The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure

by Michael Ronson

  “Isn’t it a touch warm, though?”

  I looked at Funkworthy and followed his gaze to the floor around me, which could boast a small pool of sweat which ran down the metal tube of my trouser leg. I had not been warned but was now learning that as far as absorption and breathability went, solid gold was one of the very least favourable fabrics.

  “Honestly? Yes a little bit. It’s like wearing a beautiful chimney, or a fashionable engine. Still,” I assured him, “It’ll all be worth it when we get there. It’s all about making an impression.”

  I remembered last year’s event very well. I had ascended to the main floor of the convention in the transparent elevator with Funkworthy. As the vista of the main hall came into sight I experienced a mounting bliss at what I was seeing. Banners and streamers papered the ceiling and a fine drift of confetti was raining down from the hijacked sprinkler system- a touch that the stuffy old fire marshal objected to, but I thought really added a touch of class (even in light of a small fire later in the evening which ruined a deck and burned bald a hairy child and two dogs). As I stepped onto the main floor greeted with a round of applause the crowd broke into a hearty rendition ‘Hallelujah’ wherein my name replaced all of the words. The sweet melody gloriously raised the roof with the soaring music. I felt tears well in my eyes at the sheer beauty of the scene. As the cherry on top - the ‘S’il vous plais’ as the French would say- every single person who was there to see me was wearing a strikingly faithful mask of my own face. A hall full of me-s; what a treat.

  Ah, but it was heaven.

  An electric chill of anticipation ran through my body at the recollection, and the next one was roughly fifteen minutes away. The best part? Nothing bad would happen to interfere with that. It was a foregone conclusion that this would be a day with no unforeseen twists and turns- just one serene celebration. Smooth sailing.

  As I got up to discreetly go to the bathroom and towel myself down I was stopped by a sudden shockwave which tried its damndest to send me sprawling.

  The entire ship rocked to the side as if hit with a photonic cannon. I stumbled and wheeled around to the monitors, taking my seat again. I snapped to battle mode and scanned the screens around me which were resolutely showing no signs of hostile craft. I brought myself to full alertness. I’m not too proud to admit that that process required my Captain’s posterior to let out a sonorous and gassy emission.

  I tried to paper over the embarrassment by yelling at Funkworthy, as I sometimes do when I fart inappropriately. “Keep this blasted craft flying straight, old man!” I yelled at him, “and tell me what the devil just hit us. A weapon? A satellite? Was it that damned hale-bopp comet? I’ve been meaning to finish that thing off once and for all after our last meeting.”

  Ebenezer stayed quiet for a long minute, peering at his instruments and making a puzzled expression with his face and eyes and neck. The ship levelled out and no other impacts seemed imminent but I still needed answers for that assault. I asked him again, louder.

  “I’m not quite sure,” he admitted finally, “it seemed almost like…But it can’t be…But it reads exactly like…. like a time buffer,” he said, scrutinizing his sensor array.

  “Time buffer? What in the hell is one of those when they’re in Dorset?”

  He did that big inhale-y thing he does when he’s about to explain something but I had no time to leave.

  “It’s a wave of energy that runs through the universe when a change occurs in the time/space continuum.”

  I nodded at him sagely but he plowed on with his scientific babble.

  “Say for example if someone went back in time and change something- that impacts on the future, right? Everything changes.”

  “The Flying Butt Effect!” I said, eruditely.

  “The Butterfly Effect”

  “I prefer mine.”

  “You usually do. So, say you do something that matters- it takes the universe a little while to change. Such a massive expenditure of energy over all of existence is bound to take a while, so a time wave rolls across the universe, covering everything- ripples in a pond. When the wave hits it has different effects. In deep space ships get hit by a wave of force like that one. On planets, though it’s slightly different. You don’t tend to feel the force of it as much so it manifests in small individual ways. Déjà vu is caused by time waves, for example and the phenomena can also dislocate small and localized items: socks, keys and electronic remotes can become lost when a change in time registers. Some people experience their own versions of displacement by getting songs stuck in their head or even letting out a…physical symptom like you did.”

