(Larry)
After I set off the Time Bomb, all I wanted to do was barf. It was like the worst time jump ever. No tacos were involved, and I really wasn’t sure if I might be dead. At some point I decided to just lie down and close my eyes. I have no idea how long it was before someone started kicking me.
“Well, Larry, you did it,” the kicker was saying.
I cracked open my eyelids and immediately regretted it. There was Grampy Queequeg.
“What do you want?”
“I’m helping Ishmael round up everybody that got hit by the blast,” he said.
“He asked you to do that?”
“No,” he said. “As a rule, we don’t talk to each other. It usually means one of us is about to die. But Cooper asked me to lend a hand in rounding everyone up and bringing them back to headquarters. Then, when I demurred, he started telling me many, many things I didn’t want to know.”
“Cooper? How is that weirdo?”
“Not good,” said Gramps. “He was at the apex of the pyramid when you threw the switch. He was in the middle of everything. He says he saw the whole course of human history before it was done with him.”
“He’s the same dude as the Knowledge, isn’t he?” I said.
“Who else would he be?”
“I knew it. I knew I knew him from somewhere.” But I’m also pretty sure I ran into him at a Dead show. It’s too bad Cooper’s nowhere near coherent enough to get down his take of events. All I can do is surmise that, as soon as the Time Barrier was down, he and his pack of wild dogs went apeshit all over the future, fighting the velociraptors who were scouring the outside of the pyramid, looking for their own way in to grab the Field Generator. Makes sense, but who knows. All that’s for certain is he was right at ground zero when the Time Bomb went off. I would say ‘poor dude,’ but having seen what he was like before, and after, I really can’t judge whether or not the whole thing might have actually been good for him. Also, I saw how he dies.
Thinking of that was really heavy. I didn’t like that.
“Come on, space cadet,” said Gramps. “There’s somebody waiting for you.”
“If it’s all the same, I’m kind of really ready for a break from Ishmael.”
“Not Ishmael,” said Gramps. “Lizzabits.”
I was up on my feet. He didn’t have to tell me twice.
* * *
The robot head, TG-XLR7, had explained it to me like this:
“The Time Bomb is the kindest kind of bomb, really. It doesn’t kill anyone. It’s just a more powerful version of the Time Barrier. Instead of keeping entities from passing a certain threshold in history, it just bounces them all back to the beginning of their own period.”
I guess that’s why we all found ourselves in Africa back in what Ishmael calls The Time of Chimpanzees. It was him and me, the usual jokers in the Cross Time Coordinating Agency Headquarters, and just about everybody from Wal that got caught up in that battle royal with the dinosaurs and robots.
With the Orb gone, the Cross-Time Agency guys all decided to vote Ishmael in as their new king, or supreme leader, or captain. I’m not even sure what they call it. I just call him ‘Hoss.’ Ishmael was highly annoyed at the prospect of being the head timecop, but at the same time he wasn’t about to let anyone else take the reins once he had them.
But I didn’t really care about that. What I cared about was that, when I stumbled into HQ, as soon as she saw me Liz pulled me close and tight. No matter what else is going on, if you’ve got a gorgeous human being who wants to hold you like that, you’ve really got something.
Also, I was looking forward to being there for the creation of history’s first taco. I was hungry something fierce.
Andrew Coltrin / Larry the Horrible Time Traveler /