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

by Michael Ronson

  I had to remind myself that this was not my Tempus- not yet at least- and not ever if we all succeeded. Here and now he was just a run-of-the-mill time travel scientist who was just an explosion shy of becoming the twisted monster I knew. Huddling and afraid in the corner with the rest of his staff and family he was just a scared man- a scared man who had just been informed that there was a bomb on his station-a scared man who had just been informed that there was a bomb on his station by a cabal of historically themed identical men who were now shouting historically accurate epithets at everything bomb-shaped on his ship.

  There were six of us in total here, each more historical than the last. I twirled to the Victorian gentleman. “Whasitch?” I cried at him.

  “Excellent question my dear Hardcore. We’ve secured this floating fortress to the best of our abilities and a mansearch is underway for this clockwork cad of whom you speak.”

  “Excellent,” I said, surveying the room like a chartered surveyor.

  The people of this timeline cowered behind some tables, like chairs usually do, but unlike chairs they were letting out occasional moans of alarm and bemusement. For time scientists, I thought, one would suppose that this eventuality would have occurred to them. But the pallid and meek folk of the hard sciences are so seldom prepared for the consequences of their actions and even something as tame as several identical men teleporting into their reality screaming about bombs was enough to reduce them to quivering wrecks. I yearned for a suitable foe to set about.

  The door whooshed open on cue and the youthful and energetic figure of Private Space Hardcore bounded in with the enthusiasm of a man who had just punched a cyborg.

  “Just punched a cyborg gents!” he cried

  “Huzzah,” went the cry in the room.

  “Guess who it was?” he asked the room.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “I deduce-” started Hardcolmes but before he could get any more words out my younger self manhandled a shady figure into the laboratory. He was a different man than the one I remembered in a number of ways. He was younger than the last time we met. He had more flesh and less cybernetics on him. He was clothed in more than holographic pyjamas. He was also taller, and not hollering at me from inside a flushing toilet pan. But there was no mistaking him.

  “Belson Erdinger.” I said warmly as the Private pushed him roughly at my feet.

  Belson Edinger even scrambled to his knees like an absolute shit. Clad in light covert ops armour and a few very choice fist-shaped facial bruises he managed to maintain his cold blooded composure even as he knelt before me, like his head had once done.

  He aimed a sneer at me. “Do I know you?”

  “Nope,” I said pleasantly.

  I then punched him solidly in his human eye, a vicious crunching blow fuelled by righteous anger.

  “Huzzah,” went the cry in the room.

  He took a while to return to a sitting position, by which time I had almost finished high fiving my ancestors.

  “You’ve got a strange way of introducing yoursel...ves,” he was only just looking round at the faces that were around him. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to explain myself, time travel or the presence of Pope Harcore the Third.

  “Where’s the bomb, Erdinger?”

  He went all wide eyed and innocent. “Bomb? What bomb are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Erdinger. I invented that gambit. You don’t want to go toe-to-toe with me.”

  “Toe-to-what?” he said vacantly. Seemed like he did want to play dumb. Two could play at that game and I played better than most.

  “What’s a toe?” I asked innocently.

  “A toe? No idea. Never seen one. Why do you ask?” he volleyed back.

  “Ask? What did I ask?”

  “‘What’s a toe?’”

  “What IS a toe?”

  “No idea. Never seen one.”

  “Never seen a what?”

  “A toe”

  “A-ha!”

  “A-What?”

  For some reason Hardcolmes physically stepped between the two of us.

  “Gentlemen!” he cried, “This battle of wits is an engaging thing to watch but we’re against the clock here. We need to get to this bomb.”

  “What bomb?” Erdinger said again, a smirk in his eyes. He levelled those smirking eyes at me. I punched the smirk out of that eye. Then I punched his mouth to warn it not to get any ideas about smirking.

  “Huzzah,” went the cry in the room.

  But punching the man was getting me nowhere, even if all the cheering was a lifting my spirits. I knew this kind of hardened operative was used to violence. For the first time in this version of the universe I decided to just be straight with him.

  “Listen to me Erdinger. There’s an alternate timeline that I come from. In that reality we were in prison together. I’ve eaten with you, showered with you, slid down a sewage pipe with you and cut your head off more often than you could possibly realize. I’m willing to do at least one of those things right now if you don’t give up the answers and I’ll tell you something for free; I’m not feeling peckish. Now, one last time, before I let my friends here backwards engineer wifi several centuries too soon out of your ugly mug, where. Is. Da. Bomb?”

  He held my gaze for as long as he could. He was a cold bastard alright, but even a merc like him had to know when he was out of his depth. He glanced at the Sir Selby Hardwynn who was stirring in his plate mail and shifting the weight of his morningstar in his hands. He glanced at Special Agent James Hardfist who was brusquely straightening his lapels and sipping a large coke float (shaken, not stirred). Erdinger looked back into my eyes, confusion troubling the edges of even his mechanical peepers. He was trapped in a vice of testosterone and barely veiled threat.

  “The bomb,” I growled.

  “I…..” he hesitated.

