"Good. Did I tell you how happy I am that you are no longer bashing your head on doorframes as often as you used to?"
"No, but thank you. I too am pleased by this development."
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
You Still Have to Start at the Beginning
Our earliest devices simply sent things forward into the future, to merge into whatever hapened to be in that time and place. This had the effect of causing dangerous explosions and radiation from the strange isotopes caused when two atomic nuclei happened to emerge close enough to fuse. Eventually, getting a strong handle on Dimension Five, we found that we could simply leave things we didn't want out there, wherever "out there" was. As far as we were concerned, things simply disappeared, when we wanted them to.
We debated using this for trash disposal, but decided that in the very long run, we were better off recycling. Consider that everything in our trash was something that we once needed, and that we would probably need to use those elements again. Otherwise, future generations might someday start running out of planet, or scarce materials, at least. We also decided that the Dimension Five route was the way to go when it came to our own tunneling. It was safer, cleaner, and the world had plenty of rock, anyway.
* * *
The engineering on the "Temporal Test Canisters" was pretty slick. Instead of our old basement, we were now operating from the bottom of a shaft bored twelve hundred feet into the coral, limestone, and granite under our island. This was to eliminate any danger of hurting anyone when the canisters reemerged into our continuum.
Tunneling and excavation had become simple jobs, since our people were now equipped with our new line of temporal digging tools.
The simplest of these was a variation on the escape harness. A sturdy, temporally active area like the ones on top of the shoulder boards was fitted out with a swivel, on the end of a hefty, two-yard-long stick, which contained the circuitry and a battery pack. To use it, you set a dial to the thickness of rock that you wanted to eliminate, usually around a quarter of an inch. You put the active area, the pad, on the rock you wanted to go away, and you pulled the trigger. It went pop, and a layer of the rock under the pad vanished.
The first models had a continuous-discontinuous mode switch, where the operator could elect to continue scooping away rock as fast as he could swing the hefty gadget, but this proved to be dangerous. It was too easy to let it get away from you, and we had two serious accidents before we made it a discontinuous mode only device.
With the pad swiveled all the way out, the thing looked vaguely like a shovel, and that's what the men got to calling our invention.
And yes, most of the construction workers were men. After the "manning" fiasco of our engineering outfit, Ian and I made sure that sexual bias in hiring—in either direction—didn't happen again.
We also made bigger machines, where an operator sat in a sealed cabin, and simply drove in the direction he wanted to go. When cutting through good, solid rock, this could be just as fast as he felt like driving, but in most cases it was prudent to take the time and money to line the tunnel with a sturdy steel tube.
The only disadvantage to our excavation techniques was that besides the rock and dirt that was vanishing, a lot of air was sent to somewhen else as well. When cutting down from the surface, this wasn't a problem at all. If anything, it greatly improved the ventilation. But when you had to start from a canister buried you didn't know how deep, you either had to bring a lot of bottled air with you, or your workers had to be equipped with space suits! But I'm getting way ahead of myself.
* * *
As before, we were sending back a sturdy steel canister first, to insure that the test canister emerged in a hard vacuum. Now, however, we could afford to make all of our canisters out of stainless steel, to cut down on the corrosion problems we'd seen before.
The first canister, over a yard long and a foot wide on the inside, was sent on a programmed course, sideways into the fifth dimension, then back in the fourth for a programmed duration. This was followed by a return trip in the fifth in the opposite direction, at the end of which it returned to our continuum, but earlier in time.
Within nanoseconds of arrival, before its circuitry could degrade, or the whole thing had time to explode, it sent itself, with its new contents (the dirt and stone it emerged in) out into the fifth dimension, in a dispersal mode which broke it up into atoms. We hoped that these atoms wouldn't cause any future problems.
We'd never run into anything while traveling backward in the fourth dimension, but we didn't see any sense in leaving any rocks out there that we might ram into later on some other test or trip. The truth was that we didn't know exactly what happened to those canisters of rock that we were blithely throwing around the other dimensions.
There was a great deal that we didn't know about a lot of things.
A few nanoseconds after the first canister departed, leaving a chamber filled with a hard vacuum in the past, a second canister arrived that was slightly smaller than the first. This had to get there before the walls of the chamber, if they happened to be made of something soft, started to collapse.
Inside the second canister was a small machine that we called a "surfacer." It had a top made just like the active surface of an escape harness. The sides of the machine had four caterpillar treads set at right angles to one another, and the rest of it was taken up by a radio transmitter, a power supply, control circuitry, and a timer.
The little machine sat there, under the ground, for as long as we had sent it back in time. If we sent it five hundred years back, its timer had it wait there for five hundred years, doing nothing.
