The Time Machine Did It (7 page)

He said he got the time machine
right on the fifth try. The first four didn’t so much travel in time as they
burned down his house. But he said this first version of his teleporter looked
to him like a winner.

Against my better judgment, I let
him talk me into sitting down in his teleporter and giving it a try. But aside
from scorching my clothes and blowing off some of my hair, it didn’t do
anything. He said no problem. He told me to go get some coffee and read a
magazine over and over. He’d have his Teleporter Mark II finished in less than
a year.

I didn’t want to wait that long so
I quit being cute about the whole thing and just launched myself out of a
missile silo.

I’m not very ballistically shaped,
so I only flew about eighty yards before I landed on top of a restaurant.

As I limped home, I saw a long
line of criminals impatiently waiting their turn to get into a photo booth.
That seemed odd to me. Criminals are vain, but not that vain. At the most they
get their pictures taken maybe once a month. And usually they have it done at
the police station where it’s free. While I was puzzling about this, the booth
shimmered and went out of focus briefly, then the door opened and a crook came
out carrying some loot and a briefcase. He handed the briefcase to the next
crook, who went inside and the booth started shimmering and going out of focus
again. I figured I knew what was going on. I had heard about this.

As I watched, one criminal
apparently traveled into the future, because he came out of the booth with a
silver foil suit, an overdeveloped forehead, and 8000 dollars in currency that
was no good here. He had a futuristic ray gun, which he tried out on a
pedestrian, instantly blasting him into fragments. Everyone laughed except the
pedestrian. And I didn’t laugh for long. It’s actually not very funny, when you
think about it. The next crook came out of the booth dragging a bucket full of
Crown Jewels. Hey, I thought, these guys are doing all right.

I wanted to keep an eye on all
this, but I didn’t want to attract attention, so I pretended to be reading a
newspaper. My act looked even more convincing when a newspaper blew up against
my leg which I then used as a prop. It was evidently a newspaper brought back
by one of the crooks from a different time period. It said it was from the year
2156 and the headline was “Apes Become Our Masters”. The subhead was “Hollywood
Right Again.” And inside there was an editorial blasting the whole deal.
Apparently, the apes took over after a series of increasingly violent peace
demonstrations led to our unspeakably savage and bloody Universal Brotherhood
and Love Thy Neighbor Wars.

I did a little of the crossword
puzzle, (most of the answers were “Banana” or “Pretty Banana”, so it was fairly
easy) then looked up in time to see the last of the criminals coming out of the
photo booth. Everyone else had had their turn and gone away with their spoils.
This last one came out struggling under the weight of a small printing press
that had “If Found Return To Johannes Gutenberg, 15th Century” painted on it.

The criminal was having trouble
carrying both the printing press and the briefcase, so he just tossed the
briefcase off to one side. It landed on the hood of a parked car. This was
exactly the sort of careless behavior that Groggins had been complaining about,
and that I had been waiting for.

I watched the criminal lug his
burden into the nearest pawnshop, which already had Watt’s Steam Engine and
George Washington’s face in the window. Then I sprinted across the street,
grabbed the briefcase off the hood of the car and made a beeline for my office.

I sat down at my
desk with a small, but measurable, and statistically significant, feeling of
accomplishment. I hadn’t solved the case I was working on, I had had my brains
beaten out more times than I could remember, and I hadn’t made any money in a
month, but at least I got this damn thing. “I’ve got you anyway, PeeWee”, I
thought. You’ve got to take pleasure in whatever little triumphs you can in
this life. Somebody on a bus told me that.

I was curious about what the time
machine looked like, so I opened the briefcase. Inside was a very sophisticated
looking machine that looked like a cross between a computer and something else,
maybe another computer. I’m not sure what it was a cross between, but it sure
looked like more than just one thing to me.

I fiddled with it a little bit, on
the off chance that I might know what I was doing, but I didn’t, and nothing
happened. Then I started punching buttons at random, mostly just to have
something to do. I was whistling and looking out the window as he punched them.

