Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 19

I suppose that touring factories might strike most people as a strange way to spend a day, but you have to understand that engineers like to do things like that, and we don't think that it's at all strange. It's kind of fun, actually, like visiting museums, but of the present, instead of the past. As a group, we technical types have an abiding fascination with finding out exactly how the world is made.

Because of trade secrets and insurance problems, this sort of sightseeing is difficult to do out in the real world without knowing someone on the inside who can get you an invitation. But on the island, well, we owned the place.

The factories were all big, blocky grey buildings, mostly without windows, and without any signs except for the large street numbers. Except that there weren't any street signs here, or streets either. On the other hand, in the industrial area, everything that wasn't a factory building was paved over. Maybe you could call those s.p.a.ces streets, except that there still weren't any street signs. I was a long time finding out what they did about the mail.

For our tour, Ian picked a building at random, and we just walked in, followed by most of our scantily clad entourage. As had happened before, the workers paid little heed to our ladies, but all of them turned and gawked at Ian and me. The plant manager bustled over, smiling and holding out his hand for me to shake.

It was an ordinary factory, making aluminum window frames. They were very well built window frames, obviously meant to last a long time, but there was nothing very interesting about the operation, except that there didn't seem to be any need for all the windows that they were diligently making.

"I thought that all the buildings on the Island already had windows," Ian said.

"Well, well, I'm sure that they all do, sir," the manager stammered."I haven't seen any new construction going on. What are they going to do with all the windows you folks are making here?"

"I'm sure I don't know, sir. I don't get involved with sales, you see. I just make sure that the orders are filled."

"Then show me the orders."

"As you wish, sir, but they won't tell you much."

They didn't. The purchase orders were all on the same standard form, not on forms with the letterhead of the ordering company, as would be the usual case anywhere else I'd ever heard of.

They specified which standard catalog items were to be built and s.h.i.+pped by what time, and they mentioned the catalog prices but made no mention of any discounts expected, a thing unheard of in the real world.

And they specified precisely which numbered s.h.i.+pping containers should be filled, which seemed impossible. How would anybody, except maybe for the s.h.i.+pping company, know which container would be available for s.h.i.+pment at the time the order was filled?

Oh, it could be done, I suppose, if you had that particular container especially set aside and waiting, but that would have been terribly inefficient, and why would anyone bother to do such a thing?

A little checking showed that each order exactly filled one container, which was weird, when you thought about it. How would the purchaser know exactly how they would be packed, what the exact external sizes of all the boxes were, so he could know how they would fit into a standard container?

Finally, there was no mention of who was doing the buying, when they had placed the order, nor when their check could be expected to arrive.

"A strange way to do business," I said to Ian as we left. "What kind of a building job is it that always takes exactly one full container of windows to complete the building being constructed? I mean, there would usually be a few windows more or less than what was needed."

"I know what you're trying to say, Tom, but it's just about the same story we got a few days ago at that electric motor shop."

We hit three more shops before noon: an elevator company, a plant that processed frozen fish, and a clothing factory. It was pretty much the same story at each of them: standardized orders for filling particular standardized containers of particular standardized products.

The crowd of girls with us mostly just kept quiet and followed us around, trying not to yawn. Why they came along, I don't know. We never asked to be followed around by a crowd.

Ian said it was a lot like the way the Roman Patricians figured that their status was defined by how many clients each of them had in his train.

"How about we hit a Syrian restaurant for lunch?" I said.

"I don't think I've ever tried Syrian food."

"It's a marvelous cuisine built around odd spices, flat bread, and dead animals. Their best dish is mostly raw lamb's meat. Don't worry. We'll make sure that they cook yourkibbie, and that they don't throw in very much in the way of spices."

Ian agreed, and, of course, there was an Eastern Mediterranean restaurant just outside of the industrial area. They had a big table reserved and all set for our party of twenty-six.

The place was much like the one that I had frequented back in Ann Arbor, except that here, the black-haired waitresses all wore abbreviated belly dancers' outfits, and were as bare breasted as most of their current female customers.

