Conrad's Time Machine (38 page)

Despite the long hours we all put in, it wasn't all work, not by a long shot. Every Smoothie can play at least one musical instrument, and most of them brought one along. Being ungodly cooperative, group singing came naturally to them. Furthermore, Barb was a world class ballerina, and her friends weren't far behind her.

The sea was full of fish, and there was plenty of game on the island, from wild pigs, birds, feral goats and cattle, to sea turtles. Ian claimed that many of them had been put on these islands by Christians to feed shipwrecked sailors, and to give the cannibals something to eat besides each other.

The trick with the cannibals hadn't worked. Apparently, once you develop a taste for human flesh, nothing else quite makes it.

The Killers liked to hunt and fish, so we didn't have to live on the canned food we'd brought along. A bakery, a brewery, and a still were among the first things they got going, and weather permitting, we usually ate around a campfire.

With the Killers providing the food and drink, and the Smoothies the entertainment, a very good time was had by all.

When there was nothing else for Barbara to do but cut the canal that would connect our harbor to the sea, she warned us, and we all knocked off work to watch. She had already cleared the canal down to a few inches above the high tide level.

The tunneler was sealed against both a hard vacuum and high pressure, and was as sturdy as a submarine, so taking it into the water wasn't what bothered me. I was having visions of the sea water driving her backward into the harbor, and smashing her against a pier or something.

Most people just don't realize the force of moving water. Thousands of people are killed in floods every year all around the world, but very few of them actually drown. Most often, they are ripped to naked pieces by the force of the water smashing them into things.

But Barbara insisted on doing it herself, and out-arguing her was a lot like out-stuborning a cat. You can do it, but it usually isn't worth the effort.

She got the tunneler into position on a notch that she had cut earlier for the purpose. She swung her wings out to their full thirty-two foot width, and took off at about thirty miles an hour. She ran out of stone to drive on about the time she hit the beach, but that didn't slow her down. She just pressed on regardless, eating up prodigious amounts of rocks, sand, and then water. She didn't even stop when she was completely submerged, but continued on with the water flowing over and around the big wings.

With hindsight, I can see the wisdom of her actions. She had to get out and away from the backwash she was kicking up. At the time she scared the shit out of me!

Watching her, I almost missed the start of the hydraulic show she'd kicked up. Water gushed up her recently cut canal at what must have been sixty miles an hour. It made a spectacular waterfall as it splashed down into a harbor that you could hide a five-story building in.

In a few minutes, Barb and her tunneler drove up onto the beach. She shut down the shovels, folded her wings, and hurried back to see the waterfall she'd made. She needen't have rushed. The harbor was more than six hours filling up. Only then, when the rapid flow had ceased, was it safe to go back and cut the channel wider and deeper.

We spent another two months getting the town pretty much finished. The buildings were all up, with walls and roofs, and had doors and window shutters, but were lacking glass windows, and were mostly without furnishings. They were connected to the sewer tunnels, but not to the secret passageways that would let our agents and historians communicate with the modern libraries and work rooms in the basement of the castle. The secret entranceways would be installed later on an "as needed" basis.

The castle had four floors, stairways, inner walls, partitions, and nicely arched ceilings, but was still pretty bare inside. The drawbridge was in, spanning the moat, but we didn't have the chains and mechanisms needed to draw it up. The moat was still dry, except for some rainwater. The wells were in, but we didn't have the pumps or the windmills to bring up large quantities of water.

Barb had talked the architect into letting her put a seawater moat all around the town, and this meant that we had to put in drawbridges at each of the town's three gates. They didn't work yet, either. Ian came up with a system of two floating check valves that, with the action of the tides, kept the water in the moat circulating in a clockwise fashion, keeping it fresh.

Next, somebody made the mistake of telling her how a fish weir worked, and the area near the town soon sported two big ones. We soon had more fish than we could eat. The ones we couldn't eat were eaten by the bigger ones, and nature took its course.

Then, she decided that she didn't like the way the town was situated in a notch cut into the surrounding hills, so, without informing the rest of us, and working at night, she had eliminated the hills. She didn't even let us save the lumber. Except where it abutted the cliff, with the castle above, the town was now surrounded by a smooth, stone plain. I suppose that this was good, from the standpoint of defense, but esthetically, well, it looked like the parking lot of a big shopping mall. How she was planning to get some soil and plants growing there was beyond me.

She just
liked
playing with that tunneler.

To keep her out of further mischief, I had the architect draw up plans for a road system that she could cut through the whole island, and that had kept her busy for months. We rigged a temporal sword to the front of the tunneler, and cobbled up a bulldozer blade for the front of it so she could cut the trees and push the logs off the roadway, rather than sending them to wherever such things went when we sent them elsewhere.

I made her promise to stay inside of her beloved machine whenever she was outside the town walls, so the natives couldn't hurt her. They never tried to. If they were still out there, we didn't see any of them.

To look authentic, the castle and the forts guarding the entrance to the harbor needed dozens of ornate, eighteenth-century cannons, which we didn't have yet.

Only the Red Gate Inn was really complete, sitting on the town square, with the big fountain in front of it. The fountain was empty, but we didn't have any horses that needed to drink from it anyway. At least Ian claimed that that was what public fountains were really for, originally.

You'd think that I would be the one who wanted a good bar in operation, but no, it was Ian who pushed the inn into completion first, even ahead of the church across the big square.

He explained himself one night in the common room of the inn.

"I'll get the church finished, don't worry about it. But right now, I'm the only one here who would use it, and I can pray just fine in my room."

That surprised me. I'd never actually seen Ian praying. Then again, I'd never seen him shitting either. I guess that they were both very private occupations with him.

