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

by Michael Ronson

  Jeremy Rigorous

  Valedictions of A Dying Cloud

  Ѻ

  He stood in the dark with the needles and vials spread before him, his back to me. It was a frightening array of drugs; something for any imaginable effect. On the street it would be worth millions and called by a thousand slang names. He had uppers, downers, middlers, dope, speed, whizz, charlie, jellies, peachies, jemimas, jazzy jeffs, chubby checkers, bizzwozzwops, antihistamines, electric dream accordians, funk flutes, rusty truumpets, jellied eels, jamiroquais and paracetamol. The needles before him glowed with a psychadelic slurry of a dozen of these concoctions. Something to drive Space mad? Something to amp himself up? It was impossible to tell. He cast his head back a touch, deigning to acknowledge my presence .

  “Something tells me that's not your prescription, Tempus.”

  “On the contrary. This is exactly what I- the doctor- ordered for my two irritating polyps which need to be gotten rid of. Take two of these,” he squirted a little of the toxic mixture out of the syringe, “ and call me in the morning.”

  “Big words for a man in an asylum, locked away with all the other lunatics.”

  “Well maybe you hadn't heard but we're running the asylum now.”

  Tempus sneered at me and turned around. The needle sat menacingly in his hand, green liquid drops spilling from its point. He saw me look at it and smiled. The sound of the patients beating each other was dim in here, affording us a little quiet and privacy.

  “Before we do this, I have to ask- why here?” I asked. “Why this time, this place?.”

  “The first records of Hardcore in the COAR corps,” he said simply. “Military records show exactly where and when a person is stationed.”

  I nodded. Space had told me this was his first real assignment, it would be the most traceable aspect of his early life, free of his usual exaggerations and boasts of conquests that later turn out to have been dreams or misremembered movies he had inserted himself into. I took a step forward and tried to look around for weapons of my own. I had to keep Tempus talking as I tried to think “What was the plan then? Come through, get close to Space with some knowledge of him and his future, and then-”

  “And then,” Tempus said with relish, swishing the needle before him, making stabbing motions in the air. “Quite. A young private in the COAR, no ship, a fixed address. An easy kill, Mr. Funkworthy.”

  I met his smile with one of my own. “Working out quite well isn’t it?” I asked, spreading out my arms. Dimly I heard someone scream about apes. “A prisoner in an asylum. Caught in the same place as all the other time travellers.”

  That wiped the smile from his face. “Those morons wouldn’t listen to me. I came through and saw Space himself standing before me. Younger certainly, but that smug, cocksure face of his was the same one I’ve burned into my own eyelids. I appeared and told him I was his friend from the future. 'Who?' you ask? Why Ebenezer Funkworthy is my name.” He gave a mocking little salute.

  “You fiend!”

  He bowed to my outrage. “Oh, I showed him all sorts of reports.” He thumbed his wrist communicator and brought up a host of news articles, scrolling headlines emblazoned with Space's name and mine. “Told him that I had come to save him from a threat that was coming after him; a time traveller. Some horrific Tempus fellow. You.”

  “Clever,” I noted, “but yet here we are. What happened?.”

  He grimaced and I inched closer. “I almost had him. I could see him buying the story. I had proof after all! Tech and stories from the future. He was drinking in the details of his future exploits. His ridiculous battles, his self-aggrandizing feats, the ranks, the medals all of that. I was so close to winning him over. He asked why I had come back and I saw my opportunity to lay my trap. I told him about how the two of us had come back from a future timeline and that he was going to be killed to corrupt that one possible future and affect the causal chain of events that conclude in the-”

  I smiled and nodded, “Ah. I see. He probably shot you in the face around then, right?”

  His eyes widened in surprise. “He DID. Right in the face. How did you know?”

  “Space hates to be confused. That's why he hates time travel and Cluedo. He can't bear to be seen stumped by something. I once tried to teach him chess and he locked me in the brig for cheating, insubordination and lying. There were several dozen Rubik’s cubes and a jigsaw locked in there with me for the same reasons. You got clever on him, Tempus. You couldn't help yourself and you ended up in here.”

