Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 23

"You know, Tom, I think that I was happier back when the Second Law of Thermodynamics still worked."

For whatever reason, our best conversations always seemed to take place at the breakfast table. It was my table this time, and my serving wenches.

"Nah. You were just brainwashed like almost everybody else in the technical world, except for me, of course, and Einstein and Bronowski."

Over the months, my ladies had refined their appearance to coincide with what they had apparently decided was what attracted me the most. This involved very long hair, usually straight, but curly if it was naturally so. They wore high-heeled shoes, and were otherwise naked, devoid even of body hair. They had light suntans, without strap marks.

Facial makeup was minimal to nonexistent, but more and more lately I was beginning to notice a slight glistening of body oil.

"I'd heard that Einstein had doubts about the Second Law. Who's Bronowski?" Ian asked.

"A mathematician. He did a show called 'The Ascent of Man.' You should watch more television."

"I shudder at the thought."

"Elitist."

It's odd to think that my tastes had been so carefully studied, by so many and for so long, with this as the result. I would have thought that I would have preferred more variety, but there it was. And the high-heeled shoes! For many years, I had ridiculed women for wearing them despite the pain they caused and the damage they did to the feet.

Now, they were apparently being worn by hundreds of women because I found them to be attractive!

On reflection, I begin to think that what attracts me is not the shoes per se, but the way a woman walks when she's wearing them.

"You never believed in the Second Law?"

"Of course not. Among other things, it implies that the universe as a whole isconstantly getting more random. But if you'll look around you, you'll see that everything around us is not getting more random. It is obviously getting more ordered."

"Bulls.h.i.t!" Ian said, which of course meant "give me some concrete examples of that."

"You will observe that I am currently eating breakfast. My body, in the meantime, is turning this breakfast into me. I am obviously a more ordered system than this breakfast is. Q.E.D. Thus it is demonstrated."

The waitresses and other ladies who constantly surrounded us were used to our continual arguments by now. I sometimes wonder if they kept recordings of them, so as to write up an academic paper or two, once their present charade was over.

"Your body is turning a small portion of your breakfast into you, which person, incidentally, never struck me as being particularly orderly. Most of your breakfast will be converted into carbon dioxide, water vapor, and one of your major const.i.tuents, s.h.i.t.

These are blatantly disorderly, not to say downright messy on occasion, being end products, as it were. On the average, your strange eating habits have decreased the order of the universe, not increased it."

"I deny all of the above. One glance at the evolution of life on the Earth should convince you that the universe strives upward, not downward," I said.

"If things are becoming more orderly in one place, they must be becoming less orderly in another. Earth is only one tiny bit of the universe."

"You are suggesting that on Mars, perhaps, there are animals that are evolving into beings that are slower, stupider, and in general less well adapted? Earth is the only part of the universe that we humans know much about, so I suggest that we confine our arguments to its surface. Or, if we must go into outer s.p.a.ce, I point out that current cosmological theory has the universe starting out containing little else but hydrogen, the simplest of the elements. After a few eons of star formation, stellar burning of various sorts, and the occasional supernova, the other elements were gradually built up. Notice again, please, that we went from a disorderly cloud of hydrogen to very complicated constructions like stars, planets, the hundred-odd higher elements, and me. I stands my ground."

"In the short run, you might be right, but eventually the universe will consist of nothing but lukewarm iron, the element lowest on the energy curve."

"In the short run? I'm talking about fifteen to twenty billion years, here! And as to the famous heat death of the universe which you allude to, just how do you adjust, rectify, and justify this Second Law of yours with the Law of the Conservation of Ma.s.s and Energy? If matter is convertible into energy, why can't I take some of that lukewarm iron of yours and turn it into energy to warm up the rest of it?"

"I confess that I have occasionally been troubled over that one."

"As well you should be. In truth, your rational self was rebelling against the brainwashing it had received in that overvalued university that you are so proud of having attended. They did a similar job on you young earnest types with their Laws of Momentum. They gave you a formula that said that the ma.s.s of a bullet times the speed of that bullet must equal the ma.s.s of the cannon that fired it times the speed of the cannon moving backwards. Thus, for hundreds of years, every properly educated young engineerknew, absolutely knew, that you couldn't possibly shoot a gun without that gun having a kick. It wasn't until World War Two (when someone was given the problem of making the plume of smoke from a tank's gun a little less obvious to the enemy), that the gas brake was invented. This was nothing but a bent piece of metal with a hole in it that fit over the muzzle and let the bullet go on its way, while sending some of the propelling ga.s.ses out sideways. It sent a smaller plume of smoke into the sky, but the tankers soon noticed that their guns kicked less than they had before. Notice that the improvement was made by accident, or at least for the wrong reasons, because every engineer in the world had been blinded by a formula."

