Conrad's Time Machine (37 page)

"I didn't know that Canadian geese lived in these islands," I said.

"Neither did I," Ian said. "It's the sort of information we came here to find out. You want to talk about what happened this afternoon?"

"Not just yet."

The women and the Smoothies turned in early, talking about tomorrow being a long day. Two Killers stood guard duty, but the rest gathered around the fire, passing around cold beer, whiskey and ice cubes. After a few beers, I found that I needed the whiskey. Before long, Sergeant Kuhn was talking about the first man he'd ever killed.

"I was on point, going down a forest trail in what is now southern England, with the whole Ninth Roman Legion strung out behind me. Suddenly, this tall guy wearing nothing but blue paint and a scowl jumps out from behind a tree, swinging a big, two-handed sword. I took it on my shield, just like in training, and got him in the gut with my gladius. That was the way the Romans fought. Big shield, short sword. He went down, but I had to stab him three more times before he quit moving. It was strange, everything seemed to be moving so slowly, but somehow I was still faster than the other guy, which is why I'm still here, I guess. They gave me a triple ration of wine that night, and I needed it."

Three of the other guards told stories of their own, before I was ready to talk about what had happened to me.

Much later, with a lot of empty bottles lying around, the lieutenant explained, "We call it debriefing, sir. When you're in a fight, and it's kill or get killed, you have to do things that are contrary to everything they taught you about morality and decency, ever since you were old enough to walk. After something like that, a man has to talk it out, among friends if possible. You have to settle it all out in your mind. And maybe it's a little like confession. But not doing it makes a man crazy, and old before his time."

It turned out that there wasn't a better site for a town than the place we'd come up at. The island didn't have a natural harbor, and since we wanted this to be a base for further exploration, we would have to build one ourselves. Our tunnel entrance had to be hidden and protected, and the eighteenth century being a rather violent time, we planned to build a fort covering it. The fact that it had come up at the island's high point didn't hurt a bit.

One of the construction crew, Jolsen, was an architect who had spent years studying the construction techniques of this century. Not that we planned to use those techniques, but for obvious reasons, it was important that when we got finished with construction, it had to look period.

Jolsen looked rather sheepish when he unrolled his plans for the town. It took me a while to find out why.

They showed a town that could hold three thousand people by the cramped standards of the eighteenth century. It was built around an irregularly shaped deep-water harbor that was big enough to hold two of the largest ships of this century and a dozen smaller ones. There were eight big stone piers and a largish dry dock. The main road of the town followed the shore. Most of this was to be cut from solid rock.

The town's defenses looked like something the Spanish would have done in this century, with two small forts guarding the harbor entrance, a thirty-foot wall with fourteen towers and three gates surrounding the town, and a powerful castle on the hill. Where these defenses couldn't be cut from bedrock, they were to be built of cut stones weighing two tons each, the limit of what our lift truck could handle.

It was when we got down to details like the water and sewage systems that we found out what our architect was so sheepish about. You see, he wanted to put in water and sewage systems, and that just wasn't done much in the eighteenth century.

"Yes, sir. You're right, sir. But without these systems, life in this town would be smelly and uncomfortable by modern standards, not to mention disease ridden. What I want us to build is well within the limits of eighteenth-century technology. The sewage system consists of a single tunnel that runs under the main buildings of the town. The bottom of the tunnel is at the level of low tide in this area. At one end of the sewage tunnel, a gate connects with the harbor. This is manually opened at high tide twice a day, flooding the tunnel. At the other end is a second gate that connects with the sea. This is opened at low tide, flushing the sewage out to sea."

"Yeah, that much is fine," Ian said. "But somebody is bound to get curious about the flush toilets."

"I hadn't planned to use flush toilets, sir. Just a seat with a hole in it. A tight-fitting lid should keep the smell down."

"If we can teach the men to put down the toilet seats," Barbara said.

"I suppose I could hinge the lids so that you had to hold them up, ma'am. That way they would close automatically."

"Why couldn't they do that in our century?" Barbara said, but I shushed her.

"What about the water system?" I asked.

"There's a nice steady breeze here most of the time, sir. A well and a windmill in the next valley should provide for our needs, with a simple aqueduct system to deliver it to the town. Much of it can be built within the outer city wall. Each major building will have a cistern that is also filled by rainwater. A second windmill on the castle can pump the water for its requirements."

"It might be better for the castle to have its own well. And if we ever have to stand a seige, we'll want to have the windmill inside the town. We can run a tunnel from some underground aquifer to the windmill. But all told, I suppose it beats having two hundred slaves to do the hauling. Is this okay with the rest of you? Then let's do it," I said.

"And we'd better get it done fast, since this island isn't as uninhabited as I'd like it to be," Ian said. "We need defenses in case we're seriously attacked, and we don't want any of the locals to see how we're going to build them. This is going to have to be an all-out effort until the exteriors of things at least are up."

The next step was clearing the land that the harbor, the town, and the castle would be built on, or more often carved into. It would have been easy enough to just run the tunneler over it all, but most of the area was heavily wooded, and we would be needing the lumber.

Felling the trees was no problem, not when every one of us carried a temporal sword. The problem was hauling the usable logs out of the way, when we had only one small lift truck and the tunneler. We also had a small traveling crane, though, and the tunneler soon cut some straight temporary roads that let the crane drag in logs for the lift truck to stack.

We cleared the top of the hill first, because building the castle would be the biggest job, and we had get going on it soonest.

Barbara liked operating the tunneler, and proved to be very competent in operating it. This was good, since unlike the rest of us, she didn't have to sleep, and we needed more than twelve hours of work a day out of that machine. Ming Po comandeered the lift truck, and one of the other girls, Kelly, took over the traveling crane. The other five women were on kitchen and housekeeping duty, leaving us mere men to do the grunt work. Two of the Killers were always on guard duty, but the rest were put to work.

