Don't Mess with Time Travel

Downtrodden and disregarded throughout his life, Percy never was given the opportunity to realize his potential - that is, until he completes a makeshift time machine out of old kitchen appliances.

A bottle of vodka is not, under normal circumstances, the ideal catalyst for invention.  People tend to lack the mental sharpness required to keep their eyes open when they drain the first bottle.  This can be a good thing as it prevents further bottles from being located and uncapped.

It is fortunate then, that the Device in question had been completed by a sober fellow shortly after his crime drama had ended with a cliff hanger.  Percy was not fond of cliff hangers.  They kept him more awake at night than his wife’s snoring.  He had lain on the hard mattress for forty-seven minutes before throwing off the covers and grumpily descending the steps to the basement.  (His wife had grumpily got out of bed to retrieve the covers). 

Ablaze with creative energy, Percy had performed the finishing touches on his Device.  The he had stretched, spilled a cup of coffee, fallen in to the Device and lived his final days in a cave in the Stone Age.

His wife barely registered his absence and thought he must have got lost on the way home from the pub.  This is not, was not, an uncommon occurrence.

Three of his colleagues, befuddled at his absence, resolved to trek the perilous  journey to his house and query his whereabouts.  It was his turn to pay for a round of drinks, after all, and that sort of matter was serious indeed.

They ambled to the house, hammered on the door, shot Percy’s wife a beery grin and mumbled something about the basement.  Percy tended to spend his days in the basement, they reasoned, and it might be that he had gotten lost down there.  He also kept a stash of liquor locked away in a cabinet but the trio thought it best not to mention that.

The drunken colleagues did not find Percy.  Instead, they stumbled across Percy’s baffling collection of tubes and wiring hooked up to no less than three microwaves, a toaster, one laptop, a coffee machine and a box-shaped thing covered in blinking lights. 

The coffee machine, it turned out, was just for making coffee.

Concluding that Percy had most likely defected to the Hare and Hound to get out of buying the drinks, the colleagues left the basement. They left the house, turned around, entered the basement, swiped a bottle of liquor, left the house again and stumbled into the heretic pub.  There made polite inquiry about Percy’s whereabouts.  Judging by the reactions it would seem that they had not been as polite as intended.  They conferred among themselves and made the rational decision to depart forever.

                When Percy had not been seen nor heard from for days, the trio made another basement trip, minus beery grins.  It was not that they had thought to go at the task with sober heads, but rather that they had all run out of money.  The location of Percy was all the more important. 

Searching the damp room they found a loosely-scratched collection of notes that instructed on how to work the time machine, a spilt cup of coffee and an unopened bottle of vodka.  The vodka was shared out amid discussions of what to do with the Device.

                Unfortunately for the men, the vodka was not vodka, but embalming fluid in a vodka bottle.  Alongside his gentle hobby of tinkering with the fabric of existence, Percy had been an avid admirer of dead, stuffed animals.  He was quite taken to stuffing them himself.  Once they were dead, of course.  Then again, he had never tried to stuff a live animal.

His colleagues wretched and coughed.  One of them fell into the machine, then died unceremoniously in the midst of the French Revolution.  Percy’s wife found the other two and was quite unamused at the ruckus. The noise had been diverting her attention from Countdown and she did not approve. 

Through hoarse, muffled screams the woman had been persuaded to call an ambulance.  Just that one time.  The next she swore she would not be so forgiving, though that did not matter to the two men, who passed away in intensive care. 

On the off-chance you were wondering, this is not their story.

It is the story of how, following a series of curious events involving the deceased persons, the inability of the secret service to find anything meaningful to do, and a particularly down-on-his-luck private investigator, the Device would be transported to a top-secret location in a field outside Oxford. 

The location was promptly moved when it turned out that incorrect paperwork had resulted in the wrong field being chosen and a bewildered farmer had waved a shotgun at the poachers on his land.

