Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 28

"So this mail box of yours has a time machine in it?" Ian asked.

"No sir. At least I don't think it does. My understanding is that it just has a timer to drop out each letter at the proper time. I go to the post office about once a week, drop off my old box and pick up the new one at the same time, with the right letters all set to come out at the right time. Only they're both the same box, of course. I mean, it's my personal property, you know."

"So the post office does the time traveling. How do they know when a letter should be delivered?"

"From the address, of course! Oh, I remember that in America, a letter is just addressed for the place you want it delivered to. Here, we have to state both the place and the time it should get there."

"I see. And these letters are not only from yourself, but from others as well?"

"Of course. You can use a letter to talk to anyone when a phone isn't handy. Or to talk to people in other time periods. I mean, my sister is back in 43,519 B.C., and we write each other all the time."

And here I had been thinking that these people had no more curves to throw at me!

"What would happen if you broke open the box and got all your mail at once?" Ian asked.

"Oh, that would be very dangerous, sir. The box and all the letters would burn up!"

"I see. b.o.o.by-trapped to conserve causality."

I thanked Kowalski, and asked her to write up something nice and appropriate to put in the personnel files of each of the three officers and then bring it back for my personal signature. That sort of thing was very important to American officers, and I imagine that all military outfits are pretty much the same.

"So. It was just an electronic glitch, and all of this detective work amounts to little more than a wasted exercise in paranoia on our parts," Ian said.

"Paranoia, probably, but I wouldn't call it all a wasted effort. I intend to redesign the temporal circuits as the leftenant recommended, no matter what it costs, or how much it delays our next try at time travel. It makes you wonder how many of those test canisters that didn't return failed because of this same glitch."

"Another point is that even paranoids can have people who are trying to kill them,"Ian said. "The only question still in my mind is why did Hasenpfeffer raise such a stink about our going on that trip, and why did he choose such a strange way to stage his protest?"

"Why indeed? I suppose that we could go and ask him."

"We could, but I'm not sure that I will like his answer. Tom, my gut level feeling is that we should just let this one lie."

"Moved and seconded."

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Wedding Preparations

As the day of my wedding approached, things got increasingly hectic around Camelot, and around the Taj Mahal as well, since with Ian as best man, and Ming Po as Barb's bridesmaid, all of Ian's ladies were soon roped into helping out my girls.

Barring attendance at a few rehearsals, I managed to stay out of the loop as far as most of it was concerned, but I couldn't help noticing a few of the stranger things go by.

A special issue of a book on Catholic American wedding customs was printed and distributed to everyone concerned, including yours truly. It's strange, the things people do simply to state publicly that they intend to shack up together. Rings are exchanged; bouquets are thrown about; brides are denuded of their garter belts, which are then thrown to the bachelors in the crowd; and atrocious things are done to the groom at bachelor's parties.

I wanted no such things to happen to me. This wedding was a serious thing to me, and I didn't want it spoiled by any nonsense. I talked about it long and hard with Ian, and he eventually promised that a surprise bachelor party wouldn't happen. Then I took steps to insure that no one else would try any stunts by posting public notice, promising to fire anyone involved with any crude jokes on my person.

I wanted Barb to go through the whole, days long ritual, mostly to impress upon her the seriousness of the whole thing. Once we were married, I wanted us to stay that way.

The book said, among a huge number of other bits of trivia, that Barb's father was to pick up the bill for the wedding reception. Since some three thousand people were eventually scheduled to attend, it seemed a bit much to ask the guy to pay for all of it, and over breakfast, I asked Ian to see to it that I caught the bill instead of him.

"Not a good idea, Tom. It would embarra.s.s him. Wedding ceremonies are much like the potlatch festivals that the Northwest American Indians used to throw. They are a display of wealth and power that vastly increases the prestige of the guy throwing it."

"I've heard about those things. Isn't that where the guy hosting it gives away absolutely everything he owns, and if he can't find somebody to take the last of it, he'll burn whatever was left over, just to make sure that he's totally dest.i.tute?"

"Usually, it doesn't go quite that far. Anyway, in the long run, he comes out wayahead, because everyone who accepts a gift is morally, or at least socially, obligated to give his host a gift of far greater value, once it's his turn to throw a potlatch."