  “Um..Physical symptom? I don’t follow you,” I said, I was sure that my previous expulsion had been as discreet as it had been fragrant.

  Funkworthy levelled his eyes at me. “Sir, you know I have a good sense of smell. Besides, in solid gold trousers your farts are rather amplified. It sounded like a rusty trumpet.”

  I would have coloured at this, but, having had the foresight to wear a gold tuxedo, my face was already quite red. Checkmate. “Well, fine, answer me this, smart guy: does that mean that every time I let off, someone’s changed time? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No, of course not, that usually just means you’ve eaten too many tacos as you well know, but if you let go a bugle apropos of nothing it might be a signal. Also, if you care to notice take a whiff of that gassy expulsion…?” Ebenezer proffered a wafting hand. I did as I was bid, a little dubiously and took in some of my own odours through my nose. I breathed me in and smelled something quite extraordinary. I looked to Funkworthy.

  “Why it almost smells like..”

  “Exactly like-”

  “Clocks!” I exclaimed, “That’s extraordinary.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “So what has changed?”

  He frowned shook his head. “Impossible to say without specialized time-recording equipment, and even that only resists the tide of time for so long. No, it’s curious. Time travel is a heavily regulated thing and I don’t think there were any wave-warnings on the wire today. It could be a naturally occurring temporal explosion- like when a black hole ingests a ghost ship or a psychic chokes to death on a watch- or it COULD be a rogue time user. Don’t know, in short. But it is worrisome.”

  “Gah. What use are you if you can’t even track down temporal disturbances for me?” I asked and went to rise from the seat again. Funkworthy turned to me again, looking worried, both about the time buffer and my attempts to stand up.

  “Hang about, Cap’n. I may not be able to say what caused it, but I can calculate its special origin due to the violence of the wave. Usually we wouldn’t be hit quite so hard as that, not nearly. From these readings it seems that the point of incident is close. Damned close.”

  “Near my party?!”

  “Near? More like right on top of it, if I’m not mistaken,” he said, tapping at his map screens and furrowing his brow. “There’s not another habitable place within a quarter million square hectares." He spoke gravely. "Whatever caused that time wave came exactly from there, sir.”

  I sat down heavily. I’d seen a lot of things in a career of adventuring and there were only two things I didn’t believe in: coincidences and werewolves, and I was damn sure I was looking at neither thing right now. The odds of this having nothing to do with me were too high to even consider calculating. I pointed a furrowed brow at the display screen and brought up the Kronis satellite. It hung in perfect black space before us as we raced toward it looking entirely innocent. The main body was a huge disc with four spired pillars set around the perimeter, each of which tapered down and met each other in the middle like an inverted pyramid. Dangling from the bottom was the decommissioned listening dish; a huge piece of equipment roughly seventeen miles in diameter. I smiled as I noticed someone had hung up several balloon and glitter covered banners on the outside of the station which encouraged passing starships to sound their sirens in recognit
ion of my special day.

  It looked innocent but if Funkworthy’s calculations were to be believed something had just happened inside it- a change in the fabric of time. It would be the perfect opportunity for so many of my enemies! Funkworthy looked over at me, his hand hovering over the navigation console, ready to change course.

  “Sir?” he asked. The station was getting closer by the second.

  I stood decisively. Could I really charge into a certain trap just because it was serving cakes with my face on it? Could I endanger my first mate and order him once more into the breech because I wanted to go to a fancy shindig?

  “Funkworthy,” I said, “increase our speed. I don’t want to miss my party!”

  Chapter Two

  Ruminations on Time, Space and Hats

  * * *

  “You see our people see time rather differently to you. We see time as a kind of string of moments swirling around a vortex. Like a pearl necklace in a blender. Except the blender is shrinking all the time as the necklace expands outside of it. Your puny human mind can only see it as an unbroken line. You are an ape with your head locked in a safe, riding a tricycle down a pavement unaware of the train bearing down behind you driven by a blind monkey, who paws at his controls in desperation, unaware that he is facing the wrong way and is in the wrong seat. On the wrong carriage. On a steamboat. In Finland.”

