Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "All in clean fun, what?"

  "No. Not clean fun at all, Ensign." I left him looking stunned and went out hunting Ian. I found him in the middle of a laughing crowd.

  "Damn you, Ian! You promised me that nothing like this was going to happen!"

  "Not quite, Tom. I promised that I wouldn't throw a surprise party. But you know me well enough to know that I couldn't possibly let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this go by without doing something about it. You knew I'd pull something, now didn't you? And if you knew that it was coming, it couldn't possibly have been a surprise, could it? So I couldn't and didn't throw a surprise party, and therefore I never broke my promise!"

  Faced with that line of reasoning, there was only one sensible thing I could think of to do.

  I hit him.

  My fist caught his jaw just off center, and I heard his jaw bones make a satisfying snapping sound. He went over backward and was out cold on his back.

  Then I felt much better.

  There was a gasp from the crowd. A single, white-suited man flicked into and out of existence a few feet from me. A half dozen white coated men with a stretcher blinked in, put Ian on the stretcher, and then the lot of them disapeared without a sound.

  Apparently, somebody had pressed his red button. Under other circumstances, I would have been fascinated, but just then I didn't give a damn.

  People backed away from me as I went over to the bar that ran down the left side of the room. The bartender handed me a quart sized boomba of full of dark beer, and I drained it on one breath.

  "You know," I said to the man next to me, a plant manager whose name I didn't remember, "Maybe tonight is a good night to throw a party."

  The guy gave me a nod and an overly eager smile, but after seeing me deck the last person I'd talked to, you could tell that he didn't want to get involved.

  Halfway through the next beer, Captain Stepanski came over with the rest of the wedding ushers. "Sir, you weren't serious about busting Fitzsimmon down to ensign, were you?"

  "No, I wasn't. I meant to make him a midshipman, Cadet Stepanski."

  Seargeant Kuhn was about to say something, but I cut him off with, "And that goes for the rest of you as well, Airman Basic Kuhn, or whatever that comes out to in army rank. Did you assholes actually think that you could get away with kidnapping, sexually molesting, and then publicly humiliating your Commander-in-Chief? After I had stated publicly, and in writing, that this sort of thing would not be tolerated? Because if you did, you are not only ignorant, but you are stupid as well, and both of those conditions are capital offenses in this universe!"

  They were all appalled. Somehow Ian had convinced them that I'd be a good sport about it all, once I got over being angry. Well, maybe I would be, but I wasn't anywhere near over being mad. Maybe later. Much later. Or maybe not.

  "Yes sir," Fitzsimmon said. "What are your orders for now, sir?"

  "For now, well, you might as well enjoy yourselves, since your next assignments are going to be pure Hell, the absolute worst things I can think up. However, you might get some small joy in telling everybody else who participated in this fiasco, or even showed up at this party, that their careers have been wrecked as well, for laughing at the boss when he was tied up and naked, among other things. For myself, there are three women that I promised would get one hell of a spanking for the abuse they did me."

  "You're angry at them as well, are you sir? Perhaps I can be of some assistance in locating them, in partial amends for my transgressions, as it were."

  "Assist all you want to, but it won't do you any good. You know where they are, Fitz?"

  "Well, I bloody well should! They are my wives, after all. I thought that you'd enjoy some decent, full-bodied women, after all the thin-flanked fare, hereabouts."

  "Your wives?! You sent your wives out to rape and fornicate with a stranger?"

  "Well, I hardly 'sent them out,' sir. Actually, it was their idea, once they heard that the job was open. As to that fornicating business, you must understand that these are my wives, not my slave girls. We're not barbarians! Our contracts call for me to be the biological father of their children, to share in their upbringing, and to support the family during that period. After that, we all get to discreetly play around a bit, when the mood strikes."

  "And you figure that raping your boss counts as 'discreet'?"

  "In this case, discreet means that the children shouldn't be affected."

  "Getting yourself fired just might affect the way you support them."

  "I rather doubt that, sir. At worst, it might mean that I'll have to work for longer periods between home leaves. It might take me eighty years subjective to raise the lot, instead of forty. Maybe not a bad thing at all."

  "Your people are weirder than the Smoothies."

  "We have a saying, sir. 'Weird depends on where you came from.' By my lights, the really weird bunch are the Incas. If you keep me around, I'll tell you some tales

  about them."

  "Fitz, you have more gall than any twelve people I've ever met."

  "Well, sir, it's just that after a certain number of ass chewings, there's not much left but scar tissue, which is low on nerve endings. Did you want me to send the girls over in a group, or one at a time?"

  "One at a time." I figured that it might be difficult getting the bunch of them over my knee without hurting one of them.

  Where I grew up, you don't hit a woman, not ever. But hitting someone means striking them with the intention of doing physical damage to their person, and spanking is another matter entirely. It involves deliberately causing someone pain and humiliation, but not actual damage. In spanking, you strike with the palm of your hand, and only on the bare buttocks of the person being punished. The human butt contains the biggest, strongest bones in the body, which are covered with the biggest normal muscles in the body, which are covered by an inevitable layer of fat, and lastly by some sturdy skin with lots of sensitive nerve endings.

