The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder Read Free Book Online Page A

her trainer, when I arrived carrying a bunch of roses
and a box of candy.
    I hadn’t realized I was so
handsome before this, but according to this woman, if I heard her properly, I
was a combination of Gregory Peck. She said she had to have a date with me
right away. Tonight. And she told me to come alone. No cops. Apparently she
felt if policemen were there it would be hard for us to get comfortable.
    Cola took the roses and candy I
had brought her and daintily chucked them onto a huge pile of roses and candy
in the corner. She folded me in her arms and said she couldn’t live without me,
which was confusing because she’d been living without me for about thirty six
years, by my estimate, judging by her teeth. (I forced open her jaws while she
was putting on some music.)
    We sat down on the couch. She held
me close and whispered in my ear how wonderful I was. Since I’m not wonderful,
I was pretty sure this was a trap. So I figured I’d better grope her as much as
I could before they sprung the trap. You’ve got to take what you can get in
this life. I read that in a magazine. So I started smearing kisses on her and
pawing the front of her dress, trying to get my money’s worth before somebody
bashed my head in.
    She kept moaning “Frank!… Frank!…”
and I kept asking “What?… what?…” Suddenly she pulled away.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “I can’t do it. I was supposed to
pepper you with kisses and then knock you on the head with a champagne bucket,
but…”
    “But your better nature
prevailed?”
    “No, you’re just so unattractive
to me. I don’t care if our whole plan falls through. I’m not going to do it.”
    I tried to be helpful. “Maybe if
you thought of someone else?”
    She shook her head. “I’ve thought
of everybody else. Nothing works.”
    I was disappointed that our date
was going to be over so soon. For this I got my hair cut, I thought. But at
least I hadn’t fallen into any kind of trap. At that moment, out of the corner
of my eye, I saw a dark shape rushing towards me. Then fifty more shapes. Then
more fists than you could count, more fists than there are in the rainbow,
started punching the bejesus out of me.
    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