Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "Seconded and so moved. Next, what do we do about the hundred or so women out there? If we replace them with men, what do we do with them? Do we fire them because they're women?"

  "Tom, how could we do that and still be honorable men? No, we have to keep those women who have already been hired, and try to treat them just like men."

  "But they don't want to be treated like men. They offered to work for nearly nothing because they expected us to treat them like women! Are you going to decline the services of the next attractive woman who works her way into your bed? Could any normal man turn down that many decent, gorgeous women? I mean, there are these biological imperatives that a man doesn't have all that much to say about!"

  "And there are some religious reasons for doing the same thing. God's very first commandment was for us to be fruitful, to divide and multiply. But what I meant was that in the work situation, we should try to be as fair as possible, and keep our private, sexual lives separate from our working lives."

  "Good luck. I'll tell you what I'm minded to do. Aside from Barb, I've followed Hasenpfeffer's original suggestion, and put all the girls at my place on a schedule. They each have their occasional night in bed with me, and if it happens that they get laid before then, they forfeit their next turn, until all the others have caught up."

  "Yeah. I've done about the same, Tom."

  "So, I'm going to tell Barb to put all the women who work for me on the same schedule. Those who want to, that is. If the girls at the palace don't like it, well, they can blame the whole thing on Barb."

  "Okay. Then I'll do the same. But it's not going to be easy, treating the girl you slept with last night like she's just another worker."

  "It's a rough life, Ian, but England expects every man to do his duty."

  "I've got a better idea. How about if the girls who work here for you belong to my harem, and your new harem girls all work for me? After that, we try not to mess around with each other's girls, and pillow talk about work isn't allowed."

  "A good thought! We'll act on it."

  We called in Barb and Ming Po, and explained the new program to them. I was surprised that they weren't happier about the way we'd just octtippled their salaries, retroactively to last month, but they weren't. It was like they actually didn't care, one way or the other.

  "One other thing," I said. "Dress codes. Anybody working down below on the plant floor is expected to wear proper safety equipment, including safety glasses, steel tipped shoes, hard hats, and sturdy garments that completely cover them. People who might occasionally need to go down there shall wear safety glasses and hard hats, at least, when they do. And people who work in an office environment must wear shoes and other clothing that completely covers at least their torsos. Anyone dressing too sexy, in our opinion, will be sent home to change. This last is for our benefit, not yours. All play and no work doesn't get the job done."

  "Yes, Tom."

  "Good. Now, let's go meet the managers you've hired for us."

  As we walked past my new secretary, I noticed that she was now properly dressed in a skirt, blouse, and sensible shoes.

  I decided right off that I would stay on a last name basis with the women who worked for me, in an attempt at keeping our relationships as businesslike as possible.

  I told them that they could call me "sir."

  I later noticed Ian doing the same thing, I suppose for the same reason. Something had to be done, since every woman in the shop was as beautiful as any of the women at the palaces. By ordinary American standards, they were all knockouts, each as beautiful as any leading lady that Alfred Hichcock ever put on the screen.

  I soon met the five key people I had working for me. There was Kowalski, my secretary. She was one of those extremely organized people who always knows where everything and everybody is. She had two other secretaries subordinate to her.

  Preston was primarily a mathematician, although she got her Ph.D. in physics. I figured that we'd be working together a lot. My math has always been a bit poor, and up until then, I'd had to ask Ian's help when I needed to get into anything beyond calculus. Preston didn't have a solid place in our table of organization, and her name just appeared near the top boxed in with dotted lines that didn't connect to anyone else, not even me. She had no subordinates, but she was sort of on call to anybody who needed theoretical or mathematical help.

  As the weeks went by, she got to spending much of her time at the coffee bar located between engineering and the technician's assembly area. When I asked her about that, she said that some people were hesitant about "bothering" her in her office, and she worked better on an informal basis, anyway. Later, she admitted that the biggest reason for her new location was the two hundred pounds of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee I had donated to the bar from my palace's stores.

  DuBoise was a solid electrical engineer, and was competent and disciplined, if not overly imaginative. She did everything exactly "by the book," and kept copious notes on everything she did. Everyone was encouraged to keep a journal of the work they did, but DuBoise filled them up at the rate of three a month. She headed a team consisting of eight other engineers, two computer programmers, and nine draftsmen.

  O'Mally was an engineer, too, but of a more practical bent than DuBoise. Like me, she was of the "make it work, and fill out the paperwork later, if you have time" school of thought. She headed up a group of eighteen assorted technicians.

  Brown was in charge of purchasing and liaison work with both suppliers and customers. We didn't have a sales or marketing group, since for the foreseeable future, all of our products would be used internally within our own greater company, KMH Industries, which consisted of the entire City of Morrow, and much else, besides. Not that we planned to let any of our temporal devices get off the island.

  We didn't have an advertising group, either, since everybody on the island already knew about us.

  The accounting people reported to Brown, as well, as did the janitors, for a total of twenty-one subordinates. It seemed like an odd bag, but those functions had been grouped under her, and her under me, primarily to make the size of my group the same size as Ian's group.