  “Ushe your head.” Hardfist interjected. “Tell the man what he wantsh to know.”

  He collapsed in on himself like some kind of criminal soufflé.

  “Engineering. Deck 4b. Behind the inertia dampeners,” he muttered.

  I released my grip on him and let him sink to the deck. I motioned to the me-s who surrounded me.

  “Can you handle it?” I asked, already anxiously fingering my trousers.

  “Verily.”

  “Yesh.”

  “Indubitably.”

  But I didn't wait for the period-appropriate affirmations to finish. My me-s were already racing toward Erdinger’s bomb but I needed to check on the progress of another imperilled outpost. I set the dials to my previous location, at about a minute after my last departure and blinked out of existence once more.

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  Funkworthy greeted me as I materialized.

  Or rather he jumped back yelling as I materialized out of the time/space continuum in front of him. Same difference.

  “Would you mind telling me just what the hell is going on here?”

  I surveyed around him. “Time travel business. You wouldn’t understand.”

  He made a face at that. “I wouldn’t understand? Really? Might I remind you that I’m the person who had to explain your bidet to you. Twice. Last month.”

  “Oh, Funkworthy, I’ve ascended beyong the concept of ‘last month’. Besides,those were the actions of an aggressive or amorous android. I was entitled to be alarmed at that creature. I still don’t entirely trust it.”

  “But I wouldn’t understand whatever time travel business is going on,” he said heavily.

  I clapped him around the shoulder. “Old man, this isn’t simple bidet-work, can’t you see? If this was just about the comings and goings around my gentleman’s exit we’d be done here already and I wouldn’t have needed nearly this much manpower. I’m short on time and juggling far more time periods than I’m used to. I’m out to change the damned future since- between you, me and the mule that bears your name- if we don’t get this so
rted the future’s pretty bleak for me. And that means it’s probably also pretty bleak for you.”

  He took a second to take it in and worry creased his already sadly rumpled face. “I’m...I’m dead in this future?”

  I shook my head sadly. “Worse. When I last saw you were...Captain-less. Robbed of purpose, adrift and left without meaning. You were manfully looking down the barrel of a life without me in it.”

  He looked at me strangely.

  “I know, unimaginable isn’t it? What fate would you have had without me? Bidet explainer? Perhaps something even lower. Imagine a universe where I was not around to inject meaning and adventure into your life like a big syringe. Hardly bears thinking about, eh? Perhaps you’d be a pauper, perhaps a beggar or a street person. Maybe you’d be a vagrant or perhaps you would have turned out to be something else like a tramp, brewing stew from roadkill you scavenge in a pan made from discarded socks. Panhandler? Maybe, but more likely you’d be some form of hobo, scraping change up where you could find it. Listen, I’m not saying you don’t have a multitude of possible lives, but without me? Can you even call it a life? You might as well be….well, Funkworthy there.” I motioned to the mule who was nibbling enthusiastically at Professor Bathby’s lab coat.

  Funkworthy took a measured beat to let all of this sink in. It would be hard for him to contain his gratitude but somehow he did. In many ways his reserve was his greatest and most irritating strength. My, but the man had a stiff upper lip. “So...since I don’t wish to become a mule, is there any help that you need? It seems like a gaggle of… you have comfortably overwhelmed the AI with…”

  He trailed off and glanced over at the hunky huddle that had formed around the screen of EVE-A. Some posed, making pecs dance under linen shirts, some yelled bawdy verse in middle english and others were far less advanced and far more ...primal in their mating practices.

  “...Whatever that is.” Funkworthy finished.

  As a result EVE-A was not just seduced this time, she was absolutely annihilated. The screen was a vast blue error screen being thrust at pelvically by all my ancestors in a dance as old as time. I smiled and let them continue.

  I looked around the station. It was full of me, empty of threats, devoid of active killbots and it had ceased to plummet into the sun. Not bad. One threat down. I looked back at Funkworthy.

  “We’ve got another station that needs help, Ebenezer. It’s got a ticking bomb on board, a cybernetic sod who put it there and one short of enough versions of Captain Space Hardcore to handle the whole mess.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “When do you?” I countered.

  “Checkmate,” he said.

  “Bingo. Connect four.” I replied. I was glad we were on the same page and that I had named more games than him. Another win. “So, you in?”

  He looked around and shrugged that shrug of exasperated confusion that had come to be his catchphrase, if catchphrases were spoken by shoulder gesticulations. “Makes as much sense as what’s going on here, Cap’n.”

  “Then cling tightly to my trousers,” I said.

  To his credit he only took half a second to look annoyed before he complied.

  He let out a little yell as I wrapped his hands around my temporal trousers but as I fiddled with the crotch and we blinked back toward Tempus’ station I knew it felt right.

  Hardcore and Funkworthy.

  A few millennia late? Maybe.

  A little weatherbeaten? Sure.

  A few million years older than promised and coming from separate timelines? I guess.

  But whatever the case the two of us were coming to answer that distress signal. Coming to save the day, as promised.

