In Standard Engineering Terminology, this situation is called "Fucking Up." I suppose that I could mumble and grumble about how my uncreative staff, acting like I was God, had a lot to do with the way my error wasn't caught, but the truth is that it was my mistake.
I'm glad that I made that first trip, and took my chances dying on it. If somebody else had died because of my fuck-up, well, I couldn't have lived with it.
Two cheapshit quarter-watt, carbon pull-down resistors cured half the basic problem. Hardening our registers with their own, separate, triple redundancy circuits (plus a bit of lead shielding) did most of the rest. The triple redundancy with back-ups for the whole circuit came later. Fortunately, I had help with that.
Actually, the triple circuit didn't take us all that long to build and test. There were books and papers available on how to make any electrical circuit more reliable, provided that you didn't mind spending money, space, and power to get it. Nothing creative was required on our parts. I had a lot of good engineers who could do a very competent job under those conditions.
Within two weeks, we tested the new circuit out on a small test canister, and it worked. We ran two hundred more tests, going as far back as fifty thousand years, and had a success rate that was almost twice as good as we'd ever had before, all of which was pretty damned embarrassing. It meant that we had lost thousands of canisters on our earlier tests, not because of problems with making machinery last fifty thousand years, or because of geological accidents, but because of a simple electronic glitch!
Ian ragged me about it for years, and while the Smoothies were all far too polite to ever mention it, the people in his mechanical design team acted smug, aloof, and superior to my electronic people from that day on.
We then ran ten tests on full-sized canisters, shuttling back and forth from 1735 to our newly rebuilt terminal in 1972. We were now ready to make our trip into the past, except that I had this wedding to attend.
My own.
* * *
Even though Ian promised that there wouldn't be any bachelor party stunts, I was increasingly watchful as the day of the wedding approached. I knew that he was going to pull something. But nothing happened.
With the ceremony less than an hour away, my bath girls got me into the formal, full-dress with tails outfit that somebody had decided was absolutely necessary. Just as well, since I never could have figured out how to get into it on my own, what with the shirt studs, the bow tie, the gaiters and all. It even came with a spring-loaded top hat, an opera cape, and a walking stick. I'd hoped that there was a sword hidden in the walking stick, but no such luck. Or if there was one in there, I couldn't figure out how to get the damned thing out.
My usual accessories, my calculator and my temporal sword, didn't seem appropriate with the formal outfit, and what with all the new stuff, I failed to notice the lack of a red button on the belt buckle.
Ian showed up with six other friends of mine, Killer drinking buddies from the Bucket of Blood, who had volunteered to act as ushers. They were all in the same uniform that I was, and they said that they were going to escort me to the church.
"Sort of an honor guard, as it were," Leftenant Fitzsimmon said, as we got into the subway car.
But when the car door opened, I could see that we weren't in the basement of the church. We were in the time canister test chamber below our shop!
"What? You pressed the wrong button by mistake, Ian?"
"No . . . Tom, listen to me. First, you must understand that I am your best friend. That all of us here are friends of yours. And as your friends, we can't let you go out and make the biggest mistake of your life! Deep down inside, we know that you realize that Barbara is simply not the right girl for you, and that by marrying her, you would not only be making yourself miserable for the rest of your life, you would be ruining her life as well."
"I realize no such God damned thing!" I said, standing up and trying to make it to to the car's control panel.
I never got there. All seven of those guys piled on me, and while they did no damage to anything but my pride, they held me down in the aisle.
"We were afraid that you would take it this way," Ian said. "We sincerely regret being forced to put you in bondage, but sadly, you leave us no choice."
My arms were forced behind my back, and a set of handcuffs was snapped on my wrists. I was furious! Not only were they doing their damndest to upset a ceremony that I had been looking forward to for months, but they were actually overpowering me, physically! Such a thing had never happened to me before. I had always been the strongest person I knew, and I hadn't realized how much of my ego was involved with that fact.
But the seven of them were more that I could handle. I was helpless against the fighting skills of the six Killers, and Ian's towering strength. I never even got a single good lick on any one of them.
Once the handcuffs were on, most of them worked their way down to my feet, and put a set of leg irons on me. I was squirming and shouting loudly for help. At first it didn't seem to bother them, but my increasingly vulgar cursing ended when they held my nose closed and stuffed a ball gag into my mouth.
"Now don't get yourself into too much of a dither," Ian said calmly as they carried me at shoulder height over to a time canister. "We're only sending you back ten years, to when the island was unpopulated. That ought to give even you enough time to get over your present, doubtless temporary, insanity."
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Kidnaped!
With Ian giving directions, my six other "friends" carried me from the subway car to the back of a big canister, half loaded with boxes and crates that were strapped down to the deck. They laid me down, face up, on a big, inflated air mattress.
"You've got all the supplies you need here to keep yourself healthy and happy until you catch up with the present again. Food, camping gear, clothing. Even your favorite cigars, and plenty of beer."
