The Time Machine Did It (12 page)

I turned my attention back to the
elevator just in time to see it disappear. I had failed to set the emergency
brake again, but this time on purpose. The machine had to be available for
Pellagra to use. I looked at my watch. Just a couple more minutes.

At this point I had a crisis of
conscience. My conscience was telling me if I went through with this, I would
be preventing a corrupt city official from paying the just penalty for his
crimes. And that, my conscience stressed, practically waggling its finger, was
wrong.

If you’ve read this much of my
story you’re probably wondering where the hell this conscience of mine came
from all of a sudden? Where has it been all this time? I was wondering the same
thing. Just what a detective needs in the middle of a difficult case is a
complex ethical problem. I thought about it for a minute, then told my
conscience to take the rest of the day off, go watch a movie or something. If
it bothered me again, I’d beat its brains in. That’s the way you have to deal
with things like that. A firm hand. Otherwise you’ll be taking orders from
everybody.

Suddenly the elevator returned.
Pellagra stepped out and started across the street, carrying the figurine
exactly as he had before.

I took off after him. I wasn’t
planning to do anything tricky. I was just going to knock him down, grab the
figurine, get back to the elevator and warp out of there before he knew what
hit him. It probably would have worked like a charm too, except halfway across
the street I ran into myself from the last time I was there and started
fighting with myself, punching myself in the belly and getting punched in the
belly in return. The fight, predictably, ended in a draw, and I ran off in
different directions.

Later I asked Professor Groggins
about this fight. He said it couldn’t have happened and showed me a bunch of
equations to prove it. I ran the numbers a couple of times on my pocket
calculator and they checked out. So I guess it didn’t happen. But sometimes,
when Groggins isn’t around, when I’m alone in my room with the lights out, and
my calculator’s in the other room, I wonder if it did.

Because of this fight I thought I
had, I was delayed in stopping Pellagra. So once again he had gotten into the
police station with the figurine. The idea of going back to 2003 so I could
come back and try the whole thing again just made my head hurt. The logistics
of these things is what gets to you after awhile. I decided to just stay in
1941 and try to get the figurine away from the cops, using some tricky method I
hadn’t tried last time. That meant all I needed now was a trick to pull. Some
kind of great trick. I thought for a minute, then pulled out my gun and marched
into the police station.

Pointing a gun at the cops turned
out to be a pretty good trick. Simple, yet effective. It saved everybody a lot
of time and cut down on the backtalk. I had everybody in the police station
reaching for the sky in no time. Pellagra too. He didn’t seem very happy to see
me there, but then no one ever seems to be, so my feelings weren’t hurt. I
picked up the figurine off the sergeant’s desk and started to back out of the
station, also grabbing a couple of other things that looked interesting.

“You’ll never get away with this,”
said the desk sergeant.

“Yes I will. I’ve got the perfect
alibi. I haven’t been born yet.”

The cops looked at each other.
They were impressed. That was some alibi all right.

I ran out of the police station
with the figurine. No one was pursuing me because I had told them that if any
of them moved, or even lowered their hands, the bomb would explode. It was
quite awhile before they realized, hey what bomb?

Just as I was nearing the elevator,
I saw a cop standing there writing a ticket and looking for the machine’s
license plate. I ducked behind a parked car. Maybe he’d be gone in a minute, I
thought. It doesn’t take very long to write a ticket. Before that minute could
pass, however, a strange looking machine shimmered into existence next to the
elevator. It looked like it had started out life as a particularly large and
menacing phone booth. But now it had a flashing red light on top of it and many
guns sticking out of its gunports. It said “Time Machine - Mark VI” on it.

I found out later that Sgt. Dodge
had gotten tired of only being able to pursue me when I happened to be in the
year 2003. He had grabbed Professor Groggins and forced him to quickly slap
together another time machine. One that was even bigger and faster than the one
I was using. But then he loaded it down with all kinds of heavy armament, so in
the end it was a little slower than the Mark V.

The door opened and Dodge and his
boys emerged.

“Burly!” called Dodge. “Oh Burly
boy! It’s your old friend, Dodgy!”

I was trying to decide whether I
should answer or not, when a cat halfway up the street coughed and Dodge and
his boys whirled and lambasted it with automatic weapons fire, keeping it
spinning in the air for over three minutes. I decided maybe it would be better
for me to remain quiet for awhile. We were all a little too jumpy right now.
And our aim was too good.

Dodge and his boys fanned out and
started looking for me. I couldn’t run anywhere without being seen immediately,
and Dodge’s men were getting close to my hiding place, so it looked like it
wouldn’t be long before they picked me up by the ears and said something like
“Well well well, look what we’ve got here,” which is a phrase I’ve learned to
hate.

But before they could get to me,
the police station across the street emptied out and a large contingent of 1941
cops ran up. The two groups of cops stared at each other. Dodge tapped his
badge in a meaningful way.

“21st Century police,” Dodge said.
“We’re looking for a fat guy named Burly.”

“So are we,” said the desk
sergeant. “He just held up the police station.”

“He’s from our time period,” said
Dodge. “So we’ll take it from here, if it’s all right with you.”

The desk sergeant frowned. “You
can’t do that. We’ve got jurisdiction here. This is our time period.”

Dodge said: “Jurisdiction is a
nice thing to have. But we’re better equipped to handle this. We’re the Cops Of
The Future. We’ve got more sophisticated weapons and more advanced crime
detection techniques at our disposal than you have.”

“Yes,” retorted the desk sergeant,
“but you’re weaker physically and you look stupid with those overdeveloped
heads. No crook will take you seriously here. And let go of my face.”

I watched, fascinated, as the two
police forces argued about who was best equipped to bring me to justice. This
was starting to get interesting. So instead of trying to escape like I should
have, I poked my face over the fender of the car to get a better look at what
was going on, and started eating a candy bar.

