The Time Machine Did It (10 page)

He tried to surrender to me, but I
didn’t have any facilities for housing any prisoners at that time. He would
have had to sleep in my bed with me. So I told him he’d better just move along.
He wandered off, dragging his parachute behind him, looking back at me like I
was a jerk or something. The feeling is mutual, pal. I guess he eventually got
to Scotland and lost the war for his country all right.

I wasn’t the only person who was
ignoring the war. Nobody in our town was interested. It was too far away, and
no one liked those Europes anyway. The thing the people in our town wanted to
talk about – the thing that really got the newspapers excited - was the race
for District Attorney. This race looked like it was going to be not so much an
election, but a coronation, for the incumbent, a guy by the name of Mandible,
oddly enough. I wondered if he was any relation. He was the most popular man in
the city, and everyone from the Mayor down was stumping for him. But I wasn’t
really following the election. I wasn’t eligible to vote in this time period
anyway, not being alive in any way that could be measured.

Most of my leisure time was spent
in bars, where I would regale the locals with my exciting tales of the future.

“In the future,” I informed my
slack-jawed audience, “there will be gas pumps that talk.”

“What will they talk about?”
hushed voices would ask.

“Gas.”

This didn’t seem so much
unbelievable as boring to them.

“So?” asked one of them.

“So, that’s something that I know
and you don’t know. Advantage, me.”

This got them confused. “But you
just told us all about it,” said one.

“Everybody in the place knows it
now,” said another.

“We can’t stop thinking about it
at this point,” added a third.

My superior grin faded into an
equal scowl. They were right. I vowed not to tell them any more about the
future. Why should I give away my advantage? But it’s hard not to show off how
smart you are. All smart guys know this. After a couple more drinks I was back
to dispensing knowledge again.

“In the future,” I intoned, “there
will be fins on cars. Then they will be gone. And someday there will be a man
named Hitler or Hister who will cause a great war…

Someone raised their hand. “You
mean that war that’s been going on in Europe for the last two years?”

“Yes!” I said impressively.

The more I talked about the
future, the more interested they got. “What’s going to happen in 1977?” asked
one.

“I forget.”

“How about 1978?”

“Forget. Wait, I think I remember
something… no, it’s gone.”

“Gee, the future sounds real
exciting,” one of the drunks sneered.

“Hey, lay off the future,” I
warned him. “It’s all right.”

Sometimes I got competition from
other drunks in the bar who claimed they were from a more interesting future
than I was.

“In the future I’m from,” said one
drunk in the back, “everybody is movie stars. And we’re all married to Carole
Lombard. And our dogs crap money.”

I didn’t remember any of that, and
doubted that this man had ever traveled to the future at all, but he certainly
had a more riveting story to tell than I did. After awhile I found myself
making up stuff too. I didn’t feel good about that, but I didn’t want to lose
my audience. Once you’ve been the center of attention, it’s hard to go back to
being one of the guys in the corner.

Through all of this, I never gave
up trying to find a way to get back to 2003. I made it a point to always stand
within five feet of anyone I saw carrying a briefcase, just on the off chance
he was a time traveler. I haunted briefcase stores. I even listened to The
Briefcase Hour on the radio for awhile. But that was a stretch, and the show
was pretty terrible so I switched to Edgar Bergen.

Once, in desperation, I tried to
attract attention to my plight by damaging the space/time continuum, figuring
science would eventually trace the problem back to me. So I booed the hell out
of Citizen Kane Part Two, the film that focuses on what Kane said after
“Rosebud” - all those long sentences he yelled out real fast at the end there,
and that song he sang - trying to make the movie into a flop, instead of the
biggest blockbuster in film sequel history. I figured future film critics would
sense something was wrong, alert the scientific community, and maybe come to my
rescue somehow. It flopped all right, thanks to me, but no film critics ever
showed up. Lazy bastards.

But I did finally find a way back
home. All I had to do was look across the street at the right moment.

