Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (13 page)

“This was the
only way to get in before,” I told the ghosts. “Through here.”

“Let’s go in the
main gate,” said Fred.

“All right, but
this side gate used to be important. Remember that.”

“Yeah, yeah,
let’s go.”

We went around to
the front.

I marched the
army into the facility’s main building, then down the empty corridors, pointing
out where each guard used to be, and how hard it used to be to get past this
point here, and how mean the guard was down that hallway, and so on, to the
uninterested ghosts, until we got to the room the Clarence machine was in.

I tried the door,
but it was locked. The army tried a few cannon blasts, but the shells just went
right through the door and out of the building. We had no idea where the shots
ended up, but after we had fired four or five of them a phone next to us
started ringing. We didn’t answer it.

I told the ghosts
I thought I knew where the key to the door was. They said I’d better. I laughed
and said “good joke”, then started leading them to Albert Conklin’s office.

The door to
Conklin’s office was open, so we trooped in without knocking. Conklin was
surprised to see us, but not very.

“Figures,” he
said, and resumed cleaning out his desk and putting everything into boxes.

I asked what was
going on. Why was the building so empty? Even my guard was gone. He stopped
packing and looked at me for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to bother
to answer me or not, while the ghosts waited patiently, with only a few
occasionally saying “boo” and the others saying “quiet”.

“We’re being shut
down,” he said finally. “We couldn’t provide our service anymore so they’re
closing the facility.”

“What service?
What the heck do you do here, anyway? What’s it all about?”

“Well, as you
might have guessed, the Clarence machine wasn’t designed just to make it so you
were never born. The government doesn’t spend that kind of time and money on
anything so trivial as…well…you.”

“I guessed that,”
I lied.

“Its primary
purpose was to undo governmental mistakes before any nosey voters found out
about them.”

I said I had
guessed that too. Everyone in the room suggested I be quiet for awhile and let
the man talk, before something bad happened to me. That sounded like good
advice, so I became quiet.

“You’ve got the
floor, Conklin,” I said.

“The machine was
completed eight months ago,” Conklin said. “To test it, we corrected a few
governmental mistakes from the past. We got Pancho Villa off of the Supreme
Court, and detonated the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the South
Pacific, instead of Carnegie Hall in New York. The machine worked perfectly.
Those original blunders just faded away, like they never happened. Old timers
who could have sworn they saw Jascha Heifetz and his violin blown through the
side of the Chrysler Building just think they saw a hallucination now. Then,
just for the hell of it, we sank the Bismarck. And lucky for Johnny Horton we
did. His ‘Let’s All Take A Ride On The Bismarck’ had been a flop.”

“I’ve never heard
that song now,” I said.

“Quiet,” said
everybody.

“We quickly
realized that we had a powerful tool in our hands. We could call anything in
history a mistake, and then just fix it. We could make our political party the
only party that ever existed, because it was a mistake that there were others,
or make any one of us here in the department the hereditary King Of The United
States, because it was a mistake that we were clerks.”

He opened one of
the boxes he had packed and looked wistfully at a crown. Then he put it back
and closed up the box. “But we soon learned we shouldn’t meddle in the past,
not even for a good cause. History is complicated, and altering any part of it
can cause unforeseen problems. The Lusitania can’t sink if you’ve just fixed it
so it was never built. And if it didn’t sink you’ve got a whole shipload of
people - who should be lying safely on the bottom of the ocean - wandering
around the planet for fifty or sixty years altering world events in ways you
can’t imagine, much less control. And then they have kids they shouldn’t have
had, who alter even more events. And the kids have cats you don’t know about.
And so on. It’s a mess, believe me.”

“Why would the
government care about problems caused in the past?” I asked. “No skin off their
nose. They live here in the good old present with us.”

No one told me to
be quiet. Everyone seemed to feel that was a pretty good question.