"Weird custom, sort of like a voluntary income tax, except that with the Indians, you eventually get something back for what you have to sh.e.l.l out. So the Smoothies have a custom like the potlatch, too?" I asked.

"d.a.m.ned if I know. n.o.body ever gave me a handbook of Smoothie customs. But you know, I'd be willing to bet that from now on, they adopt your Catholic-American customs as the standard way to get married."

"Bulls.h.i.t," I said politely. "There is no way that so many couples could possibly get a real Catholic priest to marry them."

"Okay, you've got me on that one. But the huge ceremony, the ma.s.sive display of wealth, and the social commitment that these public displays enforce, could well become permanent things hereabouts. For one thing, marriage customs quickly become permanent anywhere. Look at the way that the giving of a diamond ring to announce an engagement quickly became universal. Most Americans would say that the custom was ancient, whereas it really has only been around for less than a century."

"The reason for that one is obvious. Besides the millions that the DeBeers diamond cartel spends on advertising, a woman naturally wants to know that the guy has made a serious commitment to her before she makes the commitment that he wants from her. I'm surprised that the custom wasn't invented sooner."

"Without any sort of dependable birth control device, and what with the social stigma placed on giving birth to a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, most properly brought up women back then weren't likely to give in to their man's desires before marriage, in any event," Ian said.

"What about the medieval lord's droit du seigneur, where he got to take all of his peasant girls?"

"Traditionally, he only had the right to take them on the night before their wedding, so her husband to be was there to take care of the kid, in case the lord's sperm got lucky.

You know, there is a similar custom in Southeast Asia, where the Buddhist monks take on the hard duty of relieving the local maidens of their maidenheads."

"Purely for religious reasons, of course."

"Of course. The causing of pain and the spilling of blood are sinful acts according to Buddhist tenets. Due to the strength of his soul, a monk is best suited to do the onerous task. They even get paid for doing it."

"A typically religious justification for the defloration of the youth, while raking in the money," I said.

"Some religions, perhaps. Not mine, of course."

"You figure that the Smoothies are going to pick up on that one, too?"

"No. But they have a culture without much real depth, and such cultures are quick to adopt new customs. Like any other new culture, they slosh around a lot, like water carried in a shallow tray."

"How do you get off calling them a 'new' culture? We keep hearing that they've been around for thousands of years!"

"They have and they haven't," Ian said. "Don't forget that almost everyone here leftwherever they came from when they were teenagers, and spent at least their next ten years scattered throughout the United States. That amounts to a very definite cultural break. Now that they are together again, they want a feeling of cultural solidarity, but they don't have the customs, the symbols of cultural solidity, to work with. Being absolutely uncreative, they have to get those customs from us, the only creative people around."

"Huh. I don't mind being responsible for creating the technical basis for their sick little culture. I mean, they're not an evil people, or anything like that. But I don't know if I feel right about being the cause of their social customs as well. I don't feel that I'm competent to handle a job like that."

"You're not. Neither am I. But then again, I don't think that we'll do more than modify a few surface things, like wedding customs. The real basis for their culture, and the reason for their uncreativity, is the way they use time travel. For that, we certainly are responsible, perhaps to the d.a.m.nation of our souls."

"I can't buy that," I said. "We just made a machine. We never forced anyone to use it, to make it the basis of their whole culture."

"Once the machine was there, it was going to be used. I've heard it argued that Henry Ford, along with the other early auto makers, was responsible for the change in morals that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. Maybe all Henry wanted was to give people a cheap, convenient means of transportation, and to make a fortune doing it, but he also gave the average young man an enclosed, self-mobile box to take his girl out with. No longer was he forced to spend his Sunday afternoons sitting with her in her father's well-chaperoned parlor. He now had a way to take her somewhere else, as well as a convenient place to have s.e.x with the girl."

"He could have done the same thing with a horse-drawn carriage," I said.

"Only if he was rich. Even if the horse and carriage had been free, it still took a lot of time and effort to take care of a horse, more than the typical working man could afford. A Model T Ford could be bought new for ten weeks' pay, and you didn't have to feed it, curry it, shoe it, and do everything else that a horse needs to stay healthy."

