Frankowski, Leo - Stargard 7 - Conrad's Time Machine

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Conrad's Time Machine

by Leo A. Frankowski

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely

coincidental.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3557-5

Cover art by David Mattingly

First printing, September 2002

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my new wife, Marina.

She is beautiful, intelligent, warm, loving, and

more than any man could possibly deserve.

Acknowledgements

This story had been rattling around for so long that virtually

every person that I have ever known has read parts of it

and made useful suggestions. I've gotten feedback from

hundreds and hundreds of people, and I can't

possibly give them all the credit that they deserve.

Dave Grossman gave me the idea for the ending,

but the rest must remain unnamed.

Baen Books by Leo Frankowski

A Boy and His Tank

Fata Morgana

Conrad's Time Machine

Forward

Many of my books were a long time getting finished, but unless I live to be a

hundred, this one is the record setter.

I was in high school in the fifties when I asked my self the classic science

fiction question, "What if?" In this case, it was what if time travel were

really possible? I wasn't concerned with the paradoxes that other writers had

explored to more than completion. I was wondering what else you could do with

it.

My first attempts at writing were pretty amateurish. I didn't know much about

writing, but having cut my teeth on Robert Heinlein juveniles, I knew good

writing from bad. Wisely, I kept my smudged pages to myself. Anyway, I was too

busy flunking out of Senior English to have much time for anything else. Back

then, I had some truly wretched English teachers, who forced the poetry and

Shakespeare that I had loved down my throat so hard that I soon hated it and

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him—and them. I eventually regained my love for it and him, but never for them.

It never occurred to me that I would end up as a professional writer.

Not when I had some really great science teachers, who knew their subjects and

taught them well. A career in science, technology, and/or maybe business seemed

to be my obvious life path.

Still, the thoughts kept on welling up, like bubbles in a cesspool. If you could

move something, maybe even yourself, from one position in the space-time

continuum to any other position, then you would immediately have effectively

infinite wealth and power. You could always win the lotteries, always buy the

best stock on the market, always bet on the winning horse.

So, with that going for you, what would you do with your life, aside from

getting filthy rich? Well? No quick answer? I didn't have one either. It took me

forty-three years to work it out, and even then it took the help of my good

friend, Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman to finally give me a good ending for

the story.

I hope you enjoy it.

—Leo Frankowski

Tver, Russia

2002

CHAPTER I

Sad Leavings

The war in Vietnam was heating up, half the people in the country were smoking

dope, and the Flower Children were sprouting peace and free love all over the

place.

I was only vaguely aware of it.

It was 1968, and I was leaving.

The Air Force never said goodbye, but I didn't love them either. I'd made a few

good friends in the service, but Chris was in the guard house again, SelfCheck

had been discharged the week before, Crazy Mormon was on leave, and Johnny

Sleewa was on duty at the time. No one was there to see me off. I finished up my

paperwork, gathered my few belongings, and walked past the dead trees in front

of the squadron area.

They were my one lasting accomplishment in the United States Air Force.

It happened like this. Last fall, I'd gotten a whole weekend off, and I figured

to make it with this girl I knew in Toronto, which was a little outside of the

hundred mile limit they had us on. I'd put a fictitious address on the official

checkout sheet, but left the chick's phone number with Johnny, so if something

really important happened, he could get in touch with me.

Around one-thirty on a Saturday morning, I'd just gotten to her place when a

sergeant phoned. He asked for me, and said that I was scheduled for "special

duty" at eight that morning. He didn't know what it was all about, but I'd

better be there.

Well, I thought it must have been important or Johnny wouldn't have handed out

the number. See, I was one of only three techs who were trained to fix the Alert

Transmit Console, and it was about the only piece of equipment at The Notch that

wasn't duplicated.

The machine had a keyboard on it that was used to send messages like "fire all

of your missiles," but it wasn't a QWERTY. The keys were arranged in

alphabetical order.

None of the officers could type, since among our masters, such abilities were

considered unmanly.

