Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "Oh, yes. Your activities here, your clumsy muddling with some of the aspects of the multi-dimensional universe have caused a certain degree of distress to the Travelers. I am instructed to inform you that you must cease and desist in these activities immediately, or the Travelers will destroy your entire Solar System. These sausage things are good, too."

  There was about thirty seconds of silence, and then I said, very quietly, after getting a nod from Ian, "Barb, put out the word to everybody on the island. Do it right now. Tell them that absolutely nothing of a temporal nature may be used in any way until further notice. Every device that does anything concerning other dimensions is to be collected up and locked away, or locked off, or something done to it to make sure that nobody makes a mistake."

  Barb left quickly.

  * * *

  Barb returned, saying that she had made the order retroactive to the moment that the Teacher had walked in the front door.

  I was about to start shouting that that in itself was a use of time travel on her part, in direct contradiction to my orders, when the Teacher said, "Yes, that was quite wise of you. The Travelers really would have done it, of course. Having a hive mind, the lives of mere individuals don't mean much to them."

  "If they had destroyed the Solar System, you would have been killed, too, wouldn't you?" I said. "Why doesn't this trouble you?"

  "Because I would only be destroyed as an individual, and as I just said, we aren't very concerned about the life or death of a single individual."

  "Okay," Ian said. "I'm trying to absorb this. You say that these 'Travelers' can't live here, and if they can make somebody like you, they obviously have a technology that is vastly superior to our own. Given that, there can't be much that we have that they could want. So why are they threatening us?"

  "You are quite right. You have nothing that they want, or could possibly use. All they want of you is to be left alone. They have threatened you because you have done them a great deal of damage. Among other things, you have caused the death of several million of their component parts. Their people, as it were."

  "We have killed millions of them?" I said.

  "Quite so. You have been taking millions of tons of stone and other materials and dumping it into what you have been calling the 'Fifth Dimension.' The Travelers use that dimension, very regularily, for traveling in. The speeds involved are of course astronomic, so that even quite small particles can cause catastrophic damage to their vehicles and 'people.' "

  Barbara entered the conversation for the first time. "Just what millions of tons of stone are you talking about?"

  "Why, that installation you recently built a few hundred of your years ago on this very island," the Teacher said. "You not only dirtied our shipping lanes to an unprecedented extent, but you sent out several times the amount of rubbish than was necessary to complete your project. You wantonly destroyed several hundred of our, well, I suppose you could call them 'Passenger Liners,' and did it for no apparent reason at all."

  "I did that," Barbara said, a look of absolute horror on her face.

  "True. We examined the incident quite carefully before I was sent here."

  "I murdered millions of people?"

  "I suppose that you could say that. They were certainly terminated without their permission, and by your standards, I suppose that you could call them people."

  "I was having fun, playing with a piece of machinery. I didn't know that I was hurting anybody."

  "We know that, and of course you meant no harm. By our standards, you did no great wrong. To us, it was as if you had deleted a few million cells in our body. A minor injury at most. We don't hate you for it, but you must understand that this practice must stop."

  "By our standards, ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law," Barbara said, starting to cry.

  I said, "Hey, Barb, lighten up! He has said that all you did was mess up a few million cells in their body. That's like falling and scraping your knee. No big thing, pretty girl! It's not like you killed a human, or something."

  "But of course, she did that, also. When she was perforating the roof of the overly extensive water collection system she was putting in, she inadvertently also perforated eleven canibals who were sitting hungrily around a campfire. But they were from a culture that was soon to be extinct, so the incident shouldn't trouble her," the Teacher said.

  Barbara's eyeballs rolled up and she just crumpled silently onto the floor. As I bent down to pick her up, I said, "Oh, but it does trouble her. It troubles her greatly."

  "We are not concerned with either your emotional reactions or your primitive legal standards. Since you have agreed to stop your offensive practices, my other task is to teach you how to do things properly. Simple modifications to your equipment will enable you to dispose of your trash in such manner that you won't cause anyone else any damage. I left a suitcase in your entranceway that contains a complete set of textbooks, written in your language, that will allow you to continue with your lives without disturbing ours."

  "You are going to teach us everything there is to know about traveling in the other dimensions? Give us the theoretical background that we presently lack?"

  "Of course. It is really preferable to killing you all, and it doesn't actually cost us anything. I mean, I had to be made to deliver the message, and since I'm here, I might as well live somewhat longer and spend my time being a teacher. Also, it is quite possible that as I learn more about you, the knowledge might be useful to the Travelers. In fact it is more than possible. Already, I have learned much that is valuable. The whole phenomenon of taste is new to us. Your pancakes, sausages, and this 'coffee' are absolutely delightful!"

  "You are going to have a marvelous time when you discover sex," I said, making Barb as comfortable as I could. I didn't realize then that the damage to her psyche was permanent.

  Ian said, "Okay. You've got a deal. You teach us everything we need to know, and we'll do the same. We've got a good, complete university sitting empty on this island, and we've always wondered what it was for. Now we know. It's all yours, Teacher. Take it, staff it and run it any way you want to. Have a ball!"

