Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "That's some relief, even if I don't snore. Okay. Back to the strange people we find around us."

  I filled him in on what I'd learned, mostly about the many odd ways these people used time travel to replace everything from plumbing to radios. That there were two separate groups of people here from quite separate cultures, and that the Smoothies, at least, considered this a very dangerous place to be.

  "Interesting. I'd picked up most of that myself, but it's good that you confirm my findings. Did you know that all the Smoothies here are college graduates, mostly from American universities? That they all went to our high schools, too, but not to our grade schools? That about half of them have advanced degrees? That they all have two to ten years experience in industry, business, government, or some such?"

  "No, I guess I missed all that." I rolled over and swam a while on my back.

  "It's nothing to be embarrassed about, Tom. It's just that you're properly ashamed of your lack of a decent, formal education, so you would feel awkward asking about that sort of thing. Another point. Have you noticed that it isn't actually necessary to do anything to cause a change to be made in the past? That it is sufficient to merely intend to do something?"

  "I have, and it bothers me. What if you meant to do something, so what you meant to happen actually does, and then you never get around to doing it? What happens to causality?"

  "I don't know, and what's more, I'm convinced that they don't know either! These people absolutely never violate causality. I swear that they would murder their own grandmothers before they even thought about doing it."

  "The mind boggles. What if you can't do what you meant to do? What if you got killed?"

  "Beats me, Tom. Maybe these Smoothies don't get killed. I suspect that they live lives that are so organized and preordained that accidents simply don't happen. Compared to what they are used to, our world would seem dangerous indeed to them."

  A wave ducked me and I went from swimming on my back to a side stroke. I didn't like what I saw over Ian's shoulder.

  "Speaking of which, can you tell a shark's fin from a porpoise's? Like that one over there, for instance?"

  "No, but I think that a quick trip to shore is in order!" He started stroking for the distant shore at full speed.

  "Be it so moved!" I yelled, but I don't think he heard me.

  "Ah! Something just rubbed me and took off a bit of skin!"

  "That sounds like a shark! Porpoises have smooth skins. Move, boy!"

  "No, wait."

  Ian pulled a pencil sized brass cylinder from the chain around his neck. In the process, he broke the chain and lost his scapular medal.

  "A flare," he said needlessly, as a bright red star flashed upwards.

  I ducked under water to see what was happening. At first, all I could see were some dark shapes, fuzzy as things always are when you're under water without goggles. Then suddenly, everything came into focus. My eyes had abilities they never had before, but what I saw left me no time to be thrilled about it. There were dozens of sharks down there!

  "Ian, we're in big trouble! There's . . ."

  "Don't worry! The cavalry, in the nick of time! ARRG!"

  Ian was jerked under water, only to surface again thirty feet away. The water around him darkened with his blood.

  Three choppers were converging on us.

  I stroked hard toward Ian, but I never got to him.

  An F-105 jet streaked by the choppers and strafed the water not twenty-five feet from us. The sound of those 20mm slugs was unbelievably loud. Half of a huge blue shark was blown out of the water right in front of me, while the impact of the shells hitting the water knocked the wind out of my lungs.

  I was half stunned by the blast, the smoke, and the noise, but when a rope bumped my head, I grabbed for it.

  I got my hand in a loop of rope and was yanked swiftly upwards. I saw Ian dangling from another rope above me, with blood pouring off of him. Half of his right foot was gone. Again.

  The chopper's crewmen got us promptly aboard and attended to Ian. They had a tourniquet and a needle of pain killer all ready, of course.

  Ian looked at his foot and shook his head. "Damn. Twice! You know, Tom, I don't think I want to go swimming back there any more."

  Behind us, four jets were shooting up the sharks in the water that we'd just left. Vengeance, pest control, or maybe just target practice.

  "Be it so moved. As to your foot, well, they fixed it before, so they can do it again, but it sure looks like somebody is trying to tell you something."

  "Maybe, but I can't imagine what He's trying to say. Maybe it's just that I shouldn't have left my sword on the beach. Can you beat that, Tom? We wore those damn swords for two years without ever really needing them, then the one time when we really do, we both left them behind! Talk about terminal stupidity!"

  "No, fortunately, it was only near terminal. Good idea about the flare, though. What ever prompted you to bring it along?"

  "Ming Po gave it to me, and insisted that I wear it. She said I might need it."

  "Figures. By the way, who won our bet?"

  "I did, Tom. Thirty-eight. Do you want verification?"

  "No, I trust you. Do you want another bet?"

  "No, thanks. I've learned my lesson."

  "This is good, my son. Wisdom becomes you."

  The chopper set us down on top of the hospital, where a crew was waiting to whisk Ian downstairs. I stopped to thank the men in the chopper for saving our lives and to shake their hands.

  "Just doing our jobs, sir."

  "Doing them damn well, Captain LeFarge!" I said, reading the name tag on his uniform. "Is there anything that I can do for you guys?"

  "Can't imagine what, sir, except, well, that sure is a fine sailboat you have in the harbor," the chopper pilot said.

  "It's yours any time you want it. In fact, all three of them are there for you and all of your guests, and that goes double for whoever was flying that F-105."

