Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "Well, no, to all of your questions. But you've also got to ask, could we have done all of this without him? And you've got to answer no to that one, too."

  "True, but neither of us would have wanted to do all of this. We would have been quite content to run a profitable little business just outside of Ann Arbor, and maybe not so little a one at that. We probably wouldn't have had all the palaces, and certainly not all the women, but we would have built a good life for ourselves, Tom."

  "I can't argue with you. But things are what they are right now, and we've got to play it from here."

  "Right. And what we'll do now is make our first trip into history."

  Ian's timing was dead on, because just then the Nixie tubes read six zeros, and we left home.

  Our first surprise was the lack of gravity. It was just like being in a space ship, I suppose, with things floating up and out of our pockets, and us floating out of our chairs. It had never occurred to us that we'd need seat belts.

  "Why didn't we expect this?" I said, "It would have been easy enough to build an instrument that could check for gravity, and put it into a test canister."

  "Because we never thought of it," Ian said from six feet "above" my head. "Still, it makes perfect sense. We are not on Earth any more, so we aren't affected by Earth's gravitational field."

  I would have been more upset, except that I saw the eight soldiers we had with us, sitting in their chairs with their hands firmly gripping the armrests, grinning at the two new kids. They and the construction workers were used to this sort of thing. I made a mental note to have someone put safety belts on all the seats, next time.

  "Well, if it makes so damn much sense to you, why didn't you predict this null gravity thing?" I asked, floating upside down to everything else.

  "I said it made sense, not that I knew it was going to happen. It would also have made sense if the gravity slowly went away as we got farther and farther away from Earth in the fifth dimension."

  "Only that didn't happen, so the fifth dimension must be impervious to gravity waves, whatever they are."

  "That, or we are moving a lot farther into the other dimensions than we thought. I mean, if we were billions of miles away from home, there wouldn't be much of Earth's gravitation field to feel."

  "Well, I've already thought of a use for the effect," I said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Sure. Get a weight and put it on top of a spring. The weight pushes the spring down. Take the contraption out into the fifth dimension, and the spring pushes the weight away. Attach the weight to a crank, and turn the time circuit on and off quickly. You get free power, and I bet it would be a lot cheaper to build than that emergency power machine of yours. No turbines, for one thing, and it doesn't need a bodacious supply of air."

  "Tom, that sounds just stupid enough to work. You know, we could have powered the surfacers with something like that. We'll put technical team on it when we get back."

  "Okay. You know, maybe you shouldn't have pulled your sword on Hasenpfeffer."

  "It got his attention, and we were running out of time. If we'd let him delay us past the departure time, it would have given him another day to think up things to delay us further."

  "I can see your point, but while we've done impolite things to each other before, we've never used real weapons up till now."

  "All right, all right. I'll send him a formal note of apology as soon as we get back."

  "Thank you. I just don't want this whole thing to escalate."

  Another set of Nixie tubes said we had forty-one minutes until we arrived. We'd known that it took time to travel in time almost since the beginning. We still didn't know why that was so, and it still bugged me.

  Free fall was starting to get fun, now that I was no longer startled by it. I would have suggested some sort of free fall game, except that if the troops and workers got out of their chairs and got involved, the place would have gotten crowded in a hurry.

  Besides fifteen people, we had power, food, and water aboard for a year. We had bottled oxygen, calcium oxide, and activated charcoal to last us a week. We had digging equipment to get us to the surface, tools and materials to set up a small station in 1735, and a small observatory to let us ascertain our exact geographical position. What we didn't have was much room for a game of null-G touch football.

  We were all in our seats when the Nixie tubes counted down to zero again.

  Nothing happened. Gravity did not return. We weren't on Earth in 1735, or anything like it.

  I heard a nervous voice behind me say, "Boss, I think we're in big trouble."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Big Trouble

  Ian said, "Tom, you checked this program yourself, didn't you?"

  "No. I wrote it myself. Prescott checked it. I'll go take a look at it."

  I opened the control cabinet under the Nixie tubes, and turned on the cathode ray tube display. While it warmed up, I fumbled around and found the program, a long column of nine digit numbers, all of them ones and zeros, written in my own handwriting. Ours was a stripped down system written in straight, efficient machine language, without benefit of Fortran.

  What I didn't find was my flow charts, our volumes of charts and tables of lateral drift, and everything else I needed to write a five dimensional program from scratch. They weren't here because it had never occurred to me that I might need them anywhere else except at my desk in my office.

  In hindsight, I know that this sounds incredibly stupid, but please remember that we had written more than sixty thousand of these programs before, and all of them had been for test canisters without any humans aboard. Including the volumes of tables in a small, unmanned test canister would not only be stupid, it would have been flat impossible.

  After a while, you settle into habits, solid routines of how things are done. Ian and I had been so eager to make this trip that we hadn't bothered to think everything out again from the beginning.

  As it was, we were lucky that we had even the program itself with us. It was here only because the typist and her checker hadn't bothered to take it back with them.

