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.