  "That was Captain Stepanski."

  I would have talked with them longer but I spotted Barb coming across the helicopter pad toward us. She had my clothes with her. Would you believe that I had been standing there naked and hadn't even noticed the fact? I suddenly realized that everybody else around me had clothes on, and immediately I felt very strange. I even stepped back into the chopper to dress.

  They were the same clothes I'd left on the beach, sword, calculator and all, except for the belt buckle. It was like the old one, only it had a red button in the middle of it, on the inside.

  "It's something that I should have given you when you first arrived, Tom, but I didn't know how you'd react to it. There's a transmitter in the buckle. We all carry one, in one form or another. If you press the red button, a distress signal is sent and help arrives immediately. Today's problem wouldn't have happened if you had had one on you."

  She looked like she was feeling guilty about it all.

  "Not your fault, little one. Anyway, I probably would have left it on the beach along with my sword. I just wasn't thinking."

  "Then you must learn to think, Tom."

  "Yes, mother. Let's go find Ian."

  Ian was well, dressed, and waiting for us.

  "Tom, I'm having some special gold medals struck in honor of our rescuers, and forming up a special order for them, the Order of the Two Right Feet. But for now, let's go scuba diving, only this time let's take our swords with us."

  "Climbing right back on the horse that threw you, eh? Good! Let's do it!"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Playboys in the Sun

  The next three weeks went by like that, only without further bloodshed. Hasenpfeffer kept on conferring with bureaucrats, and Ian and I kept on pretending that we were wealthy tourists. We went skydiving and hang gliding, steeplechasing and auto racing, surfing and skin diving. We took flying lessons, at first on ultralights, but in a week we talked the Air Force into letting us fly a pair of their jet fighters, although they wo
uldn't let us do it solo. I even got to be fairly good at piloting a helicopter.

  Our evenings were full, too. There was no end of good entertainment available at Morrow. They had a full symphony orchestra and a world-class ballet company. There were Olympic-grade ice skaters, and gymnasts who were the best I'd ever seen anywhere. The word gymnasium means something like "the naked place," and that's the way they did it down there. I thought it was an improvement, on the girls anyway, being prejudiced.

  There were bluegrass bands and rock groups, folk singers of a dozen descriptions, and every type of ethnic music imaginable. There was even a Grand Opera Company, although we let that one pass. It was all first quality stuff, and we were surprised to discover that there were no professional entertainers on the island.

  All sports, theater, and music of of any description was done by amateurs. It seems that every Smoothie could play a musical instrument, paint a beautiful picture, and dance like Nureyev. Incredible.

  Barb turned out to be a classical ballet dancer. We went to see her perform, one night, and she was great, absolutely perfect. She was pleased with her performance, herself. She told me so, sitting there beside me, watching it.

  "I did this a year ago, subjectively. If that bothers you, just think of it as a movie. I could watch a movie of myself, couldn't I?"

  But what Ian noticed first was that while they were all outstanding at the performing arts, not one of them could do anything creative! There wasn't a composer or a novelist or a choreographer in the whole bunch. Apparently, when you started out knowing everything that you were going to do in your whole life, it just wasn't possible to think up anything new.

  The Killers weren't nearly as talented. A few played musical instruments, but most didn't. Most of them could fix almost anything that was broken, but few were real engineers. If they used a paint brush, it was likely to be four inches wide.

  In fact, most of the Killers had distinctly low-brow tastes. There were a few waterfront dives set aside for them, traditional smoke-filled dens that the Smoothies ran, but weren't too happy about. There was even a go-go bar where the dancing girls were always new. This happened because the Smoothie women drew lots to see who had to do it next, and they figured that one night of it was enough for any girl. Apparently, it was part of their contract with the Killers.

  The Bucket of Blood was my favorite low-life dive, since it took something about as far as it could go, and I've always been an extremist, on just about any subject. Ian wouldn't go there a second time, but I got to be a regular.

  The place was part bar and part shooting gallery. They didn't throw darts, they threw knives. There was a pistol range in the hallway to the john, and it was unwise to walk out of the bathroom too quickly. There was a pit where you could take on another sportsman with bare knuckles, with quarterstaves, or with sword and shield in full medieval armor, if that was your pleasure. Or you could use anything else in the way of instruments of mayhem that might be mutually agreed on. The stock of strange weapons and armor filled a basement that was bigger than the drinking areas were above. They even practiced with javelins, out in back, and sometimes played a game involving teams that each consisted of a spear chucker and a spear catcher!

  And yes, people did get hurt there, but they had a direct subway to the hospital so hardly anybody ever died. The only thing phony about the place were the Smoothie waitresses, who were trying hard to act sleazy when their hearts really weren't in it.

  The first night I was there, some of the guys talked me into giving them a demonstration of my temporal sword, and they all acted very impressed. But since they all used other aspects of time travel on a regular basis, I had a feeling that their interest was faked. I think.

  Or maybe it was necessary for them to learn about the swords from me, even though they already knew about them, just so causality wasn't violated. It's as confusing as Hell.

