Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 22

"Of course, Tom."

"I should have asked you sooner, but is it inconvenient for you to lie beside me every night while I sleep? I mean, what with you not sleeping and all. Doesn't it get boring?"

"Not really. My mind doesn't need to sleep, but my body still needs to rest, and if I wasn't by your side, I'd be lying down somewhere else, alone. I like being by you, and it gives me time to think."

"What do you think about?"

"Nothing important, usually. I go over the events of the day, and sort of mull them over. I plan the things that I'll be doing tomorrow. That sort of thing."

"Hmm. Well, if I ever do something that you are not happy with, be sure and tell me about it, won't you? I want you to be happy. You've become a very important person tome."

"Thank you, Tom."

"There's another thing that I've been meaning to ask you about. It's been more than a month since that first night we spent together. At the time, you said that there was a sixty percent chance that that you had conceived a child."

"Yes?"

"Well, have you? I mean, a month has gone by and all. Did you miss a period? Are you pregnant?"

"I am not pregnant now, Tom."

"Oh. Okay. To be honest, I don't know if I'm disappointed or relieved. I mean, you'd be a wonderful mother and all, but at the same time, having a child is such a huge responsibility, and I'm not sure whether or not I'm ready for it. I doubt if any man is, until after it happens to him."

"Not being a man, I couldn't advise you on that one, Tom."

"True. And what's more, I find it good that you are not a man. Good night, Barb."

"Good night, Tom."

I fell asleep kicking myself, because once more I had lost my nerve. I had not asked this perfect little woman to marry me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Different Kinds of Power

Tuesday being a day when Ian's people cooked our breakfast, I met him there in his Taj Mahal.

"Tom, I've been playing with an idea for a logo for our new company. M and K Temporal Engineering."

Ian was already working on his usual stack of Famo Buckwheat pancakes with Vermont maple syrup. I'd gotten into the habit of asking to be surprised with something completely different each morning, and on that particular morning I was served some poached herring, English style, she said. It seemed like a strange thing to eat for breakfast, but it didn't taste all that bad.

"Catchy name, and I guess it's your turn to get your name first."

"My thought exactly. Look at these."

I looked over the sketches he had done up, and the truth was, they were better than the usual stuff you see plastered over the world's billboards.

"They look good to me. Better, in fact, than anything I could come up with. Only, I've got this one nagging question."

My breakfast waitress was wearing a loose top of some very flexible material that covered her to American television standards when she was vertical, but fell away and exposed her torso completely when she bent over to serve me. Thus, she was able to satisfy both Ian's desire for decorum and my own desire for lechery at the same time. I thought it an interesting engineering solution to what was essentially a social problem.

Ian said, "Yeah?"

"Do we really have a company?"

"Well, of course we've got a b.l.o.o.d.y company! Just where did you think you spent all day yesterday, you silly twit?"

"I'm not sure, but I just might have been at the Temporal Engineering Research and Development Group, a loyal subsidiary of KMH Industries. A separate name and logo sort of implies that we're an independent company, doesn't it? But when all of the money, personnel, and other useful things are coming, I suppose, from KMH, just how independent can we be?""Your comments are rude, Tom, your demeanor is insufferable, and your timing is abominable. I was sitting here, bothering no one, and having a lot of fun, designing these logos. I was halfway there to designing us a corporate blazer for everyone to wear at company functions, where we could all sing the company song together. Then you came along with your unwanted existence and f.u.c.ked it all up, for no other reason than that you stupidly picked this precise moment to have a rare flash of common sense. Furthermore, you insisted on performing your vandalism before I'd even had a chance to finish breakfast. You know, I think that if we ever discover who your parents were, they will turn out to be brothers."

With that, he crumpled his sketches up and threw them over his shoulder. An obsequious blond maid, kneeling behind him in proper oriental fashion, picked up the papers and put them out of view, probably to hand them down to her grandkids, thinking, "Actual drawings by the hand of the great Ian McTavish himself! Yes, I knew him back then. . . ."

"Well, look Ian, if you have these inner needs to get creative in that direction, why don't you do something about a new KMH logo? We could probably use a company song or two, even if you can't carry a tune in a backpack or hold a note with a pair of Vice Grips, and even if I've never once seen you wearing a blazer, company or otherwise.

Together, we own two-thirds of KMH, don't we? We thus const.i.tute a solid majority on the board of directors, so we can do anything we want with it. We can even make it sing, if we want to!"

"Apparent power and actual power are often two different things, my poorly educated young friend. As to the Board of Directors of KMH Corporation, or whatever it's called, are you really positive that it has one? Have you ever seen it? And is this weird little Magic Fairyland of an island really owned by KMH?"

"I have been under those distinct impressions."

"Yes, but are you resolute in your convictions?"

"It beats me. Tell you what. This morning, instead of going to work, let's march over to Hasenpfeffer's Monstrosity and demand our rightful places on the Corporate Board of Directors!"

