Security Plan

By JOSEPH FARRELL
Illustrated by WOOD
I had something better than investing for the future ... the future investing in me!
My mother warned me, Marilyn said again, to think twice before I married a child prodigy. Look for somebody good and solid, she said, like Dad—somebody who will put something away for your old age.
I tapped a transistor, put a screwdriver across a pair of wires and watched the spark. Marilyn was just talking to pass the time. She really loves me and doesn't mind too much that I spend my spare time and money building a time machine. Sometimes she even believes that it might work.
She kept talking. I've been thinking—we're past thirty now and what do we have? A lease on a restaurant where nobody eats, and a time machine that doesn't work. She sighed. And a drawerful of pawn tickets we'll never be able to redeem. My silver, my camera, my typewriter....
I added a growl to her sigh. My microscope, my other equipment....
Uncle Johnson will have them for his old age, she said sadly. And we'll be lucky if we have anything .
I felt a pang of resentment. Uncle Johnson! It seemed that every time I acquired something, Uncle Johnson soon came into possession of it. We'd been kids together, although he was quite a few years older, a hulking lout in the sixth grade while I was in the first, and I graduated from grammar school a term ahead of him. Of course I went on to high school and had a college degree at fifteen, being a prodigy. Johnson went to work in his uncle's pawn shop, sweeping the floor and so on, and that's when we started calling him Uncle.
This wasn't much of a job because Johnson's uncle got him to work for almost nothing by promising he would leave him the pawn shop when he died. And it didn't look as if much would come of this, because the uncle was not very old and he was always telling people a man couldn't afford to die these days, what with the prices undertakers were charging.
Before I had even started to shave, I had a dozen papers published in scientific journals, all having to do with the nature of time. Time travel became my ambition and I was sure I saw a way to build a time machine. But it took years to work out the details, and nobody seemed interested in my work, so I had to do it all myself. Somehow I stopped working long enough to get a wife, and we had to eat. So we ran this little hash house and lived in the back room, and at least we got our food wholesale.