Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "As I have said, I may not speak of such things. But for now, would you care for some more of this wine?"

  * * *

  The French ship also contained a fair store of luxury items, like fine China dinnerware, cut glass ware, and rich cloth for clothing, curtains and furniture. In the end, we bought almost their entire cargo, except for some wine that the count praised highly, but which was really bad stuff. French wine has always been vastly over rated.

  We emptied out their ship to such an extent that we had to sell them twenty tons of granite bricks that we said were left over from the building, for ballast, so their ship wouldn't fall over.

  But mostly, we now had forty-three bronze cannons of various sizes. They were gorgeously ornate and absolutely authentic. We now had enough weapons not only for the forts and the castle, but for the city gates as well.

  Our guests left with a long list of things we needed, and they promised to return in the spring.

  "So, Ian," I said, as we watched the ship clear the harbor. "Can we go home now?"

  "Yes, Tom, now we can go home."

  * * *

  Most of the construction crew stayed behind to finish up the job, and to get some farmland cleared. Since most Smoothies were good artists, when they could copy somebody else's work, and since we had books on eighteenth-century decorative art with us, they were looking forward to decorating our new buildings with their temporal swords.

  I gave them my blessings. I also told them that it might come in handy to have a sailing ship of our own, and that they might want to get started building one, once the gates on the dry dock were constructed. Our Smoothie carpenter drooled at the idea. Building an eighteenth-century ship suitable for the needs of a wealthy merchant-adventurer was something that he had fantasized about for most of his life. He said that it would take him a few years, and he made me promise to come back and sail it when he had it completed. I said I'd do that, provided that he made the ceilings high enough so that I wouldn't bump my head.

  Lieutenant McMahon and his men elected to stay on for a while to protect them, they said. Mostly, I think, they wanted to get the cannons mounted so that they could have some fun shooting them.

  Four of the ladies who had formed attachments with men from one group or the other stayed on to do the cooking, but the rest returned home with Ian and me.

  Our carpenter said that it seemed wasteful to send the canister back empty. He had our storage area filled with wood that he said was very rare in our era, and he asked us to have it sent to his furniture factory in the twentieth century.

  Our time canister was such that in order to safely return, since we had spent four months in the past, we had to return four months after we left.

  My mathematician, Preston, was the only person waiting to greet us.

  "Boss, if the shop has to go four months without the two of you being there, we are going to run out of stuff to do. Things will go a lot better at work if we have the two of you there in charge. If you don't mind, I'll blindfold both of you, and take you back in time, the same way I got you to your wedding."

  It didn't make sense to let things at the shop stall out for lack of direction, so Ian and I went along with it. After ten minutes of stumbling around in the dark, we found ourselves back home in my palace.

  I said, "Someday, we are going to have to figure out how we are going to did that."

  "Yeah. It's really annoying to have to work on something that you don't completely understand. But we'll do it someday. We'll have to. It's preordained."

  "Right. Well. First things first. Ian, you promised to help me to get my children up here. Barbara, I have been very patient with you in this matter, but enough is enough. You now have two-thirds of the Board of Directors of this place ordering you to produce our three children. Are you going to bring them to me here and now, or am I going to send a military detachment back to wherever and whenever they are to get them?"

  "Damn you, Tom! Can't you get it through your thick skull that it's dangerous up here?"

  "Okay. If you're worried about the kids' safety, I'll have a squad of very polite and discreet soldiers on duty twenty-four hours a day, guarding them. If you want, I'll have Lieutenant McMahon do the job. Now, are you going to get them, or do I send out the troops?"

  "I'll do it myself, damn you. It's better doing it that way than to have a squad of Killers handling my children."

  "Come on! You've just spent four months in close company with a bunch of those Killers. They're not such bad guys."

  "They are still Killers! My people don't kill the way you and those hired guns of yours do!"

  "Me? If you are referring to that cannibal I killed, well, just what was I supposed to do? He had just murdered a woman, and he was charging at me with a bloody axe in his hands! I waited till the last possible moment before I cut him down! I didn't have any choice!"

  "You could have run away! You could probably have outdistanced him without any difficulty."

  "Probably is not a very encouraging word when somebody is trying to chop you up with an axe! Running might have worked, but what was I supposed to do if it didn't? What if that cannibal was faster than he looked?"

  "Maybe you could have led him back to the others. Then one of the Killers could have done the dirty work."

  "So now it's evil to defend myself, but okay to get somebody else to do my killing for me? You have a lousy concept of ethics, lady! Anyway, what if I had tripped, or the Indian had caught up with me, with my back turned and my weapons still at my belt? What then, huh?"

  "Then you could have died! That's what one of my people would have done, rather than be guilty of killing somebody else. We don't kill!"

  "Is that so? Then why haven't I noticed that all of you are vegetarians? Why were you enjoying the roast meat around the campfire with the rest of us?"

  "That's not the same thing! Those were animals, not people!"

  "That cannibal didn't see much difference between the two! Killing is killing."