"I suppose that we could do such a thing, but what would it prove? The locals hereabouts have the wealth and organization to sit the two of us at some huge, impressive table, surround us with dozens of equally impressive suits filled with distinguished looking people inside them, and then bore the s.h.i.t out of us with accounting figures until we give up and go back to work at our own little company. And for all we know, everything we see could be just another Potemkin Village."

"A what Village?"

"Okay. Time for another history lesson. Catherine the Great of Russia wanted to lead an enlightened nation into the Western World. She wanted all of her peasants to live well, and to be happy and healthy. She even gave orders to that effect. Her n.o.bles wouldn't go along with it, figuring it would be too expensive, and what was the point of being a n.o.bleman if you couldn't make a few peasants miserable now and then? They said that it would take all of the fun out of being boss, but Catherine was adamant. She actually did the unprecedented thing of going out into the country and seeing for herself that her orders were being carried out. To forestall any unpleasantries, one of her ministers,Potemkin, arranged that everywhere she went, she was met by healthy, happy peasants, living in nice, clean peasant villages with healthy cows and happier chickens. The problem was that Catherine went in for long road trips, and Potemkin couldn't afford to build that many idyllic villages, let alone hire enough actors to play all the peasants. So, as an economy measure, he only built a few villages, and had them moved, buildings, happy peasants, fat cows, contented chickens and all, such that as the Empress of All the Russias progressed through her country, she always had nice villages to look at. Of course, they were always the same villages, with the same peasants and the same cows, but who looks all that closely at a cow, a chicken, or a peasant, anyway."

"Good G.o.d! And this really happened?"

"Oh, yes. And similar things go on all over the world to this day. So just because they call you the Emperor, the Chairman of the Board, or whatever, don't go believing that you are really in power."

"Well, if we're not, then who is?"

"A good question. If you study any one of the thousands of books on conspiracy theories that have been filling the world's bookshelves for the last three hundred years at least, you can convince yourself that some secret group of sinister individuals actually rules the world."

"But you don't believe this?"

"Oh, I do believe it, but only on Thursdays and Sat.u.r.days. The rest of the time, I think that the world is so complicated, confused, and corrupted that there isn't anybody smart enough to comprehend the whole of it, let alone manage the place. I don't think that anybody is actually in charge. Sometimes, I think, perhaps, the world is like a huge but poorly constructed ship, designed by a madman, and crewed by billions of people who refuse to talk to each other. It is a ship with a hundred propellers all pointing in different directions, and with a thousand rudders each with a thousand helmsmen, and every one of them is trying to get her safely into a different port."

"Ian, sometimes you paint some very strange pictures inside my head. Come on, let's go to work."

With plenty of competent help around, things progressed quickly at work.

The temporal product that was farthest along, the temporal sword, was properly doc.u.mented in a few days. That is to say, we had good engineering drawings of every part, complete a.s.sembly instructions written up and printed, and a user's manual had been sent to the typesetters.

One of Kowalski's people, Downing, turned out to be a first cla.s.s technical writer.

Incredibly, she was able to write instructions that even I could read and understand. We promoted Downing up to her own office, and had Kowalski find herself a new receptionist.

Our vendors started delivering civilian versions of the sword within the month, and our military got its first temporal side arms a few weeks after that.

The "Temporal Bomb" was next off the line. This was little more than a toughened up version of the device we had originally found in that woods in Northern Michigan, years before. It had been adjusted so that the sliced up bits returned to our normal threedimensions within a few microseconds, rather than the hours that original circuit had taken, so that the noise and implosion effects didn't have time to take place. There was just a loud click, and everything within the designated sphere crumbled into very small pieces. Since the bits and peices didn't have time to fall down into each other, and air didn't have time to get in, the bits reemerged in a fairly good vacuum, and there wasn't much radiation at all.

Designed to fit in the nose cone of one of the small, two-inch mortars our infantry carried, it had a calibration ring on it that let the operator adjust the radius of destruction from three feet to three hundred feet. Thus, the same weapon could be used to take out anything from a machine gun nest to a football stadium, at the operator's discretion.

Destruction within the radius was absolute, with everything within the sphere just suddenly collapsing into thin shards. Destruction outside that volume was nonexistent.

Our little army was very impressed with it.

We also made the Army a hand grenade version of the bomb, with a smaller radius of destruction for operator safety.

The Navy promptly requested their own version of the hand grenade for use as a depth charge. The main difference between the two was that the navy version left a hard vacuum behind for several seconds. In the atmosphere, a near miss by a temporal bomb caused little or no serious damage, but under water, at a depth of a few hundred feet, the implosion of seawater into a large sphere of hard vacuum was remarkably deadly.

Shortly thereafter, the Air Force got its version of the bomb, designed to fit on the nose of a small, two-inch Mighty Mouse rocket. It was made to aeros.p.a.ce specifications, of course, rather than to army specs. That is to say, it wasn't dust proof, mud proof, or rust proof, but it could function at two hundred thousand feet. Since pilots are customarily farther away from the damage they do than foot soldiers are, the radius of destruction was adjustable out to five hundred feet.

When fitted with some stabilizing fins, the same nose cone could be used as a gravity bomb. Once somebody else had designed, built, and installed suitable bomb racks, they gave one of our fighter jets the firepower of a World War II style thousand-plane raid.

