The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder

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