Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 20

"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 bra.s.s!"

"Anyway, if the bra.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 d.a.m.n island is so eager togo to them? He's sure to hear about it."

"It will not be difficult, sir. We will simply let everyone on 'the whole d.a.m.n 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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Baboons and the Ladies

We spent a day and two nights getting our cla.s.s 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. n.o.body ever told me about baboons," I said.

"No s.h.i.t? 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 s.e.x 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 j.a.panese 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, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d at heart, because I don't resist it any more. The fact is that I enjoy the h.e.l.l out of it."

"Yeah, so do I. So much so that I was too embarra.s.sed to talk about it, before this. All this cleanliness, it just doesn't seem . . . manly, somehow."

"By the standards of a lower cla.s.s working man, it isn't, and that's the subculture that both of us were brought up in. A working slob can't help having dirty fingernails, but I've gotten a good look at a General Motors vice president, or two, and let me tell you, those guys are well groomed. Not as well groomed as we are, though," Ian said.

"I'll bet that they have their women, too. I mean, besides a wife, often a second 'trophy' wife at that, they all have a secretary or two, a female chauffeur, a few house maids, and as often as not a few girlfriends. Nothing like what we have, but you see the pattern. The cl.u.s.ter of women around each of them helps make him a leader of men.""You're cutting with a sword, Tom. Then there's our clothes. Back in Michigan, you had exactly three pairs of pants that fit you, and you never wore one pair, but saved it in case you ever got a hot date. Furthermore, you were almost as poorly equipped when it came to shirts, socks, and underwear."

"No fair! Do you realize that a man my size had to pay three or four times as much for clothes as you little critters did? And every time you gain a few pounds, you have to go out and buy a whole new set! I tell you that a fat boy ends up spending five times as much for clothes as you Munchkins do, and then we still look shabby despite the expense!"

"Hey, lighten up, Tom! I'm not pa.s.sing out blame. I'm explaining a situation. There's no denying that you are dressing well now. Even though we've never worn anything but casual clothes around here, I'll bet it cost at least three thousand dollars, cash money American, to dress each one of us today."

"Yeah. It was weeks before I found out that the only shirts I have that aren't made out of silk are made of Egyptian cotton, and every one of them is hand st.i.tched." I said. "I've got three sports jackets in my closet made of vicuna."

"Shades of the Great Inca. Not only did he keep more women than the three of us put together, he was the only person in his entire empire permitted to wear that precious cloth, vicuna, and he never wore the same garment twice. The Queen of England can't keep a harem, but she follows the custom of never being seen twice in the same dress to this day. What's more, I'll bet that our ladies will never let either of us wear a single article of clothing for more than one day, even though b.u.t.tons are hand carved out of jade where they aren't made of precious jewels, or cast in twenty-two carat gold. What's more, we'll be doing it for the rest of our lives, and radiating the purest manna in the process."

"Then what's going to happen to all of those clothes? n.o.body could wear them secondhand. Who could fit into clothes big enough to fit us?" I asked.

"Who wears Queen Elizabeth's old clothes? I don't know, either. My advice is don't worry about it."

"It seems so d.a.m.ned wasteful."

"Oh, it is. But it's all part of the program of making the two of us into great world leaders. In fact, it's probably one of the cheapest parts."

"Make that the three of us, since Hasenpfeffer's doubtless getting the same treatment."

"Probably. But at least he knows what the h.e.l.l is going on!" Ian said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Loss of a Friend

We soon found that speaking in public for four hours a day, each, was a lot, so we cut the lectures down to a ten to noon matinee and a two to four afternoon show.

It was yet another revelation. Up until then, I'd thought that the twenty-hour work weeks that most teachers did was sheer government worker style featherbedding, but four hours a day whacked us out, even though we didn't have to correct any papers or tests.

All the while, Hasenpfeffer was coming by every morning, and being handed each day a more improbable tale of our whereabouts than he got the day before. Sometimes it took Ian and me hours each evening to come up with a new story.

We survived the course, and at the end of the last cla.s.s, we were each presented with bound galley proofs of a book that somebody had put together from our lectures. This meant that we each had to read the whole thing over one more time, making corrections as needed, and making sure that what this guy had thought he heard was what we had meant to say.

Hasenpfeffer came around to the small party we threw after the last cla.s.s at my place, celebrating the end of school. It was good to see him again, but somehow, he wasn't the same.

"Dammit! He was polite to me! To both of us! What the h.e.l.l is the matter with him, being polite to his best friends?" Ian said, after Jim had "made an appearance" and departed.

"Maybe we've been a little rough on him."

