Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 35

"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 sc.r.a.ping 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 legalstandards. 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 s.e.x," 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 b.u.t.ton to push, and there you were.

Actually, I don't remember ever pressing any of those two-hundred-odd b.u.t.tons on the wall of each subway car. I was always with a crowd of girls, and one of them always pushed the b.u.t.tons. 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 smallroom. A panel on the wall let you dial in the time that you wanted to arrive at, and you pushed a b.u.t.ton. 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 s.p.a.cious 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 embara.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 abit 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 s.e.x to be as marvelous a thing as I had promised him it would be. s.e.x, 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 s.p.a.ce-time continuum, and bending it into the other dimensions. Within that defined portion (think of it as sort of a pipe), s.p.a.ce 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 const.i.tuent 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, t.i.tanium 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 crowdswere 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 s.p.a.ce, and gave her enough time, she would eventually recover. It wasn't like I needed the s.e.x, what with all the other girls around.

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 s.e.x 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 bra.s.s 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 thethree 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."