Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 3

"What is that?" he said.

"That" was a bunch of hundred dollar bills that materialized right in front of me. I had them scooped out of the air before they fell into the hole.I said, "Hey, good idea about the net!"

"Thank you. They're coming in at six minute intervals now, so be ready. I'll watch for anything else that might be useful."

So I was left holding the stick, but it didn't trouble me any more. In the next eight pops, with Hasenpfeffer warning me of each impending pop, I raked in an even two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was a lot of money back then. Some of the bills were cut up, but I got all the pieces. We could Scotch tape them back together later on.

Then there was nothing much except wood and plumbing fixtures for a few hours, so I took a lunch break. I was halfway through my fourth salami sandwich when Hasenpfeffer started yelling.

"His papers! There are papers coming in!"

"What? Whose papers?"

No answer. The pops were coming two minutes apart now, so I inhaled the sandwich and went back to work. Actually, my net was a little big for Hasenpfeffer to handle alone.

Paper came in, but it was more like confetti than anything else. You see, the money had been laid parallel to the surface of the sphere, whereas this stuff was perpendicular to it. It came as thin, curved walls of confetti that gently exploded on arrival. The first bits were followed by a deluge of paper.

"Jim, this is ridiculous. A whole library has been run through the grandmother of all paper schredders here. No way in h.e.l.l will we ever get it together," I said.

"But we must try! It's critical!"

"Maybe, but it's also impossible. I'm going back to lunch. Call me if anything useful turns up."

Ian hadn't moved, but he still had a pulse.

Towards four o'clock the gore started. I had been scooping up bits of electronic parts, circuit boards and workbench when I got a bit of meat on my sleeping bag. At first I thought that I was going through another refrigerator. At this point the sphere was about two yards in diameter. I was standing knee deep in sharp splinters of wood veneer, thankful for my leather pants and s.h.i.+t-kicker boots. The pops were coming every ten seconds and it was about five scoops before I realized what was happening. I was pitching people!

"OmiG.o.d," I said.

"You noticed," Hasenpfeffer said. "Don't let it throw you. We're almost to the end."

"But . . ."

"Hang on just a little longer, Tom. We can't save him, but maybe we can save his work."

The last hundred or so sh.e.l.ls came in a long BBRRIIIP!

And then it was over.

I was dead tired and went over to the lawn, by Ian, who had rolled over on his side, and had his pants unzipped. I lay down upwind of him, because he was doing the vomit and urine routine. Forty ounces of sour mash is quite a bit for a little fellow who'd never been drunk before.I guess I sacked out.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Venture

It was dusk when Hasenpfeffer shook me awake.

"Hey, Tom. Are you all right?"

"Huh? Yeah. I guess so."

"I just wanted to tell you that actually, we were able to salvage very little. Only the money, some wrecked circuits-that you may or may not be able to do something with- and this. It was the only piece of legible paper that I was able to save. Do you have any idea of what it is?"

I was feeling sort of woozy.

"Uh, sure. It's a circuit schematic."

"I deduced that. But does it mean anything to you?"

"Well, it's strange. He's got digital, a.n.a.log and R-F components in the same circuit.

Maybe I can figure it out. Later. Look, I don't feel so good."

"You don't look so good, either. I have already sent Ian for an ambulance. He said to tell you that alcohol is not a pain killer. It's a pain delayer and relocator."

"Uh, if Ian was all hung over, why didn't you go yourself?"

"Because I don't feel so good either."

Then for a while there my memory gets sort of spotty. It was a lot like when you're on a good drunk only without any of the fun involved.

Medical types were always waking me up to do something to me. Hauling me into an ambulance, out of an ambulance, into bed, out of bed. Asking weird questions I couldn't quite follow. Waking me up to get some more shots. Waking me up again to take my sleeping pills. I tell you that medics have less respect for your personal individuality than the average Air Force sergeant.

Eventually, the fog cleared some and Hasenpfeffer was leaning over me.

"Radiation sickness and some sort of chemical poisoning," Hasenpfeffer said. "You are going to be all right, but you came about as close to being dead as you could get."

"So, why didn't you get it, too?" I said.

