Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  Shortly thereafter, the Air Force got its version of the bomb, designed to fit on the nose of a small, two-inch Mighty Mouse rocket. It was made to aerospace specifications, of course, rather than to army specs. That is to say, it wasn't dust proof, mud proof, or rust proof, but it could function at two hundred thousand feet. Since pilots are customarily farther away from the damage they do than foot soldiers are, the radius of destruction was adjustable out to five hundred feet.

  When fitted with some stabilizing fins, the same nose cone could be used as a gravity bomb. Once somebody else had designed, built, and installed suitable bomb racks, they gave one of our fighter jets the firepower of a World War II style thousand-plane raid.

  And, of course, the Navy got its own version, to its own specifications, for its rockets, guns, and depth charges.

  Near the end of the Temporal Bomb Project, Ian and I heard one of my engineers referring to the thing as a "Time Bomb." I chuckled at the pun, but Ian's reaction was a bit different.

  "Tom, have you ever heard a Smoothie tell a joke before?"

  "Well, no, thinking about it."

  "Right. That's because in order to be funny, a joke has to be new. But these people already know everything that is going to happen to them. They don't tell jokes, ordinarily. Making up a new joke, even a silly pun, is an act of creation, something that these people are not capable of. Yet here we just heard one of them use a pun. Did one of them think it up herself?"

  "I don't know, but I can find out. Who knows? Maybe there's hope for these people yet."

  I put one of the junior assistant secretaries on it. I asked her to trace the joke back, going from person to person, asking each of them when and where they had first heard the pun, and who they had heard it from.

  The result was disappointing. It turned out that the originator of the pun was none other than my friend, Leftenant Fitzsimmons, and he wasn't a Smoothie at all.

  * * *

  Farther down the pipeline were bigger, longer-ranged versions of the temporal sword, with ranges of up to fifty miles. They replaced our infantry rifle, various army machine guns, aircraft machine guns, and so on. All told, there were twenty-three distinct versions of these high-powered swords. Or perhaps I should say relatively high powered, since the biggest of them only consumed nine and a half watts.

  The military gadget that I was proudest of was the "Escape Harness." This thing looked like a pair of epaulets with arm loops under them, and straps across the back and chest. The chest strap had an arming button, a kill button, and a control knob on it.

  The tops of the epaulets functioned like the beam of a temporal sword, except that instead of focusing the temporal distortion into a fine thread, the entire tops of the shoulder boards became active. Air rushed into the things at almost supersonic speeds, to be sent a short while into the future. The undersides of the epaulets were still at normal atmospheric pressure, of course, but the tops felt only a hard vacuum. Since the total active area was about forty square inches, the escape harness had an effective lift of up to six hundred pounds at sea level.

  This was plenty of power to pull a pilot right up out of his aircraft at four Gs, eliminating the need for the ejection seat as well as for the parachute.

  The real beauty of the gadget was that here was something that you could wear on a regular basis, that weighed less than a pound, but that would let you fly! It was easy enough to steer. You just moved your legs one way or the other. The knob on your chest controlled the amount of active area, and thus the lift.

  It was noisy as all hell, but the pilot's crash helmet protected his ears well enough.

  I thought of these things as being strictly for emergency use, since the amount of air they sucked out of the present was pretty huge. They seemed wasteful to me, but Preston proved that there was no danger of dropping the world's air pressure by any measurable amount, even if everyone in the world used one all the time. The air being sent elsewhen wasn't being wasted, after all. It all came back in a short while.

  * * *

  The night after the first successful test, I was having a drink at the Bucket of Blood with Captain Stepanski, an Air Force pilot. I showed him one of the prototype escape harnesses my people had made up, to get his opinion of it, and, well, to show off.

  He was impressed, and after a few more beers, we went outside so he could try it out, ear plugs and some helmets having been scrounged out of the sporting equipment in the basement.

  Naturally, a crowd followed us, so I had to explain all over again, loudly this time, what it was and how it operated.

  Captain Stepanski was a natural pilot, with a plane or without one. In moments, he had it all figured out, and he was doing aerial acrobatics in minutes. Once he came down, Leftenant Fitzsimmon of the Navy stepped up, and thinking that he wanted to try his hand at flying, Stepanski gave him the harness.

  Instead of putting it on, the leftenant proceeded to fasten the harness to a log, a big section of tree trunk that was set upright in the concrete, and normally used as a target for knife, sword, and javelin throwing.

  "What are you doing?" I asked him.

  "Just trying out an idea I had. I won't be but a minute, sir."

  Soon, the harness was howling away, trying without success to pull the log over sideways. Fitzsimmon walked back ten paces, borrowed a snub-nosed .44 Magnum pistol from one of his men, and proceeded to put all six slugs into the harness!

  I was at first shocked, that someone would dare to try to destroy my latest brainchild, but I quickly saw that it was unharmed. The leftenant went over and shut off the screaming harness, so we could talk again.

  "What? You missed all six times?" I said.

