The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder Page A

he realized I was
never going to answer him.
    “Well, we’ll do it here then,” he
said. “The thing I want you to investigate is connected with the Danielson
Case.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You know, the ferry boat scandal
over in Marina City.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “Never mind.”
    So I lost my first client. I
realized I was going to have to bone up on the current events and geography
around here if I was ever going to be of any value to my clients. I made a
mental note to see if there was a library in this town.
    While I was making, and admiring,
this mental note, a cop nudged me with his nightstick.
    “Move along,” he said. “You can’t
be a detective here.”
    I didn’t want any more trouble
with the police, so I moved to an area where no pedestrians were walking, which
satisfied the cop, but made it harder for me to conduct my business. I could
yell and wave at passersby to come over to where I was in the flowerbed, but no
one seemed to want to do that. If anything, they moved farther away from me the
louder I shouted and the more I waved and made faces at them.
    I reassessed my situation. It was
clear that if I was going to be a successful detective here, I needed an
office. That would cost money. And I’d need furnishings; a desk, file cabinets,
a client chair, and so on.
    That meant that at least for
awhile, I was going to have to get some other kind of job, a less glamorous
job, until I could build up some capital. This was a little depressing for me,
because I like the power and prestige that goes with being a shamus more than
the power and prestige that goes with, say, pushing a mop. But I cheered up
when I remembered that I was the Man From The Future. I was 62 years ahead of
these pre-1950 yokels mentally. I’d wow em back here in the primitive past.
    The first thing I did was check
out the want-ads in the paper. But I was in for a disappointment there. Every
job seemed to require some experience or skills I lacked. Do you know how to be
the comptroller for a canning company? Or how to build infernal machines for
Anarchists? I don’t.
    And the lowest level jobs were out
too, because they insisted that I not have some of the qualifications I did
have. Like they didn’t want me to have more than a third grade education,
because they felt that if I had a fourth grade education, or its equivalent, I
wouldn’t be carrying sewer pipes for them very long. It would just be a pit
stop for me professionally. So it seemed I was overqualified for some jobs, and
underqualified for the rest. The general impression I got was that 1941 could
get along perfectly well without me.
    But if there’s one thing you can
say about us Burlys (okay, Torgesons. See chapter 1), it’s that we don’t give
up right away. We don’t give up for months. So I went out on a series of job
interviews and tried to bluff my way through them, saying yes I was a fully
qualified whatever-you-said, or no, I’ve never heard of the Union movement,
what’s that? - whatever I guessed they wanted to hear. Lying like this works
pretty well, I’ve always found. Because it allows you to tell a prospective
employer things you could never tell him if you were being truthful. But you
tell that to the youth of today and they won’t listen. They think they know it
all.
    The only times I ran into trouble
were when I didn’t lie. Like when I inadvertently filled out employment
application forms with accurate information. My birth date, for example, raised
a lot of red flags.
    “Born in 1965, eh?” some personnel
guy would say.
    “Yes.”
    “I guess that makes you about
minus 24 years old.”
    “I’m more mature than my age would
indicate.”
    Sometimes I’d get over all the
other hurdles and they’d take me out to the work site to see me in action
before they hired me. To see me demonstrate the expertise I had bragged about
on my application form. This was a problem, because it’s easier to bluff your
way through a written test