"I did. But you spent much more time in the rubble than I. Ian was the least affected,due to his distance from the event and all that Jim Beam you poured into him. It seems that alcohol reduces the effects of radiation on the system."

"He poured it into himself. Look, where is Ian?"

"In his room. He still has difficulty getting around."

"Hey, I thought that you said he was okay."

"From the radiation," Hasenpfeffer said. "But that sand in his foot blocked off the blood supply to his toes. Gangrene. He lost half his right foot."

"Christ. We should have gotten him to the hospital sooner."

"Perhaps. But the doctors said that it wouldn't have helped any. There is no technique for pulling sand out of someone's foot when it didn't make a hole getting in there in the first place. No prior medical art."

"s.h.i.+t. Uh, what about the money?"

"When it became obvious that we were having medical difficulties, I locked the money and the rest of our salvage into those detachable saddlebags of mine and hid them a few kilometers from the site. This was fortunate, because by morning the medical types had reported the radiation sickness and the place was crawling with government types."

"And the money?" I asked.

"Safe and sound. I picked it up this morning."

"Hey, great! What about the guy who got sliced up?"

"Woman. Her name was Barbara Elaine Kruger. n.o.body seems to know anything about her, except that she was maybe sixty, and her neighbors didn't like her. She had no relatives that anybody knows about," Hasenpfeffer said.

"Weird. Just her up there puttering all alone?"

"That's what it looks like. But now you are in for a grilling by the AEC, the FBI and Air Force Intelligence."

"Uh, that last is a contradiction in terms."

"Hush. Your story is that we heard an explosion and went to investigate. When we got there, we all fell asleep. You woke up once or twice and saw a number of flying saucers cruising in formation. Then you went to sleep again and woke up in the hospital."

"Hey, why not just . . ."

"Tell the truth? If we did that, we would loose a quarter of a million dollars, and possibly a good deal more," Hasenpfeffer said.

"Uh, okay. Why the flying saucers?"

"Because mentioning them is the best way to get things hushed up."

So for the next three weeks, until I got out of the hospital, I was grilled about twice a day by different people wearing white s.h.i.+rts and narrow ties. I just played dumb. Four years as a SAC Trained Killer made me a past master at the game of pretending that you're stupider than your boss, even though you've got seventy IQ points on him. Since most of the government bozos grilling me were even dumber than your average sergeant, none of them caught me at it.

Ian had more problems, since his training in college and at GM was all about how to look smart even when you don't have the slightest idea of what's going on. I wish I couldhave given him some pointers, but the rooms were generally bugged.

The hubbub about the radioactive explosion site died out surprisingly fast, without a single word of it getting into the papers.

Hasenpfeffer was released from the hospital in a few days, but another month went by before Ian and I were mobile.

Ian's company-paid Blue Cross-Blue s.h.i.+eld covered all his bills, and Hasenpfeffer somehow talked the Air Force into picking up my hospital tab. At least I had to sign a paper saying that it wasn't the fault of the U.S. Air Force, but they were treating me for radiation poisoning purely out of the goodness of their hearts and I wasn't allowed to sue the s.h.i.+t out of them for it later.

Hasenpfeffer didn't have to pay for his own bills, either, though I'm not quite sure how he worked that. Maybe he got one of the girls in billing to pad his bill into mine or Ian's. He was good at that sort of thing.

Because of the repeated interrogations we'd been through, with a strange a.s.sortment of unmannerly government types asking us nonsensical questions that varied from the stupid to the rude, we had been afraid to talk freely with each other in the hospital. Once I actually found a tape recorder in my room, and Ian was acting downright paranoid.

Finally, the ordeal over, we celebrated in a private dining room at the best restaurant Hasenpfeffer could find. He picked the place while we were in the taxicab on the way there, so we figured that they couldn't possibly have the place bugged.

"Gentlemen, I feel that a serious discussion is in order," Hasenpfeffer said as we sat back, stuffed with high calorie, greasy, salty, and glorious food after weeks of that disgustingly healthy hospital pap.

