Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  Anyway, having lived with them for years, I had of course gotten to know my household staff pretty well, as well as the ladies who worked at the shop under Ian.

  Natually, I asked the new girl what she was doing there.

  She said that she worked at Camelot now, in gardening, replacing a woman who had decided to get married to a man who was going to the Atlantic Ridge.

  I said that that was nice, and we had a fine night together.

  Then, the next day, I found another new girl waiting in the bedroom. I soon discovered that over half of my household was scheduled to leave soon, and that in a few months, they would start having difficulty finding replacements. I decided, what the heck? The place didn't really need a hundred and fifty women to keep it up. Thirty or forty of them could handle things (and me) well enough.

  Ian was having similar experiences. It seemed that since we were no longer necessary for the continuation of the culture, our previously infinite sex appeal was starting to wear a little thin.

  Barbara's depression didn't wear thin. Instead, it got worse. Much worse. In a few weeks, she became impossible for anyone to talk to, and the Head Chef, a woman named Julia, started taking over most of her duties.

  Barbara stopped spending her days with me, as well.

  I was making some progress with my boys, but it was slow going. Scuba diving and flying ultralights still frightened them, but we often went horseback riding now.

  But I couldn't get them to race each other on horseback. The closest they got to it was galloping three abreast across the fields, like an old-time cavalry charge. That gave me an idea. I had uniforms made up for the four of us, the infinitely flashy outfits worn by the ancient Polish Winged Hussars, complete with golden helmets, leopard skin sashes, scale mail breastplates, sabres, and long lances. Plus, of course, the great feathered white wings going from their backs to high above their heads. Then I found a Killer corporal who had actually served in the Winged Hussars in the early fifteenth century. He showed up in full regalia—just Absolute Panache—to give them some pointers. The boys actually got fairly good with those long, hollow lances, skewering brass rings at a full gallop, but when it came to using a sabre, well, they just couldn't bring themselves to swing one at somebody.

  Often, the four of us went sailing. I tried to talk the boys into each taking one of the three yachts, using their servants as a crew, and racing each other, but they didn't want to. They prefered to work together, as a team. Turning them into individuals was going to take time.

  One night, at the Bucket of Blood, I got to talking to Leftenant Fitzsimon.

  "Look, Fitz, you are a multiply married man, with lots of kids. You have more experience with children than I'll ever have. I've told you the kind of problems I've been having with my boys. What am I doing wrong?"

  "Wrong, sir? Why, nothing that I can see. Look. A boy needs a mother who loves him no matter what, and a father who spends enough time with him to show him what being a man is all about. See that he gets those two things, and enough to eat, and he'll grow up all right. But I get the feeling that that's not exactly what you want. You want those boys to grow up like twentieth-century Midwestern Americans, and there's only one way to do that. You'll have to take them to twentieth-century America, say, about 1945, a healthy, peaceful time, really, although it didn't seem that way to the people who lived there. Raise them in the American Midwest, and they'll grow up to be just like you. I mean, if you raise them in Inca Land, they'll grow up being good little Incas, if you get my meaning."

  "But how can I do that? My job is here."

  "You can do what I do, sir, if your wife will go along with it. Spend your working life whereever the job takes you, and spend your vacations with your boys and their mother. Do it right and they won't even be aware of the fact that you spend most of your time elsewhere."

  "But don't you see, my wife is my biggest problem! She is a Smoothie who considers herself to be a murderer, and I'm beginning to realize that Smoothies have a bigger guilt complex than anything a Pagan or a Jew or a Catholic ever suffered from."

  "Sir, it sounds to me like the two of you are in need of professional help. You need a psychologist from your own American culture, and there's only one of them on the whole island. He's a friend of yours."

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  A Talk With Hasenpfeffer

  I mulled it over for weeks, and in the end I knew that Fitzsimmon was right. I had to talk with Hassenpfeffer. Still, I procrastinated until one day Barbara was gone. She simply could not be found anywhere on the island.

  Frantic, I called together the three Killer officers who had helped me back when we thought that somebody might be sabotaging our first time canister.

  "Find her," I told them. "Find Barbara."

  "Right, sir," Leftenant Fitzsimmon said. "We'll be back directly, I expect."

  They all returned to my living room in five minutes.

  "Yes?"

  "She's left, sir. She went back to 1965, when the local time transports were first put in. She went directly to the harbor and talked her way onto a freighter that had just delivered a load of building materials here. She sailed off with them, sir, headed for New Orleans."

  "Well, stop her! Get her back here!"

  "Yes sir, if that's what you really wish. But have you thought it all the way through? Do you really want us to have a military squad waiting for her when that ship docks in New Orleans? What if she doesn't want to go back? Should we force her to come with us? What should our response be with regards to the local people and authorities? To them, this might look like a kidnapping, and then the use of force would seem appropriate to them. When that happens, do we fight back?"

  "Oh, how the hell should I know? Why can't you stop her before she gets on that ship?"