The ATC had two Chevrolet ignition keys, mounted ten feet apart, so that it took

two men to operate it, at least from the front. They used it for calling

practice alerts, scrambling the bombers, and starting wars.

The controls inside the back of the ATC were a different matter. Once, Chris got

to playing with the buttons back there and managed to scramble the 99th Bomb

Wing. Those guys were over Hudson Bay, fueled up and with bombs ready, awaiting

orders from the President, before anybody else knew they were gone.

Nobody got on Chris's case for it, though, since none of the brass would believe

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that an airman had enough brains to pull a stunt like that. Me, I knew that

Chris had an IQ in the 160's, but it would never occur to them to ask me about

it. To them, I was just another dumb trooper, too.

What got Chris thrown into the guardhouse this time was sweeping dirt under the

floor. Not under the carpet, you understand, but actually under the floor. Chris

was very strong, and he had a penchant for doing things the hard way.

Well, what with Chris in the guardhouse and me gone for the weekend, that only

left Johnny Quest qualified to work on the machine. If something happened to

Johnny and the ATC went west, SAC's third alternate Combat Operations Center

would be out of business, and you never could tell when they might want to start

a war.

And while I hated the Air Force, I still loved my country, so on the girl's

phone, I admitted to the sergeant that I was me.

I had to turn around and leave. I tried to kiss the chick goodbye, but she

wasn't the understanding sort. She screamed a lot about my wasting her whole

weekend and told me not to come back.

That night, I drove all the way back to Massachusetts without sleeping and got

on base with seven spare minutes to change into fatigues, report, and find out

what was happening.

What it was, was that the colonel had decided that the squadron area needed some

beautification.

Having a full bird colonel in command of a squadron was strange, but then a nine

hundred man squadron was pretty weird, too. The guy had been a hot fighter

jockey during World War II. He'd made all his rank during his first three years

in the service, and hadn't been promoted since. This made him an unhappy man,

and he didn't lead a happy squadron.

Boots were new troops who had finished tech school and were now idle for three

months, awaiting their security clearances before they were allowed to work on

the equipment that they had just spent a year learning how to fix. Why these

clearances weren't obtained while they were still in school, saving fifteen

percent of their useful careers, was one of those little unexplained military

mysteries.

Our colonel's beautification plan was that I should drive ten of the boots out

into the nearby woods, have them dig up nine likely looking trees, and drive the

trees and boots back. We would then plant the trees about the squadron area at

the points specified on the enclosed sketch by that evening. Why we couldn't do

this during the week, when all of those guys were idle, or doing useless

make-work, was also not explained. Neither was why this qualified as an

emergency sufficient to pull me in from a weekend pass, but then the Air Force

never bothered to explain things to an airman.

So I did it, making the boots do all the work.

Then I showered up, and, too tired to sleep, I went to a blind pig hidden below

its neon sign in the basement of a Baptist church just outside the gate.

Sensibly, I got stinking drunk while mulling over the injustices of the world. I

was still unhappy when I returned to the barracks at three in the morning. The

colonel wasn't available to hear my suggestions, so I ripped the newly planted

trees out by the roots and threw them halfway to the parking lot.

Feeling much better, I found my room and went to sleep.

I'm bigger than most people.

When I got up late on Sunday afternoon, the sun was setting, somebody had

replanted the trees, and the girl in Toronto wouldn't talk to me on the phone.

It was thus reasonable to get drunk again, and wandering back, I came across the

replanted trees.

I ripped them all out again, and this time, using a hammer-throw technique,

sailed one of them all the way to the parking lot, narrowly missing somebody's

fifty-seven Chevy.

The same thing happened Monday night, too, since by then somebody had once more

replanted the trees. Actually, it happened almost every night for about a month,

and after a while it got so that I didn't even have to get drunk first. I had

found a certain relief from tension and a deep-seated satisfaction in ripping up

those trees and giving them a good toss.

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The strange thing is that nobody ever saw me do it, or if they did, they didn't

talk about it, but then most people don't realize that I'm really a very gentle

person, if you give me half a chance.

