Conrad's Time Machine (6 page)

"Uh . . ." I said. "You bought it for $226K. You sold it for $358K. Then you bought it back for $480K . . . Why?"

"Surely it is obvious. When the smoke clears, we get the facilities we need for five years at no cost to us, except that we have to pay the taxes and insurance, which will be assessed at the $226,000.00 price."

"You mean that you conned somebody into giving us the place almost free?" Ian's eyes were tall.

"Conned? Swindled? Nonsense, Ian. My principal here will be quite handsomely rewarded. See here. We are working with Dr. Bernstein, who has a medical practice in Ann Arbor. He bought the property from us—well, from me, actually, since you two weren't available. Anyway, he bought the property for $358,000.00, putting $132,000.00 down and easily obtained a $226,000.00 mortgage for the balance. After all, he is a solid citizen, he put thirty-seven percent down, and he had a long term lease—with us—on the property. We rent it at $2,200.00 a month. His payments are $1,361.00 to the bank. It is the sort of arrangement that financial institutions love."

"So we owe rent on it." Ian said.

"No. The rent has already been paid, five years in advance. I gave Bernstein a check for $132,000.00, which he used for his down payment."

"He got it for free, but he's making our mortgage payment? Why?"

"Because Bernstein saves money by paying it. Of that $1,361.00 payment, $1,155.00 is interest, which is tax deductible. At twenty year straight-line depreciation, he can deduct an additional $1,491.00 per month for a total of $2,646.00 in tax deductions. His tax bracket is well over fifty percent, so he comes out ahead, cash-wise, in addition to building valuable equity."

"Jim, I thought that that kind of wheeling and dealing went out with Diamond Jim Brady. What happens to his taxes on the $132,000.00?"

"Oh, that never really existed. The checks were never cashed."

"But . . ."

Which was the start of a two hour discussion that I would just as soon not remember and in fact have forgotten. Long experience had taught me that Hasenpfeffer can do magic and that Ian can keep him honest.

I went through two more cigars and four more Grand Marniers, and had the waitress to the point where she didn't mind my arm around her waist. She was stroking my bald head.

Then I got the bill. It was over a week's pay at my Air Force job, and more than I had on me. Being unable to attract Hasenpfeffer's attention, I picked his pocket. It was my money, or ours, anyway. I returned it discreetly, after giving the waitress a twenty percent tip and a squeeze, one of which made her squeal with joy. I told her that we'd be needing further services.

She went off shift and I never saw her again.

Her replacement was even better looking, having all of her teeth, and I was starting to repeat the process when my partners came to some sort of an understanding.

"So, Ian. It's all honest?" I asked.

"Well, yes, of course. At least I think so, I mean . . ."

"Hey, are we going to go to jail for it?"

"No. Or at least not until the deceased first owner gets jailed first."

"Well, good enough for a veteran. So we are decided?"

"One last thing," Hasenpfeffer shooed the waitress out. "Security. I know that that's a bad word with some of us, but a certain degree of it is necessary. I am not proposing armed guards and television cameras. At this stage they could do nothing more than attract attention. I am merely suggesting that we keep silent and tell no one, absolutely no one, about out plans, objectives, or intentions. Are you with me?"

"Of course."

"Yeah, sure." I said, "What about the waitresses?"

"How could they know what we're talking about when we don't know ourselves?" Ian asked.

"Good points, gentlemen. The fact is that I have already ascertained that they are both local people with no outside affiliations. In the future we must be more cautious. One last thought: we must agree that everything we learn or accomplish must be kept within the group. Absolutely nothing may be released to outsiders without our unanimous agreement. Are we together on this?"

"Certainly, Jim."

"Well, yeah, okay. Remember that
I'm
the only one here with a top secret clearance. But I've got a question or two of my own. Jim, you've been pulling your little strings on us all evening long, but you haven't told us what you're thinking."

"I have led the discussion in examining certain obvious questions, but I have not concealed anything."

