Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  I remember one night when Hasenpfeffer was carrying on about the latest cosmological theory that some academician—Hawker, I think he said his name was—had been writing about. Something about how the universe started as something the size of a dime, sixteen billion years ago, had expanded up to the size of the solar system in a few seconds, and had been expanding ever since.

  I used our customary method of stating that I wished to engage in a debate on the current subject at hand. I stood, raised my fist, and shouted at the top of my voice, "Bullshit!"

  Following protocol, he stared at me, pretending to be aghast, as if he was shocked at my disagreement.

  "It's all bullshit. First off, the solar system is many light hours across. You have the leading edge of your universe traveling way faster than the speed of light. Explain that one away!"

  "You know, Tom, I met a noted physicist from the university at a party, and I asked him that very question. He told me that it wasn't a matter of going faster than light so much as it was that space was being created behind the leading edge." He noted my dubious look, and continued, "I confess that I didn't fully understand his statement myself, but the man's reputation is that he is one of the finest theoretical . . ."

  But I was already rolling up my pant cuffs, signifying that I wished them to remain unsoiled, even though the bullshit being spread around had already ruined my shoes and socks.

  "Right." I said, "Then there's this whole 'expanding universe' nonsense. Now, the only proof we have that the whole universe is expanding is the shift in the spectrums of certain apparently small, and therefore supposedly far away, galaxies, into somewhat lower frequencies."

  "Of course. The famous Red Shift."

  " 'Famous' just means that all the fools have had time to hear about it. Let's look at this red shift. Photons lower their frequency when their energy level is lowered. A blue photon is stronger than a red photon. An X-ray photon is vastly more powerful than a microwave photon. It is true that if an object is traveling away from you, the photons it emits will be relatively less energetic than a photon emitted by a stationary object. In exactly the same way, a rock thrown at you by someone in a departing car will hurt less than one thrown from a stationary one. But is that the only way a photon can lose energy? You don't know? Well, I don't know either! Nobody knows. Nobody knows because nobody has ever observed a photon for anything but a very short time, the longest of which is the time it takes a radar beam to leave the reflector, hit the target, and return. A few milliseconds at the most."

  "A few minutes," Ian interjected. "They've bounced radar beams off the moon and some of the planets."

  "Call it hours for all I care! What are hours compared to sixteen billion years? What I'm trying to say is that we don't have any idea what happens to a photon over long periods of time. Yet these half-baked 'cosmologists' blithely assume that photons are absolutely unaffected even though they have been winging it through space for billions of years. Personally, I can't imagine anything remaining unaffected after traveling at light speed for ten billion years! Yet all that would have to happen would be for the tiny photons to get just a little bit tired, lose a little bit of energy, and your expanding universe theory is right out the window!"

  "But all the theories prove—" Hasenpfeffer started to say.

  "Theories don't prove anything! Theories are things we invent to make the world more comprehensible to our inadequate little brains. Facts prove—or disprove—theories, not the other way around. If we don't have the facts, then theories are nothing more than wild ass guesses! We aren't any closer to the truth than if we just said, 'God did it, so He must want it that way.' "

  I could see Ian tightening up when I brought God into the argument, which I did fairly often, for an atheist. My theory was that if He didn't want me to do something, He had the wherewithal to stop me. And if He didn't care, or He wasn't around to care, then who was Ian to object?

  Ian, of course, had heard all that years before, and decided that just now he didn't feel like plowing up old turds. So he said, "What troubles me about all this cosmology stuff is the way the cosmologists have of speaking so definitively about what happened ten or twenty billion years ago. I mean, shit, there's no way that you can get a bunch of historians to agree on what exactly happened during the Civil War! And that was an event that had millions of observers, and thousands of people recording their observations. I tell you that cosmology is just a silly game that physicists like to play, probably because they don't have anything else to do."

  "That seems like an extreme statement," Hasenpfeffer said.

  "Extreme, Hell. Those guys with their super expensive toys haven't come up with anything useful and new since they came up with atomic power, long before the beginning of World War II."

