The Exploding Detective by John Swartzwelder

thousands more
than I needed. Overkill is the only way to succeed when it comes to world
domination. And Overkill is my name.”
    “Beautiful.”
    We walked past a
large machine that had a big red handle. “What’s that thing?” I asked.
    “Doomsday
Machine.”
    “Ah.”
    “That’s in case
things don’t work out exactly as I’ve planned. It can destroy the entire
universe.”
    I raised my hand.
    “No way to test
it, of course,” he said, “but I’m confident it will work as it’s designed to.”
    I put down my
hand.
    “I don’t want to
seem like a poor sport,” he added, “but if I can’t rule the universe, I don’t
want there to be one. Does that make me sound like I’m a poor sport?”
    “Not at all.
Quite the reverse. Anybody who says you’re a poor sport has it backwards.”
    “I’m relieved to
hear you say that. Now, you asked earlier where I got my patterns for Napoleon
and Lincoln and so on. Follow me and I’ll show you the most amazing part of my
operation.”
    He led me to a
large door. Before he opened it he asked: “When we were having dinner, did you
notice one of my servants – General Custer, I think it was - come in carrying a
tray of hot dogs and suddenly start spinning in a circle against a weird stripy
background, finally disappearing with a pop?”
    “Yeah. One of those
hot dogs was supposed to be for me.”
    “Do you remember
asking me where that bastard went with the hot dogs?”
    “Vividly.”
    He opened the
door. “The answer is in here.”
    We walked in.
Overkill stood proudly next to a huge water-nozzle-shaped tunnel.
    “What you are
looking at is a doorway to the future. Or the past.”
    “What about the
present?”
    “No, that’s all
these other doors. Did you ever see a television show called The Time Nozzle?”
    “I think so.
Something about two handsome scientists traveling through time with a bad
script, wasn’t it?”
    He nodded. “It
was a cheap knockoff of The Time Tunnel. It wasn’t very popular and got
cancelled after 14 episodes.”
    “I saw a
fantastic episode of Wagon Train once that…”
    He interrupted
me, impatiently. “After it was cancelled, all of the props from the show were
put into storage on the studio lot and forgotten. Then last year they were
rediscovered and put up for auction. I had no interest in the smaller props,
but I outbid several other super villains for The Time Nozzle itself.”
    I started telling
him about some collectible TV memorabilia I used to have - a Roy Rogers
lunchbox and a Lassie paw - but he wasn’t interested.
    “What viewers in
the 1960’s didn’t realize,” he went on, “was that a lot of what they were
seeing was real. Studios didn’t skimp when it came to production values in
those days. Whenever possible they used the real thing, not a mock up. Disney
hired the real Zorro, for example, for the show’s pilot episode. But it turned
out the old fellow had trouble memorizing lines. Couldn’t even remember where
he lived. They dumped him out in the Valley somewhere and got a younger guy for
the series. And I have it on the highest authority – a stuntman told me this –
that there was a real Twilight Zone. Rod Serling found it next to his house. He
didn’t have to write any scripts at all. Just grabbed actors and threw them in,
then turned on the cameras. The show wrote itself. Everyone thought those old
TV shows were just fantastic entertainment, but they were more than that. They
were up to 10% real.”
    “Wait, are you
trying to tell me that The Time Nozzle actually worked?”
    “Works,” he
corrected me. “Present tense. When the show was originally filmed, the actors
felt they couldn’t get ‘into’ their parts if the machine didn’t actually work.”
He snorted derisively. “As if it mattered whether they were ‘into’ their parts
or not. Just say the damn lines.”
    “I hate actors
too.”
    “So handymen at
the studio worked on it until they made it operational to a certain