Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 24

"Then tell me one single thing that's wrong with it."

"It's as I just said, Tom, our standards differ."

"That's a bulls.h.i.+t answer and you know it."

"Tom, can't you see that it's dangerous here?"

"Dangerous? The only thing that I've seen around here that's dangerous are the sharks at the north end of the island, and your people never swim there."

"Tom, this whole twentieth-century world that you've lived in all your life isdangerous! There are dozens of countries out there with atomic bombs! There are hundreds of people dying every minute of horrible diseases! There are psychotics and gangsters and whole governments that kill people without any more reason than just for the fun of it! Why, the future history of this time isn't even known! Anything could happen! We are willing to be here, for a while, because it is necessary, but you can hardly expect us to subject our precious children to all of this danger!"

"So you're telling me that your people are so cowardly that you can't face each new day without being afraid of it?"

"I face each day here with some fear, yes. But I do what must be done, and if you want to call that cowardly, then do so. You and your people face the future by pretending that all the bad things that could happen won't happen to you. You lie to yourselves, and then you live within your lies, until you are no longer aware of the harm that can come to you and those that you care for. Our standards differ, Tom. By mine, it is your people who are the cowards!"

"Huh . . . . Well, there is a lot of truth in what you just said. But let's go back to my original question. Have I ever gotten you pregnant?"

"Tom, enough has been said tonight. Go to sleep."

"I'm not sleepy, you can't sleep, and I want some answers. Do I have a child?"

"You have hundreds of children, Tom. I'll get you the exact number in the morning."

Well, that's as heavy a kick in the head as a normal man ever gets, but I still wasn't satisfied.

"Nice of you to tell me about it. Did you think that I didn't care? I mean, most of those had to be by women that I didn't love, but I certainly cared for them. You, however, are a very special case. I love you, and I want a straight answer. Have we made any children together? Answer me."

"Yes, Tom, we have. We have created three lovely sons together. When last I saw them, they were six years old. And since you were about to ask it, no, I have never had another child by any other man."

If I knew anything at all about this woman, I knew that she had doubtless been with each of the kids for every minute of their time since they were born. And if she had last seen her kids when they were six, that meant that she knew that I had not see them during that time. As I understood the laws of causality, this all meant that my children's early childhood was forever lost to me.

It is not nice to rob a man of his children's childhood. Nonetheless, I resolved to keep my cool.

"I didn't know that I was going to ask about your previous love life, but thank you, anyway. So, the boys are all six, now? You'd better explain that."

"Very well. Among my people, it is customary for a woman to live with each of her babies alone for the child's first year. After that, she usually brings all of her children together, and raises them as an equal age group from their first to their fifteenth year, when they all go out on their own."

"Then from what you've said, you are what? Nine years older now than when when I first met you?""It's just over ten years, Tom."

"You don't look any older."

"My people don't age as quickly as your people do."

"Then how old are you now?"

"Please, Tom, leave a girl with some secrets."

"All right. I guess it doesn't really matter. You said that your people let your kids go pretty early. Fifteen seems a bit young, but I guess in your sort of world, n.o.body can possibly get hurt. But mostly, I'm more than a little angry about this business of my children being six years old, and I've never even seen them yet. They're my kids, too, you know, and I should have some say-so as to how they're brought up!"

"In your culture, perhaps. Not in mine. Even in yours, a woman must be married to a man before he has any rights over her or her offspring."

"Which gets us to something that I have been wanting to do since the first morning I spent on this weird little island. Barb, I want to marry you. You are the most beautiful woman I've ever met, the smartest, and the most desirable. I love you. Will you marry me? Please, say yes."

"But there are so many things that we have to discuss first. . . ."

"Then we'll discuss them, but later. For right now, answer me. Yes or no."

"Well then, yes, Tom. I will marry you."

A double victory! First I got my nerve up to ask her, and then she said yes!

The next morning, I bounced into the breakfast room in the Taj Mahal.

"Ian, I want you to be the best man."

"My impression was that I always had been, though I didn't want to rub it in. Still, it's rather nice to hear you admit it."

"No, stupid! I want you to be my best man. I'm getting married!"

"Married? To what? A woman? Just who is this poor deluded girl?"

"Barbara, of course."

"The poor thing. And I'd had such hopes for her." Ian shook his head and went back to eating his inevitable stack of pancakes.

My brilliant parry and tart riposte were forestalled by a waitress bringing in my breakfast. She said it was Eggs-Something-or-Another-in-French, and it mostly involved a lot of heavy cream and garlic. It smelled good but looked sort of wimpy.

Before I could remember what I was going to say, Ian interrupted.