Conklin sighed.
“Because by altering the past we ended up affecting the present. Members of our
research team suddenly started disappearing. We didn’t know why at first. We
didn’t connect it with anything we had done. But then we discovered that one of
our men disappeared because his grandfather had been killed in a bar fight with
the crew of the battleship Maine in 1911. He had said their battleship was
crap, and they had said it wasn’t. A fight followed, resulting in his death.
That bar fight should never have happened. The Maine should have gone down in
1898. But because of our meddling, it hadn’t. After several more of our people
disappeared, including the head of the department, word came down from the new
head of the department that all meddling with the past had to stop. It was
putting all of us in danger.”

I noticed a sign
on the wall put out by the Government Printing Office that had a drawing of a
monkey writing in a history book, with the slogan: “Only A Monkey Monkeys With
The Past.”

“Is that why that
sign is up there?”

“Yes. That should
have been an end to it, but a little while later, at an office party, one of
the funnier bureaucrats in our department, who had a lampshade on his head at
the time if I remember correctly, suggested having Amelia Earhart make a
surprise attack on Japan in 1937. She was heading that way anyway on her round
the world flight. Why not divert her? Maybe take out the Japanese leadership
before the war even started. The Japanese aren’t the only people who can make
sneak attacks, he reminded us. Us Yanks can do it too. Well, I guess everybody
had had a little too much to drink. We decided to do it.”

“You’d forgotten
what the monkey said,” I said, pointing at the sign.

“Yes, well, we’d
been drinking, as I said. Anyway, she never completed her mission. We know now
that she was shot down and crashed on the lawn of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo,
and died crawling towards the Emperor with a knife in her teeth. There was a
big diplomatic uproar about the whole thing. It made the Japanese so mad they
attacked Pearl Harbor, of all places.

“We tried to undo
what we’d done, but only succeeded in blowing up the Hindenburg and making Lou
Gehrig sick. On top of that, three more of our technicians vanished without a
trace, and I’ve got a Hitler mustache now.”

“I’d shave that
off if I were you,” I recommended.

“I do shave it
off, but it keeps growing back.”

I thought about
this. “Try shaving it off. See if that helps.”

Conklin ignored
this advice. “At the time, we didn’t know where Earhart’s body had ended up. We
assumed it would never be found. She was lost in 1937, and presumably they’d
been looking for her ever since. If they hadn’t found the body by now they
probably never would. Then one of our guys yelled ‘Hey! Some guy just found
Earhart! And he’s on TV! Shit!’

“Everyone crowded
around the TV saying ‘shit’. Then the big boss came in and saw what was going
on. After awhile he left without saying anything except ‘shit’.

“We knew it would
only be a matter of time before everything came out in the open, including the
existence of the Clarence machine.”

“So what?” I
asked. “That’s not such a big scandal. The government has weathered bigger
scandals than that before.” I tried to think of an example, but all I could
think of were airports.

“Like airports,”
I said.

He looked at me
like I was stupid. Okay, maybe I am stupid, but I don’t like people looking at
me that way. I started to ball up my fist.

“If everything
came out,” he explained, “voters would realize that their representatives
weren’t brilliant men, but in fact were idiots with a machine that could fix
their mistakes for them. We couldn’t let that happen. We liked it that people
thought we were smart. So we solved the problem by simply removing you from the
equation. If you didn’t exist, you could never find Earhart’s body, and
everyone would be in the clear.”

“Slick,” I said,
impressed. “That could work.”

“It did work,” he
reminded me. “And since then we’ve been very careful to only use the machine
for the purpose it was originally designed. We’ve left the past completely
alone and concentrated on fixing current governmental mistakes - everything
from major problems, like global flattening, to minor embarrassments, like some
county dog catcher catching the wrong dog. In every case the machine has worked
perfectly. Each mistake has been erased, and the voters have never known
anything about them.”

“So… everything’s
all right then?” I asked. I was getting a little lost.

