Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "You didn't have to. You stood there behind him, literally backing him up. Also, you heard me order you and the rest of the crowd out, and you didn't obey me. Why was that?"

  "But, you wanted one thing, and Dr. Hasenpfeffer wanted another, and I didn't know what to do, so I didn't do anything!"

  "For future reference, this outfit is owned by three equal partners. If we ever have the bad taste to disagree in public again, remember that any two of us can outvote the third."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Now, did you know of any reason why we should not have taken that trip?"

  "Well, when you got back, you were all sent to the hospital! Isn't that reason enough?"

  "Yes, but did you know about that before we left?"

  "No, sir. But Dr. Hasenpfeffer did say that your trip was 'ill advised,' and that was hint enough for me."

  "Huh. Well, go, for now. Send in the rest of my senior staff, one at a time, and don't tell them what all this is about."

  "Yes, sir."

  The rest of my people came in one at a time, and they all said about the same thing as Kowalski. They were there because Hasenpfeffer had invited them, and they didn't do anything because they didn't know what to do.

  We went to Ian's office and he repeated the procedure with his people.

  We got the same results.

  "Maybe we're reading more into this thing than we should," I said.

  "Maybe. Let's see what those military types of yours have come up with. We've kept them waiting for over an hour."

  "Oops! I forgot about them."

  We went back to my office and had Kowalski send in the three officers.

  "I'm sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting for so long, but we got involved in something else, and I lost track of time."

  "No problem, sir," Fitzsimmon said in his best phony British accent. "With any appointment, it's common to make a TARR—that's a Time Actually Required Request—to a bloke's secretary. It saves all sorts of time that would otherwise be wasted sitting around and waiting. Your Miss Kowalski informed us of when you'd really want us here, so we got here just in time."

  "A TARR, huh? I see that you are as efficient as ever. Well then, what can you tell us about the 'accident' we had earlier today? What are we up against? Technical failure or sabotage?"

  "Technical failure, beyond all doubt. Last night, all electronic systems in the canister were completely torn down and everything was carefully checked. The controls of the canister were in perfect working order. Early this morning, a technician typed the program in accurately, checked it herself, and then had a co-worker check it all again. I then personally verified that the program installed was the one you wrote. No one went into the canister from then until your group entered an hour later."

  "How can you be so sure of all of this?"

  "Besides our personal checks, we used various classified surveillance devices to verify everything."

  "What sort of 'classified' devices."

  "I'm not at liberty to disclose that, sir."

  "I don't like that answer."

  "I'm sorry, but it's the best answer you are going to get, sir. Please consider that these devices will someday be invented by the two of you gentlemen. If you learned about them before you had invented them, you would be messing with the laws of causality, a most unsafe procedure."

  "So just what would happen to me if I did break these laws of yours?"

  "I haven't the foggiest idea, sir. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a well-documented case of anyone ever daring to break those laws."

  "Then how can you possibly say that breaking them is dangerous? The best you can honestly say is that it is unknown."

  "Sir, you haven't taken the time to consider the facts carefully. We have two entire cultures where millions of people have been using time machines for many thousands of years. Thus, there have been untold trillions of opportunities to violate causality. Consider that some of those people were probably dishonest, and that many more of them were doubtless curious. Yet there is not one single verifiable case of violated causality on record. Do you know why?"

  "No, I don't."

  "Neither do I. The best guess is that nature has some mechanism that corrects these violations. How it does this is unknown. My own thought is the data can also be stated thusly—"There is no one still in existence who has ever violated causality.' Given that, the short of it, sir, is that I prefer existence to its alternative, and therefore I have no intention of ever messing with the laws of causality."

  "Interesting, but let's get back to the problem at hand," Ian said. "You said that we had technical problems. What do you recommend that we do?"

  "Your equipment was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, which was appropriate for use in disposable canisters when only discrete electronic components were available. Now, with large, non-expendable canisters, we recommend that you redesign your circuitry for greater safety. For example, you are using only a simple, horizontal parity check. We suggest that at the least you add an additional, vertical parity check. A good investment might be in a military style, triple redundant circuit, where two out of three circuits must agree for anything to happen. With the new integrated circuits, this shouldn't cost much in terms of bulk or power requirements. There are many other security techniques to be found in the textbooks."

  "Very good, gentlemen. Thank you for a job well done," I said as they left.

  While Ian and I mulled their report over, I called Kowalski in and asked her to tell me exactly how she used TARRs.

  "Well, sir, when those three officers first left your office a few hours ago, one of them, the Air Force captain, told me that they had an appointment to see you in an hour, so I wrote it down in your appointment book. Then the Navy lieutenant asked me for a TARR, and I wrote down the time he had asked for it. Then my mail box dropped a letter from its out slot addressed to him. I gave him the envelope without opening it, of course. Then, a few minutes ago, after you'd actually called them in, I wrote down the time you called for them, and sealed the note in an envelope. I addressed the envelope with my own address but the lieutenant's name, and the time when he asked for the TARR. Then I put the envelope in the box's in slot."