Within a day, the hilltop was logged over, and by working through the night, Barb and "her" tunneler had us down to a big flat piece of limestone bedrock by morning. The hill and the tunnel mouth had become thirty-five feet lower, and my nifty interlocking steel hoops were gone.

The town and the harbor covered over six hundred acres, and logging it took us over a week. The tunneler easily kept up with the rest of us. For this sort of work, digging with an open sky above you, the tunneler was equipped with a periscope that let the operator see over the front shovel. With its side wings on, and driving an easy seven miles an hour, that thing was capable of sending twenty-five hundred cubic feet of rock into oblivion every second. By the time we had the tree trunks hauled away, Barb had the harbor cut down to fifty feet deep, complete with stone piers, a launching ramp, and a dry dock. A thirty-two-foot-wide road surrounded it, a road of equal width ran on both sides of the town wall, and some of the connecting roads were in as well. A big town square was cut, with a big block of limestone left in the center to be eventually cut into a fountain. She had been able to leave enough good rock in position so that half the outer wall, complete with towers and gates, was already built, and the larger buildings closest to the castle, where a hill used to be, could be made by simply hollowing them out, rather that having to build them up out of cut stone. The architect calculated that there was plenty enough good limestone left inside the buildings, and in the unfinished roads, to complete the town.

We quarried the stone for the castle out of the granite walls of the staging area down near the canister we'd arrived in. It would have to be hauled up the tunnel to the top of the hill, but there was already a freight elevator of sorts to do the job. Well, it was a cart that ran on stone rails cut on either side of the steps going up. An electric winch moved it up and down.

With a temporal sword, cutting stone was no problem. You just switched it on and whacked away. Cutting it accurately, however, required that you carefully place a simple aluminum frame with an adjustable rail that you set up to where you wanted the cut to be. There was a sword that cut a quarter-inch-wide hole mounted on a little wheeled trolly that rolled along the rail. You needed that thickness to slide metal bars between the blocks before you cut them loose from the wall. Without the bars, you couldn't get a lift truck fork under a block to lift it.

The lift truck operator took the blocks to the stair elevator and sent them up in groups of four. At the top of the steps, a worker checked the blocks and if necessary did some trimming on them. He also put two holes in each one, so the crane would have something to grab onto, and attached them to the end of the traveling crane's cable.

Our crane was small, and had to drive along on top of the eight-foot thick wall it was building. A fifth worker eased the blocks in place and mortared them down.

Our usual block was two feet wide by two feet high by four feet long, and weighed about two tons. Once we got into it, a team of five of us averaged one block—cut, hauled, and mortared into place—every minute and a half. The Smoothies were amazingly coordinated, and worked together like a well designed machine. Every one of them seemed to know exactly what everyone around them was doing, what needed to be done next, and what their part in that ought to be. They did construction work the way auto workers built cars—with calm, cool effiency, even though each of their jobs was new and different, and the car workers had been doing the same things over and over again for years. The Killers were competent and hard working, but at the end of the day, they each got only half as much done as a Smoothie. And despite our advantages of size and strength, Ian and I weren't quite as good as a pair of Killers when it came to getting things done.

We started quarrying a rock face that was eight feet tall, as high as the little electric lift truck could lift. Being taller than the rest, Ian and I spelled each other doing the cutting. Even so, we were a week getting the outer walls of the castle built, and that was working a twelve-hour day. Putting in the interior partitions, floors and ceilings, with all the supporting arches required, was going to take months, but that could be done after company came, working behind the shield of the outer walls. We made a point of leaving plenty of extra stone over and around doors, windows, fireplaces, and banisters, so that decorations could be carved in later. Doing all that fine work might take years, but that could be done at some future date when people felt bored and artistic.

Actually, after years of skull sweat, doing manual labor was kind of fun. These new bodies of ours gloried in hard work. I suspect that the construction workers had had similar treatments, since they didn't seem to have any trouble keeping up with us big guys. Or maybe Smoothies were just built that way.

Barbara and her tunneler pretty much worked straight through, barring quick stops for meals and occasional bouts lovemaking with me. She was a few days getting all the sewers and secret passages in, including a second set of both that extended outside the town's walls. This was her idea, for future expansion, she said.

She also went way overboard when it came to getting our water supply in. She cut twenty-two miles of tunnels, twelve feet high and eight wide, eighty feet below sea level in the remarkably solid limestone under the island, and then rigged a dozen half-inch drills in a fan-shaped array on her tunneler to punch millions of holes in the roof all the way to the surface. This drained ground water into two huge underground vaults that the windmills could draw water from.

It also punched holes in thousands of trees that would otherwise have been good timber. When I complained about this, Barb said that there wasn't any way to be sure exactly how far up the surface was, and it was better to be safe than sorry. The damage was done, and it wouldn't be repeated, so I let the matter drop.

The architect calculated that once the system filled with water, if the island suffered from a total drought for twenty years, we would still have plenty of water for all of our needs.

Personally, I think Barbara just liked digging tunnels.

Another crew was working with the logs we'd collected during the ground clearance. There wouldn't be time to season the wood properly before we turned it into furniture, doors and window shutters, but any seasoning was better than none, so we got on it soonest.

Our "saw mill" looked like a long, aluminum sawhorse that you set up above the log you were planning to turn into boards. Up to sixteen temporal swords fit on a wheeled trolley that ran along the bottom of the long beam of the sawhorse. Pulling the trolley the length of the horse sliced the log into nice, smooth lumber.

The hard part was stacking the wood in neat, rectangular piles so it would dry out properly.