Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 5

From everything we had been able to learn, it looked as though if you simply reversed the phase in one section of the circuit, it should reverse the circuit's total temporal effect.

A circuit thusly configured should have been able to send things back in time, but when I tried it, the circuit overloaded, every time, and burned to a blackened pile of ashes and melted metal. We had no idea what the problem was. Coupled with it was the impossibility of just how a tiny, nine volt transistor battery could possibly put out enough power to so thoroughly fry a good sized epoxy-gla.s.s circuit board. Ian calculated that over its entire lifetime, such a battery couldn't put out a thousandth of the power we saw repeatedly generated.

"So, gentlemen, it appears that in addition to everything else, you have discovered a new source of industrial power!" Hasenpfeffer said one morning at breakfast.

"A f.u.c.king expensive source of power, if you ask me," Ian said. "When you spend thirty dollars worth of circuitry to generate thirty cents worth of power, you aren't making a profit."

n.o.body had a good way of answering that, and in the momentary silence, Hasenpfeffer's lady of the night walked in, wearing one of his old housecoats. She was a gorgeous, slender young thing, with long, straight blond hair, like most of the others. Ian offered to make her breakfast, and since Hasenpfeffer was here, she nodded acceptance.

After that, it was as though Ian and I didn't exist, as far as she was concerned. After a bit, we picked up our coffee cups and drifted off, leaving the two lovers, or at least s.e.x partners, alone.

We were used to it. The same sort of thing had been happening for seven years, since we all were freshmen in college. But being used to something doesn't mean that it no longer hurts. I couldn't help but look on Hasenpfeffer's success with the ladies with mixed emotions, the most prominent of which was envy.

We settled into the family room, out of earshot of Hasenpfeffer's latest.

"Over the years, he's got to have had two hundred of them over," Ian said.

"Counting college, yeah, it has to have been be at least that."

"Well, you'd think that at least one of them would want to have something to do with at least one of us."

"It seems statistically likely, only it just hasn't happened. The books all say that women want permanence in a relationship, yet all of Hasenpfeffer's chicks have to know that he'll drop them in a week or three, just like he dropped all of the others. If either of us latched onto a girl as fine as any of his, we'd want to keep her forever. They've got to know that, too. But will one of them even talk to us for ten minutes? No!"

"Tom, I don't think that we'll ever understand women. It's like they're a strange, alien species."

"You could be right. You know, the biologists, or maybe the biochemists, figure the separation of two species by computing the time since the two groups had a common ancestor. If the chimpanzee's branch separated from the human branch five million years ago, then that's the measure of separation between the two species. Now then, biologically, s.e.x was discovered back in the days when single celled critters were the most advanced things around. Even bacteria occasionally get together and exchangegenetic information. So male was separated from female at least a billion years ago. By the rules the biologists use, you and I are two hundred times more closely related to the chimps that we are to women. That makes them a very alien species, indeed."

"You tell me," Ian said.

"That argument is so ridiculous that it's probably true. Shall we accuse Hasenpfeffer of sodomy? What I want to know is why I can't get laid."

I said, "Look, don't ask me about it. All I know is that whatever the typical woman wants, it ain't me. Try asking Hasenpfeffer, or better still, one of his many chicks."

"Dammit, I've done that very thing. Jim can't explain a thing, except to say it might have something to do with pheromones. The girls always say that there's a good woman out there for me somewhere, and then they take off at a dead run. I'm totally lost."

"I was never found in the first place."

After a silence, the conversation dropped back to an old, unresolved issue. The paradoxes of time travel.

"So what are you going to do when I kill your grandfather?" I asked.

"Well, I can't kill one of yours in retaliation, since n.o.body knows who they were.

Anyway, why would you want to kill one of my grandfathers? By all accounts, they were both fine, decent gentlemen."

"You know what I mean. If we can really get it together, and get our time machine built, and go into the past, what happens if we change something? It wouldn't have to be a big change, you know. The tiniest change in the wrong place could make everything different. How many alternate history science fiction stories have we read between the three of us? Dozens?"

"I'd guess it to be more like hundreds, Tom, and fully a third of them seemed pretty plausible. If you really want to know what I think, it's that we shouldn't f.u.c.k with it."

"You mean that we should build the thing and then not use it? That's crazy! If we aren't going to use it, why bother to build it in the first place?"

