“I suppose that’s true, if you wanted to stretch a few definitions. Prox switches are electronic, so the technology must exist somewhere. It might take me weeks to look it up, though.”
“No, it won’t,” Barb said. “That’s the sort of thing that you have secretaries and librarians for. You’ll have the information you need in the morning, unless you need it sooner. But let me continue with these military purchase orders.”
The Navy had similar requests for side arms, and requests for quotes on the research and development required to design a heavy, turret mounted weapon, for which they had incidentally left space in their existing deck turrets (sketch included).
And the Air Force had a similar bunch of requests, only with aerospace specifications, instead of the naval requirements for salt-spray tests.
Then there were orders from three local industrial supply houses, saying that they had heard of our swords, and couldn’t something similar be used for cutting very hard materials? Assuming that this was so, they wanted to buy them, and they didn’t care about the price.
Ian said, “So what it comes down to is, we’ve got a fistful of production orders on stuff we already know how to make. If we’re going to fill them, we’re going to have to put on a lot of people in a hurry, and back off on R and D for a while.”
Somehow, we never wondered if we should fill those orders.
I said, “Nah. I can’t see getting involved with the headaches of mass production. There are lots of shops with good managers on this island. They can make anything you want, so long as you don’t expect them to get too creative. All we have to do is to design the products, build some prototypes, and test them. Then we can hand it all over to someone else.”
“We’d lose a lot of the profits, that way, Tom.”
“What profits? Don’t you realize that all these things we’re going to develop and make are going to be used inside of our own organization? That everything on this whole Island is already ours? How could we possibly make a profit off that? We’d be as likely to make a profit by taking in each other’s laundry!”
“Huh. You’ve got a point there, only we will profit, in the increased equity of our holdings. But okay, we’ll get an accountant to handle whatever accounting they need to do around here, and after that, we just won’t worry about the money.”
“Agreed. I haven’t seen any money around here anyway. Everybody just seems to sign for stuff, however that works. So where are we?” I asked.
“Well, first, we have to take those items that have already been built and tested—the temporal swords, the machine tool adaptations of them, and the bomb—and document them so that other people can build them.”
“But before we can do that, we’ll need people who know as much as we do about this whole thing. I hate to say it, Ian, but I think that you and I will have to become school teachers for a few weeks.”
“What a depressing thought.”
“True. And we have to make sure that we have some real school teachers in that first class, or we’ll have to keep on teaching the damn thing ourselves. Are you taking notes, Barb?”
That last was for Ian’s benefit, since I knew that Barb either had an eidetic memory or a built-in tape recorder. She not only didn’t sleep, she never forgot anything, either. Sexy, too. I definitely had to marry that girl, one of these days.
Barb said yes, and that if we going to teach a class, something that we did not enjoy doing, it would make sense to teach as large a class as possible. A large auditorium was available, and did we want to have the first class in the morning?
Ian said, “No. We’ll need at least a day to get our class notes together. We’ll start on Thursday morning, at eight. Ming Po, set it up. Two four-hour sessions a day. In the meantime, I found Hasenpfeffer’s old sword in one of the drawers in my tool box downstairs. Shirley, get it over to some engineering outfit or other, and have them make formal drawings of all the parts, since we built them from rough sketches. Warn them not to turn the thing on until after they’ve been to our lectures. Can you think of any thing else that needs doing before we get going on the class notes, Tom?”
“Nothing except to say ‘What you mean “we,” White Man?’ You’re the one with all that wonderful formal education. You do the notes, and I’ll kibitz.”
“Deal. But you have to give half of the talks, and we’re both going to have to be up on the stage together. For moral support, you know, and making sure that we get it right.”
“Stage, huh? We’re going to have that big an audience?”
Barb said, “The hall I had in mind seats three thousand, Tom. If we use anything smaller, the V.I.P.s will crowd out all of the engineers and technicians.”
“V.I.P.s!” Ian shouted, “We don’t need no stinking V.I.P.s! We’re doing this to educate our work force, not to entertain the brass!”
“Anyway, if the brass comes, Hasenpfeffer will come too, and that’ll blow away our joke on him,” I said. “No. No V.I.P.s. If they come, I won’t.”
“Tom, you must remember that most of the people on this island have been waiting for this lecture series for most of their lives. You can’t expect them to pass up seeing it in person. No manager is going to send his subordinates, when he himself has to sit home.”
My mind had stuck on that “waiting all their lives” line, and hadn’t gotten much farther.
“Then how are we going to insure that Hasenpfeffer doesn’t show up?” Ian said.
“I don’t think that we can, sir. But what we could do is see to it that he doesn’t come for two more weeks, subjectively, while your joke is being played on him. Then he can double back for the lecture series,” Barb said.
“I don’t think that I could have thought of that,” Ian said. “How are you going to keep him from knowing about our talks, if everybody on the whole damn island is so eager to go to them? He’s sure to hear about it.”
“It will not be difficult, sir. We will simply let everyone on ‘the whole damn island’ in on the joke being played.”
“You know, Ian, I think they could do that. It couldn’t happen in our world, of course, but we’re not in Michigan any more. Look at the way these people have stonewalled us on a dozen different topics.”
“Yeah. And I’ll bet that most of that stonewalling was at Hasenpfeffer’s instigation. Nailing him back is only fair. Our little joke is getting better all the time.”
I said, “Barb, let’s go back to that line about how everybody here has been waiting all their lives to hear our lecture series. What’s so new about what we’re going to say? I mean, you people use time machines as often as the average American uses a telephone. It can’t be any big deal to you.”
“Tom, we use temporal products in exactly the same way as the average person uses a telephone. We know how to use them, but we don’t know how they work. None of us do!”
“Well, some of you must. I mean, you have repairmen, don’t you?”
“Of course. But the repairmen don’t do anything but replace defective sealed boxes with functioning sealed boxes that are shipped to us from the future. Those boxes are tamper-proof, and naturally, we’re all dying to find out what’s inside of them.”
I spent a long while mulling that one over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Baboons and the Ladies
We spent a day and two nights getting our class notes together.
When Hasenpfeffer came by at eight in the morning, one of the girls told him that we were out hunting for a Narwhal in our scuba rigs. We needed it so we could make ourselves some drinking cups out of the tusk, that would protect us against the ever-present danger of being poisoned.
By noon, we had decided that the best way to explain the whole thing was to do it as a narrative, explaining our actions and thoughts in chronological order. We still didn’t know enough about the theory to present it in a more logical fashion.
I dug out those same notes to write this book, years later, but like I said, it’s best to tell the whole thing in the order in which it all happened.
It’s a curious thing, but it simply never occurred to us at the time that we should worry about security. After two and a half years of keeping absolutely mum to outsiders about our project, here we were, not just telling someone about it, but about to give a definitive lecture series to three thousand people! And it never occurred to us to wonder about this, any more than we gave any thought as to whether we should equip a tiny island nation with a new set of very powerful weapons.