Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "Yeah, that much is fine," Ian said. "But somebody is bound to get curious about the flush toilets."

  "I hadn't planned to use flush toilets, sir. Just a seat with a hole in it. A tight-fitting lid should keep the smell down."

  "If we can teach the men to put down the toilet seats," Barbara said.

  "I suppose I could hinge the lids so that you had to hold them up, ma'am. That way they would close automatically."

  "Why couldn't they do that in our century?" Barbara said, but I shushed her.

  "What about the water system?" I asked.

  "There's a nice steady breeze here most of the time, sir. A well and a windmill in the next valley should provide for our needs, with a simple aqueduct system to deliver it to the town. Much of it can be built within the outer city wall. Each major building will have a cistern that is also filled by rainwater. A second windmill on the castle can pump the water for its requirements."

  "It might be better for the castle to have its own well. And if we ever have to stand a seige, we'll want to have the windmill inside the town. We can run a tunnel from some underground aquifer to the windmill. But all told, I suppose it beats having two hundred slaves to do the hauling. Is this okay with the rest of you? Then let's do it," I said.

  "And we'd better get it done fast, since this island isn't as uninhabited as I'd like it to be," Ian said. "We need defenses in case we're seriously attacked, and we don't want any of the locals to see how we're going to build them. This is going to have to be an all-out effort until the exteriors of things at least are up."

  * * *

  The next step was clearing the land that the harbor, the town, and the castle would be built on, or more often carved into. It would have been easy enough to just run the tunneler over it all, but most of the area was heavily wooded, and we would be needing the lumber.

  Felling the trees was no problem, not when every one of us carried a temporal sword. The problem was hauling the usable logs out of the way, when we had only one small lift truck and the tunneler. We also had a small traveling crane, though, and the tunneler soon cut some straight temporary roads that let the crane drag in logs for the lift truck to stack.

  We cleared the top of the hill first, because building the castle would be the biggest job, and we had get going on it soonest.

  Barbara liked operating the tunneler, and proved to be very competent in operating it. This was good, since unlike the rest of us, she didn't have to sleep, and we needed more than twelve hours of work a day out of that machine. Ming Po comandeered the lift truck, and one of the other girls, Kelly, took over the traveling crane. The other five women were on kitchen and housekeeping duty, leaving us mere men to do the grunt work. Two of the Killers were always on guard duty, but the rest were put to work.

  Within a day, the hilltop was logged over, and by working through the night, Barb and "her" tunneler had us down to a big flat piece of limestone bedrock by morning. The hill and the tunnel mouth had become thirty-five feet lower, and my nifty interlocking steel hoops were gone.

  The town and the harbor covered over six hundred acres, and logging it took us over a week. The tunneler easily kept up with the rest of us. For this sort of work, digging with an open sky above you, the tunneler was equipped with a periscope that let the operator see over the front shovel. With its side wings on, and driving an easy seven miles an hour, that thing was capable of sending twenty-five hundred cubic feet of rock into oblivion every second. By the time we had the tree trunks hauled away, Barb had the harbor cut down to fifty feet deep, complete with stone piers, a launching ramp, and a dry dock. A thirty-two-foot-wide road surrounded it, a road of equal width ran on both sides of the town wall, and some of the connecting roads were in as well. A big town square was cut, with a big block of limestone left in the center to be eventually cut into a fountain. She had been able to leave enough good rock in position so that half the outer wall, complete with towers and gates, was already built, and the larger buildings closest to the castle, where a hill used to be, could be made by simply hollowing them out, rather that having to build them up out of cut stone. The architect calculated that there was plenty enough good limestone left inside the buildings, and in the unfinished roads, to complete the town.

  We quarried the stone for the castle out of the granite walls of the staging area down near the canister we'd arrived in. It would have to be hauled up the tunnel to the top of the hill, but there was already a freight elevator of sorts to do the job. Well, it was a cart that ran on stone rails cut on either side of the steps going up. An electric winch moved it up and down.

  With a temporal sword, cutting stone was no problem. You just switched it on and whacked away. Cutting it accurately, however, required that you carefully place a simple aluminum frame with an adjustable rail that you set up to where you wanted the cut to be. There was a sword that cut a quarter-inch-wide hole mounted on a little wheeled trolly that rolled along the rail. You needed that thickness to slide metal bars between the blocks before you cut them loose from the wall. Without the bars, you couldn't get a lift truck fork under a block to lift it.

  The lift truck operator took the blocks to the stair elevator and sent them up in groups of four. At the top of the steps, a worker checked the blocks and if necessary did some trimming on them. He also put two holes in each one, so the crane would have something to grab onto, and attached them to the end of the traveling crane's cable.

  Our crane was small, and had to drive along on top of the eight-foot thick wall it was building. A fifth worker eased the blocks in place and mortared them down.