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The Departure of the Smoothies

  The Teacher started out by writing down a few simple equations on a piece of paper, and Ian and I stared at them for a few minutes.

  "That's it," Ian said. "That's what we've been busting our balls on for years, trying to figure out."

  "Yeah. I sure wish it was more complicated, so I wouldn't feel so dumb."

  "All the world's great ideas are simple, and always have been, all the way through history."

  "I'll take your word for it," I said. "Anyway, these equations prove that the Teacher's for real. I don't see that we have any choice but to do everything that he says."

  "Yeah. And here I was hoping that I would go down in history as one of science's greatest thinkers."

  "Me too. But we have to either give up on that dream, or have our Solar System destroyed because we are guilty of Interstellar Littering. On the other hand, well, we're still filthy rich. That's got to count for something."

  "It always has, Tom. It always has."

  * * *

  The first major effect of having the Teacher around was that, since it was obvious that Ian and I hadn't invented all this time travel stuff in the first place, it would not violate causality if we got to see some of it, and learn how it worked.

  It turned out that there were four time travel terminals on the island, which were connected to the subway system. All you had to know was which destination button to push, and there you were.

  Actually, I don't remember ever pressing any of those two-hundred-odd buttons on the wall of each subway car. I was always with a crowd of girls, and one of them always pushed the buttons. In my years on the island, I had never dialed a telephone, rung a doorbell, or written a letter. It was easy to see (now) how they had so easily kept so many things from us. I began to realize that
having too many servants makes you a rather limited person.

  Anyway, you stepped across the hallway from the subway door and into a small room. A panel on the wall let you dial in the time that you wanted to arrive at, and you pushed a button. The door closed and in a little while it opened. Then you were then. There was no free-fall, since the room was able to maneuver within Earth's gravitational field, now, but the transit time was still there, which was why people used the more spacious and comfortable canisters for traveling long temporal distances.

  I was told that if I was going to start using the Local Temporal Transport System, one thing that I had to be careful of was to keep a close watch over my own circadian rhythms. It was all too easy to get them out of step with one another, and there was a danger of getting yourself stuck in a permanent jet lag.

  It was frustrating to see how simple it all was, and embarassing to realize that we hadn't been smart enough to figure it out by ourselves.

  * * *

  The next thing we did was to take the Teacher around, and show him every bit of temporal engineering that we had on the island. He passed judgement on each device, saying whether it was okay to use, or it needed modification, or it had to be destroyed immediately.

  It was our tunneling and digging equipment that caused most of the problems. Mechanically, the devices were okay, but the electronic controls had to be destroyed, and entirely new ones built and installed. The same went for some of the weapons we'd been so proud of. Not the bombs, since they returned all the matter involved back to our own dimensions, as did the emergency power generators and the escape harnesses. But all the variations of the temporal swords were no longer allowed, not without a complete redesign. The earliest models, which caused some residual radiation, were deemed acceptable by the Teacher, but they had all been replaced years ago by what we thought were cleaner models, which dumped the trash into the fifth dimension, rather than into our own future. It was with great regret that I unclipped my temporal sword from my belt, and handed it to the Teacher.

  * * *

  The Teacher took over the university that we had given him, hired some administrators at our expense to schedule classes and keep student records, and put on some more housekeepers, janitors and gardeners to keep the place very neat and clean. Then he proceeded to teach every class himself, doubling back in time as much as necessary to get the job done. You could go through the school and see what appeared to be hundreds of him, teaching hundreds of small classes of typically ten students. He soon took over an entire student dormitory for himself, and lived in all of the rooms, aparently simultaneously.

  And it wasn't only multi-spatial engineering that he was lecturing about. The Travelers were way ahead of us in almost everything scientific, cultural, mathematical or philosophic. The Teacher was prepared to teach anything to anybody at any time. New textbooks somehow materialized on a regular basis and were sent to our print shops for duplication. Of course, you had to be a Smoothie, a Killer, or a member of the Historical Core to get on the island, so enrollment at the university was somewhat restricted. Maybe we'll change the rules, later. Maybe much later.

  The Teacher always dressed very well. He discovered that with a little re-tailoring, Ian's worn-once outfits fit him very well, and that he liked them. My old clothes, being a bit small for him, continued to fill up the closets in my palace.

  The ladies of the island were as attracted to the Teacher as they were to the three of us, but I think for different reasons. He liked them as well, and he found sex to be as marvelous a thing as I had promised him it would be. Sex, but not reproduction. For whatever reason, he proved to be sterile, with human women, anyway.

  Ian and I got private tutoring, of course, but we didn't do all that well at it. We'd been the boss for too long to slip easily back into the role of being mere schoolboys, but we did pick up a few pointers.

  One thing that I was delighted to learn was that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a purely local phenomenon that only applied to some aspects of a three dimensional universe. I'd known it all along. With a bit of digging, I found plans for a simple device that turned water into ice cubes, and produced electricity as a by-product.