And, of course, the Navy got its own version, to its own specifications, for its rockets, guns, and depth charges.

Near the end of the Temporal Bomb Project, Ian and I heard one of my engineers referring to the thing as a "Time Bomb." I chuckled at the pun, but Ian's reaction was a bit different.

"Tom, have you ever heard a Smoothie tell a joke before?"

"Well, no, thinking about it."

"Right. That's because in order to be funny, a joke has to be new. But these people already know everything that is going to happen to them. They don't tell jokes, ordinarily.

Making up a new joke, even a silly pun, is an act of creation, something that these people are not capable of. Yet here we just heard one of them use a pun. Did one of them think it up herself?"

"I don't know, but I can find out. Who knows? Maybe there's hope for these people yet."

I put one of the junior a.s.sistant secretaries on it. I asked her to trace the joke back,going from person to person, asking each of them when and where they had first heard the pun, and who they had heard it from.

The result was disappointing. It turned out that the originator of the pun was none other than my friend, Leftenant Fitzsimmons, and he wasn't a Smoothie at all.

Farther down the pipeline were bigger, longer-ranged versions of the temporal sword, with ranges of up to fifty miles. They replaced our infantry rifle, various army machine guns, aircraft machine guns, and so on. All told, there were twenty-three distinct versions of these high-powered swords. Or perhaps I should say relatively high powered, since the biggest of them only consumed nine and a half watts.

The military gadget that I was proudest of was the "Escape Harness." This thing looked like a pair of epaulets with arm loops under them, and straps across the back and chest. The chest strap had an arming b.u.t.ton, a kill b.u.t.ton, and a control k.n.o.b on it.

The tops of the epaulets functioned like the beam of a temporal sword, except that instead of focusing the temporal distortion into a fine thread, the entire tops of the shoulder boards became active. Air rushed into the things at almost supersonic speeds, to be sent a short while into the future. The undersides of the epaulets were still at normal atmospheric pressure, of course, but the tops felt only a hard vacuum. Since the total active area was about forty square inches, the escape harness had an effective lift of up to six hundred pounds at sea level.

This was plenty of power to pull a pilot right up out of his aircraft at four Gs, eliminating the need for the ejection seat as well as for the parachute.

The real beauty of the gadget was that here was something that you could wear on a regular basis, that weighed less than a pound, but that would let you fly! It was easy enough to steer. You just moved your legs one way or the other. The k.n.o.b on your chest controlled the amount of active area, and thus the lift.

It was noisy as all h.e.l.l, but the pilot's crash helmet protected his ears well enough.

I thought of these things as being strictly for emergency use, since the amount of air they sucked out of the present was pretty huge. They seemed wasteful to me, but Preston proved that there was no danger of dropping the world's air pressure by any measurable amount, even if everyone in the world used one all the time. The air being sent elsewhen wasn't being wasted, after all. It all came back in a short while.

The night after the first successful test, I was having a drink at the Bucket of Blood with Captain Stepanski, an Air Force pilot. I showed him one of the prototype escape harnesses my people had made up, to get his opinion of it, and, well, to show off.

He was impressed, and after a few more beers, we went outside so he could try it out, ear plugs and some helmets having been scrounged out of the sporting equipment in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Naturally, a crowd followed us, so I had to explain all over again, loudly this time, what it was and how it operated.

Captain Stepanski was a natural pilot, with a plane or without one. In moments, he had it all figured out, and he was doing aerial acrobatics in minutes. Once he came down, Leftenant Fitzsimmon of the Navy stepped up, and thinking that he wanted to try his handat flying, Stepanski gave him the harness.

Instead of putting it on, the leftenant proceeded to fasten the harness to a log, a big section of tree trunk that was set upright in the concrete, and normally used as a target for knife, sword, and javelin throwing.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Just trying out an idea I had. I won't be but a minute, sir."

Soon, the harness was howling away, trying without success to pull the log over sideways. Fitzsimmon walked back ten paces, borrowed a snub-nosed .44 Magnum pistol from one of his men, and proceeded to put all six slugs into the harness!

I was at first shocked, that someone would dare to try to destroy my latest brainchild, but I quickly saw that it was unharmed. The leftenant went over and shut off the screaming harness, so we could talk again.

"What? You missed all six times?" I said.

"No sir, I could hardly miss at that distance. All six rounds went into the active area of your new device. Where they went after that is something that you'll have to tell me about. You have more than an escape device or a flying machine here, sir. You have also invented the world's first perfect armor!"

After Ian watched the first test of the escape harness, he went back to his desk to sketch up an "Emergency Power Generator." This had an area at the back that was essentially the same as the top of an epaulet, creating a hard vacuum. Before getting there, inflowing air was ducted over an air turbine, which was in turn connected to a standard electrical generator.

It worked the first time we tried it out. As we watched it run, I gave Ian a copy of Prescott's writeup on air consumption, and told Ian that he had to take the word "Emergency" out of the name of the thing. There was no need to burn coal, oil, or any other fossil fuel at all, ever again.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Second Law