The Time Machine Did It (6 page)

When I woke up I was being dragged
by my feet down a long cement corridor, through metal doors, then down more
corridors, always winding farther down under the street. It’s embarrassing
being dragged like that. And yes, it scrapes your head up pretty good too. So
that makes two things wrong with it. It wasn’t the best situation to find
yourself in, of an evening, but I tried to stay upbeat and make the best of it.
I sang a few songs, made plans for what I was going to do tomorrow, if there
was a tomorrow, waved to the armed guards in the corridor
etc.

I asked one of the armed guards if
he could help me out. I said there was some guy dragging me by the feet. That
guy with the crew cut. I suggested that there might be a few bucks in it for
him if he would join the Burly Team. He didn’t answer. Probably thinking about
something else.

I was dragged into a big room
which, I was told used to be part of our city’s Civil Defense system, but was
now owned by the Pellagra Crime Family. The city’s rationale for selling their
Civil Defense System was that it would save taxpayers x amount of dollars a
year – they never got more specific than that - and was no longer needed.
Though they admitted that in the unlikely event of a nuclear attack, the public
would probably have to go screw themselves, they stressed that this was a worse
case scenario.

The big room I was in was the
command center, which had all sorts of viewer screens and consoles and scary
looking launch buttons, so you could conduct an entire nuclear war from in
there if you wanted to. Pretty slick, I thought. Wish I had one of these.

The crook who had been dragging me
said they had gotten tired of trying to kill me. It was too hard, for some
reason. They didn’t know why. I started telling him about my protective layer
of fat, but he told me to shutup. He said they’d run out of ideas, so they just
decided to just toss me down here.

“Why don’t you kill me now? While
I’m upside down?” I said. I like pointing out to criminals when they’re being
inconsistent or their reasoning has some stupid flaw. But he just gave me a
look that seemed to say I should mind my own business. Then he actually said I
should mind my own business. So that’s what that look meant, all right.

He told me the crooks used this
place for more than just a dumping ground for undesirables. He said they also
had a lot of food stored here in case there was ever a nuclear war. That way
they could insure that in the future there would still be criminals.

He said they even had a selective
breeding program going on down here, trying to breed the perfect criminal by
crossing themselves with gorgeous showgirls. I asked how the gorgeous showgirl
part helps make the criminal.

“Wouldn’t it be better to have the
women be scrawny and beady-eyed?” I ventured. “Maybe with the face of a rat?”

“Hey, you have your selective
breeding program, we’ll have ours.”

While he was untying my hands,
straightening my jacket and combing my hair, I pointed out that this is where
the bad guys always make their big mistake, giving the good guy, that’s me in
this instance, all the information he needs to destroy them, letting him in on
all their most criminal secrets.

“When I escape from your clutches,
you’re screwed,” I told him.

I waited for him to blab some
secrets to me, but he just left and slammed the door. So I figured now probably
wasn’t the time. He’d tell me later, most likely. And then he would be screwed.
I looked around. I wasn’t alone.

There were about two dozen other
prisoners in the huge room. They were looking at me curiously, but also trying
to cover as much of the floor with their bodies as they could so as to lay
claim to that much space. Among them I recognized a couple of honest
politicians and several honest cops I’d seen around who were plainly regretting
their choice of sides by now.

Then I saw a geeky old guy with
glasses, wearing a smock that had “Professor Groggins” embroidered above the
pocket. I was getting sick of everybody I met being named Professor Groggins,
but something told me this was the real Professor Groggins. And that something
was him.

“I am the real
Professor Groggins,” he said.

I made him show me three pieces of
I.D. before I would let him say anything more. Then I asked him what he was
doing here.

He told me that the crooks had
broken into his home during a routine burglary, and had stolen everything from
his lab that had looked like it was valuable, including the time machine he had
invented. After they had found out the time machine really worked, they came
back and stole Groggins himself so he could invent more useful devices for
them.

