Conrad's Time Machine (23 page)

"Yeah, so do I. So much so that I was too embarrassed to talk about it, before this. All this cleanliness, it just doesn't seem . . . manly, somehow."

"By the standards of a lower class working man, it isn't, and that's the subculture that both of us were brought up in. A working slob can't help having dirty fingernails, but I've gotten a good look at a General Motors vice president, or two, and let me tell you, those guys are well groomed. Not as well groomed as we are, though," Ian said.

"I'll bet that they have their women, too. I mean, besides a wife, often a second 'trophy' wife at that, they all have a secretary or two, a female chauffeur, a few house maids, and as often as not a few girlfriends. Nothing like what we have, but you see the pattern. The cluster of women around each of them helps make him a leader of men."

"You're cutting with a sword, Tom. Then there's our clothes. Back in Michigan, you had exactly three pairs of pants that fit you, and you never wore one pair, but saved it in case you ever got a hot date. Furthermore, you were almost as poorly equipped when it came to shirts, socks, and underwear."

"No fair! Do you realize that a man my size had to pay three or four times as much for clothes as you little critters did? And every time you gain a few pounds, you have to go out and buy a whole new set! I tell you that a fat boy ends up spending five times as much for clothes as you Munchkins do, and then we still look shabby despite the expense!"

"Hey, lighten up, Tom! I'm not passing out blame. I'm explaining a situation. There's no denying that you are dressing well now. Even though we've never worn anything but casual clothes around here, I'll bet it cost at least three thousand dollars, cash money American, to dress each one of us today."

"Yeah. It was weeks before I found out that the only shirts I have that aren't made out of silk are made of Egyptian cotton, and every one of them is hand stitched." I said. "I've got three sports jackets in my closet made of vicuna."

"Shades of the Great Inca. Not only did he keep more women than the three of us put together, he was the only person in his entire empire permitted to wear that precious cloth, vicuna, and he never wore the same garment twice. The Queen of England can't keep a harem, but she follows the custom of never being seen twice in the same dress to this day. What's more, I'll bet that our ladies will never let either of us wear a single article of clothing for more than one day, even though buttons are hand carved out of jade where they aren't made of precious jewels, or cast in twenty-two carat gold. What's more, we'll be doing it for the rest of our lives, and radiating the purest manna in the process."

"Then what's going to happen to all of those clothes? Nobody could wear them secondhand. Who could fit into clothes big enough to fit us?" I asked.

"Who wears Queen Elizabeth's old clothes? I don't know, either. My advice is don't worry about it."

"It seems so damned wasteful."

"Oh, it is. But it's all part of the program of making the two of us into great world leaders. In fact, it's probably one of the cheapest parts."

"Make that the three of us, since Hasenpfeffer's doubtless getting the same treatment."

"Probably. But at least
he
knows what the hell is going on!" Ian said.

We soon found that speaking in public for four hours a day, each, was a lot, so we cut the lectures down to a ten to noon matinee and a two to four afternoon show.

It was yet another revelation. Up until then, I'd thought that the twenty-hour work weeks that most teachers did was sheer government worker style featherbedding, but four hours a day whacked us out, even though we didn't have to correct any papers or tests.

All the while, Hasenpfeffer was coming by every morning, and being handed each day a more improbable tale of our whereabouts than he got the day before. Sometimes it took Ian and me hours each evening to come up with a new story.

We survived the course, and at the end of the last class, we were each presented with bound galley proofs of a book that somebody had put together from our lectures. This meant that we each had to read the whole thing over one more time, making corrections as needed, and making sure that what this guy had thought he heard was what we had meant to say.

Hasenpfeffer came around to the small party we threw after the last class at my place, celebrating the end of school. It was good to see him again, but somehow, he wasn't the same.

"Dammit! He was
polite
to me! To both of us! What the hell is the matter with him, being
polite
to his best friends?" Ian said, after Jim had "made an appearance" and departed.

"Maybe we've been a little rough on him."