A more secretive top-secret location was agreed upon and somebody lost their job for the ineptitude.

In a different field outside Oxford, one surrounded by trees and hedgerows and one lacking irritable country folk, a shack was erected with a staircase that delved deeply below the earth.  The bunker it lead into was split into several rooms.  The largest contained the Device itself, while the two remaining rooms comprised a lavatory and a room for the paperwork.  

The aforementioned investigator was Mr. Hawkins, who had been offered the task of examining the Device for a tidy sum of money.  Why the secret service had chosen him for their errand nobody could tell.  He liked to think it was due to his excellent and professional résumé.  In reality, the same calibre of mishap that had settled on the wrong location had, in fact, settled on the wrong Mr. Hawkins. 

He was provided with a clerk (who stressed that he was not a secretary), one man that would watch the bunker’s entrance and two men from the army that would assist him as he saw fit.  And so, Mr. Hawkins proceeded with his investigation.  After introducing himself to the staff and commanding the clerk not to record anything, he and the two men from the army poked and prodded at the Device to see what would happen.  The clerk, meanwhile, sat in the paperwork room and wondered what he was being paid for.

Foresight or good fortune had led Old Percy to scribble down a handful of notes into a personal journal.  The journal acted as a sort of manual with crude descriptions and diagrams showing how to work the device.  Mr. Hawkins’ first attempt to get it working yielded a steamy cup of coffee.

It would not be until his ninth attempt that Mr. Hawkins would meet with success.  The clerks' stables were beamed back in time to the Cretaceous period.  Aloud Mr. Hawkins asked whether a t-rex could manipulate such a tiny item.  To himself the clerk wondered why his stationary kept vanishing.

To test the validity of his findings Mr. Hawkins opted to send man back in time and change a well-documented historic event.  That would earn him his fee.

“You.  What’s your name?” he jabbed a finger at the fubsier of the two men from the army.

“Private Salmer, Sa,” the man replied.

“Okay, Salmer.  This is what I want you to do…Good god, man, have you been at the drink?” Mr. Hawkins caught a whiff of Salmer’s odour now that he focused on the man.

“No, Sa.”

“He always smells like that, sir.  Runs in the family, it does,” the second man chipped in.  Mr. Hawkins asked for the second man’s name.

“Private Endrick, sir,” he said.  Mr. Hawkins wondered why they both insisted on calling him ‘sir’, but he liked it and did not challenge the formality.

“Right.  Salmer-“

“Sa,” the man saluted, quivery on his feet.

“Uh, yes.  You. I want you to stand on that panel, there,” he pointed at a two-foot-by-two-foot metal piece that lay next to the Device, wired to it haphazardly.   Mr. Hawkins was following a quasi-step-by-step guide on how to send somebody back in time, courtesy of one departed inventor.  Salmer strolled triumphantly to the panel and stood astute atop it.  It wobbled under his weight.

“I am sending you back one hundred years, to 1912.  You will be aboard the Titanic.”  Salmer gulped.

“I would rather not, Sa.”  Mr. Hawkins was thrown for a second.

“Why ever not?”

“It sank, Sa.” Salmer said.

“Well, yes, I know that.  You’re going to stop it from sinking.”  Salmer clicked his tongue.

“Wouldn’t know anything about boats, Sa.  More of a land person meself.”  Mr. Hawkins blinked.

“You don’t have to pilot the damn thing.  Just…make sure it misses the iceberg that drowned it.  I don’t know, tell somebody to change course.  Improvise, man.”

“Yessa.”  Salmer saluted a bit too quickly and slapped his forehead.  He stood at attention for the half minute it took Mr. Hawkins to puzzle out the minute workings of the device and input the coordinates.  It was the most still he had been all day.  Moments later there was a zap and a flash of light.  A microwave dinged, and Salmer had vanished, leaving a faint trail of steam where he had been standing.

The room was quiet and smelled faintly of antiseptic.  Endrick looked at Mr. Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins looked at the metal plate.  The Clerk came in, and looked at Endrick.