I ordered the lemon and rice soup, the fattoush salad, and my kibbeh nayeh raw and spicy. And sherbert for desert. All of my girls followed suit, which seemed perfectly sensible to me. After all, it was the best food in the house.

Since I'd warned him, Ian asked for his kibbeh cooked and bland, but I was surprised when all twelve of his ladies ordered the same thing that he did.

Dedication on that level amazed me, since the spiced ground raw lamb's meat and cracked grain-floating in olive oil and served with quartered raw onions on flat pita bread-is one of the foods of the G.o.ds! Cooked, it loses a lot. But here they all were, missing out on one of life's better pleasures, just to suck up to their boss.

I tell you, it does a boss's heart good.

Ian and I chowed down with gusto, the way we'd been doing since we'd first seen that doctor. These oversized, muscular bodies burned a lot of fuel, and somehow they did something with everything extra we packed in, because my weight hadn't changed an ounce, despite the way I'd been overeating for almost a month. After a lifetime of starving myself, and gaining weight anyway, well, eating all I wanted to was almost as wonderful as all the gorgeous ladies and free s.e.x.

Barb signed for the meal, and we left. Thinking about it, I realized hadn't touched any money since the day before we got here.

That afternoon, we toured a shop that made wrought iron railings, and another one that made gla.s.sware. Metal working was old hat for Ian and me, but neither of us had ever had much to do with gla.s.s factories. The technology of making things out of sand heated into a gooey liquid was pretty interesting, and we spent a few hours there. They sold many of their consumer products to local shops, but mostly it was the old story of filling orders that each filled a standard container.

I was getting ready to knock off, and maybe find a good bar, but Ian insisted on touring one more factory.

The building he selected was larger that any of the other factories we'd visited, but when we went in, there was no one around. Curious, we wandered around what was mostly a big, general purpose machine shop, equipped with some of the newest, biggest, and finest machinery available. Despite the high ceiling, the place obviously had a second floor. We were heading for the stairway in the corner when Ian stopped me, grabbing my left arm.

"Tom, that small stuff by the wall! That's my shop! I recognize my equipment!"

We went over there, and yeah, it was our property, neatly separated from the rest of the plant with a waist-high fence. I mean, there were temporal swords instead of cutting bits on all of the tools, and the saws were all just clamps that held the stock in place while letting the swords do their thing. Ian was going over each tool, making sure that nothing was missing or broken."I'll bet that my old electronics shop is upstairs," I said. "I'm going up there to find it."

Ian nodded, but was too busy to answer.

Half of the second floor was an engineering design shop, with dozens of drawing boards complete with parallel bars instead of the old T-squares, and even one of the new drafting machines that I'd heard about. There were a dozen gla.s.sed-in offices along the walls, with one posh and much larger office in the far corner. All of the furniture in it was oversized, and done in Danish Modern teak.

You entered the big office by first going through a nice secretary's office. The other door led to a hallway with a big restroom complete with an oversized shower, and a private elevator, so the big boss could sneak in (or out) without letting the peasants know about it.

I knew that the door at the end of the hallway had to lead to my office. It was as big as Ian's, only my furniture was American walnut, and heavily carved with a strange mixture of electronics symbols and naked ladies. I liked it.

My office had two more heavily carved doors, one that went to a secretary's room, and the other, at last, to my old electronics lab. The equipment was old and shabby, with dozens of cigar burns on the upper edges, but for the first time in weeks, I felt really at home.

As I walked in, I just automatically turned on my soldering iron and my battered but dependable Textronic 545 oscilloscope, the way every good tech does. I put my feet up on the solder-splattered work bench and debated with myself about brewing up a pot of Maxwell House coffee. I was home. I don't know how long I sat there before I got up and continued my tour.

Beyond my personal area, I found a big, well-equipped electronics shop, which took up about a third of the whole second floor. There was room there for maybe thirty guys to work with plenty of workbench s.p.a.ce and more than decent elbow room.

Except that it was empty of people, and felt almost dead. It shouldn't be that way, I thought. It should be full of people, enjoying themselves while doing good, useful work.

I retraced my steps, and found Ian admiring his new office with his feet up on his new desk.

