Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "The committee that had set up the retraining program compiled all these grades on neat charts that proved that the experienced troop was always the best student.

  "Then the Air Force bought the 465L Command Control System, which at that time was the most complicated computerized control system known to man. And the committee in charge of manning this monster decided that it would take some pretty bright boys to keep it working, so they scheduled troops to be trained for repairing it on the basis of IQ. I was one of them they selected.

  "So they paid me to go to school for a year, drink a lot, and do pushups in the sandburrs. Once I got to my duty station, I found that my boss was a sergeant with an IQ of about ninety. While he wasn't a bad guy, he had been too dumb to make it as a sheet-metal repairman, so he had been retrained by the Air Force in the exciting new career field of electronics.

  "He was running a major computer repair section and he was afraid of electricity. The fact that all of our equipment ran on five volts, and was as safe as a flashlight, didn't faze him. He knew that the stuff could electrocute you, so he wouldn't touch it. He made sure that we kept the floors clean, though, so no one of any importance suggested replacing him.

  "My Officer In Charge was a college graduate, as per regulations. Only there weren't any Degreed Electrical Engineers around who wanted to take on a low-rent job like Second Lieutenant, and the Air Force, with no sensible candidates available, had to take what it could get. The only officers we got were those who had taken degrees in fields where there were no civilian jobs available. My OIC, who was in charge of a quarter acre of computers supposedly defending North America, had his degree in Marine Biology and didn't know for shit about computers. His boss had a degree in Forestry and his had a master's in Music Appreciation.

  "Then, at the bottom of this strange pyramid, surrounded by a half billion dollars worth of inoperative equipment, were us four hundred misfits. None of us had the social graces to get a college degree of our own and every one of us had a sad story as to how he ended up in uniform. Yet all of us had IQs of over one forty! All of us were subordinate to sergeants with IQs of under ninety. All of whom were commanded by officers who hadn't the slightest idea of what was going on.

  "The result was obvious chaos, and there are stories to be told about it, but not just now, breakfast being over and it being Jim's turn to do something about the mess. But on some future date I shall relate the tale of the atomic clock that failed."

  "Tom, you fry a good pancake, but they weren't worth having to listen to your bullshit."

  "Every word of it is true, I swear it! Do you think that I could have invented a story like that?"

  "Hmm. You have a point there. You're not that smart. In fact, I don't think that anybody could invent a story like that one. Yet could such a situation actually be?" Jim said.

  "There could and there is, for I was just there and it's not likely to change. But my point is that each step of the above was sensible, or at least not thoroughly insane when looked at in its own small context. But when an organization gets so large that nobody can possibly know everything that is happening elsewhere, many small sensible steps generally congeal into a major conglomeration of mass stupidity."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  An Explosion in Time

  We were packing up after breakfast when we heard the explosion.

  Sort of a deep, heavy, ground shaking FUMP!

  "Is there some sort of mining operation going on around here?" Hasenpfeffer said.

  "Not in the last forty years, Jim, and certainly not on a Sunday," Ian said. "I doubt if there's a farm or factory within ten miles of here."

  "Hey, we're not that far from Kincheloe Field," I said. "Could be some Weekend Warrior broke his bird. We'd better check it out. I think it came from that way."

  A BMW isn't ideal for cross-country work, but Ian's Harley was worse. Anyhow, I got there first.

  It wasn't like any explosion that I'd ever heard of. There was a hole there—maybe ten yards across and five deep—clean and hemispherical. It hadn't been there long, because there wasn't any erosion to speak of. Just a little rubble at the bottom.

  But there wasn't any blast damage around it. If you blow a hole in the ground, the dirt has to go somewhere. I was standing on what looked like a lawn, and the grass wasn't even dirty.

  Hasenpfeffer came up.

  "Strange. Look at that. The rocks are polished," he said.

  There was some stone work at the end of the hole, made of rounded field stones, the sort that I had seen used locally for chimneys. It was as though somebody had sliced and polished the stones in the same plane as the edge of the hole. No, let me take that back. It wasn't a plane. It was as though the hemisphere of the hole just sort of continued up through the fireplace and chimney. Spooky.

  Ian came in from the other direction, skirting a newly planted garden. He killed the ignition on his overheated Harley and it knocked a dozen times before it died.

  "Either you've got the wrong hole, or this is some kind of a joke." Ian was on the far side of the pit.

  "How so?"

  "There wasn't any explosion, Jim. Explosions blow things outwards. This was an implosion. Look at his garden here. The sticks with the seed envelopes on them are all lying toward the hole."

  We had to go the long way around the pit because there was an old station wagon in the way. Half of the front bumper was missing. In fact, the bumper ended exactly at the same invisible sphere that the hole and the fireplace did.

  We heard a "pop" and a thin oval of shiny wire fell from the bumper into the hole. It slid to the bottom and was half buried by some sand and thin slices of stone.

  "Hey, it's getting bigger!" I said.

  "Bullshit. It's getting smaller, Tom. The stuff fell into the hole, not out of it."

  Nothing happened for the next few minutes. There wasn't much to see, so I said, "Look, anybody got a rope or something? I'm going to go see what's down there."

  "Are you out of your fucking mind?" Ian suggested.

  "Uh, what do you mean?"

  "I mean whatever is down there can slice steel like cheese, and now you want to put your whole body into it."

  "Huh. You've got a point there."

  There was another pop and more rubble fell into the hole.

  "Maybe we should get the police," Ian said.

  "Has a crime been committed?" Hasenpfeffer asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Neither do I. And until we have positive evidence of criminal activity, I suggest that we leave the authorities out of this." Hasenpfeffer dug out his notebook.

  "But, just sit here, Jim?"

  "And observe. This could be the basis of an excellent paper, even though it probably does not concern my own field. One's progress in Academia is largely dependent on what one has written." Hasenpfeffer dug out the tape recorder and camera that he'd planned to use recording our "interactions."

  "They had to spend a lot of time getting the hole this smooth." Ian crumbled the edge of the pit in with the heel of his engineer's boot.

  There was another "pop" and Ian's scream must have been heard in Sault Sainte Marie.

  "The 'pops' seem to be happening at eight-minute, forty-second intervals," Hasenpfeffer noted.

  Ian would have fallen into the hole, except that I happened to be right there and a lot bigger than most people. I managed to get a hand on his belt and carried him over to the lawn. Across the arch of his boot there was a quarter-inch wide stripe where the leather and rubber were puffed out and dirty. Ian had stopped screaming and started swearing, so I figured that it wasn't too serious.

  When I got his boot and sock off, I saw that his right foot had the same quarter inch stripe, only now it was black and purple, as well as puffed out and dirty. Nothing seemed to be broken or cut, but I got out my canteen and first-aid kit. I washed and bandaged the guy's foot, just for form's sake.

  Ian still wasn't all that coherent. The only anesthetic I had was a forty-ounc
e bottle of Jim Beam that I'd bought along with a carton of Pall Malls at the tax-free shop at the Canadian border, and he was a teetotaler. I got the bottle out of my saddle bags anyway.

  "Come on, amigo. It's a good pain killer."

  "You know I never touch the stuff, Tom."

  "Hey, this is purely medicinal." I took a drink to demonstrate its virtues.

  "I'll pass, Tom."

  "But Ian, my boy, this is the true ancient panacea, historically proven to cure cancer, ease childbirth and improve virility in your old age."

  "Crawl off and die a lonely death, Tom."

  "Why, this elixir is so beneficial that were you cleaved from head to knave, I would only have to fit the two halves precisely together, and then by placing only the smallest of drops on your sadly mutilated tongue . . ."

  "God Dammit!" He grabbed the bottle. "If it'll shut you and Don Quixote up . . ."

  My purposes accomplished, I wandered back to Hasenpfeffer.

  "I think Ian'll be all right," I said. "How's the hole?"

