Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  We moved in that day. Oh, it was a fourth-floor walkup and the six-foot ceilings were—for me—an absolute pain, but it was cheap and that was the deciding factor. None of us had a family to fall back on for money.

  I guess we did have something in common. We were all orphans.

  Ian pulled a straight four point and had no difficulty in keeping his church scholarship. Hasenpfeffer had this talent for pulling dollars out of all sorts of organizations. But I was only an average student and I wasn't much good at filling out forms and begging.

  I'd used up a small inheritance by the end of my junior year, and joining the Air Farce seemed like a better shot than getting drafted into the Army. They put me through a year of electronics school and then had me spend three years pretending to fix computers under this mountain in Massachusetts. They'd never even let me ride on a military airplane. . . .

  Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made a right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.

  The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for eight weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large groups of people working earnestly together to do something that stupid.

  The arithmetic average of the number of streets coming into an intersection is probably somewhere around four, but the modal number is three, with the next most likely number being five and after that seven. The whole town is like a quilt made by crazy old ladies out of random polygons. There's even one frightening crossroads called 'Twelve Points." No shit.

  Right downtown, doubtless by accident, there are these two streets that cross at almost right angles, although one of them changes its name in the process. This oddity so astounded the locals that they built this big office structure there and called it "The Four Corners Building."

  I passed it seven times trying to find Hasenpfeffer's address, and it was pretty late when I finally got there.

  I recognized it right off when I saw it. It was exactly the sort of place he had to live in. It was an ancient clapboard mansion that had long ago been converted into housing for the perpetually poor class, students. It was painted barn red and had a yellow external staircase with fully eleven odd-angle turns in it that led up to the sixth-floor attic. I didn't have to read the mailboxes to know that Hasenpfeffer had to live on top. He was home, and—A Wonderment!—was actually alone, bereft of all female accompaniment.

  "Well, Tom. The parallelism of truly linked souls." Hasenpfeffer hadn't changed much. The same blue eyes, blond hair, and straight features. Only now he had a full beard, his hair brushed his shoulders, and he no longer belonged on a poster advertising the Hitler Youth Movement. Instead, he was ready to compete in a Jesus Christ Look-Alike contest.

  He was wearing this yellow scholar's robe with a garish collar.

  "Huh?" My first comment to him in four years, barring a few letters.

  "Your motorcycle. I saw you pull up. I have one just like it, but without the Ranger faring." He stood up and twirled to show off the gaudy cadmium yellow circus tent he was wearing. It had two broad strips of bright blue velvet running up the front, over the shoulders, and then meeting at the back of this oversized hood. Not that he could have put up the hood, since he wore this black tam-o'-shanter with a gold tassel.

  "What do you think?"

  "They make you wear that all the time, or just when you're on duty?"

  "None of the above. I'm getting my doctorate in Behavioral Psychology tomorrow. That is why you came, isn't it?"

  "Well, no. Just passing through. But I'll stick around if you want."

  "You are out of the Air Force?"

  "Yeah."

  "Any plans?"

  "Uh, none, really." I didn't think that he'd understand about officers.

  "Excellent! Then we can leave in two days."

  "Leave? Where are we going?"

  "No place in particular. I have a Department of Defense grant to study social interactions within motorcycle gangs. That's how I bought the BMW. Forming our own gang will be much pleasanter and safer than trying to join the Hell's Angels."

  Great. Me they stuff under a mountain. For him, they buy a motorcycle.

  "Hell, why not?"

  "Excellent! Ian will be with us, at least at first."

  "Ian McTavish? What's he doing with himself?"

  "He got his bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering two years after you left, and a second one in World History at the same time. He has been working for General Motors ever since. He has three weeks vacation due him, and we're to pick him up in Michigan this coming Friday."

  "Great. Who else?"

  "No one. Just the three of us."

  "So three people constitute a motorcycle gang? I mean, if you've got this paper to write . . ."

  "I can pad it out a bit. No one reads these DOD things anyway."

  Hasenpfeffer lent me a tie and made me wear it to the graduation ceremony. I thought it looked funny with a T-shirt and a leather jacket, but it was his show. It was about six hours of boring people proving how boring they could be, and after all that, they didn't even give him his diploma, just a blank roll of paper. The real one was to be sent later. Much later, as it turned out.

  The party afterwards was worse than the ceremony itself, with all the grads and their families standing around while the professors came in, "made an appearance," and left as soon as possible.

  I'm patient enough to put up with things like that for old friends. Once in a while. At least I didn't have to stand in formation.

  In the course of the day, about a dozen slender young women came up to say goodbye to Hasenpfeffer. They each got a smile, a hug, and some vague promises about seeing each other again. He politely introduced each of them to me, but it seemed that I wasn't somebody that they wanted to meet. They each left as soon as possible.

  That night and the next morning, we got all his stuff packed and a moving company hauled most of it away for storage. A half dozen more girls came by for their goodbye kisses, and one of them spent the night with him. He actually invited the last two of them to spend the night, but with me, since he was already occupied, but they developed pressing engagements elsewhere. They both left at a dead run, although one of them stopped to see if I was following, and to pick up a rock.