"Would either of you chaps care for some tea?” He had found something useful to do.  Both chaps conceded that, yes, they would care for a cup.  The clerk disappeared and the steady hum of the kettle rose from the bathroom.  Mr. Hawkins called out through the closed door.

“Are you boiling water in the toilet?” he said.

“…Yes.”  Damp concrete muffled the response.

“Why?”

“It’s the only room with a plug socket,” came the reply.  Mr. Hawkins looked from the first, to the second, to the third unused outlet in the room.  Perhaps it would be best to keep the clerk from duties with greater responsibility.  He took a seat, gestured for Endrick to do the same, and waited for the tea.

It was beige and sugarless.  The milk came from little plastic packets and made the tea taste of polystyrene.  What was the point of tea without sugar?  Mr. Hawkins sipped at the too-hot liquid and eyed Endrick, who saw no reason to complain.  Endrick caught his gaze, looked away, then looked at Mr. Hawkins, then looked away again awkwardly.  He was not a particularly talkative fellow.

Mr. Hawkins pondered what to do.  He sent Endrick to check on the guard at the top of the staircase, more to seem important than for any particular reason.  The bunker opened with a whine and shut again with a hiss.  He counted the fading clangs on the staircase until they were too quiet for him to hear. 

The clerk was sat, feet on his desk, consumed by a book.  Mr. Hawkins did not knock as he pushed the door open but left when it became plain that the clerk was more interested in his book than idle conversation.  He slouched back into his chair in the main room with a sulk.  Salmer would not return for an hour or so.  The Device would see to that, and would bring him back after the predetermined measure of time had passed.  It seemed odd that Salmer would not be brought back to the time he had left. 

During his bored skulk, Mr. Hawkins had an idea.

He stepped onto the metallic plate, input the right information, and transported himself one hour into the future.

The sensation of moving through time was not unlike the sensation of regurgitating one’s dinner through ones’ the eye sockets.  The room exploded in a dizzying array of light as Mr. Hawkins’ brain tried to chew itself maniacally.

He stepped off the plate and his brain stopped gnawing.  The room was as it had been, except for one small change"the tea, which had cooled.  Salmer was nowhere to be seen.  Mr. Hawkins could hear a dull thudding noise as his senses realigned themselves.  He oriented his hearing, strolled to the entrance and heaved the metal door backwards.

“Thank you, sir,” Endrick said, shivering as he stepped inside.

“How long have you been out there?” Mr. Hawkins asked.

“About an hour by my watch, sir.” Endrick said.

“And you didn’t think to ask the guard to let you in?”

“I did, sir.”

“Then why didn’t he let you inside?”

“Because he isn’t there, sir.”  Mr. Hawkins rubbed his eyes and grunted.  He looked the chap up and down.

“And why are you wet, Endrick?  We’re underground.”  A small puddle had formed at the man’s feet.

“I tried to find a way into town, sir.  Then the heavens opened and it started raining, it did.”

“Of course it did,” Mr. Hawkins whispered.  “Get yourself warmed up, then.”

“Thank you, sir.” Endrick skipped into the lavatory to put the kettle on.  Meanwhile, Mr. Hawkins sought a word with the clerk.  He poked his head around the door, yelling at the man before he was in sight.

“...open the door?  Did you think the banging was coming from a bloody owl?!”  It occurred to Mr. Hawkins that owls were not subterranean creatures.  He ignored that fact.

“Hmm?” the clerk removed an earphone and looked up from his reading.  Mr. Hawkins humped and slammed the door, but it was soft plastic and did not make a particularly loud statement.  The clerk returned to his book.

Mr. Hawkins slumped in an armchair.  Endrick entered, glued to a hot cup.  Not literally; he hadn’t glued himself to anything in over six weeks.  (Endrick had ran out of superglue six weeks ago.)