  Dennis Q Dimpletwat

  The Night of Too Many Bastards

  Ѻ

  “Damn!”

  I swore softly to myself. Then I swore far louder for emphasis and drama, then I kicked over a lamp.

  I was caught in the horns of a dilemma. I was wrestling a quandary as old as time, a question that has perplexed man since first he looked up at the stars and dreamt that there might be other sentient life out there looking down on all of us

  ‘What the devil am I to wear?’

  Laid out on the bed to my right, next to seven shattered clothes hangers was my solid gold tuxedo, but before me lay the Shangri-la of exquisite sartorial magnificence: my personal walk-in climate controlled wardrobe. I knew that within there were thigh-length boots made from the rarest of hides, fine capes built by Italian nanomachine tailors, pigmented tunics built to change shade in accordance with the season and my state of arousal. It was a cornucopia of fashion elegance that stretched all through the deck, I had even had to knock through a wall in my quarters several years ago and convert Funkworthy’s personal leisure/sleeping area into a shoe rack out of sheer necessity.

  “NOW APPROACHING DOCKING KRONIS STATION.”

  The computerized screech of the ship’s PA brought me to the fact that I was still standing before my clothes repository. I bounced on my heels, willing the nagging feeling out of myself. I had been ready to arrive in understated glamour in my solid gold tuxedo, but all of this time malarkey happening in the vicinity gave me pause for thought. My legendarily astute gut told me that there was something foul going on aboard the Kronis; it was an easy and obvious target for the many despots, murderers and ex-wives out in the universe who would wish to do me harm by striking at the people who admired me the most. One seeking to draw me into a deadly confrontation would be hard pressed to find a better venue. But.

  But.

  If I was to go along that line of reasoning I would have to go into the station in full readiness, prepared for attacks, action and any manner of adventuring. I’d have to be ready for hostage situations, gunfights, hand-to-hand karate battles and/or high speed quad bike chases. And that meant that I could not, with a clear conscience, wear a tuxedo that weighed a quarter tonne.

  It was a hell of a pickle.

  “Captain? Are you ready? It’s been quite some time.” Funkworthy now, replacing the computerized nagging with a far more annoying organic version over the intercom.

  Why did it have to be a time travel thing? I had never ever been comfortable with those kinds of deals. As far as I was concerned, the advent of time travel had brought nothing but trouble.

  I had actually worked security detail in the lab when they had activated the first time-drive those many years ago and from the very second those eggheads turned the switch to ‘on’ the COAR experimental lab had been bloody inundated with time travellers materializing and giving us dire warnings about the future. That first day- the first half hour even- fifty seven ragged fellows had zapped into existence in the lab, all asking what date it was, who the president was and if this kind of monkey or appliance had become self aware and started an uprising yet. Absolute nightmare. In the end we just shipped them off to a local lunatic asylum when we didn’t feel like shooting them. It was that day I went right off the whole time/space continuum.

  A timid tapping came from my door. I shouted an invitation and the door whooshed open in the futuristic manner of all my doors, allowing Ebenezer entry into my dilemma and, to a lesser extent, my room.

  “Sir, is your intercom working? I did announce that we are coming to th-whurgh!” He wheeled around suddenly and buried his face in his hands. “Sir, are you aware that you are in rather an advanced state of nudity?”

  “The most advanced!” I boasted.

  The man had never been comfortable around spectacular nudity. I looked at him distastefully, hating to see a fellow officer consumed with ugly jealousy. “I am perfectly aware. I have been attempting to choose something to wear. Your time wave has upset things somewhat, as you may well imagine.”

  “It’s not mine, sir, I merely pointed it out.”

  “A likely story. Anyway, I cannot proceed to a place I know to have been compromised by as yet unverifiable time nonsense in a suit made of precious metal, can I?”

