"Hell, continental drift, for all I know. Or magma flows. Or solar flares. Or phases of the moon. Look, I'm to the point where I'm starting to understand why something is
when
it is. I've got no idea why it's
where
it is. They buried what was left of the only person who could give us some straight answers. Dammit, we're running out of money! In three months we'll be out of credit. We've got to rob a bank!"
"We could have a breakthrough at any time, Tom. You're talking about grand larceny!"
"Hey, we've been looking for that breakthrough for eleven months. And we can rig the robbery to take place a year after we get the money. We can even deposit it in the same bank we're going to rob. We'd never get caught."
"But theft, Tom?"
"So, banks are insured. Nobody will get hurt."
"Nobody? Look at all the damage we've caused around the property here. Nobody's been hurt, because we're out in the country. You're talking about doing it in downtown Ann Arbor! We'd kill someone for sure."
"We can have the whole thing happen at three in the morning, when no one's around," I said. "Look. We rent the garage across from the bank. We build a time cabinet large enough to hold a big truck. We send the truck back maybe three hundred years, before this town was built, before there was any significant number of people around. The truck drives forward exactly eighty feet. Inside the truck we have another time cabinet. It goes forward three hundred and one years—right to the sidereal second—and emerges in the same space as the bank vault, so the money is inside the time field. It comes back with the contents of the vault to the truck. The truck backs up to where the garage will be and the whole thing comes back to now. We have a year to loot the vault before the robbery takes place! I can have the controls ready in a week, and it shouldn't take you much longer to make the cabinets."
"You've been thinking about this for some time, haven't you?"
"Yeah."
"Well, you've been thinking stupid, the whole while! First off, aside from the moral questions, you're talking about cabinets a hundred times larger than anything we've ever built. Scaling up isn't always as easy as it sounds. We don't know what problems we'll run into. Two. If your truck gets hung up driving that eighty feet across who knows what, we've got a first class anachronism our hands. And three, worst of all, you're expecting the inner time cabinet to emerge four times in air, or something worse. It'll be as radioactive as sin and shot through with rust. There's not a chance in hell of it being operational for that trip back."
"You weren't listening. Any one time circuit only has to operate twice. The money itself will only be transferred twice," I said, "so it won't be too bad. Paper outgasses easily. And to heck with the time cabinet. We can build another one."
"And the truck?"
"We rent it."
"Well, maybe," Ian said, "but it's going to be more work and money than you're counting on. And we've got to get Hasenpfeffer in on it."
Hasenpfeffer walked into the lab on cue, wearing the gaudy, bell-bottom trousers that were currently fashionable, but looking glumly at the floor.
I turned off my power supplies, hid the breadboard I'd been working on, and put the dust cover over my Textronics scope. It was just conditioned reflexes on my part. He hadn't actually gotten close enough to break anything, which was probably conditioned reflexes on his part.
As I finished, Hasenpfeffer said, "There is something that I have to talk over with you gentlemen."
"Shoot." I'd never seen him this far down.
"I have been trying," he said. "For well over two years I have been trying to make a meaningful contribution to our endeavor. I have done whatever I could, even the most menial of tasks. But this just is not sensible. The only rational thing is for me to get a job elsewhere, and to hire someone to do the trivia around here. After all, washing your underwear is not the best use I can make of my doctorate."
"Cheer up, Jim. We're all doing a lot of dirty work. The twelve hours I have just spent at a well-named boring mill didn't have much to do with thermodynamics," Ian said.
"True, but we can't afford a machinist, and we
could
afford a housekeeper. I can make a better contribution with a paycheck."
"Look, there's something we're going to be doing over the next few weeks where we'll need your help. After that we can talk this over."
"What do you have in mind, Tom?" Hasenpfeffer perked up.
"Well, we're going to rob this bank."
"What!"
"Look, we're running out of money." I said. "See, we get this truck, and we build a big time cabinet in the garage across from the bank and . . ."
"Shit!" Hasenpfeffer looked at me disgustedly. "We aren't
that
hard up." He went over to a small test canister sitting on my work bench. "But if we really need large amounts of capital, there are more rational ways of obtaining it."
He opened the canister and took out a copy of next week's
Wall Street Journal
.
We didn't see Hasenpfeffer for three months. He rented an office in town and as best as we could tell, he was sleeping in it. At any rate, he sent over a middle-aged and overweight housekeeper who moved into his old room.
She complained a lot about dirty socks in the family room and cigarette butts in the coffee cups, but she stayed clear of the lab and the shop. She was annoying, but Ian and I found ourselves working longer hours than ever.
Truth was, we missed Hasenpfeffer. He phoned us maybe once a week and told us to just send all the bills of any kind over to him, to spend whatever we had to, but to get the job done. A courier, always an attractive young woman, but always a different one, arrived every Monday afternoon to pick up the bills. From the first, she dropped off a paycheck for the housekeeper and two more for Ian and me. Whatever Hasenpfeffer was doing, it must have been profitable, because Ian and I were now each drawing more than Ian had made working for General Motors.
We started eating better and dressing better as well. Clothes for somebody my size almost always have to be hand tailored, which is clothing store talk for expensive. Ian had trouble buying clothes, too, unless he wanted to go to the children's department.
Men's clothing styles went through a major evolution in the early seventies, and now the two of us could look a little more "with it." Ian was especially happy that a man could now wear high heels and platform boots in public without being considered a queer, and he still wore his heel lifters inside them. I stuck with low heels, of course, but with boots, nobody much noticed.
Women's clothing was changing, too. Skirts had been creeping happily upward for a decade, and had now gotten about as short as they could get without becoming a wide belt. See-through blouses were getting popular, and were often worn without a bra, although they usually had two strategically located pockets in front. The scenery was thus better than ever, even if the two of us never got any of it to take home.