"How so? I mean, we took a vacation when he didn't want to, and when he got to yelling and screaming about it, we ignored him. That seems normal enough. It's not like we made
him
take a vacation, when he didn't want to take one. Then, we played a trivial joke on him, where for a few weeks, while we were giving those lectures, which was what he wanted us to do in the first place, we made him think that we were still goofing off. Is that anything to get
polite
about?"

"But Ian, to play that joke, we had to organize the entire population of Morrow into a conspiracy to tell lies to him."

"We didn't organize anything. We just gave your housekeeper permission to go ahead and do as she suggested. These islanders are the most organizing people in the known universe, I swear it."

"Well, we did make up all those stories our girls told him, but the big thing is that he'd just spent a month or so, working his buns off, being diplomatic to everybody, while we'd gone around being fornicating playboys. And then, for his reward for being such a good boy, everybody in the whole country ganged up on him to play a joke. Think about it. Every single person on the island sided with us. Everybody he saw for two weeks knew what he didn't, and was laughing at him for it."

"So? Is that so much different from what's been happening to the two of us? Everybody in Morrow knows what's going on but you and me, Tom, but do we go around being
polite
to old friends? Of course not!"

"Yeah, but we've still got each other. Hasenpfeffer is out there all alone."

"All alone with nobody but his hundred and fifty naked ladies and a few thousand sundry others."

"Yeah, but those people aren't
friends
. It makes me feel rotten. We gotta do something about it."

It had taken us eleven days of lecturing to explain everything we knew, or thought we knew, about time travel. After that, we took a long weekend off, and vowed to start work, bright and surly, on Monday morning. Which implied having some manpower there to help us out.

Talking it over on Friday morning, Ian and I decided that we didn't know anything about hiring people. Neither one of us had ever had any significant number of people working for us. Barb and Ming Po, on the other hand, were both experienced managers, so we gave them the job of hiring the men who would work at our factory.

Oh, Ian and I had sketched up the job description for each slot to be filled, but after that we let the girls handle everything, including salaries.

Having thus performed my managerial duties by delegating them all away, I spent the rest of the day curled up with a book and a bottle, in that little room Ian had found on our first morning in Morrow. Sometimes, a man just has to get away from the rest of the world for a while.

Early on Saturday morning, I walked over to Hasenpfeffer's glass and chrome monstrosity, to talk to him and see about mending some fences. A man has very few true friends in this world, and you can't just let them slip away.

It was actually the first time that I had ever been inside of Hasenpfeffer's house, after living next to it for over a month. Most of the time, the three of us had met over at my place, I suppose because the Gothic styling there was more conducive to comfortable living than Ian's rather austere Taj Mahal, or Hasenpfeffer's sterile, modernistic glass and metal thing.

Aside from the splashy but ugly architecture, which had all sorts of elevated platforms and walkways cutting at different levels through huge volumes of space, the first difference I noticed were the women.

At my place, the girls were naked or nearly so, and openly friendly, cheerful, and energetic. Thinking about it, this was doubtless a response to my lecherous but essentially egalitarian personality.

Ian's women wore a bit more clothing than mine did, but they all were still pretending to be Chinese slave girls, with a lot of bowing, kneeling, and groveling. The Oriental kowtowing had happened at first due to one of my suggestions, when I was trying to get Ian over a hump, but the fact that Jim hadn't changed it probably said something about the man. But then again, maybe all it said was that he had simply never noticed it. For all his education, intelligence, and perception, that boy could be God awful dense, sometimes.

The ladies of Hasenpfeffer's harem were all fully and properly dressed, generally in shades of grey, black, and white. Many of them wore well-fitted ladies' business suits. They all acted as if they were at a major corporate headquarters, with stiff, artificial smiles and quick, efficient motions.

In his glassed-in breakfast room, atop a clear, round glass tower which faced the city and not the sea, Hasenpfeffer, too, was in a three piece business suit. It was carefully tailored of grey wool with a thin, dark blue pinstriping. He wore a silk Rep tie, a diamond tie tack, and had a gold chain running from a twenty carat diamond watch fob to a priceless antique gold watch.