  I also finally learned why it took time to travel in time. The way the Travelers looked at it, what we were doing when we traveled in time was taking a defined portion of our space-time continuum, and bending it into the other dimensions. Within that defined portion (think of it as sort of a pipe), space and time remain completely normal. They have to, since if they ever became discontinuous, even for an instant, anyone inside would cease to live, or even to exist.

  Now, this wasn't the way I had been looking at what we were doing. It seemed to me that I was working with fields and forces, not bending continuums. I don't know. Maybe I never did really understand time travel. I've heard that DeForrest never really understood what was going on in a vacuum tube. He only invented the thing. Other people, like Major Armstrong, figured out why it worked.

  So our island was finding a new role in life. It was now becoming a university town. This was good, since its other functions were starting to shut down.

  At the shop, all of our subordinates had enrolled at the university as soon as it was opened, and doubled forward and back as necessary, usually completing several years of graduate work in what appeared to us to be a single night.

  Within a few days, all of the people in our little company were retrained, barring two of the janitors (a musicologist and a history major, who weren't interested in technical things), and within a few weeks, all of our old machinery and weapons were operational in the new, safe mode.

  Sometimes, when there was some bit of trash that we were sure that the world would never need again, we would simply dump it into the sun. More often, it was sent to a recycling center where the stuff was broken down into its constituent atoms, sorted, and stored. Well, things like pure oxygen, argon and nitrogen were usually just released into the environment. Then, if you needed a few tons of pure silicon, titanium or gold, well, you knew where to go.

  Now that our engineers had textbooks to go by, they didn't need to be creative at all. They had all the answers that a culture a thousand times older than our own had come up with. If you had a problem, all you had to do was look it up. The girls turned out some marvelous things, but for Ian and me, well, they didn't need us anymore.

  We were still in charge and all, but there weren't many opportunities to earn the undying admiration of our loyal workers because of our astounding creativity.

  Work got very boring, for me at least. Ian was so wrapped up with getting his Historical Core going that he usually didn't have time to eat, let alone talk to old friends.

  In many of the manufacturing plants around, work was getting nonexistent. One day I noticed that the window frame plant, which we had toured in one of our first weeks on the island, was closing down. All of the stock bins were empty, the last of the finished windows were being hauled away, and the machinery was being packed into shipping containers.

  Ian and I found the plant manager.

  "What goes on here?" I asked.

  "Why, we're closing down, sir."

  "I can see that. But why?"

  "Lack of work, I suppose. We've filled all of our orders and used up all of our raw materials, so it is time to close it all up."

  "They stopped ordering windows? Strange. But then, I never could figure out where all of those windows were going in the first place."

  "Going, sir? Why, look around you! Every window on this entire island was manufactured right here in this plant, and so was every window at Atlantic Ridge City. All of the necessary repair and replacement windows have been manufactured and stored, so they won't be needing this facility ever again. The machinery is all being sold to a company in Mexico, they tell me. It will be working for many years yet, but I won't. I'll be retiring as soon as we finish getting the building cleaned out."

  "I hope you enjoy the rest," Ian said. "But what
was that you were saying about a city on the Atlantic Ridge?"

  "They never told you about that, sir? How odd. Well, anyway, during the Ice Age before last, the level of the oceans got so low that a few hundred square miles of the Atlantic Ridge became exposed to the air. It's a perfect place for all of us Smoothies to live, for thousands of years. The climate is lovely, there's no local ecology to disrupt, so we can bring in modern plants and farm animals without endangering existing species, and when it eventually sinks back into the sea, there won't be any possibility of problems with causality. My plant made all the windows we'll ever need for the city and all the surrounding countryside."

  "I guess they never told us because we never asked. What are they going to do with your old factory building?" I asked.

  "I'm sure I don't know, sir. Maybe the university will find some use for it. It's not my concern. I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon."

  "You're going to Atlantic Ridge City?"

  "Yes. The wife and I have bought a nice apartment there, with a good view of the ocean. It's a two week trip, going back that far, but we've booked a private canister, and we're looking forward to the trip. The wife is calling it our second honeymoon."

  "Well, enjoy yourself. I wish you both the best of everything."

  "Thank you, sir. I'll give the wife your regards."

  As the weeks went on, more and more factories and shops were closing down, their purposes for existing having been completed. In time, I began to notice that the crowds were thinning down, that the concert halls were no longer full, and that the plays often had fewer actors and were being given shorter runs.

  Ian asked me if I didn't want to go back and see this Atlantic Ridge City that everybody was abandoning our island for, but I didn't want to do it, not now, anyway. When we got to talking about it, he said that he felt about the same way as I did. Later. We'd do it later.

  Then one night I found a new woman in my bed.

  Barbara's depression had grown until she had stopped sleeping with me. The doctors couldn't seem to do anything for her. I figured that maybe if I let her have her space, and gave her enough time, she would eventually recover. It wasn't like I needed the sex, what with all the other girls around.