The Time Machine Did It (13 page)

When I got back to my house I took
the figurine off the mantel and started to go back out. Halfway out the door I
remembered that I probably should check in with Professor Groggins and let him
know that I had kind of bunged up his time machine a little bit, and which
runway he could scrape it off.

I put in a call to him and
sketched out what had happened, trying to make the whole thing sound a little
humorous, so maybe he’d decide he was kind of glad it had turned out the way it
did because of the huge laugh he got out of it.

He didn’t get the humor of the
situation at all. I’ve got to work on my delivery, I guess. Timing is important
too, darnit. Once he’d heard the whole story, the thing that worried him most
was the possibility that I might have done something, maybe something that
seemed inconsequential at the time, that might have altered history.

I admitted that during the police
chase through time I had done a couple of things that I regarded as iffy. “I
married my own mother and ran over myself as a small boy.

“What!?!

“And I also stepped on something
that was trying to evolve into me. But that was much earlier.”

“Good God, man! Do you realize
what this means? It means you were never born! You don’t exist. Nothing you
ever did in your life has happened now.”

“Then how did I run over myself as
a small boy?”

“Uh…”

“And if I don’t exist, who are you
talking to?”

After a moment’s thought he said:
“Look, I can show you the numbers, if you like.”

I like science as much as the next
guy, but this whole topic was starting to bore me. “I don’t feel any different.
What do I care about the paperwork? Anyway, I wrecked a lot more important
stuff than my I.D. cards. Remind me to tell you about Ford’s Theater.”

Before I hung up I asked him to
explain something that was puzzling me. Why was it that, after the past had
been altered, we both still kind of remembered what it had been like before?
Scientifically, how did that work?

Groggins confidently started to
explain this phenomenon, but soon realized he had already gone way past what he
actually knew on the subject, and was now in the magical realm of bullshit. At
that point he stopped trying to explain it and just said he didn’t know. So
don’t ask me how it works. But there’s probably a simple explanation. You can
probably find it in some other book.

A little later, I arrived at the
gutter and handed Mandible the figurine. “Here you go, Chief.”

Mandible delightedly grabbed the
figurine and looked at it. It was a little the worse for wear, but it was his
figurine all right. “I’ve got it! Now everything is back the way it was before
and I’m rich again!”

He looked at the city skyline. All
the museums and libraries were back, but there was something wrong. He couldn’t
identify what it was at first, but then the wind picked up a little bit and the
rags he was wearing flapped in the breeze. He glanced down at his tattered
clothes, then looked at me with a confused expression.

“What trickery is this? The city
is back to the way it was, but I still seem to be poor. How is that possible?”

“You’ll be even poorer when you
pay my bill. My fee is $500 a day, as we discussed when you hired me. And even
though only a couple of weeks have passed for you, I’ve been working on this
case for over two years by my watch.”

I handed him his bill and walked
off. Mandible sat down on a heap of rubbish, took a long pull of some cheap
wine, and started trying to figure out what had happened.

I got into my Rolls
Royce, which was parked in front of the Burly Science Museum, drove past the
Burly Library and the fabulous Burly Convention Center and pulled up to my
office in the Burly Building. It’s located on the corner of Burly and Burly, so
it’s an easy address to remember. All of the parking places in front of the
building were reserved for me, so I could take my pick. Today I decided to park
in the extra big one. I got out of the car, walked past the line of statues of
me and went into the building.

I walked into my office, and
looked around with satisfaction. All the photos and wise sayings I had on the
wall were now framed in 14 carat gold. Neither one of my crappy chairs would
ever fall over again now. I had used some of my vast wealth to get the leg on
that one chair fixed.

My secretary was looking around
the office, frowning, more confused than usual. On her head was a hat that was
completely unknown to her.

“What happened to the office? It’s
different,” she said. “And where did I get this hat?”

I sat back in my chair, confident
that it wouldn’t tip over, and gave her a quick summary of what I’ve told you,
then told her what I hadn’t told Mandible about my last visit to 1941.

I had wanted to use the figurine
to get the city back to the way I remembered it, law abiding and peaceful, with
no corrupt cops chasing me through time, but I didn’t want Tom Mandible to get
off Scot free. So on my last trip to 1941, I took the figurine to my
grandfather and told him it was valuable evidence that he could use to
blackmail the city’s wealthy District Attorney. I said if he used it right he
could make a fortune with it. The only condition was that he had to build
libraries, museums etc, and stick my name prominently on each one.

It took awhile to explain all this
to him, because we Burlys have never been very smart, but he finally got it.
And once he understood the concept, he turned out to be a real first class
blackmailer. He managed to bleed Tom Mandible so dry, that the D.A., infuriated
at the way he was robbed of his ill-gotten gains, clamped down even harder on
crime in the city. So the city ended up becoming even nicer and safer than it
had been before.

Of course, nothing in life works
perfectly. The Burly family was never very good with money, so the bulk of our
family fortune got pissed away in one way or another, a lot of it in trying to
blackmail other public officials with other figurines. But there was still a
comfortable amount left over when I came along.

Elizabeth didn’t believe very much
of this story. It made me sound smart, which she knew I wasn’t. But she liked
the office better. And the hat was okay. So she didn’t press the matter. She
didn’t have time to talk about it anymore today anyway. She had to go home now.
That part in her hair was bothering her again.

I watched her go and got out a
cigar. It’s not often that I do something smart, but it happens sometimes, and
when it does I like to celebrate. I started to light the cigar with a twenty
dollar bill, then changed my mind and lit it with a stamp.