  I expect that Ian might say that God built the human fanny with a definite purpose in mind.

  "Right sir. There's a small room with a chair in it that might serve your purpose. It's through that door. I'll send Judy around first. She's the redhead. She rather enjoys a bit of spanking."

  Suddenly, I had bad feelings about all this.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Wedding

  I spent a day and a night sobering up. Then Prescott, my mathematician, showed up with a blindfold and said that if I wanted to get to my wedding on time, I had to put it on.

  After a very short trip, she took off my blindfold and I was in one of my rarely used guest rooms, where my bath girls had a duplicate of my last wedding outfit all laid out and ready. Or maybe, they'd just had the old one cleaned up. In an hour, Ian and my ushers arived looking not a bit abashed, and we rode on horseback to the cathedral, waving to the cheering crowds.

  The sky was clear blue, and spotted with white clouds. The cathedral was beautiful, and decked with white flowers. My Barbara was the most beautiful of all, swathed in acres of white lace, and just stepping out of her father's white carriage as my party arrived.

  Inside, after an abbreviated mass, Barb's father presented her to me before the thousands of people present, and she was by ancient custom officially mine now, once the Spanish speaking priest mumbled out a few memorized lines in English.

  On the way to the reception hall, in an open white carriage drawn by four white horses, Barbara said, "On the way to church, I heard about your bachelor party."

  "Ian gets carried away, sometimes."

  "So do you. Are you really planning on demoting every man on the island?" Barb was smiling and waving to the crowds.

  "I've been thinking about it, and you know, it's just not logically possible. Every man who is in any kind of managerial position in the entire organization was at that party. If I demote every one of them, all that happens is that the whole company goes down a few pegs, but their relative positions go u
nchanged. So what's the point?"

  "Not quite, Tom. Half the managers on the island are women. Demoting the men would put them in charge. Smile. Wave to the people."

  I smiled and waved.

  "And you think that this would be an improvement?"

  "It might be fun, but seriously, no, it would cause many more problems than it would cure."

  "Right. I think I'll just let them all worry about it for a few days, to get back at them for what they did to me, and then rescind the order."

  "Good. Next question. Did you really spank all three of Leftenant Fitzsimmon's wives?"

  "No. That wouldn't have done any good, either. The first one showed up already naked, with a bag full of handcuffs, whips, and chains. I didn't know what half of that stuff was for, even. She had all these suggestions about how I was supposed to tie her up, dangle her upside down from the ceiling, and go at her with this cat-o'-nine-tails whip she'd brought. There were these fish hook things at the end of each goddamn strand, and she was really looking forward to getting swatted with it! Short of killing her, there wasn't anything that I could do to that woman that she wouldn't have considered entertainment!"

  "So what did you do?"

  "I told her to get out of Morrow, and promised that if she ever returned, I'd have her executed. Painlessly."

  "It was probably the cruelest thing you could have done to her. What about the other two?"

  "The second one showed up with a bag of her own, but I threw her out before she had a chance to open it. I left before the third one got there."

  "Poor baby. Left alone with all the difficult decisions of command." She giggled at me, then went back to waving at the crowds.

  The reception was a long, boring affair, with ridiculously expensive foods and wines being consumed by the ton, and Barbara's father smiling throughout while his gluttonous friends and alcoholic aquaintances impoverished him. Yet he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself, so maybe there was something to Ian's potlatch theory.

  With my ushers prompting me, I went through a dozen silly ceremonies. I threw Barb's garter to the bachelors in the crowd, danced the first dance with her, and then the second with her attractive mother. Barb's bouquet went the way of all wedding bouquets, a six-foot-tall wedding cake was cut into thousands of pieces and handed out, for eating and for souveniers, and everybody kissed everybody of the opposite sex.

  I'd thought that the reception should be held at Camelot, since so many people had expressed curiosity about the place, but Barb wouldn't have it. It seems that we were only equipped to entertain a thousand people, and that wasn't nearly enough. A suitable hall was rented. I have no idea what they did with the place when the boss wasn't getting married.

  In the course of the evening, Barb told me about her plans for Camelot, which—thankfully—did not include redecorating, since she'd been in charge of decorating the castle in the first place. She figured that if she threw one party a week for sixty-five weeks, with a carefully controlled guest list, everybody on the island could have their curiosity satisfied. I figured that if that was all the mischief that she planned to get into, I was getting off light. Just so long as I was not required to attend every one of them, if they turned out to be boring.

  It was after midnight when we finally got home, and because of the tradition of the wedding night, the other girls left us in bed alone. Or maybe Barb had just scheduled it that way.

  After we'd made love a few times, I said, "So how does it feel to be Mrs. Kolczyskrenski?"

  "Oh. I hadn't really thought about changing my name. Do you want me to?"

  "Since everybody on this island is on a first name basis, I don't suppose it much matters. If we ever move back to the States, though, I'll expect your papers to say 'Barbara Kolczyskrenski.' But for now, well, what's the local custom?"

  "You keep the name you were born with. A girl is given her mother's last name, and a boy, his father's."

