“Maybe we’ve been a little rough on him.”
“How so? I mean, we took a vacation when he didn’t want to, and when he got to yelling and screaming about it, we ignored him. That seems normal enough. It’s not like we made him take a vacation, when he didn’t want to take one. Then, we played a trivial joke on him, where for a few weeks, while we were giving those lectures, which was what he wanted us to do in the first place, we made him think that we were still goofing off. Is that anything to get polite about?”
“But Ian, to play that joke, we had to organize the entire population of Morrow into a conspiracy to tell lies to him.”
“We didn’t organize anything. We just gave your housekeeper permission to go ahead and do as she suggested. These islanders are the most organizing people in the known universe, I swear it.”
“Well, we did make up all those stories our girls told him, but the big thing is that he’d just spent a month or so, working his buns off, being diplomatic to everybody, while we’d gone around being fornicating playboys. And then, for his reward for being such a good boy, everybody in the whole country ganged up on him to play a joke. Think about it. Every single person on the island sided with us. Everybody he saw for two weeks knew what he didn’t, and was laughing at him for it.”
“So? Is that so much different from what’s been happening to the two of us? Everybody in Morrow knows what’s going on but you and me, Tom, but do we go around being polite to old friends? Of course not!”
“Yeah, but we’ve still got each other. Hasenpfeffer is out there all alone.”
“All alone with nobody but his hundred and fifty naked ladies and a few thousand sundry others.”
“Yeah, but those people aren’t friends. It makes me feel rotten. We gotta do something about it.”
* * *
It had taken us eleven days of lecturing to explain everything we knew, or thought we knew, about time travel. After that, we took a long weekend off, and vowed to start work, bright and surly, on Monday morning. Which implied having some manpower there to help us out.
Talking it over on Friday morning, Ian and I decided that we didn’t know anything about hiring people. Neither one of us had ever had any significant number of people working for us. Barb and Ming Po, on the other hand, were both experienced managers, so we gave them the job of hiring the men who would work at our factory.
Oh, Ian and I had sketched up the job description for each slot to be filled, but after that we let the girls handle everything, including salaries.
Having thus performed my managerial duties by delegating them all away, I spent the rest of the day curled up with a book and a bottle, in that little room Ian had found on our first morning in Morrow. Sometimes, a man just has to get away from the rest of the world for a while.
* * *
Early on Saturday morning, I walked over to Hasenpfeffer’s glass and chrome monstrosity, to talk to him and see about mending some fences. A man has very few true friends in this world, and you can’t just let them slip away.
It was actually the first time that I had ever been inside of Hasenpfeffer’s house, after living next to it for over a month. Most of the time, the three of us had met over at my place, I suppose because the Gothic styling there was more conducive to comfortable living than Ian’s rather austere Taj Mahal, or Hasenpfeffer’s sterile, modernistic glass and metal thing.
Aside from the splashy but ugly architecture, which had all sorts of elevated platforms and walkways cutting at different levels through huge volumes of space, the first difference I noticed were the women.
At my place, the girls were naked or nearly so, and openly friendly, cheerful, and energetic. Thinking about it, this was doubtless a response to my lecherous but essentially egalitarian personality.
Ian’s women wore a bit more clothing than mine did, but they all were still pretending to be Chinese slave girls, with a lot of bowing, kneeling, and groveling. The Oriental kowtowing had happened at first due to one of my suggestions, when I was trying to get Ian over a hump, but the fact that Jim hadn’t changed it probably said something about the man. But then again, maybe all it said was that he had simply never noticed it. For all his education, intelligence, and perception, that boy could be God awful dense, sometimes.
The ladies of Hasenpfeffer’s harem were all fully and properly dressed, generally in shades of grey, black, and white. Many of them wore well-fitted ladies’ business suits. They all acted as if they were at a major corporate headquarters, with stiff, artificial smiles and quick, efficient motions.
In his glassed-in breakfast room, atop a clear, round glass tower which faced the city and not the sea, Hasenpfeffer, too, was in a three piece business suit. It was carefully tailored of grey wool with a thin, dark blue pinstriping. He wore a silk Rep tie, a diamond tie tack, and had a gold chain running from a twenty carat diamond watch fob to a priceless antique gold watch.
All this to meet an old friend on a Saturday morning.
He met me in a friendly enough manner, but with a touch of formality, too.
We had breakfast, served by a quiet woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a black-and-white English maid’s outfit. She had long sleeves, her top was buttoned up to her throat, and the hem of her black skirt almost brushed the floor.
Jim’s old casual manner and slovenly ways were entirely gone. He was as well groomed as Ian and I had become, but it was more than that. He was now a corporate executive, a consummate politician, a manipulator of people. Even his table manners were now disgustingly impeccable.
Between the power suit, Hasenpfeffer’s formal politeness, and his new table manners, I felt as intimidated as all hell, despite the fact that I was still twice his size.
Nonetheless, I pushed onward.
I started out by apologizing for the joke we’d pulled on him, but before I had even finished, he brushed it off as not worth bothering with.
“Think nothing of it, Tom. It was nothing but a youthful prank, and a harmlessly amusing one at that.”
“Youthful prank? Jim, we are the same age. You are just as youthful as I am.”
“Of course we are. Did I tell you what an outstanding job you and Ian did with that lecture series? It was remarkably well done. Why, even I got the feeling that I understood this time travel business myself, by the time the two of you were finished. Everyone has been talking about it, of course, even those who could only catch it on television.”
“I never realized that we were being televised. I never saw any cameras. Where were they?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion. The people here have their ways, of course. I’m told that the two of you will be starting back to work on Monday.”
“Yes.”
“That is excellent. You will be accomplishing great things there in your new facility, never doubt it for a moment.”
I tried repeatedly to get him talking about the strange things Ian and I had discovered about the island, about the two distinct types of people who lived here, and the strange cultural quirks that each type had, but I might as well have been talking to a college advisor, for all the personal interest he took in it. He acted as if I was a small child, telling him about all the things that had happened today in the third grade.
“Yes, the two of you are far too intelligent and observant for anything to remain a mystery for long. It’s one of the many things that I have always admired about you both.”
“Jim, this is Tom. Do you remember? Your friend Tom?”
“Of course I remember. We’ve always been the best of friends, and we always will be!”
“Yeah.”
I left, feeling saddened and sickened. One of my two best friends was gone. Grown up, maybe, while I was just abandoned like Puff the Magic Dragon. The fact was that in a few weeks, Jim Hasenpfeffer had somehow grown old.
Ian was waiting for me when I got back.
“So how is he, Tom?”
“Uh, I’d rather not say, just now. Why don’t you visit him tomorrow, before church. After that, we can compare notes.”
But on Sunday afternoon, Ian was looking as sad as I felt.
Hasenpfeffer, at least the old Hasenpfeffer that we knew, respected, and, yes, loved. . . . was gone.