  Our usual block was two feet wide by two feet high by four feet long, and weighed about two tons. Once we got into it, a team of five of us averaged one block—cut, hauled, and mortared into place—every minute and a half. The Smoothies were amazingly coordinated, and worked together like a well designed machine. Every one of them seemed to know exactly what everyone around them was doing, what needed to be done next, and what their part in that ought to be. They did construction work the way auto workers built cars—with calm, cool effiency, even though each of their jobs was new and different, and the car workers had been doing the same things over and over again for years. The Killers were competent and hard working, but at the end of the day, they each got only half as much done as a Smoothie. And despite our advantages of size and strength, Ian and I weren't quite as good as a pair of Killers when it came to getting things done.

  We started quarrying a rock face that was eight feet tall, as high as the little electric lift truck could lift. Being taller than the rest, Ian and I spelled each other doing the cutting. Even so, we were a week getting the outer walls of the castle built, and that was working a twelve-hour day. Putting in the interior partitions, floors and ceilings, with all the supporting arches required, was going to take months, but that could be done after company came, working behind the shield of the outer walls. We made a point of leaving plenty of extra stone over and around doors, windows, fireplaces, and banisters, so that decorations could be carved in later. Doing all that fine work might take years, but that could be done at some future date when people felt bored and artistic.

  Actually, after years of skull sweat, doing manual labor was kind of fun. These new bodies of ours gloried in hard work. I suspect that the construction workers had had similar treatments, since they didn't seem to have any trouble keeping up with us big guys. Or maybe Smoothies were just built that way.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Barbara's Tunneling Machine

  Barbara and her tunneler pretty much worked straight through, barring quick stops for meals and occasional bouts lovemaking with me. She was a few days getting all the sewers and secret passages in, including a second set of both that extended outside the town's walls. This was her idea, for future expansion, she said.

  She also went way overboard when it came to getting our water supply in. She cut twenty-two miles of tunnels, twelve feet high and eight wide, eighty fe
et below sea level in the remarkably solid limestone under the island, and then rigged a dozen half-inch drills in a fan-shaped array on her tunneler to punch millions of holes in the roof all the way to the surface. This drained ground water into two huge underground vaults that the windmills could draw water from.

  It also punched holes in thousands of trees that would otherwise have been good timber. When I complained about this, Barb said that there wasn't any way to be sure exactly how far up the surface was, and it was better to be safe than sorry. The damage was done, and it wouldn't be repeated, so I let the matter drop.

  The architect calculated that once the system filled with water, if the island suffered from a total drought for twenty years, we would still have plenty of water for all of our needs.

  Personally, I think Barbara just liked digging tunnels.

  Another crew was working with the logs we'd collected during the ground clearance. There wouldn't be time to season the wood properly before we turned it into furniture, doors and window shutters, but any seasoning was better than none, so we got on it soonest.

  Our "saw mill" looked like a long, aluminum sawhorse that you set up above the log you were planning to turn into boards. Up to sixteen temporal swords fit on a wheeled trolley that ran along the bottom of the long beam of the sawhorse. Pulling the trolley the length of the horse sliced the log into nice, smooth lumber.

  The hard part was stacking the wood in neat, rectangular piles so it would dry out properly.

  * * *

  Despite the long hours we all put in, it wasn't all work, not by a long shot. Every Smoothie can play at least one musical instrument, and most of them brought one along. Being ungodly cooperative, group singing came naturally to them. Furthermore, Barb was a world class ballerina, and her friends weren't far behind her.

  The sea was full of fish, and there was plenty of game on the island, from wild pigs, birds, feral goats and cattle, to sea turtles. Ian claimed that many of them had been put on these islands by Christians to feed shipwrecked sailors, and to give the cannibals something to eat besides each other.

  The trick with the cannibals hadn't worked. Apparently, once you develop a taste for human flesh, nothing else quite makes it.

  The Killers liked to hunt and fish, so we didn't have to live on the canned food we'd brought along. A bakery, a brewery, and a still were among the first things they got going, and weather permitting, we usually ate around a campfire.

  With the Killers providing the food and drink, and the Smoothies the entertainment, a very good time was had by all.

  * * *

  When there was nothing else for Barbara to do but cut the canal that would connect our harbor to the sea, she warned us, and we all knocked off work to watch. She had already cleared the canal down to a few inches above the high tide level.

  The tunneler was sealed against both a hard vacuum and high pressure, and was as sturdy as a submarine, so taking it into the water wasn't what bothered me. I was having visions of the sea water driving her backward into the harbor, and smashing her against a pier or something.

  Most people just don't realize the force of moving water. Thousands of people are killed in floods every year all around the world, but very few of them actually drown. Most often, they are ripped to naked pieces by the force of the water smashing them into things.

  But Barbara insisted on doing it herself, and out-arguing her was a lot like out-stuborning a cat. You can do it, but it usually isn't worth the effort.

  She got the tunneler into position on a notch that she had cut earlier for the purpose. She swung her wings out to their full thirty-two foot width, and took off at about thirty miles an hour. She ran out of stone to drive on about the time she hit the beach, but that didn't slow her down. She just pressed on regardless, eating up prodigious amounts of rocks, sand, and then water. She didn't even stop when she was completely submerged, but continued on with the water flowing over and around the big wings.

