(Ishmael)
The Knowledge was one of those guys you hoped would never show up at the party. But he always did. Anytime three or four seasoned, non-agency time travelers met up to talk shop, the Knowledge would always make an appearance. No one ever invited him, he just had a sense for where and when he could be the most irritating and he’d arrive there.
It’s no surprise that he’d be at Lenny’s. It was a surprise that no one else was there.
I didn’t like it. But this was only the latest in a long string of events that I didn’t like. It was best to wade right in and ask him what his take was.
I motioned for Larry to follow me over to the Knowledge’s booth. He grabbed his pint and shuffled over.
“Good evening,” the Knowledge said. “But, no, not really. It’s not really good, but we’re here, and you’re here, and I see you’ve got Larry with you. Good to see you again, Larry.”
“You’ve met?”
“Of course,” said the Knowledge.
“This dude is so familiar,” said Larry. “I probably met him. I meet a lot of people at shows. The Stones, right?”
“Great,” I said. “I’m glad we don’t have to waste time on introductions. What the hell’s going on?”
The Knowledge drifted his gaze away from us and up to the coffered ceiling. Then he started drumming his lips with his fingers like an idiot child. His mouth twisted to one side and he made a quiet, high pitched hum as if contemplating a minor structural engineering problem.
This was the problem with the Knowledge. The real reason no one ever wanted to talk to him is that he never would say things in any conversational order. He’d proven again and again that he possessed a depth of information on just about everything, but he could never just share it when asked. Instead he would randomly interject horrifyingly inappropriate insight into people’s personal lives at the worst possible moment. No one wants to be suddenly informed of how closely they are related to Rasputin while chatting up a really fabulous girl at a really fabulous New Year’s party.
It wasn’t even that closely. Seventh cousins, four times removed, for the record. But if that information isn’t a colossal cock-block in and of itself, I don’t know what is.
All these thoughts and more fighting their way out of my head as I was trying to patiently wait while the Knowledge internally deliberated whether or not he would speak anymore that day.
“We don’t have time for this!” I said.
“I,” he said, “I... you might be right. But...” a shorter whining hum, “I can only... You know what it’s like when you’ve run out of onramp and the traffic on the Interstate is like... like Daytona under green? All of time is happening right now! You just can’t see it!”
“It was the Dead,” said Larry. “I definitely met this dude at a Grateful Dead concert.”
“Shut up, Larry,” I turned back toward the knowledge and put on my best approximation of a calm voice. “Help me see it. Something big is going on. I need to know what.”
“And if you got any idea where my girl went?” said Larry.
“Oh, Lizzabits!” said the Knowledge. “Lovely, lovely. Lots there.” He turned his head to Larry and smiled. “It won’t be long now.”
“I guess that’s something,” I said. “But we’re not getting very far.”
The Knowledge cackled like a harpie, writhing, shrieking, almost falling out his seat.
“But you’ve already been there!” he said, pounding the table. “You know what might help? A game. Let’s play a game.”
“We don’t have time for games.”
“Wrong! You have time for one game. Cribbage?”
“Oh, hell no,” said Larry. “I can’t play any game where the scoring is more confusing than tennis and sometimes you get ‘knob.’ How about RISK?”
“Are you out of your mind, Larry?” said the Knowledge “Do you have any idea how insensitive that is? Playing RISK during the middle of World War II? You might as well play American football during one of the Battles of Ypres? It would be an abomination!”
“My bad, I guess. Uno?”
“Official rules or schoolyard?”
Larry and the Knowledge then descended into a short discourse over how many a friendship had been ended due to the sheer frustration of playing schoolyard, “loser take all” UNO.
“Those assholes don’t know that the game’s against them when they play schoolyard,” said Larry. “When you have to draw until you finally get a playable card, the game extends into an unending vortex of Skips, Reverses, and Wild Draw Fours. Soon everybody has twenty cards in their hands, everyone has missed lunch recess, and everyone’s ready to punch someone in the mouth.”
“Agreed,” said the Knowledge. “The rules laid out by Merle Robbins describe a gentleman’s game quite able to be finished within a 30 minute timeframe. Shall we play to 500?”
And so a deck of Uno cards was rustled up.
Playing Uno for information felt like one of the biggest wastes of time conceivable, but, somehow, Larry was actually good at it. I was stuck with an increasingly full hand as Larry and the Knowledge hit me with Draw Twos, Skips and Reverses. They shared the same dumb luck, or the same savage instincts on when to hit me with an action card. Either way, this was definitely their game. And the magic of their game loosened up the Knowledge enough to actually tell us a thing or two.
“You came here to find out about the dinosaurs,” he said, “but what you need to ask is ‘why are the dinosaurs so hot to pierce the Great Time Barrier and the Cyberian Age?’”
“Is that what they’re doing?” I asked.
“You saw the gate. Only entities small enough to get through the archway can make it.”
“Like those robot ninjas,” said Larry.
“And the velociraptors,” I said.
“You’re catching on,” said the Knowledge. “It’s positively fascinating the way those stupid little dinosaurs are flooding the very end of the human era. Who saw that coming? By the way, draw four, I’m changing the color to yellow.”
“You know,” said Larry, “I never knew dinosaurs could time travel, but now that I do know, I feel like it should have been a no brainer.”