  Working the controls with one hand while I held myself in place with the other was annoying. I put my sword inside the cabinet, took off my shoulder belt, and used it to fasten myself to the stool in front of the cabinet.

  I tediously checked the screen against my written program and found the problem in about ten minutes. Two zeros in one line had somehow become ones.

  "Had only one error occurred, it would have been caught in a parity check. What we're seeing here is pretty improbable."

  "You think somebody did it on purpose?" Ian said.

  "I don't know, but we can worry about that one later. The point now is that we've missed our target, both in time and in space. From here, I don't think that I can steer us back to there. Not without all the stuff I have back in my office."

  "Can you get us back home again?"

  "That's what I'm going to try, even though I don't have any of our charts or tables with us. I think the easiest thing to do will be to simply retrace our steps. I'll pick a time in our subjective future, and have it reverse our directions from that point."

  "Why do it in our future? Why not do it now?"

  "Because it's going to take me some time to change the program in the first place, stupid, and I don't want to rush myself. I may not get a second try. We may not get a second try."

  It took me a half an hour to modify the program to run us backward, and load it into the buffer. I had to use some educated guesses as to estimating our drift, and that troubled me. If I was off by twenty feet sideways, we would emerge in solid rock, which would not only instantly kill all of us, but would likely take out the entire factory as well. Being off by only two inches would wreck the canister, and it just might kill us anyway, although in a less spectacular fashion.

  Ian spent another forty-five minutes checking over my work before he would approve of what I'd done.

  I'd allowed
two hours for the job, so we had another forty-five minutes to chew our nails before we could load the modified programs into the machine proper.

  The squad of infantry, all being of Killer stock, spent the first half hour of the emergency quietly talking to each other. You could see that they were worried, but on the whole, they were taking it pretty well.

  After that, someone got out a deck of cards and a poker game was soon in progress, played in zero gravity. They hadn't brought any money with them, but they had an empty Kleenex box Scotch taped to the middle of a makeshift table, and IOUs written on scraps of paper were being stuffed into it as the game progressed. The winner of each hand got to empty the box. Since their period outfits didn't run to pockets, cards and IOUs of various denominations had to be stuffed under one's belt. It slowed down the game, but killing time was the object of the exercise in the first place.

  Had there been anything that needed doing, I could see that these troops were ready to do it.

  The construction workers were all Smoothies, and they were in much worse shape. One burly sand hog had simply fainted the moment that it was obvious that we were in trouble. Most of the rest just sat it out in a blue funk, with sweat beading up on their zero-G faces like monstrous zits. About an hour and a half in, one of them freaked out, screaming and clawing his way toward the canister door, for what reason none of us could imagine. There wasn't anything outside the door, not even air. Maybe not even space.

  At least we didn't think there was anything out there. The temporal screen that surrounded the canister reflected back everything in the electromagnetic spectrum, including light and radio waves. Some of the test canisters had been programmed to turn off their screen so we could get an instrumented look around, but none of those had ever returned.

  Bracing himself between two seats, Lieutenant McMahon simply threw the screaming worker back to the other end of the canister, and when the man immediately tried for the door again, Bob just kicked the fellow in the jaw, knocking him out cold.

  "Nice job," Ian said, as he helped haul the unconscious worker back to his seat.

  Finally, the timer I'd set up to dump the buffer into the machine proper timed out, and we were, in theory at least, heading home. Not that we felt any change in our direction.

  From there, it was another three hours of sitting around to see if my fix had really fixed anything, and if, indeed, we would survive this trip.

  Ian had two of the workers break out some food and we had a quiet, nervous lunch.

  The canister didn't have a john, but the only sergeant we had along, a fellow named Kuhn, emptied a keg of ancient-looking, hand-cut nails into a plastic sack, and we made do with the keg. You had to be quick with the lid, or you had a mess floating around, but we made do.

  After a bit, I joined into the poker game, and was soon followed by Ian. We all fit around the small table because half of the troops were upside down, and holding themselves to the ceiling by means of the cargo straps up there. None of the Smoothies asked to play, because Smoothies never gambled. With their lifestyle, there wasn't any point to it.

  The game broke up a few minutes before we were due to arrive home. It was just as well, since by then I was fourteen thousand dollars down, and Ian had lost more than twice that. When you know that there's a fair chance that you won't live to settle up your debts, there's not much incentive to scrimp on your betting. Sergeant Kuhn was the day's big winner, being over twenty thousand ahead. I don't think he cheated, but that man is one mean poker player!

  Everyone got back to their seats. Most of the people had improvised some sort of seat belts by then, and the rest of them just held on.

  The timer hit six zeros again, and this time something definite happened. The canister wall to my right was suddenly three inches closer to me, the "POP" nearly burst my ear drums, and gravity had returned.

  "It seems that we have arrived!" I shouted, and got a cheer out of the troops. The Smoothies just sat there and looked relieved.

  Ian and Lieutenant McMahon got to the door at about the same time, but when they tried to turn the crank, it wouldn't budge. We were home, or at least we were someplace with earth gravity, but we were still trapped in the canister!