Leftenant Fitzsimmon took an oversized can of Australian beer from one of the cases, opened it, and set it on the deck near my head with a friendly wink. Not that I could drink any of it, bound and gagged as I was. Captain Stepanski returned my top hat, opera cape, and walking stick, which had been scattered in the struggle. He dusted them off, folded the cape, and set it all neatly on the floor near the beer can.
"We've jimmied the time circuit so that this machine can only travel backward. Without test equipment or even a soldering iron, there's no chance that even you could fix it," Ian said, tossing the keys for the cuffs to the floor near me. "I doubt if it will take you more than a few hours to get yourself free. Again, sorry, but this really is for your own good, you know."
And with that, Ian hit one button on the canister's keyboard and they all filed out of the canister. I heard them close both vacuum-tight doors, and in a few minutes I was suddenly in zero-G, traveling back in time.
There was enough spring in the air mattress to push me high into the air. Floating upward and rotating slowly, I could see that the beer can was also afloat, and that a growing blob of frothy beer was extruding itself from the opening. I soon bounced gently with my back to the ceiling, and lost my rotation in the process. It wasn't a big immediate problem, but I knew that when we arrived and gravity returned, if I wasn't back down I had a nasty fall coming!
Coming slowly back toward the deck, I saw that the glob of beer had grown much larger than the can it had come out of. It was bigger than my head, and it was coming directly at my face!
I had ugly visions of the blob fastening itself around my face, suffocating me. Beer foam is a mixture of carbon dioxide gas and a liquid made up mainly of water. Not the sort of thing you can breathe. A hell of a thing! Tom Kolczyskrenski, drowning in a single can of Foster's Lager Beer!
I couldn't change the vector of the beer, and I couldn't move my head more than a few inches. All that I could think of to do was to blow at it, and what with the ball gag, I was limited to blowing through my nose. This was not an efficient procedure, and t
he deadly glob of beer came closer and closer.
Gyroscopic action! If I could spin myself around and catch it on the back of the head, I just might survive. While I normally don't use hair oils, this time my bath girls had said that the slicked down look was right for the outfit I would be wearing, and had greased me up. The hair oil, being non-polar and thus hydrophobic, ought to repel the hydrophilic beer! I tried moving my head around, to my left shoulder, then my chest, my right shoulder, back, and repeated the procedure as rapidly as possible.
There was some gyroscopic reaction, but not nearly enough, and the beer blob was still growing, turning from yellow to foamy white, and still coming at me.
I did some rapid mental calculations for a journey of ten years, and came up with a subjective trip length of four minutes, assuming that the program was using our usual temporal velocity, and assuming that Ian hadn't been lying about sending me back for ten years. If both of these assumptions were true, I could hold my breath if the blob covered my face, and probably stay conscious until gravity returned to splatter the beer on the deck. But that was two too many assumptions, when my only life was on the line!
By swiveling my legs rapidly around my hips, I was able to turn myself ninety degrees or so, and from there I could bend over to let the dangerous beer slowly cruise past my head.
Victory! Now I only had to worry about breaking my neck, falling from what could be fourteen feet up when the gravity came back. I had to time it so that I was at or near the deck when that happened.
The problem was that, because of the handcuffs, I couldn't see my watch, and when I had been high enough above the boxes and crates to see the Nixie tubes on the control panel, I was facing in the wrong direction.
I drifted back toward the air mattress, and tried to flex my body so that I wouldn't bounce as hard next time. I was only partially successful. The next time I got to the ceiling, I could see the orange numbers, telling me that I had nine seconds to get down before I fell four yards to the floor. Squirming, I bumped the ceiling as hard as I could, and got to within three feet of the floor before gravity returned.
I missed the air mattress, and the fall knocked the wind out of me, but at least I hadn't broken my neck. Moments later, a gallon and a half of beer foam hit the deck, splattering my face and chest. Damn Ian, anyway!
I could see the keys to my handcuffs, and had started to wiggle my way toward them, when I heard someone opening the big steel door on the canister. Some rapidly chattering feminine voices echoed in the canister, and my first thought was that Barbara and some of her friends were coming to my rescue!
"Great! It's a cargo canister!"
"Yeah, but it's ancient. Can you handle the programing on one this old?"
"Are you kidding? I could reprogram Methuselah, if he had a keyboard!" They spoke to each other very quickly, in something like an Australian accent, with no time wasted between when one left off and another began.
"Then get on it, girl, before somebody comes by!"
I heard the doors being closed while the first voice said, "I'm working, I'm working!"
These weren't friends of mine. These people were some sort of temporal hijackers! Still, I tried to get their attention by mumbling past the damn ball gag and bumping my feet on the deck, on the theory that once I was free, I could deal with them somehow or another. The trouble was, they were making too much noise to notice me.
Whoever she was, she must have known her stuff, because in a few minutes we were in zero-G again, and presumably going farther into the past.
I drifted up to the ceiling once more, and got a look at my new set of abductors. There were three of them, a blonde who was taking off her backpack, a brunette sitting strapped to the chair at the keyboard, and a real redhead, with freckles and everything. All three had their long hair pulled back into pony tails. They were dressed for roughing it, in flannel shirts, blue jeans, and hiking boots.
