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

by Michael Ronson

  Henry winced as a foot was planted onto his prostrate form. It was Delroy. He held a hand casually out and the shotgun was flung into it. He walked atop the king, looking down grimly at him as he pointed the gun.

  “How does it go again, Your Majesty?” he asked as the royal rolled on the ground beneath him. “The way we remember the fates of your brides. ’Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced beheaded…?’”

  Henry’s face lit up with hope, as he lay under the muzzle of the gun. “Survived! It’s ‘survived’!’ I swear, if you just let me-”

  The boom of the shotgun filled the room as Henry exploded in yellow light.

  “I never was much good at history,” Delroy said, blowing away a trail of cordite seeping from the barrel of the gun.

  A one liner, a killing, a cool pose? I patted myself down physically again to make absolutely sure it wasn’t somehow me doing all of this instead of this interloper. He seemed to be taking some kind of leadership role when, as was historical fact, I knew that that it was my job. It must be one of those quirks of time travel, I thought , desperately.

  He noticed me on the floor.

  “Captain!” he called, “Good to see you! Come here, we have something to show you!” he beckoned me into the control room. Beckoned. As if I were a lowly dog or horse or Funkworthy.

  I followed, swallowing vast bitter lumps of pride. I could still turn this around, I knew. The pillars of my personality had to stand. I was still the leader. But I had questions that needed answered, like how everyone had turned into Napoleons, or how that one Napoleon had turned into a fat king. But a barrage of questions about how holograms suddenly put on weight was not a way to wrestle back leadership of the group.

  Grace looked brightly up at me from her console. “Delroy’s found something that might lead us to victory” she chirped.

  “What a leader!” said Q’uinc’y.

  I looked at the man until he stopped smiling.

  “So what-” I began but then stopped myself. Questions were a weakness. I just silenced myself and after an uncomfortable silence where everyone peered at me and waited for me to finish speaking, they finally started supplying the details themselves.

  “Remember what we said about this thing? Can’t kill the holograms but it can change them, right? It can change them.”

  “Right. Of course,” I replied. If I could just appear to have more of an idea than this upstart non-captain that might suffice.

  “Change them. Remember what we said about the skeletons? Why there are so many? It’s because the skeletons are-

  “-Spooky!” I broke in confidently.

  “No. Simple! There are so many because they’re simple.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” I muttered.

  “So we can use that. We can use that weakness. Of course, we have an ace programmer at the helm in the form of-” he shot out a gesturing hand to Grace, but I was sure I could take over this conversation.

  “Me!” I broke in again.

  “No, no, Grace,” Delroy said, “she can change them. We can get her to hack the system and change the skeletons into something a little bit more complex.”

  Grace continued. “We can change them into complicated things. This place’s processors won’t be able to handle all of their holograms suddenly being turned from a simple skeleton into very complicated things, like horses or Einsteins or jellyfish or Picassos. It’ll overload them. The numbers will have to drop. This station can only render a couple hundred Mozarts max. We short out the system by taxing it too much.”

  Grace looked round expectantly at Delroy, looking for permission. With a curt nod he gave it to her and she beamed back at him. I remembered being the one to have inspired that smile the first time round.

  “And that’s what we use to beat them once and for all,” Deloux said, taking a deep and solemn breath and facing us all.

  I remembered what it was time for.

  It was time for a stirring speech; one perfect rallying address to the troops who were about to go on the last stage of the mission. It was our last desperate charge- death or glory. I remembered being the one to give this speech the last time, before we had initiated our final assault on the reactor and now some pretender was going to give an inferior version before we started our assault on the control room.

  All eyes were on Deloux.

  “That’s our shot,” I murmured to myself. It was how my speech had started. But nobody heard me.

  “That’s our shot,” Delroy said. ”We start changing the troops.”

  “Listen! listen to my stirring words,” I whispered to myself.

  “Listen, I’m not one for speeches,” Delroy said.