"No, that's not what I mean, stupid. I just mean that we should at least try not to change anything. Even an atheist like you should know that none of us is G.o.d. We shouldn't try to act as if we are Him!"

"I'll second that one," Hasenpfeffer said as he came in from the kitchen. "Be it moved that we should not play G.o.d."

"Third, and be it so moved," I said. "At least at first, we've got to be super cautious, until we get a better handle on this thing, anyway."

Before long we'd agreed that it would take a unanimous vote to change the rule.

Nothing new, there, of course. All of our agreements were unanimous, the thought being that if one of us couldn't go along with the others, we just hadn't talked it over long enough, and anyway, none of us had any way of forcing anybody to do anything.

Future planning is something that every company ought to do now and then, even though we were still a long way from having our time machine.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cosmology

We still really didn't understand what we were doing, but then we humans never understand anything absolutely. I mean, I've been working competently with electronics all my adult life, but I've never seen an electron. Thinking about it, I'm not at all sure that I've been dealing with some sort of tiny particle. I'm even less sure that I've been playing with a zillion tiny negative indentations in the s.p.a.ce-time continua. But I know how to build a circuit, how to make it do what I originally had in mind, and how to fix it when it breaks.

And that is all that I need to know.

So we were starting to get a feel for how to use this stuff, and of what could be done with it. That is to say, we had a bit of practical experience, but we didn't have a codified theory yet. We didn't have an algebraic formula that worked every time.

Ian was fond of pointing out that the builders of the medieval cathedrals didn't know anything formal about the strength of materials, let alone stress a.n.a.lysis, but they built some vast, beautiful buildings, and most of them didn't fall down.

He loved to point out that the first steam engines were built by men who had never heard of the laws of thermodynamics. Nonetheless, their steam ships made it across the Atlantic on schedule, and their railroad trains ran on time.

And I had to agree that DeForest and Armstrong really didn't know what they were doing, but they got the job done. The world now enjoys radio, television, and the rest.

It was the same thing with our explorations of this new technology. Some of the time, things worked out pretty much as we'd planned, and when it didn't, we often were able to figure out why. Jim and I decided that this was fairly good. We worked well together, and made a good team.

Only, we had this problem with Hasenpfeffer.

You see, Ian is a first rate mechanical engineer and a good machinist, besides. I can usually handle anything electrical or electronic. Further, we each knew enough about the other's field to lend the other a hand when circ.u.mstances made that a good idea.

But Hasenpfeffer got his doctorate in Behavioral Psychology, and I guess that's what caused most of the pain.The man was an absolute genius when it came to working out a complicated business deal, or talking a beautiful woman into his bed, or solving any other sort of person-to- person problem. This wasn't something he learned in college. It was some sort of a talent, or an innate gift.

He could do it on day one of his freshman year, when I saw him take a future homecoming queen to bed, cold sober, on the first day he met her. I swear that they hadn't talked for more than four minutes before they were grinning ear to ear at each other and walking hand in hand to his bedroom.

Yet he was an absolute idiot when it came to anything technical. This, too, had to be innate. n.o.body could possibly learn to be that incompetent.

To make it worse, he was always so pitifully eager to help. He wanted to be "in" on things, and he'd follow you around like a puppy dog, wagging his tail and trying to understand it all. And like a puppy, he'd always make a mess of things.

It wasn't that Hasenpfeffer was stupid, or that he was malicious, or even careless. It was just that he had the innate ability and compulsion to stick his finger into whatever was most likely to break. And he was G.o.d-awful clumsy besides.

Like the time I asked him to clean off some printed circuit boards with MEK-I'd given up trying to use him as an a.s.sembler.

Hasenpfeffer eagerly took the boards out of my lab and into a small enclosed bathroom. When he was about two-thirds done, I guess he felt a little light headed, because he sat down on the toilet seat and tried to light a cigarette.

The Fire Marshall wasn't the least bit reasonable, the boards were a complete loss, and the doctor bills were absurd.

So Hasenpfeffer mostly wandered around feeling useless. He was trying to help. He kept the place clean and did the dishes. He even did the laundry so Ian and I could keep at it fifteen hours a day. And he took care of the books. Not that there was much to that. No income. All out-go.