  "Filling in. The time between 'pops' is decreasing, logarithmically I think. It is down to eight minutes, twelve seconds. Do you think that you could retrieve some samples of the debris without injuring yourself?"

  "Well, I can try," I said.

  "The next pop is due in about a minute."

  I got an old, dry stick from the garden and held it next to the edge of the polished stone work, keeping my hand well away from it. The pop came on schedule and this time it was accompanied by a minor explosion coming from the bottom of the hole. Startled, I jumped back, but kept hold of the stick. Looking at it, I had a wafer of polished stone—the kind you see in lapidary shops—stuck through the end of my stick. I mean, the stick just went in one side and out the other, without the stone having a hole in it.

  "I should have warned you about the explosion," Hasenpfeffer said. "What have you got there?"

  "Well, it looks like we've got a good stone-cutting technique," I said.

  "We might have a great deal more than that. Tell me, how far was it from the stone to where this wafer appeared?"

  "Oh, about an inch and a quarter."

  "About three centimeters. Excellent. That confirms my theory," Hasenpfeffer said.

  "Enlighten me."

  "This wafer is just under a half centimeter thick. We have observed six pops since we arrived, and the debris at the bottom of the hole indicated that a pop occurred before we got here."

  "So?"

  "So seven times less than a half equals about three."

  Maybe in psychology they use a different kind of arithmetic than we use in electronics, but I don't think that I'd want Hasenpfeffer to design a circuit for me.

  "Yeah?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" Hasenpfeffer said. "The material that once occupied a spherical volume of space went someplace else and now it's returning to its original position in small pieces."

  "Uh huh," I said. "Where did it go when it wasn't here?"

  "How should I know? I would imagine that it went into some alternate spatial or temporal continuum."

  "Alternate. . . . ?"

  "Don't you read any science fiction? Come, there's work to do. And get Ian," Hasenpfeffer said.

  Well, Ian was still there, and the bottle was still there, but the contents of the latter had been transferred to the former.

  "Ian's going to be out of it for a while."

  "Oh. I see. Well, we will simply have to do it ourselves."

  "Do what?"

  "Rig some sort of net to recover as much as of the debris as possible."

  "What on earth for?"

  Hasenpfeffer looked at me sadly. Then he started speaking slowly and with small words. "Something made a big ball of earth and air go away. Now it is coming back. Big balls of earth don't usually go away, so something unusual must have made it go away. Maybe that something is in the middle of the big ball that went away. If we can get it, maybe we can find out how to make other big balls of dirt go away."

  "Go drag your knuckles in your shit."

  Obnoxious son of a bitch. I went and cut down two thin saplings for poles. The twit needed me because he was too clumsy to cut down a tree without chopping off both of his thumbs in the process. I heard another "pop while I rigged up a butterfly net of sorts out of the poles, my sleeping bag, and some bungee cords. Dumb bastard, anyway.

  "You'll notice that there was some sort of structure here," Hasenpfeffer said. "The last few pops have contained bits of wood and shingles, located precisely where you would expect them to be if a thin spherical shell were to materialize in our space. While none of the debris so far has been very heavy, some of it looks quite sharp, so do be careful. Oh yes. The explosions are becoming less violent. I think that the additional material at the bottom has a muffling action."

  My "butterfly net" weighed about fifty pounds.

  "Hey, I should be careful? Damn it, Jim, give me a hand with this thing!"

  "Well, if you really feel that you require physical assistance . . ." But he didn't come any closer to me.

  Pop.

  "What is that?" he said.

  "That" was a bunch of hundred dollar bills that materialized right in front of me. I had them scooped out of the air before they fell into the hole.

  I said, "Hey, good idea about the net!"

  "Thank you. They're coming in at six minute intervals now, so be ready. I'll watch for anything else that might be useful."

  So I was left holding the stick, but it didn't trouble me any more. In the next eight pops, with Hasenpfeffer warning me of each impending pop, I raked in an even two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was a lot of money back then. Some of the bills were cut up, but I got all the pieces. We could Scotch tape them back together later on.