  "But surely, all of the dozens and hundreds of subatomic particles must count for something, even to one of your sadly restricted intellect."

  "For the last part of that, up your ass, Hasenpfeffer! For the first, I said 'useful.' Nobody has ever found a use for a Mu-Meson, an Electron-Neutrino, or a Left-Handed Boson."

  "I met a left-handed bos'n's mate, once," I said, but was ignored.

  "Furthermore," Ian continued, "I doubt the very existence of the things. Subatomic particles are things that their inventors have painted with the colors of their own minds, and then glued together with their own shit. Data? They don't have no stinking data! Those overpaid academicians sit around and try to 'interpret' tiny, meaningless squiggles on photographic plates the way ancient Roman soothsayers tried to predict the future by interpreting the bumps on the liver of a sacrificed owl. And in both cases, the stupid politicians lap up every irrational word of it, and reward the rip-off artists with gold from the public coffers! If we had spent on biology what we've wasted on all those cyclotrons and accelerators and what not, the world would be a lot better off!"

  Hasenpfeffer whispered aside to me, "Oh, my. I do believe the poor boy is going to start in on Taxes again. Try and head him off, won't you?"

  I turned to Jim and said quietly, "You feel that way because you have never had to pay any, or found a way around it if you did. You fork out a major chunk of your income very week and see what you think about taxes, and what the bozos spend it all on."

  Ian had indeed started in on his often told Speech On Taxes before noticing that he had lost his audience. Eventually, his sermon wound itself down.

  "Be that as it may," Hasenpfeffer said in a normal voice, "I wonder if the reason that Ian is such a regular churchgoer is that his is one of those sects where they let lay people get up and speak. I mean, with a less critical audience, he could go on ranting for hours about anything that comes into his curious little mind."

  Ian glowered at him, but didn't say anything, so I suppose that much of what Hasenpfeffer said about Ian's church was true. I was curious, but not quite curious enough to take Ian up on one of his frequent offers to take me to church.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Autum Leaves and Temporal Swords

  About the only non-time-travel thing the three of us did agree on was that the smell of burning autumn leaves was the finest of perfumes, gaseous ambrosia and vastly superior to all commercial olfactory products. Also, that any governmental official who called it pollution was obviously a Fascist Left-Wing Atheist. (As named by Jim, me, and Ian, respectively.)

  One day, just as Hasenpfeffer completed raking all the leaves from our huge front lawn into a humongous pile on the gravel drive in front of the shop, Ian came screeching up in the Corvette. He had this bright idea burning a hole in his mind, and was so eager to try it out that he simply didn't notice the six-foot high pile of leaves on the driveway. He just plowed through them, jumped out of the car and hobbled as fast as his damaged foot would take him into the shop.

  Hasenpfeffer, less than amused, proceeded to pack the little car solid with leaves, raise the rag top, and then bury the car with the rest of the pile. This procedure left him with a feeling of contentment, a
ccomplishment, and proper vindication.

  An hour later, Ian realized that he needed a few parts from the industrial supply store down the road. He rushed to what he still thought of as "his" car, jumped in and actually fired it up before he realized that he couldn't see out the windshield, or breathe either, for that matter.

  The next day, Hasenpfeffer's bedroom was stuffed nearly solid with leaves, leaving Ian looking smug while Jim, with a new lady friend on his arm, screamed.

  And the day after that it was Ian's bed and closet that got the full treatment.

  I watched this leafy dialogue go on all winter, the same pile of leaves being handed back and forth, and growing smaller and increasingly tattered in the process.

  Wisely, I stayed neutral.

  Toward spring, they were down to one leaf. You might pull on a roll of toilet paper and out would float this battered tree leaf.

  If I happened to find it, I always returned it to its place. After all, they weren't talking to me. I didn't want to get involved, it wasn't my fight, and furthermore, in the service I had seen this sort of thing get dangerously out of hand.

  Still, they played it safe enough, this time. Usually, an exchange of practical jokes tends to escalate, each side trying to out do the other, every round, but in this case they were saved by the self-destructibility of autumn leaves.

  The leaf appeared in magazines and books, under the place mats and in the breakfast cereal. Finally, it had been abraded down to a stem and six fragile veins before it was retired by mutual consent.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the work went on. We learned to calibrate our circuits to amazing accuracies—things sent for weeks reemerged within micro-seconds of the predicted time.

  We learned how to focus the field and project it as tight as a laser beam, which made an incredible knife or sword. This was nothing like a Star Wars light saber. It was a lot better. Switched on, it projected a thin needle of nothingness that looked like a tightly stretched black thread. Everything that entered that line was sent forward, an atom at a time, I think, for hundreds and thousands of years, reemerging imperceptibly except as an immeasurably tiny addition to the background radiation.

  It was a neat toy, and I spent a few weeks "polishing" it into a tidy, hand-held package. For safety reasons, I put in four trigger switches, complete with anti-tiedowns. To turn it on, you had to have a finger on each trigger, and lifting any one of them turned the beam off. Then, you had to release all the buttons before it could be turned back on. This was so that Hasenpfeffer wouldn't try to tape down three of the buttons, and hurt himself, or me either.

  The blade length was adjustable from an eighth of an inch out to twelve feet, by means of a sliding potentiometer built into the side, easily reachable with your right thumb. For power, it had solar cells charging Ni-Cad batteries, and everything that had to penetrate the housing—switches and so forth—were guaranteed to be dust tight and water tight, down to thirty meters.

  Ian machined up three stainless steel housings for them, complete with belt clips, and these were hermetically sealed at well.

  We christened them "Temporal Swords."

  Switched on, it made a crackly hissing sound that was caused by air molecules leaving rapidly for elsewhen. The sword was a glorious thing, the ultimate cutting tool and the deadliest possible short-range weapon.

  As a cutting tool, it could cut absolutely anything as quickly and as smoothly as you could feed the stock to the tool. There were no vibrations, and with the right beam width, no chips to clear away. Over the coming months, Ian adapted all of his cutting tools from conventional cutting bits to temporal swords. The lathes didn't look much different, but the Bridgeports looked like they were decapitated with their motors and gearboxes gone. And the saws were reduced down to being little more than holding fixtures! Eventually, Ian replaced all five of his saws with simple clamps to hold the swords accurately, and had Hasenpfeffer sell the surplus machine tools.

  At the other end of the spectrum, as a weapon, it was something to make a combat veteran perk up, drool, and pant with lust. With a flick of your wrist, you could cut through anything with this puppy! I mean that if a Sherman tank offended you, you could turn it into a pile of small metal chunks in seconds. And the only sounds anybody would hear would be a quiet hiss and the much louder sound of bits of dead tank hitting the ground.

  But you couldn't fence with one because you couldn't parry. Two beams interpenetrated without difficulty. I figured that it was just as well, since I think that Hasenpfeffer has a Zorro streak in him, and a temporal sword wasn't a play toy.

  I put a light bulb in the butt, letting it serve as a flashlight as well as a cutting tool. This use was not encouraged because it quickly ran down the batteries.

  Ian and I talked about high-output, long-range pulsed models—rifles and pistols—but, probably because none of us hunted, it was a long while before we got around to making any.

  Anyway, when the first "production" model was done, I took it outside to run a real world test, or, in the popular vernacular, to play with it.

  It was a beautiful day and Hasenpfeffer was trimming the hedge with a pair of huge, two handed scissors. He was still doing most of the drudge work around the place because he wasn't of much use elsewhere.

  I went to the shaggy end of the hedge, adjusted the blade to about three feet, and held the beam horizontally at shoulder level, where the hedge should be topped. Then I walked steadily towards Hasenpfeffer, neatly trimming the shrubs to height. He saw me, stared at me, and registered pleasant shock.

  "Give me that thing!"

