A Glitch in Time

by Gary D. Snyder

Chapter 9:

Back in Drakken's lair Shego idly manicured her nails as she half-watched the previously advertised tag team wrestling match. She would have paid more attention but she had found that Drakken's frequent grunts, mutterings, and other noises were too distracting for her to enjoy the broadcast. On another level, she found his antics much more entertaining than the well-rehearsed choreography of professional wrestling. She had not bothered to make any comments up to now, but a particularly distressed yelp of anger and pain was too hard to ignore.

"Good news?" she deadpanned.

Drakken made a noise of disgust as he sucked a sore finger. "Stupid…disorganized…useless…" He straightened from his study of the temporal complosion device and shook the screwdriver in his hand in Shego's direction. "Tell me, Shego. What sort of person would go to all the trouble of stealing a top-secret device and not take the instruction manual?"

"I'm guessing someone smart enough to not need one."

"No one's smart enough to figure out how to work this without a manual," Drakken complained. "The schematics and blueprints alone are forty pages."

Shego couldn't resist needling Drakken further. "Professor Dementor thought he was."

"Dementor," Drakken spat, as though the name itself left a foul taste in his mouth. "More like Dumb-entor. I could think rings around that quack."

Shego paused, tapping her chin with the emery board. "Isn't a 'quack' someone pretending to be a medical doctor?"

"Hmm." Drakken thought about it. "'Shyster'?"

"That's an unscrupulous lawyer."

Drakken gave up. "Then what do you call some incompetent boob who thinks he's a genius of a mad scientist?"

"Well," Shego drawled, pretending to think about it, "a name that comes to mind would be –"

Drakken suddenly realized how he had set himself up and glared at Shego. "Don't even go there, Shego," he warned. "Remember – payday is still a week off and I haven't signed your timesheet."

"Yeah, okay, whatever," Shego answered, resuming her manicure. "But if you want my opinion…" She became aware that Drakken was staring at her. "What?" she demanded.

"I was just wondering," Drakken said. "Why is it that you file your nails with your gloves on?" After a few seconds more thought he added, "Come to think of it, how can you file your nails with your gloves on?"

Shego rolled her eyes. A top-secret device to figure out and he's interested in my personal habits, she thought in disgust. "I practice a lot," was all she said. "But back to the subject. If you want my opinion about how that thing works –"

Drakken waved his hands to cut her off. "Uh-uh-uh-uh," he interrupted. "I don't need your opinions on this. After all, who's the genius around here?"

Shego turned her back so that Drakken couldn't see her smirk. "Right now, I'm guessing the kid hanging in the other room."

Drakken grabbed up a portable multimeter lying on the work bench before him., which was the closest and heaviest thing he could find. Before he could throw it, however, Shego's words sank in. "What did you say?" he asked.

"Yeah, I know," Shego replied with a sigh. "Payday is still a week a away and you haven't signed my timesheet. I'm sorry, but if you keep giving me those straight lines…"

"No." Drakken shook his head. "No. I'm serious. What did you say?"

Puzzled, Shego replied, "I said that the genius around here is that Neutron kid hanging in the other room."

"That's it!" Drakken exclaimed. He rubbed his hands together in glee. "I don't need to know how to work this. We already had someone who knows how."

"You mean you think Neutron is going to give you lessons on how to use that thing?" Shego looked surprised but quickly shook her head. "No way. He'll never do it."

Drakken gave Shego the evil smile that Shego found herself so strangely attracted to at times. He activated the portable soldering iron he had been using and carefully studied the tip before pressing it into the surface of the wooden table. "Have faith, Shego," he said, as a thin stream of smoke rose from the smoldering wood. "He's a genius. I'm sure he'll see reason…sooner or later."

"And I'm guessing that we should try to make it sooner?" Shego asked as Drakken deactivated the soldering iron.

"Absolutely," Drakken agreed. "As the expression goes, let's strike while the iron…is hot."

Even without his watch Jimmy was able to gauge the passage of time fairly accurately. By his estimates he and Kim had been captives for approximately four-and-a-half hours when they heard footsteps approaching. Had they been imprisoned alone the time would have seemed interminable to them and taken a great toll on their spirits, but having each other to talk to had kept their spirits up. Both Kim and Jimmy glared defiantly at Drakken and Shego as they entered.