"The hell you say. You bought and sold a major piece of property with our money without even asking us about it first, or telling us about it later, second. Now, I've said how this thing could be a weapon and Ian's talked about using it as a tool. What do
you
think we have here?"

"I am not sure that my opinions are relevant. You two are the technical ones."

"Not a chance. Spill it," I said. Ian nodded his agreement.

"This is premature, but very well.
If
you technical gentlemen can perfect it, I expect that we shall eventually have a time machine."

The place outside of Ann Arbor was everything that Hasenpfeffer said it would be. Everything was well built, clean and new. The house was a big brick ranch style thing, and while I would have picked some other color than pink for the bricks, even that sort of grew on you.

There was a big living room that we dubbed a "parlor" and filled with Ian's old three quarter sized furniture, agreeing among ourselves that we wouldn't use it except for entertaining people we didn't like. I mean, it had a white carpet and white walls. Ian was a painfully neat person, but the best thing you could say about Hasenpfeffer and me was that he was a filthy slob, and that I was a filthier one. Obviously, the room wouldn't stay white if we were allowed to use it. Anyway, you've got to have someplace to use if the girl's folks want to come over, right?

There was a big family room with a fireplace and enough bookshelves to hold all of Hasenpfeffer's books and Ian's as well. Ian put his little leather easy chair in there, and Hasenpfeffer found out that there
were
companies that made stuff big enough to fit me, for a price. I got this glorious real leather recliner that actually fit my back while Hasenpfeffer chose a leather and chrome Eames swivel chair and hassock for himself.

Of course, Danish Modern, chrome and leather, and Lazy Boy don't match, but then we didn't match, either.

The kitchen was full of gadgets that I wasn't used to, like a microwave oven, a garbage disposal and a dishwasher, but modern man is pretty adaptable, and it's remarkable how quickly these fabulous luxuries became absolute necessities.

I got a new set of bedroom furniture, and that was wonderful. For the first time since I started to grow hair below my waist, I had a bed long enough to fit me! I got the master bedroom, too, since I needed it to get my new bed and an oversized desk into it. It had its own bathroom, but then so did the other two bedrooms.

The door into my room was of only normal size, so I could still bump my head on it. I was half tempted to cut the door frame out on top so I could walk through standing straight up, but I decided against it. The guys had been pretty reasonable about everything else, and I thought it wise not to push them too far.

The place had a three-car garage, and that was filled up pretty quickly. We kept Ian's Corvette as group property, since he owed more on it than it was worth, and I think Hasenpfeffer liked it even more than Ian did.

Only, while the 'vette was a pretty little plastic toy, the damn thing was too small for me to get into. I threw a temper tantrum about it, so we bought a secondhand Chrysler as group property so I had something to drive in the winter, too. The bikes took up the third stall, and we soon had to buy an old pickup truck to run errands for the factory. The truck was never granted garage privileges.

There was a full basement with a ten-foot ceiling, and I took that over for my electronics lab. It was air-conditioned and the factory wasn't. Electronic equipment works better at a constant temperature, and so do I. I'm one of those people who think that sixty-five is a wonderful temperature, provided that I can sit naked in front of a fan.

All told, the move was a big step up for all of us, and for me more than the others.

We settled into our new quarters in a few weeks, although a month went by before all of my oversized furniture arrived. I had to camp in my bedroom until then.

While the shop already had most of what Ian thought he would need, I had to put together an electronics lab from scratch. It took two months before I got all the big stuff in. I was another five weeks building the first breadboard circuit, mostly awaiting parts. Having
almost
everything doesn't make it. Not in electronics.

Cheop's Law: Everything costs more and takes longer.

But the very first time we tried the thing out—from a quarter mile away—it worked perfectly, dutifully putting a thirty-yard hole in our back forty.