  Which meant that when Barb had set it up, she was thinking more about a balanced harem than of an efficient work force.

  Someday, I'm going to get ahead of that little girl.

  Still and all, it was a day well spent. The six of us had gotten ourselves shaken down, then, in a four hour meeting with Ian and his people, we had figured out what we had to do, and had a schedule that said when we were going to do what.

  * * *

  Late that night, after four new ladies (two mechanical engineers, a draftsman and a machinist with a Ph.D.—a woman also strange in other ways) had come and gone, I was alone in bed with Barb.

  "Barb, you're awake, aren't you?" I said quietly.

  "Of course, Tom."

  "I should have asked you sooner, but is it inconvenient for you to lie beside me every night while I sleep? I mean, what with you not sleeping and all. Doesn't it get boring?"

  "Not really. My mind doesn't need to sleep, but my body still needs to rest, and if I wasn't by your side, I'd be lying down somewhere else, alone. I like being by you, and it gives me time to think."

  "What do you think about?"

  "Nothing important, usually. I go over the events of the day, and sort of mull them over. I plan the things that I'll be doing tomorrow. That sort of thing."

  "Hmm. Well, if I ever do something that you are not happy with, be sure and tell me about it, won't you? I want you to be happy. You've become a very important person to me."

  "Thank you, Tom."

  "There's another thing that I've been meaning to ask you about. It's been more than a month since that first night we spent together. At the time, you said that there was a sixty percent chance that that you had conceived a child."

  "Yes?"

  "Well, have you? I mean, a month has gone by and all. Did you miss a period? Are you pregnan
t?"

  "I am not pregnant now, Tom."

  "Oh. Okay. To be honest, I don't know if I'm disappointed or relieved. I mean, you'd be a wonderful mother and all, but at the same time, having a child is such a huge responsibility, and I'm not sure whether or not I'm ready for it. I doubt if any man is, until after it happens to him."

  "Not being a man, I couldn't advise you on that one, Tom."

  "True. And what's more, I find it good that you are not a man. Good night, Barb."

  "Good night, Tom."

  I fell asleep kicking myself, because once more I had lost my nerve. I had not asked this perfect little woman to marry me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Different Kinds of Power

  Tuesday being a day when Ian's people cooked our breakfast, I met him there in his Taj Mahal.

  "Tom, I've been playing with an idea for a logo for our new company. M and K Temporal Engineering."

  Ian was already working on his usual stack of Famo Buckwheat pancakes with Vermont maple syrup. I'd gotten into the habit of asking to be surprised with something completely different each morning, and on that particular morning I was served some poached herring, English style, she said. It seemed like a strange thing to eat for breakfast, but it didn't taste all that bad.

  "Catchy name, and I guess it's your turn to get your name first."

  "My thought exactly. Look at these."

  I looked over the sketches he had done up, and the truth was, they were better than the usual stuff you see plastered over the world's billboards.

  "They look good to me. Better, in fact, than anything I could come up with. Only, I've got this one nagging question."

  My breakfast waitress was wearing a loose top of some very flexible material that covered her to American television standards when she was vertical, but fell away and exposed her torso completely when she bent over to serve me. Thus, she was able to satisfy both Ian's desire for decorum and my own desire for lechery at the same time. I thought it an interesting engineering solution to what was essentially a social problem.

  Ian said, "Yeah?"

  "Do we really have a company?"

  "Well, of course we've got a bloody company! Just where did you think you spent all day yesterday, you silly twit?"

  "I'm not sure, but I just might have been at the Temporal Engineering Research and Development Group, a loyal subsidiary of KMH Industries. A separate name and logo sort of implies that we're an independent company, doesn't it? But when all of the money, personnel, and other useful things are coming, I suppose, from KMH, just how independent can we be?"

  "Your comments are rude, Tom, your demeanor is insufferable, and your timing is abominable. I was sitting here, bothering no one, and having a lot of fun, designing these logos. I was halfway there to designing us a corporate blazer for everyone to wear at company functions, where we could all sing the company song together. Then you came along with your unwanted existence and fucked it all up, for no other reason than that you stupidly picked this precise moment to have a rare flash of common sense. Furthermore, you insisted on performing your vandalism before I'd even had a chance to finish breakfast. You know, I think that if we ever discover who your parents were, they will turn out to be brothers."

  With that, he crumpled his sketches up and threw them over his shoulder. An obsequious blond maid, kneeling behind him in proper oriental fashion, picked up the papers and put them out of view, probably to hand them down to her grandkids, thinking, "Actual drawings by the hand of the great Ian McTavish himself! Yes, I knew him back then. . . ."

  "Well, look Ian, if you have these inner needs to get creative in that direction, why don't you do something about a new KMH logo? We could probably use a company song or two, even if you can't carry a tune in a backpack or hold a note with a pair of Vice Grips, and even if I've never once seen you wearing a blazer, company or otherwise. Together, we own two-thirds of KMH, don't we? We thus constitute a solid majority on the board of directors, so we can do anything we want with it. We can even make it sing, if we want to!"

