A few nanoseconds after the first canister departed, leaving a chamber filled with a hard vacuum in the past, a second canister arrived that was slightly smaller than the first. This had to get there before the walls of the chamber, if they happened to be made of something soft, started to collapse.
Inside the second canister was a small machine that we called a “surfacer.” It had a top made just like the active surface of an escape harness. The sides of the machine had four caterpillar treads set at right angles to one another, and the rest of it was taken up by a radio transmitter, a power supply, control circuitry, and a timer.
The little machine sat there, under the ground, for as long as we had sent it back in time. If we sent it five hundred years back, its timer had it wait there for five hundred years, doing nothing.
Once its timer said “GO!” the temporally active area was turned on, its treads started moving, and it ate its way through the top of its canister, and then through the rock above it, crawling slowly upward on its treads until it eventually reached either the air, or, as was more likely, the bottom of the sea. If it reached air, it would send up an antenna and broadcast its ID number. If it found water, it dropped its treads and their drive as an anchor, while the rest of it floated to the surface, connected by a few thousand feet of fishing line, and again it radioed its presence.
Then someone, usually from the Navy, went out and found it with the aid of radio direction finders, carefully noted its position using the Loran system we had installed, and brought it back for possible repair and reuse.
As the project continued, we found a major long-term drift to the east, far out into the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that we had to operate from deeper and deeper shafts, to make sure that one of our canisters didn’t emerge deep in the ocean water. If that happened, there was no telling where ocean currents would take the thing, and if we ever did get it back, it’s positional data would be totally useless.
The design of the canisters and the surfacers they contained had to be changed as time went on. Making machinery that could sit idle for thousands of years, and then function properly on command was no trivial task!
Eventually, we were building the surfacers mostly out of stainless steel, with gold bushings on all moving parts, and then filling the canisters with a fluorinated oil to keep moving parts from welding themselves together over the ages. Whole categories of electronic parts had to be eliminated. There isn’t a battery or an electrolytic capacitor that will last more than a few decades, and these things had to be designed around. Power supplies were a particular problem.
A version of Ian’s emergency generator eventually powered the things. It made a partial vacuum that the encapsulating oil boiled into. The resultant gas went through a piston type motor which in turn powered an electric generator.
Even so, a small atomic battery was needed to get the Rube-Goldberg affair started. These batteries had been developed in the late fifties. They consisted of a thin rod of a radioactive isotope that emitted alpha particles. These particles struck a surrounding layer of a phosphor that gave off visible light. This light, in turn, energized a layer of solar cells, which converted the light into a small trickle of electricity, enough to run a clock and keep a large, mylar capacitor charged. It was a matter of one overly complicated Rube-Goldberg device starting another.
We also had to modify the six ships of our small navy, so they had the range to go out on the high seas and recover our transmitters. Their huge Rolls-Royce gas turbines were removed and replaced with things that worked on the same principle as Ian’s emergency generator, but which turned impellers rather than electric generators. They now had essentially infinite range, especially after we added a small galley, a shower, and some submarine-style bunk space, where the engines and fuel used to be.
Even so, toward the end, only one surfacer in three was being returned to us.
We sent out some sixty-seven thousand of the things before we were sure that we had the local drifts mapped for the last fifty thousand years. We would have gone back even farther, except that we weren’t up to designing machinery and electronics equipment that could last much longer. In the end, we decided that we’d have to someday build a beachhead back there, and then use it as a base for further temporal explorations into the past.
* * *
Mayor Jenkins managed to find a genuine Catholic priest who was willing to commit the unspeakably sinful task of marrying two people who were not of his faith. He turned out to be an impoverished fellow of mostly Indian ancestry who hailed from one of the poorest sections of Paraguay.
Even so, he didn’t come cheap. In return for his services, KMH bought and installed a complete water and sewage system for the extended village that was his parish. He also got a small, but well equipped hospital, two food processing plants (to get local products ready for market), and a small fleet of trucks (to get those processed products to those markets). Finally, he gouged us for the materials necessary for the building of a church, a rectory, and a minimal house for every family in the parish.
The priest figured that if he was going to sell his only soul to the rich and boorish, he might as well charge all that the traffic would bear!
It was months before he arrived, since he demanded his pay, or rather his loot, up front. Then, once he got here, he insisted on taking six weeks for the posting of the banns, time which he planned to use to educate us in the one true religion. Fortunately, he spoke no English, we spoke no Spanish, and the translators that I was paying for somehow found more pressing things to do, so his plan didn’t quite work out.
He then demanded that I cease sleeping with Barbara until the wedding.
I politely suggested that in return, it would only be proper that we should burn his building materials, put sugar in the gas tanks of all of his pretty, new trucks, and dynamite his nice, new water and sewage system. Eventually, he saw the light.
It’s a hell of a thing. A sold out sky pilot who won’t stay bought!
* * *
Meanwhile, work on the Time Train went on.
With the local temporal drifts mapped out, we went into Phase Two of the project. This involved canisters big enough to transport equipment, supplies, and people. After some debate, we settled on a canister sixteen feet in diameter and sixty feet long, big enough to take a standard shipping container and the truck it drove in on, or to comfortably seat fifty people, along with all of their luggage.
Long hours were spent in meetings, hammering out our plans. After months of debate, what we came up was this:
The first part of the drill was to be much like that used on the smaller, exploratory canisters, except that now we knew where we were going, as well as when. The first canister would weave its way through five dimensions, arrive at the predetermined site for a few nanoseconds, and then go away, taking nine thousand cubic feet of rock away with it. The second would arrive by the same route, a few nanoseconds behind, and materialize in the vacuum left by the departing first canister.
And yes, we probably could leave the first canister in position, and discard only its contents, saving the cost of the second canister entirely, but this procedure would leave the walls of the canister impregnated with rock, which weakened the metal in an unpredictable way, and made it radioactive. In addition, the temporal circuitry itself wasn’t all that dependable after it had emerged once in solid rock.
Time, money, and human effort weren’t among our problems. We had plenty of resources, so there wasn’t any incentive to chintz on the job.
The second canister sat there until the the third canister was scheduled to arrive. Just before that point, it sent its contents (mostly air, along with anything else that might have leaked in) out into the fifth dimensional void so that the third canister could emerge into a truly hard vacuum.
Once the third canister made it safely back to the twentieth century, that particular leg of the Time Train was declared ready to be put into service.
Then, a work crew could be sent back, armed with temporal digging tools, to tunnel their way up to the surface.