Free The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder

to me that a person in my situation
needed the help of a scientist. Since I didn’t have access to Professor
Groggins, I went to a nearby physics laboratory and asked to talk to the guy
with the biggest brain. There was a whispered conference amongst the
physicists, tape measures, skull saws, and forceps were brought out, then
finally one of them came forward to talk to me with a slight smirk on his face.
    I outlined my problem for him, as
best as I knew how. We quickly got into a shouting match, with him saying time
travel couldn’t be done, and me saying then explain my presence here asshole.
So he said make me. And I said I sure would in just about a minute. Then he
punched me in the stomach. When I got my breath back, we agreed to disagree,
and I left. So much for the scientific approach.
    I knew at the time that it didn’t make
a lot of sense, but I was getting kind of desperate and I needed to talk to
Professor Groggins, so I went to a telegraph office with the idea of sending a
telegram to 2003. I figured the worst that could happen would be I’d be out a
couple of bucks and the rest of the telegram sending public would give me the
horselaugh. Which is what happened, so I was right in a way. Score one for me.
    The people behind the counter
didn’t know what I was talking about at first. And they still didn’t know what
I was talking about a couple of hours later. They said they didn’t know where
to send my telegram.
    While I was trying to get them to
give it a try anyway - what the heck, I pointed out - the line behind me got
really long and angry. It has always amazed me how angry people can get at my
stupidity. How do they think I feel? They only have to be around me a couple of
hours at a time. I’ve got me all day.
    In the end, they flatly refused to
send my telegram. I told them I was going to complain to somebody and they said
that’s what they’d do, so we left it like that.
    While I was fuming outside of the
telegraph office, debating whether or not to go back in and try it again, maybe
this time claiming I had a gun, or claiming that I had had a gun the last time,
but didn’t now, I suddenly remembered the long and tedious explanations I had
received from Professor Groggins about how the time machine worked. This opened
up a whole new line of thought. Maybe I could describe the time machine well
enough so that a local artisan here in this time period could build one for me.
    I walked to a nearby gas station
and discussed the matter with a likely looking mechanic. I had made a crude
drawing of the briefcase and its contents. I showed it to the mechanic and
asked him if he could build it.
    “It’s shaped like a briefcase,” I
told him, “but that’s only part of the story. It’s also got all sorts of wheels
and blinking lights and things inside. As illustrated here. Because it’s a time
machine as well as a briefcase. It’s two things in one.”
    He looked my drawing over and
frowned. “Well I can build the briefcase easy enough, but I can only guess
about what to put inside it. Some of these shapes you’ve drawn don’t exist in
nature.”
    “Do the best you can,” I told him.
“That’s all anyone can ask.”
    With me looking over his shoulder
and kind of rooting him on and shouting words of encouragement, and reminding
him to hurry up, he fashioned something that looked a lot like my time machine.
It had the same kind of blinking lights, dials to indicate the passage of years
and so on. I didn’t know how tricky stuff like this was, but I figured if the
space/time continuum wasn’t paying much attention today, if it was looking out
the window or chatting on the phone with the fourth dimension or something, this
might work.
    I took the time machine outside,
found a phone booth and got inside. Normally at this point I would have set the
dials for September 14th, 2003, but this version didn’t have dials like that.
There was just a space for me to write the date in with a grease