The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder Page B

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.”
    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