  ‘I’ve taken you this far. I’ve carried you all to this point, lashed you to my back and carried you to this point but this is where you all have to join in’. I could remember all that I had said.

  “We’ve gotten this far. We’ve got here together. But I have to ask you to go a little further.”

  ‘Now I could do this alone. Could and probably should. It might be quicker and certainly more stylish.’

  “I can’t do this alone. We have this one chance to pull together. Like I say, one shot”

  ‘The odds we face aren’t too bad. I’ve faced worse odds three times in the last fortnight.’

  “We’re looking at an enemy none of us could imagine.”

  ‘A Prussian wizard from the year 1973’

  “A Russian madman from the 1820s”

  ‘Aided by Charlie Chaplin’

  “Aided by Adolf Hitler”

  ‘Some other chap’

  “Josef Stalin”

  ‘ And backed by some kind of magical horde of monster men from god knows where.’

  “Flanked by an army of holograms,”

  ‘Listen, I don’t understand it, but we don’t need to. Here’s the bottom line’

  “We all know what we’re up against. Here’s the bottom line””

  ‘If you don’t follow me’

  “If we don’t do this together”

  ‘Then the bad guys win and the good guys lose’

  “Then everyone on this planet dies”

  ‘And I won’t let that happen’

  “We can’t let that happen.”

  ‘Especially not today, three days short of my quarter birthday.’

  “Especially not today, on the anniversary of the Galactic Peace Treaty”

  ‘Now, I could go on-’

  “Damnit, I’ve talked enough-”

  ‘But I have a job to do.’

  “But we’ve got a damn job to do. And In the words of a wise man-”

  ‘To coin a phrase I’ve just made up-’

  “‘If you’re going through Hell, Keep going!’”

  ‘If you’re going through Hell, it’s time to blow up the damn reactor!’

  “Who’s with me?”

  ‘Follow me!’

  A cheer went up then. Though I would have liked to think it was for the muttered speech from an alternate timeline I was saying in the corner, I really couldn’t believe that. Delroy turned, shucked the shotgun and led the way, jogging out toward the control tower to battle with Rasputin and the survivors (save Grace who cracked her knuckles and took up residence at her terminal) thoughtlessly fell in behind him.

  “LAPAW,” I said weakly but it sounded unconvincing and tinny in my own ears.

  Before the doors swung closed I f...f….ffffff….followed.

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  The drawing room/laboratory/study of a Victorian adventurer is a terrible place to be, when it explodes.

  There are simply too many curios.

  I’ve been in a lot of exploding places, unfortunately, and I can speak on this matter with some measure of authority. When I’m in a room I appreciate clean lines and a minimalist aesthetic. Your classic late twentieth century Earth designs, the twenty third century iHomes or the gel formed wombs of the Xendar worlds are, for example, plac
es where I can really feel comfortable. Because when Space (or apparently one of his ancestors) is in a room all of its contents are going to be hurled at you in the midst of a fireball and I’d much prefer to be battered only with an artisanal kettle, an abstract painting and a Swedish futon shaped like a breast than…this cavalcade.

  In the midst of the smoke and rubble I slithered out from under a leather high backed divan just before a violin case crashed down on my head. A ship in a bottle, an ape skull, seven pipes, a rusty trumpet and a hat rack soon followed. I only just missed being struck by an oil painting of ships. Across the room a huge oaken shelf full to the brim with jars of powders and vittles crashed down, filling the room with a cloud of scientific-smelling powder and blotting out all light. My mouth was immediately coated by this medical tasting fug.

  I cried out for help but my own voice was just a vibration in my throat sac. My ears were ringing like a wasp’s clock tower and I could hear almost nothing. The room was a ruin of flying dust and detritus. I gained my feet and squinted into it and yelled out again, out of habit more than anything, but the dust was too thick to see much of anything. Only one thing was even dimly visible as I peered around and that was a small orange flame lying some hundred yards away. As I stared at it, momentarily puzzled I saw it sputter out only to be replaced by a huge blooming orange flame.