Strange to say, we also missed the parade of Hasenpfeffer's ladies. For years, Ian and I had placed bets about the hair color and probable measurements of his next one, and just when this slender young thing would come along, but with Jim gone, his ladies were gone, too.
So we technical types had little left to do but work and spend money. And spend we did, I don't know how much. We farmed out a lot of the work but we always did the final assembly and programing ourselves.
And the work progressed. Money has a lot to do with the creative process. When you're broke, you spend all of your energy trying to come up with inexpensive solutions to your problems. Since we were flush again, Ian and I fell into an attitude of "Hell, it's only twenty thousand! Let's try it!"
One of the expensive things that worked was our discovery that you could make a circuit reemerge below ground by starting off below ground. And if you triggered the circuit again within three nanoseconds after reemergence, before it had time to explode, it would usually still work.
This meant that working from a pressure chamber in the basement, we could transmit back a second, smaller sacrificial pressure chamber, which contained its own temporal circuitry. Immediately on reemergence, it sent itself and its contents way out sideways, scattering it harmlessly out over the fifth dimension. At least we hoped it was harmless. At any rate, we never saw anything of any of them again.
Ten nanoseconds later, a second very sturdy pressure chamber arrived, which stopped the walls of the hole from collapsing. Also, the pressure chamber had a second time circuit. This was used in "cannon" mode, to send any air that managed to leak into the chamber out to oblivion just before the next, third, canister was due to arrive, insuring that it emerged into an absolutely hard vacuum.
The net result was a precisely located hard vacuum, the position of which tracked with the chamber in the basement. Exactly where it was physically was a moot point, but a sidereal day later we could transmit to that time or receive from it. Our first stopover station in the past went to exactly four years before.
Four years was an inconveniently long time from an experimental point of view, but any shorter and there was the statical danger of having the canister reemerge too close to the experimenter, namely your humble narrator, snuffing him mightily.
What we had dreamed about for years was a time machine much like an automobile, where you could get in and go to whenever you wanted. What we had succeeded in building had more in common with a railroad, with discrete stations at least four years apart along its "track."
To get any closer to a given point in time, you either had to go back to the nearest time before your target date, and then wait around until the time you wanted happened, or you had to build other lines with spacings of longer than four years, and then change lines several times to get closer to when you wanted to be.
This was less than ideal, but you had to admit that traveling by railroad was superior to having absolutely no transportation at all.
We got to the point where we sent a mouse back to 1967, let it stay there a day, and then brought it back healthy and a day or so older. I say "or so" because instruments indicated 5.4 seconds of "travel time," which was very puzzling.
It took time to travel through time.
Why did whatever we sent "think" that it was traveling through the fourth dimension, the way we normally do, when in fact it was flipping back and forth through the fifth dimension and
backward
in the fourth?
We argued for months over that one, and slowly a lot of things started to make sense.
Until the housekeeper arrived, lunch happened at some random time between eleven and three, whenever someone got hungry enough to cook enough for the three of us. With Mrs. Kelly around, well, lunch was served at noon, whether we were ready to eat or not. I think that she considered anything else to be sinful. Breakfast at seven and dinner at six were also prime tenets of her religion.
Her only saving grace was that she would always put the food on the table and leave, which let the two of us talk shop over the dining room table without breaching security.
At one point, discussing something having to do with causality, Ian said, "It's undefinable. It's like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
"That's a perfectly stupid question. Obviously, the egg came first."
"You seem remarkably positive about that. Would you care to illuminate me with the glow of this newfound wisdom?"
"Certainly, my conventional little friend. Consider that what we call a chicken is in fact a domesticated Ceylonese jungle fowl. That domestication could not possibly have taken place more than ten thousand years ago."
"I'll accept that for the sake of argument. What has it to do with the subject at hand?"
"Why, everything. Eggs have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Billions, maybe. Dinosaurs laid eggs, you know, and fishes were laying eggs long, long before that. The time difference between ten thousand years and a billion years is so great as to make the question of priority blatantly obvious. Now, had you asked about the chicken and the
chicken egg
, the problem might have been less easily resolvable, but fortunately that's not what you said."
Ian's rejoinder was lost for all time because I had to get up to answer the telephone.
"Tom, can you and Ian get over here at one this afternoon? It's important." Hasenpfeffer sounded tired over the phone.
"Sure. Where are you?" I said.
"I have the top two floors of the Madison Building."
"The big new one on Third?"
"Yes. And put a suit on, will you? Appearances, you know."
It was already half past noon, so we changed quickly without bothering to wash up. We left on the run, not realizing that we'd never see our home again. Ten minutes after we were gone, a small fleet of moving vans arrived and cleaned the place out in two hours flat. And I do mean cleaned out. They even took all the trash in the garbage cans.
When we got to the Madison Building, we found that the top floor button on the elevator had been replaced with a key lock, so we got off on the sixteenth. The elevator door opened on a large room half-filled with impressively dressed and manicured people. Silk ties. Leather attache cases. Three-piece grey wool suits.
Presiding over it all was an incredibly beautiful and efficient-looking woman. She sat behind this nine-foot desk that was just encrusted with gadgets.
"Quite a layout," Ian said, looking past his dirty fingernails to his unshined shoes.
"Yeah. Look, let's go somewheres and buy a tie or something."
The woman at the desk spotted us and came over quickly, smiling. "You must be Mr. McTavish and Mr. Kolczyskrenski."
An angel. She even pronounced my name right. She ushered us past the briefcase crowd and through a much larger room. There were scores of desks with intent people sitting at them, talking quickly on an equal number of telephones. Word processors were being operated. A big computer on the far wall was in operation, with dozens of big tape decks whirling and stopping and whirling once more with simpleminded diligence. All told, maybe a hundred people doing important looking things.