As I watched, the two groups of
cops quickly went from showing each other their equipment, to test firing each
weapon, to beating each other over the heads with their weapons. Pretty soon
they were just tearing each other to pieces, rolling around and fighting,
yelling “ya bastard! ya bastard!”.

This was my chance. I bolted from
my hiding place and headed for the elevator. I didn’t say ‘So long, suckers!’
or ‘See you in the funny papers’, but I was thinking those things.

As soon as I broke cover, all
fighting stopped and the two groups of cops lit out after me. I got to the
elevator first, ran in and shut the door. Then I opened it again and stuck my
head out to see how far away the cops were, and several of them ran into the
elevator with me.

Somehow, in the ensuing struggle,
the time machine started up and off we went into the void. The rest of the cops
jumped into the Mark VI and disappeared into time to give chase.

As we hurtled through the eons,
the cops in my elevator were bashing me with billy clubs and stunning me with
tasers, while the elevator was being fired on by the time machine that was
following us. The figurine was on the floor of the elevator, forgotten by
everyone, being kicked from one side of the elevator to the other and occasionally
stepped on .

I won’t bore you with a full
account of my adventures through time and space because I know you are
primarily interested in the crime solving aspects of this case. You are a
student of criminology. And I respect you for that. But during the roughly nine
months the chase went on, a number of interesting things happened that I
probably should mention here.

The first time the time machine
stopped and I was able to get out and make a run for it was in the year 1865.

The cops caught up to me at Ford’s
Theater. When they drew their guns and started to shoot, I ducked behind Abe
Lincoln. Now, I know what you’re going to say: faux pas. I won’t deny it. But I
mean, what the heck, he was going to die anyway, right? As it turned out, he
wasn’t much of a shield. The automatic weapons fire practically tore both him
and John Wilkes Booth in half.

While the cops were arguing with
Secret Service Men and historians, I ran back to the time machine. Some of my
pursuers dove in just as I was pulling away and resumed wrestling with me for
control of the machine.

We next arrived in Hollywood in
1919, and they chased me all over that town. There were a lot of filmmakers
roaming the streets in those days looking for something cheap and interesting
to film so, without knowing we were doing it, we inadvertently made some pretty
good Keystone Kops pictures. I’ve got a stack of royalty checks on my desk
right now for work I didn’t really do. I mean, I wasn’t really trying to
entertain anybody. I was just trying, in my own way, to escape.

At one point I managed to get the
elevator to myself and, trying to throw the cops off the scent, I traveled far
into earth’s future, where all was peace and harmony and everyone was perfect
and snotty. I didn’t fit in too well there. They viewed me as some kind of
Neanderthal, because my forehead didn’t weigh 80 pounds like theirs did, so
they chucked me into a cage. I guess they figured I wouldn’t be able to pull
any of my Neanderthal tricks on them from in there. To my surprise, the cops
who had been chasing me were already in the cage, so I guess I hadn’t thrown
them off the scent as completely as I had thought.

We spent four months there, with
our keepers treating us as if we were brutal Neanderthals. We tried to convince
them we were humans of great sophistication and cultural advancement, just like
them, but they weren’t buying it.

In the end we managed to escape by
being brutally Neanderthal and bashing their overdeveloped heads in, getting so
excited while we were doing it that we screamed and jumped around like monkeys.
I’m not proud of that. It kind of makes their point that we were on a lower
level than them mentally.

During our prolonged chase though
time we accidentally altered the chronology of world history a little bit, I’m
embarrassed to report. For example, the Civil War now happened BEFORE the Civil
War. And when the Titanic sank it landed on the Bismarck. With Noah’s Ark on
top of the pile. Don’t ask me how these things are possible. I just wreck
history, I don’t explain it. But I do know that this is what happens when
sophisticated machinery like that is operated by unqualified personnel, like
me.

The final stop in the chase was
back in good old 1941. I jumped out of the elevator, clutching the battered
figurine, and ducked down an alley. Thanks to my familiarity with the period, I
managed to successfully elude their searches by hiding under the Andrews
Sisters. The cops knew I would have to come back to the elevator sooner or
later, so they finally decided to just wait there.

When I did go back to the
elevator, I no longer had the figurine. And the Mark VI was no longer there.
And Dodge and his boys were gone. While the 1941 cops were milling around
trying to figure out why they were all out on the street together, with torn
uniforms and bloody noses and foot long beards, I strolled past them into the
elevator and headed for home.

I arrived safely
back home in my own time, but due to being in a rush to get away from 1941, I
had set some of the dials inaccurately. It was the correct date, but the
location was slightly off. Instead of appearing on the sidewalk near my home, I
appeared on Runway 35E at the airport.

I got out and looked around. It
was going to be a long walk home. I decided to just correct the mistake I had
made when I set the destination dials on the machine. I opened the briefcase
and started fiddling with the dials and punching some buttons.

I guess I hit a wrong button
somewhere and accidentally activated some special defense mechanism, because suddenly
the briefcase started screaming. “Auto-destruct engaged!” it yelled wildly.
“Glue applied to handle! Emitting poison gas! Die! Die! Everybody Die!”

I struggled with the briefcase for
a moment, trying to get the damn thing to let go of me. Then I heard a growing
roar and noticed that a jumbojet was about to land on me. To add to my
problems, the briefcase was emitting noxious gas, ticking like a bomb, and
cursing like a sailor. It was a situation that I had never been in, but I
instinctively knew what to do. When in doubt, start breaking things.

Using all the burly strength at my
command, I snapped off the handle, heaved the remainder of the briefcase as far
out onto the runway as I could, then dove off to one side out of harm’s way.

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?