“They’ve kept me here for who
knows how long…”

“Two weeks,” I said.

“I’ve completely lost track of
time.”

“Two weeks.”

“Bush was president when they put
me in here.”

“Two weeks ago.”

He complained about the treatment
he’d received since he had arrived, especially the Sunday Brunch, which he felt
was uninspired, and all the evil laughing in this place was keeping him awake
at night. He probably would have kept complaining indefinitely, but I reminded
him that I didn’t work there, and if I did work there I probably wouldn’t be
working in the Complaints Department. I’d more likely have some kind of lifting
job.

I asked him what he had invented
for them so far. He said nothing had been completed yet, but they had him
working on a machine that fixes horse races so the dishonest horse wins every
time, a machine that makes their enemies nine feet tall, so they can see them
coming, and a milk-shake machine. “I just bought them one of those,” he said.

Then Groggins told me about the
time machine; what it looked like, how it worked, and so on. After 35 or 36
hours of explanation I figured I understood what the thing was. “A briefcase,”
I said.

“Yes.”

I won’t bore you with the
technical aspects of the machine, because, like me, you’re probably too stupid
to understand most of it. You’re good looking though. Damn good looking. Don’t
forget that. But basically the way it worked was this: the time mechanism
itself was contained in an ordinary businessman’s briefcase. All you had to do
was open the briefcase, turn the machine on, fast forward past the welcoming
messages and the advertisements for other of Groggins’ inventions, set the
dials for the year you wanted to travel to, then wait to be blasted into the
void.

When the machine made a connection
with another time period, a five foot square opening opened up in both the
current time period and the period you were going to. This hole closed back up
when your journey was complete. While the hole was open, people in both time
periods could look in and see what was going on in the other time period and
shout abuse at each other. “1958 Sucks! 1743 Rules!”, that sort of thing.

Only the briefcase was needed to
travel through this hole, but Groggins said you should always remember to duck
into a phone booth, or an elevator or some other small walled-in space before
turning on the machine.

“You want to be in an enclosed
space when you travel through time. Otherwise you’ll be hit by rocks, bottles
and other debris,” he said.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s a jealousy
thing probably, resentment. Who knows why people throw things?”

I more or less understood the
science of the thing now, but I still couldn’t figure out what crooks would
want with a time machine. What would they use it for? Historical research? That
seemed pretty unlikely to me. Don’t make me laugh. I mean, who are they trying
to fool? This is bullshit. Groggins explained that if you’re a criminal, having
mastery over time is very useful in a number of ways.

“It’s good for extremely quick
getaways, for example,” he said. “One second after committing a crime you can
be 1000 miles and 4 years away. And it can help you establish a terrific alibi.
You can rob a bank in broad daylight, writing your name all over all the people
you’ve just robbed, then prove conclusively that you were in five other places
when the robbery occurred. No one with an alibi like that has ever been
convicted in the United States. You can also go back in time and steal things
and then return to the present with no danger of being prosecuted. Because the
statute of limitations will have run out on the crime. I understand they’ve
already stripped 1995 of every penny it had. And you can go back in time and
win bar bets from people in the past who don’t know, for example, that Lincoln
is about to be assassinated. That’s why Lincoln died broke. His estate had to
pay out millions to gamblers. It was his own fault. He should have smelled
something fishy with all those bets going down on Friday Apil 14th. He should
have laid some of the bets off.”

After hearing all this I agreed
that a time machine could be very useful to a criminal. I also agreed that
Lincoln should have stuck to politics.

Then I suggested Groggins must be
pretty upset that the criminals were using his wonderful machine for evil
purposes. He said not really. Some of the things he’d planned on using it for
were kind of evil too. What irritated him was that they weren’t being more
careful with it. They left it in cloakrooms, in the back seats of taxicabs,
tossed it in dumpsters, and so on. Sheer carelessness. Sometimes it would be
days before it turned up in some lost and found somewhere. They had no respect
for the machine at all.

