The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver

I

When Eustace Weaver invented his time machine he was a very happy man. He knew that he had the world by the tail on a downhill pull, as long as he kept his invention a secret. He could become the richest man in the world, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. All he had to do was to take short trips into the future to learn what stocks had gone up and which horses had won races, then come back to the present and buy those stocks or bet on those horses.

The races would come first of course because he would need a lot of capital to play the market, whereas, at a track, he could start with a two-dollar bet and quickly parlay it into the thousands. But it would have to be at a track; he’d too quickly break any bookie he played with, and besides he didn’t know any bookies. Unfortunately the only tracks operating at the present were in Southern California and in Florida, about equidistant and about a hundred dollars’ worth of plane fare away. He didn’t have a fraction of that sum, and it would take him weeks to save that much out of his salary as stock clerk at a supermarket. It would be horrible to have to wait that long, even to start getting rich.

Suddenly he remembered the safe at the supermarket where he worked—an afternoon-evening shift from one o’clock until the market closed at nine. There’d be at least a thousand dollars in that safe, and it had a time lock. What could be better than a time machine to beat a time lock?

When he went to work that day he took his machine with him; it was quite compact and he’d designed it to fit into a camera case he already had so there was no difficulty involved in bringing it into the store, and when he put his coat and hat into his locker he put the time machine there too.

He worked his shift as usual until a few minutes before closing time. Then he hid behind a pile of cartons in the stock room. He felt sure that in the general exodus he wouldn’t be missed, and he wasn’t. Just the same he waited in his hiding place almost a full hour to make sure everyone else had left. Then he emerged, got his time machine from the locker, and went to the safe. The safe was set to unlock itself automatically in another eleven hours; he set his time machine for just that length of time.

He took a good grip on the safe’s handle—he’d learned by an experiment or two that anything he wore, carried, or hung onto traveled with him in time-and pressed the stud.

He felt no transition, but suddenly he heard the safe’s mechanism click open—but at the same moment heard gasps and excited voices behind him. And he whirled, suddenly realizing the mistake he’d made; it was nine o’clock the next morning and the store’s employees—those on the early shift—were already there, had missed the safe and had been standing in a wondering semi-circle about the spot where it had stood—when the safe and Eustace Weaver had suddenly appeared.

Luckily he still had the time machine in his hand. Quickly he turned the dial to zero—which he had calibrated to be the exact moment when he had completed it—and pressed the stud.

And, of course, he was back before he had started and …