Conrad's Time Machine (22 page)

My original thoughts had been that I would take on one or two techs or engineers, teach them what we had learned about time travel, and get them to work. That is to say, if I
had
to become a manager, I wanted to sort of ease myself into it, kind of the way you ease yourself into a cold lake, hoping that once you're over the shock, it won't really be so bad.

The first thing that Ian wanted to do was to convert all of his spanking new machinery over from conventional cutting bits to temporal swords, which would require that my people build several hundred industrial swords for the purpose. This would mean that I had to provide several thousand electronic man hours to satisfy him. I'd need a few more techs than I'd planned.

My stomach started grumbling, so I sent four girls out for a supply of cheese and anchovy pizzas and a few cases of beer, enough for everybody. Ian immediately countermanded my order, such that his half of the crowd got cheese, ham, and green pepper pizzas. He's a nice guy, but he's got no taste.

The girls were back so fast that they must have passed themselves on the steps going both up and down, a frequent occurrence on this strange little island. Not that they'd ever let the two of us see how they did it.

Barb helped herself to a can of Budweiser and entered the discussion by saying that while Ian and I were touring our new offices, she had found the accounting office of our new company. There she had found purchase orders from our small Army, our smaller Navy, and our tiny Air Force. An army colonel, who said that he had met me in that reception line, wanted swords, like the ones Ian and I wore on our belts, for all of his men, and could we please develop something larger along the same line to replace the small arms his men carried? Was anything possible for the artillery? This was followed by some simple sketches of a rapidly spinning artillery shell with six swords built into it.

"What he really wants is a circuit like the one we found in the first place in the Upper Peninsula. We could put one in an artillery shell, with some sort adjustment on it to control the size of the hole. You could do that, couldn't you, Tom?"

"Yeah, but I don't know about building a circuit that could stand the shock of being shot out of a cannon," I said.

"It can be done," Ian assured me. "They make proximity fuses for antiaircraft shells, don't they? Aren't they a sort of tiny radar rig?"

"I suppose that's true, if you wanted to stretch a few definitions. Prox switches are electronic, so the technology must exist somewhere. It might take me weeks to look it up, though."

"No, it won't," Barb said. "That's the sort of thing that you have secretaries and librarians for. You'll have the information you need in the morning, unless you need it sooner. But let me continue with these military purchase orders."

The Navy had similar requests for side arms, and requests for quotes on the research and development required to design a heavy, turret mounted weapon, for which they had incidentally left space in their existing deck turrets (sketch included).

And the Air Force had a similar bunch of requests, only with aerospace specifications, instead of the naval requirements for salt-spray tests.

Then there were orders from three local industrial supply houses, saying that they had heard of our swords, and couldn't something similar be used for cutting very hard materials? Assuming that this was so, they wanted to buy them, and they didn't care about the price.

Ian said, "So what it comes down to is, we've got a fistful of production orders on stuff we already know how to make. If we're going to fill them, we're going to have to put on a lot of people in a hurry, and back off on R and D for a while."

Somehow, we never wondered if we
should
fill those orders.

I said, "Nah. I can't see getting involved with the headaches of mass production. There are lots of shops with good managers on this island. They can make anything you want, so long as you don't expect them to get too creative. All we have to do is to design the products, build some prototypes, and test them. Then we can hand it all over to someone else."

"We'd lose a lot of the profits, that way, Tom."

"What profits? Don't you realize that all these things we're going to develop and make are going to be used inside of our own organization? That everything on this whole Island is
already
ours? How could we possibly make a profit off that? We'd be as likely to make a profit by taking in each other's laundry!"

"Huh. You've got a point there, only we will profit, in the increased equity of our holdings. But okay, we'll get an accountant to handle whatever accounting they need to do around here, and after that, we just won't worry about the money."

"Agreed. I haven't seen any money around here anyway. Everybody just seems to sign for stuff, however that works. So where are we?" I asked.

"Well, first, we have to take those items that have already been built and tested—the temporal swords, the machine tool adaptations of them, and the bomb—and document them so that other people can build them."

"But before we can do that, we'll need people who know as much as we do about this whole thing. I hate to say it, Ian, but I think that you and I will have to become school teachers for a few weeks."

"What a depressing thought."

"True. And we have to make sure that we have some real school teachers in that first class, or we'll have to keep on teaching the damn thing ourselves. Are you taking notes, Barb?"

That last was for Ian's benefit, since I knew that Barb either had an eidetic memory or a built-in tape recorder. She not only didn't sleep, she never forgot anything, either. Sexy, too. I definitely had to marry that girl, one of these days.

Barb said yes, and that if we going to teach a class, something that we did not enjoy doing, it would make sense to teach as large a class as possible. A large auditorium was available, and did we want to have the first class in the morning?

Ian said, "No. We'll need at least a day to get our class notes together. We'll start on Thursday morning, at eight. Ming Po, set it up. Two four-hour sessions a day. In the meantime, I found Hasenpfeffer's old sword in one of the drawers in my tool box downstairs. Shirley, get it over to some engineering outfit or other, and have them make formal drawings of all the parts, since we built them from rough sketches. Warn them not to turn the thing on until after they've been to our lectures. Can you think of any thing else that needs doing before we get going on the class notes, Tom?"

"Nothing except to say 'What you mean "we," White Man?' You're the one with all that wonderful formal education. You do the notes, and I'll kibitz."

"Deal. But you have to give half of the talks, and we're both going to have to be up on the stage together. For moral support, you know, and making sure that we get it right."

"Stage, huh? We're going to have
that
big an audience?"

Barb said, "The hall I had in mind seats three thousand, Tom. If we use anything smaller, the V.I.P.s will crowd out all of the engineers and technicians."

