He set the machine for eleven hours ahead—and then had a second thought. That setting would take him to nine o’clock the next morning. The safe would click open then, but the store would be opening too and there’d be people around. So instead he set the machine for twenty-four hours, took hold of the handle of the safe and then pressed the button on the time machine.
At first he thought nothing had happened. Then he found that the handle of the safe worked when he turned it and he knew that he’d made the jump to evening of the next day. And of course the time mechanism of the safe had unlocked it en route. He opened the safe and took all the paper money in it, stuffing it into various pockets,
He went to the alley door to let himself out, but before he reached for the bolt that kept it locked from the inside he had a sudden brilliant thought. If instead of leaving by a door he left by using his time machine he’d not only increase the mystery by leaving the store tightly locked and thereby increasing the mystery, but he’d be taking himself back in time as well as in place to the moment of his completing the time machine, a day and a half before the robbery.
And by the time the robbery took place he could be soundly alibied; he’d be staying at a hotel in Florida or California, in either case over a thousand miles from the scene of the crime. He hadn’t thought of his time machine as a producer of alibis, but now he saw that it was perfect for the purpose.
He dialed his time machine to zero and pressed the button.
THE SHORT HAPPY LIVES OF EUSTACE WEAVER III
When Eustace Weaver invented his time machine he knew that he had the world by the tail on a downhill pull, as long as he kept his invention a secret. By playing the races and the stock market he could make himself fabulously wealthy in no time at all. The only catch was that he was flat broke.
Suddenly he remembered the store where he worked and the safe in it that worked with a time lock. A time lock should be no sweat at all for a man who had a time machine.
He sat down on the edge of his bed to think. He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes and pulled them out—but with them came paper money, a handful of ten-dollar bills! He tried other pockets and found money in each and every one. He stacked it on the bed beside him, and by counting the big bills and estimating the smaller ones, he found he had approximately fourteen hundred dollars.
Suddenly he realized the truth, and laughed. He had already gone forward in time and emptied the supermarket safe and then had used the time machine to return to the point in time where he had invented it. And since the burglary had not yet, in normal time, occurred, all he had to do was get the hell out of town and be a thousand miles away from the scene of the crime when it did happen.
Two hours later he was on a plane bound for Los Angeles—and the Santa Anita track—and doing some heavy thinking. One thing that he had not anticipated was the apparent fact that when he took a jaunt into the future and came back he had no memory of whatever it was that hadn’t happened yet.
But the money had come back with him. So, then, would notes written to himself, or Racing Forms or financial pages from newspapers? It would work out.
In Los Angeles he took a cab downtown and checked in at a good hotel. It was late evening by then and he briefly considered jumping himself into the next day to save waiting time, but he realized that he was tired and sleepy. He went to bed and slept until almost noon the next day.
His taxi got tangled in a jam on the freeway so he didn’t get to the track at Santa Anita until the first race was over but he was in time to read the winner’s number on the tote board and to check it on his dope sheet. He watched five more races, not betting but checking the winner of each race and decided not to bother with the last race. He left the grandstand and walked around behind and under it, a secluded spot where no one could see him. He set the dial of his time machine two hours back, and pressed the stud.
But nothing happened. He tried again with the same result and then a voice behind him said, «It won’t work. It’s in a deactivating field.»
He whirled around and there standing right behind him were two tall, slender young men, one blond and the other dark, and each of them with a hand in one pocket as though holding a weapon.
«We are Time Police,» the blond one said, «from the twenty-fifth century. We have come to punish you for illegal use of a time machine.»
«B-b-but,» Weaver sputtered, «h-how could I have known that racing was—» His voice got a little stronger. «Besides I haven’t made any bets yet.»
«That is true,» the blond young man said. «And when we find any inventor of a time machine using it to win at any form of gambling, we give him warning the first time. But we’ve traced you back and find out your very first use of the time machine was to steal money from a store. And that is a crime in any century.» He pulled from his pocket something that looked vaguely like a pistol.
Eustace Weaver took a step backward. «Y-you don’t mean—»
«I do mean,» said the blond young man, and he pulled the trigger. And this time, with the machine deactivated, it was the end for Eustace Weaver.
EXPEDITION
«The first major expedition to Mars,» said the history professor, «the one which followed the preliminary exploration by one-man scout ships and aimed to establish a permanent colony, led to a great number of problems. One of the most perplexing of which was: How many men and how many women should comprise the expedition’s personnel of thirty?
«There were three schools of thought on the subject.
«One was that the ship should be comprised of fifteen men and fifteen women, many of whom would no doubt find one another suitable mates and get the colony off to a fast start.
«The second was that the ship should take twenty-five men and five women—ones who were willing to sign a waiver on monogamous inclinations—on the grounds that five women could easily keep twenty-five men sexually happy and twenty-five men could keep five women even happier.
«The third school of thought was that the expedition should contain thirty men, on the grounds that under those circumstances the men would be able to concentrate on the work at hand much better. And it was argued that since a second ship would follow in approximately a year and could contain mostly women, it would be no hardship for the men to endure celibacy that long. Especially since they were used to it; the two Space Cadet schools, one for men and one for women, rigidly segregated the sexes.
«The Director of Space Travel settled this argument by a simple expedient. He—Yes, Miss Ambrose?» A girl in the class had raised her hand.
«Professor, was that expedition the one headed by Captain Maxon? The one they called Mighty Maxon? Could you tell us how he came to have that nickname?»
«I’m coming to that, Miss Ambrose. In lower schools you have been told the story of the expedition, but not the entire story; you are now old enough to hear it.
«The Director of Space Travel settled the argument, cut the Gordian knot, by announcing that the personnel of the expedition would be chosen by lot, regardless of sex, from the graduating classes of the two space academies. There is little doubt that he personally favored twenty-five men to five women—because the men’s school had approximately five hundred in the graduating class and the women’s school had approximately one hundred. By the law of averages the ratio of winners should have been five men to one woman.