"So you're blaming the automotive engineers for the breakdown of morals during the 1920s? Well, good for the engineers! And to h.e.l.l with drinking tea and eating crumpets with a bunch of maiden aunts, anyway!"

"It's a judgement call, and if that's yours, go wallow in it," Ian said. "Some of us have a different opinion. None of which changes our responsibility for the Smoothy lack of creativity."

"There's got to be a better way. There has got to be a way that we can use time travel and still be creative."

"When you figure it out, tell me about it. For now, let's get to work. You have to find where that glitch is in our time circuit, fix it, and then design a triple redundant version of it, with back-ups and extra parity checks. I have to take a look at the damage we did down below, and do something about it."

Our best guess turned out to be that a single energetic bit of radiation managed to upset two adjacent registers, which caused the entire circuit to malfunction. A single badregister would have caused a parity error, and the canister would have returned home immediately.

Our circuit could malfunction under these circ.u.mstances because those two particular bits changed a legal command into an illegal one. Of the sixty-four codes allocated to control functions, only sixty-two were actually in use. I had used a simple diode decoding matrix to do the job, with each function incorporating a transistor circuit for amplification, which also performed the pull-down function. I had not included an amplifier for those two codes that had no use. This meant that those two codes didn't have a pull-down resistor, and various "sneak paths" existed when either of them was called up.

We had tested the circuit extensively, but we had never tested for things that "couldn't possibly happen," like codes that weren't in use. So what could possibly happen was that several functions were activated simultaniously, and your humble heroes were left drifting in the sixth dimension, for a while there.

In Standard Engineering Terminology, this situation is called "f.u.c.king Up." I suppose that I could mumble and grumble about how my uncreative staff, acting like I was G.o.d, had a lot to do with the way my error wasn't caught, but the truth is that it was my mistake.

I'm glad that I made that first trip, and took my chances dying on it. If somebody else had died because of my f.u.c.k-up, well, I couldn't have lived with it.

Two cheaps.h.i.t quarter-watt, carbon pull-down resistors cured half the basic problem.

Hardening our registers with their own, separate, triple redundancy circuits (plus a bit of lead shielding) did most of the rest. The triple redundancy with back-ups for the whole circuit came later. Fortunately, I had help with that.

Actually, the triple circuit didn't take us all that long to build and test. There were books and papers available on how to make any electrical circuit more reliable, provided that you didn't mind spending money, s.p.a.ce, and power to get it. Nothing creative was required on our parts. I had a lot of good engineers who could do a very competent job under those conditions.

Within two weeks, we tested the new circuit out on a small test canister, and it worked. We ran two hundred more tests, going as far back as fifty thousand years, and had a success rate that was almost twice as good as we'd ever had before, all of which was pretty d.a.m.ned embarra.s.sing. It meant that we had lost thousands of canisters on our earlier tests, not because of problems with making machinery last fifty thousand years, or because of geological accidents, but because of a simple electronic glitch!

Ian ragged me about it for years, and while the Smoothies were all far too polite to ever mention it, the people in his mechanical design team acted smug, aloof, and superior to my electronic people from that day on.

We then ran ten tests on full-sized canisters, shuttling back and forth from 1735 to our newly rebuilt terminal in 1972. We were now ready to make our trip into the past, except that I had this wedding to attend.

My own.

Even though Ian promised that there wouldn't be any bachelor party stunts, I wasincreasingly watchful as the day of the wedding approached. I knew that he was going to pull something. But nothing happened.

With the ceremony less than an hour away, my bath girls got me into the formal, full- dress with tails outfit that somebody had decided was absolutely necessary. Just as well, since I never could have figured out how to get into it on my own, what with the shirt studs, the bow tie, the gaiters and all. It even came with a spring-loaded top hat, an opera cape, and a walking stick. I'd hoped that there was a sword hidden in the walking stick, but no such luck. Or if there was one in there, I couldn't figure out how to get the d.a.m.ned thing out.

My usual accessories, my calculator and my temporal sword, didn't seem appropriate with the formal outfit, and what with all the new stuff, I failed to notice the lack of a red b.u.t.ton on the belt buckle.