"Tom, would you please tell me why any sane man, or even one sadly like yourself, would want to get married? I mean, consider your position. You are sound of body and perhaps even of mind. You are infinitely wealthy, for all practical purposes, and you are currently surrounded by hordes of attractive women who have somehow been deceived into thinking that you are s.e.xually desirable. You should be happy as you are, especially since you are presently in a position to make hundreds of those sadly deluded women happy as well. Yet instead of simply enjoying yourself, you are proposing to abandon all of your advantages in order to make just one woman miserable. Please attempt to explainyour ridiculous line of reasoning."

"There's nothing to explain. I love the girl, and I want her to stay with me, even when this whole stupid charade ends. And it will end, you know, someday."

"I know that nothing is forever, this side of heaven, and okay, I can see some sense in wanting to nail down a good one before she gets away. What I can't see you doing is giving up the vast harem of increasingly naked ladies that you currently enjoy."

"Well, I hadn't planned to give it up. Why should I? I mean, Barb doesn't mind my s.e.xual generosity. In fact, she schedules it, and seems to think to think that I am just doing my manly duty. Furthermore, all of the other girls are pretty enthusiastic about the arrangement, as you well know."

"So you are planning on committing adultery even while you are planning your marriage?"

"How can there be a crime if all the parties involved are willing, consenting adults?"

"Oh, there can, there can. Ask any politician or police chief. Victimless crimes are where all the graft is, which is of course why we had so many of them, back home.

Whenever you hear somebody screaming about how we have to stamp out prost.i.tution, or p.o.r.nography, or drugs, or gambling, or anything of the sort, you can be certain that the people behind him, or more likely her, are sure to make a lot of money out of it. Real crimes, like murder, or a.s.sault and battery, or theft, simply don't lend themselves to the paying of political contributions and other graft. But I wasn't talking about crime. I was talking about sin, which is a different matter entirely."

"I don't see how I can be sinning, either, especially since I don't believe in your strange religion in the first place."

"Your position on religion is common knowledge. By the way, what is Barbara's religion?"

"I don't think she has one. Religion doesn't seem to fit into the Smoothies' way of thinking."

"I've noticed that. Tom, I strongly advise that you sit down with Barbara and talk out exactly what you expect from one another in this marriage. I shudder to say it, but you might even want to get a lawyer involved, and write up a prenuptial agreement, because what you are calling a marriage doesn't have much in common with what most other people would call a marriage."

"All right. I'll do both of those things."

"You really are serious about this marriage business, aren't you?" Ian asked, "I mean, this isn't just another one of your illiterate jokes, is it?"

"Ian, I am dead serious. I asked Barb to marry me, and she said yes. It's that simple."

"Nothing is ever that simple. Now, about this best man thing. As I recall, the bride's parents are responsible for the reception, so I don't have to worry about that. Who are Barb's parents, by the way?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea. People around here don't seem to have parents. At least, n.o.body ever seems to mention them."

"I've noticed that, as well. Maybe they just don't mention them to us, since you and I are both orphans. Maybe they simply don't want to hurt our feelings. Anyway, I hope thatyou realize that when you marry a woman, you are not only marrying her, you are marrying into her family as well."

"a.s.suming that she has parents and a family."

"Well, of course she must have parents, at least. It's a biological requirement.

Whether they're on this island, or even in this century is another question, of course.

That's the third thing you'll have to do, look up Barb's parents. To be properly engaged to her, you will need her father's formal permission. The list is growing, so you'd better start writing all this down."

One of Ian's girls immediately put a pad and pencil in front of me. I was used to that sort of thing. Without comment, I wrote down: 1) Talk to Barb about what getting married means. 2) Talk to a lawyer. 3) Find out who her father is. 4) Get his permission to marry his daughter.

"Don't look so upset," Ian continued. "Barb knows everything that has ever happened to her, and except for her time here in the twentieth century, she knows everything that ever will happen to her. She will certainly know where her parents are to be found. Now, as your best man, I believe that traditionally, I am in charge of the groom's party, and thus responsible for the service, itself. Being an atheist or worse, I suppose that you'll be wanting a simple, Justice of the Peace sort of wedding?"

"Justice of the Peace! Ian, I may be an atheist, d.a.m.n you, but I'll have you know that I'm a Catholic atheist. I want Barbara to have a full Roman Catholic service, complete with an ordained priest, four altar boys, an organist on the big pipe organ, and a full choir besides. And I want it held in that big, empty cathedral we found in the city. Now, at least, we know why it was built."

"You expect me to find a genuine Roman Catholic priest who is willing to marry a professed atheist to a woman who has no real idea of what religion is in the first place?

You're asking a lot of a man who hasn't even finished his breakfast!"

"I am doing no such thing. Please, by all means, finish your customary breakfast first.

There's not that big of a hurry."

"But Tom, well, I don't know all that much about the Catholics, but I can tell you this- They take their religion very seriously. Getting a genuine priest to do what you want him to do is not going to be like getting a Baptist minister who is currently working out of a storefront in the ghetto."

"My oversized friend, you have the resources of the whole island, not to mention the rest of KMH Corporation, behind you. Just delegate the job to somebody. It sounds like a natural for the Mayor of Morrow. You know, the one who did everything 'personally.' I think his name is Jennings, or something like that."