  "He wasn't civilized, and neither are you! Anyway, those animals we ate were already dead when the Killers brought them in."

  "So now you're back to having somebody else doing your killing for you! To hell with this! Shut up and go get my boys!"

  "You don't have any respect for life at all!" she said as she stamped out.

  * * *

  On the island, everything always happened when you wanted it to happen, without all the inevitable time lags that occur in the real world. Therefore, I was taken aback when six hours went by before Barb returned with my three sons. Maybe she was punishing me, or maybe she wanted to give me a chance to cool down. Whatever she had in mind, it didn't work.

  But when she finally got there, she was trying to be pleasant. Trying, but not exactly making it, and what little I know about kids says that they are a lot like dogs when it comes to picking up on the mood of those around them. We all tried to make the best of an awkward situation.

  They were good-looking boys, blond and big for their age, but they didn't seem to have the energy, the spunk, the just plain bad manners that you expect from healthy youngsters.

  They were named Tom, Ian, and Jim, after me and my friends. I thought that was a nice gesture on Barb's part, but that she really should have asked my opinion about it before she named them. When you name little people after big people who are still alive, they end up being called things like "Junior," or "Butchie," or "Little Tommy," which doesn't do the kid's ego much good.

  Still, it was done, and the best thing to do about it was to live with the situation, and use middle names when necessary.

  I told them that they were welcome to our island.

  They didn't say much. They acted as though they were afraid of me, or of the world around them.

  I said that my partners and I owned the whole place, and if there was anything that they wanted, all they had to do was ask.

  They didn't ask for anything.

  I told them that we had horse
s here, and that we could go horseback riding in the morning, if they wanted to.

  Apparently, they didn't want to.

  I talked about scuba diving and flying airplanes, but I didn't get much of any response. Camping and fishing didn't get me anywhere, either.

  The whole thing was depressing. I mean, I know that I don't know anything about kids, but I was a kid once myself, and back then I would have lied in the Confessional to get the kind of offers that I was giving these boys. It was like there wasn't any "boyishness" in any of them at all.

  I don't know.

  Maybe I was coming on too strong. Maybe I really was a barbarian, and they were the civilized ones. Or maybe they had been given too God damned many lessons in how to be a Smoothie.

  Individualism, that's what they needed. The three of them had been living together in one room for too long. I had each of them assigned a big suite of rooms, in three different corners of the palace. I gave each of them a half dozen women as their personal servants, in addition to the four Killers who were assigned to guard each of my boys around the clock. I made sure that all of their teachers would be Killers, too. The program might turn them into spoiled rotten brats, but they sure as hell wouldn't be Smoothies for long.

  * * *

  When I got to my office in the morning, I found that I had been gone for only two days. There hadn't been time for any management problems to crop up, so I could spend my time playing engineer. After four months as a construction worker, it felt good.

  The architect had given me sketches of all the special machinery we would need in the eighteenth century, as well as lists of other supplies that would be needed to complete the job properly. It looked as though we would have to send about twenty cargo canisters to haul it all back there. Besides furnishings for the castle, there were the ordinary household supplies needed by three thousand people. Plates, cooking pots, silverware, towels and an almost endless stream of other things. I gave it all to my secretary, and told her to get it done.

  Ian was busy working out the manning requirements for his Historical Core, so I got busy on a few pieces of machinery that we hadn't considered before.

  Feeding the people of our little town would require about thirty thousand acres of farmland, if what I understood about the productivity of eighteenth-century farming techniques was correct. Clearing the land of trees could be done with temporal swords, if we could do it privately, or the hard way, with axes, if the locals were around. But chopping down the trees was the easy part. Something had to be done with the tree stumps and roots, and after that, the soil would inevitably be full of rocks and stones that would take millions of man hours to remove.

  I sketched up something I called a shredder, a simple two-wheeled vehical twelve feet wide that could be pulled with a farm tractor, a horse, or even by hand, if the ground was level. It contained six hundred temporal swords, a third of them pointing straight down, and the rest at a forty-five degree angle to one side or the other. As you pulled this over a field, everything under it for a yard down was sliced to bits a half inch across at most. Going over it a second time, at right angles to the first pass, should mean that you would be able to get a plough through it immediately. The rocks and bits of wood would have a lot of sharp edges, and it might be years before you could work in the fields barefoot, but the chips would round out eventually.

  I calculated that one shredder should prepare about forty acres for planting in an eight hour day. I ordered ten of the shredders to be made up, along with an equal number of light farm tractors to be powered by something like Ian's emergency generators. Then I doubled the number of tractors, since they could be used for dragging logs as well.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The Appearence of the Teacher

  The next morning, there were a lot of changes at my breakfast table. Barbara, Ming Po, Ian and I, our usual "Gang of Four," were there, but now my three boys had joined us as well, and that somehow made a dent in the usual free-wheeling conversation. We just didn't feel comfortable enough with each other to get into a decent argument.