I was in the middle of one of my
humiliating day jobs, pigeon cleaning duty for the city - I especially hated
brushing their filthy little teeth and combing their ratty fur. And where were
their wings? That’s what I wanted to know - when I looked up at the right
moment to see an elevator suddenly appear on the sidewalk and Big Al Pellagra
get out and start walking purposefully across the street. Under his arm was a
figurine of justice holding the scales.

I dropped the
pigeon I had been spit-shining, rushed over to the elevator, and stepped inside.
The briefcase was there! Excitedly, I started fiddling with the dials, then I
stopped. I couldn’t just hurtle off through time and leave the figurine here. I
was being paid to recover it. In theory, anyway. Also, I was a little curious.
Why would Pellagra have traveled 62 years into the past to where I was,
carrying the figurine I was looking for, and walk right past me with it?
Coincidences of that magnitude make me stiffen slightly. And what was Pellagra
planning to do with the figurine now that he was here? I had to find out.

I stepped out of the elevator, put
the briefcase in a stray dog’s mouth and told him to “stay”, then thought
better of it and put the briefcase back in the elevator. Then I started to
follow Pellagra.

I kept behind him, but at a
discrete distance until he walked up the steps into the police station. I
decided to wait outside. There were policemen in there. After a few minutes he
came back out, no longer carrying the figurine. He looked around at all the old
cars and the unfamiliar skyline with a slightly bemused expression, then saw a
diner advertising a strictly 1940’s Italian dish called LaSpaghettiloni. He
licked his lips, looked at his watch, smiled as if realizing it didn’t really
matter to a time traveler what time it was at any particular moment, then went
into the diner and sat down. I headed into the police station.

I walked up to the desk sergeant
and pointed at the figurine which was perched on the desk next to him.

“Can I have that?” I asked.

He said I couldn’t have it. It was
important evidence. “Who are you anyway, and what do you want?”

I said I was a friend. A friend
who wanted that thing that was on his desk. I offered to buy it. His whole
attitude changed.

He said I couldn’t have the
figurine, but just about everything else in the police station was for sale. He
started showing me stuff that I could buy and quoting me special prices that he
felt were a real steal for evidence of this quality, but I insisted I only
wanted the figurine. We were at an impasse.

I asked to see my lieutenant
friend, the one who liked the future even more than I did. He would go to bat
for me and help put this deal across. The desk sergeant said the lieutenant was
on extended leave. He had embezzled the police pension fund and bet it all on
the Red Faces to win the 1941 World Series, as per the list I had given him.
The Red Faces, hampered by the fact that they didn’t exist, did not win, and
the lieutenant’s star had faded here at the station.

While the desk sergeant was
telling me all this, I slowly tried to steal the figurine. My hand inched ever
closer to it, but just before I got hold of it, the desk sergeant picked it up
and handed it to another policeman. “Put this in the evidence room,” he said.

The policeman took it and walked
off. After he had gone I looked at the desk sergeant.

“Where’s the evidence room?” I
asked. “Is it near here?”

He didn’t say anything. I pointed.
”I know it’s down that corridor. Then should I turn left or right?”

“Hey, who are you?” he asked.

“You want my real name or my other
name?”

“Take your pick.”

“Burly.”

Two big cops hustled me out of the
building and threw me down the steps. “Get out Burly,” one of them said.

I picked myself up and started
heading back towards the elevator. I figured I’d given it my best shot. Now to
get back to 2003 where I belonged. At least I could tell Mandible where the
figurine was, so I had accomplished part of my mission.

I got into the elevator and
activated the time machine. The elevator started to shimmer but just as it was
beginning to disappear into time, Big Al Pellagra stepped in.

We looked at each other, startled.
But before we could react to each other’s surprise presence, the elevator began
heading for home. Pellagra and I looked straight ahead during the journey like
two strangers on an elevator should. Our eyes strayed towards each other
occasionally, but then darted away.

The elevator arrived in 2003 and
the door opened. Both of us got out without saying anything and we went off in
opposite directions. I had the presence of mind to keep hold of the briefcase.