In a month or so, I was pretty sure that the trees were dead, what with the way

the bark was falling off, and after that I left them alone.

That had been six months ago and they were still out there, because the colonel

hadn't given any orders about them. Likely, he hadn't noticed.

My mark on the Air Force. Nine dead trees.

I carried my belongings to the garage outside of the gate and settled up with

the owner of the place.

Motorcycles weren't allowed on base. They had the wrong image by Air Force

standards, although they were allowed up at the Notch, since civilians weren't

allowed within sight of the place. They'd give you a sticker for one to let you

past the Elite Guard, through the gate, and to the small parking lot. From there

it was a short walk past more guards, past the thick steel blast doors, and into

the generator-packed tunnel that led deep into the hollowed out mountain.

I packed up, kick started her with one hand and rode off. I never put a foot on

the kick starter, my theory being that if hand cranking wouldn't do it, she

needed a tune up. Electric starters, of course, are for wimps.

I stopped a hundred yards outside the Westover Field gate and peeled the SAC

sticker from the Wixom Ranger faring on my BMW R-60. I no longer felt any hate.

I just didn't want it there, defacing my bike, now that I was free.

I had joined the Air Force for many reasons. Without the money to finish my

degree, I needed a trade, and they'd promised to teach me electronics, the one

promise they'd actually kept. Mostly, though, I'd wanted have some adventures

while I was still young, to spread my wings a little, and see a bit of the

world.

Instead, they'd stuffed me under a mountain for the duration.

More than anything else, I'd wanted to do something . . . significant. To do

something important for my country, and maybe even for the world.

But there's nothing glorious about fixing machinery, especially when the stuff

almost never broke down. Ninety percent of my actual work time had been spent

cleaning floors, dusting equipment, and trying to look busy. Most of the rest of

it was spent filling out paperwork, an occupation that took six times longer

that the actual repair work did.

Mostly, I just sat there at a grey metal desk. The lighting was cool, efficient

fluorescent. The temperature was kept at a constant 70.4 degrees fahrenheit. The

relative humidity was at 48.6 percent The floors and ceilings were white. The

walls were beige. The equipment was a uniform dove grey, with small, unblinking

colored lights.

The silence was deafening.

You sat there for eight hours every day, forbidden to read anything but

technical manuals, staring at the walls and waiting for someone up in the cab to

tell the heavy bombers and all the land-based missiles to go and blow up the

world.

Off duty, you drank a lot, but it didn't help all that much.

My outfit had a suicide rate that was higher than the casualty rate of most

combat outfits in time of war. And it wasn't just the young kids who "took the

pipe." Old, balding sergeants would somehow get sort of listless, and then you'd

hear, unofficially, that they'd put a bullet behind their ear. You never heard a

word officially, of course, not even a notification of the funeral service. It

didn't fit the public image the Air Force wanted everybody to believe in.

Soon, you learned to hate the bastards.

The hate I'd felt for years for the organization that had kept me in useless

bondage had become a bigger part of my life than I had imagined, and now that

those bonds were finally parted, I was left with a vast hollowness inside of me.

I'd sold off almost everything I owned except my camping gear. Even my uniforms

were gone, which wasn't precisely legal since I was still supposed to be a

member of the inactive reserves. But I didn't have any family or anyplace to

send that junk for storage, so if I couldn't fit it into my saddlebags, I

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couldn't see keeping it.

I really didn't knowwhat I wanted, but I had a strong handle on some negatives.

Like I never wanted to see another officer again in my life. Mostly, I needed to

get way far away from petty rules and silly regulations and people who outranked

me, which in the Air Force was just about everybody.

I wasn't the kind who got promoted.

My BMW sort of automatically took me to the Mass Pike and just as naturally

pointed west, which was fine. There isn't much east of Massachusetts that you

can get to on a bike.