  My throat vibrated as I yelled out all the curses I could as I threw myself backward onto the floor.

  I felt the cannonball whistle past my face, close enough to trim a millimetre off my eyelashes. It zipped past me and burrowed into the sitting room wall and sent another plume of debris firing into the room, clouding my vision with white dust and debris anew. The floor groaned and shifted under me queasily as the load bearing walls of the Baker Street flat splintered and shifted, unaccustomed as they were to sustained attacks from naval cannons. Tracking back the path of the ball, I imagined I could almost make out another dim orange light. It had to be a fuse on that dreadful cannon, and even if I was imagining it, I knew that reality would soon catch up to my delusions. We were fish in a barrel, rats in a bucket, turtles in a box, sitting ducks perched on the end of a loaded gun. Whatever the animal, whatever the receptacle, we were almost certainly buggered.

  The dim sound of a bellow touched my ear flaps then. It was a distant sound, distorted by my tinnitus so it resembled nothing so much as a walrus’ yawn. I shook my head and tried to focus on it. Hardcore, I mean Hardcolmes. I waggled fingers in ear flaps as I lurched over the no man’s land that separated him from me and the floor shifted crazily under my feet, eager to collapse onto the street like a jigsaw falling from a table, but even more frightening. I came to Hardcolmes and found his dusty figure was lifting a bookcase off of himself. I came to a stop next to him and he clapped a meaty hand on my shoulder and started again.

  “I think,” he bellowed, “I have formed a deduction on the case of the stolen cannon.”

  “What a keen mind you have.”

  He beamed down at me with a winning enthusiasm just as I registered that familiar orange bloom cut through the plasterboard fug over his shoulder. It flared through the white fog, aimed directly at us. I only had time to wince away from the impact.

  But what hit us was neither ball shaped nor deadly however, as the definitively man-shaped Humsworthy sprang forth and clotheslined both of us to the ruined and shaking floor just as the deadly ball whistled overhead. We hit the rug just as a fresh gust of stinging debris shot down past us covering us in a drift of powdered wall. I was inhaling quite a lot of the Hardcolmes study and my nasal passages were beginning to burn, my face feeling numb for some reason.

  We scooted on the floor, using an overturned cabinet as cover and sweeping aside some broken jars that littered the floor.

  “Congratulations!” cried Humsworthy into our ears. “Perhaps you’ll favour us with your deductions once we vacate the premises.” I admired the man’s ability to remain sarcastic while seconds from death.

  “Capital! But for now we have to deal with this mysterious blackguard who’s blowing up all of my scientific apparatus and enlightening literature. I happen to have deduced that we’re dealing with a Dutchman, left-handed and driven mad by syphilis. How could I know this, you ask? Well, simply consider-”

  “I refuse to die like this,” Humsworthy said as he pushed himself upright. I joined him and we both flattened our backs against what was left of the study wall. We both brushed the remnant of some shattered medical jars from ourselves and Hardcolmes joined us presently. I looked over to Humsworthy who had his eyes closed and a look of deep concentration on his face. After a brief moment of ringing silence the detective sheepishly began.

  “Well, you see I figured the man for Dutch due to the tell-tale use of a cannon. The Dutch, you see-”

  A fresh cannonball shot boomed through the room. It cut into the wall on the opposite side of the room from us. He was searching for us now, laying waste to the room to flush us out.

  The good doctor clamped a hand over the still-moving mouth of Hardcolmes, who had moved onto the topic of the deficient moral character of all left handed men. The floor beneath us groaned and shifted dizzily.

  “Sixty seconds,” he announced.

  “What is?”

  “Hmmph rmph hm huhrmph,” answered the detective from under a hand.

  “The interval between the shots. It takes exactly one minute for him to fire, load a fresh ball and fire the blasted thing again.”

  I nodded . “Alright, so as soon as he fires again we make a break for it?”

  “Mphh Mphhhh”

  Humsworthy nodded, his eyes focussed and wide, his pupils dilated with determination. “That’s as good a plan as any, and a damned sight more attractive than sitting here waiting to be buggered by one of this chap’s balls.”