  "You mean his biological father's? So then our three boys are already named Kolczyskrenski? I was worried that I might have to adopt them, or something."

  "Yes, yes, and adoption isn't necessary. Your other three hundred and eighteen sons also share that name. Your two hundred and ninty-six daughters have their mother's names."

  "Six hundred and twelve kids?"

  "Conceived as of yesterday morning, Tom. Most of them are still in their mothers' wombs."

  "I'd better get a will made up! Otherwise, the lawyers are going to have a field day when I kick off."

  "I can't imagine why. We don't have that many lawyers, and inheritance doesn't play much part in our lives here."

  "Your people don't inherit anything when your parents die?"

  "Not in the normal course of things. So many of our older people spend their time traveling up the time stream, that not all that many of them have actually died. When they do, it's often by arrangement, and any property is given out as gifts by the person dying."

  "They arrange their own deaths? You mean suicide?"

  "Hardly ever that. But there are limits to what the doctors can do, and when those are reached, and the body is failing, a person usually simply gets tired of living, and welcomes death. One's best friends generally attend the gathering."

  "I'll bet that they sometimes go to each other's Death Party. 'I'll go to yours if you'll come to mine.' "

  "Yes, of course."

  "You know, this is one hell of a topic of conversation for a wedding night! What I was trying to get around to was that since I am now officially our children's father, I want to see the little buggers! I want them brought here, to the palace, by ten o'clock tomorrow morning, so I can start getting to know them."

  "Tom, I don't like that idea. We've talked about it before. This is a dangerous world up here! Too dangerous to raise children in!"

  "I am going to meet and have a hand in raising my own children! The causality laws won't let me go back to when ever it is that you keep them, so they will have to come here to me!"

  "You'd risk their lives just to satisfy your ego?"

  "I'm not risking anybody's life, my ego has nothing to do with this, and my children are not going to be raised to be three more of your dull, cowardly, uncreative drones! They are going to have every possible chance of becoming bright, curious and inventive people. The kind of people their ancestors were, out there in the real world."

  "Tom, you can't make me do this."

  "Maybe I can't, but if you don't bring them here, I'll have a military platoon go back and get them for me."

  "You'd never do that!"

  "Oh, yes I would, lady. Don't make me prove it!"

  "Tom, I believe you would."

  "That's what I've been telling you!"

  "Tom . . . Could I have a few weeks, to, to get used to the idea?"

  "Well . . . Okay, if you need it. But one limitation. You may not go back to see them until the day they leave for here and now. I don't want to discover that they're all fifteen years old when they arrive."

  * * *

  The honeymoon was not the delightful affair I'd hoped it would be. I'd made arrangements for us to tour Niagara Falls, plus the four other biggest and/or tallest waterfalls in the world, with fake ID and so on, but Barb couldn't see them as being anything but examples of the horrible, powerful destructiveness of the world I lived in. I finally gave in, and called the tour off after five days.

  "You got back early," Ian said as I sitting down at my desk. "You want to talk about it?"

  "No, I just want to get back to work."

  "When you're ready, then. Your managers tell me that everything is pretty much on schedule, but you'll want to get the details from them. Our first time trip is ready to go, again. I've had it on hold, pending your return."

  "Thanks. How about if I spend the day around here, and we leave for the eighteenth century in the morning?"

  "Suits. There's one other thing that I want to talk about, Tom. They tell me that after you cold cocked me at the party, someb
ody hit a red button, and you saw the whole procedure."

  "You figure that you didn't have it coming?"

  "No, it's not that. What's a broken bone or two, between friends? It's not like I felt any pain. I went out like a light, and woke up feeling fine in the hospital. I even went back to the party, once you were too drunk to notice. No. What bothers me is that we're now up against a violation of causality, and from everything I've heard about it, that's about the most dangerous thing a man can possibly do."

  "Naah. Don't worry about it."

  "You've got a new slant on causality?"

  "Nope, but I've got a fix for the problem at hand."

  "Enlighten me, my master."

  "Now, you're showing the proper attitude! The solution is simple. I saw the Red Button Drill, and how they took you to the hospital. You didn't, since you were out cold, enjoying your just deserts on the floor. Therefore, I won't tell you what I saw, and you will have to invent the whole thing all by yourself, without any input from me."

  "Yeah, I guess that would work. I'll do some thinking about it this afternoon."

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The Second Expedition

  This time, there wasn't anybody waiting for us near the opened time chamber except for a few guards, the construction crew and the military squad who were scheduled to go along. Everybody who was going was all decked out, as we were, in eighteenth-century finery.

  We were getting ready to shut the steel doors when Barbara, Ming Po, and a half dozen other women arived in the wide-bottomed feminine equivalents of our outfits, and tried to join us inside.

  "Whoops! Hold on, there!" I said. "You people can't come with us!"

  "And why not? We are man and wife, joined until death do us part, in your theory of things. Where you go, I go."

  "But you can't! It might be dangerous!"

  "If it is, then it's all the more reason for me to be along, to protect you. But it's not. You've said so repeatedly."