  The two of us were on the road Friday morning at ten with a clear blue sky above us.

  We took the short cut through Canada, and 401 is a good place for road bikes. I was glad that Hasenpfeffer had bought a BMW because people who own them don't much like rolling with those who ride all the lesser breeds.

  It's not that we're uppity, so much, though pride has a certain amount to do with it. It's just that a BMW is about the only machine that can go on forever without breaking down. I had to stop running with a buddy in the service because his Honda had an average of three mechanical problems a day, and that sure ruins a trip.

  But with good machinery between our legs, we knew that there wouldn't be any holdups, so we could afford the time to make about four beer stops and load up on that fine Canadian brew. I never could figure out how one people could make such great beer and such lousy cigarettes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Other Friend

  We got to Ian's condo that evening. It was quite a place, with carefully tended gardens and an impressive entranceway. It looked as though GM was doing well by our boy. The living room was spacious and nicely furnished with Danish Modern stuff. Indeed, it looked a lot bigger than it actually was. I found out the reason when I sat down. The furniture was tiny! It turned out that he had furnished his "pad" with the three-quarter sized stuff they make to put in model homes, so they can fool people into thinking they're buying more than they're actually going to get.

  It all fit Ian just fine, though, and it was his place after all. It got me to wondering if anybody made furniture to fit proper-sized people like me. Not that I could afford any furniture, much less a place to put it in.

 
But what wasn't undersized was Ian's motorcycle.

  "Hey, you bought a Harley?" I said.

  "What's wrong with buying American, Tom?" Ian said.

  Ian was using my name, and Hasenpfeffer's as well, a whole lot more than he used to. Obviously, while I was gone, he'd taken a Dale Carnegie course. "How to Win Friends, Influence People, and Be A Complete Phony in Ten Easy Lessons."

  "Well, nothing, when you're buying cigarettes or cars," I said. "But the engineering in that thing is forty years out of date."

  "It's tried and true engineering, Tom."

  "Tell you what, little buddy. I'll lend you a hand the first two times a day it breaks down. After that, you can find me at the next bar up the road."

  "Have you ever considered the advantages of autocopulation, Tom?"

  Back in college, I'd ragged Ian a lot about swearing as much as he did while at the same time being such a regular churchgoer. This last statement obviously represented his attempt to cut down. It didn't last.

  The next morning, we were on I-75 heading north. The plan was to go to Washington State by way of Minnesota, head south through California, and then get Ian home in three weeks by way of Louisiana.

  By noon, we were off the expressways. We didn't plan to use the Interstate system all that much. The best way to travel while on vacation is get a map, figure out where you are, and where you want to be that night. Then you draw a straight line on the map between those two points. After that, you try to stay as close to that line as possible while staying on paved roads. This gets you into the country, where things can get interesting. The expressways are efficient, but they're also boring.

  Ian's Duo-Glide held up better than I had feared, with only a half hour lost for repairs that day. We went over Big Mac (the bridge, not the junk food) that afternoon, but an hour later it started sprinkling, so we pulled up to the only building in Pine Stump, Michigan.

  It was a combination gas station (one pump), general store (one small shelf of canned goods) and tavern (four stools at a linoleum topped bar and two chairs at a small table).

  The town's mayor and sole inhabitant was the little old lady who ran the place, tended the bar, and lived in the building's other room, in back. She looked to be eighty years old. She was skinny, and about as frail as a crowbar.

  The surrounding area really did have pine stumps. Thousands of them! They were huge for White Pine, probably world record setters when they'd been cut maybe eighty years before, when the area had been logged over. Nothing growing there now was even close.

  The three of us packed the place, since there were a couple of locals at the table and an Indian at the bar. He was dressed in blue jeans and was wearing a bow hunter's cap, but he wasted no time explaining that he was a full blooded Ojibwa. Then he stood up, shouted "Jesus Christ!" at the top of his lungs, slammed his can of Blatz down on the linoleum bar, and sat down.

  I asked him what seemed to be the problem, and he launched into a tirade about the hunting and fishing rights he had as a result of a treaty between his people and the government. I had a hard time understanding exactly what he was talking about, not because of any accent—he spoke perfect, standard English—but because every so often he would stop in the middle of a sentence, stand up, shout "Jesus Christ!", slam down his increasingly flat can of beer, and then sit down again as though nothing had happened. After this happened about six times, Hasenpfeffer whispered to me that the fellow was on a fifty-three-second cycle. He'd been timing the guy.

  After maybe a half hour of this, I figured out that the treaty said that the Indians could hunt and fish whenever they wanted to, without needing a license, and it didn't say anything about the manner in which they should accomplish this.

  Now the government game warden had written him up for dynamiting fish, a thing he felt he had a perfect right to do.

  Well, that was interesting, and shot down all the nonsense you hear about Indians being natural ecologists, but the constant standing up and screaming was starting to get to me. It was getting to Ian worse, nursing his coke while everyone else was into their second six pack, him being a Christian and all, and he was on the side that was being sprayed with beer every fifty-three seconds. I think Ian was just trying to quiet the Indian down in a friendly, humorous way.