"Well, I don't feel like anything should be in order, except maybe another gla.s.s of this Grand Mariner stuff." I puffed on a two-dollar cigar. "Then, let's play vegetable for three hours, followed by having another pretty waitress bring us four more bottles of wine, another round of caviar, three more steaks, some more Cherry Jubilees, and then some more cigars and . . ."

"Tom, you sound like a first century Roman glutton," Ian said. "I'm due back at the plant in a few days. If I go back."

"Then again, I don't feel much like arguing, either."

"Excellent. To sum up, we find ourselves in a unique position. We are suddenly the proprietors of both some radical technology and the capital with which to develop it."

"IF it's ours, Jim," Ian said. "They both really belong to that Kruger woman."

"Who is irretrievably dead, with no apparent heirs or relatives. I'm sure that she would have wanted someone to carry on her work. Now, the question is, what do we do with our windfall?"

"Hey, you might call it a windfall, but for Ian and me it was pretty d.a.m.ned expensive.

He lost half his foot, and my radiation poisoning cost me every hair on my body. I'll be on chemotherapy for a year, and- "

"Gentlemen, in our ignorance we have sustained accidents and injuries, but nothing devastating. When you consider that Ian couldn't dance before his accident, and the fact that you weren't beautiful with your hair, you must conclude that your collective lossesaren't that severe."

"Yeah, but I still think you ought to pitch in your part. Like maybe your left t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e.

What say, Ian?"

"I think it's time that you cut your Polish blarney. n.o.body made me stick my foot into that hole, and none of us knew about the radiation. If it hadn't been for Jim's quick thinking, we probably wouldn't have either the money or those bits of circuits. The only fair way to handle this is as an even three-way partners.h.i.+p."

"An excellent suggestion. I second it." Hasenpfeffer smiled.

"Oh, what the h.e.l.l. I'll third it."

"We are agreed, then. The next obvious question is, 'Besides the money, what exactly do we have?' Tom, you've had time to look over that circuit. Could you duplicate it?"

"Sure. No sweat. It's all standard parts, so I could probably get it together in a week or so. But I couldn't tell you why it did whatever it did. And I'd want to be about four miles away when we turned it on."

"You feel that we could produce something useful in a relatively short time?"

"Well, that depends on what you mean by useful. Lookit, a few ounces of electronics stuff did about as much damage as a two-thousand-pound bomb. The Air Farce would call that d.a.m.n useful."

"You are suggesting that we develop the military aspects of this?"

"h.e.l.l, no! If uncle found out about this thing, we'd be under tight security for the rest of our lives. Look, do you know what it's like working in a government top-secret area?

Showing your badge to armed guards six times a day? Filling out forms in triplicate to get a resistor? Having a TV camera in the john watching you c.r.a.p?" I s.h.i.+vered.

"More important," Ian said. "If we develop the military side of this before we have the civilian uses on the market, we might never be allowed to develop the industrial products at all."

"Then you see commercial uses in this?"

"Dozens of them, so many that I feel like a phlogiston chemist who just got a good look at the Periodic Table of Elements. Think about mining. Put one of those circuits against the side of a cliff. Turn it on, and before the chips come back, get a conveyor belt in there to haul them out. Then put another circuit against the far wall and repeat the process. I tell you that we could tunnel at a cost of a few dollars a foot, where the compet.i.tion would have to charge thousands!"

"I see. And the difference between those two figures is called profit?"

"Sure. You think I'm a 1930s style socialist? But more important, think about what we could do with cheap tunnels. A lot of mountain ranges-the Rockies and the Andes- are too wet on one side and too dry on the other. Think about big tunnels to carry irrigation water to the deserts. Or, think about an underground highway system. No snow on the roads to cause accidents. No rain to wash out bridges. No bridges at all, for that matter. No fog or other problems with visibility. No dogs or other animals to hit. No children to worry about. Without all the obstructions, it would be easy to automate, so bad drivers wouldn't be a problem, either! I tell you it would save billions of dollars and fifty thousand lives a year!""So you are suggesting that we become involved with the construction industry?"

"Sure. But it's even more than that. Do you realize that half of the lumber that's harvested is turned into sawdust and sc.r.a.p? You saw what the circuit did to the wood in that house. Smooth polished surfaces on both sides of the cut, with absolutely no waste.