Of Time-Travel and Tea

"Bugger, blast, damn and double damn," exclaimed Samuel Wenthrop, extracting himself from the ruins of the smoking time machine with an undignified and partially anatomically impossible wrench of his lower quarters. On realising the latter fact and, more importantly, remembering that attempting the anatomically impossible often leads to quite surprising amounts of agony (as was indeed true in this case), he proceeded to follow up the aforementioned expletives with a rather more potent set, including several which he had picked up from his previous travels in time and which this present author therefore lacks the knowledge to translate (though the few phrases of Ancient Sumerian he favoured his unfortunate contraption with were in fact a recipe for a primitive forerunner of the digestive biscuit - Wenthrop's knowledge of ancient languages was not as extensive as he often claimed).

When he had quite exhausted his stock of curses both present and past (and had indeed moved beyond them and into the realms of multisyllabic scientific terminology [rather more because he liked the sound of the words than because he expected either his legs or the machine to take offence at them]), he became aware more fully of his surroundings, and in particular of a certain cold feeling at the base of his neck. Through further consideration, he ascertained that the feeling appeared to be caused by a roughly ring-shaped piece of relatively thin metal, and that said piece of metal was being pressed against the back of his neck with somewhat unwarranted and impolite forcefulness by an unseen-as-yet adversary (he made the leap of logic which led him to that conclusion when he realised that the piece of metal was, in all probability, the barrel of a gun. People who hold guns to the back of other peoples' heads are generally not predisposed to be particularly affectionate towards them, or so he reasoned, and he deduced from that that the holder of the gun could, without much doubt, definitely be termed as an adversary. For some reason this train of successful reasoning failed to please him much.)

"Your money or your life," growled the aforementioned adversary, in what Wenthrop felt was a rather unnecessarily confrontational tone (not to mention one which sounded far more animal than human, which was most definitely not on), and reinforced his request by pressing the barrel of the pistol harder against the hapless scientist's neck.

Wenthrop, attempting to avoid being terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought and failing utterly to do so, squeaked.

The highwayman (for that was what he seemed to think he was, as far as cliched [but very effective] lines were any proof of identity) growled again, sounding rather as though he was gargling with a particularly gritty mouthful of gravel. "Your money, or your life."

"I don't have any!" Wenthrop protested (somewhat less squeakily - although still exceptionally terrified, he had at least regained the capacity of speech), leaving his listener in some doubt as to which of the two options he was referring to (if indeed he did not mean both). Feeling, correctly, that this reply was unlikely to please his demanding interlocuter, he searched desperately through his memories of what he had packed for the trip for something that he could offer the...man (and whether the highwayman was a man or not was something which the scientist was beginning to be very confused about).

Finally, he thought of something. Favouring the air in front of him with a shaky smile (which he somehow expected the man-creature-thing standing behind him to be able to see), he took a deep breath and said hopefully:

"I've got some tea."