This meant that we could have gotten into the mining and tunneling business almost immediately, but after a nine-hour-long meeting, we decided to hold off on that until we could develop the whole concept a bit further. We still didn't know the basic principles that the gadget worked on, and without knowing those, we'd be hard pressed to get an all inclusive patent.

If we started using or selling the circuit, well, I'd copied the thing easily enough, and so could any other competent tech. Given a hint on what we were doing, hundreds of outfits would soon be out there competing with us.

Competition might be a good thing for the economy as a whole, but it is a bad thing for an underfinanced little company like ours was.

For the rest of that first year, we made solid steady progress. The field did not have to be generated from a point source. We found out how to set up steady-state fields, where a given volume was irradiated evenly and could be transported through time without being sliced into sushi.

We found out how to shield the field, so we could send what we wanted to send without cratering the landscape.

We learned how to operate it with the circuitry inside the field, so it acted sort of like a car, taking its motive power with it. We also figured out how to work it with the circuitry outside the field. We got to calling this the "cannon" technique.

All this time, we were only putting things into the future. From a practical point of view, we could have accomplished much the same thing by locking whatever it was in a box, and taking it out of the box later. The real prize would be to be able to send things into the past.

From everything we had been able to learn, it looked as though if you simply reversed the phase in one section of the circuit, it should reverse the circuit's total temporal effect.

A circuit thusly configured should have been able to send things back in time, but when I tried it, the circuit overloaded, every time, and burned to a blackened pile of ashes and melted metal. We had no idea what the problem was. Coupled with it was the impossibility of just how a tiny, nine volt transistor battery could possibly put out enough power to so thoroughly fry a good sized epoxy-glass circuit board. Ian calculated that over its entire lifetime, such a battery couldn't put out a thousandth of the power we saw repeatedly generated.

"So, gentlemen, it appears that in addition to everything else, you have discovered a new source of industrial power!" Hasenpfeffer said one morning at breakfast.

"A fucking expensive source of power, if you ask me," Ian said. "When you spend thirty dollars worth of circuitry to generate thirty cents worth of power, you aren't making a profit."

Nobody had a good way of answering that, and in the momentary silence, Hasenpfeffer's lady of the night walked in, wearing one of his old housecoats. She was a gorgeous, slender young thing, with long, straight blond hair, like most of the others. Ian offered to make her breakfast, and since Hasenpfeffer was here, she nodded acceptance. After that, it was as though Ian and I didn't exist, as far as she was concerned. After a bit, we picked up our coffee cups and drifted off, leaving the two lovers, or at least sex partners, alone.

We were used to it. The same sort of thing had been happening for seven years, since we all were freshmen in college. But being used to something doesn't mean that it no longer hurts. I couldn't help but look on Hasenpfeffer's success with the ladies with mixed emotions, the most prominent of which was envy.

We settled into the family room, out of earshot of Hasenpfeffer's latest.

"Over the years, he's got to have had two hundred of them over," Ian said.

"Counting college, yeah, it has to have been be at least that."

"Well, you'd think that at least one of them would want to have something to do with at least one of us."

"It seems statistically likely, only it just hasn't happened. The books all say that women want permanence in a relationship, yet all of Hasenpfeffer's chicks have to know that he'll drop them in a week or three, just like he dropped all of the others. If either of us latched onto a girl as fine as any of his, we'd want to keep her forever. They've got to know that, too. But will one of them even talk to us for ten minutes? No!"

"Tom, I don't think that we'll ever understand women. It's like they're a strange, alien species."

"You could be right. You know, the biologists, or maybe the biochemists, figure the separation of two species by computing the time since the two groups had a common ancestor. If the chimpanzee's branch separated from the human branch five million years ago, then that's the measure of separation between the two species. Now then, biologically, sex was discovered back in the days when single celled critters were the most advanced things around. Even bacteria occasionally get together and exchange genetic information. So male was separated from female at least a billion years ago. By the rules the biologists use, you and I are two hundred times more closely related to the chimps that we are to women. That makes them a very alien species, indeed."