Well. My motorcycle was paid for. My savings and accumulated leave added up to

just under $2,000.00. It was springtime and figured I could live for six months

without the need to reconnect myself to society. Then, maybe I'd go back and

finish my degree. Or maybe not.

The Mass Pike dumped me onto the New York Thruway and a green-and-white sign

read "Rochester—231 Miles."

That got me thinking about Jim Hasenpfeffer, since he was working on his Ph.D.

at the University of Rochester and this naturally got me thinking about Ian

McTavish as well.

CHAPTER TWO

An Old Friend

Actually, we never did have much in common.

Take religion.

Now, I was a defrocked altar boy whose convictions varied between my normal

atheism to militant Agnosticism when I'm argued into a corner. Militant

agnostics say that they don't know anything about God,and you don't either,

dammit !

Ian was sort of conventional about religion. He always went to church on Sunday,

but he never much talked about it. I think he was about the only Christian I'd

ever met who was capable of being polite about religion. Or at least he was

always annoyingly polite with me.

And nobody ever had the slightest idea of what—if anything—Hasenpfeffer believed

in. He had this talent for sidestepping whatever he felt wouldn't be personally

rewarding.

Or take women.

I always tried like hell, but never got anywhere with them. Or even when I did

score, they usually didn't want to see me again the next day.

I'm pretty sure that Ian knew that women were necessary for the continuation of

the species, but he acted as though they were something that a rational man

shouldn't waste his time on.

Like, once I brought these two girls home because I didn't know what else to do

with them. They'd been hitchhiking in Detroit, a profoundly unsafe procedure.

They were very young, very pretty, and very stoned on God knew what. Ian was

sitting in an easy chair, reading myScientific American , when one of them

latched onto his leg. She was kneeling at his feet, babbling something about

running barefoot through the forest together, and sliding down rainbows.

Ian looked down from his article, said "Rainbows lack structural integrity," and

went back to reading. He wasn't queer. Just sort of indifferent.

Hasenpfeffer always seemed to have a woman within arm's reach. Even baching it

with us, I don't think he ever slept alone. They seemed to follow him like flies

going after shit.

Or, take politics.

Back then, I was an awfully liberal Libertarian and Ian was a conservative

Republican. I'm not sure, but I think Hasenpfeffer was pretty left wing.

Or take partying. I like to drink and sing a lot. Ian was an absolute teetotaler

about all drugs beyond coffee. And Hasenpfeffer did moderate amounts

ofeverything .

Or take sports. Or hobbies. Or damn nearly anything.

Hell, I'm six foot six and Ian was five one with his elevator shoes on.

Yet when we met in the freshman registration line at U of M, we hit it off

pretty quick. Hasenpfeffer had found this huge three-bedroom apartment and was

looking for two people to share expenses.

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We moved in that day. Oh, it was a fourth-floor walkup and the six-foot ceilings

were—for me—an absolute pain, but it was cheap and that was the deciding factor.

None of us had a family to fall back on for money.

I guess we did have something in common. We were all orphans.

Ian pulled a straight four point and had no difficulty in keeping his church

scholarship. Hasenpfeffer had this talent for pulling dollars out of all sorts

of organizations. But I was only an average student and I wasn't much good at

filling out forms and begging.

I'd used up a small inheritance by the end of my junior year, and joining the

Air Farce seemed like a better shot than getting drafted into the Army. They put

me through a year of electronics school and then had me spend three years

pretending to fix computers under this mountain in Massachusetts. They'd never

even let me ride on a military airplane. . . .

Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made

a right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.

The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for

eight weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large

groups of people working earnestly together to do something that stupid.

The arithmetic average of the number of streets coming into an intersection is

probably somewhere around four, but the modal number is three, with the next

most likely number being five and after that seven. The whole town is like a

quilt made by crazy old ladies out of random polygons. There's even one

frightening crossroads called 'Twelve Points." No shit.

Right downtown, doubtless by accident, there are these two streets that cross at

almost right angles, although one of them changes its name in the process. This

oddity so astounded the locals that they built this big office structure there

and called it "The Four Corners Building."

I passed it seven times trying to find Hasenpfeffer's address, and it was pretty

late when I finally got there.

I recognized it right off when I saw it. It was exactly the sort of place he had

to live in. It was an ancient clapboard mansion that had long ago been converted

into housing for the perpetually poor class, students. It was painted barn red

and had a yellow external staircase with fully eleven odd-angle turns in it that

led up to the sixth-floor attic. I didn't have to read the mailboxes to know

that Hasenpfeffer had to live on top. He was home, and—A Wonderment!—was

actually alone, bereft of all female accompaniment.

"Well, Tom. The parallelism of truly linked souls." Hasenpfeffer hadn't changed

much. The same blue eyes, blond hair, and straight features. Only now he had a

full beard, his hair brushed his shoulders, and he no longer belonged on a

poster advertising the Hitler Youth Movement. Instead, he was ready to compete

in a Jesus Christ Look-Alike contest.

He was wearing this yellow scholar's robe with a garish collar.

"Huh?" My first comment to him in four years, barring a few letters.

"Your motorcycle. I saw you pull up. I have one just like it, but without the

Ranger faring." He stood up and twirled to show off the gaudy cadmium yellow

circus tent he was wearing. It had two broad strips of bright blue velvet

running up the front, over the shoulders, and then meeting at the back of this

oversized hood. Not that he could have put up the hood, since he wore this black

tam-o'-shanter with a gold tassel.

"What do you think?"

"They make you wear that all the time, or just when you're on duty?"

"None of the above. I'm getting my doctorate in Behavioral Psychology tomorrow.

Thatis why you came, isn't it?"

"Well, no. Just passing through. But I'll stick around if you want."

"You are out of the Air Force?"

"Yeah."

"Any plans?"

"Uh, none, really." I didn't think that he'd understand about officers.

"Excellent! Then we can leave in two days."

"Leave? Where are we going?"

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"No place in particular. I have a Department of Defense grant to study social

interactions within motorcycle gangs. That's how I bought the BMW. Forming our

own gang will be much pleasanter and safer than trying to join the Hell's

Angels."

Great. Me they stuff under a mountain. For him, they buy a motorcycle.

"Hell, why not?"

"Excellent! Ian will be with us, at least at first."

"Ian McTavish? What's he doing with himself?"

"He got his bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering two years after you left, and a

second one in World History at the same time. He has been working for General

Motors ever since. He has three weeks vacation due him, and we're to pick him up

in Michigan this coming Friday."

"Great. Who else?"

"No one. Just the three of us."

"So three people constitute a motorcycle gang? I mean, if you've got this paper

to write . . ."

"I can pad it out a bit. No one reads these DOD things anyway."

Hasenpfeffer lent me a tie and made me wear it to the graduation ceremony. I

thought it looked funny with a T-shirt and a leather jacket, but it was his

show. It was about six hours of boring people proving how boring they could be,

and after all that, they didn't even give him his diploma, just a blank roll of

paper. The real one was to be sent later. Much later, as it turned out.

The party afterwards was worse than the ceremony itself, with all the grads and

their families standing around while the professors came in, "made an

appearance," and left as soon as possible.

I'm patient enough to put up with things like that for old friends. Once in a

while. At least I didn't have to stand in formation.

In the course of the day, about a dozen slender young women came up to say

goodbye to Hasenpfeffer. They each got a smile, a hug, and some vague promises

about seeing each other again. He politely introduced each of them to me, but it

seemed that I wasn't somebody that they wanted to meet. They each left as soon

as possible.

That night and the next morning, we got all his stuff packed and a moving

company hauled most of it away for storage. A half dozen more girls came by for

their goodbye kisses, and one of them spent the night with him. He actually

invited the last two of them to spend the night, but with me, since he was

already occupied, but they developed pressing engagements elsewhere. They both

left at a dead run, although one of them stopped to see if I was following, and

to pick up a rock.

The two of us were on the road Friday morning at ten with a clear blue sky above

us.

We took the short cut through Canada, and 401 is a good place for road bikes. I

was glad that Hasenpfeffer had bought a BMW because people who own them don't

much like rolling with those who ride all the lesser breeds.

It's not that we're uppity, so much, though pride has a certain amount to do

with it. It's just that a BMW is about the only machine that can go on forever

without breaking down. I had to stop running with a buddy in the service because

his Honda had an average of three mechanical problems a day, and that sure ruins

a trip.

But with good machinery between our legs, we knew that there wouldn't be any

holdups, so we could afford the time to make about four beer stops and load up

on that fine Canadian brew. I never could figure out how one people could make

such great beer and such lousy cigarettes.

CHAPTER THREE

The Other Friend

We got to Ian's condo that evening. It was quite a place, with carefully tended

gardens and an impressive entranceway. It looked as though GM was doing well by

our boy. The living room was spacious and nicely furnished with Danish Modern

stuff. Indeed, it looked a lot bigger than it actually was. I found out the

reason when I sat down. The furniture was tiny! It turned out that he had

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furnished his "pad" with the three-quarter sized stuff they make to put in model

homes, so they can fool people into thinking they're buying more than they're

actually going to get.

It all fit Ian just fine, though, and it was his place after all. It got me to

wondering if anybody made furniture to fit proper-sized people like me. Not that

I could afford any furniture, much less a place to put it in.

But what wasn't undersized was Ian's motorcycle.

"Hey, you bought a Harley?" I said.

"What's wrong with buying American, Tom?" Ian said.

Ian was using my name, and Hasenpfeffer's as well, a whole lot more than he used

to. Obviously, while I was gone, he'd taken a Dale Carnegie course. "How to Win

Friends, Influence People, and Be A Complete Phony in Ten Easy Lessons."

"Well, nothing, when you're buying cigarettes or cars," I said. "But the

engineering in that thing is forty years out of date."

"It's tried and true engineering, Tom."

"Tell you what, little buddy. I'll lend you a hand the first two times a day it

breaks down. After that, you can find me at the next bar up the road."

"Have you ever considered the advantages of autocopulation, Tom?"

Back in college, I'd ragged Ian a lot about swearing as much as he did while at

the same time being such a regular churchgoer. This last statement obviously

represented his attempt to cut down. It didn't last.

The next morning, we were on I-75 heading north. The plan was to go to

Washington State by way of Minnesota, head south through California, and then

get Ian home in three weeks by way of Louisiana.

By noon, we were off the expressways. We didn't plan to use the Interstate

system all that much. The best way to travel while on vacation is get a map,

figure out where you are, and where you want to be that night. Then you draw a

straight line on the map between those two points. After that, you try to stay

as close to that line as possible while staying on paved roads. This gets you

into the country, where things can get interesting. The expressways are

efficient, but they're also boring.

Ian's Duo-Glide held up better than I had feared, with only a half hour lost for

repairs that day. We went over Big Mac (the bridge, not the junk food) that

afternoon, but an hour later it started sprinkling, so we pulled up to the only

building in Pine Stump, Michigan.

It was a combination gas station (one pump), general store (one small shelf of

canned goods) and tavern (four stools at a linoleum topped bar and two chairs at

a small table).

The town's mayor and sole inhabitant was the little old lady who ran the place,

tended the bar, and lived in the building's other room, in back. She looked to

be eighty years old. She was skinny, and about as frail as a crowbar.

The surrounding area really did have pine stumps. Thousands of them! They were

huge for White Pine, probably world record setters when they'd been cut maybe

eighty years before, when the area had been logged over. Nothing growing there

now was even close.

The three of us packed the place, since there were a couple of locals at the

table and an Indian at the bar. He was dressed in blue jeans and was wearing a

bow hunter's cap, but he wasted no time explaining that he was a full blooded

Ojibwa. Then he stood up, shouted "Jesus Christ!" at the top of his lungs,

slammed his can of Blatz down on the linoleum bar, and sat down.