  The maids were fully clothed now, as were all the other women around Camelot and quite possibly the whole island. I guess that the ladies had decided that running around naked didn't generate the right atmosphere to raise young boys in. I had to agree with them, in a way, but a part of me missed the old ways.

  The breakfast conversation had degenerated into a monologue by Barbara about the necessity of leading a virtious life, of being careful and considerate of others, and never harming anyone, and so on. She went on and on about how she had never hurt anyone in her entire life. It was nothing that you could really object to, but it was getting damned boring, nonetheless. Thus, I welcomed the interruption when a maid came and announced that we had a visitor with an urgent message.

  We got very few visitors at Camelot, and time travel being what it is, we never got unexpected guests.

  Bemused, I said, "Well, send him in."

  He was a young man of proper size. That is to say, he was about six foot ten, about halfway between Ian and myself. He was well built and had those straight features that most women seem to find attractive. Clean shaven, and with short blond hair, he wore the same sort of hyperexpensive silk and vicuna outfit that Ian and I usually sported.

  "I see that we have the same doctor," Ian said.

  "No, we don't," the stranger said. "But I can understand why you would think that, since my exterior form was patterned after you and your partners."

  I said, "You were 'patterned' after us. Great green gobs of greasy gopher shit. This might turn out to be an interesting day after all. Barb, call the office and tell them that Ian and I will be late for work. I expect that this conversation might be a long one." Barb nodded but of course she didn't have to leave and do it right now. "So, stranger, do you have a name?"

  "From studying your people, I assumed that you would expect one. Would 'Teacher' be adequate? Or perhaps 'Ambasador'?"

  "Those are more like titles than proper names," Ian said. "Unless you want to be 'Mr. Teacher,' of course."

  "I would be happy with any designation that you would care to use."

  "I'd be happier to know what your real name is," I said.

  "In reality, I don't have a name. My people don't use separate names for individuals, although we occasionally use job classifications. Any name I use will be strictly for your convenience."

  "Tom, assuming that this isn't an elaborate practical joke, it looks like we've just come across our third cultural group. First the Smoothies, then the Killers, and now this bunch."

  "I'd like it to be a joke. It would mean that Hasenpfeffer is becoming human again. But I don't think that it is," I said. "Okay, Teacher, so what are your people called?"

  "It might be best if you called us 'The Travelers,' since it is in that connection that I was made to contact you with a message."

  "Before we get to this message of yours, you say that you were 'made'? Do you mean that you are some sort of machine, a robot?" Ian asked.

  "Not in the sense of what you think of as a robot. I am a biological construct, not a thing of metal. If your biologists were to examine me, they would find hydrocarbons, proteins, and DNA that is not too different from what they are accustomed to seeing. They might find some differences in my gross anatomy that would suprise them, but then again they might not. The Travelers would not have been able to come to you themselves, being physically incapable of surviving on this planet, and being mentally incapable of having a meaningful conversation with you. You, of course, have the same incapacities with respect to them. An intermediary was therefore necessary. I am it, or he, if you prefer."

  "And just what are these physical incapabilities you are referring to?" I said.

  "There are many. At the most basic level, your body chemistry is based primarily on carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen compounds surrounded by water. The Travelers use those elements, plus a lot of silicon and fluorine compounds all surr
ounded by ammonia. You are quite poisonous to each other."

  "And mentally?"

  "You are individuals who exist in a diffuse cultural matrix and communicate in a serial fashion using modulated sound waves. The Travelers have a hive mind, and while they are physically individuals, they are mentally a single entity. They communicate in a broad-band, parallel fashion using modulations in an energy field that you have not yet discovered. In addition, your people live in three dimensions while traveling through a fourth, which you call time. The Travelers live in five dimensions, while traveling in two others. In addition, your people have a rather stodgy disposition, while the Travelers have an extensive sense of humor that I don't think that you could ever comprehend."

  "Ian, that sounds like such a crock of shit that it is almost certain to be true."

  "Yeah. So you can somehow communicate with these seven-dimensional Aliens who built you?"

  "That might be a fair statement. Or, it might be more accurate to say that I am a seven-dimensional Alien, as well as being a four-dimensional creature who strongly resembles you humans. In order to do my job properly, I had to be made with a dual nature. You might say that I am an interface."

  "I always wondered what it would be like when the Aliens finally landed. I never expected them to walk in for breakfast," I said. "In any event, please sit down. Would you like some breakfast? You do eat, don't you?"

  "Oh, yes. This part of me was made to be perfectly human, as nearly as possible."

  "Good. Make yourself at home."

  The maids quickly brought in another chair and a large tray of assorted breakfast foods.

  "I hope to. After all, this part of me will be spending the rest of my life here."

  "No way of going back to the seven-dimensional world, I take it?" Ian said.

  "Not with this body, and of course my other half can't exist in this world. I exist, must exist, in both. It's rather difficult to explain. These pancakes are absolutely delicious. I've never eaten anything before, you know."

  "Well then, you have a lot to learn, as well as teach, I suppose. There was some talk about a message that you had for us?"