Yet there was nothing grim about us or what we were doing. Looking back, yeah, we had a good time. There was a constant round of bull sessions, arguments and practical jokes. Mostly, we disagreed on practically everything, often for no other reason than the rollicking fun of a good argument.

I remember one night when Hasenpfeffer was carrying on about the latest cosmological theory that some academician-Hawker, I think he said his name was-had been writing about. Something about how the universe started as something the size of a dime, sixteen billion years ago, had expanded up to the size of the solar system in a few seconds, and had been expanding ever since.

I used our customary method of stating that I wished to engage in a debate on the current subject at hand. I stood, raised my fist, and shouted at the top of my voice, "Bulls.h.i.t!"

Following protocol, he stared at me, pretending to be aghast, as if he was shocked at my disagreement.

"It's all bulls.h.i.t. First off, the solar system is many light hours across. You have the leading edge of your universe traveling way faster than the speed of light. Explain that one away!""You know, Tom, I met a noted physicist from the university at a party, and I asked him that very question. He told me that it wasn't a matter of going faster than light so much as it was that s.p.a.ce was being created behind the leading edge." He noted my dubious look, and continued, "I confess that I didn't fully understand his statement myself, but the man's reputation is that he is one of the finest theoretical . . ."

But I was already rolling up my pant cuffs, signifying that I wished them to remain unsoiled, even though the bulls.h.i.t being spread around had already ruined my shoes and socks.

"Right." I said, "Then there's this whole 'expanding universe' nonsense. Now, the only proof we have that the whole universe is expanding is the shift in the spectrums of certain apparently small, and therefore supposedly far away, galaxies, into somewhat lower frequencies."

"Of course. The famous Red Shift."

" 'Famous' just means that all the fools have had time to hear about it. Let's look at this red shift. Photons lower their frequency when their energy level is lowered. A blue photon is stronger than a red photon. An X-ray photon is vastly more powerful than a microwave photon. It is true that if an object is traveling away from you, the photons it emits will be relatively less energetic than a photon emitted by a stationary object. In exactly the same way, a rock thrown at you by someone in a departing car will hurt less than one thrown from a stationary one. But is that the only way a photon can lose energy?

You don't know? Well, I don't know either! n.o.body knows. n.o.body knows because n.o.body has ever observed a photon for anything but a very short time, the longest of which is the time it takes a radar beam to leave the reflector, hit the target, and return. A few milliseconds at the most."

"A few minutes," Ian interjected. "They've bounced radar beams off the moon and some of the planets."

"Call it hours for all I care! What are hours compared to sixteen billion years? What I'm trying to say is that we don't have any idea what happens to a photon over long periods of time. Yet these half-baked 'cosmologists' blithely a.s.sume that photons are absolutely unaffected even though they have been winging it through s.p.a.ce for billions of years. Personally, I can't imagine anything remaining unaffected after traveling at light speed for ten billion years! Yet all that would have to happen would be for the tiny photons to get just a little bit tired, lose a little bit of energy, and your expanding universe theory is right out the window!"

"But all the theories prove-" Hasenpfeffer started to say.

"Theories don't prove anything! Theories are things we invent to make the world more comprehensible to our inadequate little brains. Facts prove-or disprove-theories, not the other way around. If we don't have the facts, then theories are nothing more than wild a.s.s guesses! We aren't any closer to the truth than if we just said, 'G.o.d did it, so He must want it that way.' "

I could see Ian tightening up when I brought G.o.d into the argument, which I did fairly often, for an atheist. My theory was that if He didn't want me to do something, He had the wherewithal to stop me. And if He didn't care, or He wasn't around to care, then who was Ian to object?Ian, of course, had heard all that years before, and decided that just now he didn't feel like plowing up old t.u.r.ds. So he said, "What troubles me about all this cosmology stuff is the way the cosmologists have of speaking so definitively about what happened ten or twenty billion years ago. I mean, s.h.i.t, there's no way that you can get a bunch of historians to agree on what exactly happened during the Civil War! And that was an event that had millions of observers, and thousands of people recording their observations. I tell you that cosmology is just a silly game that physicists like to play, probably because they don't have anything else to do."

"That seems like an extreme statement," Hasenpfeffer said.

"Extreme, h.e.l.l. Those guys with their super expensive toys haven't come up with anything useful and new since they came up with atomic power, long before the beginning of World War II."

"But surely, all of the dozens and hundreds of subatomic particles must count for something, even to one of your sadly restricted intellect."