The man left a trail of droplets wherever he went, which was everywhere, for he could not stand in one spot.  All a sudden the panel rattled and buzzed and flashed and Salmer appeared standing on it.  Mr. Hawkins nestled a chin on a hand and spoke at the floor grumpily.  He was in the bunker of idiots.

“The ship sank, I take it.”

“ Yessa….How did you know, Sa?”

“No reason.  Get yourself dry, private.”

“Yessa.”  Salmer waddled off into the bathroom.  He waddled back moments later.

“We have no towels, Sa.”  Mr. Hawkins did not shift his gaze from the concrete.

“Funny, that,” he said.

“Permission to go into town to get-“

“Salmer.”

“Yessa.”

“It is the middle of the night.”

“I know, Sa.”

“Who is going to sell you an armful of towels in the middle of the night?”

Salmer blinked and was silent.  Endrick had begun to follow the trail of water he left behind and was traipsing about in circles.

Salmer had a look about the room.  He had the aura of a boy who had been in trouble and told to shut up and stand on the spot.  Mr. Hawkins sighed, sat forward, and asked him for the details.

“I went up to the bridge and knocked on the door, Sa,” said Salmer, “and they opened it.”

“As you do with doors,” Mr. Hawkins commented.

“Then I told ‘em the ship was gon’ ta sink.  They didn’t believe me and asked ta see my ticket.  Then they threw me in a cell.  I didn't have no ticket.”  Salmer scraped a heel along the floor and shuddered.  He looked a little blue.  Mr. Hawkins approved. 

“Ugh,” he huffed.  “Right.  You.  Endrick.  I want you to have a shot at this.  Let me see,” Mr. Hawkins bent over the controls, studying them. 

“I’m going to send you a little further back, by an hour or two.” 

“Right you are, sir.”  Endrick saluted.  He did not know why, for he was saluting at Mr. Hawkins’ rear.

“Step onto the panel,” Mr. Hawkins said.  Endrick did so obediently.

“This time,” Mr. Hawkins mumbled, “You should reappear back here right away.”  Nobody had been present when Mr. Hawkins had jumped an hour into the future, so Salmer and Endrick scratched their heads.  Mr. Hawkins looked from one man to the other as they scratched in unison.  Fools.  He pressed the button.

The machine whizzed and made a screeching noise like a toddler on acid.

“Wha-“ Endrick uttered.  Sadly, he was unable to complete whatever he had wanted to say, for the second he opened his mouth the man popped like a ketchup-filled balloon and painted the room in crimson spray.

Mr. Hawkins stood frozen as a wad of sauce dripped from his cheek. 

Oops.

Fifty years in the past and fifty years in the future, half a man would appear in Trafalgar Square and frighten the tourists by stumbling about, looking for its sibling.

The floor was pudgy and slippery. Mr. Hawkins was barely able to remain on his feet.  He slip-slid a foot to his left to input new coordinates.  He could not say what it was that was keeping him calm.  Perhaps the sudden end to Endrick’s existence had shocked him thoroughly into tranquillity.

Perhaps it was plot convenience.

Salmer, though, was not calm.  Salmer was blobbling. Blobbling is the reaction you get from a sea lion that is put into a vibrating chair and clean shaven.

Mr. Hawkins got on the panel, input the time, felt his brain munch on itself and beamed into the past.  Salmer blobbled.

*

Endrick and Salmer were dry and as befuddled as ever.  Though, somewhere back in the 1960s, Endrick’s left half had already ruined a lot of peoples’ lunches.  Time is fickle.

Mr. Hawkins wasted not a second in commencing a new plan.  He addressed Salmer.

“Right, Salmer.  This time, I want you to go onto the bridge, wave a gun about and force the captain to change course.”

Salmer looked to Endrick and Endrick looked to Salmer.  Both turned to Mr. Hawkins and were the picture of confusion. Endrick ended the silence, shaken at the sight of blood.