  "My friend, you swear too fucking much," Ian said, a perfectly normal statement to make in a Detroit auto plant, but not, as it turned out, in the UP. (That's pronounced You Pee, with an equal accent on each syllable.)

  Things quieted down in a hurry. There was dead silence for a few seconds, then one of the locals got up from his chair and knocked Ian off his bar stool.

  "What—what's wrong?" Ian said from the floor. He was more shocked than hurt.

  "You was using vulgarity, and in front of a lady!" The man explained. The bar keeper nodded in agreement, happy to have her honor defended.

  "Vulgarity? After all the swearing that has been going on in here? You're out of your fucking mind!"

  "That was taking the Name in vain, and it ain't the same thing!"

  "Shouldn't simple vulgarity be the lesser offense?" Ian said, still flat on his back.

  The local didn't know how to answer that, so he hauled off to kick Ian when he was down, and naturally, I couldn't sit quiet for that. I picked up the would-be kicker from behind with my right hand on his belt and said, "Gentlemen, please fight politely."

  At this point the other local and the Indian piled onto me, ignoring Ian entirely. I thought it best to take them outside, since the furnishings of the little place didn't look too sturdy. There wasn't much to it since I was already carrying the one, and the other two were crawling all over me trying to wrestle me to the ground. I even had a free hand with which to open the door.

  I walked over to a twenty-foot gully near the road, threw them rolling down it and went back into the bar, locking the flimsy screen door behind me.

  "I think I've deduced the problem," Hasenpfeffer said, writing hurriedly in a new notebook. "It seems that in this subculture they differentiate between two types of swearing. . . ."

  "Yeah, I got that much," I said. "You all right, Ian?"

  "I think so, Tom. Geeze, I thought I was making a joke!"

  "It was a nasty joke!" The old bartender said, "Nasty!"

  "Yeah. Well guys, the rain's stopped. Let's drink up before they think about knocking over our bikes."

  "These are good, solid interactions," Hasenpfeffer said as we left.

  * * *

  Later, the three of us were camped way off the road in someplace called Ontonagon County. It was Sunday morning, and Ian was trying to talk us into going to church with him, since he had stopped at all those bars with us. I allowed as how that seemed fair, but did he know of a church that served beer? After all, he'd been able to get a coke at each of our bars.

  "Maybe we can find one that serves wine with communion," Hasenpfeffer suggested.

  Ian looked disgruntled, and a change of topic seemed in order. I was doing the cooking, and thus by ancient custom I had certain conversational rights.

  I said, "Back to what you were saying last night, Ian, I still maintain that stupidity, true stupidity mind you, is not an individual function. Oh, anybody can do something dumb, and usually does, but to create truly monumentally ridiculous edifices, it takes large groups of people working diligently together. A case in point can be taken from my recent Air Force experience.

  "This organization, if I may use such a term on a group of more than ten people, which are inherently disorganized, is obviously—"

  "Share out some coffee, and your ramblatory obfuscation will be sharply reduced by the caffeine," Jim said.

  "Yeah, and you won't talk so funny either, Tom," Ian added.

  "Right," I said, pouring. "So like I was saying, somebody at the Chief of Staff level became convinced that the best way to insure that the United States Air Force had officers of the finest quality was to require that all such new people were college graduates. Just who thi
s person was, I'm not sure, but you can be certain that he was a college graduate.

  "As an aside, I point out that General Chuck Yeager (the first man to crack the sound barrier, an ace pilot in WWII and the commander of the most efficient flying unit in Viet Nam), was only a temporary general. His permanent rank was sergeant, since he talked funny and didn't have any Ivy League accent at all. They figured that he didn't measure up since all he knew about was flying, fighting and getting things organized. How could anybody with a redneck accent be officer material?

  "Anyway, in some very different nook or cranny of that same service, some committee looked out and observed that enlisted men who had been trained in fields like electronics, and who could thus earn three times their Air Force pay working on the outside, rarely reenlisted. Since there was nothing that this committee could do about pay rates (those being the prerogative of some other committee somewhere else), but needing sergeants trained in electronics to boss the peons they were perforce training in vast droves, and yet heaven forbid that they should make a sergeant out of anyone without first giving him grey hair, passed the following ruling: As an incentive to reenlistment, any troop choosing to reenlist could pick the career field (like electronics) of his choice, and receive up to two years worth of training in that new field.

  "Unbeknownst to any of the above committees, the Air Training Command decided that all that an instructor had to know was what was in the training guide, and that practical experience was unimportant in such a fast-moving field as electronics, where things were obsolete before they were installed anyway. Furthermore, they didn't have any sergeants trained in electronics in the first place, what with none of the airmen reenlisting, so they might as well use airmen right out of school to teach the next class. This set up a situation where airmen were training sergeants who were taking advantage of the reenlistment training bonus, sergeants they could very well be subordinate to on their next tour of duty. Oddly enough, those sergeants all got very good grades, whether they proved capable of learning Ohm's Law or not.