Then I noticed a stack of dust
covered correspondence on my desk that appeared to have been waiting there for
me since 1941. There were overdue hotel bills, thank you notes from my
grandfather and the Andrews Sisters, offers to join the “Wire Recorder Spool Of
The Month Club”
etc.
I threw them all away. Too late
to answer them now.

Then a very old dust-covered
mechanic came into my office. It was that guy who had tried to build a time
machine for me in 1941. I remembered now that I had never paid him. He
remembered it too.

“You owe me 8 bucks,” he said.

He held out a dust covered bill. I
examined it for a moment, then shrugged and paid him. It was only eight
dollars. It would have cost more than that to fight him in court or hire
someone to kill him. We rich guys always have to look at things from the
financial angle. That’s our curse. He took the money and shuffled off, as happy
as a really old guy with eight dollars can be.

Then a representative of our
federal government showed up and presented me with a bill for WWII. I told him
there must be some mistake. This bill couldn’t be for me. This must be one of
those rare instances, that comes along maybe once in a generation, when the
government is full of shit.

He insisted it was a legitimate
obligation, owed by me because of that telegram I hadn’t sent. We did a lot of
back and forth about “what telegram?” “you know what telegram!” for quite a
while – I was starting to have a pretty good time - when I suddenly remembered
what telegram he was talking about.

I had made several attempts during
my stay in 1941 to send telegrams to the future. Every time someone new started
working at the telegraph office, I gave it another try. But nothing ever came
of it. One of the times, an agitated Japanese man was in line behind me. He was
trying to get off an urgent telegram to the Imperial Japanese Fleet. He kept
trying to move in front of me, but every time he did, I just gave him the old
Burly Get-Back-There.

Finally he changed his tactics and
tried to get me to send the message for him. He handed me the scrawled message.
I took it, promised I would send it when I was done with what I was doing,
unless I forgot about it, stuck the message in my pocket and forgot about it.

Now that I remembered the
telegram, I was curious as to what it said. I walked over to a trophy case that
had, among other prized items, a pair of heavily worn trousers labeled “Time
Travel Pants”. I reached in the back pocket, pulled out the yellowed telegram
and read it. It said “Don’t Attack Pearl Harbor”.

I walked back to my desk and
looked over the itemized list of expenses I was being billed for. It said I was
responsible for the loss of 139,000 tanks, 2800 ships, 268,000 airplanes, and
was expected to pay for 60 million funerals.

I put the bill down and shook my
head. “I admit I’m solely to blame for the war in the Pacific, but Hitler
handled the European end of the thing, so he’s at least as responsible for WWII
as I am. Can’t you bill him for some of these expenses?”

The government official shook his
head. “He’s dead.”

“Shit.”

We haggled for awhile, then I
agreed to give them $80 a month until it was all paid off. I figured I got off
easy.

I thought that tied up all the
loose ends until Mandible came in one day with his tramp lawyer. They said they
were suing me. I asked what for? The lawyer said I was liable for changing the
course of human events in a way that was detrimental to his client. They had a
pretty good case, being so right and everything, but I didn’t think the case
would ever get to trial. The tramp life had gotten to them both and pretty soon
they had mostly forgotten about me and were fighting over my cigar butt. I gave
them a bottle of cheap wine, then I waited until they were unconscious and
settled the matter out of court by pushing them out of a window.

There’s not too much left to tell.
Professor Groggins, I’ve heard, is working on a machine that talks about the
weather but doesn’t do anything about it. That will save everybody a lot of
time. At my request, he used his Mark VI time machine to go back in time and
fix up most of the past that I had wrecked. He said there were a couple of
things he couldn’t change back, because I’d just screwed them up too bad. So if
you’re upset that we had a depression in the 1930’s and that Richard Nixon was
elected President twice, instead of being Lou Costello’s partner in the movies.
I guess you can blame me for that.

As for me personally, the only
real change in my life, aside from the increase in my bank account, is that
there are now fourteen of me living around town in different apartments. We
avoid each other when we see each other on the street, maybe just a nod, but
nothing more. It’s a little unnerving, but doesn’t seem to cause any harm
otherwise. Except, of course, that now I’ve got a lot more competition in the
detective business in this town. That’s just what I need at this point.

BOOKS BY

JOHN SWARTZWELDER

THE TIME MACHINE DID IT (2004)

DOUBLE WONDERFUL (2005)

HOW I CONQUERED YOUR PLANET (2006)

THE EXPLODING DETECTIVE (2007)

DEAD MEN SCARE ME STUPID (2008)

EARTH VS. EVERYBODY (2009)

THE LAST DETECTIVE ALIVE (2010)

THE FIFTY FOOT DETECTIVE (Spring 2011)

Copyright © 2002 by John
Swartzwelder

Published by:

Kennydale Books

P.O. Box 3925

Chatsworth, California 91313-3925

All Rights Reserved. No part of
this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the
author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

First Printing June, 2004

ISBN 13 (paperback edition)
978-0-9755799-0-9

ISBN 13 (hardback edition)
978-0-9755799-1-6

ISBN 10 (paperback edition)
0-9755799-0-8

ISBN 10 (hardback edition)
0-9755799-1-6

Library of Congress Catalog Card
Number: 2004093998

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of
America

THE TIME MACHINE DID IT

JOHN SWARTZWELDER

Kennydale Books.

Chatsworth, California