  "Causality again, sir. You see, the three of us have watched her get on the ship and sail off. Not directly, but through the means of certain surveillance devices available to us. Anyway, her sailing off is now an established fact, and there's no way in the world to change that."

  "Shit. Just what kind of surveillance devices are you talking about?"

  "Right. Well, there isn't any reason to keep anything from you anymore, is there? We use these 'bugs' that actually look like insects. They can crawl, fly, and have enough intelligence to follow their target at a discreet distance. They have enough sensors to observe everything that happens and enough memory to record about six hours of it. Then they fly home, and let you see what they saw."

  "Are these some kind of living thing, or a sort of tiny robot?"

  "As I understand it, they are somewhere in between, sir."

  "Then how can what a machine knows stop you from doing anything?"

  "Well, we know it too, sir, now that we've looked at what it saw. But their very act of recording it makes the event immutable. If we were investigating a murder, for example, and there was a dead body on the floor, we could bug the place, and find out exactly what happened there. We could prove conclusively who did the killing, and have a one hundred percent expectation of bringing him to justice. But we couldn't do a thing for the victim of the crime, except avenge him, of course."

  "Well, damn causality!"

  "I've often felt that way myself, sir. But for now, may I point out that the events we are talking about happened many years in the past? That you have plenty of time to think everything through, before you take any action? Time enough, say, to discuss the matter with your oldest friends and business partners?"

  I sat there a while, thinking. "Yeah. I suppose you're right. Okay. Thank you, gentlemen for another job well done."

  Ian was getting more and more involved with his Historical Core, to the point that it was difficult to get him to talk about anything else.

  Anyway, I had a people problem, and only one person I knew of had the expertise to help me. I asked my secretary to make me an appointment to see Hasenpfeffer.

  He said that he'd be right over.

 
In ten minutes, he was in my living room. He was much older than when I'd seen him last, and he had shrunk, somehow. His hair, what there was left of it, was grey turning to white. His skin was a bright, untanned pink, and there were crow's feet around his clear blue eyes. More importantly, he seemed to have mellowed out with age, with a steady, sincere smile on his lips and in his eyes.

  "Come in," I said. "Have a seat. Can I get you anything?"

  "Thank you, and perhaps we'll have some refreshment later. For now, there is much to discuss, and this talk is long overdue."

  "You know that Barbara is gone?"

  "Oh, yes. Is that where you want us to start?"

  "Well, no. Maybe we'd best start at the beginning. Jim, just what in the hell has been going on around here?"

  "I was sure that you had figured that out by this time. No? Let me explain it from my point of view, and then it will all make sense to you. The obvious first point was that once we had formed the partnership, we were faced with a basically technical problem, that of developing a time machine. We had two people, you and Ian, who were very competent, technically, but who were woefully incompetent in their interpersonal relationships. Great leaders you were not. You couldn't even talk a girl into having sex with you. Then we had one person, me, who was competent in managing people but equally incompetent at anything technical. Therefore it made perfect sense for me to handle all the business, financial, and management tasks, and for the two of you to do the technical things. Are you with me so far?"

  "Yes, of course, that much is obvious. But this island, these cities, all these women? Wasn't that going way overboard?"

  "I don't think so. You see, it eventually became obvious that your technical endeavors were going to be sucessful far beyond our earlier dreams. This brought on the need for elaborate security provisions, since wealth of the magnitude that we were soon generating could not possibly be hidden. At the same time, you and Ian would soon have to become competent managers in your own rights, since we were growing outside of the backyard inventor's millieu. You had to be able to run at least a major engineering company, and lead the people in it. Ian was quite right about the similarity between humans and baboons. If you wish to be a great leader of men, you must first have a considerable following of women. I'm sure that if you asked him, he could give you hundreds of historical examples."

  "So you were deliberately manipulating us from the very beginning?" I said.

  "True. But I was also manipulating myself, for a few months there, until I figured out precisely what I would have to do, and what it was that, in a sense, I had already done. Convincing the women that the three of us were sexually desirable was a relatively simple matter of adjusting the parameters of their culture, to make us be perceived as the most desirable possible fathers for their children, and making it socially permissable for them to aggressively pursue us. After which, well, Mother Nature simply took her course."

  "Horseshit. You were always a lady's man, from the first day that I met you."

  "Again true. Or, to put it another way, I was fortunate in being somehow a culturally approved ideal mate for women in the second half of twentieth-century America. You and Ian were not. As the saying went, some get it, and some don't. I arranged matters such that all three of us were in that exalted category in the Smoothie culture. Surely you can't be angry with me for that."

  "Maybe not. But you just happened to have a whole bloody culture around that you could manipulate in any way you wished?"

  "In a manner of speaking, yes. Like many other thinkers, psychologists, and philosophers throughout history, from Plato on down, I had often dreamed of creating a perfect culture, a place of peace and harmony where people could live long, rich lives completely free from the deprivations, the horrors and the anxieties that the rest of humanity has always been heir to. Unlike the rest of them, I had the wherewithall, thanks to you and Ian, to actually create it, and the time to guide it to fruition."