  "No sir, I could hardly miss at that distance. All six rounds went into the active area of your new device. Where they went after that is something that you'll have to tell me about. You have more than an escape device or a flying machine here, sir. You have also invented the world's first perfect armor!"

  * * *

  After Ian watched the first test of the escape harness, he went back to his desk to sketch up an "Emergency Power Generator." This had an area at the back that was essentially the same as the top of an epaulet, creating a hard vacuum. Before getting there, inflowing air was ducted over an air turbine, which was in turn connected to a standard electrical generator.

  It worked the first time we tried it out. As we watched it run, I gave Ian a copy of Prescott's writeup on air consumption, and told Ian that he had to take the word "Emergency" out of the name of the thing. There was no need to burn coal, oil, or any other fossil fuel at all, ever again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Second Law

  "You know, Tom, I think that I was happier back when the Second Law of Thermodynamics still worked."

  For whatever reason, our best conversations always seemed to take place at the breakfast table. It was my table this time, and my serving wenches.

  "Nah. You were just brainwashed like almost everybody else in the technical world, except for me, of course, and Einstein and Bronowski."

  Over the months, my ladies had refined their appearance to coincide with what they had apparently decided was what attracted me the most. This involved very long hair, usually straight, but curly if it was naturally so. They wore high-heeled shoes, and were otherwise naked, devoid even of body hair. They had light suntans, without strap marks. Facial makeup was minimal to nonexistent, but more and more lately I was beginning to notice a slight glistening of body oil.

  "I'd heard that Einstein had doubts about the Second Law. Who's Bronowski?" Ian asked.

  "A mathematician. He did a show called 'The Ascent of Man.' You should watch more television."

  "I shudder at the thought."

  "Elitist."

  It's odd to think that my tastes had been so carefully studied, by so many and for so long, with this as the result. I would have thought that I would have preferred more variety, but there it was. And the high-heeled shoes! For many
years, I had ridiculed women for wearing them despite the pain they caused and the damage they did to the feet.

  Now, they were apparently being worn by hundreds of women because I found them to be attractive!

  On reflection, I begin to think that what attracts me is not the shoes per se, but the way a woman walks when she's wearing them.

  "You never believed in the Second Law?"

  "Of course not. Among other things, it implies that the universe as a whole is constantly getting more random. But if you'll look around you, you'll see that everything around us is not getting more random. It is obviously getting more ordered."

  "Bullshit!" Ian said, which of course meant "give me some concrete examples of that."

  "You will observe that I am currently eating breakfast. My body, in the meantime, is turning this breakfast into me. I am obviously a more ordered system than this breakfast is. Q.E.D. Thus it is demonstrated."

  The waitresses and other ladies who constantly surrounded us were used to our continual arguments by now. I sometimes wonder if they kept recordings of them, so as to write up an academic paper or two, once their present charade was over.

  "Your body is turning a small portion of your breakfast into you, which person, incidentally, never struck me as being particularly orderly. Most of your breakfast will be converted into carbon dioxide, water vapor, and one of your major constituents, shit. These are blatantly disorderly, not to say downright messy on occasion, being end products, as it were. On the average, your strange eating habits have decreased the order of the universe, not increased it."

  "I deny all of the above. One glance at the evolution of life on the Earth should convince you that the universe strives upward, not downward," I said.

  "If things are becoming more orderly in one place, they must be becoming less orderly in another. Earth is only one tiny bit of the universe."

  "You are suggesting that on Mars, perhaps, there are animals that are evolving into beings that are slower, stupider, and in general less well adapted? Earth is the only part of the universe that we humans know much about, so I suggest that we confine our arguments to its surface. Or, if we must go into outer space, I point out that current cosmological theory has the universe starting out containing little else but hydrogen, the simplest of the elements. After a few eons of star formation, stellar burning of various sorts, and the occasional supernova, the other elements were gradually built up. Notice again, please, that we went from a disorderly cloud of hydrogen to very complicated constructions like stars, planets, the hundred-odd higher elements, and me. I stands my ground."

  "In the short run, you might be right, but eventually the universe will consist of nothing but lukewarm iron, the element lowest on the energy curve."

  "In the short run? I'm talking about fifteen to twenty billion years, here! And as to the famous heat death of the universe which you allude to, just how do you adjust, rectify, and justify this Second Law of yours with the Law of the Conservation of Mass and Energy? If matter is convertible into energy, why can't I take some of that lukewarm iron of yours and turn it into energy to warm up the rest of it?"

  "I confess that I have occasionally been troubled over that one."

  "As well you should be. In truth, your rational self was rebelling against the brainwashing it had received in that overvalued university that you are so proud of having attended. They did a similar job on you young earnest types with their Laws of Momentum. They gave you a formula that said that the mass of a bullet times the speed of that bullet must equal the mass of the cannon that fired it times the speed of the cannon moving backwards. Thus, for hundreds of years, every properly educated young engineer knew, absolutely knew, that you couldn't possibly shoot a gun without that gun having a kick. It wasn't until World War Two (when someone was given the problem of making the plume of smoke from a tank's gun a little less obvious to the enemy), that the gas brake was invented. This was nothing but a bent piece of metal with a hole in it that fit over the muzzle and let the bullet go on its way, while sending some of the propelling gasses out sideways. It sent a smaller plume of smoke into the sky, but the tankers soon noticed that their guns kicked less than they had before. Notice that the improvement was made by accident, or at least for the wrong reasons, because every engineer in the world had been blinded by a formula."

