Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 7

"Well, okay. You talked me into it. I'll do it now while he's still gone. The roll's nearly empty, anyway."

So, thanks to me, they didn't kill each other, the three-way partnership didn't self- destruct, and time travel would still have a chance to be invented.

I'd spent a lot of time mulling over the problem of going backward in time. Since I couldn't handle more than three dimensions in my head, I started by imagining two of the ordinary ones out of existence. This left me with a one dimensional string, or sometimes it was a line on a piece of paper. Then, I could imagine the fourth dimension, time, as being like an infinite number of strings, lying one beside another. Well, I can't really think in infinities, either, but call it a large number of strings.

Each second that goes by, a zillion or so new strings are laid down. Now, the strings that will go onward into the future don't exist yet, so it isn't hard to take the NOW string and push part of it in that direction. It lands ahead of everything else, and waits there (can I really say that?) until the rest of the world catches up with it.

At that time, the now and the transported thing may or may not interact, depending on whether or not there was any matter at that time and place in the now.

On the other hand, all of the strings that lie behind the now string still exist. You can't go straight backward because the s.p.a.ce behind you is all filled up. Maybe that could explain all the extra energy we kicked up when I threw the circuit into reverse. It was like we had an infinite line of railroad cars rolling free behind us, and I was jamming on the brake. Of course things heated up!

It took me two hours to explain my admittedly fuzzy thoughts to Ian, who was less than violently enthusiastic about the concept.

"It's an interesting a.n.a.logy, Tom, but that's all it is. An a.n.a.logy. a.n.a.logies are slippery things, and not to be confused with reality. And even if it is a good a.n.a.logy, which we have no way of knowing, where does it get us? If you are right, then we never will be able to go to the past, and I, for one, will be profoundly disappointed. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but the big reason why I want access to the past isn't in order to know which stock to buy, or what horse to bet on. I want to know exactly what happened, all through human history. And you're telling me that I can't do it!"

"Not quite, my friend! You can't go back there only if A) my a.n.a.logy is correct, and B) we live in a four dimensional universe. That is to say, the two that I threw away, the one represented by the length of the line, and the one we like to call time."

"So? Isn't that obviously the case?"

"I don't know. Is it? All I'm thinking is that if all we've got are four dimensions, then we can't have backward time travel. But imagine if there was one more dimension. Put it at right angles to the time dimension, and hope it doesn't have any matter in it. If both those things turned out to be true, we should be able to pick something in the now lineup off the paper, move it backward however far we want, and then come back onto the paper in the past.""Interesting. So we have to start by imagining the world was made the way it would have to be for our project to succeed, and then seeing if we do succeed to know whether it's built that way or not."

"Close, although if we don't succeed, it proves nothing. After all, our failure just could be because we're stupid. But yes, we either have to a.s.sume that success is possible in this universe, or give up."

"Put that way, it's not so farfetched, Tom. So what precisely do you think we should do next? Just how do we handle this possibly imaginary but absolutely necessary fifth dimension?"

"I think maybe that the place to start is with varying the phase angles in that part of the circuit that seemed to be trying to take us back. I mean, if a 180 degree shift took us backward, what would all the other possibilities do?"

A month later, we had an instrument canister leave and never come back anywhere or anywhen that we were aware of. Since it was only powered to be gone for a few minutes at most, we guessed that this meant that it went off sideways, and got lost there. It seemed only fair to call that a victory.

Next, we would have to arrange for a canister to swing out sideways in the fifth dimension, stop swinging, go back in time, and then swing in sideways exactly as far as we had swung out. It seemed simple enough at the time, but remember that this was happening in the early seventies, before large scale integration was more than a gleam in an engineer's eye. Before we were done, we needed two hundred pounds of computer to do the navigating, and each test had a twenty percent chance of destroying everything electronic on reemergence.

Things started getting very expensive.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Robbing a Bank

We were making progress, but we were also going broke, and every time we plotted both curves on graph paper, it always showed going broke winning the race.