  He sneered. “True enough, Mister Funkworthy. I was put in this place and have spent weeks with the feeble minds that have ended up here, including your good self, of course. Even with all your advantages you end up here too?”

  “Our previous conversation ten, fifteen years from now was cut a little short. I wanted to end it. Permanently.” He was stood in front of all of the medical apparatus. I had found no weapons. I'd have to go into this with just my fists.

  Tempus' smile returned. “Good thing too.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because I need to get close to the Captain again to stick this rather fetching pharmaceutical concoction in his neck. What better way than to come to him with the body of his enemy? His trusty lapdog, bringing him the cadaver of Professor Tempus.” He made a fist around the needle, grabbed a scalpel with his other hand.

  “What a wonderful idea. I might join you in that.”

  He smiled at me and I smiled tightly back, having reached an accord. No more need for words. In the cramped office we both took up a fighting stance. He swished his scalpel in front of him, cutting through the air in savage, whistling movements. I took my first tentative step towards him. He inched closer to me. I’d have to disable that arm, I thought, take the fight to the ground, there the weight of my trousers would give me an advantage. I shuffled my feet closer. His face went blank, pupils contracted . We-

  Cla-chick

  The sound of a weapon being cocked. A very specific weapon. We wheeled around.

  “Freeze,” came a familiar voice.

  At the smashed-in pharmacy window stood a young Captain Space Hardcore pistol in hand and confusion in his eyes. It was a comfortingly familiar sight.

  “Right then,” he said, “one of you is Ebenezer Funkworthy. And one one of you is some kind of evil time professor. The question is: who's who?” He asked, gun wandering from one of us to the other.

  I looked at Tempus. He looked at me. Dropping his weapons he shot his hand up.

  “I am Ebenezer Funkworthy! Shoot him,” he yelled.

  “I am Ebenezer Funkworthy! Shoot him,” I returned.

  Space sighed.

  “Oh f-”

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  “Fire!”

  I snapped off the arm of the robot and leaned against his body, firing its own laser over its shoulder into the horde. It was a good strategy, as it turned your enemy into your shield and your weapon. It was also a necessary strategy since our weapons were lying empty behind us and the robots were firing an unceasing barrage of laser bolts. Funkworthy and Bathby did likewise, shoulder-charging into the foremost mech and commandeering their weapons. We three trudged onward, firing blindly into the crowd with their bodies as our shields. Aim was secondary. Every shot hit an enemy since there were so many.

  “ONE MINUTE FOURTY UNTIL SOLAR IMPACT” STEVE-A said, redundantly. The room was like a sauna already and the windows were wreathed in fire.

  I searched my mind for paradoxes. I had used one earlier on; the only one I could think of when I screamed “I have made a mistake.” At the computer, but both it and my companions had taken that statement entirely at face value and nobody had blown up because of logical impossibility. I must say, I was most disappointed in Funkworthy.

  Speaking of whom, Ebenezer, frantic enough to agree to go along with my plans screamed out; “I have one; This statement is true, the previous statement is false.”.

&nb
sp; “What? Well, which one is it?” I asked urgently. It seemed like he had taken a temporary leave of his senses. “It has to be one or the other.” I urged.

  “That’s a paradox!” he yelled, firing a volley over his metal cadaver

  “Really? Are you sure? I They’re usually in the form of a question. Some start with ‘knock-knock’.”

  “That’s a joke!”

  “Sometimes jokes are paradoxes. There’s one old one about the Sphinx. Can’t quite remember it. Oh, damnit, let’s try.” I pointed my face at STEVE-A’s screen and raised my voice, “The Sphinx!” I cried. The screen didn’t even flicker. “Worth a try.”

  “Catch-22,” I yelled. Nothing.

  “It needs to be more than the title of the paradox,” Bathby yelled.

  “Schrodinger had a cat.”