Once its timer said "GO!" the temporally active area was turned on, its treads started moving, and it ate its way through the top of its canister, and then through the rock above it, crawling slowly upward on its treads until it eventually reached either the air, or, as was more likely, the bottom of the sea. If it reached air, it would send up an antenna and broadcast its ID number. If it found water, it dropped its treads and their drive as an anchor, while the rest of it floated to the surface, connected by a few thousand feet of fishing line, and again it radioed its presence.
Then someone, usually from the Navy, went out and found it with the aid of radio direction finders, carefully noted its position using the Loran system we had installed, and brought it back for possible repair and reuse.
As the project continued, we found a major long-term drift to the east, far out into the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that we had to operate from deeper and deeper shafts, to make sure that one of our canisters didn't emerge deep in the ocean water. If that happened, there was no telling where ocean currents would take the thing, and if we ever did get it back, it's positional data would be totally useless.
The design of the canisters and the surfacers they contained had to be changed as time went on. Making machinery that could sit idle for thousands of years, and then function properly on command was no trivial task!
Eventually, we were building the surfacers mostly out of stainless steel, with gold bushings on all moving parts, and then filling the canisters with a fluorinated oil to keep moving parts from welding themselves together over the ages. Whole categories of electronic parts had to be eliminated. There isn't a battery or an electrolytic capacitor that will last more than a few decades, and these things had to be designed around. Power supplies were a particular problem.
A version of Ian's emergency generator eventually powered the things. It made a partial vacuum that the encapsulating oil boiled into. The resultant gas went through a piston type motor which in turn powered an electric generator.
Even so, a small atomic battery was needed to get the Rube-Goldberg affair started. These batteries had been developed in the late fifties. They consisted of a thin rod of a radioactive isotope that emitted alpha particles. These particles struck a surrounding layer of a phosphor that gave off visible light. This light, in turn, energized a layer of solar cells, which
converted the light into a small trickle of electricity, enough to run a clock and keep a large, mylar capacitor charged. It was a matter of one overly complicated Rube-Goldberg device starting another.
We also had to modify the six ships of our small navy, so they had the range to go out on the high seas and recover our transmitters. Their huge Rolls-Royce gas turbines were removed and replaced with things that worked on the same principle as Ian's emergency generator, but which turned impellers rather than electric generators. They now had essentially infinite range, especially after we added a small galley, a shower, and some submarine-style bunk space, where the engines and fuel used to be.
Even so, toward the end, only one surfacer in three was being returned to us.
We sent out some sixty-seven thousand of the things before we were sure that we had the local drifts mapped for the last fifty thousand years. We would have gone back even farther, except that we weren't up to designing machinery and electronics equipment that could last much longer. In the end, we decided that we'd have to someday build a beachhead back there, and then use it as a base for further temporal explorations into the past.
* * *
Mayor Jenkins managed to find a genuine Catholic priest who was willing to commit the unspeakably sinful task of marrying two people who were not of his faith. He turned out to be an impoverished fellow of mostly Indian ancestry who hailed from one of the poorest sections of Paraguay.
Even so, he didn't come cheap. In return for his services, KMH bought and installed a complete water and sewage system for the extended village that was his parish. He also got a small, but well equipped hospital, two food processing plants (to get local products ready for market), and a small fleet of trucks (to get those processed products to those markets). Finally, he gouged us for the materials necessary for the building of a church, a rectory, and a minimal house for every family in the parish.
The priest figured that if he was going to sell his only soul to the rich and boorish, he might as well charge all that the traffic would bear!
It was months before he arrived, since he demanded his pay, or rather his loot, up front. Then, once he got here, he insisted on taking six weeks for the posting of the banns, time which he planned to use to educate us in the one true religion. Fortunately, he spoke no English, we spoke no Spanish, and the translators that I was paying for somehow found more pressing things to do, so his plan didn't quite work out.
He then demanded that I cease sleeping with Barbara until the wedding.
I politely suggested that in return, it would only be proper that we should burn his building materials, put sugar in the gas tanks of all of his pretty, new trucks, and dynamite his nice, new water and sewage system. Eventually, he saw the light.
It's a hell of a thing. A sold out sky pilot who won't stay bought!
* * *
Meanwhile, work on the Time Train went on.
With the local temporal drifts mapped out, we went into Phase Two of the project. This involved canisters big enough to transport equipment, supplies, and people. After some debate, we settled on a canister sixteen feet in diameter and sixty feet long, big enough to take a standard shipping container and the truck it drove in on, or to comfortably seat fifty people, along with all of their luggage.
Long hours were spent in meetings, hammering out our plans. After months of debate, what we came up was this:
The first part of the drill was to be much like that used on the smaller, exploratory canisters, except that now we knew where we were going, as well as when. The first canister would weave its way through five dimensions, arrive at the predetermined site for a few nanoseconds, and then go away, taking nine thousand cubic feet of rock away with it. The second would arrive by the same route, a few nanoseconds behind, and materialize in the vacuum left by the departing first canister.