I could tell at a glance that they weren't Smoothies. The girls of Morrow were almost all slender with a lot of hidden muscle, having the sort of bodies you see on ballerinas, lithe figure skaters, or rhythmic gymnasts.
These women were of a different sort, with large, firm breasts, wasp-tiny waists, and flaring hips, a bit like a slender version of the Victorian ideal, or perhaps like exaggerated Playmate-of-the-Month types. Not the sort that I'm usually attracted to, they were none the less very fine looking women.
I was still near the ceiling when they noticed me.
"Hey! We've got company!" The blonde shouted.
"He's all tied up! Shouldn't we free him?" The brunette said, undoing her safety belt.
"What makes you so sure about that? Maybe he's some kind of criminal!" The redhead said.
"Muff muff!" I said through the ball gag.
"But he dresses so nicely!" the brunette objected.
"I'll bet he undresses nicely, too!" the blonde said.
"And quickly, if I have anything to do with it!" the redhead said.
"Muff?"
"You know, I've always wanted a slave boy!" the blonde said.
"Muff!?!"
"You've always wanted anything that involves sex!" the brunette said.
"So what's wrong with that?" the blonde said.
"Nothing, except that I get him first," the redhead said, as she took her shirt off.
"No way! You got to pick the restaurant we ate lunch at!" The blonde was furiously unlacing her boots.
These women were experts at maneuvering in zero-G, and had apparently been together long enough to be well coordinated in their actions. As a group, they swarmed over me, disrobing themselves and me with equal efficiency. In seconds, they were all naked, and over my strenuous objections, I was floating with gobs of clothes at my bound wrists and ankles, but was otherwise naked save for a ball-gag.
I've heard it said that it is physiologically impossible to force a male Homo Sapiens to have sex, but I can testify that such a statement is a patent lie. Even if you are not a volunteer, and have no intention of participating in their pleasures, when enough beautiful, naked women spend enough time stroking your body (about thirty seconds, in this case), the gallant reflex occurs.
From then on, they have you at their mercy.
Oh, for a little while, there, I thought the fact that we were in zero-G would save me from further molestation, but as I said earlier, these women were experts at maneuvering without gravity. Furthermore, despite her earlier kindly thoughts, it was the brunette who impaled herself on me first.
The short of it was that I was soon forced into submission and raped six times.
Yes, raped!
I wasn't in charge, I wasn't a volunteer, and I didn't like it.
That having been said, I don't think that the women involved deserved twenty years in jail apiece for their crimes, which is what would have happened to three men back in the States, if they had done to a woman what these three did to me.
But God dammit! A good spanking was definitely in order!
Toward the end of my ordeal, they used my socks as a blindfold to add to the ball gag, cuffs and leg irons.
"Whoops!" One of them yelled, "It's time to hit the deck!"
I was woman-handled to the ground just before the gravity returned.
I heard one of them opening the steel door. "Come on, you two! We gotta get out of here!"
"What about our boy toy here?"
"What about him? We gotta quit this place before we're caught! Leave him where we found him!"
"No! I like him. I want to take him along."
"Yeah, me too!"
"Then grab him and let's run! We can't stay here!"
It took all three of them to set me up on my feet, but I didn't feel much like cooperating. I went down on my knees, and tried reasoning with them.
"Muff. Muff!" I explained.
"Look fellow, you can come with us or you can stay here, but either way, I'm going and I've got the keys to your cuffs in my pocket."
"Muff." I
capitulated, and they set me upright again.
I was husteled naked out of the capsule, barefoot with my pants at my ankles. From the sound, I'd guess we went down a long corridor, and then into a much larger room. We came to some steps, where I tripped and fell forward. Before I landed, I was picked up by two pairs of strong arms and hauled up onto some sort of platform. Somebody turned me ninety degrees to the right.
"Gentlemen! May I present our guest of honor!" Ian's voice boomed out.
The blindfold was ripped off, and I found myself on a stage in front of an audience of at least a thousand men!
"Yes, Tom, this is Your Bachelor Party!"
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
A Bachelor Party from Hell
Things got worse.
I was hauled to the side of the stage, still bound, gagged and naked. Meanwhile, my three former captors and molesters, who had somehow managed to get dressed in evening gowns, were acting like the models on a TV game show. With much swirling, smiling and hand waving, they opened the big curtain behind me, exposing a movie screen, and bowed out stage left.
I was forced to stand there while every man I had ever met on the island watched a movie of everything that had happened to me from the moment Ian and his henchmen walked me down to the subway.
The shouts and catcalls were loud, the display was vulgar and obscene, and I was royally pissed. People thought that assaulting me seven to one was funny. They thought that leaving me bound and gagged in a damaged time cannister was a great joke, and that my vigorous avoidance of being drowned in beer foam was marvelous comedy.
The girls got special applause for every nefarious crime they committed on my body, and came to the front of the stage individually or in a group, each time, to take a bow.
And when the bloody-be-damned thing was finally over, the crowd demanded to see it all over again. But for this performance at least, Leftenant Fitzsimmon came around and undid my cuffs and shackles. I was able to get most of my clothes back on, although I was still barefoot.
Conrad's Time Machine Page 26