“What bridge, sir?” He said doing his utmost to focus on the singular clean patch on Mr. Hawkins’ face.  A frown burrowed itself on it.

“What do you mean ‘what bridge’?  The ship’s bridge, of course.  Where the captain is.”  Endrick and Salmer exchanged another look.

“What ship, Sa?”  Salmer chipped in.

“The Titanic!” Mr. Hawkins snapped, throwing a hand in the air and catching sight of himself.

“Uh, ah,” he said.  He had not put on a red suit that morning nor had he rolled about in a field of jam.

“The Titanic sank, sir,” Endrick said.  He spoke as if consoling Mr. Hawkins.  About what, he knew nothing.  Mr. Hawkins breathed and scrubbed at his scalp, tearing out a hair.  When he was calmer, he spoke.  Endrick was here, and whole.

“Salmer.”  

“Sa.” His eyes stole glances at a trickle of blood that was doing its own thing.

“You are to go to the bridge of the ship when I send you back.  You are to coerce the captain, and his crew, to change course.  You will stop the ship from sinking.”

“Sa.”  Mr. Hawkins was a terrible sight and Salmer would do whatever it took not to end up like a previous unsatisfactory minion. 

Mr. Hawkins placed a revolver into Salmer’s palm and tightened the fingers around it. Salmer looked at his hand.  The gun was wet.

Mr. Hawkins instructed Salmer to take up position on the panel, and then sent him back a century.  As he pressed the button he closed his eyes, praying Salmer would not burst.

Salmer was fine.  Presumably.  He was, of course, a century in the past on the ship that would sink in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but he had not exploded.  That was most certainly a good thing.  Mr. Hawkins got on the panel himself and set the dial for one hour in the future.

Mr. Hawkins did not arrive on hour in the future.  The toll of dire miscalculation caused him to pass out instantly, and he came to his senses in a neural clinic and panicked when a MediBot came to check his vital signs.  Frantically, he looked about the ward but saw no sign of human staff.  Only clunky MediBots that stood over 6’ in height and rolled about on wheels.  As the robot looked over him, Mr. Hawkins began to chuckle to himself.

He had only wanted to test whether the machine worked and had got so caught up with things that the obvious had never entered his dull mind. 

It was hilarious!

He ignored the MediBot as it pressed for him to calm down.  Mr. Hawkins laughed frivolously at the absurdity.  Here he was; he had proven the efficacy of the Device but had nobody to tell it to.  Ha!  The MediBot injected him with sedative and filed a ticket to have the man liquefied. 

Back in the present, after private Endrick had taken several turns about the room, had pestered the clerk about his reading more than once and had drank no less than seven cups of weak tea, his comrade reappeared, blinking and wet.

Wet, but not from water.  His green-brown army fatigues were damp over the torso, yes, but damp, sticky, and red.  The man was quivering, a shaky gun in one hand.  Endrick offered him a swig from a hidden flask.

“They wouldn’t listen.  None of ‘em,” he chugged heartily from the flask.

“Not one of ‘em, even when I drew the gun.  They all said I was mad.  Mad, me?”

“Um,” Endrick mumbled, taking the flask back and drinking from it himself.

“Me?  I’m sane as a book, me.”  Endrick wondered.  Could a book be insane?  This novel clearly was off his trolley.  Endrick put an arm around a shoulder and walked his comrade out of the bunker.  Out of the bunker, and into the rain to cool off.  He made sure to relieve the man of the gun.

The clerk looked up from the book.  Endrick stood in the doorway so he removed a headphone.

“Yes?”

“Uh.  Would you come with me?  I need your help with, uh, something.”  The clerk sighed, stretched, and hucked the book onto the table.  He had something to do.

Endrick pointed toward the mess of wires and machinery.  He had no idea how any of it worked but the clerk look smart and academic and instilled trust in him.

“I need you to set this thing to go to the same time as Sal,” he said, treading onto the panel.

“Uh,” the clerk said.

“And then go there and stop him from shooting anybody.”

