The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder

just as you’re just
finishing that, now Detroit is starting to calm down, so you have to run back
there. The whole thing is harder than it sounds.
    After two weeks of work, all I had
managed to sell were three Davy Crockett Caps, two Ralph Kramden Bus Driver
Games, and one recording of me singing “Stayin’ Alive”. And the people who
bought them weren’t very excited about their purchases after awhile, and a
couple of them wanted to sell them back to me, but I wasn’t interested.
    I’d like to report to you that it
wasn’t long after this that I figured a way out of my predicament and got back
to the good old present day, but it didn’t turn out to be that easy. It was
eight long months before my chance came to get home.
    I spent those eight months
continuing to earn a small humiliating living doing day jobs. I never could
quite get enough money saved up to get my detective business going, mostly
because I kept coming up with brilliant ways to triple my money overnight. I
kept thinking I could remember which Bum of the Month was going to beat Joe
Louis, but it was never any of the guys I put money on. So I had to keep
starting over. I pushed mops all over 1941, passed out handbills, posed for
“Before” pictures, and so on. My one big payday was a one-day gig I had doing a
cameo appearance in the movie The Pride Of The Yankees. In the scene where Lou
Gehrig finds out he’s dying, I’m the guy who’s pointing at him and laughing.
    To save money I tried living with
my grandparents for awhile, but they were uncomfortable having me around. I
kept hearing them muttering things like “It’s not natural”, “Who is he?” and
“Space/time continuum”. So after a couple of weeks I split.
    One money making idea I had during
this period promised to be a gold mine for me. I wrote out motion picture
scripts that were word for word transcriptions of successful films I had seen
in the 1990’s, then shipped them off to Hollywood and sat back to wait for the
checks to come rolling in. All the scripts were returned to me, with rejection
slips that said they stunk to high heaven. I read the scripts again and they
did! This made me mad on several levels.
    Despite my shortage of money, life
in 1941 wasn’t too bad. Like I said before, I’m not a history buff, but the
past did have its charms. The food didn’t have any preservatives or vitamins in
it, so it had a pleasant, dangerous taste that was new to me. There weren’t any
safety rules anywhere, so if you hurt yourself, at least you didn’t get yelled
at too. And the whole year was in full natural color, not the grainy black and
white I was led to expect. It was all kind of pleasant. A restful period in our
history to be alive, I felt. It’s true that there was a war going on in Europe,
but Europe was a long ways away. You couldn’t hear any of the screaming where I
was.
    The only time the war entered my
life at all in those days was the afternoon I was walking down the street and
Rudolf Hess landed on me. I told him he was supposed to land in Scotland, not
on top of me, and I expected the Third Reich to replace my hat with one just as
good. I hinted that otherwise there would be trouble. Germany was already
fighting with France and England. They didn’t want to piss me off too.
    He tried to surrender to me, but I
didn’t have any facilities for housing any prisoners at that time. He would
have had to sleep in my bed with me. So I told him he’d better just move along.
He wandered off, dragging his parachute behind him, looking back at me like I
was a jerk or something. The feeling is mutual, pal. I guess he eventually got
to Scotland and lost the war for his country all right.
    I wasn’t the only person who was
ignoring the war. Nobody in our town was interested. It was too far away, and
no one liked those Europes anyway. The thing the people in our town wanted to
talk about – the thing that really got the newspapers excited - was the race
for District