"Ready to give up?" Jimmy challenged.

Rather than becoming angry, as Jimmy had expected, Drakken simply smiled. "Ah, Jimmy Neutron, boy genius. How very good to know that your faculties are as sharp as ever."

"Good. Because you've got to let us out of here and give us back the temporal complosion device before it's too late. You don't know what's going on!"

Drakken's smile thinned a bit at that and his voice became as cold and brittle as ice. "That may be," he replied. "That is, in fact, why I'm here. There are certain aspects of the temporal complosion device that require clarification."

Jimmy looked suspicious. "Certain aspects?"

"Yes…like…oh…" Drakken paused, searching for the correct words.

Shego, more blunt than Drakken, finished for him. "Like how to turn it on, how to work it, what it does…that sort of thing." Drakken glared at Shego, who shrugged at his anger. "Hey, what are they going to do? We want something and diplomacy is not going to work here."

Drakken regained control of himself as he weighed Shego's words. "Very true, Shego," he observed. "And I suppose it does save us some time. BE sure to take all this down." Shego pulled out a notepad and pencil and he turned to Neutron. "What does that thing do and I how I get it to do it?"

"Kiss rocks," Jimmy sneered.

Shego paused in the midst of scribbling something down to ask, "Hold on. Are you saying you think that band is really good, or that you want Drakken to lip-wrestle rocks?"

"Oh, please, Shego," Drakken scoffed. "It was obviously the latter. It's the kind of smart-mouthed response I'd expect him to give." Almost as an aside he added, "Besides, it was obvious that Simmons was carrying the group."

Shego seemed to take offense at this. "Oh, please. Have you even seen –"

"Moving on," Drakken interrupted in an ominous voice that caused Shego to subside. "I repeat: I want to know everything about that device and I want you to tell me."

"I'll tell you this. We're all going to die unless you give it back and let us go!"

Drakken shook his head and jammed a finger in Jimmy's face. "You're in no position to give demands here, Brain Boy."

"Will you buy a vowel already, Drakken," Kim called out angrily. "Why do you think we even stole the device if it wasn't important to the safety of the world?"

"Exactly my point. If it is so important I want to know what it does and how to work it."

"Drakken," Jimmy said calmly, trying a last attempt at reason, "listen to me. Dementor's machine malfunctioned and created something called a temporal singularity that is going to absorb everything unless we can use the temporal complosion device we stole to neutralize it. If you monkey with it and the complosion field hits the singularity you'll pull our own time into the singularity!"

Shego, who had been listening indifferently thus far, suddenly became interested. "Absorb everything?" she asked. Both Kim and Jimmy nodded and Shego looked uncertain. "I don't know, Doc. It's not like Kimmie swipes things for no reason. Their story could be on the level."

"Nonsense." Drakken dismissed Shego's concerns with a casual wave of his hand. "They're bluffing, and the good guys never bluff well."

"Maybe," Shego admitted. "But if they are the good guys, would they be lying about this?"

"If they were…lying is…sometimes to be good…" Drakken vigorously shook his head. "This is making my head hurt. I'll worry about it later."

"There may not be a 'later'!" exploded Jimmy. "We don't have a lot of time left! The singularity is pulling other slices of time towards it. We'll be seeing things from the past as they go through our own time on the way to the singularity. Eventually our own time will begin to destabilize. If we wait too long and that happens, we may not be able to neutralize the singularity. Everything will collapse into a single point in time!"

Drakken had been listening intently to Jimmy's diatribe and a thoughtful look crossed his face. "So as I understand it," he said, "this device has something to do with time?"

Jimmy and Kim let out simultaneous screams of frustration while Shego folded her arms. "Hence the word 'temporal' in the name," Shego declared in mock amazement. "Why didn't I think of that? Oh, wait…I know. Because I already did."

"If you knew, why didn't you say so?" Drakken demanded.

"Because it was obvious?"

Drakken merely grunted at her and turned back to Jimmy. "So what does it do with time? Let you see through it? Pull things through it? Travel through it? All of the above? What?"

"Forget it, Drakken," Jimmy answered in a sullen voice. "I'm not saying anything until you let us out of here and give us the device back."

"Have it your way," Drakken replied sociably. "No more Mr. Nice Evil Scientist." He pulled the portable soldering iron from inside his lab coat. He held it close to Jimmy's face and let Jimmy study it. "Do you know what this is?"

