Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 26

"Good. Now then, to answer your last a.s.sertion, Barbara, Ian and I are not beholden to this island and the people on it. Rather, we own the place, and the people here are all our employees, including the particularly lovely one that I intend to marry in a few weeks. After that time, you might have some substantial claim on me, but until then you do not! For the time being, Ian and I feel absolutely free to risk our own silly necks in any fashion that we see fit. Am I understood?"

Our ladies' response was sullen but affirmative.

"Good. Now then, one thing does occur to me. We just might run into some people back there, and I think that it would be advisable if our party was dressed in clothes appropriate to the period. Also, we should have a squad of ground troops along with us, just in case. They should be appropriately dressed, and equipped with weapons that at least look period. Have it all ready for us in six minutes, when we get to the shop."

Again, Barb nodded a sullen a.s.sent.

As we got up to leave, Ian said, in a girlish, falsetto voice, "Oh, Tom! You look so manly when you get a.s.sertive!"

This statement earned him a heavy fist on the shoulder.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The First Expedition

When I got to my office, there was a costume waiting on my desk for me. It consisted of a wide-sleeved white cotton shirt, white canvas pants, and a pair of st.u.r.dy leather slip on boots. A broad brimmed felt hat with a white ostrich plume, and a real steel rapier, complete with a sheath and a wide, over-the-shoulder leather sword belt completed the outfit. It was st.u.r.dy, work-a-day stuff, and looked well worn. The only decoration was on the baldric, where it disguised a red emergency b.u.t.ton. Just what good that would do me back in 1735 was a moot point, but there was no point in removing it, either.

I stripped off my usual finery and put on the coa.r.s.e-feeling clothes. Months of wearing silk, vicuna, and the like had spoiled me for more plebeian fabrics. Nonetheless, I felt jaunty, mostly because I liked the plume in the hat, and the long, thin sword. I was clipping my temporal sword to the belt on the pants, next to my calculator and my Swiss Army knife, when Ian walked in. He was similarly attired, except that his outfit had brown leather accessories instead of black.

I said, "Shouldn't we have a pistol or two, and daggers in our boots?"

"I suppose we could, Tom, but do you really know how to operate a flintlock?"

"No, but there can't be all that much to learn. I'm sure that somebody at the Bucket Blood could show us."

"The canister is scheduled to leave within the hour, and I can't see delaying the trip by a sidereal day just so you can have both a sword and a pistol by your side, just like the Froggy who Went Acourtin'."

"I suppose you're right. But next time we should plan these things out better."

"Making the d.a.m.n time machine work was mental exercise enough for me," Ian said.

The elevator in the hallway now went all the way down to the upper time-canister chamber, three hundred feet down. When we got there, a fair-sized welcoming committee was waiting for us, headed by Hasenpfeffer, and including Barb, Ming Po, all of our senior technical staff, and a few dozen other, officious looking people.

None of them looked happy.

Jim Hasenpfeffer stepped pompously forward with his hands on the lapels of his grey wool suit. He said, "Gentlemen, surely you realize that this action on your part isinadvisable."

"h.e.l.lo, Jim," Ian said. "We haven't seen you in months. It's good to see you out slumming with us working folks. You should do it more often. It would work wonders on your stodgy personality. Do you have any idea of what a pompous a.s.s you've become?"

"This is hardly a suitable occasion for name calling. You youngsters are about to do something stupidly dangerous, and it was felt that I was the only person who had sufficient authority to dissuade you from your childish foolishness."

" 'It was felt?' By who? Last time I heard, Tom and I owned two thirds of this outfit, so we're the only ones around here with any clout!"

I cut in with, " 'Youngsters'? 'Childish'? When we arrived here, Jim, we were all the same age, and the fact that you have decided to act like an old fart doesn't give you any enhanced authority in our eyes. If you want us to have any respect for you, you should start by coming around now and then and having breakfast, or better yet a beer with us.

As things are, well, you are just a silly, old fool who used to be a friend of mine. I mourn the loss of that friend, but you aren't him any more."

"Please, gentlemen, you are embarra.s.sing me in front of my a.s.sociates. This should be a memorable occasion, the first test of our first temporal canister with human occupants. Please, boys, just step aside and let those who are properly trained for the task enter the device."

"Wrong," I said. "First off, there's n.o.body who's 'properly trained' because n.o.body has ever done this before. Secondly, Ian and I know more about it than anyone else, so we're going on the first trip. We have a digging crew scheduled to go with us, and a squad of infantry to handle any emergencies. The rest of you are not supposed to be here.

I want you to leave. Please. Do it now."

The managers and officials in the crowd looked uneasily at Jim and me, and then at one another, uncomfortable with receiving contradictory orders from the various parts of their upper management team. They didn't like what was going on, but they didn't leave, either. Not even my own d.a.m.n subordinates.

Well, they'd hear from me later. First things first.