"The inn is another matter. Our people, the historians, are going to have to spend much of their time traveling around. They are going to want to see everything that goes on, but not draw too much attention to themselves. Now I ask you, where is the one place where a stranger is not much noticed? Obviously, at a hotel or inn. And where are other travelers most likely to gather and swap their stories? At a bar in an inn, of course. Therefore, the centers that the Historical Core will build and use will have to be inns. Eventually, we'll need to build thousands of these, in every age and culture the world has known. And to make sure that our agents can find those inns, we are going to mark them all with a bright red front door, and all of them are going to named 'The Red Gate Inn,' or some variation of that in the local language."

"It sounds like a program," I said. "Do you suppose that the Red Gate Inn, back in the twentieth century, is one of your Historical Core centers?"

"I expect that it might be. We'll probably decide that the history of the island is just as important as the history of every place else."

"You keep saying 'we,' but you know, Ian, it's really
your
program. I mean, I'd be happy to help out and all, but you are the one who is so fascinated with history. I'm interested in what happened in the past, but it's nothing that I want to spend my whole life working on."

"Huh. Then what
do
you want to spend your life doing?"

"I really can't tell you. I've never had anything like a life plan. So far, I've been like most people, just doing what comes to me, and trying to roll with the punches. We've still got years and years of work ahead of us, developing this time travel thing, and after that, well, who knows?"

"Agreed. But what do you yourself want to do. What really turns you on?"

"You know, before we built this town, I wouldn't have believed it, but I find that I enjoy the hell out of building things. You know, we could have turned this job over to a bigger, better equipped crew months ago, but nobody has suggested that we do so. I think that everybody here has been having as much fun as I have."

"It's been a real vacation, and no mistake," Ian said. "But if what you want to do is to build things, well, there's the whole culture and city that the Smoothies come from. Somebody's got to build that."

"Let Hasenpfeffer do it. I still think that that whole sick culture is all his fault, anyway. I mean, I may not be a Christian, but I'm not totally immoral, either! Do you think that I want to be responsible for creating a civilization full of people who are as absolutely uncreative as those Smoothies are?"

"They can't be that bad. You married one of them, didn't you?"

"Yes, and it's not turning out as well as I'd hoped it would."

"Like, what's the trouble?"

"Mostly, it's the way she won't let me see our kids. They're already six years old, somewhen back there, and I haven't met my own children."

"Huh. But then, we each must have hundreds of children, what with all the fornicating we've been doing, and I haven't seen any of mine, either."

"I know I'm not being rational, but somehow, it's just not the same thing. Barbara is my wife, and not just another bedmate."

"Well, if it's really bothering you, when we get back, we'll both do something about it."

"It
is
bothering me, and I thank you. It is very good to have a real friend, Ian."

"And I love you, too. So just what is it that you want to build?"

"I think that I want to build a culture, all right, but I want it to be a place where intelligent, creative people can enjoy themselves being intelligent and creative."

"And how would that be possible if they have time travel? It's the fact that they know their own futures that makes the Smoothies what they are, and what they aren't."

"I've been thinking about that, and I've got some ideas, but they're too hazy just now to be worth talking about."

"Well, you keep thinking about it, and when you're ready to talk, I'll be ready to listen. For me, well, I haven't been staying here for the joy of getting my hands dirty. The real reason that I've been hanging around is that I've been hoping that some ship will come sailing into our new harbor, and we can make contact with the locals. The civilized locals, I mean, although I'm almost ready to go out and look for those cannibals of yours, I'm getting that frustrated."

"A ship will happen by eventually, and when they do, they're all yours. Do you have any idea how you're going to explain how this town just sort of popped up one night like a mushroom?"

"I plan to wing it on that one. I mean, if we find out that nobody much has been here for fifty years, there's nothing to explain. If the guy was by here three months ago, we'll have to convince him that he was someplace else, I suppose. I'm smart. I'll figure something out."

Two weeks later, I was in what was now the carpentry shop in what would later be the town hall, making table legs. Three thousand people end up requiring over a thousand tables, and that means four thousand table legs. It was a matter of taking a four by four from one stack, putting it in a homemade lathe, spinning it up and making one swipe with a temporal sword sliding along a bumpy template, then taking it out and handing it to Ian, who was cutting some slots in the big end for the tabletop supports to go into.

Farther on, two more guys were assembling the tables, using wooden pegs but modern glue, and painting them with twentieth-century polyurethane varnish. Cutting with temporal tools, everything was so smooth and accurate that we didn't have to bother with sandpaper. We wanted everything to look authentic, but it wasn't like anybody was going to send this stuff out for chemical analasys.

This was not intellectually stimulating work, but we'd done all the fun things first. Like making four thousand chairs. Maybe in the eighteenth century, they wouldn't have made them all identical, on a production line, but our carpenter assured us that using green wood the way we were, everything would soon warp all to hell, and then it would all would look as individualistic as you could possibly want.

I felt a definite relief when one of the sentries ran in and shouted that a ship had been sighted. Ian ran out to get a look at it, while I told everybody else to hide everything anachronistic, and then clean the place and themselves up, in that order.

I found Ian on the fighting top of one of the harbor forts, holding his body rigid and staring out to sea.

Besides being able to see clearly under water, our new eyes had another trick, but we didn't know about it until Lieutenant McMahon had showed us how to use it, a few weeks before. We had telescopic vision, just like an eagle. It didn't come naturally, like the underwater thing. You had to hold yourself very still, and concentrate on it, but when you got the hang of it, it was better than a pair of twenty power binoculars.

"He's a Frenchman," Ian said. "At least, that's an eighteenth-century French flag on his mizzenmast."

"No. The flag on top has some kind of a cross on it. That's got to be one of the Scandinavian countries, doesn't it?"