Ian and I talked about high-output, long-range pulsed models—rifles and pistols—but, probably because none of us hunted, it was a long while before we got around to making any.
Anyway, when the first “production” model was done, I took it outside to run a real world test, or, in the popular vernacular, to play with it.
It was a beautiful day and Hasenpfeffer was trimming the hedge with a pair of huge, two handed scissors. He was still doing most of the drudge work around the place because he wasn’t of much use elsewhere.
I went to the shaggy end of the hedge, adjusted the blade to about three feet, and held the beam horizontally at shoulder level, where the hedge should be topped. Then I walked steadily towards Hasenpfeffer, neatly trimming the shrubs to height. He saw me, stared at me, and registered pleasant shock.
“Give me that thing!”
“Hey, sure Jim.” I laughed. “Only it’s as dangerous as sin and not quite as much fun. Look, you hold all four of these triggers down to make it work. Then this slide controls blade length and . . .”
“Got it!” He took it out of my hand, ignorant of the fact that it is very bad form to take a tool out of any workingman’s hands. It’s a fighting offense in the Society of the Competent.
He slashed at the hedge, gouging a hole that would take years to grow back in. He laughed and ran to some Blue Spruce lawn trees that were in need of clipping. He began vigorously trimming them, slicing thin cuts into the lawn that made hash out of the automatic sprinkler system.
I once read the report of an early Spanish explorer who had given a jungle native a sharp steel machete. This Indian had spent much of his life pushing thick greenery aside so that he could walk upright, forcing his way around it when he had to, and bowing under it when nothing else would suffice.
The Indian tried a few swings with the machete and suddenly realized that he now had the power to slash his lifelong tormentor asunder! He ran off laughing, screaming and yelling war cries while butchering the vines and shrubs of the Amazon. A little technology sometimes goes a long way. . . .
Eventually, hours later, the Indian came back to camp with his new blade hanging from his exhausted right arm. He was slick with sweat, and the explorer described his facial expression as of “one who had just enjoyed sexual release.”
Hasenpfeffer acted just like that Indian. He trimmed a few more small fir trees, laughing and shouting, working his way to the “back forty.” He slashed a big, ornamental boulder in half, screaming like a cowboy, or maybe a Rebel cavalryman. Then he fixed his attention on a big sugar maple which grew at the edge of the lawn.
Ian heard the shouting and came out in time to see the ancient tree fall to a single cut! With great, uncharacteristic agility, Hasenpfeffer leaped at his foe, gleefully chopping it in seconds into firewood.
“Hasenpfeffer, what happened to your ecology thing?” Ian shouted.
It was one of our many continuing arguments. I figured that it was our world and we shouldn’t make it dirty, but Ian had this semi-religious idea that we were morally obligated to use everything that God had given to us here on earth.
Hasenpfeffer was a flaming, left-wing ecology freak. He loudly defended the “right to life” of leeches, snail darters, puff adders and every other living creature except for mosquitoes, of course, and the cow he was currently eating.
And here he was, butchering this innocent tree.
“We’ve already got a five-year supply of firewood!” Ian added.
“My God. You’re right.” Shocked at his own actions, Hasenpfeffer dropped to his knees. Forgetting that all he had to do to turn off the blade was to let go of any one of the four triggers, he stupidly reached for the blade length adjustment with his left hand. His mania over, his clumsiness returned, and that’s when Hasenpfeffer pitched in his part.
The thin, black thread of nothingness crossed his palm, and four still connected fingers hit the dirt before he felt the pain.
I got a tourniquet around his wrist and we drove him to the U of M Hospital, where things were considerably more sophisticated than they are in the Upper Peninsula. Ian had had the brains to pick up the severed fingers, put them on ice, and bring them along. The doctors were able to sew them back on, blood vessels, tendons, and all.
In a few months they worked again, after a fashion, but the nerves never regenerated. Most of his left hand was numb.
The medical bills made a major dent in our cash reserves.
Despite Jim’s accident, Ian and I got to wearing our swords all the time, just like we both always carried our calculators clipped to our belts.
Hasenpfeffer wouldn’t touch a sword after his accident. He claimed that our carrying them was an atavistic fetish, a response to our primitive blood lusts, and a stupid macho stunt.
Well, he rarely touched a calculator, either.
Admittedly, a sword was rarely useful as a tool. After the first week, I used my Swiss Army jackknife ten times for every time I used my sword. It was just too powerful for most ordinary things—it was too easy to cut the circuit board you were working on in half when you only meant to trim a lead.
Out in the shop, cutting steel and ceramics, Ian used variations of the sword all the time. By then, he had replaced them as the cutting tools on all of his lathes and mills and saws. But I rarely remember seeing him using the one that was clipped to his waist.
A feeling of power? Maybe. I suppose that I could have cut a truck in half if I ever needed to. But that same line of reasoning said that my calculator, my wallet and my keys each gave me, in their own ways, a similar feeling of power. I felt naked with any one of them missing.
All I know is that it felt good to have my sword there.
CHAPTER TEN
Lateral Displacement and Practical Jokes
Work continued, but we started hitting technical snags, the worst of which was the lateral displacement problem.
At first, we’d been running most of our tests for short time periods, a few seconds or so, for the sake of convenience, so the problem wasn’t immediately noticeable, but when something was transported, it didn’t reemerge in exactly the same place as it left. It never moved up or down much, but it shifted sideways in a random direction that averaged six inches per hour, assuming “drunkard’s walk” statistics.
We sometimes had a hard time finding a test object when it emerged in the air, and because of this, we got to sending small, Citizen Band radios as test objects. A receiver was wired up to a commercial time clock, so if the walkie-talkie emerged when we weren’t there to observe it, we at least knew when it happened.
From there it was a simple matter, if nothing was broken, of using a radio direction finder to locate our vagrant test object. Later, we got to putting them in steel canisters, to protect the radios from the shock of hitting the ground.
What made this lateral displacement problem so serious was that on reemergence our test object suddenly co-existed in the same space as whatever else was there. Emerging in air killed anything alive and degraded electronic circuits something fierce. Emerging within a solid or liquid usually caused an explosion.
If we could tell exactly where something would emerge, it would be easy, or at least possible, to arrange to have a hard vacuum waiting there. But when a thing could drift a mile in a year . . .
Well, things started getting grim. We spent more than a year trying to get a handle on the problem, making hundreds of tests and wrecking a circuit and a radio on most of them. We had test objects reemerging in the damndest places, blasting twenty trees, destroying a drill press in the shop, and blowing out Hasenpfeffer’s bedroom wall, just when he was getting into his latest chick.
But eventually something useful emerged. After tediously charting the exact times and places of every departure and arrival, Ian discovered that, while the actual displacement seemed to be random, nonetheless it tracked according to the sidereal day. If you sent something at noon for (say) exactly fifteen hours into the future, leaving point A and reemerging at point B, then you could do the same thing tomorrow at 11:56 and it would go from the same point A to the same point B.
This gave us a handle on the lateral displacement problem.