Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Time Machine Part 6

We learned how to focus the field and project it as tight as a laser beam, which made an incredible knife or sword. This was nothing like a Star Wars light saber. It was a lot better. Switched on, it projected a thin needle of nothingness that looked like a tightly stretched black thread. Everything that entered that line was sent forward, an atom at a time, I think, for hundreds and thousands of years, reemerging imperceptibly except as an immeasurably tiny addition to the background radiation.

It was a neat toy, and I spent a few weeks "polis.h.i.+ng" it into a tidy, hand-held package. For safety reasons, I put in four trigger switches, complete with anti-tiedowns.

To turn it on, you had to have a finger on each trigger, and lifting any one of them turned the beam off. Then, you had to release all the b.u.t.tons before it could be turned back on.

This was so that Hasenpfeffer wouldn't try to tape down three of the b.u.t.tons, and hurt himself, or me either.

The blade length was adjustable from an eighth of an inch out to twelve feet, by means of a sliding potentiometer built into the side, easily reachable with your right thumb. For power, it had solar cells charging Ni-Cad batteries, and everything that had to penetrate the housing-switches and so forth-were guaranteed to be dust tight and water tight, down to thirty meters.

Ian machined up three stainless steel housings for them, complete with belt clips, and these were hermetically sealed at well.

We christened them "Temporal Swords."

Switched on, it made a crackly hissing sound that was caused by air molecules leaving rapidly for elsewhen. The sword was a glorious thing, the ultimate cutting tool and the deadliest possible short-range weapon.

As a cutting tool, it could cut absolutely anything as quickly and as smoothly as you could feed the stock to the tool. There were no vibrations, and with the right beam width, no chips to clear away. Over the coming months, Ian adapted all of his cutting tools from conventional cutting bits to temporal swords. The lathes didn't look much different, but the Bridgeports looked like they were decapitated with their motors and gearboxes gone.

And the saws were reduced down to being little more than holding fixtures! Eventually, Ian replaced all five of his saws with simple clamps to hold the swords accurately, and had Hasenpfeffer sell the surplus machine tools.

At the other end of the spectrum, as a weapon, it was something to make a combat veteran perk up, drool, and pant with l.u.s.t. With a flick of your wrist, you could cut through anything with this puppy! I mean that if a Sherman tank offended you, you could turn it into a pile of small metal chunks in seconds. And the only sounds anybody wouldhear would be a quiet hiss and the much louder sound of bits of dead tank hitting the ground.

But you couldn't fence with one because you couldn't parry. Two beams interpenetrated without difficulty. I figured that it was just as well, since I think that Hasenpfeffer has a Zorro streak in him, and a temporal sword wasn't a play toy.

I put a light bulb in the b.u.t.t, letting it serve as a flashlight as well as a cutting tool.

This use was not encouraged because it quickly ran down the batteries.

Ian and I talked about high-output, long-range pulsed models-rifles and pistols- but, probably because none of us hunted, it was a long while before we got around to making any.

Anyway, when the first "production" model was done, I took it outside to run a real world test, or, in the popular vernacular, to play with it.

It was a beautiful day and Hasenpfeffer was tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the hedge with a pair of huge, two handed scissors. He was still doing most of the drudge work around the place because he wasn't of much use elsewhere.

I went to the s.h.a.ggy end of the hedge, adjusted the blade to about three feet, and held the beam horizontally at shoulder level, where the hedge should be topped. Then I walked steadily towards Hasenpfeffer, neatly tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the shrubs to height. He saw me, stared at me, and registered pleasant shock.

"Give me that thing!"

"Hey, sure Jim." I laughed. "Only it's as dangerous as sin and not quite as much fun.

Look, you hold all four of these triggers down to make it work. Then this slide controls blade length and . . ."

"Got it!" He took it out of my hand, ignorant of the fact that it is very bad form to take a tool out of any workingman's hands. It's a fighting offense in the Society of the Competent.

He slashed at the hedge, gouging a hole that would take years to grow back in. He laughed and ran to some Blue Spruce lawn trees that were in need of clipping. He began vigorously tr.i.m.m.i.n.g them, slicing thin cuts into the lawn that made hash out of the automatic sprinkler system.

I once read the report of an early Spanish explorer who had given a jungle native a sharp steel machete. This Indian had spent much of his life pus.h.i.+ng thick greenery aside so that he could walk upright, forcing his way around it when he had to, and bowing under it when nothing else would suffice.

The Indian tried a few swings with the machete and suddenly realized that he now had the power to slash his lifelong tormentor asunder! He ran off laughing, screaming and yelling war cries while butchering the vines and shrubs of the Amazon. A little technology sometimes goes a long way. . . .

Eventually, hours later, the Indian came back to camp with his new blade hanging from his exhausted right arm. He was slick with sweat, and the explorer described his facial expression as of "one who had just enjoyed s.e.xual release."

Hasenpfeffer acted just like that Indian. He trimmed a few more small fir trees, laughing and shouting, working his way to the "back forty." He slashed a big, ornamentalboulder in half, screaming like a cowboy, or maybe a Rebel cavalryman. Then he fixed his attention on a big sugar maple which grew at the edge of the lawn.