"You look contented, my young friend. I take it that you are pleased with the arrangements made for you."

"Indeed I am. I presume that your facilities are equally efficacious. They're down that hallway, I suppose?"

"Your presumption is indeed fortunate," I said, sitting down on the Danish Modern chair in front of his desk. It was a lot less uncomfortable than it looked.

"My own lab is in proper condition, and the larger lab for my nonexistent a.s.sistants is more than adequately appointed."

He waited a while before answering.

"Of course. Around this strange little island, how could it possibly be otherwise?"

I waited a bit as well. Ian was thinking of something, and on such occasions, it was best to give him plenty of time. I slowly realized that we were alone in his office. The girls had dropped back some time ago, although in fact I wasn't quite sure when they'ddone that. In only three weeks, I had actually become blase about beautiful women.

Remarkable!

After a few more minutes of silence, I said, "My formerly runty friend, I perceive that you are about to eventually give vent to some momentous thought, or bold decision, or otherwise profound statement."

Several minutes later, he said, "Tom, let's go back to work."

"I had been thinking much the same thing. The only thing that deters me is that I don't know how to break the news to Hasenpfeffer."

"Yeah. It's going to be rough, telling him that we've decided to do things his way after all."

"I've really gotten used to his daily morning shouting solos. There is a certain harmony in the way his discordant rantings balance our beautiful surroundings, the way his ugly facial contortions offset the smiles of our lovely maidens," I said.

"True, all too true. Maybe we could just not tell him of our decision to somewhat modify our lifestyle. Look, the girls have always done exactly what we've asked of them.

Do you think that they'd tell a few lies for us as well?"

"You know, I believe that they would, loving creatures that they are. I mean, they'd only have to say that we were out skin diving today, and cannot be disturbed, or flying the heavens with our newly invented gossamer wings, or raping, in friendly fas.h.i.+on, the eager peasant girls."

"Or developing our expertise at floral arrangements, basketry, and the proper placement of nipple clamps. Yes. You know, this could be fun, Tom."

"Considering his arrogance, profound rudeness and insufferable presumption, he certainly has it coming. Of course it will be fun."

"Then let's act on it. The girls have to be waiting out in engineering. Let's go explain our little joke to them."

"Seconded, and carried by unanimous vote. We're also going to have to tell them to call in a suitable work force for us."

"Yeah. We'll have to work out our manning requirements. Well, let's get on it!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Ve Vas Only Filling Orders

The girls had all laughed and giggled at the thought of lying to Hasenpfeffer, so much so that I figured that he'd hear about it in a few hours. Just as well. The important thing was that he should know that his nagging morning lectures had had the opposite effect of what he had desired. They had slowed down our return to work.

My original thoughts had been that I would take on one or two techs or engineers, teach them what we had learned about time travel, and get them to work. That is to say, if I had to become a manager, I wanted to sort of ease myself into it, kind of the way you ease yourself into a cold lake, hoping that once you're over the shock, it won't really be so bad.

The first thing that Ian wanted to do was to convert all of his spanking new machinery over from conventional cutting bits to temporal swords, which would require that my people build several hundred industrial swords for the purpose. This would mean that I had to provide several thousand electronic man hours to satisfy him. I'd need a few more techs than I'd planned.

My stomach started grumbling, so I sent four girls out for a supply of cheese and anchovy pizzas and a few cases of beer, enough for everybody. Ian immediately countermanded my order, such that his half of the crowd got cheese, ham, and green pepper pizzas. He's a nice guy, but he's got no taste.

The girls were back so fast that they must have pa.s.sed themselves on the steps going both up and down, a frequent occurrence on this strange little island. Not that they'd ever let the two of us see how they did it.

