SERIALIZATION OF “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle” – Chapter 5 of 61

You Pick the Century and I’ll Pick the Spot

CHAPTER 5

You Pick the Century and I’ll Pick the Spot

Albert nervously clears his throat. He doesn’t want to upset Comfy, but he can’t help correcting his overly-simplistic nomenclature. “Actually, what Comfy calls the ‘shrinker/deshrinker’,” Albert softly, caustically, and derisively chuckles, “is the Material Compressor/Decompressor, or MC/D for short.”

“Technically, Mr. Joad is correct,” Comfy says to Warble, “but it’s not necessary to use mechanic-speak when referring to these gadgets,” he adds, glaring at Albert.

“Nevertheless,” Warble responds, “I do like to call things by their proper names. Tell me more, Albert. Just how does the Compressor/Decompressor—the MC/D, you called it?--work?”

Albert flashes a gloating glance at Comfy, as if to say, ‘So much for your simplifications, smarty-pants.’

“Oh, before I forget, let me show you this little doo-dad,” Albert says, reaching into the Arodnap and flipping on the Contextual iPod, a device that, when activated, automatically downloads music whose lyrics or theme correspond to what’s going on at the time in the immediate vicinity. Albert briefly explains its function, and activates it to demonstrate just how it works. Jimmy Buffett’s “Boat Drinks” begins playing over the Arodnap’s octophonic speaker system.

Note: Henceforth, all Soundtrack Notes refer to the songs automatically chosen by the contextual iPod. Occasionally, this potentially irritating or embarrassing behavior (automated song selection) is overridden by direct human intervention

“Anyway,” Albert continues, “To expand on an earlier discussion, you use the GPS to pick the spot you want to travel to, and the CPS to enter the date you want to be there—not just year, but also month, day of the month, and time of day. If you don’t select a specific date or portion of a date, it just defaults to the current one.”

“How do you mean?” Warble asks, who wasn’t paying close attention, instead listening to the Jimmy Buffett tune.

Soundtrack note: Obviously, Jimmy Buffett’s “Boat Drinks” should be playing during this scene (obvious if you’re a Parrothead, anyway)

“Well, for instance, say you pick a spot but no date. You will just be doing space traveling but not time traveling—the date remains the same. If you pick a year, but don’t explicitly change the other parts of the date, they will remain what they are—for example, if you choose 1492 as the year but don’t specify anything further, it will take you to the spot you chose (or remain here if you don’t pick a spot) on this date of that year—that is, since today is May 29th, it would take you to May 29th, 1492.”

“Oh, I see,” Warble says. “In other words, the only things that change, space-wise or time-wise, are those that you explicitly change yourself.”

“Exactly!” Comfy says, trying to regain control of the conversation.

“So what’s the MC/D, now?” Warble asks.

Comfy again steps between Warble and Albert. “The MC/D,” Comfy explains, “shrinks things when its force field passes over them. This way, you can take along a lot of gear without it taking up a lot of precious cargo room. As you can see, the Arodnap’s trunk is, for aerodynamic and stylistic reasons, quite limited in its carrying capacity.”

“I think what you really mean to say is that it’s downright puny,” Warble says.

Comfy nods his agreement with that assessment. “But it doesn’t need to be large, as you can shrink everything you need down,” he says. “When you need the shrunken stuff, you simply change polarity on the shrinker/deshrinker by flipping this switch on its barrel...”

“Material Compressor/Decompressor,” Albert insists.

Comfy shoots him a dirty look. “Albert, when are you going to learn to leave half of what you know in your head? If you were expendable, I’d expend you right now,” he whisper-growls into Albert’s ear. Albert just smiles.

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” Comfy continues, “when you need your shrunken goods to regain their normal dimensions, you flip this switch on the Compressor/Decompressor, which changes it from shrink to deshrink mode” (Albert places himself in Warble’s line of vision and mouths ‘toggles it from compress to decompress mode’) “and—voila! You’ve got your medications, science books, barbecue grill, or whatever you brought along, back at their original size.”

“Neat,” Warble says, wondering why he would want to take those kinds of things along.

“Ah,” Albert interjects, pointing his finger into the air, “if I may, there’s a feature of the MC/D I’d like to point out.”

“Sure,” Warble assents, all ears.

“While it’s true that you can go to the trouble of toggling the polarity switch, in actual practice and by default the MC/D is ‘smart’ enough to know whether you’re compressing or decompressing things.”

“Really!?” Warble responds, half questioning, half expressing his delight.

“Yep,” Albert continues, “The MC/D knows if something is to be made smaller (compressed) or larger (decompressed) based on its size as the MC/D wand is passed over the item: If the item to be acted on is larger than a bread basket, it is compressed; if it’s smaller than a bread basket, it’s decompressed.”

“Ah,” Warble says, wondering what would happen if a bread basket were the object in question (which is, by definition, the size of a bread basket and thus is neither smaller nor larger than a bread basket).

Warble is about to ask Albert about that very possibility, when Comfy intrudes on his reverie by saying: “Those are the features of the Arodnap in a nutshell, Consumer Warble. Now, what say we take this prototype for a test ride? It’s not quite ‘ready for prime time’ yet, but we do have one location and time that has been fully tested which we can demonstrate to you—1956 at the Ed Sullivan Show in New York, when Elvis Presley made his debut!”

“Elvis Presley?!” Warble says. “Why would I want to see Elvis Presley? I can go to the Citizen Page* in town any time and gawk at him there all I want.”

* Note: For those who haven’t read book 1 in the trilogy (the Wacky Misadventures of Warble McGorkle), “Citizen Page” is the fast-food burger joint that Warble frequents most frequently.

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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle” is being serialized in this space each Thursday; it is also available in its entirety from here.

You can listen to the recording of this excerpt, by the author, here: