Conrad's Time Machine (41 page)

"And just what are these physical incapabilities you are referring to?" I said.

"There are many. At the most basic level, your body chemistry is based primarily on carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen compounds surrounded by water. The Travelers use those elements, plus a lot of silicon and fluorine compounds all surrounded by ammonia. You are quite poisonous to each other."

"And mentally?"

"You are individuals who exist in a diffuse cultural matrix and communicate in a serial fashion using modulated sound waves. The Travelers have a hive mind, and while they are physically individuals, they are mentally a single entity. They communicate in a broad-band, parallel fashion using modulations in an energy field that you have not yet discovered. In addition, your people live in three dimensions while traveling through a fourth, which you call time. The Travelers live in five dimensions, while traveling in two others. In addition, your people have a rather stodgy disposition, while the Travelers have an extensive sense of humor that I don't think that you could ever comprehend."

"Ian, that sounds like such a crock of shit that it is almost certain to be true."

"Yeah. So you can somehow communicate with these seven-dimensional Aliens who built you?"

"That might be a fair statement. Or, it might be more accurate to say that I am a seven-dimensional Alien, as well as being a four-dimensional creature who strongly resembles you humans. In order to do my job properly, I had to be made with a dual nature. You might say that I am an interface."

"I always wondered what it would be like when the Aliens finally landed. I never expected them to walk in for breakfast," I said. "In any event, please sit down. Would you like some breakfast? You do eat, don't you?"

"Oh, yes. This part of me was made to be perfectly human, as nearly as possible."

"Good. Make yourself at home."

The maids quickly brought in another chair and a large tray of assorted breakfast foods.

"I hope to. After all, this part of me will be spending the rest of my life here."

"No way of going back to the seven-dimensional world, I take it?" Ian said.

"Not with this body, and of course my other half can't exist in this world. I exist, must exist, in both. It's rather difficult to explain. These pancakes are absolutely delicious. I've never eaten anything before, you know."

"Well then, you have a lot to learn, as well as teach, I suppose. There was some talk about a message that you had for us?"

"Oh, yes. Your activities here, your clumsy muddling with some of the aspects of the multi-dimensional universe have caused a certain degree of distress to the Travelers. I am instructed to inform you that you must cease and desist in these activities immediately, or the Travelers will destroy your entire Solar System. These sausage things are good, too."

There was about thirty seconds of silence, and then I said, very quietly, after getting a nod from Ian, "Barb, put out the word to everybody on the island. Do it right now. Tell them that absolutely nothing of a temporal nature may be used in any way until further notice. Every device that does anything concerning other dimensions is to be collected up and locked away, or locked off, or something done to it to make sure that nobody makes a mistake."

Barb left quickly.

Barb returned, saying that she had made the order retroactive to the moment that the Teacher had walked in the front door.

I was about to start shouting that that in itself was a use of time travel on her part, in direct contradiction to my orders, when the Teacher said, "Yes, that was quite wise of you. The Travelers really would have done it, of course. Having a hive mind, the lives of mere individuals don't mean much to them."

"If they had destroyed the Solar System, you would have been killed, too, wouldn't you?" I said. "Why doesn't this trouble you?"

"Because I would only be destroyed as an individual, and as I just said, we aren't very concerned about the life or death of a single individual."

"Okay," Ian said. "I'm trying to absorb this. You say that these 'Travelers' can't live here, and if they can make somebody like you, they obviously have a technology that is vastly superior to our own. Given that, there can't be much that we have that they could want. So why are they threatening us?"

"You are quite right. You have nothing that they want, or could possibly use. All they want of you is to be left alone. They have threatened you because you have done them a great deal of damage. Among other things, you have caused the death of several million of their component parts. Their people, as it were."

"We have killed millions of them?" I said.

"Quite so. You have been taking millions of tons of stone and other materials and dumping it into what you have been calling the 'Fifth Dimension.' The Travelers use that dimension, very regularily, for traveling in. The speeds involved are of course astronomic, so that even quite small particles can cause catastrophic damage to their vehicles and 'people.' "

Barbara entered the conversation for the first time. "Just what millions of tons of stone are you talking about?"

"Why, that installation you recently built a few hundred of your years ago on this very island," the Teacher said. "You not only dirtied our shipping lanes to an unprecedented extent, but you sent out several times the amount of rubbish than was necessary to complete your project. You wantonly destroyed several hundred of our, well, I suppose you could call them 'Passenger Liners,' and did it for no apparent reason at all."

"I did that," Barbara said, a look of absolute horror on her face.

"True. We examined the incident quite carefully before I was sent here."

"I murdered millions of people?"

"I suppose that you could say that. They were certainly terminated without their permission, and by your standards, I suppose that you could call them people."

"I was having fun, playing with a piece of machinery. I didn't know that I was hurting anybody."

"We know that, and of course you meant no harm. By our standards, you did no great wrong. To us, it was as if you had deleted a few million cells in our body. A minor injury at most. We don't hate you for it, but you must understand that this practice must stop."

"By our standards, ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law," Barbara said, starting to cry.

I said, "Hey, Barb, lighten up! He has said that all you did was mess up a few million cells in their body. That's like falling and scraping your knee. No big thing, pretty girl! It's not like you killed a human, or something."

"But of course, she did that, also. When she was perforating the roof of the overly extensive water collection system she was putting in, she inadvertently also perforated eleven canibals who were sitting hungrily around a campfire. But they were from a culture that was soon to be extinct, so the incident shouldn't trouble her," the Teacher said.