James Hasenpfeffer was not about to be ordered out. He marched ostentatiously over to the front of the canister's heavy, vacuum-proof door and stood obstinately in front of the thing with his arms crossed. I glanced over to Bob McMahon, an infantry lieutenant I knew from drinking with him at the Bucket of Blood. He was wearing a period outfit, so I a.s.sumed that he was in charge of the infantry squad I'd ordered up. I was about to ask him to clear the area of non-essential personnel, but then I changed my mind.

Asking Bob to decide which of his bosses he was going to obey wouldn't be fair to him. It would be better management technique to handle the problem myself.

With that thought in mind, I walked over to Hasenpfeffer, grabbed him by his carefully tailored wool lapels, and lifted him up in the air at arm's length. I've always been a lot stronger than most people, and the modifications made on me by that annoying Killer doctor hadn't weakened me one bit.

Jim was so shocked that someone would actually use physical force on him that he didn't even struggle. I carried him like a limp doll over to the opposite wall and set him down. Meanwhile, Ian had cranked open the canister doors and was gesturing theconstruction workers inside. Embarra.s.sed at being present at a disagreement among their upper management, they obeyed him with alacrity.

Hasenpfeffer got over his initial shock and became furious. You could see his complexion go from dead white to beet red, starting at the top of his slightly balding head and progressing downward. He started to move toward the opened canister when I heard a hissing, crackling sound.

A thin line appeared on the pavement in front of Hasenpfeffer's polished, wingtip brogues. He came to an abrupt stop, and his face went from red back to white again.

Ian had his temporal sword in his hand.

"Jim, we just had a meeting of the Board of Directors, and you were outvoted on this one. Tom and I want to take a ride in our new time machine, and we're going to do it.

Now, go back to your office and administer something. Leave the technical stuff to the technical people."

I could tell that Hasenpfeffer wanted to rant and rave a bit, but seeing that we were willing to use both force and violence, he thought better of it. He stalked away, muttering under his breath like a very old man.

I said, "Lieutenant, get your men in the canister. The train is leaving the station."

As we sealed the door on the stationary vacuum canister and then the door on the traveling can, the orange, glowing Nixie tube numbers on the countdown timer said that we had four and a half minutes to go.

The controls used on these big canisters were almost exactly the same as those used on the small test canisters we'd used in the early part of the program. After all, we knew they worked, and we were producing them on an a.s.sembly line, so they were fairly cheap. They were automatic, and worked whether people were around or not. The only difference was that on the big canisters, there was a keyboard available, and if you knew what you were doing, you could reprogram the thing. Normally, though, it was to be just a matter of going aboard and letting it take you where you were supposed to go.

I sat down next to Ian, carefully sliding my steel sword down between the seats, and said, "Maybe we were a bit rough on our old friend. Maybe we shouldn't have humiliated him in public the way we did."

"Well, he was the one who made it public in the first d.a.m.n place! If he wanted to talk it over with us, he could have come over to our places, or to our offices, or even invited us over to his. We could have discussed it privately, but no, he had to round up all of our managers at the shop, and our girlfriends, and act the thing out in front of them."

"I didn't like Barb and Ming Po being there either. I mean, yes, they're both managers subordinate to us, but they both are a lot more than that, too. Jim used to be so slick when it came to handling people, but he sure botched this one. He didn't really leave us much choice but to do what we did. It's like he was having some sort of mental aberration, or delusions of power."

"I don't think he's gone crazy. I mean, all three of us are getting used to being big shots, and generally getting things done our own way, but you and I have had the advantage of being engineers. Mother nature has a way of maintaining the humility of a man who works with her. Jim has had nothing to work with but people. It's like you said, he's not the same man any more. He's gotten so used to having his every word be the lawthat he's forgotten that he has partners in this business. We are the ones who made this whole thing possible. Jim just helped out with the business side of things," Ian said.

"I don't think that he looks at it that way. I think that he really has gotten old, administering this island and everything else. I think that he has put many, many years of his life into this project, doubling back and forth through time in machines that we haven't even thought of yet."

"So? Did we ask him to do that? Did we ever authorize him to go off on his own, and create this sick little society of time travelers who can't think up a new joke, or invent a widget, or even whistle a tune unless somebody else plays it for them first? Was our opinion asked before the fruits of our labors were used to create an entire culture that I, for one, consider to be downright immoral?"

"Well, no, to all of your questions. But you've also got to ask, could we have done all of this without him? And you've got to answer no to that one, too."

"True, but neither of us would have wanted to do all of this. We would have been quite content to run a profitable little business just outside of Ann Arbor, and maybe not so little a one at that. We probably wouldn't have had all the palaces, and certainly not all the women, but we would have built a good life for ourselves, Tom."

"I can't argue with you. But things are what they are right now, and we've got to play it from here."

"Right. And what we'll do now is make our first trip into history."

Ian's timing was dead on, because just then the Nixie tubes read six zeros, and we left home.