Barb helped herself to a can of Budweiser and entered the discussion by saying that while Ian and I were touring our new offices, she had found the accounting office of our new company. There she had found purchase orders from our small Army, our smaller Navy, and our tiny Air Force. An army colonel, who said that he had met me in that reception line, wanted swords, like the ones Ian and I wore on our belts, for all of his men, and could we please develop something larger along the same line to replace the small arms his men carried? Was anything possible for the artillery? This was followed by some simple sketches of a rapidly spinning artillery sh.e.l.l with six swords built into it."What he really wants is a circuit like the one we found in the first place in the Upper Peninsula. We could put one in an artillery sh.e.l.l, with some sort adjustment on it to control the size of the hole. You could do that, couldn't you, Tom?"

"Yeah, but I don't know about building a circuit that could stand the shock of being shot out of a cannon," I said.

"It can be done," Ian a.s.sured me. "They make proximity fuses for antiaircraft sh.e.l.ls, don't they? Aren't they a sort of tiny radar rig?"

"I suppose that's true, if you wanted to stretch a few definitions. Prox switches are electronic, so the technology must exist somewhere. It might take me weeks to look it up, though."

"No, it won't," Barb said. "That's the sort of thing that you have secretaries and librarians for. You'll have the information you need in the morning, unless you need it sooner. But let me continue with these military purchase orders."

The Navy had similar requests for side arms, and requests for quotes on the research and development required to design a heavy, turret mounted weapon, for which they had incidentally left s.p.a.ce in their existing deck turrets (sketch included).

And the Air Force had a similar bunch of requests, only with aeros.p.a.ce specifications, instead of the naval requirements for salt-spray tests.

Then there were orders from three local industrial supply houses, saying that they had heard of our swords, and couldn't something similar be used for cutting very hard materials? a.s.suming that this was so, they wanted to buy them, and they didn't care about the price.

Ian said, "So what it comes down to is, we've got a fistful of production orders on stuff we already know how to make. If we're going to fill them, we're going to have to put on a lot of people in a hurry, and back off on R and D for a while."

Somehow, we never wondered if we should fill those orders.

I said, "Nah. I can't see getting involved with the headaches of ma.s.s production.

There are lots of shops with good managers on this island. They can make anything you want, so long as you don't expect them to get too creative. All we have to do is to design the products, build some prototypes, and test them. Then we can hand it all over to someone else."

"We'd lose a lot of the profits, that way, Tom."

"What profits? Don't you realize that all these things we're going to develop and make are going to be used inside of our own organization? That everything on this whole Island is already ours? How could we possibly make a profit off that? We'd be as likely to make a profit by taking in each other's laundry!"

"Huh. You've got a point there, only we will profit, in the increased equity of our holdings. But okay, we'll get an accountant to handle whatever accounting they need to do around here, and after that, we just won't worry about the money."

"Agreed. I haven't seen any money around here anyway. Everybody just seems to sign for stuff, however that works. So where are we?" I asked.

"Well, first, we have to take those items that have already been built and tested-the temporal swords, the machine tool adaptations of them, and the bomb-and doc.u.mentthem so that other people can build them."

"But before we can do that, we'll need people who know as much as we do about this whole thing. I hate to say it, Ian, but I think that you and I will have to become school teachers for a few weeks."

"What a depressing thought."

"True. And we have to make sure that we have some real school teachers in that first cla.s.s, or we'll have to keep on teaching the d.a.m.n thing ourselves. Are you taking notes, Barb?"

That last was for Ian's benefit, since I knew that Barb either had an eidetic memory or a built-in tape recorder. She not only didn't sleep, she never forgot anything, either. s.e.xy, too. I definitely had to marry that girl, one of these days.

Barb said yes, and that if we going to teach a cla.s.s, something that we did not enjoy doing, it would make sense to teach as large a cla.s.s as possible. A large auditorium was available, and did we want to have the first cla.s.s in the morning?

Ian said, "No. We'll need at least a day to get our cla.s.s notes together. We'll start on Thursday morning, at eight. Ming Po, set it up. Two four-hour sessions a day. In the meantime, I found Hasenpfeffer's old sword in one of the drawers in my tool box downstairs. s.h.i.+rley, get it over to some engineering outfit or other, and have them make formal drawings of all the parts, since we built them from rough sketches. Warn them not to turn the thing on until after they've been to our lectures. Can you think of any thing else that needs doing before we get going on the cla.s.s notes, Tom?"