Conrad's Time Machine (28 page)

"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, nobody 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 that you realize that when you marry a woman, you are not only marrying her, you are marrying into her family as well."

"Assuming 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, damn 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 friendship. 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 bashing your head on doorframes as often as you used to?"

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

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 basement, 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 sturdy, 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 sexual 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 sturdy steel tube.

The only disadvantage to our excavation techniques was that besides the rock and dirt that was vanishing, 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 space suits! But I'm getting way ahead of myself.

As before, we were sending back a sturdy 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.

The little machine sat there, under the ground, for as long as we had sent it back in time. If we sent it five hundred years back, its timer had it wait there for five hundred years, doing nothing.

Once its timer said "GO!" the temporally active area was turned on, its treads started moving, and it ate its way through the top of its canister, and then through the rock above it, crawling slowly upward on its treads until it eventually reached either the air, or, as was more likely, the bottom of the sea. If it reached air, it would send up an antenna and broadcast its ID number. If it found water, it dropped its treads and their drive as an anchor, while the rest of it floated to the surface, connected by a few thousand feet of fishing line, and again it radioed its presence.

Then someone, usually from the Navy, went out and found it with the aid of radio direction finders, carefully noted its position using the Loran system we had installed, and brought it back for possible repair and reuse.

As the project continued, we found a major long-term drift to the east, far out into the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that we had to operate from deeper and deeper shafts, to make sure that one of our canisters didn't emerge deep in the ocean water. If that happened, there was no telling where ocean currents would take the thing, and if we ever did get it back, it's positional data would be totally useless.

The design of the canisters and the surfacers they contained had to be changed as time went on. Making machinery that could sit idle for thousands of years, and then function properly on command was no trivial task!

Eventually, we were building the surfacers mostly out of stainless steel, with gold bushings on all moving parts, and then filling the canisters with a fluorinated oil to keep moving parts from welding themselves together over the ages. Whole categories of electronic parts had to be eliminated. There isn't a battery or an electrolytic capacitor that will last more than a few decades, and these things had to be designed around. Power supplies were a particular problem.

A version of Ian's emergency generator eventually powered the things. It made a partial vacuum that the encapsulating oil boiled into. The resultant gas went through a piston type motor which in turn powered an electric generator.

Even so, a small atomic battery was needed to get the Rube-Goldberg affair started. These batteries had been developed in the late fifties. They consisted of a thin rod of a radioactive isotope that emitted alpha particles. These particles struck a surrounding layer of a phosphor that gave off visible light. This light, in turn, energized a layer of solar cells, which converted the light into a small trickle of electricity, enough to run a clock and keep a large, mylar capacitor charged. It was a matter of one overly complicated Rube-Goldberg device starting another.

We also had to modify the six ships of our small navy, so they had the range to go out on the high seas and recover our transmitters. Their huge Rolls-Royce gas turbines were removed and replaced with things that worked on the same principle as Ian's emergency generator, but which turned impellers rather than electric generators. They now had essentially infinite range, especially after we added a small galley, a shower, and some submarine-style bunk space, where the engines and fuel used to be.

Even so, toward the end, only one surfacer in three was being returned to us.

We sent out some sixty-seven thousand of the things before we were sure that we had the local drifts mapped for the last fifty thousand years. We would have gone back even farther, except that we weren't up to designing machinery and electronics equipment that could last much longer. In the end, we decided that we'd have to someday build a beachhead back there, and then use it as a base for further temporal explorations into the past.

Mayor Jenkins managed to find a genuine Catholic priest who was willing to commit the unspeakably sinful task of marrying two people who were not of his faith. He turned out to be an impoverished fellow of mostly Indian ancestry who hailed from one of the poorest sections of Paraguay.

Even so, he didn't come cheap. In return for his services, KMH bought and installed a complete water and sewage system for the extended village that was his parish. He also got a small, but well equipped hospital, two food processing plants (to get local products ready for market), and a small fleet of trucks (to get those processed products to those markets). Finally, he gouged us for the materials necessary for the building of a church, a rectory, and a minimal house for every family in the parish.

The priest figured that if he was going to sell his only soul to the rich and boorish, he might as well charge all that the traffic would bear!

It was months before he arrived, since he demanded his pay, or rather his loot, up front. Then, once he got here, he insisted on taking six weeks for the posting of the banns, time which he planned to use to educate us in the one true religion. Fortunately, he spoke no English, we spoke no Spanish, and the translators that I was paying for somehow found more pressing things to do, so his plan didn't quite work out.