"MV is still equal to MV," Ian said. "Gun designers were just a little bit slow in noticing that you not only shot the bullet out the end of the gun, you shot the propelling ga.s.ses out as well. If you send those ga.s.ses out sideways, or better yet backwards, you can significantly reduce the total kick of the weapon, and even eliminate it in some cases.

So what?"

"So what? So a whole lot! Had that advance been available around the turn of the century, in the days of the All Big Gun navies, it would have made possible a ship the size of a destroyer that could have taken out a battleship! It could have shifted the basis of world power! But it wasn't done because the engineers of the world had been blinded by their own neat little formulas."

"And what does that have to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics?"

"A lot," I said. "People were as brainwashed by the Laws of Momentum as they currently are by the Second Law, when all along, there were ways around them both."

"Oh, I suppose you're right, of course. After all, in a few months, we'll be powering the whole d.a.m.n island with a system of generators that the Second Law says can't work. I just feel less comfortable without a new law to replace it with," Ian said.

"You're just asking for a new set of horse blinders. 'Beyond this point you must not see, much less think about.' "

"Knock it off. A man needs guidelines."

"Well then, have one of mine. If it works, it's not only good engineering, it's also good science as well."

"I guess I'll have to take that as a working hypothesis."

"Hey. It's all that John Roebling, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Major Armstrong, and all the rest of the great old engineers had to go on, and they did good work. Finish your breakfast, and we'll go do some of it, ourselves."

I was sketching up plans for an entirely new type of military aircraft, based on what we had learned from the escape harness.

It would be a small craft, consisting mainly of a chair inside of a hermetically sealed geodesic ball for the pilot, a big temporal sword, and a bomb rack. This was entirely surrounded by plates that acted like the shoulder boards on the harness. They provided the lift necessary to keep the thing in the air, and they provided all the forward acceleration, braking, and maneuvering required. Also, they could be selectively switched on by a proximity sensor such that if anything solid came quickly at the craft, a bullet, for example, it would be atomized and sent safely into the future. When this happened, aplate opposite was also switched on, to keep the plane from accelerating in the direction of the bullet.

Streamlining? We didn't need no stinking streamlining! Who needs streamlining when you can make all the air in front of you disappear? At that point, you are moving into a hard vacuum, no matter what your alt.i.tude is!

This puppy would be small, inexpensive, fast, maneuverable, and indestructible.

"Tom, it looks great to me, and in time I think we should build one of them. But we have been working on military equipment for months now, and we haven't ever asked ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. What do we need with all these super weapons, anyway? n.o.body is bothering us."

"Well, we had all those purchase orders . . ."

"Orders? Those weren't orders! Those were written requests sent to us by our subordinates!"

"Huh . . . Okay, I suppose you could think of them that way. But you were the one who was so adamant about filling the d.a.m.n things."

"So I was. I just hadn't thought it all out, back then. We wanted to get our own company going, and here suddenly were all these military orders. Back home, military orders are government orders, and patriotism, the law, and common sense says 'fill them.'

I hadn't figured out yet that when you own the whole country, all that changes."

"I suppose it does. But I still don't see where we've done anything wrong. Having a more effective military never hurt any country, even if we do own it, ourselves. The military contracts have given all of our people here some valuable experience with temporal equipment, and all of it has been relatively simple stuff, and free of the kind of brain busting headaches our earlier work entailed. The fact is that it has been fun, and you enjoyed it as much as I did."

"True. There's something about making weapons that sort of grabs a man's attention.

It's probably something in us left over from the Paleolithic Age, when man first learned that a pointed stick and a sharp rock are handy things to have around."

"Right, only it's not something just 'left over.' It's something we still need today. The fact is that the need for protection has been around long enough for it to be hard wired into our systems, just as all of the rest of our basic needs are. Food, air, water, shelter, procreation, and protection. Without them, we can't continue to exist. So, you feel pain when they are lacking and pleasure when they are satisfied. Evolution, or G.o.d, if you prefer, set it up so that we do what we have to do, without much recourse to our brains, which are still expensive, unproven, and newfangled gadgets, anyway."

"Save it for a breakfast table discussion, Tom. Only, why do you call the brain expensive?"

"The brain makes extremely high energy demands on the body. The average person, sitting quietly, has an energy requirement of around a hundred watts. About thirty-five of those watts are consumed by two pounds of brain tissue. The other hundred and fifty odd pounds burns only sixty-five watts. It's no big thing in our overfed civilized world, but we humans evolved out in the wilds, where the big problem is usually getting enough to eat.

Back then, it was a very significant expense."

"Huh. Is human energy output really that much higher than that of all the otheranimals?"

"Without your clothes, you're naked, aren't you? We are just about the only land mammal that has had to dispense with the thermal insulation and the physical protection that a coat of fur gives you. There has to be a reason for that."