"V.I.P.s!" Ian shouted, "We don't need no stinking V.I.P.s! We're doing this to educate our work force, not to entertain the brass!"

"Anyway, if the brass comes, Hasenpfeffer will come too, and that'll blow away our joke on him," I said. "No. No V.I.P.s. If they come, I won't."

"Tom, you must remember that most of the people on this island have been waiting for this lecture series for most of their lives. You can't expect them to pass up seeing it in person. No manager is going to send his subordinates, when he himself has to sit home."

My mind had stuck on that "waiting all their lives" line, and hadn't gotten much farther.

"Then how are we going to insure that Hasenpfeffer doesn't show up?" Ian said.

"I don't think that we can, sir. But what we could do is see to it that he doesn't come for two more weeks, subjectively, while your joke is being played on him. Then he can double back for the lecture series," Barb said.

"I don't think that I could have thought of that," Ian said. "How are you going to keep him from knowing about our talks, if everybody on the whole damn island is so eager to go to them? He's sure to hear about it."

"It will not be difficult, sir. We will simply let everyone on 'the whole damn island' in on the joke being played."

"You know, Ian, I think they could do that. It couldn't happen in our world, of course, but we're not in Michigan any more. Look at the way these people have stonewalled us on a dozen different topics."

"Yeah. And I'll bet that most of that stonewalling was at Hasenpfeffer's instigation. Nailing him back is only fair. Our little joke is getting better all the time."

I said, "Barb, let's go back to that line about how everybody here has been waiting all their lives to hear our lecture series. What's so new about what we're going to say? I mean, you people use time machines as often as the average American uses a telephone. It can't be any big deal to you."

"Tom, we use temporal products in
exactly
the same way as the average person uses a telephone. We know how to use them, but we don't know how they work. None of us do!"

"Well, some of you must. I mean, you have repairmen, don't you?"

"Of course. But the repairmen don't do anything but replace defective sealed boxes with functioning sealed boxes that are shipped to us from the future. Those boxes are tamper-proof, and naturally, we're all dying to find out what's inside of them."

I spent a long while mulling that one over.

We spent a day and two nights getting our class notes together.

When Hasenpfeffer came by at eight in the morning, one of the girls told him that we were out hunting for a Narwhal in our scuba rigs. We needed it so we could make ourselves some drinking cups out of the tusk, that would protect us against the ever-present danger of being poisoned.

By noon, we had decided that the best way to explain the whole thing was to do it as a narrative, explaining our actions and thoughts in chronological order. We still didn't know enough about the theory to present it in a more logical fashion.

I dug out those same notes to write this book, years later, but like I said, it's best to tell the whole thing in the order in which it all happened.

It's a curious thing, but it simply never occurred to us at the time that we should worry about security. After two and a half years of keeping absolutely mum to outsiders about our project, here we were, not just telling someone about it, but about to give a definitive lecture series to three thousand people! And it never occurred to us to wonder about this, any more than we gave any thought as to whether we should equip a tiny island nation with a new set of very powerful weapons.

There was something about the Smoothies that just naturally made you want to trust them. I
liked
the Killers, but I
trusted
the Smoothies.

They had placed some orders for the weapons, and it seemed only natural at the time to fill those orders without question.

The lecture series went off without a hitch, even though it was the first experience either of us had with public speaking. There was a huge crowd of carefully groomed people there to watch us, and it was strange to think that a few hours before, every one of them had been sitting naked in a bathtub, in absolution for this momentous event of hearing Ian and me talk.

I vaguely recognized a few people in the crowd, and Hasenpfeffer was there in the first row, cheering us on. But mostly it was a sea of eager, but anonymous, faces. As best as I could tell, all of them were Smoothies, with not a Killer in the bunch.

I expected to be nervous, at first anyway, but I never was, and neither was Ian.

Somewhere along the line, we'd both picked up a lot of confidence that neither of us had had when we'd first gotten to Morrow.

"I saw a thing on television, once, about baboons," Ian said over a boomba of beer, the evening after our first lecture. "The baboon leaders are actually chosen by the females of the pack, or tribe, or whatever you call it with baboons."

"Let's see. Wolves come in packs, whales come in pods, quails have coveys, geese have gaggles, and owls belong to parliaments. Nobody ever told me about baboons," I said.

"No shit? Parliaments? Are you sure?"

"Would I lie?"

"Constantly. Sometimes, I think that you only tell the truth to set me up for your next lie. But I remember now. Baboons belong to troops. The females of the troop select the next leader by giving him all the sex he wants. When this happens, he grows bigger, sleeker, and more powerful. The females groom him a lot, too, and kowtow to him, and before long, he's strutting and swaggering like a medieval Japanese warlord. All this adds up to making him boss. The other males knuckle under or get beaten up."

"Are you saying that that's what's been happening to us? That all these women decided to make us the leaders, so we became the leaders?"

"I wouldn't swear as to who made the decision, but it's a fair bet that the women are playing a prominent part in carrying it out. Or at least, it's a good working theory, Tom. I observe that we're both remarkably well groomed, and have been since we first arrived here. Back in Michigan, I never saw you even clean your fingernails, let alone trim, buff, and polish them to the state of perfection that they presently enjoy."

"You still won't see me do it. Every morning, a half dozen naked women spend an hour or more on me, scrubbing me down with all of us in a huge tub, then doing my fingernails and my toenails, trimming my hair and my beard and the hair in my ears. They even brush my teeth with a rig like a dentist uses. I get rubbed down and polished up like you wouldn't believe, except that your crowd of groveling ladies obviously does the same thing to you."

"True. I resisted it at first. It seemed like an invasion of my person, and sinfully decadent, besides, to have someone else do such private things to my body. But I guess that I'm a decadent bastard at heart, because I don't resist it any more. The fact is that I enjoy the hell out of it."