The Uncle Tal Stories (Patreon)

Chapter 11: Mistaken Identity

One Fine Afternoon in 2078 AD

United States of America

Earl always liked dropping over to Chester’s place in the afternoon. The two had been best buddies in high school, dropped out of college for two different reasons (well; same reason, two different girls) and pursued highly satisfying but not especially lucrative careers in the dying field of auto mechanics. Recently, Chester had started buying up all sorts of junk from some pretty weird places, with the idea of building something big and amazing.

Earl supported his best buddy, he really did, but he just wished the guy would decide what it was he wanted to make. One week it would be a totally self-sufficient fully-recycling home, while the next it would be an anti-grav surface to orbit shuttle, like the government got from those aliens way back when.

“Oh hey, buddy!” Chester greeted him happily. “Just in time! Let’s celebrate!”

They went inside and Chester got beers for the both of them, but good Earth brewskis, not that Lunar-brewed crap. That stuff was way too gassy, in Earl’s expert opinion. They cracked the beers and chugged them down, then crushed them on their foreheads like the frat boys they had once been.

“Okay,” Earl said once they were relaxing with a second beer apiece. “So what are we celebrating?”

“Finally figured out what I was makin’.” Chester took a long pull from his beer, then belched mightily. “Time machine, bro.”

Earl stared at his best buddy for a minute or so. “Time machine? You shitting me?”

“I shit you not.” Chester preened for a moment, then jumped to his feet. “C’mon, I’ll show ya.”

They went out to Chester’s garage, where he proudly showed off the craft that had been built on the chassis of a 2030 Ford Lunar; under the bubble canopy, there was room for two people and a beer cooler. Earl approved, but he had a question. “So, how’d you make it work as a time machine, anyways?”

Chester shrugged. “Got hold of one o’ them temporal stabilizer units out of a bulk freighter’s FTL drive. Rewired a few things and bypassed the safety interlocks. So, when do you wanna go to first?”

“Got me an idea.” Earl grinned. You could take the frat boy out of college, but he was still a frat boy at heart. “Remember them tasers we got online that one time ta try fishing with? Let’s get them an’ go back ta ancient Greece and stuff, and pretend to be gods. An’ if anyone gets in our face, we taser their asses.”

Chester’s jaw dropped. “An’ I was gonna just try and bang Marilyn Monroe. Bro, you got the best ideas.”

Earl shrugged modestly. “Eh, she probably had the clap anyway, amirite?” He high-fived his buddy. “Let’s do this thing.”

It didn’t take long to get their outfits together. Chester got the beard out of a Filthy Santa costume, but left the rest of it behind. Earl unearthed the tasers and charged them up. They both made sure the cooler had enough ice and beer in it.

“So what did Greeks wear, anyway?” asked Earl, once they were almost ready to leave. He looked down at his Rambo XXI t-shirt and jeans. “This should be okay, right?”

“Nah, bro.” Chester finished his latest beer and crushed it. Against his forehead, of course. “Pretty sure they wore togas.”

“All-righty!” declared Earl. “Toga party in time!”

“Just don’t let your junk hang out like that one time,” Chester warned.

“Never happened,” claimed Earl. If he couldn’t remember it, that meant it didn’t count, right?

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” jeered Chester. “So what are we gonna do once we taser a few guys? I mean, once they start treatin’ us like gods an’ all?”

Earl already had that figured out. “Then we get ‘em to bring us tribute. Gold an’ jewels an’ money an’ stuff. An’ hot chicks. Back then, gods useta bang hot chicks all the time. Always wanted to bang a Greek chick.” He made a rude gesture. “I hear they like butt stuff.”

Chester frowned. “What about protection an’ stuff?”

“Pfft, as if.” Earl made a thrusting motion with his hips. “Bareback all the way, bro. Who cares if we get ‘em up the duff? An’ I’m pretty sure they hadn’t invented the clap yet.”

Chester nodded at Earl’s well made points. “Sounds like you got it all figured out, bro. Let’s do this thing.”