Larry played a Reverse and the next turn was mine. It irritated me more than it should have that I did not have a single yellow card in my hand. As per the rules, I drew a single card only to add another Blue 5 to my already cumbersome hand of useless cards.
“So why are the dinosaurs rushing the robots’ zone of history?” I asked.
“I can only speculate,” said the Knowledge as he played a Yellow Reverse. “But it might have something to do with the asteroid that destroyed their civilization.”
“What civilization?” I asked, as I had to draw yet another unusable card, a Green Skip. It might come in handy at some point, I supposed.
“Dude,” said Larry. “They’ve got aviator sunglasses and stupid sweaters. They totally had a civilization. It just must have been totally nuked by that asteroid that hit Mexico and, you know, killed all the dinosaurs way back when.”
“Bingo!” said the Knowledge. “And Uno! I’ve got Uno, losers.”
“Is it permissible to fold in Uno?” I said. This game was bullshit.
“You really shouldn’t be playing this game with the Knowledge,” said a newcomer who appeared at our table with the smug swagger of an asshole who had already settled his tab and was one foot out the door. “He knows what everybody’s going to play next.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have yet to play a single card in this game. Also, who the fuck are you?”
The newcomer looked familiar: basically handsome, a little younger than myself, and dressed pretty well for there being a war on. I had noticed him chatting with Sinatra earlier, but I don’t like to admit that I notice things like that.
“You don’t know this guy?” said Larry. “I totally know this guy.”
“But I don’t think I know you,” the newcomer said.
The knowledge started cackling. His laughter deteriorated into a gasping fit in the corner of the booth. He could barely look at any of us without giggling.
“I got it. You’re Grampy Queequeg,” said Larry.
Queequeg?
At Lenny’s?
Shit.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Not yet.
“Relax,” squeaked the Knowledge. “It’s not happening yet, this is something else.”
“What is happening?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you what’s happening,” said Queequeg. “The joint’s about to be raided. I’m advising you guys to distance yourselves from the Knowledge when our friends in cerulean arrive, because he’s most definitely going to be caught up in the dragnet.”
Queequeg gave no indication that he might recognize me. Of course, I hadn’t recognized him. He was quite old the first time we crossed timelines, when he gave me the watch. And I always liked to think it was going to be the same for me when we inevitably crossed timelines again and I hand over the watch to the younger him. Our nepotistic time travel legacy was a loop and a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it didn’t make sense that we were in the same place at the same time now, though. There was a Law of the Conservation of Methods that supposedly held that kind of thing in check. Or maybe that was just another CTCAHQ smokescreen.
It wasn’t long before Queequeg finished his farewells, collected Frank Sinatra, and flashed him out of Lenny’s, hopefully off to wherever, whenever Sinatra was supposed to be.
“The dragnet is coming,” said the Knowledge. “But they won’t take me. I’ve already been to where they’re going.”
“Where are they going?”
“Where you’ve already been,” he said. “This business with the dinosaurs is the direst crisis the Agency has ever faced. They’re pulling everyone one off the mission to sabotage Hitler’s Projekt: Zeitmaschine and redeploying them. Can you believe it? Dinosaurs are more menacing than Nazis!”
“But why?” I asked. “The ones I’ve met seem like nothing more than run-of-the-mill hoods and idiot muscle.”
“Dude, there’s a bigger picture,” said Larry. “Why can’t you see it? Just think. If the robot ninjas have the technology to keep everyone from being able to move past a certain point in the future, it’s a cinch they have the knowhow to nudge a Texas-sized asteroid a few degrees onto a different trajectory. The asteroid doesn’t crash, the dinosaurs don’t die off, humans don’t evolve... and I guess the robot overlords never arise to become masters of this ball of filth called Earth.”
“Listen to this guy,” said the Knowledge. “Larry’s just a little bit less of an idiot than you think he is.”
“Yeah,” said Larry. “It’s pretty fuckin’ metal, but I think that’s what’s going on.”
Larry reached for his drink, but in the darkened bar his hand grabbed something else.
“Wait a minute. What the hell is this?”
Larry lifted up an object from the table and held it up to the light.
“I think Queequeg dropped this,” he said. “What the hell is this?”
The Knowledge snorted. His grin was growing crazier by the minute.
What Larry held in his hand was another hand. A severed, desiccated, gnarled, and leathery fist gripping an old-fashioned skeleton key.
“This is seriously metal,” said Larry. “Fricking Quiet Riot metal bullshit. You’re grandpa’s one fucked up dude.”
“You two need to go,” said the Knowledge. “Right now.”
“I can handle a little CTCAHQ raid,” I said.
“It’s not that,” said the Knowledge. “It’s the ceiling. It’s about to fall in and kill everyone at this table. But just the people at this table.”
“What?”
The building rocked from the shock of a nearby explosion. We were in London during the middle of a German bombing raid after all. The joists groaned and cracked overhead. Plaster began to rain down on us. On any other day, I might have waited to see how bad the damage was going to be, but the Knowledge’s information about the fate of those sitting at the table was very specific.
Out of pure instinct I grabbed my watch, squeezed the first stud my fingers reached, and we flashed. I usually never like the results of an unplanned jump. This was no exception.