  "And you are proud of this thing that you have done?"

  "Oh, yes. Infinitely so."

  "I think it's a fucked-up mess. You have created a huge mass of mental cripples who can't think for themselves! They can all play musical instruments, but not one of them can compose a simple tune! They can each paint a beautiful picture, but not one of them can create anything original! They can do sound engineering work, but not one of them can actually invent anything! They can't make up a fucking joke, for God's sake!"

  "I don't completely agree with you, but even if what you claim is true, well, so what? In the world we both grew up in, not one person in ten thousand was truly creative. All the rest worked their butts off trying to survive as best they could, eking out some sort of a living in an absolutely insecure world. My people feel secure precisely because they know what their futures will be. There is no crime because everyone knows that every criminal will be caught and punished for his transgressions. There is no material want because we know exactly what will be needed and when, and have various sensible means of providing it. My people live long, contented lives. If that one person in ten thousand who wants to be creative gets eased out of my society and into one where he will be appreciated, well, is that so great a price to pay?"

  "What 'society where he will be appreciated'?"

  "Why, the one that you will build, of course. You know, for quite a while, there, after you married Barbara, I had hopes that you would change your mind about the Smoothies, as you call them. I had hopes that you would one day become my successor, as the leader of this society. I see now that you will never want to do such a thing. A pity. Ian, of course, has found a lifetime avocation in running his Historical Core. I suppose that I will end up having to choose one of my own sons, and train him to succeed me. Interesting."

  "Okay," I said. "To be fair, I have been thinking about some sort of thing like a culture for creative people, but that's not what I want to talk about. Barbara is gone, and I want her back!"

  "My old friend, Barbara is gone, and you will never get her back."

  "What the fuck are you talking about? She's just having some emotional problems. She'll straighten out and come home, eventually."

  "No, she won't. Barbara is gone forever. You must somehow reconcile yourself to that. Look, by her standards, she committed two great crimes, one almost has to say two great sins. Her carelessness killed some cannibals living on the island, and then her rambunctiousness with a piece of equipment that you and Ian had designed caused the deaths of a few million Aliens from the Travelers' culture. By our standards, neither of these acts could possibly be considered murder. Even the Aliens don't hold her personally responsible. But by her standards, she sinned the greatest possible sins. She felt that she had to atone for those sins, and that she could only do that by giving her life for the betterment of her society. And that's exactly what she did. It was a lot like a Greek tragedy, really. The beautiful, innocent young mother going willingly to her death because of circumstances totally beyond her control."

  "Then we will damn well stop her! And don't give me any of that causality shit!"

  "I must give you that causality shit, Tom, because you yourself have already seen her dead body. Remember that day in Northern Michigan when this whole thing started? Those thin slices of human being that you scooped up with that contraption you'd made out of your sleeping bag? That was Barbara, Tom. She had learned enough about how time travel worked from sitting in on the tutorial sessions that the Teacher gave you and Ian. She took a supply of money with her from your accounts here,—You didn't even know that you had such accounts, did you?—and went north to set up the demonstration that resulted ultimately in the creation of her entire society, her entire world. When the story gets known, I am sure that she will become the equivalent of the Patron Saint of her world."

  "Holy shit, Jim. I don't know what to say," I said, no longer being able to hold back the tears.

  "Then don't say anything. There are drugs and therapy that might help, but sometimes the
old remedies are the best ones," Jim said, pulling out a fifth of the Jim Beam I used to favor in the old days. "Come, old friend. Drink with me."

  * * *

  Much later, and three fifths of sour mash later, I said, "My boys, Jim. What am I going to do with my boys?"

  "You must find them a new mother, Tom. Or perhaps, mothers. If you really want them to grow up as individuals, I would recomend that you separate them as soon as possible. Are you ready to get married again?"

  "Married? Me? No, I don't think that I'll ever do that again. The first time was too painful."

  "Then you must either send them back to Barbara's family, where I'm sure her parents would be happy to raise them, as good little Smoothies, or you should follow Leftenant Fitzsimmon's recomendations and take them to the early second half of the twentieth century, in the American Midwest. That is to say, put them up for adoption, with good families."

  "Smoothies? My boys? Never! Adoption? I wouldn't have any idea how to go about doing such a thing."

  "I could take care of that for you, if that's what you really want."

  "Let me think on that for a few days."

  "That is very good thinking."

  "Another thing, Jim. You've been telling me about all these things that you shouldn't be able to know. Things like what Ian said to me when we were all alone. What gives? You've been spying on us the whole time?"

  "Of course! If you are going to manage a culture, and tweak it to perfection, you have to give up on things like a concern for privacy. Oh, we never intrude on anyone's life. They probably know that we are watching them the way a Christian believes that God is always looking over him, but it rarely affects them personally, unless they are desperately in need of help, or are in the act of committing some crime, so no one ever minds it."