"For the last part of that, up your a.s.s, Hasenpfeffer! For the first, I said 'useful.'

n.o.body has ever found a use for a Mu-Meson, an Electron-Neutrino, or a Left-Handed Boson."

"I met a left-handed bos'n's mate, once," I said, but was ignored.

"Furthermore," Ian continued, "I doubt the very existence of the things. Subatomic particles are things that their inventors have painted with the colors of their own minds, and then glued together with their own s.h.i.t. Data? They don't have no stinking data!

Those overpaid academicians sit around and try to 'interpret' tiny, meaningless squiggles on photographic plates the way ancient Roman soothsayers tried to predict the future by interpreting the b.u.mps on the liver of a sacrificed owl. And in both cases, the stupid politicians lap up every irrational word of it, and reward the rip-off artists with gold from the public coffers! If we had spent on biology what we've wasted on all those cyclotrons and accelerators and what not, the world would be a lot better off!"

Hasenpfeffer whispered aside to me, "Oh, my. I do believe the poor boy is going to start in on Taxes again. Try and head him off, won't you?"

I turned to Jim and said quietly, "You feel that way because you have never had to pay any, or found a way around it if you did. You fork out a major chunk of your income very week and see what you think about taxes, and what the bozos spend it all on."

Ian had indeed started in on his often told Speech On Taxes before noticing that he had lost his audience. Eventually, his sermon wound itself down.

"Be that as it may," Hasenpfeffer said in a normal voice, "I wonder if the reason that Ian is such a regular churchgoer is that his is one of those sects where they let lay people get up and speak. I mean, with a less critical audience, he could go on ranting for hours about anything that comes into his curious little mind."

Ian glowered at him, but didn't say anything, so I suppose that much of what Hasenpfeffer said about Ian's church was true. I was curious, but not quite curious enough to take Ian up on one of his frequent offers to take me to church.

CHAPTER NINE

Autum Leaves and Temporal Swords

About the only non-time-travel thing the three of us did agree on was that the smell of burning autumn leaves was the finest of perfumes, gaseous ambrosia and vastly superior to all commercial olfactory products. Also, that any governmental official who called it pollution was obviously a Fascist Left-Wing Atheist. (As named by Jim, me, and Ian, respectively.) One day, just as Hasenpfeffer completed raking all the leaves from our huge front lawn into a humongous pile on the gravel drive in front of the shop, Ian came screeching up in the Corvette. He had this bright idea burning a hole in his mind, and was so eager to try it out that he simply didn't notice the six-foot high pile of leaves on the driveway. He just plowed through them, jumped out of the car and hobbled as fast as his damaged foot would take him into the shop.

Hasenpfeffer, less than amused, proceeded to pack the little car solid with leaves, raise the rag top, and then bury the car with the rest of the pile. This procedure left him with a feeling of contentment, accomplishment, and proper vindication.

An hour later, Ian realized that he needed a few parts from the industrial supply store down the road. He rushed to what he still thought of as "his" car, jumped in and actually fired it up before he realized that he couldn't see out the windshield, or breathe either, for that matter.

The next day, Hasenpfeffer's bedroom was stuffed nearly solid with leaves, leaving Ian looking smug while Jim, with a new lady friend on his arm, screamed.

And the day after that it was Ian's bed and closet that got the full treatment.

I watched this leafy dialogue go on all winter, the same pile of leaves being handed back and forth, and growing smaller and increasingly tattered in the process.

Wisely, I stayed neutral.

Toward spring, they were down to one leaf. You might pull on a roll of toilet paper and out would float this battered tree leaf.

If I happened to find it, I always returned it to its place. After all, they weren't talking to me. I didn't want to get involved, it wasn't my fight, and furthermore, in the service I had seen this sort of thing get dangerously out of hand.Still, they played it safe enough, this time. Usually, an exchange of practical jokes tends to escalate, each side trying to out do the other, every round, but in this case they were saved by the self-destructibility of autumn leaves.

The leaf appeared in magazines and books, under the place mats and in the breakfast cereal. Finally, it had been abraded down to a stem and six fragile veins before it was retired by mutual consent.

Meanwhile, the work went on. We learned to calibrate our circuits to amazing accuracies-things sent for weeks reemerged within micro-seconds of the predicted time.