  Then there was nothing much except wood and plumbing fixtures for a few hours, so I took a lunch break. I was halfway through my fourth salami sandwich when Hasenpfeffer started yelling.

  "His papers! There are papers coming in!"

  "What? Whose papers?"

  No answer. The pops were coming two minutes apart now, so I inhaled the sandwich and went back to work. Actually, my net was a little big for Hasenpfeffer to handle alone.

  Paper came in, but it was more like confetti than anything else. You see, the money had been laid parallel to the surface of the sphere, whereas this stuff was perpendicular to it. It came as thin, curved walls of confetti that gently exploded on arrival. The first bits were followed by a deluge of paper.

  "Jim, this is ridiculous. A whole library has been run through the grandmother of all paper schredders here. No way in hell will we ever get it together," I said.

  "But we must try! It's critical!"

  "Maybe, but it's also impossible. I'm going back to lunch. Call me if anything useful turns up."

  Ian hadn't moved, but he still had a pulse.

  Towards four o'clock the gore started. I had been scooping up bits of electronic parts, circuit boards and workbench when I got a bit of meat on my sleeping bag. At first I thought that I was going through another refrigerator. At this point the sphere was about two yards in diameter. I was standing knee deep in sharp splinters of wood veneer, thankful for my leather pants and shit-kicker boots. The pops were coming every ten seconds and it was about five scoops before I realized what was happening. I was pitching people!

  "Omigod," I said.

  "You noticed," Hasenpfeffer said. "Don't let it throw you. We're almost to the end."

  "But . . ."

  "Hang on just a little longer, Tom. We can't save him, but maybe we can save his work."

  The last hundred or so shells came in a long BBRRIIIP!

  And then it was over.

  I was dead tired and went over to the lawn, by Ian, who had rolled over on his side, and had his pants unzipped. I lay down upwind of him, because he was doing the vomit and urine routine. Forty ounces of sour mash is quite a bit for a little fellow who'd never been drunk before.

&nb
sp; I guess I sacked out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Venture

  It was dusk when Hasenpfeffer shook me awake.

  "Hey, Tom. Are you all right?"

  "Huh? Yeah. I guess so."

  "I just wanted to tell you that actually, we were able to salvage very little. Only the money, some wrecked circuits—that you may or may not be able to do something with—and this. It was the only piece of legible paper that I was able to save. Do you have any idea of what it is?"

  I was feeling sort of woozy.

  "Uh, sure. It's a circuit schematic."

  "I deduced that. But does it mean anything to you?"

  "Well, it's strange. He's got digital, analog and R-F components in the same circuit. Maybe I can figure it out. Later. Look, I don't feel so good."

  "You don't look so good, either. I have already sent Ian for an ambulance. He said to tell you that alcohol is not a pain killer. It's a pain delayer and relocator."

  "Uh, if Ian was all hung over, why didn't you go yourself?"

  "Because I don't feel so good either."

  Then for a while there my memory gets sort of spotty. It was a lot like when you're on a good drunk only without any of the fun involved.

  Medical types were always waking me up to do something to me. Hauling me into an ambulance, out of an ambulance, into bed, out of bed. Asking weird questions I couldn't quite follow. Waking me up to get some more shots. Waking me up again to take my sleeping pills. I tell you that medics have less respect for your personal individuality than the average Air Force sergeant.

  Eventually, the fog cleared some and Hasenpfeffer was leaning over me.

  "Radiation sickness and some sort of chemical poisoning," Hasenpfeffer said. "You are going to be all right, but you came about as close to being dead as you could get."

  "So, why didn't you get it, too?" I said.

  "I did. But you spent much more time in the rubble than I. Ian was the least affected, due to his distance from the event and all that Jim Beam you poured into him. It seems that alcohol reduces the effects of radiation on the system."

  "He poured it into himself. Look, where is Ian?"

  "In his room. He still has difficulty getting around."