  "So this mail box of yours has a time machine in it?" Ian asked.

  "No sir. At least I don't think it does. My understanding is that it just has a timer to drop out each letter at the proper time. I go to the post office about once a week, drop off my old box and pick up the new one at the same time, with the right letters all set to come out at the right time. Only they're both the same box, of course. I mean, it's my personal property, you know."

  "So the post office does the time traveling. How do they know when a letter should be delivered?"

  "From the address, of course! Oh, I remember that in America, a letter is just addressed for the place you want it delivered to. Here, we have to state both the place and the time it should get there."

  "I see. And these letters are not only from yourself, but from others as well?"

  "Of course. You can use a letter to talk to anyone when a phone isn't handy. Or to talk to people in other time periods. I mean, my sister is back in 43,519 B.C., and we write each other all the time."

  And here I had been thinking that these people had no more curves to throw at me!

  "What would happen if you broke open the box and got all your mail at once?" Ian asked.

  "Oh, that would be very dangerous, sir. The box and all the letters would burn up!"

  "I see. Booby-trapped to conserve causality."

  I thanked Kowalski, and asked her to write up something nice and appropriate to put in the personnel files of each of the three officers and then bring it back for my personal signature. That sort of thing was very important to American officers, and I imagine that all military outfits are pretty much the same.

  "So. It was just an electronic glitch, and all of this detective work amounts to little more than a wasted exe
rcise in paranoia on our parts," Ian said.

  "Paranoia, probably, but I wouldn't call it all a wasted effort. I intend to redesign the temporal circuits as the leftenant recommended, no matter what it costs, or how much it delays our next try at time travel. It makes you wonder how many of those test canisters that didn't return failed because of this same glitch."

  "Another point is that even paranoids can have people who are trying to kill them," Ian said. "The only question still in my mind is why did Hasenpfeffer raise such a stink about our going on that trip, and why did he choose such a strange way to stage his protest?"

  "Why indeed? I suppose that we could go and ask him."

  "We could, but I'm not sure that I will like his answer. Tom, my gut level feeling is that we should just let this one lie."

  "Moved and seconded."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Wedding Preparations

  As the day of my wedding approached, things got increasingly hectic around Camelot, and around the Taj Mahal as well, since with Ian as best man, and Ming Po as Barb's bridesmaid, all of Ian's ladies were soon roped into helping out my girls.

  Barring attendance at a few rehearsals, I managed to stay out of the loop as far as most of it was concerned, but I couldn't help noticing a few of the stranger things go by.

  A special issue of a book on Catholic American wedding customs was printed and distributed to everyone concerned, including yours truly. It's strange, the things people do simply to state publicly that they intend to shack up together. Rings are exchanged; bouquets are thrown about; brides are denuded of their garter belts, which are then thrown to the bachelors in the crowd; and atrocious things are done to the groom at bachelor's parties.

  I wanted no such things to happen to me. This wedding was a serious thing to me, and I didn't want it spoiled by any nonsense. I talked about it long and hard with Ian, and he eventually promised that a surprise bachelor party wouldn't happen. Then I took steps to insure that no one else would try any stunts by posting public notice, promising to fire anyone involved with any crude jokes on my person.

  I wanted Barb to go through the whole, days long ritual, mostly to impress upon her the seriousness of the whole thing. Once we were married, I wanted us to stay that way.

  The book said, among a huge number of other bits of trivia, that Barb's father was to pick up the bill for the wedding reception. Since some three thousand people were eventually scheduled to attend, it seemed a bit much to ask the guy to pay for all of it, and over breakfast, I asked Ian to see to it that I caught the bill instead of him.

  "Not a good idea, Tom. It would embarrass him. Wedding ceremonies are much like the potlatch festivals that the Northwest American Indians used to throw. They are a display of wealth and power that vastly increases the prestige of the guy throwing it."

  "I've heard about those things. Isn't that where the guy hosting it gives away absolutely everything he owns, and if he can't find somebody to take the last of it, he'll burn whatever was left over, just to make sure that he's totally destitute?"

  "Usually, it doesn't go quite that far. Anyway, in the long run, he comes out way ahead, because everyone who accepts a gift is morally, or at least socially, obligated to give his host a gift of far greater value, once it's his turn to throw a potlatch."

  "Weird custom, sort of like a voluntary income tax, except that with the Indians, you eventually get something back for what you have to shell out. So the Smoothies have a custom like the potlatch, too?" I asked.

  "Damned if I know. Nobody ever gave me a handbook of Smoothie customs. But you know, I'd be willing to bet that from now on, they adopt your Catholic-American customs as the standard way to get married."

  "Bullshit," I said politely. "There is no way that so many couples could possibly get a real Catholic priest to marry them."

  "Okay, you've got me on that one. But the huge ceremony, the massive display of wealth, and the social commitment that these public displays enforce, could well become permanent things hereabouts. For one thing, marriage customs quickly become permanent anywhere. Look at the way that the giving of a diamond ring to announce an engagement quickly became universal. Most Americans would say that the custom was ancient, whereas it really has only been around for less than a century."

