Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "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 class 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 hell 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 outgasses 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 . . ."

  "Shit!" 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 large amounts 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 butts 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, nobody 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 assembly 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 attitude of "Hell, 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 basement, 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 sturdy 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 basement. 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 spacings 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 trave
ling 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 fifth dimension 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?"

  "That's a perfectly stupid question. Obviously, the egg came first."

  "You seem remarkably positive about that. Would you care to illuminate me with the glow of this newfound wisdom?"

  "Certainly, my conventional little friend. Consider that what we call a chicken is in fact a domesticated Ceylonese jungle fowl. That domestication could not possibly have taken place more than ten thousand years ago."

  "I'll accept that for the sake of argument. What has it to do with the subject at hand?"

  "Why, everything. Eggs have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Billions, maybe. Dinosaurs laid eggs, you know, and fishes were laying eggs long, long before that. The time difference between ten thousand years and a billion years is so great as to make the question of priority blatantly obvious. Now, had you asked about the chicken and the chicken egg, the problem might have been less easily resolvable, but fortunately that's not what you said."

  Ian's rejoinder was lost for all time because I had to get up to answer the telephone.

  "Tom, can you and Ian get over here at one this afternoon? It's important." Hasenpfeffer sounded tired over the phone.

  "Sure. Where are you?" I said.

  "I have the top two floors of the Madison Building."

  "The big new one on Third?"

  "Yes. And put a suit on, will you? Appearances, you know."

  It was already half past noon, so we changed quickly without bothering to wash up. We left on the run, not realizing that we'd never see our home again. Ten minutes after we were gone, a small fleet of moving vans arrived and cleaned the place out in two hours flat. And I do mean cleaned out. They even took all the trash in the garbage cans.

  When we got to the Madison Building, we found that the top floor button on the elevator had been replaced with a key lock, so we got off on the sixteenth. The elevator door opened on a large room half-filled with impressively dressed and manicured people. Silk ties. Leather attache cases. Three-piece grey wool suits.

  Presiding over it all was an incredibly beautiful and efficient-looking woman. She sat behind this nine-foot desk that was just encrusted with gadgets.

  "Quite a layout," Ian said, looking past his dirty fingernails to his unshined shoes.

  "Yeah. Look, let's go somewheres and buy a tie or something."

  The woman at the desk spotted us and came over quickly, smiling. "You must be Mr. McTavish and Mr. Kolczyskrenski."

  An angel. She even pronounced my name right. She ushered us past the briefcase crowd and through a much larger room. There were scores of desks with intent people sitting at them, talking quickly on an equal number of telephones. Word processors were being operated. A big computer on the far wall was in operation, with dozens of big tape decks whirling and stopping and whirling once more with simpleminded diligence. All told, maybe a hundred people doing important looking things.

  At the top of the escalator, where they couldn't be seen from the floor below, stood two uniformed guards, festooned with radios, side arms and submachine guns. These were not your usual rent-a-cops. They were deadly types.

  "This way, sir." The angel put her hand on a wall mirror and a heavy door opened electrically.

  "The screen is keyed to my palm print," she said. "This is as far as I am allowed to go. The next door is keyed to both of your prints."

  "Hey, this is getting a little ridiculous," I said.

  "Dr. Hasenpfeffer's orders."

  "Look, Hasenpfeffer isn't God."

  "Indeed?"

  I didn't know how to answer that one, so I went in and Ian limped after me. Inside were more guards with that sleepy look and more guns with thirty-round clips. Ian opened the next door and we finally saw Hasenpfeffer, sitting behind a huge desk in a big, dirty, and profoundly cluttered office. There were old newspapers and computer printouts all over the place.

  "I see that you gentlemen made it."

  "Quite a setup you have here, Jim."

  "Thank you. It's quite necessary, I assure you."

  "Look, what's with the guards and bank vault doors?" I asked.

  "My friends, you must understand that when you convert twelve thousand dollars into something in excess of twenty-six million within six months, people are bound to ask questions. For obvious reasons, it is preferable that they do not receive accurate answers."

  "Twenty-six million!" I gasped.

  "At present. Six times that amount by this time tomorrow, if all goes well." Hasenpfeffer said.

  "How in the hell did you do it?" Ian rasped.

  "The stock market. The race tracks. And real estate. I asked you both here to sign several warranty deeds. We have four closings scheduled this afternoon, but I have arranged them at forty-five minute intervals so as to interrupt your schedules as little as possible."

  "Like, what schedules? We work and we sleep."

  "Jim," Ian said, "With the staff you have here, what do you need with our help?"

  "In most things I can act in your names with relatively little difficulty, but when a major corporation pays thirty-one million dollars for a parcel of oil producing land, they naturally expect a clear title."

  "Hey, back up." I said. "Our signatures? You mean I own a piece of this?"

  "One third, of course. This is a group venture."

  The year before, Hasenpfeffer had taken my four-channel, two-gigahertz, delayed sweep Textronics storage scope and dropped it down the basement steps. It was at this moment that I finally forgave him.

  "But we must hurry," he continued. "It is imperative that we finish by 4:15. Soybean futures will be hitting a three year low this afternoon, Great Stag will be paying thirty-seven to one this evening, and Mitsubishi will be announcing a three to one split at 11:30 local time. Come, now."

  Hasenpfeffer led us quickly to the corridor.

  "Is that all?" Ian was having trouble keeping up with Hasenpfeffer's rapid, jerky stride.

  "Of course not. There's the heavyweight championship, National Robotics is going public in the morning, and Exxon will announce an inexpensive shale oil recovery process. It won't prove to be practical, but there will still be plenty of money to be made in trading its stocks for a few months." Hasenpfeffer broke into a trot. "We'll be receiving fifty-five million dollars in certified checks, which must be in the bank before it closes."

  "Hey, calm down," I said. "The universe will still be here."

  "If we upset today's schedule, we'll slow our growth by four months. So many highly profitable things are happening today! We are at a cusp, and there is a sea tide in these things. We must not miss it!"

  Th
e office was empty except for the angel.

  "Where are they, Haskins?"

  "Standard Oil called from Chicago. They'll be at least an hour late, Dr. Hasenpfeffer," the angel said.

  "Reschedule this afternoon's appointments."

  "I've been trying to, sir. I haven't been able to contact the Texaco group or Bradford Development. Mobile will get here on time, but not before. And they are the last of the four."

  "Most annoying. Keep trying, Haskins."

  When she left, Hasenpfeffer said, "Shit!" and flopped down on a couch. "Oh, yes. There is the matter of your new laboratory. I have taken the liberty of having a moving company clean out your present quarters. I think the new facility in Arizona will be very much to your liking."

  "New facility!" Ian cried. "What on earth for? We've got pretty much what we need right where we're at."

  "Primarily for security. Your coming here has announced your presence. We can not have our project known to the public."

  "Security! Damn it, if you think that I'm going to let a gang of armed thugs into my lab . . ." I said.

  "Tom, security forces are the lesser of the possible evils. Your staff can isolate you from any unpleasantries."

  "Staff?" Ian said. "Jim, one of our primary goals with the time field was to keep it to ourselves. With a staff, there's bound to be a leak."

  "They will be quite reliable people, selected from my own personnel here. Many of them are very competent, technically, and Haskins will set up the organization along the lines of the Manhattan Project."

  "Haskins? The angel?" I said.

  "Yes, she'll be going with us as General Manager. You'll find that she's quite efficient."