I asked him what seemed to be the problem, and he launched into a tirade about

the hunting and fishing rights he had as a result of a treaty between his people

and the government. I had a hard time understanding exactly what he was talking

about, not because of any accent—he spoke perfect, standard English—but because

every so often he would stop in the middle of a sentence, stand up, shout "Jesus

Christ!", slam down his increasingly flat can of beer, and then sit down again

as though nothing had happened. After this happened about six times,

Hasenpfeffer whispered to me that the fellow was on a fifty-three-second cycle.

He'd been timing the guy.

After maybe a half hour of this, I figured out that the treaty said that the

Indians could hunt and fish whenever they wanted to, without needing a license,

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and it didn't say anything about the manner in which they should accomplish

this.

Now the government game warden had written him up for dynamiting fish, a thing

he felt he had a perfect right to do.

Well, that was interesting, and shot down all the nonsense you hear about

Indians being natural ecologists, but the constant standing up and screaming was

starting to get to me. It was getting to Ian worse, nursing his coke while

everyone else was into their second six pack, him being a Christian and all, and

he was on the side that was being sprayed with beer every fifty-three seconds. I

think Ian was just trying to quiet the Indian down in a friendly, humorous way.

"My friend, you swear too fucking much," Ian said, a perfectly normal statement

to make in a Detroit auto plant, but not, as it turned out, in the UP. (That's

pronounced You Pee, with an equal accent on each syllable.)

Things quieted down in a hurry. There was dead silence for a few seconds, then

one of the locals got up from his chair and knocked Ian off his bar stool.

"What—what's wrong?" Ian said from the floor. He was more shocked than hurt.

"You was usingvulgarity , and in front of alady !" The man explained. The bar

keeper nodded in agreement, happy to have her honor defended.

"Vulgarity? After all the swearing that has been going on in here? You're out of

your fucking mind!"

"That was taking the Name in vain, and it ain't the same thing!"

"Shouldn't simple vulgarity be the lesser offense?" Ian said, still flat on his

back.

The local didn't know how to answer that, so he hauled off to kick Ian when he

was down, and naturally, I couldn't sit quiet for that. I picked up the would-be

kicker from behind with my right hand on his belt and said, "Gentlemen, please

fight politely."

At this point the other local and the Indian piled onto me, ignoring Ian

entirely. I thought it best to take them outside, since the furnishings of the

little place didn't look too sturdy. There wasn't much to it since I was already

carrying the one, and the other two were crawling all over me trying to wrestle

me to the ground. I even had a free hand with which to open the door.

I walked over to a twenty-foot gully near the road, threw them rolling down it

and went back into the bar, locking the flimsy screen door behind me.

"I think I've deduced the problem," Hasenpfeffer said, writing hurriedly in a

new notebook. "It seems that in this subculture they differentiate between two

types of swearing. . . ."

"Yeah, I got that much," I said. "You all right, Ian?"

"I think so, Tom. Geeze, I thought I was making a joke!"

"It was a nasty joke!" The old bartender said, "Nasty!"

"Yeah. Well guys, the rain's stopped. Let's drink up before they think about

knocking over our bikes."

"These are good, solid interactions," Hasenpfeffer said as we left.

* * *

Later, the three of us were camped way off the road in someplace called

Ontonagon County. It was Sunday morning, and Ian was trying to talk us into

going to church with him, since he had stopped at all those bars with us. I

allowed as how that seemed fair, but did he know of a church that served beer?

After all, he'd been able to get a coke at each of our bars.

"Maybe we can find one that serves wine with communion," Hasenpfeffer suggested.

Ian looked disgruntled, and a change of topic seemed in order. I was doing the

cooking, and thus by ancient custom I had certain conversational rights.

I said, "Back to what you were saying last night, Ian, I still maintain that

stupidity,true stupidity mind you, is not an individual function. Oh, anybody

can do something dumb, and usually does, but to create truly monumentally

ridiculous edifices, it takes large groups of people working diligently

together. A case in point can be taken from my recent Air Force experience.