  * * *

  Anyway, a few of the Killers were genuinely creative artists. Leftenant Fitzsimmon wrote some remarkably good poetry, and Captain Stepanski did something that might have been called carpentry, or wood carving, or sculpting, or cabinetry, or maybe none of the above, but he filled whole rooms with oddly shaped, joined, and polished pieces of wood that I found to be strangely disturbing at first. Yet somehow, after a few hours, it sort of grew on me, and I got to liking it. Whatever he was doing, it was certainly original.

  The Smoothies were bothered by his stuff, too, but I found one of them carving, cutting, and sanding away, making an accurate copy of one of his pieces.

  The Red Gate Inn was Ian's favorite home away from home. It was run by some sort of social club, "The Guardians of the Red Gate," and most of the members were Killers. Yet fully half of the clientele were Smoothies. A big place, it had some two dozen fair-sized rooms, and each of them featured a different sort of entertainment, from chess through movies past bagpipers and on to a full dance band.

  I liked the place second best.

  The island had a large, beautiful Gothic cathedral, in the French style, that was pretty much unused. The islanders didn't seem to have much, if any, religion, and I personally never noticed any of the Killers being of that persuasion, either.

  Ian occasionally went there on Sunday mornings, and he said that a Killer lay preacher spoke to perhaps two dozen people, most of them other Killers, in the huge building. He said that the few Smoothies who came had the look of sociologists. They took notes, photos, and recordings of the proceedings, but they didn't look very prayerful.

  Even more odd was the fact that the island boasted a full-sized university, with housing and facilities for ten thousand students. Completely equipped, it stood there empty, totally devoid of both faculty and students. The only people around were a small maintenance crew, who had no idea why the place had been built. Central Maintenance had assigned the area to them to keep in shape, and that's all they knew. Its existence was a mystery, and either nobody knew why it was there, or everybody was somehow forbidden to talk about it.

  My best guess was that it had been built by mistake, that the City Planning Committee had changed its mind about the desirability of a university, and had so informed the Committee for Personnel Allocation, but neither organization had gotten around to telling the Architectural Council or the Builders' Guild about the change in plans.

  Ian wouldn't buy my explanation. His thoughts were that with complete foreknowledge, where those in the future could always tell those in the past about what went wrong, such mistakes were impossible.

  My idea was that you couldn't know about a mistake until it had already been made, at which time you were presented with a fait accompli. At that point, you could tear the place down, but you couldn't make it "didn't happen." Once one of my three-dimensional strings was laid down on that sheet of four-dimensional paper, that was it. You shouldn't be able to modify it.

  "Or maybe," I said, "The Committee for Telling the Past Where It Screwed Up forgot to tell the Committee for Listening To the Future about the screw up. Or maybe the Committee of the Second Part just forgot to listen in the first place."

  Ian didn't like that one, either. He remained convinced that there was a purpose for everything.

  * * *

  For three weeks, Ian and I played in the sunshine. We were well entertained in the evenings, and our nights, well, our nights were generally spent simply wallowing in the ladies of our households, like a pair of contented pigs in their sties.

  But wallow though I certainly did, still I found myself sleeping most comfortably when Barb was at my side. The best of the lot was at the beginning, and I began to think that my thoughts of that first morning were right after all. I really was going to have to marry that girl. But later, I told myself, once all the rest of these women ceased fighting their way into my bed.

  * * *

  More and more often, Ian and I found ourselves finding that it was more fun to tour through the factories and farms of the island, than to play with all of our expens
ive adult toys that were laid out for our pleasure.

  Not that we were about to let Hasenpfeffer know that, since taking a formal tour of the place was the first thing he wanted us to do.

  He was still coming by every morning, singing the same old song about how the two of us really ought to quit goofing off, and knuckle down to business, as he claimed he was doing.

  Ian and I had already said everything we wanted to say about the matter, the first morning we'd been here, but Hasenpfeffer kept on harping on the same old strings.

  I quit discussing the matter with him, by simply never paying the slightest attention to him when he was ranting and raving. The easiest way to do this was to pay more attention to the breakfast waitress. When he wouldn't stop, I wouldn't either. Flirting would give way to a kiss or two and some light-hearted petting, which would eventually escalate up to concentrated foreplay. On one occasion when we were breakfasting at Ian's, it went as far as actual copulation right there at the breakfast table before Hasenpfeffer gave up and left, muttering to himself.

  That day, I'd just finished up, and sent the smiling, if a bit tousled, girl out for more coffee, when Ian said, "That was quite a show."

  "Thank you, sir. Not to mention that it finally got rid of Hasenpfeffer."

  "Not to mention that you did it with one of my girls."

  "Oooh! Territoriality raises its ugly little head! What's it to be next, Ian? Putting your private brand on each chick in your household? Tell me, do you plan on burning a big 'I-bar-M' unto all their trim little left buttocks? Or do you figure on getting creative about it? Like maybe hitting a belly button here and a right tit there?"

  "Knock it off! You know damn well that I'd never do any such thing! But we never agreed to go communal with our lady friends, and to just take one without permission is damned arrogant behavior."