Our first surprise was the lack of gravity. It was just like being in a s.p.a.ce ship, I suppose, with things floating up and out of our pockets, and us floating out of our chairs.

It had never occurred to us that we'd need seat belts.

"Why didn't we expect this?" I said, "It would have been easy enough to build an instrument that could check for gravity, and put it into a test canister."

"Because we never thought of it," Ian said from six feet "above" my head. "Still, it makes perfect sense. We are not on Earth any more, so we aren't affected by Earth's gravitational field."

I would have been more upset, except that I saw the eight soldiers we had with us, sitting in their chairs with their hands firmly gripping the armrests, grinning at the two new kids. They and the construction workers were used to this sort of thing. I made a mental note to have someone put safety belts on all the seats, next time.

"Well, if it makes so d.a.m.n much sense to you, why didn't you predict this null gravity thing?" I asked, floating upside down to everything else.

"I said it made sense, not that I knew it was going to happen. It would also have made sense if the gravity slowly went away as we got farther and farther away from Earth in the fifth dimension."

"Only that didn't happen, so the fifth dimension must be impervious to gravity waves, whatever they are."

"That, or we are moving a lot farther into the other dimensions than we thought. I mean, if we were billions of miles away from home, there wouldn't be much of Earth'sgravitation field to feel."

"Well, I've already thought of a use for the effect," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Sure. Get a weight and put it on top of a spring. The weight pushes the spring down.

Take the contraption out into the fifth dimension, and the spring pushes the weight away.

Attach the weight to a crank, and turn the time circuit on and off quickly. You get free power, and I bet it would be a lot cheaper to build than that emergency power machine of yours. No turbines, for one thing, and it doesn't need a bodacious supply of air."

"Tom, that sounds just stupid enough to work. You know, we could have powered the surfacers with something like that. We'll put technical team on it when we get back."

"Okay. You know, maybe you shouldn't have pulled your sword on Hasenpfeffer."

"It got his attention, and we were running out of time. If we'd let him delay us past the departure time, it would have given him another day to think up things to delay us further."

"I can see your point, but while we've done impolite things to each other before, we've never used real weapons up till now."

"All right, all right. I'll send him a formal note of apology as soon as we get back."

"Thank you. I just don't want this whole thing to escalate."

Another set of Nixie tubes said we had forty-one minutes until we arrived. We'd known that it took time to travel in time almost since the beginning. We still didn't know why that was so, and it still bugged me.

Free fall was starting to get fun, now that I was no longer startled by it. I would have suggested some sort of free fall game, except that if the troops and workers got out of their chairs and got involved, the place would have gotten crowded in a hurry.

Besides fifteen people, we had power, food, and water aboard for a year. We had bottled oxygen, calcium oxide, and activated charcoal to last us a week. We had digging equipment to get us to the surface, tools and materials to set up a small station in 1735, and a small observatory to let us ascertain our exact geographical position. What we didn't have was much room for a game of null-G touch football.

We were all in our seats when the Nixie tubes counted down to zero again.

Nothing happened. Gravity did not return. We weren't on Earth in 1735, or anything like it.

I heard a nervous voice behind me say, "Boss, I think we're in big trouble."

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Big Trouble

Ian said, "Tom, you checked this program yourself, didn't you?"

"No. I wrote it myself. Prescott checked it. I'll go take a look at it."

I opened the control cabinet under the Nixie tubes, and turned on the cathode ray tube display. While it warmed up, I fumbled around and found the program, a long column of nine digit numbers, all of them ones and zeros, written in my own handwriting. Ours was a stripped down system written in straight, efficient machine language, without benefit of Fortran.

What I didn't find was my flow charts, our volumes of charts and tables of lateral drift, and everything else I needed to write a five dimensional program from scratch.

They weren't here because it had never occurred to me that I might need them anywhere else except at my desk in my office.

In hindsight, I know that this sounds incredibly stupid, but please remember that we had written more than sixty thousand of these programs before, and all of them had been for test canisters without any humans aboard. Including the volumes of tables in a small, unmanned test canister would not only be stupid, it would have been flat impossible.

After a while, you settle into habits, solid routines of how things are done. Ian and I had been so eager to make this trip that we hadn't bothered to think everything out again from the beginning.

As it was, we were lucky that we had even the program itself with us. It was here only because the typist and her checker hadn't bothered to take it back with them.

Working the controls with one hand while I held myself in place with the other was annoying. I put my sword inside the cabinet, took off my shoulder belt, and used it to fasten myself to the stool in front of the cabinet.

I tediously checked the screen against my written program and found the problem in about ten minutes. Two zeros in one line had somehow become ones.

"Had only one error occurred, it would have been caught in a parity check. What we're seeing here is pretty improbable."

"You think somebody did it on purpose?" Ian said.

"I don't know, but we can worry about that one later. The point now is that we'vemissed our target, both in time and in s.p.a.ce. From here, I don't think that I can steer us back to there. Not without all the stuff I have back in my office."