  “Well said. I think we’re agreed but on one point; where do we go? Further into the building? We’d draw his fire to other innocents. Into 221B?”

  A gleeful laugh came from underneath Humsworthy’s hand. He finally tore it from off of his face.

  “God’s bones, gentlemen; isn’t it obvious? Have you ever read ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’? Wonderful poem. And like all good poetry it is, at its heart, about sound military strategy. If you pay attention to its subtext you can learn a lesson about how to engage the enemy. This fellow has blown up one of my very favourite walls and we’re going to turn that problem into a solution.. We charge out directly at him! Surprise attack! It’s what Napoleon called a ‘pincer movement’, I believe. After all, who wouldn’t be surprised to be attacked by some pincers? Maybe crabs. But we’re getting off topic. Lobsters? Probably. Anyway- He fires, we charge out there,” he pointed toward the cannonfire, “AT him. AT him! He won’t expect that.”

  “I don’t know why, but that…almost makes sense to me,” Humsworthy said, nodding his head fervently.

  I had to admit that, even though it made no sense I found the thought of attack quite exhilarating. I wanted to move suddenly, to attack, or at least to talk animatedly. I found myself nodding and repeating “yeah, yeah, yeah.” I shifted uncomfortably and looked down to the cabinet that we had collapsed upon that had spilled jars and bottles around the floor.

  “Wh-why do you have all of these?” I asked, kicking at some of the labelled bottles.

  Hardcolmes looked irritably down at my feet. “What do you mean? My friend is a medical doctor and I myself am a keen scientific investigator. Of course we have a well-stocked pharmacy!”

  “Best in all of London,” Humsworthy yelled, uncomfortably close.

  I felt my eyes widen and my heartbeat quicken and I finally understood why. The human medical practices of this time were...less advanced than I had supposed. I kicked over the labels of the cheerful pharmacy bottles, the contents of which, I now realized had been distributed liberally into the study’s air by the barrage of cannonballs.

  “‘Cocaine powder,’” I said, reading the first label.

  �
��A fine tonic for toothache!” Hardcolmes cried, sweating profusely.

  “Morphine…” I read the next

  “Ah! A good medicine put in a tonic for a teething child,” Humsworthy said, clapping his hand hard on my shoulder.

  “Opium powder?”

  “A nifty answer to the headaches, stubbed toes, hair aches and corpulence”

  “Methamphetamine?”

  “A jiffy for tooth retention and sloth.”

  Hardcolmes took me by the arm roughly, “Why do you ask? Do you have some kind of a plan? Some injury that needs treatment? Some way to use these harmless medicines against our foe?”

  “Well, I have to say that I-”

  But my words were cut off as another explosion erupted the floor beneath our feet. The room itself seemed to jump about a foot in the air before it creaked back down. A maelstrom of debris and powder was all the air in the room and I gasped another lungful down. What percentage was detritus and what percentage was grade-A Victorian pain relief was a mystery. I breathed it all in. It filled my being with a glorious, thrumming excitement.

  “Nevermind!” I shouted to the room. “We’ve got to get that bastard!”

  “Yes!” shouted Hardcolmes from somewhere in the cocaine fog. “I knew you’d see it my way. Charge of the light brigade!”

  “Charge of the light brigade!” agreed Humsworthy from somewhere in the study.

  I got unsteadily to my feet and sighted the orange glow of the fuse through the smoke. I almost felt as though I could just reach out and grab it where it was. Tempus. What a fool. He didn’t know who he was messing with. The three of us would be over there in a flash dealing out justice in a second. What did he have? An ancient cannon and some futuristic time technology? Pah!

  “Charge of the Light brigade!” I cried happily as the study floor lurched under my feet.

  We three started sprinting straight forward as the building started to come down on top of us, as the floor started sliding to the street, as the cannon started tracking us. As the orange flame erupted into the night air.