"Yes," Jimmy answered as he eyed the tool. "It's a Shur-Sodr battery-powered soldering pencil with grounded removable small chisel tip and rechargeable battery pack. Tip temperature of approximately 700° to 725° Fahrenheit. Operates 60 minutes on a single charge. I have one like it in my lab."

Jimmy's cool assessment of the soldering tool seemed to put Drakken off-balance. "Yes," he finally replied. "Precisely. In addition to soldering, it can do a number of other things. Very…nasty…things," he concluded with relish.

"You don't scare me, Drakken," Jimmy replied defiantly. "I won't tell you anything."

Kim was both horrified and incredulous at Drakken's veiled threat. "You wouldn't dare!"

"Wouldn't I?"

"Don't worry, Kim," Jimmy said. "I won't tell him anything no matter what he does to me."

"Very heroic," Drakken replied coolly as he took slow, measured steps towards Kim. "But who said that I'd do anything to you?" He stopped in front of Kim, smiling coldly.

Jimmy's voice was hoarse and hardly audible. "You wouldn't!"

"Don't give in, Jimmy," Kim responded. "He's bluffing."

"I never bluff," sneered Drakken.

"Believe it," Shego agreed. "His poker royally tanks."

Drakken said nothing, letting time rather than words drive his threat deeper into Jimmy's mind. After letting the boy squirm for long seconds he shrugged indifferently, activated the soldering iron, and turned to Kim, who struggled in vain to pull free of her restraints. Before Drakken could move, however, Jimmy cried out, "All right! You win! I'll help!"

Drakken shut the iron off with a cackle of triumph. "You see, Shego? That's the nature of good. It always concerns itself with the welfare of others. That's its greatest weakness."

Doy, thought Shego.

"Now, boy," Drakken continued, "tell me how the device works."

"It compresses sequential time, creating direct access to any point in the timestream," Jimmy said dully. "This effectively allows the user to travel to any point in time."

"Aha!" Drakken crowed. "Then it does have something to do with time!"

"Hello! I think we've already been there!" Shego pointed out. "If we're going to keep coming back to this then we're going to need a time machine just to move on with our lives."

Drakken simply growled. "All right then," Drakken replied. "How do I operate it?"

Jimmy shrugged. "I don't know."

Even Kim seemed amazed. "What?"

"I didn't invent it," Jimmy explained to her, "and I didn't have time to examine it before we were captured. I was going to analyze the schematics and blueprints and figure out how to do that." A thought crept into the back of his mind. "But I can still do that. Let me out of here and give me the blueprints and the device to study and -"

"No way!" Drakken objected. "I am not letting you out of this cell. You'll just have to tell me what to do. Shego," he instructed, "take this down."

Shego lifted pencil to pad again and nodded. "Ready."

Jimmy sighed. "All right. If the device follows standard temporal complosion design topology the first thing you'll need to do is calibrate the intermediate frequency of the chronosynclastic quantum oscillation to one-half of an octave above the fundamental self-resonance harmonic to avoid potential heterodyning issues."

Drakken's face had gone blank. "The…chrono…elastic…quantum…heterogenous…" He closed his eyes and shook his head vigorously as though to clear his head. "Shego! Read back that last part."

Shego consulted her pad. "'All right. If the devices follows standard big word, big word, blah, blah, blah, yadda-yadda-yadda.'" She looked up. "You want me to type that up for you?"

Drakken snorted in disgust and looked closely at Jimmy. "Are you making this up?"

"I thought you said that the good guys never bluff well," Jimmy replied. When Drakken's expression did not change, he sighed again and said pointedly, "No. I'm not making this up."

"Looks like you'll have to let Jimmy out if you want to make that thing work after all," Kim said.

"Don't rub it in," Drakken warned, wagging his finger at her. "All right," he told Jimmy. "I'll let you out. But just remember this. You'll be watched every minute, and I still have Possible if you're thinking about trying anything funny. Capisce?"

Jimmy nodded wordlessly. After summoning two henchmen Shego released his restraints and let him drop to the ground under the watchful eye of Drakken, Shego, and the additional guards. I will save you, Jimmy thought grimly as he exchanged a last look with Kim. Count on it. Then he was marched from the cell, leaving Kim still captive but now completely alone.

End of Chapter 9