"This organization, if I may use such a term on a group of more than ten people,

which are inherently disorganized, is obviously—"

"Share out some coffee, and your ramblatory obfuscation will be sharply reduced

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by the caffeine," Jim said.

"Yeah, and you won't talk so funny either, Tom," Ian added.

"Right," I said, pouring. "So like I was saying, somebody at the Chief of Staff

level became convinced that the best way to insure that the United States Air

Force had officers of the finest quality was to require that all such new people

were college graduates. Just who this person was, I'm not sure, but you can be

certain thathe was a college graduate.

"As an aside, I point out that General Chuck Yeager (the first man to crack the

sound barrier, an ace pilot in WWII and the commander of the most efficient

flying unit in Viet Nam), was only atemporary general. His permanent rank

wassergeant , since he talked funny and didn't have any Ivy League accent at

all. They figured that he didn't measure up since all he knew about was flying,

fighting and getting things organized. How could anybody with a redneck accent

be officer material?

"Anyway, in some very different nook or cranny of that same service, some

committee looked out and observed that enlisted men who had been trained in

fields like electronics, and who could thus earn three times their Air Force pay

working on the outside, rarely reenlisted. Since there was nothing that this

committee could do about pay rates (those being the prerogative of some other

committee somewhere else), but needing sergeants trained in electronics to boss

the peons they were perforce training in vast droves, and yet heaven forbid that

they should make a sergeant out of anyone without first giving him grey hair,

passed the following ruling: As an incentive to reenlistment, any troop choosing

to reenlist could pick the career field (like electronics) of his choice, and

receive up to two years worth of training in that new field.

"Unbeknownst to any of the above committees, the Air Training Command decided

that all that an instructor had to know was what was in the training guide, and

that practical experience was unimportant in such a fast-moving field as

electronics, where things were obsolete before they were installed anyway.

Furthermore, they didn't have any sergeants trained in electronics in the first

place, what with none of the airmen reenlisting, so they might as well use

airmen right out of school to teach the next class. This set up a situation

where airmen were training sergeants who were taking advantage of the

reenlistment training bonus, sergeants they could very well be subordinate to on

their next tour of duty. Oddly enough, those sergeants all got very good grades,

whether they proved capable of learning Ohm's Law or not.

"The committee that had set up the retraining program compiled all these grades

on neat charts that proved that the experienced troop was always the best

student.

"Then the Air Force bought the 465L Command Control System, which at that time

was the most complicated computerized control system known to man. And the

committee in charge of manning this monster decided that it would take some

pretty bright boys to keep it working, so they scheduled troops to be trained

for repairing it on the basis of IQ. I was one of them they selected.

"So they paid me to go to school for a year, drink a lot, and do pushups in the

sandburrs. Once I got to my duty station, I found that my boss was a sergeant

with an IQ of about ninety. While he wasn't a bad guy, he had been too dumb to

make it as a sheet-metal repairman, so he had been retrained by the Air Force in

the exciting new career field of electronics.

"He was running a major computer repair section and he was afraid of

electricity. The fact that all of our equipment ran on five volts, and was as

safe as a flashlight, didn't faze him. He knew that the stuff could electrocute

you, so he wouldn't touch it. He made sure that we kept the floors clean,

though, so no one of any importance suggested replacing him.

"My Officer In Charge was a college graduate, as per regulations. Only there

weren't any Degreed Electrical Engineers around who wanted to take on a low-rent

job like Second Lieutenant, and the Air Force, with no sensible candidates

available, had to take what it could get. The only officers we got were those

who had taken degrees in fields where there were no civilian jobs available. My

OIC, who was in charge of a quarter acre of computers supposedly defending North

America, had his degree in Marine Biology and didn't know for shit about

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file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Leo%20Frankowski%20-%\20Stargard%207%20-%20Conrad's%20Time%20Machine.txtConrad'sTimeMachinebyLeoA.FrankowskiThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedin\thisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsis\purelycoincidental....

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