And yes, we probably could leave the first canister in position, and discard only its contents, saving the cost of the second canister entirely, but this procedure would leave the walls of the canister impregnated with rock, which weakened the metal in an unpredictable way, and made it radioactive. In addition, the temporal circuitry itself wasn't all that dependable after it had emerged once in solid rock.
Time, money, and human effort weren't among our problems. We had plenty of resources, so there wasn't any incentive to chintz on the job.
The second canister sat there until the the third canister was scheduled to arrive. Just before that point, it sent its contents (mostly air, along with anything else that might have leaked in) out into the fifth dimensional void so that the third canister could emerge into a truly hard vacuum.
Once the third canister made it safely back to the twentieth century, that particular leg of the Time Train was declared ready to be put into service.
Then, a work crew could be sent back, armed with temporal digging tools, to tunnel their way up to the surface.
The temporal drifts were such that we were able put our first big canister back some two hundred and thirty-five years, and still be under the island. Before that, and they would emerge in the rock under the sea, and that didn't seem like something that I'd personally want to dig my way up from.
Intuitively, one would think that the sensible thing to do would be to go in small steps, sending the first canister back one year, say, and the next back for two. I mean, that's the way things are normally built. If you are building a railroad, you start from where you are, and build in the direction that you are going to. Then you continue the proscess until you finally get to where you want to be.
But it doesn't work that way when you are building a railroad line into the past. Consider that tunnels, by their very nature, tend to last a long time. Starting out below ground, we had to first tunnel our way out.
Suppose that we made our first canister emerge in 1900, planning to have other canisters emerge earlier than that. In 1900, we couldn't know what we would find out there in 1890, so we couldn't possibly know what we would need to build in 1890 once we got there. And since we didn't know exactly what we would need in the past, we couldn't be sure that we wouldn't wreck some of it as we dug ourselves out. If we made sure in 1890 that there would be plenty of empty space for the 1900 people to dig themselves out, we would be seriously reducing our building options.
Then, of course, when we went back to 1880, our problems would be even more difficult, and by 1750... well, you see the problem. Even when you have a time machine, you have to start at the beginning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Barbara's Family
One evening, I was sitting on a couch in the American Room of Camelot with Barb snuggled up comfortably at my side, as naked as all of my other servants around the place. Fumbling through my pockets, I dug out the list of things I had to do prior to marriage.
"Ian says that to do things properly, I need your father's permission to marry you."
"Tom, we are both adult human beings. Neither of us needs parental approval to do anything."
"I agree. However, I think that it might be a good idea for me to meet your relatives in any case, and if that satisfies Ian, well, so much the better."
"Very well, if that is your wish."
"Is there some reason why I shouldn't? Is there some problem between you and your folks? I mean, you've never mentioned them, or anything."
"My siblings and I maintain a normal relationship with our parents and our other ancestors, and meet them at all the usual quarterly meetings."
"Quarterly meetings? Now you've got me confused again, Barb."
"Among my people, it is customary to spend a day with one's biological ancestors every three months, at the solstices and equinoxes. This permits parents to observe the developments of their offspring and their further descendants."
"Sort of a culture-wide family reunion, huh? Not a bad idea, I suppose. I'm surprised that I've never been invited to one."
"Well, you don't have any ancestors here, Tom. But I expect that the real reaso
n for the lack of invitations is that these meetings are terribly boring, even for those who are seeing their relatives again. An outsider would simply feel lost."
"Well, if everybody is bored stiff at them, why do you hold them at all?"
"Because not everybody is bored. The older people enjoy the meetings immensely. Parents are naturally far more interested in their children than the children are in them. This is even more noticeable between grandparents and grandchildren. And when they are eight or ten generations removed, well, I'll let you imagine the results for yourself."
"Eight or ten generations! Good God, Barbara, I knew that your people lived longer than mine, but that's ridiculous! Even at twenty years per generation, you are talking about people who are more than two hundred years old!"
"I think that the average length of a generation among us might be closer to fifty years, Tom, although people over two hundred years old subjective are extremely rare. And since you are about to ask it, no, I am nothing close to fifty years old. You got me started on raising children quite early, as it turned out."
"Please don't tell me what I'm going to ask you next. I'm never sure if it's just an expression of yours, or if you really have read my next statement out of one of your history books."
"It's simply that your facial expressions are very telling, Tom, so your thoughts are easy to guess. I never really know what you're thinking. The history of this century has never been written. Quite possibly, it never will be."
"One strange statement at a time, young lady. Back to these ancestors of yours who are ten of your fifty year generations old without pushing two hundred."
"Isn't it obvious? After they reach retirement age, people in my culture have a great deal of freedom. They can do just about anything they want, go anywhere, or any when. Many of them become extremely interested in their descendants, and attend two, or three, or sometimes even seven successive quarterly meetings a week, subjectively. There are some who have made meeting their descendants the major hobby in their lives, and attend all of the meetings for thousands of years."
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