I arrived at my
office building and immediately ducked behind a parked police car. There were
dozens of police cars parked all around my building. Some of them with their
sirens howling. Sgt. Dodge, who was in charge of the operation, was walking
around trying to find out whose police cars those were and get them to shut
their sirens off.

“This is a covert operation,
people!” he shouted over his bullhorn. “Covert!”

About 35 cops were crowded into
the front entryway to my building, looking sharply around for any signs of me.
Hundreds more were on the roof. And a couple of cops were climbing up and down
the face of the building - walking a very tough beat if you ask me.

It had been so long, I had forgotten
the cops were trying to get that time machine away from me. It hadn’t been a
long time for them. Only half an hour had gone by for Sgt. Dodge since he had
battered down the door to my office and watched me disappearing into the past,
so that disappointment was still fresh in his memory.

One of the cops saw me crouching
behind his car and yelled at me to get out of there. This was a restricted
area, he informed me. Police personnel only. I was about to tell him that I had
a perfect right to be here because I was the guy the cops were looking for. I
was a real major player in this drama. But I decided it would be wiser to
remain silent. I’d let him win this round.

I backed away from the building
without being seen and yelled at more than two or three more times, then
stashed the time machine at my house, and went off to see Mandible.

I gave a complete verbal report of
what I’d done over the past eight months to Mandible and his new junkie
secretary, who was taking frantic and self-destructive notes of the meeting.
Mandible was fascinated by my story whenever the figurine or Pellagra was
mentioned, but didn’t seem interested in the rest of it - my months of
hardship, the binge drinking, the moments of self-doubt, and so on. I thought
those were the most interesting parts of the story, and sort of acted out some
of them, doing all the voices, but Mandible just made “hurry up” motions with
his hand during those parts of the story, which he characterized as “drivel”,
and told me to “skip on down” to the important stuff.

When I had finished my report,
Mandible seemed satisfied. He wasn’t upset at all that I hadn’t gotten the
figurine, he said, because I was going to go back there right now and get it.

“Bring it back here, or destroy
it,” he said. “Either way. It doesn’t really matter.”

This confused me. “Hey, do you
want this thing or not?”

“I want it. But if I can’t have
it, I don’t want anyone to have it.”

I could understand that. I feel
that way about everything. But I didn’t fancy the idea of going back to 1941.
It had been a bad year for me. So I said no, I’d remain here, if it was all the
same to the universe, if space and time didn’t mind.

Mandible insisted. He said if I
didn’t do what he wanted he would horsewhip me. I asked where he was going to
get a horsewhip at this time of day? All the horsewhip stores were closed. He
must have realized the truth of this because he changed his tack. He started
pleading with me to go back, pointing out that he was an old man, a pathetic
figure with a whiny insistent voice. I should have mercy on him and do what he
wanted or he’d by God horsewhip me.

I told him I wouldn’t even
consider going back unless somebody told me what this whole thing was all
about. When you’ve been played for a sucker as many times as I have, you start
to get a sense of when it’s happening again. It’s like radar or something.
There was something missing from this story, my sucker-sense told me. Mandible
seemed like about the least sentimental guy I’d ever met, and I’ve met some
people who have been dead for a week. So why did he really want this figurine
so much, if it wasn’t sentiment? I wanted the whole story this time. And even
if I got it, I cautioned, I wasn’t promising anything. I wasn’t either.

He blustered for a little while
longer, referring back to the horsewhip once or twice, then finally relented.

“No one outside the family has
ever known the full story,” he said. “You must swear you’ll never reveal a word
of what I’m about to tell you to anyone.”

I said sure, you got it, Ace. And
I meant it, too. But the thing people should know about me when they swear me
to secrecy is that I don’t have a good memory. The first thing I forget is that
it’s a secret. The second thing I forget is who told me this secret. The third
and final thing I forget is the secret itself. So if you tell me something in
the strictest secrecy, you’re guaranteeing that eventually everyone in the
world will know this secret except me.