some smaller drunks, I started to cheer
up again. I realized the mistake I had made was in trying to duplicate the
actual important achievements of my time, the things that made life better, the
things with moving parts. I could make just as much money, maybe more, by duplicating
the crap of my era.

So I got to work again, trying to
cash in, in advance, on some of the nationwide fads that I knew were coming.
Davy Crockett hats, disco, that sort of thing. But I’ll tell you a secret –
most people wouldn’t tell you this, but I will. I’m your friend - it’s hard to
get a nationwide fad going. The nation is a big place. You can get, say,
Cincinnati whipped into a frenzy about your product, but just as you’re just
finishing that, now Detroit is starting to calm down, so you have to run back
there. The whole thing is harder than it sounds.

After two weeks of work, all I had
managed to sell were three Davy Crockett Caps, two Ralph Kramden Bus Driver
Games, and one recording of me singing “Stayin’ Alive”. And the people who
bought them weren’t very excited about their purchases after awhile, and a
couple of them wanted to sell them back to me, but I wasn’t interested.

I’d like to report to you that it
wasn’t long after this that I figured a way out of my predicament and got back
to the good old present day, but it didn’t turn out to be that easy. It was
eight long months before my chance came to get home.

I spent those eight months
continuing to earn a small humiliating living doing day jobs. I never could
quite get enough money saved up to get my detective business going, mostly
because I kept coming up with brilliant ways to triple my money overnight. I
kept thinking I could remember which Bum of the Month was going to beat Joe
Louis, but it was never any of the guys I put money on. So I had to keep
starting over. I pushed mops all over 1941, passed out handbills, posed for
“Before” pictures, and so on. My one big payday was a one-day gig I had doing a
cameo appearance in the movie The Pride Of The Yankees. In the scene where Lou
Gehrig finds out he’s dying, I’m the guy who’s pointing at him and laughing.

To save money I tried living with
my grandparents for awhile, but they were uncomfortable having me around. I
kept hearing them muttering things like “It’s not natural”, “Who is he?” and
“Space/time continuum”. So after a couple of weeks I split.

One money making idea I had during
this period promised to be a gold mine for me. I wrote out motion picture
scripts that were word for word transcriptions of successful films I had seen
in the 1990’s, then shipped them off to Hollywood and sat back to wait for the
checks to come rolling in. All the scripts were returned to me, with rejection
slips that said they stunk to high heaven. I read the scripts again and they
did! This made me mad on several levels.

Despite my shortage of money, life
in 1941 wasn’t too bad. Like I said before, I’m not a history buff, but the
past did have its charms. The food didn’t have any preservatives or vitamins in
it, so it had a pleasant, dangerous taste that was new to me. There weren’t any
safety rules anywhere, so if you hurt yourself, at least you didn’t get yelled
at too. And the whole year was in full natural color, not the grainy black and
white I was led to expect. It was all kind of pleasant. A restful period in our
history to be alive, I felt. It’s true that there was a war going on in Europe,
but Europe was a long ways away. You couldn’t hear any of the screaming where I
was.

The only time the war entered my
life at all in those days was the afternoon I was walking down the street and
Rudolf Hess landed on me. I told him he was supposed to land in Scotland, not
on top of me, and I expected the Third Reich to replace my hat with one just as
good. I hinted that otherwise there would be trouble. Germany was already
fighting with France and England. They didn’t want to piss me off too.