"The things one does in the name of friends.h.i.+p. Okay, Tom, I'll see that the job gets done. Now finish that French garlic stuff that I'm smelling too much of, so we can get to work."

"Good. Did I tell you how happy I am that you are no longer bas.h.i.+ng your head on doorframes as often as you used to?"

"No, but thank you. I too am pleased by this development."

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

You Still Have to Start at the Beginning

Our earliest devices simply sent things forward into the future, to merge into whatever hapened to be in that time and place. This had the effect of causing dangerous explosions and radiation from the strange isotopes caused when two atomic nuclei happened to emerge close enough to fuse. Eventually, getting a strong handle on Dimension Five, we found that we could simply leave things we didn't want out there, wherever "out there" was. As far as we were concerned, things simply disappeared, when we wanted them to.

We debated using this for trash disposal, but decided that in the very long run, we were better off recycling. Consider that everything in our trash was something that we once needed, and that we would probably need to use those elements again. Otherwise, future generations might someday start running out of planet, or scarce materials, at least.

We also decided that the Dimension Five route was the way to go when it came to our own tunneling. It was safer, cleaner, and the world had plenty of rock, anyway.

The engineering on the "Temporal Test Canisters" was pretty slick. Instead of our old bas.e.m.e.nt, we were now operating from the bottom of a shaft bored twelve hundred feet into the coral, limestone, and granite under our island. This was to eliminate any danger of hurting anyone when the canisters reemerged into our continuum.

Tunneling and excavation had become simple jobs, since our people were now equipped with our new line of temporal digging tools.

The simplest of these was a variation on the escape harness. A st.u.r.dy, temporally active area like the ones on top of the shoulder boards was fitted out with a swivel, on the end of a hefty, two-yard-long stick, which contained the circuitry and a battery pack. To use it, you set a dial to the thickness of rock that you wanted to eliminate, usually around a quarter of an inch. You put the active area, the pad, on the rock you wanted to go away, and you pulled the trigger. It went pop, and a layer of the rock under the pad vanished.

The first models had a continuous-discontinuous mode switch, where the operator could elect to continue scooping away rock as fast as he could swing the hefty gadget, but this proved to be dangerous. It was too easy to let it get away from you, and we had two serious accidents before we made it a discontinuous mode only device.With the pad swiveled all the way out, the thing looked vaguely like a shovel, and that's what the men got to calling our invention.

And yes, most of the construction workers were men. After the "manning" fiasco of our engineering outfit, Ian and I made sure that s.e.xual bias in hiring-in either direction-didn't happen again.

We also made bigger machines, where an operator sat in a sealed cabin, and simply drove in the direction he wanted to go. When cutting through good, solid rock, this could be just as fast as he felt like driving, but in most cases it was prudent to take the time and money to line the tunnel with a st.u.r.dy steel tube.

The only disadvantage to our excavation techniques was that besides the rock and dirt that was vanis.h.i.+ng, a lot of air was sent to somewhen else as well. When cutting down from the surface, this wasn't a problem at all. If anything, it greatly improved the ventilation. But when you had to start from a canister buried you didn't know how deep, you either had to bring a lot of bottled air with you, or your workers had to be equipped with s.p.a.ce suits! But I'm getting way ahead of myself.

As before, we were sending back a st.u.r.dy steel canister first, to insure that the test canister emerged in a hard vacuum. Now, however, we could afford to make all of our canisters out of stainless steel, to cut down on the corrosion problems we'd seen before.

The first canister, over a yard long and a foot wide on the inside, was sent on a programmed course, sideways into the fifth dimension, then back in the fourth for a programmed duration. This was followed by a return trip in the fifth in the opposite direction, at the end of which it returned to our continuum, but earlier in time.

Within nanoseconds of arrival, before its circuitry could degrade, or the whole thing had time to explode, it sent itself, with its new contents (the dirt and stone it emerged in) out into the fifth dimension, in a dispersal mode which broke it up into atoms. We hoped that these atoms wouldn't cause any future problems.

We'd never run into anything while traveling backward in the fourth dimension, but we didn't see any sense in leaving any rocks out there that we might ram into later on some other test or trip. The truth was that we didn't know exactly what happened to those canisters of rock that we were blithely throwing around the other dimensions.

There was a great deal that we didn't know about a lot of things.

A few nanoseconds after the first canister departed, leaving a chamber filled with a hard vacuum in the past, a second canister arrived that was slightly smaller than the first.

This had to get there before the walls of the chamber, if they happened to be made of something soft, started to collapse.

Inside the second canister was a small machine that we called a "surfacer." It had a top made just like the active surface of an escape harness. The sides of the machine had four caterpillar treads set at right angles to one another, and the rest of it was taken up by a radio transmitter, a power supply, control circuitry, and a timer.