  Chapter Thirty One

  The Last Bomb

  * * *

  In the beginning there was the Word. And that word was ‘In’. Next was ‘the beginning’ followed closely by ‘there was the Word’. I forget the next bit but the last part is ‘cockles’. Cockles.

  Channing Hardcastle

  The Devil Makes a Tedious Dance Partner

  Ѻ

  I had, conservatively speaking, probably around seven hundred questions swirling in my head as the Captain teleported us through time and space into the crew-deck of a scientific research station. Even that sentence contained about a dozen improbable things I would have liked to have addressed.

  We flashed into existence in what looked like a roughly similar laboratory setting as the one we had just left- a sleek and airy open chamber that looked like a computer retail outlet had collided with a high school science class. Heraldon’s sun must be lousy with anonymous science installations in various degrees of distress. Another thing that was similar in our surroundings were the amount of theatrically dressed Hardcores yelling in it.

  I’d say that would be one of the chief things that I was curious about- why there were so many different versions of the Captain and why they were all dressed in costumes from throughout Earth’s history. Even if one were to accept that the Captain had summoned his ancestor’s from throughout time to aid him in this mission (and that was quite a large thing to accept, if I say so myself) that answer in itself only raised further questions. Questions like ‘why did you bring a caveman onto a space station?’ or ‘what use is a cowboy?’ or ‘why did you bring a mule here?’

  These were all good questions, I think (though I am biased), but there were even smaller more niggling concerns that kept occurring to me. Why, for example, was the Captain wearing such ill-fitting trousers? They were at least two sizes too small and they looked roughly-used; two things that Space avoided at all costs. Another question- why the change in Space’s demeanour. As the different versions of him had appeared on the deck the Captain himself had seemed to change slightly, almost imperceptibly. He was rougher almost, harder and colder around the eyes and with a sense of detachment. It was as though he’d been through some invisible trial, or perhaps even a tribulation.

  Also- how had Space become so au fait with the use of time travel technology? This slightly older version of the Captain had been zipping about all over the temporal plane since he showed up. The Captain I knew had always been hostile towards the very notion of time travel and was still more than as little suspicious of microwaves and ambivalent about traffic lights. Hell, I’ve seen the man accuse seven scientists of being warlocks in his career.

  But I supposed I should prioritize. As I looked around the sparse, white interior of the laboratory, I had to ask the most obvious of things.

  “Why is that medieval knight mashing that cyborg’s face into a bomb?” I asked.

  Some more Hardcores peered round at me momentarily as I asked that, but my query did nothing to halt the action itself (which was rather the point). The knight- clad in blinding gold chainmail- was yelling incomprehensibly through his helmet as his gauntleted hand repeatedly smashed the face of a kneeling man into the blinking casing of what was obviously a very powerful explosive device. The bomb itself- a device about the size of modest endtable (but more dangerous than any endtable I could imagine)- did not seem unstable enough to be pummelled into exploding but I usually erred on the side of caution when it came to bombs. This level of tact when it came to tactical arms was more than this medieval man was acquainted with. He crunched the man’s face into the blinking bomb once more.

  The victim of the bludgeoning was managing to yell out some words in between the concussions.

  “It can’t-” Smash. “-be turned-” Smash. “-off!” was what I got out of it.

  I presumed he was talking about the titular explosive.

  A dapper Hardcore in a tuxedo turned politely to us, raised an elegant eyebrow and remarked. “We’ve got the devishe, chaps. Devil of the thing is, though, it doesn’t sheem to have an ‘off’ switch. We might go up any shecond and if we do, gents, it’sh been a blast.”

  Space halted the knight’s actions and grabbed the cyborg by the scruff of the neck, addressing him and giving
him a name.

  “Is that true Erdinger? Can you not disarm this thing?”

  This Erdinger shook himself and deflated a little. He said plaintively. “It’s a cheap and nasty bomb. No ticking timer, no disarmament code, none of that muck, just set the thing and forget it. There’s probably some wire you can snip inside it, but I’m damned if I know how to do it. I just set the thing and leave.” He cast an eye around the room, fear shining through his professional detachment (and also his eye).

  The Hardcores exchanged a look at each other, then some curt nods. It seemed that they agreed- this Erdinger was telling the truth.

  “This knave speaks true words, brethren. What is to be done?”

  A Hardcore in a deerstalker chipped in, “I deduce that we have a limited time to rid ourselves of this nefarious device.”

  “Can we shoot it out into shpace?”

  I decided to break in, if only to break the unreality of the situation. “Maybe we can teleport it out of here.”

  Space shot a look over to one of the scientists huddled in the other side of the room. “Tempus!” he called, “Teleporter?”

  A nebbish little man stumbled forward a few steps apologetically. It was my first real time noticing the small gaggle of scientists who were doing what was most sensible in the situation; cowering in the corner and looking agog at what was happening. The ‘Tempus’ that Space addressed seemed to be the leader- a compact and efficient looking man in a lab coat who was trying valiantly to keep himself together. “This station has no need of a teleporter.” he said apologetically.

  “A trebuchet?” asked the knight.

  “Shome kind of ejector sheat?”

  “A really big toilet?”