Wearing their best toga approximations—sheets wrapped around them and safety-pinned over the shoulder—they piled into the time machine. As a last-minute addition, Chester grabbed a couple of those alien translator modules so they could actually tell the locals to bring them hot chicks.

He pulled the canopy shut and pressed the big red button. With a sound akin to water gurgling down the drain, except nothing like it, they vanished.

Athens, 1100 BC

The first Herak the Minoan knew of the disturbance was when he heard the laughter and the strange tac-tac-tac noise. He concluded his transaction with the stallholder, swapping out Minoan gold for local drachmae, then went to see what was going on.

When he saw, he ran one broad, brawny hand down his face. “Time travelers,” he muttered in a language that was neither Koine nor Minoan, but instead one that had yet to appear on the world stage. “Why is it always time travelers?”

There came no answer to his question, rhetorical as it was. He sighed and moved forward. With his broad shoulders, short stature and odd mode of dress—he’d gotten used to the Minoan style centuries earlier—he stood out from the terrified, fleeing crowd. One of the two laughing figures looked toward him.

“Hey, check that geezer out!” One of them pointed and the other turned and laughed. “What’s his deal?” There was a peculiar echo to his voice that sounded like one language, overlaid on another.

“Dunno,” replied the second one. “He’s looking this way. Like he’s never seen a god before.”

The first one hefted the bright yellow object that each of them carried. “Check it out. Bet you fifty bucks I can make him piss himself.”

“You’re on!”

Herak didn’t know everything that was going on, but he could make a good guess. The strangers’ badly wrapped cloaks, the tiny fibulae holding them closed, the false beards, the strange objects he assumed were weapons, the fact that one of the echoing languages was English … they all added up to the conclusion he’d already come to.

Time travelers.

He hated time travelers.

The leather sack he held was heavy with drachmae. As the yellow object lined up on him, he sidestepped and hurled the sack at the interloper’s face. It struck true, throwing the man off his feet, even as two glittering wires shot past Herak. Not wasting any time, Herak closed with the other one fast.

“Hey, what the hell?” shouted the second time traveler, just as Herak reached him and batted the yellow thing from his hand. “Fuck! My taser! Okay, time for some good old-fashioned American rasslin’!”

The man stood a head taller than Herak, but his arms weren’t any longer. When he went to enfold the Minoan with his arms, Herak picked him up, spun him around and slammed him down on the paving stones of the agora. He lay there, the fight gone from him as Herak stumped over and picked up his sack, collecting the few coins that had fallen out and dropping them back inside.

One of the men who had been struck down by the odd weapons struggled to his feet. “Who are you, stranger, that you vanquished these pretenders to the name of Zeus so easily?”

He shrugged. “I am called Herak.”

“Herak? Herakles! Herakles is among us!” The man fell to his knees. “We are blessed by your presence, mighty Herakles! What would you have us do with these demons, these pretenders?”

Oh, just fucking great. “I’ll handle them. I’ll uh, make sure they get back to where they belong.” Turning to the groaning pair, he gestured. “C’mere, you two,” he said in the English he’d learned from that other time traveler, all those millennia ago. “Which way’s your time machine?”

Earl fell into the time machine, and the brawny stranger more or less threw Chester in on top of him. The two tasers, twisted and shattered in the powerful hands of the brutal savage, landed somewhere in beside him.

“Git,” the man called Herak ordered. “If I see you again, I will start breaking bones.”

“But—but who are you?” croaked Chester. “How did you know we were time travelers?”

The stranger sneered. “Think you’re the first ones I’ve met? Now fuck off.” He slammed the canopy shut.

Hastily, before Earl could do something stupid, Chester pushed the go-home button. The time machine shuddered then vanished.

*****

“Good riddance,” Herak grumbled in his own language, then switched to English. “Every fucking time those assholes show up, they ruin things for me.” Now, he was going to have to travel far and fast, and change his name, to get away from his potential worshippers.

He could understand their confusion, though. They weren’t to know that it was a time traveler who had set him on this path, all those many centuries ago. Tucking the sack of drachmae into his belt, the last Neandertal sighed and began trudging out of town.

Chapter 12