“No. A couple of weeks
ago, we came in to work and found that the Clarence machine had been broken. It
looked like someone had been messing around with it, kicking it and spilling
mustard on it. They had even taken some of the pieces off and lost them, then
tried to replace them with pieces from a typewriter and that old refrigerator
over there.”

Everyone looked
at me.

“Hi, everybody,”
I said.

“Since the
machine was broken,” Conklin went on, “the problems the politicians brought in
to us that day couldn’t be fixed. And the public, which was used to seeing
brief hallucinations by now - and in fact had started to like them, to view
them as a new kind of cheap entertainment - was suddenly confronted with
hallucinations that didn’t go away: real nuclear explosions, genuine collisions
with other planets, and all-conquering foreign armies that took our land and
didn’t give it back three seconds later. These sorts of things did not sit well
with the public. Everyone began demanding explanations. Newspapers called for
investigations. All hell was breaking loose.

“The government,
of course, was frantic. They demanded the Clarence machine be put back into
operation this instant – it was the first time I had ever seen the federal
government actually stamp its feet - but they were told it wasn’t possible. The
machine needed a complete overhaul, and wouldn’t be operational again for
months.”

I didn’t see what
the big problem was with all this. “So what’s a few months more or less?” I
asked. “Whenever the machine is fixed, you can just change all this back. It’ll
be like it never happened.”

“We don’t have a
few months. The administration is really going to take it on the chin in the
coming elections, if the polls are right. The public views us as incompetents
who can’t do anything right. The Clarence machine won’t be on line again until
after the election. So the administration will be swept out of office and our
opponents will have the machine.”

“Oops.”

“Yes. That’s why
they’ve ordered the machine to be dismantled, the blueprints shredded, and
everyone in the facility reassigned. They don’t want their political opponents
to be able to use any of this stuff. And that’s why the facility was nearly
empty when you arrived with your friends.”

Everyone in the
room was quiet for a moment.

“I told you I’d
find out in the end,” I said.

“Yes, you did. I
remember.”

“Score one for
me.”

He nodded and
made a small mark on a piece of paper.

The ghosts had
been listening to all this very politely, showing remarkable patience. Finally
one of them cleared his throat pointedly.

“Oh yeah,” I
said, “there’s another problem. There are all these ghosts here.”

“Yes, I’m sorry
about that,” said Conklin.

“You’re sorry?
You mean it’s your fault?” asked Ed.

Conklin sighed
and nodded. “I’m afraid it is. Each mistake the government made got people
killed who shouldn’t have died yet. And when we fixed the mistakes, we tended
to kill even more. That’s bureaucracy for you. Hence all the ghosts, I’m told.”

“Fix it back,”
said Fred, quietly.

“Can’t,” shrugged
Conklin. “As I said, the machine is broken, and it’s being dismantled as we
speak.”

The ghosts were
crestfallen. They stood there sadly for a moment, then started loading up their
cannon and swiveling it around so it would be pointing at both Conklin and
myself.

That gave me an
idea. “Follow me everybody.”

I edged past the
ghosts out into the corridor. Conklin followed, wondering. Then the ghosts
looked at each other, shrugged, and started following me too.

Everyone wondered
what my idea was. My idea was it would be harder to kill me out in the
corridor. I would have more running room out there.

As soon as I got
outside the door, I started running like hell, but my feet slipped on the
highly polished floor. I landed on my face and, legs still churning, skidded
into a room full of experimental machines.

Everyone followed
me into the room and looked around at all the gadgets.

“This is your
idea?” asked Fred, dubiously.

“Uh…yeah,” I
said, legs still churning.

There was a long
pause.

“Explain your
idea to us,” said Ed.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Er...” I looked
around the room for an idea. Suddenly, to my surprise, I got one. “Hey, yeah!”
I said to myself. “That could work. And even if it didn’t, at least it would
buy me some time, and I could make a run for it later.” At this point I
realized I had been talking to myself out loud all this time - really loud.
Some of the ghosts had their hands over their ears. I stopped talking. I’d
already said too much.