Ian heard the shouting and came out in time to see the ancient tree fall to a single cut!

With great, uncharacteristic agility, Hasenpfeffer leaped at his foe, gleefully chopping it in seconds into firewood.

"Hasenpfeffer, what happened to your ecology thing?" Ian shouted.

It was one of our many continuing arguments. I figured that it was our world and we shouldn't make it dirty, but Ian had this semi-religious idea that we were morally obligated to use everything that G.o.d had given to us here on earth.

Hasenpfeffer was a flaming, left-wing ecology freak. He loudly defended the "right to life" of leeches, snail darters, puff adders and every other living creature except for mosquitoes, of course, and the cow he was currently eating.

And here he was, butchering this innocent tree.

"We've already got a five-year supply of firewood!" Ian added.

"My G.o.d. You're right." Shocked at his own actions, Hasenpfeffer dropped to his knees. Forgetting that all he had to do to turn off the blade was to let go of any one of the four triggers, he stupidly reached for the blade length adjustment with his left hand. His mania over, his clumsiness returned, and that's when Hasenpfeffer pitched in his part.

The thin, black thread of nothingness crossed his palm, and four still connected fingers. .h.i.t the dirt before he felt the pain.

I got a tourniquet around his wrist and we drove him to the U of M Hospital, where things were considerably more sophisticated than they are in the Upper Peninsula. Ian had had the brains to pick up the severed fingers, put them on ice, and bring them along.

The doctors were able to sew them back on, blood vessels, tendons, and all.

In a few months they worked again, after a fas.h.i.+on, but the nerves never regenerated.

Most of his left hand was numb.

The medical bills made a major dent in our cash reserves.

Despite Jim's accident, Ian and I got to wearing our swords all the time, just like we both always carried our calculators clipped to our belts.

Hasenpfeffer wouldn't touch a sword after his accident. He claimed that our carrying them was an atavistic fetish, a response to our primitive blood l.u.s.ts, and a stupid macho stunt.

Well, he rarely touched a calculator, either.

Admittedly, a sword was rarely useful as a tool. After the first week, I used my Swiss Army jackknife ten times for every time I used my sword. It was just too powerful for most ordinary things-it was too easy to cut the circuit board you were working on in half when you only meant to trim a lead.

Out in the shop, cutting steel and ceramics, Ian used variations of the sword all the time. By then, he had replaced them as the cutting tools on all of his lathes and mills and saws. But I rarely remember seeing him using the one that was clipped to his waist.

A feeling of power? Maybe. I suppose that I could have cut a truck in half if I ever needed to. But that same line of reasoning said that my calculator, my wallet and my keys each gave me, in their own ways, a similar feeling of power. I felt naked with any one ofthem missing.

All I know is that it felt good to have my sword there.

CHAPTER TEN

Lateral Displacement and Practical Jokes

Work continued, but we started hitting technical snags, the worst of which was the lateral displacement problem.

At first, we'd been running most of our tests for short time periods, a few seconds or so, for the sake of convenience, so the problem wasn't immediately noticeable, but when something was transported, it didn't reemerge in exactly the same place as it left. It never moved up or down much, but it s.h.i.+fted sideways in a random direction that averaged six inches per hour, a.s.suming "drunkard's walk" statistics.

We sometimes had a hard time finding a test object when it emerged in the air, and because of this, we got to sending small, Citizen Band radios as test objects. A receiver was wired up to a commercial time clock, so if the walkie-talkie emerged when we weren't there to observe it, we at least knew when it happened.

From there it was a simple matter, if nothing was broken, of using a radio direction finder to locate our vagrant test object. Later, we got to putting them in steel canisters, to protect the radios from the shock of hitting the ground.

What made this lateral displacement problem so serious was that on reemergence our test object suddenly co-existed in the same s.p.a.ce as whatever else was there. Emerging in air killed anything alive and degraded electronic circuits something fierce. Emerging within a solid or liquid usually caused an explosion.

If we could tell exactly where something would emerge, it would be easy, or at least possible, to arrange to have a hard vacuum waiting there. But when a thing could drift a mile in a year . . .

Well, things started getting grim. We spent more than a year trying to get a handle on the problem, making hundreds of tests and wrecking a circuit and a radio on most of them. We had test objects reemerging in the d.a.m.ndest places, blasting twenty trees, destroying a drill press in the shop, and blowing out Hasenpfeffer's bedroom wall, just when he was getting into his latest chick.

But eventually something useful emerged. After tediously charting the exact times and places of every departure and arrival, Ian discovered that, while the actual displacement seemed to be random, nonetheless it tracked according to the sidereal day.

If you sent something at noon for (say) exactly fifteen hours into the future, leaving pointA and reemerging at point B, then you could do the same thing tomorrow at 11:56 and it would go from the same point A to the same point B.

This gave us a handle on the lateral displacement problem.

The three of us celebrated by going out to a good restaurant, a seafood place since it was my turn to pick, and I had developed a taste for critters with hard skins during my years in Ma.s.sachusetts. Hasenpfeffer ordered us a dozen raw oysters for an appetizer, and he and I dug into them.