  "The reason for that one is obvious. Besides the millions that the DeBeers diamond cartel spends on advertising, a woman naturally wants to know that the guy has made a serious commitment to her before she makes the commitment that he wants from her. I'm surprised that the custom wasn't invented sooner."

  "Without any sort of dependable birth control device, and what with the social stigma placed on giving birth to a bastard, most properly brought up women back then weren't likely to give in to their man's desires before marriage, in any event," Ian said.

  "What about the medieval lord's droit du seigneur, where he got to take all of his peasant girls?"

  "Traditionally, he only had the right to take them on the night before their wedding, so her husband to be was there to take care of the kid, in case the lord's sperm got lucky. You know, there is a similar custom in Southeast Asia, where the Buddhist monks take on the hard duty of relieving the local maidens of their maidenheads."

  "Purely for religious reasons, of course."

  "Of course. The causing of pain and the spilling of blood are sinful acts according to Buddhist tenets. Due to the strength of his soul, a monk is best suited to do the onerous task. They even get paid for doing it."

  "A typically religious justification for the defloration of the youth, while raking in the money," I said.

  "Some religions, perhaps. Not mine, of course."

  "You figure that the Smoothies are going to pick up on that one, too?"

  "No. But they have a culture without much real depth, and such cultures are quick to adopt new customs. Like any other new culture, they slosh around a lot, like water carried in a shallow tray."

  "How do you get off calling them a 'new' culture? We keep hearing that they've been around for thousands of years!"

  "They have and they haven't," Ian said. "Don't forget that almost everyone here left wherever they came from when they were teenagers, and spent at least their next ten years scattered throughout the United States. That amounts to a very definite cultural break. Now that they are together again, they want a feeling of cultural solidarity, but they don't have the customs, the symbols of cultural solidity, to work with. Being absolutely uncreative, they have to get those customs from us, the only creative people around."

  "Huh. I don't mind being responsible for creating the technical basis for their sick little culture. I mean, they're not an evil people, or anything like that. But I don't know if I feel right about being the cause of their social customs as well. I don't feel that I'm competent to handle a job like that."

  "You're not. Neither am I. But then again, I don't think that we'll do more than modify a few surface things, like wedding customs. The real basis for their culture, and the reason for their uncreativity, is the way they use time travel. For that, we certainly are responsible, perhaps to the damnation of our souls."

  "I can't buy that," I said. "We just made a machine. We never forced anyone to use it, to make it the basis of their whole culture."

  "Once the machine was there, it was going to be used. I've heard it argued that Henry Ford, along with the other early auto makers, was responsible for the change in morals that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. Maybe all Henry wanted was to give people a cheap, convenient means of transportation, and to make a fortune doing it, but he also gave the average young man an enclosed, self-mobile box to take his girl out with. No longer was he forced to spend his Sunday afternoons sitting with her in her father's well-chaperoned parlor. He now had a way to take her somewhere else, as well as a convenient place to have sex with the girl."

  "He could have done the same thing with a horse-drawn carriage," I said.

  "Only if he was rich. Even i
f the horse and carriage had been free, it still took a lot of time and effort to take care of a horse, more than the typical working man could afford. A Model T Ford could be bought new for ten weeks' pay, and you didn't have to feed it, curry it, shoe it, and do everything else that a horse needs to stay healthy."

  "So you're blaming the automotive engineers for the breakdown of morals during the 1920s? Well, good for the engineers! And to hell with drinking tea and eating crumpets with a bunch of maiden aunts, anyway!"

  "It's a judgement call, and if that's yours, go wallow in it," Ian said. "Some of us have a different opinion. None of which changes our responsibility for the Smoothy lack of creativity."

  "There's got to be a better way. There has got to be a way that we can use time travel and still be creative."

  "When you figure it out, tell me about it. For now, let's get to work. You have to find where that glitch is in our time circuit, fix it, and then design a triple redundant version of it, with back-ups and extra parity checks. I have to take a look at the damage we did down below, and do something about it."

  * * *

  Our best guess turned out to be that a single energetic bit of radiation managed to upset two adjacent registers, which caused the entire circuit to malfunction. A single bad register would have caused a parity error, and the canister would have returned home immediately.

  Our circuit could malfunction under these circumstances because those two particular bits changed a legal command into an illegal one. Of the sixty-four codes allocated to control functions, only sixty-two were actually in use. I had used a simple diode decoding matrix to do the job, with each function incorporating a transistor circuit for amplification, which also performed the pull-down function. I had not included an amplifier for those two codes that had no use. This meant that those two codes didn't have a pull-down resistor, and various "sneak paths" existed when either of them was called up.

  We had tested the circuit extensively, but we had never tested for things that "couldn't possibly happen," like codes that weren't in use. So what could possibly happen was that several functions were activated simultaniously, and your humble heroes were left drifting in the sixth dimension, for a while there.