  “It seems inadvisable to go anywhere in that.” I ignored him. “In fact, speaking of going to inadvisable places, I have to restate my objections to proceeding to the Kronis station, sir. It’s still not too late to change course and pull back! I can do it now.”

  “Nonsense! When I get invited somewhere I show up, unknown time fracture or no unknown time fracture.” To save the man’s blushes and his bumbling about, I pulled on a pair of velvet jodhpurs and a matching neckerchief and told him he could open his eyes.

  “With all respect, Space, that isn’t at all true. You’ve failed to turn up to jury duty eleven times and you’ve failed to appear before COAR’s sexual harassment board so often that they’ve posted quite a tempting bounty on your head.”

  “Let me clarify- when I am invited somewhere through the medium of a pop-up card which plays a song when you open it, I show up, regardless of all other considerations.” I saw his eyes slide over to my bedside table which, I admit was crowded with cheery musical cards from the sexual harassment board. They had gotten savvy these last few months. I dodged Funkworthy’s accusatory look by pulling on a tunic made from the hide of the Beroxian Tunic Lizard. “Regardless of any other reasons for attendance,” I said, emerging from the head opening on the third try, “We know that a mysterious time related incident has occurred in what many would consider the most important location in the universe. That sounds like something that needs to be investigated. And we ARE the closest craft to the disturbance. Party or not, it is our duty to investigate. Honestly, old man, I’m surprised I would need to remind you of your oaths.”

  Ebenezer coloured slightly, but he remained obstinate. “That may be somewhat true but in any other respect than vicinity we are woefully underprepared for a temporal incident. COAR has a cadre of time shielded ships for exactly this kind of fix; The Golden Fleet. Those ships are outfitted with paradox proofed hulls, atomically aligned hyper clocks that are shaped like an ouroboros and all of their hulls are plated with gold, thus the name”.

  “Gold ships, eh? Seems a touch gaudy,” I said, stowing my tuxedo’s cumberbund.

  Ebenezer looked pointedly at it for some reason then said, “They’re gold because temporal energy reacts with and is conducted by precious metals for some reason. It’s like the universe has the same sense of style as you. That tuxedo i
s half-way to becoming a decent time machine, incidentally. But we should contact them, Captain.”

  “Who?”

  “The Golden Fleet. It’s their responsibility. We have neither the equipment nor the…mental compatibility for such operations.”

  I looked round at him as I shifted the tri-corn hat on my head. There was only one reason anyone would avert their eyes from the magnificent sight of my own private fashion show. He looked uncomfortably to the floor and shifted his weight. I scanned his remarks for a veiled insult. “Mental compatibility?!” I cried, ”Are you saying that I’m too dense for all this time hopping nonsense? You forget the ‘AW’ of CALAPAW- that’s the part that means ‘and wits’”

  “Sir, some people are simply more…attuned to the complex non-linear nature of multiple shifting timelines. And, I hate to bring this up, but you have killed several timecops. You even beat up that watch salesman rather unnecessarily.”

  I looked at him, hurt. He was really dead set against proceeding to the station.

  “Listen Funkworthy, I know you think that all I am is a dashing and endlessly heroic, handsome space adventurer who’s all charisma and machismo-”

  “I never-” he started to protest but I clamped my hand over his mouth.

  “You never had to say it aloud, my friend. But there is more to me than all that. I have a brain too, a pretty good one that’s more than capable of tangling with any temporal paradox. After all am the man who proposed ‘the Theory of the Three Constants’.”

  My hand was still clamped over his mouth flap so he just made a quizzical noise. I held a finger aloft as I laid out my grand theory.

  “There are three constants in the universe,” I intoned solemnly, “and have been ever since the Big Bang. They are- Time, Space and Space Hardcore.”

  He looked at me silently. Even when I removed my hand, he just stared at me evenly. I admit it was a hard theory to wrap one’s head around. In fact most scientific journals were still trying to unravel it, as evidenced by the fact that they still had yet to respond to my paper (even though it was only twenty two words long, discounting the attached picture of me doing a flip on a dirtbike.)