All this to meet an old friend on a Saturday morning.

He met me in a friendly enough manner, but with a touch of formality, too.

We had breakfast, served by a quiet woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a black-and-white English maid's outfit. She had long sleeves, her top was buttoned up to her throat, and the hem of her black skirt almost brushed the floor.

Jim's old casual manner and slovenly ways were entirely gone. He was as well groomed as Ian and I had become, but it was more than that. He was now a corporate executive, a consummate politician, a manipulator of people. Even his table manners were now disgustingly impeccable.

Between the power suit, Hasenpfeffer's formal politeness, and his new table manners, I felt as intimidated as all hell, despite the fact that I was still twice his size.

Nonetheless, I pushed onward.

I started out by apologizing for the joke we'd pulled on him, but before I had even finished, he brushed it off as not worth bothering with.

"Think nothing of it, Tom. It was nothing but a youthful prank, and a harmlessly amusing one at that."

"Youthful prank? Jim, we are the same age. You are just as youthful as I am."

"Of course we are. Did I tell you what an outstanding job you and Ian did with that lecture series? It was remarkably well done. Why, even I got the feeling that I understood this time travel business myself, by the time the two of you were finished. Everyone has been talking about it, of course, even those who could only catch it on television."

"I never realized that we were being televised. I never saw any cameras. Where were they?"

"I haven't the foggiest notion. The people here have their ways, of course. I'm told that the two of you will be starting back to work on Monday."

"Yes."

"That is excellent. You will be accomplishing great things there in your new facility, never doubt it for a moment."

I tried repeatedly to get him talking about the strange things Ian and I had discovered about the island, about the two distinct types of people who lived here, and the strange cultural quirks that each type had, but I might as well have been talking to a college advisor, for all the personal interest he took in it. He acted as if I was a small child, telling him about all the things that had happened today in the third grade.

"Yes, the two of you are far too intelligent and observant for anything to remain a mystery for long. It's one of the many things that I have always admired about you both."

"Jim, this is Tom. Do you remember? Your friend Tom?"

"Of course I remember. We've always been the best of friends, and we always will be!"

"Yeah."

I left, feeling saddened and sickened. One of my two best friends was gone. Grown up, maybe, while I was just abandoned like Puff the Magic Dragon. The fact was that in a few weeks, Jim Hasenpfeffer had somehow grown
old
.

Ian was waiting for me when I got back.

"So how is he, Tom?"

"Uh, I'd rather not say, just now. Why don't you visit him tomorrow, before church. After that, we can compare notes."

But on Sunday afternoon, Ian was looking as sad as I felt.

Hasenpfeffer, at least the old Hasenpfeffer that we knew, respected, and, yes, loved. . . . was gone.

Ian and I showed up promptly at eight on Monday morning, ready to meet our new workmen and get them all to work.

We'd taken the subway there, and rather than ride our private elevator up to our offices, we went up the public elevators to the main plant floor. Barb had said that our new people would be there at seven, to start getting things squared away, so we expected to find dozens of men working diligently. The doors opened and we got our first shock of the day.

We didn't have any manpower in our facility.

We had woman power. Working around the huge lathes, mills and overhead cranes, there was not a single male human being. All of the machinists, skilled tradesmen, and repairmen were beautiful young women.

Now, back in Michigan, I'd heard all of the women's complaints about the inequalities in the workplace, and for the most part, I sympathized with them. I mean, if somebody was working next to me, doing exactly the same job that I was doing, but was bringing home twice what I was being paid, I wouldn't be happy. And if I was making half what that person was, just because of a little biological accident, I'd be downright pissed! If I was being passed up for promotions, if the good work I'd done was not being credited, and I was simply not being taken seriously for the same non-reason, I'd be ready to revolt! If I was the last to be hired, and the first to be laid off, and given all the shit jobs in between, I'd be about ready to head up into the hills with a rifle and a bandolier of ammo to rectify the situation!