Ian held back. He had been raised in a conservative, WASP household which apparently subsisted on boiled chicken, boiled potatoes, and boiled beef on Sundays. No seafoods, no foreign foods, and no spices at all.

"Come on, Ian. At least try one! They're delicious!" Hasenpfeffer said.

Ian picked one up and looked at it dubiously.

"It looks like a glob of grey snot," he said.

"Yeah, it looks funny, but it tastes strange, too," I said. "Sort of salty and slippery, since you swallow them whole. But they really are delicious, even though I can't say exactly why."

Hasenpfeffer as always was more persuasive than I was. Eventually Ian closed his eyes and slurped the little bivalve down. He had a strange expression on his face, as though he knew that somehow, another joke was being played on him.

That expression must have been where Hasenpfeffer got his clue for the stunt he pulled.

"But, but, you DIDN'T KILL IT!" he yelled. "You were supposed to kill it with your fork first, just before you ate it! It's still alive, man! My G.o.d, it'll eat your guts out!

You've got to kill the d.a.m.ned thing before it perforates your intestines and kills you!

Here, quick, drink this!"

And with that, Hasenpfeffer handed our terrified friend a large bottle of Cajun Hot Sauce, something that Ian had never seen before, let alone tasted. And before I could stop him, the little fellow upended the bottle and drank it all down at one gulp.

Ian had never even eaten a taco, so I'll let you imagine the results of Hasenpfeffer's s.a.d.i.s.tic stunt. It wrecked the evening, and Ian couldn't talk properly for days. I gave Hasenpfeffer a military style chewing out, once we got home, and he was pretty contrite about the whole thing. Ian just shook his head and walked out.

I saw Ian the next day, heading out to the woods behind our place. He had a four foot long one-by-six board under his arm, and was further equipped with a roll of toilet paper, one of those cardboard tubes you get when the toilet paper is used up, a plastic garbage bag, and a pair of heavy rubber gloves.

"Not meaning to invade your privacy, you understand, but just what in the h.e.l.l are you up to?" I asked.

He looked at me and smiled. He gestured to his throat, as if to say he couldn't speak, and continued on his way, leaving me standing there.

A week later, he was sitting at the kitchen table with the same rubber gloves on. Ian had always been an incredibly neat person, and the table was now covered with neatly aligned newspapers. He was carefully unrolling an oversized roll of toilet paper, takingout hundreds of now-dried poison ivy leaves, and dropping them carefully into a lined trash container. He then rerolled the paper on another cardboard tube, and was doing so neat a job of it that it looked like a brand new roll, even though it had soaked up a deadly oil from the green and red leaves.

I shuddered to think about what this meant, but again I had brains enough not to get involved.

The next day, Hasenpfeffer developed a terrible rash on his a.s.s, and his current lady friend went home carrying her underpants in her hand, never to be seen again. She was angry, and muttering something about V.D.

Venereal diseases were nearly nonexistent in the early seventies, having been almost wiped out accidentally by doctors who were handing out antibiotics for everything from head colds to sprained ankles. Of course, at the time, n.o.body knew that, and government ads still harped about how deadly V.D. was.

I found Jim lying naked on his stomach in bed, with his legs spread. I told him that it didn't look like any sort of V.D. that I'd ever seen, and suggested that a trip to a dermatologist might be appropriate.

The doctor insisted that it was poison ivy, even though Hasenpfeffer insisted that such a thing was impossible. One shot cleared the problem up, though, and you can't argue with success.

Except, of course, that the next day, having perforce used his toilet and toilet paper again, he had a relapse. I drove him back to the same doctor, who gave him another shot, and warned him to launder everything he owned, and especially anything his b.u.t.t might have touched.

For eight days, each morning I drove Hasenpfeffer to the doctor, who was becoming increasingly agitated. I can't begin to describe Hasenpfeffer's mood, except to say that it involved a lot of raw hate, with a suicidal backdrop.

It was time to talk to Ian.

"And you are positive that he has now suffered more than I did?" Ian said.

"Absolutely. That poor boy now knows suffering like the way he knows how to talk a chick into bed."

"Well, perhaps I could remove the toilet paper from his john in a day or two."

"Do it now. Please."

"But . . ."

"Now, or I'll tell Hasenpfeffer the cause of his troubles."

"So now it's threats, is it?"

"Not really, but look. I've let you have fair vengeance for what he did to you. But enough is enough! End this thing, before he figures out that all of his pain, and his last girl friend's pain, has been deliberately caused by you!"

"I did not deliberately hurt her. That was an accident."

"It was rank carelessness on your part, and as an engineer, you should have planned more carefully. Anyway, when Hasenpfeffer finds out that you pulled this on him, he will retaliate, and whatever his response is, it is sure to be much worse that an a.s.s full of poison ivy. And you know full well that after he does that, you'll do something evenworse to him. In time, this thing is likely to escalate until one of you is dead."

"You think it would actually go that far?"

"Yeah. I do."