  "Apparent power and actual power are often two different things, my poorly educated young friend. As to the Board of Directors of KMH Corporation, or whatever it's called, are you really positive that it has one? Have you ever seen it? And is this weird little Magic Fairyland of an island really owned by KMH?"

  "I have been under those distinct impressions."

  "Yes, but are you resolute in your convictions?"

  "It beats me. Tell you what. This morning, instead of going to work, let's march over to Hasenpfeffer's Monstrosity and demand our rightful places on the Corporate Board of Directors!"

  "I suppose that we could do such a thing, but what would it prove? The locals hereabouts have the wealth and organization to sit the two of us at some huge, impressive table, surround us with dozens of equally impressive suits filled with distinguished looking people inside them, and then bore the shit out of us with accounting figures until we give up and go back to work at our own little company. And for all we know, everything we see could be just another Potemkin Village."

  "A what Village?"

  "Okay. Time for another history lesson. Catherine the Great of Russia wanted to lead an enlightened nation into the Western World. She wanted all of her peasants to live well, and to be happy and healthy. She even gave orders to that effect. Her nobles wouldn't go along with it, figuring it would be too expensive, and what was the point of being a nobleman if you couldn't make a few peasants miserable now and then? They said that it would take all of the fun out of being boss, but Catherine was adamant. She actually did the unprecedented thing of going out into the country and seeing for herself that her orders were being carried out. To forestall any unpleasantries, one of her ministers, Potemkin, arranged that everywhere she went, she was met by healthy, happy peasants, living in nice, clean peasant villages with healthy cows and happier chickens. The problem was that Catherine went in for long road trips, and Potemkin couldn't afford to build that many idyllic villages, let alone hire enough actors to play all the peasants. So, as an economy measure, he only built a few villages, and had them moved, buildings, happy peasants, fat cows, contented chickens and all, such that as the Empress of All the Russias progressed through her country, she always had nice villages to look at. Of course, they were always the same villages, with the same peasants and the same cows, but who looks all that closely at a cow, a chicken, or a peasant, anyway."

  "Good God! And this really happened?"

  "Oh, yes. And similar things go on all over the world to this day. So just because they call you the Emperor, the Chairman of the Board, or whatever, don't go believing that you are really in power."

  "Well, if we're not, then who is?"

  "A good question. If you study any one of the thousands of books on conspiracy theories that have been filling the world's bookshelves for the last three hundred years at least, you can convince yourself that some secret group of sinister individuals actually rules the world."

  "But you don't believe this?"

  "Oh, I do believe it, but only on Thursdays and Saturdays. The rest of the time, I think that the world is so complicated, confused, and corrupted that there isn't anybody smart enough to comprehend the whole of it, let alone manage the place. I don't think that anybody is actually in charge. Sometimes, I think, perhaps, the world is like a huge but poorly constructed ship, designed by a madman, and crewed by billions of people who refuse to talk to each other. It is a ship with a hundred propellers all pointing in different directions, and with a thousand rudders each with a thousand helmsmen, and every one of them is trying to get her safely into a different port."

  "Ian, sometimes you paint some very strange pictures inside my head. Come on, let's go to work."

  * * *

  With plenty of competent help around, things progressed quickly at work.

  The temporal product that was farthest along, the temporal sword, was properly documented in a few days. That is to s
ay, we had good engineering drawings of every part, complete assembly instructions written up and printed, and a user's manual had been sent to the typesetters.

  One of Kowalski's people, Downing, turned out to be a first class technical writer. Incredibly, she was able to write instructions that even I could read and understand. We promoted Downing up to her own office, and had Kowalski find herself a new receptionist.

  Our vendors started delivering civilian versions of the sword within the month, and our military got its first temporal side arms a few weeks after that.

  The "Temporal Bomb" was next off the line. This was little more than a toughened up version of the device we had originally found in that woods in Northern Michigan, years before. It had been adjusted so that the sliced up bits returned to our normal three dimensions within a few microseconds, rather than the hours that original circuit had taken, so that the noise and implosion effects didn't have time to take place. There was just a loud click, and everything within the designated sphere crumbled into very small pieces. Since the bits and peices didn't have time to fall down into each other, and air didn't have time to get in, the bits reemerged in a fairly good vacuum, and there wasn't much radiation at all.

  Designed to fit in the nose cone of one of the small, two-inch mortars our infantry carried, it had a calibration ring on it that let the operator adjust the radius of destruction from three feet to three hundred feet. Thus, the same weapon could be used to take out anything from a machine gun nest to a football stadium, at the operator's discretion. Destruction within the radius was absolute, with everything within the sphere just suddenly collapsing into thin shards. Destruction outside that volume was nonexistent.

  Our little army was very impressed with it.

  We also made the Army a hand grenade version of the bomb, with a smaller radius of destruction for operator safety.

  The Navy promptly requested their own version of the hand grenade for use as a depth charge. The main difference between the two was that the navy version left a hard vacuum behind for several seconds. In the atmosphere, a near miss by a temporal bomb caused little or no serious damage, but under water, at a depth of a few hundred feet, the implosion of seawater into a large sphere of hard vacuum was remarkably deadly.