  The lieutenant started beating on the door with the butt of what looked like a "Brown Bess" musket, and a few minutes later, someone else started beating on it from the outside. Another cheer went up.

  Our good lieutenant knew Morse code, and a few moments later, someone was found on the outside who could understand him and reply.

  It seems that besides being welded to the side of the stationary canister, we had also come back a few inches too close to the door, such that the two doors were now welded together. We were instructed to wait until cutting torches could be brought down to our area.

  "This is not good," I said. "I can smell ozone. We are taking a dose of ionizing radiation right now."

  "Right. To hell with obsolete technology, anyway." Ian said. "Bob, tell whoever is out there to back off! We're cutting our own way out."

  Bob quickly beat out a message that I later heard read, "run away!", because Ian was already positioning himself in front of the door with his temporal sword in his hand.

  Ian gave whoever was out there a count of five to be gone, and then, with a quick rotation of his wrist, cut a six foot circle in the big door. As it began to fall, another fast wiggle of his hand cut the circle into six pieces, which came to the floor with a loud clatter.

  "Everybody out!" I shouted, and was almost trampled by the little, ordinary sized people scrambling past me. I was the last one out, proudly wearing my white plumed hat and my fine steel sword.

  Naturally, there were medics and ambulances waiting to take us all away. I felt just fine, but after my earlier experiences with radiation damage caused by temporal reimmersion, I thought it best not to argue with them.

  Arguing with a medic doesn't do you much good anyway. Their egos are such that if you disagree with whatever strange thing they're doing to your only body, they'll automatically assume that you're in shock, or otherwise out of your head, and sedate you so that you can't disagree with them any more.

  Our exalted status did get Ian and me to the front of the line at the hospital, and we were out of there in an hour. It turned out that the dosage we'd gotten wasn't at all serious. Of course, had we waited around in the canister for a few hours, things would have been much different.

  I soon discovered that we had returned to our own time only a half hour after we'd left. Had we gotten back much sooner, we'd have run into Hasenpfeffer and his crowd again before they'd had a chance to leave. This was good, because I wasn't ready to talk to him just yet.

  "Lieutenant McMahon, you did well today. Now, I want you to look up Leftenant Fitzsimmons of the Navy and Captain Stepanski of the Air Force. I want the three of you at my office in a half hour. I have another job for you to do."

  "Yes, sir." He saluted and left.

  "What's that about?" Ian said.

  "We need some detective work done, and one thing this strange little island doesn't seem to have is a police force."

  "True enough. But soldiers aren't cops."

  "They're the closest thing that we have available. If those three can't do the job, I think that they'll know who can. What's more, I have the feeling that they'll be on our side, no matter what, and that's something I'm not sure I can say about all the Smoothies," I said.

  "Unfortunately, after this morning I agree with you. I didn't like the way all of our managers were down there backing up Hasenpfeffer. Not to mention Ming Po and Barbara."

  "Yeah. Something stinketh mightily around here, and I intend to dig it up before we bury it again."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Sabotage?

  Still in my eighteenth-centuary getup, with my steel sword at my side and my plumed hat hanging on a convenient peg behind my desk, I filled the officers in on the problems we experienced on our first attempted time trip, with Ian sitt
ing in.

  " . . . so what we need to know is what went wrong, and how do we fix it, if it was some sort of technical problem, or who did it and why, if we're looking at sabotage. You can call in any help you think you may need, and spend as much time and money as you want, just as long as you all show up here again in an hour with some answers. Are you three up to the task?"

  Leftenant Fitzsimmon had turned out to be the senior man in the group, so he answered, in his almost accurate upper class English accent, "Yes, sir. You will be seeing us back here shortly, I expect."

  They snapped to and saluted. It felt strange to be returning a salute to a bunch of officers, but I saluted them back, rather than make them hold that silly posture. Then they did an about-face and left. I guessed that they must figure that I was their Comander-in-Chief.

  Maybe I was.

  "They'll be doubling back, of course." Ian said, "Why was Lieutenant Fitzsimmon acting as if he was superior to Captain Stepanski?"

  "Because by their rules, he is. Not having had the benefit of a proper military education, you never learned that a navy lieutenant is equal in rank to an army captain, for some strange historical reason. After that, Fitzsimmon had more time in grade. Also, a navy captain is equal to an army colonel, but why should I tell you this when you're the one with the exalted history major?"

  "Oh. Someday, I'll look it up. For now, I think our next step should be interviewing our subordinates."

  "Right," I said, pushing a button on my desk. "Kowalski, come in here."

  She walked in immediately, and stood before my desk, looking worried. I didn't feel like setting her at ease.

  "Kowalski, a while ago, you were down in the time canister area, standing behind Hasenpfeffer and apparently supporting his demands that our trip be aborted. Why did you do that?"

  "But, I didn't! I mean, I was there because Dr. Hasenpfeffer had invited me, but I never took anyone's side on anything! I never said a word!"