A quarter of a million dollars had seemed like a fabulous sum when we started, but research is expensive. While we were living as frugally as possible, there were bills that just had to be paid. The power bill, for example, and food.

Oh, we already had a number of useful and probably highly profitable products, but we knew that time travel was the biggie. If we sold the bomb or the sword, even if we manufactured them ourselves, somebody else would inevitably figure out what we were doing. We toyed with the idea of setting ourselves up as a subcontracting job shop, specializing in working with hard to cut materials, but the same problem was there.

Subcontracting from other engineering companies, we'd get a lot of bright people curious about how we were doing what we were doing, and there would go security. Then where would we be? The thought of two or more teams out killing each other's grandfathers was scary.

I figured the safest thing to do was to rob a bank.

"I don't know what Hasenpfeffer will think about robbing a bank," Ian said over a cup of tea in my lab. "His morality wouldn't have pleased Martin Luther, but he does seem to have a certain sort of ethics."

"h.e.l.l, he'll probably enjoy it. At least it'll give him something to do."

"Tom, it's so d.a.m.ned frustrating!" Ian said. "We've had working time travel for almost a year and it's totally useless."

"Hey, not completely useless. It's erratic, and we can't send animate objects yet, but we can rob a bank with it," I said.

"I just wish we knew more about the theory. There has got to be some way of easing back into the continuum, instead of this bang-bang thing we've been doing."

"Well, you've got your choice. I can give you a uniform field, and you can emerge all at once in the same volume of s.p.a.ce that the air insists on occupying, at which point you can die painfully of the bends. Or, I can give you a non-uniform field, and you can come back a little bit at a time, and die painlessly as each little bit falls on the floor. a.s.sumingthat you don't come back in the floor, that is. I think that as far as the fifth dimension is concerned, our three normal ones don't seem to have any thickness at all. You can't ease a hole into something that is infinitely thin. You either punch the hole in it, or you don't."

"Maybe if we could somehow tilt the canister somehow in either the fourth or fifth dimensions. Then we could come in at a sort of an angle, and gently push the existing matter out of the way."

"We can do roll, pitch, and yawl things in the normal three. We've seen no indication that they're possible in the other ones. Anyway, doing all three supposes at least six dimensions out there, and that gets to be more than my little brain can handle. Now, about robbing a bank . . ."

"It's definite now that the radiation is caused by random nuclear fusions on reemergence. When two objects are suddenly in the same place at the same time, a small percentage of the atomic nuclei are close enough to fuse, generating some strange isotopes. And we know the field correlates somehow with the local gravitational gradient.

But why the random lateral displacement on reemergence? We know that it tracks on the sidereal day and year, but we still haven't the foggiest notion of why it does it!" Ian wasn't biting.

"h.e.l.l, continental drift, for all I know. Or magma flows. Or solar flares. Or phases of the moon. Look, I'm to the point where I'm starting to understand why something is when it is. I've got no idea why it's where it is. They buried what was left of the only person who could give us some straight answers. Dammit, we're running out of money! In three months we'll be out of credit. We've got to rob a bank!"

"We could have a breakthrough at any time, Tom. You're talking about grand larceny!"

"Hey, we've been looking for that breakthrough for eleven months. And we can rig the robbery to take place a year after we get the money. We can even deposit it in the same bank we're going to rob. We'd never get caught."

"But theft, Tom?"

"So, banks are insured. n.o.body will get hurt."

"n.o.body? Look at all the damage we've caused around the property here. n.o.body's been hurt, because we're out in the country. You're talking about doing it in downtown Ann Arbor! We'd kill someone for sure."

"We can have the whole thing happen at three in the morning, when no one's around,"

I said. "Look. We rent the garage across from the bank. We build a time cabinet large enough to hold a big truck. We send the truck back maybe three hundred years, before this town was built, before there was any significant number of people around. The truck drives forward exactly eighty feet. Inside the truck we have another time cabinet. It goes forward three hundred and one years-right to the sidereal second-and emerges in the same s.p.a.ce as the bank vault, so the money is inside the time field. It comes back with the contents of the vault to the truck. The truck backs up to where the garage will be and the whole thing comes back to now. We have a year to loot the vault before the robbery takes place! I can have the controls ready in a week, and it shouldn't take you much longer to make the cabinets."