"How so? I mean, we took a vacation when he didn't want to, and when he got to yelling and screaming about it, we ignored him. That seems normal enough. It's not like we made him take a vacation, when he didn't want to take one. Then, we played a trivial joke on him, where for a few weeks, while we were giving those lectures, which was what he wanted us to do in the first place, we made him think that we were still goofing off. Is that anything to get polite about?"

"But Ian, to play that joke, we had to organize the entire population of Morrow into a conspiracy to tell lies to him."

"We didn't organize anything. We just gave your housekeeper permission to go aheadand do as she suggested. These islanders are the most organizing people in the known universe, I swear it."

"Well, we did make up all those stories our girls told him, but the big thing is that he'd just spent a month or so, working his buns off, being diplomatic to everybody, while we'd gone around being fornicating playboys. And then, for his reward for being such a good boy, everybody in the whole country ganged up on him to play a joke. Think about it. Every single person on the island sided with us. Everybody he saw for two weeks knew what he didn't, and was laughing at him for it."

"So? Is that so much different from what's been happening to the two of us?

Everybody in Morrow knows what's going on but you and me, Tom, but do we go around being polite to old friends? Of course not!"

"Yeah, but we've still got each other. Hasenpfeffer is out there all alone."

"All alone with n.o.body but his hundred and fifty naked ladies and a few thousand sundry others."

"Yeah, but those people aren't friends. It makes me feel rotten. We gotta do something about it."

It had taken us eleven days of lecturing to explain everything we knew, or thought we knew, about time travel. After that, we took a long weekend off, and vowed to start work, bright and surly, on Monday morning. Which implied having some manpower there to help us out.

Talking it over on Friday morning, Ian and I decided that we didn't know anything about hiring people. Neither one of us had ever had any significant number of people working for us. Barb and Ming Po, on the other hand, were both experienced managers, so we gave them the job of hiring the men who would work at our factory.

Oh, Ian and I had sketched up the job description for each slot to be filled, but after that we let the girls handle everything, including salaries.

Having thus performed my managerial duties by delegating them all away, I spent the rest of the day curled up with a book and a bottle, in that little room Ian had found on our first morning in Morrow. Sometimes, a man just has to get away from the rest of the world for a while.

Early on Sat.u.r.day morning, I walked over to Hasenpfeffer's gla.s.s and chrome monstrosity, to talk to him and see about mending some fences. A man has very few true friends in this world, and you can't just let them slip away.

It was actually the first time that I had ever been inside of Hasenpfeffer's house, after living next to it for over a month. Most of the time, the three of us had met over at my place, I suppose because the Gothic styling there was more conducive to comfortable living than Ian's rather austere Taj Mahal, or Hasenpfeffer's sterile, modernistic gla.s.s and metal thing.

Aside from the splashy but ugly architecture, which had all sorts of elevated platforms and walkways cutting at different levels through huge volumes of s.p.a.ce, the first difference I noticed were the women.

At my place, the girls were naked or nearly so, and openly friendly, cheerful, andenergetic. Thinking about it, this was doubtless a response to my lecherous but essentially egalitarian personality.

Ian's women wore a bit more clothing than mine did, but they all were still pretending to be Chinese slave girls, with a lot of bowing, kneeling, and groveling. The Oriental kowtowing had happened at first due to one of my suggestions, when I was trying to get Ian over a hump, but the fact that Jim hadn't changed it probably said something about the man. But then again, maybe all it said was that he had simply never noticed it. For all his education, intelligence, and perception, that boy could be G.o.d awful dense, sometimes.

The ladies of Hasenpfeffer's harem were all fully and properly dressed, generally in shades of grey, black, and white. Many of them wore well-fitted ladies' business suits.

They all acted as if they were at a major corporate headquarters, with stiff, artificial smiles and quick, efficient motions.

In his gla.s.sed-in breakfast room, atop a clear, round gla.s.s tower which faced the city and not the sea, Hasenpfeffer, too, was in a three piece business suit. It was carefully tailored of grey wool with a thin, dark blue pinstriping. He wore a silk Rep tie, a diamond tie tack, and had a gold chain running from a twenty carat diamond watch fob to a priceless antique gold watch.

All this to meet an old friend on a Sat.u.r.day morning.

He met me in a friendly enough manner, but with a touch of formality, too.

We had breakfast, served by a quiet woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a black- and-white English maid's outfit. She had long sleeves, her top was b.u.t.toned up to her throat, and the hem of her black skirt almost brushed the floor.

Jim's old casual manner and slovenly ways were entirely gone. He was as well groomed as Ian and I had become, but it was more than that. He was now a corporate executive, a consummate politician, a manipulator of people. Even his table manners were now disgustingly impeccable.

Between the power suit, Hasenpfeffer's formal politeness, and his new table manners, I felt as intimidated as all h.e.l.l, despite the fact that I was still twice his size.