  With hindsight, I can see the wisdom of her actions. She had to get out and away from the backwash she was kicking up. At the time she scared the shit out of me!

  Watching her, I almost missed the start of the hydraulic show she'd kicked up. Water gushed up her recently cut canal at what must have been sixty miles an hour. It made a spectacular waterfall as it splashed down into a harbor that you could hide a five-story building in.

  In a few minutes, Barb and her tunneler drove up onto the beach. She shut down the shovels, folded her wings, and hurried back to see the waterfall she'd made. She needen't have rushed. The harbor was more than six hours filling up. Only then, when the rapid flow had ceased, was it safe to go back and cut the channel wider and deeper.

  * * *

  We spent another two months getting the town pretty much finished. The buildings were all up, with walls and roofs, and had doors and window shutters, but were lacking glass windows, and were mostly without furnishings. They were connected to the sewer tunnels, but not to the secret passageways that would let our agents and historians communicate with the modern libraries and work rooms in the basement of the castle. The secret entranceways would be installed later on an "as needed" basis.

  The castle had four floors, stairways, inner walls, partitions, and nicely arched ceilings, but was still pretty bare inside. The drawbridge was in, spanning the moat, but we didn't have the chains and mechanisms needed to draw it up. The moat was still dry, except for some rainwater. The wells were in, but we didn't have the pumps or the windmills to bring up large quantities of water.

  Barb had talked the architect into letting her put a seawater moat all around the town, and this meant that we had to put in drawbridges at each of the town's three gates. They didn't work yet, either. Ian came up with a system of two floating check valves that, with the action of the tides, kept the water in the moat circulating in a clockwise fashion, keeping it fresh.

  Next, somebody made the mistake of telling her how a fish weir worked, and the area near the town soon sported two big ones. We soon had more fish than we could eat. The ones we couldn't eat were eaten by the bigger ones, and nature took its course.

  Then, she decided that she didn't like the way the town was situated in a notch cut into the surrounding hills, so, without informing the rest of us, and working at night, she had eliminated the hills. She didn't even let us save the lumber. Except where it abutted the cliff, with the castle above, the town was now surrounded by a smooth, stone plain. I suppose that this was good, from the standpoint of defense, but esthetically, well, it looked like the parking lot of a big shopping mall. How she was planning to get some soil and plants growing there was beyond me.

  She just liked playing with that tunneler.

  To keep her out of further mischief, I had the architect draw up plans for a road system that she could cut through the whole island, and that had kept her busy for months. We rigged a temporal sword to the front of the tunneler, and cobbled up a bulldozer blade for the front of it so she could cut the trees and push the logs off the roadway, rather than sending them to wherever such things went when we sent them elsewhere.

  I made her promise to stay inside of her beloved machine whenever she was outside the town walls, so the natives couldn't hurt her. They never tried to. If they were still out there, we didn't see any of them.

  To look authentic, the castle and the forts guarding the entrance to the harbor needed dozens of ornate, eighteenth-century cannons, which we didn't have yet.

  Only the Red Gate Inn was really complete, sitting on the town square, with the big fountain in front of it. The fountain was empty, but we didn't have any horses that needed to drink from it anyway. At least Ian claimed that that was what public fountains were really for, originally.

  You'd think that I would be the one who wanted a good bar in operation, but no, it was Ian who pushed the inn into completion first, even ahead of the church across the big square.

  He explained himself one night in the common room of the inn.
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br />   "I'll get the church finished, don't worry about it. But right now, I'm the only one here who would use it, and I can pray just fine in my room."

  That surprised me. I'd never actually seen Ian praying. Then again, I'd never seen him shitting either. I guess that they were both very private occupations with him.

  "The inn is another matter. Our people, the historians, are going to have to spend much of their time traveling around. They are going to want to see everything that goes on, but not draw too much attention to themselves. Now I ask you, where is the one place where a stranger is not much noticed? Obviously, at a hotel or inn. And where are other travelers most likely to gather and swap their stories? At a bar in an inn, of course. Therefore, the centers that the Historical Core will build and use will have to be inns. Eventually, we'll need to build thousands of these, in every age and culture the world has known. And to make sure that our agents can find those inns, we are going to mark them all with a bright red front door, and all of them are going to named 'The Red Gate Inn,' or some variation of that in the local language."

  "It sounds like a program," I said. "Do you suppose that the Red Gate Inn, back in the twentieth century, is one of your Historical Core centers?"

  "I expect that it might be. We'll probably decide that the history of the island is just as important as the history of every place else."

  "You keep saying 'we,' but you know, Ian, it's really your program. I mean, I'd be happy to help out and all, but you are the one who is so fascinated with history. I'm interested in what happened in the past, but it's nothing that I want to spend my whole life working on."

  "Huh. Then what do you want to spend your life doing?"