At some point I accidentally
activated the machine and it started creating all kinds of time anomalies and
time paradoxes. Those things that Groggins was worried about.

Somehow the time machine, as it
vibrated across my desk, was moving backwards and forwards slightly in time and
taking me with it. So, without meaning to, I was making copies of myself. There
was the Me From A Minute Ago, the Me From A Minute From Now, the Me That Was
Trying To Turn Off The Time Machine, the Me That Was Starting To Get Pissed,
Me’s all over the place. More Me’s than were strictly necessary, or than you
could ever use. I was also duplicating a gas bill that was on the desk near the
machine.

After an hour or so, I had 3000
gas bills on my desk, and I was locking future and past versions of myself in
the closet. “I’ll let you all out when I get this sorted out,” I told them.
Another Me appeared, hand outstretched to shake, and I shoved him in the closet
too.

I had to stop this or pretty soon
I would need to rent a bigger office. I kept punching different buttons,
turning the machine on an off, banging it on the table, and so on, but nothing
worked.

I looked up at the clock on the
wall. It was running in all sorts of directions, directions nobody ever heard
of. Time was all screwed up. I made one last attempt to fix the machine. I got
out my screwdriver and made a needlepoint adjustment to the biggest and
reddest, and therefore most important looking, valve. Then I stepped back to
see if that had solved the problem, bumping into three more Me’s who were
dancing by waving straw hats. I picked up the time machine, tossed it in the
corner and walked out. I didn’t give a damn anymore.

I went down to the bar on the
ground floor to drink. I wasn’t getting paid enough to sort all this out. It
wasn’t my job to make the universe work right. If it was my job, where was my
uniform? See what I mean? It didn’t figure. I ordered half a dozen bourbons.
That’s how to deal with things you don’t understand. Drown them. There were
five more of me at the bar. We didn’t look at each other.

After awhile I calmed down and
returned to my office. I called up the Civil Defense Shelter and asked to talk
to Groggins. They asked how I got out. They thought I was still in there.

“Well I’m not,” I told them.

“Your dinner’s getting cold.”

“I don’t care. Let me talk to the
professor.”

They connected me and, with the
criminals craftily listening in on the extension, I explained to Professor
Groggins what I had inadvertently done. He was concerned about all the time
paradoxes I had created. He warned me to be careful. I said it was a little
late for careful. What we needed now was damage control, some story we could
give to the press, and a fall guy.

While Groggins was cussing me out
and telling me a lot of things about my character that I already knew, and if
you really want to bore me that’s the way to do it, I noticed about a dozen
copies of me were next to the phone trying to listen in.

One of them said: “What is he
saying? Is it about us?”

“Piss off,” I told them. They
looked stunned, then filed out of the office with identical hurt expressions on
their faces. Hey, I can’t be nice to everybody.

I told Groggins to relax. This
could all be fixed easily enough.

“Just tell me how to use the
machine. I’ll go back in time a couple of minutes and sort this all out. I’ve
got to at least get rid of some of these gas bills. So how do you operate this
thing?”

A criminal’s voice came over the
phone. “First you…“ Then he stopped talking immediately, as if he had been told
to shut up by some friends.

“What was that?” asked Groggins.

“I don’t know. Sounded like
someone telling someone else to shutup.”

We listened to see if we could
hear anything more, but aside from some heavy breathing, and a couple more
shutups, the line was quiet. Groggins gave me a quick tutorial in the use of
the machine; which buttons to push, how to set the dials, which fingers to
cross, and so on.

“Remember to get in a phone booth
or some similar confined space so you won’t take things from the present back
in time with you. It could have unforeseen consequences.

“I’m only going back a couple of
minutes.”

“Yes, but…”

I hung up and started setting the
dials the way he had said to set them. Unfortunately I had to hurry because the
police were banging on my door demanding entrance and the surrender of the time
machine. I didn’t know how they found out that I had it. Maybe one of those
criminals had blabbed it. I saw Dodge’s foot come through the bottom of the
door, then his forehead come through the middle of the door. I didn’t have much
time.