  "Hey, sure Jim." I laughed. "Only it's as dangerous as sin and not quite as much fun. Look, you hold all four of these triggers down to make it work. Then this slide controls blade length and . . ."

  "Got it!" He took it out of my hand, ignorant of the fact that it is very bad form to take a tool out of any workingman's hands. It's a fighting offense in the Society of the Competent.

  He slashed at the hedge, gouging a hole that would take years to grow back in. He laughed and ran to some Blue Spruce lawn trees that were in need of clipping. He began vigorously trimming them, slicing thin cuts into the lawn that made hash out of the automatic sprinkler system.

  I once read the report of an early Spanish explorer who had given a jungle native a sharp steel machete. This Indian had spent much of his life pushing thick greenery aside so that he could walk upright, forcing his way around it when he had to, and bowing under it when nothing else would suffice.

  The Indian tried a few swings with the machete and suddenly realized that he now had the power to slash his lifelong tormentor asunder! He ran off laughing, screaming and yelling war cries while butchering the vines and shrubs of the Amazon. A little technology sometimes goes a long way. . . .

  Eventually, hours later, the Indian came back to camp with his new blade hanging from his exhausted right arm. He was slick with sweat, and the explorer described his facial expression as of "one who had just enjoyed sexual release."

  Hasenpfeffer acted just like that Indian. He trimmed a few more small fir trees, laughing and shouting, working his way to the "back forty." He slashed a big, ornamental boulder in half, screaming like a cowboy, or maybe a Rebel cavalryman. Then he fixed his attention on a big sugar maple which grew at the edge of the lawn.

  Ian heard the shouting and came out in time to see the ancient tree fall to a single cut! With great, uncharacteristic agility, Hasenpfeffer leaped at his foe, gleefully chopping it in seconds into firewood.

  "Hasenpfeffer, what happened to your ecology thing?" Ian shouted.

  It was one of our many continuing arguments. I figured that it was our world and we shouldn't make it dirty, but Ian had this semi-religious idea that we were morally obligated to use everything that God had given to us here on earth.

  Hasenpfeffer was a flaming, left-wing ecology freak. He loudly defended the "right to life" of leeches, snail darters, puff adders and every other living c
reature except for mosquitoes, of course, and the cow he was currently eating.

  And here he was, butchering this innocent tree.

  "We've already got a five-year supply of firewood!" Ian added.

  "My God. You're right." Shocked at his own actions, Hasenpfeffer dropped to his knees. Forgetting that all he had to do to turn off the blade was to let go of any one of the four triggers, he stupidly reached for the blade length adjustment with his left hand. His mania over, his clumsiness returned, and that's when Hasenpfeffer pitched in his part.

  The thin, black thread of nothingness crossed his palm, and four still connected fingers hit the dirt before he felt the pain.

  I got a tourniquet around his wrist and we drove him to the U of M Hospital, where things were considerably more sophisticated than they are in the Upper Peninsula. Ian had had the brains to pick up the severed fingers, put them on ice, and bring them along. The doctors were able to sew them back on, blood vessels, tendons, and all.

  In a few months they worked again, after a fashion, but the nerves never regenerated. Most of his left hand was numb.

  The medical bills made a major dent in our cash reserves.

  Despite Jim's accident, Ian and I got to wearing our swords all the time, just like we both always carried our calculators clipped to our belts.

  Hasenpfeffer wouldn't touch a sword after his accident. He claimed that our carrying them was an atavistic fetish, a response to our primitive blood lusts, and a stupid macho stunt.

  Well, he rarely touched a calculator, either.

  Admittedly, a sword was rarely useful as a tool. After the first week, I used my Swiss Army jackknife ten times for every time I used my sword. It was just too powerful for most ordinary things—it was too easy to cut the circuit board you were working on in half when you only meant to trim a lead.

  Out in the shop, cutting steel and ceramics, Ian used variations of the sword all the time. By then, he had replaced them as the cutting tools on all of his lathes and mills and saws. But I rarely remember seeing him using the one that was clipped to his waist.