"You've been thinking about this for some time, haven't you?""Yeah."

"Well, you've been thinking stupid, the whole while! First off, aside from the moral questions, you're talking about cabinets a hundred times larger than anything we've ever built. Scaling up isn't always as easy as it sounds. We don't know what problems we'll run into. Two. If your truck gets hung up driving that eighty feet across who knows what, we've got a first cla.s.s anachronism our hands. And three, worst of all, you're expecting the inner time cabinet to emerge four times in air, or something worse. It'll be as radioactive as sin and shot through with rust. There's not a chance in h.e.l.l of it being operational for that trip back."

"You weren't listening. Any one time circuit only has to operate twice. The money itself will only be transferred twice," I said, "so it won't be too bad. Paper outga.s.ses easily. And to heck with the time cabinet. We can build another one."

"And the truck?"

"We rent it."

"Well, maybe," Ian said, "but it's going to be more work and money than you're counting on. And we've got to get Hasenpfeffer in on it."

Hasenpfeffer walked into the lab on cue, wearing the gaudy, bell-bottom trousers that were currently fashionable, but looking glumly at the floor.

I turned off my power supplies, hid the breadboard I'd been working on, and put the dust cover over my Textronics scope. It was just conditioned reflexes on my part. He hadn't actually gotten close enough to break anything, which was probably conditioned reflexes on his part.

As I finished, Hasenpfeffer said, "There is something that I have to talk over with you gentlemen."

"Shoot." I'd never seen him this far down.

"I have been trying," he said. "For well over two years I have been trying to make a meaningful contribution to our endeavor. I have done whatever I could, even the most menial of tasks. But this just is not sensible. The only rational thing is for me to get a job elsewhere, and to hire someone to do the trivia around here. After all, washing your underwear is not the best use I can make of my doctorate."

"Cheer up, Jim. We're all doing a lot of dirty work. The twelve hours I have just spent at a well-named boring mill didn't have much to do with thermodynamics," Ian said.

"True, but we can't afford a machinist, and we could afford a housekeeper. I can make a better contribution with a paycheck."

"Look, there's something we're going to be doing over the next few weeks where we'll need your help. After that we can talk this over."

"What do you have in mind, Tom?" Hasenpfeffer perked up.

"Well, we're going to rob this bank."

"What!"

"Look, we're running out of money." I said. "See, we get this truck, and we build a big time cabinet in the garage across from the bank and . . ."

"s.h.i.t!" Hasenpfeffer looked at me disgustedly. "We aren't that hard up." He went over to a small test canister sitting on my work bench. "But if we really need largeamounts of capital, there are more rational ways of obtaining it."

He opened the canister and took out a copy of next week's Wall Street Journal.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rich Again

We didn't see Hasenpfeffer for three months. He rented an office in town and as best as we could tell, he was sleeping in it. At any rate, he sent over a middle-aged and overweight housekeeper who moved into his old room.

She complained a lot about dirty socks in the family room and cigarette b.u.t.ts in the coffee cups, but she stayed clear of the lab and the shop. She was annoying, but Ian and I found ourselves working longer hours than ever.

Truth was, we missed Hasenpfeffer. He phoned us maybe once a week and told us to just send all the bills of any kind over to him, to spend whatever we had to, but to get the job done. A courier, always an attractive young woman, but always a different one, arrived every Monday afternoon to pick up the bills. From the first, she dropped off a paycheck for the housekeeper and two more for Ian and me. Whatever Hasenpfeffer was doing, it must have been profitable, because Ian and I were now each drawing more than Ian had made working for General Motors.

We started eating better and dressing better as well. Clothes for somebody my size almost always have to be hand tailored, which is clothing store talk for expensive. Ian had trouble buying clothes, too, unless he wanted to go to the children's department.