Barbara's eyeballs rolled up and she just crumpled silently onto the floor. As I bent down to pick her up, I said, "Oh, but it does trouble her. It troubles her greatly."

"We are not concerned with either your emotional reactions or your primitive legal standards. Since you have agreed to stop your offensive practices, my other task is to teach you how to do things properly. Simple modifications to your equipment will enable you to dispose of your trash in such manner that you won't cause anyone else any damage. I left a suitcase in your entranceway that contains a complete set of textbooks, written in your language, that will allow you to continue with your lives without disturbing ours."

"You are going to teach us everything there is to know about traveling in the other dimensions? Give us the theoretical background that we presently lack?"

"Of course. It is really preferable to killing you all, and it doesn't actually cost us anything. I mean, I had to be made to deliver the message, and since I'm here, I might as well live somewhat longer and spend my time being a teacher. Also, it is quite possible that as I learn more about you, the knowledge might be useful to the Travelers. In fact it is more than possible. Already, I have learned much that is valuable. The whole phenomenon of taste is new to us. Your pancakes, sausages, and this 'coffee' are absolutely delightful!"

"You are going to have a marvelous time when you discover sex," I said, making Barb as comfortable as I could. I didn't realize then that the damage to her psyche was permanent.

Ian said, "Okay. You've got a deal. You teach us everything we need to know, and we'll do the same. We've got a good, complete university sitting empty on this island, and we've always wondered what it was for. Now we know. It's all yours, Teacher. Take it, staff it and run it any way you want to. Have a ball!"

The Teacher started out by writing down a few simple equations on a piece of paper, and Ian and I stared at them for a few minutes.

"That's it," Ian said. "That's what we've been busting our balls on for years, trying to figure out."

"Yeah. I sure wish it was more complicated, so I wouldn't feel so dumb."

"All the world's great ideas are simple, and always have been, all the way through history."

"I'll take your word for it," I said. "Anyway, these equations prove that the Teacher's for real. I don't see that we have any choice but to do everything that he says."

"Yeah. And here I was hoping that I would go down in history as one of science's greatest thinkers."

"Me too. But we have to either give up on that dream, or have our Solar System destroyed because we are guilty of Interstellar Littering. On the other hand, well, we're still filthy rich. That's got to count for something."

"It always has, Tom. It always has."

The first major effect of having the Teacher around was that, since it was obvious that Ian and I hadn't invented all this time travel stuff in the first place, it would not violate causality if we got to see some of it, and learn how it worked.

It turned out that there were four time travel terminals on the island, which were connected to the subway system. All you had to know was which destination button to push, and there you were.

Actually, I don't remember ever pressing any of those two-hundred-odd buttons on the wall of each subway car. I was always with a crowd of girls, and one of them always pushed the buttons. In my years on the island, I had never dialed a telephone, rung a doorbell, or written a letter. It was easy to see (now) how they had so easily kept so many things from us. I began to realize that having too many servants makes you a rather limited person.

Anyway, you stepped across the hallway from the subway door and into a small room. A panel on the wall let you dial in the time that you wanted to arrive at, and you pushed a button. The door closed and in a little while it opened. Then you were then. There was no free-fall, since the room was able to maneuver within Earth's gravitational field, now, but the transit time was still there, which was why people used the more spacious and comfortable canisters for traveling long temporal distances.

I was told that if I was going to start using the Local Temporal Transport System, one thing that I had to be careful of was to keep a close watch over my own circadian rhythms. It was all too easy to get them out of step with one another, and there was a danger of getting yourself stuck in a permanent jet lag.

It was frustrating to see how simple it all was, and embarassing to realize that we hadn't been smart enough to figure it out by ourselves.

The next thing we did was to take the Teacher around, and show him every bit of temporal engineering that we had on the island. He passed judgement on each device, saying whether it was okay to use, or it needed modification, or it had to be destroyed immediately.

It was our tunneling and digging equipment that caused most of the problems. Mechanically, the devices were okay, but the electronic controls had to be destroyed, and entirely new ones built and installed. The same went for some of the weapons we'd been so proud of. Not the bombs, since they returned all the matter involved back to our own dimensions, as did the emergency power generators and the escape harnesses. But all the variations of the temporal swords were no longer allowed, not without a complete redesign. The earliest models, which caused some residual radiation, were deemed acceptable by the Teacher, but they had all been replaced years ago by what we thought were cleaner models, which dumped the trash into the fifth dimension, rather than into our own future. It was with great regret that I unclipped my temporal sword from my belt, and handed it to the Teacher.

The Teacher took over the university that we had given him, hired some administrators at our expense to schedule classes and keep student records, and put on some more housekeepers, janitors and gardeners to keep the place very neat and clean. Then he proceeded to teach every class himself, doubling back in time as much as necessary to get the job done. You could go through the school and see what appeared to be hundreds of him, teaching hundreds of small classes of typically ten students. He soon took over an entire student dormitory for himself, and lived in all of the rooms, aparently simultaneously.

And it wasn't only multi-spatial engineering that he was lecturing about. The Travelers were way ahead of us in almost everything scientific, cultural, mathematical or philosophic. The Teacher was prepared to teach anything to anybody at any time. New textbooks somehow materialized on a regular basis and were sent to our print shops for duplication. Of course, you had to be a Smoothie, a Killer, or a member of the Historical Core to get on the island, so enrollment at the university was somewhat restricted. Maybe we'll change the rules, later. Maybe much later.

The Teacher always dressed very well. He discovered that with a little re-tailoring, Ian's worn-once outfits fit him very well, and that he liked them. My old clothes, being a bit small for him, continued to fill up the closets in my palace.