“Uh,” the clerk continued.  He searched a jumble of papers and came across the notebook, then looked up at Endrick.

“Why can’t you do it?” he said.

“Ah, because Mr. Hawkins said, uh, that somebody, that Salmer or I had to stay here.” He replied, continuing, “But Salmer is gone, so I, ah, have to stay here.”  For some reason, Endrick felt dread whenever he looked at the metal panel.  The clerk tutted but was grateful to have something meaningful to put his mind to. 

Endrick waited patiently as he thumbed through weathered, stained pages, trying to make sense of the baffling scramble.  He turned a dial, then hummed and changed his mind, and turned it back.  He pressed a button, another, flicked a switch, turned a page, and pressed another button.

The man sussed out what he could, set a timer for thirty seconds and squeezed his eyes tight as he stood rigid on the panel.  He was smart, and screw what Endrick said.  He was the only person that had caught on.  He was the only person thinking in time travel.

The microwave hummed and he counted the seconds away.  Five…four…three…two…one…

Ding.

That, he thought, was a very weird sensation.

He opened and closed his eyes.  The room was dark and damp and smelled of it.  He pawed his way about, stumbling over a table and sending something crashing to the floor.  As he stumbled around like a poorly-paid extra in a zombie movie, the door whirred and opened.  A light was flicked on, and in stepped several men.

Mr. Hawkins.  Private Salmer, unbloodied.  Private Endrick, unpopped.  And. The clerk.

Clerk A looked at clerk B. Clerk A shrugged.  Clerk B shrugged.  Mr. Hawkins looked between them.  Endrick and Salmer scratched their heads in unison.

“Well,” Mr. Hawkins said, “that just about explains that.”  He twirled on one heel, walked out of the bunker and was hit by a bus on the way home.

And as the circumstance that led him to be there in the first place ceased to exist, Clerk A popped like a ketchup-filled balloon, because the universe has a twisted sense of humour that way.

Reviews

[EssenceofDaringx]

Woooow. I must say you definitely took me on an adventure here. This was a very unique and original time traveling story in my opinion and one of the best short stories I've read in a while! The flow of the story was a bit slow at the beginning but when it picked up it kept me going straight til the end. I'm assuming these characters were British? At least that's the feeling I got from reading the dialogue, given the olde English language and the delightful use of "sa" instead of sir. Though the time period was set in 2012, it read more like 1950s. This wasn't a problem for me, just the feeling I got from this piece. Also, I love your writing style! Especially he moments where you broke the fourth wall, I know there's a literary term for this but it is escaping me at the moment. I am looking forward to anything else you put out there and I hope you will check out some of my work as well. Ta ta for now!

[Renegade Author]

It was an idea I had had knocking around for a while now. The original premise was, 'three drunken scientists invent a time machine' but then I started killing people off and found it to be quite fun.

They are British, yes. The distinction between,'Sa' and 'Sir' was originally to let the reader know who was speaking. I cut out a lot of dialogue but kept it anyway.

I'm glad you liked it. I'll take a look at something of yours later today.

[CRBain]

This reeks of Pratchett and that is a compliment. You write ver ysimillar to him (so do I), with many commas and the sort of lemony narration. You jokes sort of come out of left field and can be non sequitur-ish which I suppose could just be considered a style. My advice would be to try to find comedy in the plot instead of making the funny parts disjointed 'scenes'.

I love to see people writing with a british look at comedy and I want to see more.

[SnowyGales]

Hi! I just finished reading it, and although I'm not a fan at all of Science Fiction/time travelling stuff, I honestly enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would. Call me corny, but parts of it really had me giggling :) One thing I didn't like (possibly a result of me just disliking the genre) was that it was sort of confusing plotwise. Also, I thought that the writing itself sounded a bit pretentious, not just the character. Sometimes I feel longer sentences would help the flow of the story, as right now sometimes it feels like all your sentences blaze past. Overall, really good :)