Ian showed up with six other friends of mine, Killer drinking buddies from the Bucket of Blood, who had volunteered to act as ushers. They were all in the same uniform that I was, and they said that they were going to escort me to the church.

"Sort of an honor guard, as it were," Leftenant Fitzsimmon said, as we got into the subway car.

But when the car door opened, I could see that we weren't in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the church. We were in the time canister test chamber below our shop!

"What? You pressed the wrong b.u.t.ton by mistake, Ian?"

"No . . . Tom, listen to me. First, you must understand that I am your best friend. That all of us here are friends of yours. And as your friends, we can't let you go out and make the biggest mistake of your life! Deep down inside, we know that you realize that Barbara is simply not the right girl for you, and that by marrying her, you would not only be making yourself miserable for the rest of your life, you would be ruining her life as well."

"I realize no such G.o.d d.a.m.ned thing!" I said, standing up and trying to make it to to the car's control panel.

I never got there. All seven of those guys piled on me, and while they did no damage to anything but my pride, they held me down in the aisle.

"We were afraid that you would take it this way," Ian said. "We sincerely regret being forced to put you in bondage, but sadly, you leave us no choice."

My arms were forced behind my back, and a set of handcuffs was snapped on my wrists. I was furious! Not only were they doing their d.a.m.ndest to upset a ceremony that I had been looking forward to for months, but they were actually overpowering me, physically! Such a thing had never happened to me before. I had always been the strongest person I knew, and I hadn't realized how much of my ego was involved with that fact.

But the seven of them were more that I could handle. I was helpless against the fighting skills of the six Killers, and Ian's towering strength. I never even got a single good lick on any one of them.

Once the handcuffs were on, most of them worked their way down to my feet, and put a set of leg irons on me. I was squirming and shouting loudly for help. At first it didn't seem to bother them, but my increasingly vulgar cursing ended when they held my nose closed and stuffed a ball gag into my mouth."Now don't get yourself into too much of a dither," Ian said calmly as they carried me at shoulder height over to a time canister. "We're only sending you back ten years, to when the island was unpopulated. That ought to give even you enough time to get over your present, doubtless temporary, insanity."

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Kidnaped!

With Ian giving directions, my six other "friends" carried me from the subway car to the back of a big canister, half loaded with boxes and crates that were strapped down to the deck. They laid me down, face up, on a big, inflated air mattress.

"You've got all the supplies you need here to keep yourself healthy and happy until you catch up with the present again. Food, camping gear, clothing. Even your favorite cigars, and plenty of beer."

Leftenant Fitzsimmon took an oversized can of Australian beer from one of the cases, opened it, and set it on the deck near my head with a friendly wink. Not that I could drink any of it, bound and gagged as I was. Captain Stepanski returned my top hat, opera cape, and walking stick, which had been scattered in the struggle. He dusted them off, folded the cape, and set it all neatly on the floor near the beer can.

"We've jimmied the time circuit so that this machine can only travel backward.

Without test equipment or even a soldering iron, there's no chance that even you could fix it," Ian said, tossing the keys for the cuffs to the floor near me. "I doubt if it will take you more than a few hours to get yourself free. Again, sorry, but this really is for your own good, you know."

And with that, Ian hit one b.u.t.ton on the canister's keyboard and they all filed out of the canister. I heard them close both vacuum-tight doors, and in a few minutes I was suddenly in zero-G, traveling back in time.

There was enough spring in the air mattress to push me high into the air. Floating upward and rotating slowly, I could see that the beer can was also afloat, and that a growing blob of frothy beer was extruding itself from the opening. I soon bounced gently with my back to the ceiling, and lost my rotation in the process. It wasn't a big immediate problem, but I knew that when we arrived and gravity returned, if I wasn't back down I had a nasty fall coming!

Coming slowly back toward the deck, I saw that the glob of beer had grown much larger than the can it had come out of. It was bigger than my head, and it was coming directly at my face!

I had ugly visions of the blob fastening itself around my face, suffocating me. Beer foam is a mixture of carbon dioxide gas and a liquid made up mainly of water. Not thesort of thing you can breathe. A h.e.l.l of a thing! Tom Kolczyskrenski, drowning in a single can of Foster's Lager Beer!