  “We need more than that,” Ebenezer said.

  “Kayak!”

  “And that would be a palindrome,” Bathby this time.

  “There once was a man from Nantucket-”

  “Limerick!” came Funkworthy

  “Six ounces of cut apples, a cup of flour-”

  That’s a recipe for apple turnover.”

  “14 King Road.”

  “Part of an address,” said Bathby

  I held up my glove

  “That’s a glove,” Funkworthy again.

  “Blam.”

  “That’s an onomatopoeia and we’re getting progressively less sophisticated here, Captain,” Professor Bathby screamed at me. She fired over her robot at the hordes but they were closing in on all sides. Our robot shields were all glowing red hot from absorbing so much fire. Soon they'd be as useless as the guns in our hands, which were almost out of charge.

  “ONE MINUTE”

  Damn it all. I threw aside my robotic shield. It was coming apart too much to serve any function. I threw the freshly emptied laser at the nearest robot. Now was a time for fists. Frustration had been building in me for minutes now. My charm had been rebuffed, my plans had failed and my riddles seemed like nothing so formidable as a children’s book. In another timeline Bathby and Ebenezer were alive and happy, both quietly grateful that I had come into their lives and sorted everything out. In that timeline I could almost see them there, serenely smiling and contemplating how great my actions were, and Tempus had robbed them of that. About now, in a parallel timeline Bathby was sighing wistfully and composing her story of my deeds. But here, in this universe there was nothing but robots and fire and countdowns. If I was to die, I was going to leave this life like I can into it; fist first. I charged, both of my fists out and knocked down two robots at once. I spun and elbowed another into oblivion as the walls started to glow orange. The lasers slashed past me. I kept charging onward.

  “Damn damn damn RIDDLES!” I yelled, grabbing a spanner and thrusting it into a robot face.

  “Damn bloody TEMPUS!” I cried, kicking the legs from out under a robot and introducing its head to my uppercut.

  “T-MINUS THIRTY SECONDS” STEVE-A taunted. I gritted my teeth

  “Hell balls buggering STEVE-A!” I threw another robot body toward the flame drenched windows. The riddles had failed. That smug computer knew everything. I gritted my teeth.

  “If he’s so damnably smart, maybe HE can think of a paradox hard enough that he can’t solve it, hm?” I grabbed a robot head and thrust it down into my knee. It crumpled and fell to the floor. The one next to it fell also, presumably out of fear.

  The robot next to it fell too.

  Cowards, I thought.

  And the next fell too.

  I continued to swing my fists, but the robots were falling before it even reached them.

  It took a few more seconds and a few more swings at falling robots before I reluctantly dropped my fists to my side. The robots, littered the floor, still and lifeless. I looked around the room. Each one was in the act of powering down. I looked at the AI screen. STEVE-A's face was gone, replaced by error messages on a blue screen. He was gone. The robots deactivated. How? Who? Whence? Whither? Wherefore?

  “Space, you did it!” Funkworthy cried.

  Had I? Maybe he just said that out of habit. I couldn't remember doing anything.

  We three turned to each other, eyebrows raised in surprise as we took in the sudden calm. A huge cracking shook us from this brief reverie as the windows bisected as another crack ran through it. Robots or no, we were still falling.

  Bathby cursed and leapt over the tables to STEVE-A’s screen. Consoles exploded around her, as the heat mounted. She tapped at the control panels with astonishing speed, bringing up displays and schematics like a woman possessed.