“And they exercise no care when
they’re time traveling,” he said. “They could inadvertently cause all sorts of
time paradoxes and incongruities in the space/time continuum.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

He went on and on about how
delicate space and time was, but frankly I didn’t buy it. I mean, if you think
it’s so easy to change the course of world events, try it. You don’t need a
time machine. You’re already living in somebody’s past and somebody else’s
future. Just step on a bug or something and see what that gets you. See if now
you were never born, or suddenly now there’s fifty Hitlers in your bathroom,
crapping all over everything. It ain’t going to happen. Anyway, that’s what I
figured.

Now that I knew what the time
machine looked like, all I had to do was escape and find it. Then I could
probably take the rest of the day off.

It was harder to
break out of that place than I thought it would be. Now I know how nuclear
bombs feel. Those walls are thick. Damn thick. The old Burly Shove didn’t work
at all. Neither did the Burly Nose Ram. So I decided to get tricky.

First I tried going through the
ventilation duct, but I just ended up inside a huge air conditioner. I’m told
they could hear my screams all over the building, coming out of all those
little vents, and that many people in the building found this annoying. A
number of them had to turn their TVs up. I try to keep it down in situations
like that, but sometimes you just can’t.

Then I convinced all the other
prisoners to help me build a big fire, explaining that we would all be able to
escape when the criminals smelled the smoke, panicked, and opened the door. I
forgot how airtight those Civil Defense places are. Nobody smelled any smoke
except us. And we smelled it too well.

The other prisoners didn’t have
anything else to put out the fire with, so they used me. Then they stubbed me
out and tossed me in the corner. That’s what you get for trying to be a leader.
Sometimes I don’t know why we leaders bother.

By this time I was pretty much out
of escape ideas. That’s the way it usually is with me. Once I’ve climbed into
something and set fire to something else, I’m done. I always read about people
in these situations suddenly saying “I’ve got a plan”. And they do! And it’s
great! Where do they get all these plans, that’s what I want to know. I never
have any plans. And why didn’t they think of a plan before, so they wouldn’t be
in this fix? I don’t get it.

I checked with Groggins to see if
he could think of anything. Maybe he was one of those guys with all the plans.
To my amazement, he not only had a plan, he already had an escape device built.
I was impressed. This was just outstanding.

The crooks had set up a small lab
down there for Groggins to work on inventions for them. In his spare time he
had been secretly working on an escape device for himself. It was a teleporting
machine like they have in Star Trek. In fact, he said he got the idea and the
design by watching an episode of Star Trek. He said he did most of his research
in this way - by reading science fiction books and watching monster movies, and
so on. I looked at him like he was nuts. He noticed the look and immediately
got defensive.

“I realize my methods are
unconventional. Some people think I’m mad. But you don’t, do you?”

“Sure.”

He felt I might not be looking at
the thing from the right angle. “I might just be ahead of my time. People often
mistake genius for insanity. That might be what’s happening here.”

“You’re the screwiest guy I’ve
ever met.”

He decided I didn’t fully
understand how his technique worked. That was the problem. He took a moment to
explain.

“All the real worthwhile
inventions have already been thought of by hack science fiction writers,” he
informed me. “I’m surprised no one has actually sat down and tried to build any
of the stuff they write about. A lot of it is really easy to make.
Disintegrating rays, invisibility potions, time machines; the hard thing isn’t
developing these inventions, it’s coming up with the concept in the first
place. The hack writers of the world are the real geniuses. But they’re bad
businessmen. They think up the idea, figure out how the machine would have to
work, then sell the whole concept to whoever wants it for a few dollars. Plus
they give you an exciting story too. All the inventor has to do is experiment
around to find the missing pieces of the puzzle. And if you steal one of their
ideas and make a fortune off it they’re completely happy and swagger around
saying they “forsaw it”. If they’re satisfied with that, fine. I wouldn’t be.
I’d be suing everybody’s asses off.”