Men's clothing styles went through a major evolution in the early seventies, and now the two of us could look a little more "with it." Ian was especially happy that a man could now wear high heels and platform boots in public without being considered a queer, and he still wore his heel lifters inside them. I stuck with low heels, of course, but with boots, n.o.body much noticed.

Women's clothing was changing, too. Skirts had been creeping happily upward for a decade, and had now gotten about as short as they could get without becoming a wide belt. See-through blouses were getting popular, and were often worn without a bra, although they usually had two strategically located pockets in front. The scenery was thus better than ever, even if the two of us never got any of it to take home.

Strange to say, we also missed the parade of Hasenpfeffer's ladies. For years, Ian and I had placed bets about the hair color and probable measurements of his next one, and just when this slender young thing would come along, but with Jim gone, his ladies were gone, too.So we technical types had little left to do but work and spend money. And spend we did, I don't know how much. We farmed out a lot of the work but we always did the final a.s.sembly and programing ourselves.

And the work progressed. Money has a lot to do with the creative process. When you're broke, you spend all of your energy trying to come up with inexpensive solutions to your problems. Since we were flush again, Ian and I fell into an att.i.tude of "h.e.l.l, it's only twenty thousand! Let's try it!"

One of the expensive things that worked was our discovery that you could make a circuit reemerge below ground by starting off below ground. And if you triggered the circuit again within three nanoseconds after reemergence, before it had time to explode, it would usually still work.

This meant that working from a pressure chamber in the bas.e.m.e.nt, we could transmit back a second, smaller sacrificial pressure chamber, which contained its own temporal circuitry. Immediately on reemergence, it sent itself and its contents way out sideways, scattering it harmlessly out over the fifth dimension. At least we hoped it was harmless.

At any rate, we never saw anything of any of them again.

Ten nanoseconds later, a second very st.u.r.dy pressure chamber arrived, which stopped the walls of the hole from collapsing. Also, the pressure chamber had a second time circuit. This was used in "cannon" mode, to send any air that managed to leak into the chamber out to oblivion just before the next, third, canister was due to arrive, insuring that it emerged into an absolutely hard vacuum.

The net result was a precisely located hard vacuum, the position of which tracked with the chamber in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Exactly where it was physically was a moot point, but a sidereal day later we could transmit to that time or receive from it. Our first stopover station in the past went to exactly four years before.

Four years was an inconveniently long time from an experimental point of view, but any shorter and there was the statical danger of having the canister reemerge too close to the experimenter, namely your humble narrator, snuffing him mightily.

What we had dreamed about for years was a time machine much like an automobile, where you could get in and go to whenever you wanted. What we had succeeded in building had more in common with a railroad, with discrete stations at least four years apart along its "track."

To get any closer to a given point in time, you either had to go back to the nearest time before your target date, and then wait around until the time you wanted happened, or you had to build other lines with s.p.a.cings of longer than four years, and then change lines several times to get closer to when you wanted to be.

This was less than ideal, but you had to admit that traveling by railroad was superior to having absolutely no transportation at all.

We got to the point where we sent a mouse back to 1967, let it stay there a day, and then brought it back healthy and a day or so older. I say "or so" because instruments indicated 5.4 seconds of "travel time," which was very puzzling.

It took time to travel through time.

Why did whatever we sent "think" that it was traveling through the fourth dimension, the way we normally do, when in fact it was flipping back and forth through the fifthdimension and backward in the fourth?

We argued for months over that one, and slowly a lot of things started to make sense.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hasenpfeffer's Place

Until the housekeeper arrived, lunch happened at some random time between eleven and three, whenever someone got hungry enough to cook enough for the three of us. With Mrs. Kelly around, well, lunch was served at noon, whether we were ready to eat or not. I think that she considered anything else to be sinful. Breakfast at seven and dinner at six were also prime tenets of her religion.

Her only saving grace was that she would always put the food on the table and leave, which let the two of us talk shop over the dining room table without breaching security.

At one point, discussing something having to do with causality, Ian said, "It's undefinable. It's like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg?"