“You’ve got all the supplies you need here to keep yourself healthy and happy until you catch up with the present again. Food, camping gear, clothing. Even your favorite cigars, and plenty of beer.”
Leftenant Fitzsimmon took an oversized can of Australian beer from one of the cases, opened it, and set it on the deck near my head with a friendly wink. Not that I could drink any of it, bound and gagged as I was. Captain Stepanski returned my top hat, opera cape, and walking stick, which had been scattered in the struggle. He dusted them off, folded the cape, and set it all neatly on the floor near the beer can.
“We’ve jimmied the time circuit so that this machine can only travel backward. Without test equipment or even a soldering iron, there’s no chance that even you could fix it,” Ian said, tossing the keys for the cuffs to the floor near me. “I doubt if it will take you more than a few hours to get yourself free. Again, sorry, but this really is for your own good, you know.”
And with that, Ian hit one button on the canister’s keyboard and they all filed out of the canister. I heard them close both vacuum-tight doors, and in a few minutes I was suddenly in zero-G, traveling back in time.
There was enough spring in the air mattress to push me high into the air. Floating upward and rotating slowly, I could see that the beer can was also afloat, and that a growing blob of frothy beer was extruding itself from the opening. I soon bounced gently with my back to the ceiling, and lost my rotation in the process. It wasn’t a big immediate problem, but I knew that when we arrived and gravity returned, if I wasn’t back down I had a nasty fall coming!
Coming slowly back toward the deck, I saw that the glob of beer had grown much larger than the can it had come out of. It was bigger than my head, and it was coming directly at my face!
I had ugly visions of the blob fastening itself around my face, suffocating me. Beer foam is a mixture of carbon dioxide gas and a liquid made up mainly of water. Not the sort of thing you can breathe. A hell of a thing! Tom Kolczyskrenski, drowning in a single can of Foster’s Lager Beer!
I couldn’t change the vector of the beer, and I couldn’t move my head more than a few inches. All that I could think of to do was to blow at it, and what with the ball gag, I was limited to blowing through my nose. This was not an efficient procedure, and the deadly glob of beer came closer and closer.
Gyroscopic action! If I could spin myself around and catch it on the back of the head, I just might survive. While I normally don’t use hair oils, this time my bath girls had said that the slicked down look was right for the outfit I would be wearing, and had greased me up. The hair oil, being non-polar and thus hydrophobic, ought to repel the hydrophilic beer! I tried moving my head around, to my left shoulder, then my chest, my right shoulder, back, and repeated the procedure as rapidly as possible.
There was some gyroscopic reaction, but not nearly enough, and the beer blob was still growing, turning from yellow to foamy white, and still coming at me.
I did some rapid mental calculations for a journey of ten years, and came up with a subjective trip length of four minutes, assuming that the program was using our usual temporal velocity, and assuming that Ian hadn’t been lying about sending me back for ten years. If both of these assumptions were true, I could hold my breath if the blob covered my face, and probably stay conscious until gravity returned to splatter the beer on the deck. But that was two too many assumptions, when my only life was on the line!
By swiveling my legs rapidly around my hips, I was able to turn myself ninety degrees or so, and from there I could bend over to let the dangerous beer slowly cruise past my head.
Victory! Now I only had to worry about breaking my neck, falling from what could be fourteen feet up when the gravity came back. I had to time it so that I was at or near the deck when that happened.
The problem was that, because of the handcuffs, I couldn’t see my watch, and when I had been high enough above the boxes and crates to see the Nixie tubes on the control panel, I was facing in the wrong direction.
I drifted back toward the air mattress, and tried to flex my body so that I wouldn’t bounce as hard next time. I was only partially successful. The next time I got to the ceiling, I could see the orange numbers, telling me that I had nine seconds to get down before I fell four yards to the floor. Squirming, I bumped the ceiling as hard as I could, and got to within three feet of the floor before gravity returned.
I missed the air mattress, and the fall knocked the wind out of me, but at least I hadn’t broken my neck. Moments later, a gallon and a half of beer foam hit the deck, splattering my face and chest. Damn Ian, anyway!
I could see the keys to my handcuffs, and had started to wiggle my way toward them, when I heard someone opening the big steel door on the canister. Some rapidly chattering feminine voices echoed in the canister, and my first thought was that Barbara and some of her friends were coming to my rescue!
“Great! It’s a cargo canister!”
“Yeah, but it’s ancient. Can you handle the programing on one this old?”
“Are you kidding? I could reprogram Methuselah, if he had a keyboard!” They spoke to each other very quickly, in something like an Australian accent, with no time wasted between when one left off and another began.
“Then get on it, girl, before somebody comes by!”
I heard the doors being closed while the first voice said, “I’m working, I’m working!”
These weren’t friends of mine. These people were some sort of temporal hijackers! Still, I tried to get their attention by mumbling past the damn ball gag and bumping my feet on the deck, on the theory that once I was free, I could deal with them somehow or another. The trouble was, they were making too much noise to notice me.
Whoever she was, she must have known her stuff, because in a few minutes we were in zero-G again, and presumably going farther into the past.
I drifted up to the ceiling once more, and got a look at my new set of abductors. There were three of them, a blonde who was taking off her backpack, a brunette sitting strapped to the chair at the keyboard, and a real redhead, with freckles and everything. All three had their long hair pulled back into pony tails. They were dressed for roughing it, in flannel shirts, blue jeans, and hiking boots.
I could tell at a glance that they weren’t Smoothies. The girls of Morrow were almost all slender with a lot of hidden muscle, having the sort of bodies you see on ballerinas, lithe figure skaters, or rhythmic gymnasts.
These women were of a different sort, with large, firm breasts, wasp-tiny waists, and flaring hips, a bit like a slender version of the Victorian ideal, or perhaps like exaggerated Playmate-of-the-Month types. Not the sort that I’m usually attracted to, they were none the less very fine looking women.
I was still near the ceiling when they noticed me.
“Hey! We’ve got company!” The blonde shouted.
“He’s all tied up! Shouldn’t we free him?” The brunette said, undoing her safety belt.
“What makes you so sure about that? Maybe he’s some kind of criminal!” The redhead said.
“Muff muff!” I said through the ball gag.
“But he dresses so nicely!” the brunette objected.
“I’ll bet he undresses nicely, too!” the blonde said.
“And quickly, if I have anything to do with it!” the redhead said.
“Muff?”
“You know, I’ve always wanted a slave boy!” the blonde said.
“Muff!?!”
“You’ve always wanted anything that involves sex!” the brunette said.
“So what’s wrong with that?” the blonde said.
“Nothing, except that I get him first,” the redhead said, as she took her shirt off.
“No way! You got to pick the restaurant we ate lunch at!” The blonde was furiously unlacing her boots.
These women were experts at maneuvering in zero-G, and had apparently been together long enough to be well coordinated in their actions. As a group, they swarmed over me, disrobing themselves and me with equal efficiency. In seconds, they were all naked, and over my strenuous objections, I was floating with gobs of clothes at my bound wrists and ankles, but was otherwise naked save for a ball-gag.