  "MV is still equal to MV," Ian said. "Gun designers were just a little bit slow in noticing that you not only shot the bullet out the end of the gun, you shot the propelling gasses out as well. If you send those gasses out sideways, or better yet backwards, you can significantly reduce the total kick of the weapon, and even eliminate it in some cases. So what?"

  "So what? So a whole lot! Had that advance been available around the turn of the century, in the days of the All Big Gun navies, it would have made possible a ship the size of a destroyer that could have taken out a battleship! It could have shifted the basis of world power! But it wasn't done because the engineers of the world had been blinded by their own neat little formulas."

  "And what does that have to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics?"

  "A lot," I said. "People were as brainwashed by the Laws of Momentum as they currently are by the Second Law, when all along, there were ways around them both."

  "Oh, I suppose you're right, of course. After all, in a few months, we'll be powering the whole damn island with a system of generators that the Second Law says can't work. I just feel less comfortable without a new law to replace it with," Ian said.

  "You're just asking for a new set of horse blinders. 'Beyond this point you must not see, much less think about.' "

  "Knock it off. A man needs guidelines."

  "Well then, have one of mine. If it works, it's not only good engineering, it's also good science as well."

  "I guess I'll have to take that as a working hypothesis."

  "Hey. It's all that John Roebling, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Major Armstrong, and all the rest of the great old engineers had to go on, and they did good work. Finish your breakfast, and we'll go do some of it, ourselves."

  * * *

  I was sketching up plans for an entirely new type of military aircraft, based on what we had learned from the escape harness.

  It would be a small craft, consisting mainly of a chair inside of a hermetically sealed geodesic ball for the pilot, a big temporal sword, and a bomb rack. This was entirely surrounded by plates that acted like the shoulder boards on the harness. They provided the lift necessary to keep the thing in the air, and they provided all the forward acceleration, braking, and maneuvering required. Also, they could be selectively switched on by a proximity sensor such that if anything solid came quickly at the craft, a bullet, for example, it would be atomized and sent safely into the future. When this happened, a plate opposite was also switched on, to keep the plane from accelerating in the direction of the bullet.

  Streamlining? We didn't need no stinking streamlining! Who needs streamlining when you can make all the air in front of you disappear? At that point, you are moving into a hard vacuum, no matter what your altitude is!

  This puppy would be small, inexpensive, fast, maneuverable, and indestructible.

  "Tom, it looks great to me, and in time I think we should build one of them. But we have been working on military equipment for months now, and we haven't ever asked ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. What do we need with all these super weapons, anyway? Nobody is bothering us."

  "Well, we had all those purchase orders . . ."

  "Orders? Those weren't orders! Those were written requests sent to us by our subordinates!"

  "Huh . . . Okay, I suppose you could think of them that way. But you were the one who was so adamant about filling the damn things."

  "So I was. I just hadn't thought it all out, back then. We wanted to get our own company going, and here suddenly were all these military orders. Back home, military orders are government orders, and patriotism, the law, and common sense says 'fill them.' I ha
dn't figured out yet that when you own the whole country, all that changes."

  "I suppose it does. But I still don't see where we've done anything wrong. Having a more effective military never hurt any country, even if we do own it, ourselves. The military contracts have given all of our people here some valuable experience with temporal equipment, and all of it has been relatively simple stuff, and free of the kind of brain busting headaches our earlier work entailed. The fact is that it has been fun, and you enjoyed it as much as I did."

  "True. There's something about making weapons that sort of grabs a man's attention. It's probably something in us left over from the Paleolithic Age, when man first learned that a pointed stick and a sharp rock are handy things to have around."

  "Right, only it's not something just 'left over.' It's something we still need today. The fact is that the need for protection has been around long enough for it to be hard wired into our systems, just as all of the rest of our basic needs are. Food, air, water, shelter, procreation, and protection. Without them, we can't continue to exist. So, you feel pain when they are lacking and pleasure when they are satisfied. Evolution, or God, if you prefer, set it up so that we do what we have to do, without much recourse to our brains, which are still expensive, unproven, and newfangled gadgets, anyway."

  "Save it for a breakfast table discussion, Tom. Only, why do you call the brain expensive?"

  "The brain makes extremely high energy demands on the body. The average person, sitting quietly, has an energy requirement of around a hundred watts. About thirty-five of those watts are consumed by two pounds of brain tissue. The other hundred and fifty odd pounds burns only sixty-five watts. It's no big thing in our overfed civilized world, but we humans evolved out in the wilds, where the big problem is usually getting enough to eat. Back then, it was a very significant expense."