I quickly punched in some numbers,
then pressed the button. My office suddenly looked all shimmery and out of
focus. I rubbed my eyes, which made everything more out of focus, so I stopped
doing that. I was going back in time all right. The ride was pretty bumpy at
first, until I stopped shaking the briefcase. I have these nervous habits.

The machine had a speaker and a
voice kept coming out of it yelling frantically “you are going back in time!
back in time! back in time!” until I found the button to turn the speaker off.

After awhile I was pretty sure I
was going a lot farther back than I’d intended, but I didn’t know enough about
the machine to chance stopping it mid-trip. I figured wherever I ended up, I
would just come right back. No problem. Who could stop me? No one could, that’s
who could. I was the Master Of Space And Time. Ha-ha.

When the world around me stopped
shimmering and sharpened into focus again I figured my trip was over. That
feeling was confirmed when the time machine stopped vibrating and printed out
an invoice. I took a look at the bill and then tore it up. I’m not going to pay
that. I looked around. I was still in my office, but it looked a lot newer.
Also it was full of typists banging away on manual typewriters. They stopped
typing for a moment and stared at me, then resumed their work. I didn’t
remember having all those typists. You’d think I’d remember something like
that. I looked at the door. It said “International Radium Watch Dial &
Asbestos Corporation. America’s Fastest Growing Company.” Never heard of it.
Sounded like I should buy some stock in it though.

My desk had been moved to a
different spot in my office and my 3000 gas bills, which had traveled back in
time with me, were now in a pile on the floor. I guessed that was what Groggins
was talking about, those “unforeseen consequences”. I didn’t see what was so
terrible about it. The gas bills were just as likely to get paid on the floor
as they were on my desk. I left them there. Later I asked him if this is what
he had meant by “unforeseen consequences” and he said “yes”.

I walked out of the office and
took the elevator down to the street. The same guy was running the elevator,
but instead of being an old geezer he was four years old. That gave me an
uncomfortable feeling.

When I walked out of the building,
I saw that the street was filled with old-fashioned cars and equally
old-fashioned people. A calendar boy came by.

“Calendars!” he called. “Get your
current calendars!”

I flagged him down. “Hey calendar
boy!”

I bought the least expensive
calendar he had - the pictures were disturbing and made you vaguely ill, hence
the bargain price - and looked at the year. It said it was 1941. I didn’t
believe it. I turned to the month of February. It was 1941 on that page too.

I started walking down the street,
still half checking out the calendar pages and accidentally bumped into Joe
Dimaggio and Whirlaway. They were both from 1941, I remembered. That looked
like confirmation, but I still couldn’t really believe it.

So I spent the next half hour
walking around asking people what year it was, and they kept telling me, and I
kept saying “get outta here! It is not!” but they kept insisting it was.

I walked up to some people who
were filming a movie on the street and asked Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey
Bogart what year it was and they both confirmed the date I had been told
before. When I was leaving, shaking my head with amazement, I heard the director
say: “Wait, maybe we should leave it in. Maybe it’s great.” But then some other
guy said: “Naw, it stinks”. And they started re-shooting the scene.

I went back up to my office and
got there just in time to see the briefcase shimmer and then fade away. I had
forgotten to set the emergency brake as I was carefully warned to do by
Professor Groggins about fifty times. If you don’t set the emergency brake, he
warned me fifty times, the machine will return to its default time period after
awhile. I nodded fifty times while he was saying this, but when the time came
to actually set the emergency brake, I forgot. So I guess I dropped the ball
there.

I stood around for a moment,
feeling the empty air where the time machine had been. I waited patiently for
it to come back, but, to make a long story short, it didn’t. That meant I was
stuck here more than half a century from home, with no way to get back. I
didn’t like the sound of that.