  “Hold on,” she hollered over to us. Myself and Ebenezer hunkered down to the floor as the roaring fire outside the window intensified and the computer consoles exploded in sparks. A second later an enormous humming noise shook the floor, a reassuring vibration in the foundations of the station; mechanical life, turbines, whirring into motion. The thrusters, back online roared back into life, ready to defy gravity. In my mind I could picture all too clearly the surface of the star ready to swallow us like a pie. The sound cycled higher and higher, Bathby pushing the power levels to maximum and the whining increased in volume and intensity. That reminded me; I looked over to Funkworthy who had clung to a console and stared out at the windows. I did likewise and pressed my powerful arms around a console as the station gyrated and bucked like an enormous mechanical bull. I looked out toward the atomic sun-fire. The vibration shifted to a shudder and that shudder shifted to a quake as Bathby poured every ounce of power into our engines and a sick sound of metal rending tore through the station. Bathby kept at it. We looked and the orange of the windows gave way to a pale yellow glow. Shuddering and shifting, soon the station rose further letting in peeks of black at the edges as we felt the rush of ascent in our stomachs and other glands. The orange sank to a yellow, the yellow a pale yellow. We were rising alright. Next came the twinkling of stars in that blackness and then the fire disappeared entirely and still we rose, rocketing up out of the sun’s atmosphere. We rose, like the legend of the phoetus; unharmed by the flames and reborn in space.

  The vibration and sounds of tumult of the ship started to die away, as if soothed by the uniform blackness of space and the station settled into a comfortable thrumming. I went to Bathby and lifted her shaking hand off of the controller and settled it into a standard orbit (the station, not her hand). She sat down heavily on our barricade as Funkworthy walked over on unsteady legs.

  We let a moment of quiet fall between us.

  “Brilliant,” Funkworthy said to me with a relieved smile. “A brilliant gambit.” and patted me on the arm.

  “Quite,” I agreed.

  “An ancient paradox,” added Bathby, nodding to me. “One of the oldest probably. ‘can God make a rock so heavy he himself cannot lift it?’ Ha.”

  I had no idea. It seemed rather out of the blue to start a theological debate right now but people sometimes get queer thoughts in their heads after they’ve gone through a life or death situation. I found it wise to just nod my head and flex a little.

  Funkworthy smiled, agreeing with Bathby, and then turned to me , “You re-purposed that paradox, turned it on the AI. ‘Can STEVE-A make a paradox so clever he can’t solve it?’ It really seemed like a genuine question as well. That was the one that did him in.”

  A slight panic went through me. Had I said that? I thought back. I remembered swearing, picking up a spanner, cursing, hitting. ‘hell balls buggerring STEVE-A’ I had said. What next? ‘If he’s so damnably smart, maybe HE can think of a paradox hard enough-’ I had said that.

  “Oh yes, a slight re-invention of that older one. With the rocks and whatnot. What you said.”

  “That was a close one, Captain.”

  “Damn close” added Bathby.

  She was right.

  “So...What now?” Funkworthy looked back to me.

  It was a good question. I had almost completely forg
otten my lines from the first go-round of this, and I had to say that I didn't really feel like introducing myself with the bravado I had previously done on my first run through of this and asking Bathby to write about this adventure. Besides, now that I had passed the first test I was curious as to how I was going to return to my original time, whether Tempus would return for me or if I would automatically travel back. Perhaps I would just have to wait a year. I hoped it was the latter, since I thought I had had a way to beat Tempus in that instrument fight this time round (the key would be to throw a timpani very, very hard).

  I opened my mouth to speak. But someone else did.

  “Well, Professor, let me tell you about a story competition-.” The words came from my mouth, in my voice. But I did not control them. It was like a stranger was taking over my body. My arms moved, out of my control. My legs felt strangely alien to me, my face numb, my arms distant, my buttocks like a foreign land. I was a stranger in my own body.

  I felt a sudden lurch in my stomach, a tight queasiness and here was a sound. Beeping. The beeping of the chrono desynchronizer growing louder and louder as my stomach knotted. My vision clouded with purplish energy. The smells and temperature changed to those I remembered from the control room on station Kronis. I opened my mouth to scream but my body was not my own any more. A younger Captain Space Hardcore was piloting it now. I was ejected.

  The last thing I saw, out of the station’s window, was a bloom of orange as the other space-station exploded, right on cue.But I was gone.

  And just like that the time void had me.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Funkworthy Charade/ Space is Waylaid