"It's a thought. But back to what I was saying, Tom, I think that we've been spending too much of our effort on military weapons, and none at all on making the time machine work. I mean, isn't that what we were originally planning to do? Build a time machine?"

"Yeah, but right now, we've got thirty projects going, in every stage of development.

There'd be h.e.l.l to pay if we stopped them all dead."

"I'm not saying that we should do that. I'm just saying that we should stop, or at least slow down, initiating new military projects, and start spending more real effort on our main job."

"I'll agree with that in principle, but I still want to see this little fighter plane of mine fly," I said.

"Fine, so put a small crew on it, if you want, even though you can't properly call it a 'plane,' since it doesn't use one to fly with."

"Picky, picky, picky."

So we went back to what we were doing in Michigan, before we were so pleasantly interrupted.

First, we had to map out the lateral displacement drifts in the local area. These turned out to have almost nothing in common with those we saw around Ann Arbor, except that the drift was still lateral, and the test object reappeared with the same gravitational potential as when it left. And the drift still tracked with the sidereal day.

But where it went and in which direction was now totally different. In one sense the project was set back a long ways.

On the other hand, we now had the incredible ma.s.s production facilities of the entire island behind us, so we could send out a lot more canisters, collecting a lot more data points, and without having to worry about salvaging anything.

Also, the canisters we now used were far more sophisticated, and better engineered.

Before, we were just kluging up something workable, using existing components to get the job done in a hurry. Now, we had teams of technical people who were, I have to admit, better engineers than we were.

Beyond all doubt, the women we had working for us were extremely competent, superbly trained, and very hard working.

What they weren't was creative.

It was hard to understand. You'd give a team of them a project, and they'd come back with something that was exactly what you had in mind in the first place. It was almost like magic, seeing your own thoughts rationally developed into something that was truly beautiful, in the esoterically technical sense of the word. And it was flattering as well.

Because of this, it took a while before Ian and I realized that they weren't putting anything of themselves into their projects.

There weren't any of those little jumps of insight that a good engineer can't help butput into his work, often to the frustration of his managers. After we realized what was happening, Ian and I each got to checking the work of the other's teams, trying to find small creative things that would improve the final products.

Being inventive young men, we found a lot of places where we could make small improvements. These suggestions were always sent back to the team that did the original engineering, for incorporation into the design, or for rejection, if they could prove that we had screwed up, which we occasionally did.

It was the reactions of our engineers to what was really managerial meddling that confounded us. We expected them to feel anger and frustration, since we were messing with the children of their brains, and people are usually just as protective of those as they are of the children of their bodies.

Instead, they acted as if they were awestruck at our brilliance! At first, we both took that as mere sucking up to the boss, especially since our smiling subordinates were all women who badly wanted to get into our beds, and there to make full use of our willing bodies. Remember that these chicks were willing to eat cooked kibbie, if that's what their boss was eating. But as the months went by, we became convinced that their feelings of admiration were actually genuine.

These intelligent, competent people were absolutely incapable of doing anything creative, and were truly amazed to see anyone else doing anything new!

Once our original incredulity wore off, our feelings became a bit more mixed. Mostly, they became sadness and anger.

"Dammit!" Ian said one day as we were discussing the situation, "This sick little culture has got to be all Hasenpfeffer's doing, and that b.a.s.t.a.r.d has one h.e.l.l of a lot to answer for!"

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I'm Getting Married!

After living on the island of San Sebastian for six months, it was time to have a talk with Barbara. I mean, I talked with her every day, since I slept with her every night, but she was as slippery as Hasenpfeffer when it came to sidestepping things she didn't want to discuss. The only thing for it was to hit it straight on.

"Barb, we have been making love almost every night for six months, and you are still not pregnant. You once told me that you wanted to have children by me, so what's the problem? Is it me? Should I have a doctor check out my sperm count, or something?"

"No, Tom. Stop worrying and go to sleep. You are perfectly healthy. Your last doctor's visit proved that."

"Your flat tummy suggests otherwise. Do you have some sort of problem?"

"No. I, too, am healthy. Roll over and I'll rub your back."

"Not right now. I want to know why there isn't anybody on this island who's pregnant.

I don't know about Hasenpfeffer, but Ian and I have been doing yeoman service around here for half a year, nailing well over five hundred women regularly, and I have yet to see one bulging belly on the whole d.a.m.n island! Explain to me how this is possible."

"James Hasenpfeffer has been as s.e.xually active as you and Ian have."

"That's nice, but it wasn't my question."

"We get pregnant, and we have children, but you can't expect us to have them here!"

"So what's wrong with here? This island is a beautiful place. It's idyllic, by any normal standard!"

"By your standards, maybe, Tom. Not by ours."