“He could have done the same thing with a horse-drawn carriage,” I said.
“Only if he was rich. Even if the horse and carriage had been free, it still took a lot of time and effort to take care of a horse, more than the typical working man could afford. A Model T Ford could be bought new for ten weeks’ pay, and you didn’t have to feed it, curry it, shoe it, and do everything else that a horse needs to stay healthy.”
“So you’re blaming the automotive engineers for the breakdown of morals during the 1920s? Well, good for the engineers! And to hell with drinking tea and eating crumpets with a bunch of maiden aunts, anyway!”
“It’s a judgement call, and if that’s yours, go wallow in it,” Ian said. “Some of us have a different opinion. None of which changes our responsibility for the Smoothy lack of creativity.”
“There’s got to be a better way. There has got to be a way that we can use time travel and still be creative.”
“When you figure it out, tell me about it. For now, let’s get to work. You have to find where that glitch is in our time circuit, fix it, and then design a triple redundant version of it, with back-ups and extra parity checks. I have to take a look at the damage we did down below, and do something about it.”
* * *
Our best guess turned out to be that a single energetic bit of radiation managed to upset two adjacent registers, which caused the entire circuit to malfunction. A single bad register would have caused a parity error, and the canister would have returned home immediately.
Our circuit could malfunction under these circumstances because those two particular bits changed a legal command into an illegal one. Of the sixty-four codes allocated to control functions, only sixty-two were actually in use. I had used a simple diode decoding matrix to do the job, with each function incorporating a transistor circuit for amplification, which also performed the pull-down function. I had not included an amplifier for those two codes that had no use. This meant that those two codes didn’t have a pull-down resistor, and various “sneak paths” existed when either of them was called up.
We had tested the circuit extensively, but we had never tested for things that “couldn’t possibly happen,” like codes that weren’t in use. So what could possibly happen was that several functions were activated simultaniously, and your humble heroes were left drifting in the sixth dimension, for a while there.
In Standard Engineering Terminology, this situation is called “Fucking Up.” I suppose that I could mumble and grumble about how my uncreative staff, acting like I was God, had a lot to do with the way my error wasn’t caught, but the truth is that it was my mistake.
I’m glad that I made that first trip, and took my chances dying on it. If somebody else had died because of my fuck-up, well, I couldn’t have lived with it.
Two cheapshit quarter-watt, carbon pull-down resistors cured half the basic problem. Hardening our registers with their own, separate, triple redundancy circuits (plus a bit of lead shielding) did most of the rest. The triple redundancy with back-ups for the whole circuit came later. Fortunately, I had help with that.
Actually, the triple circuit didn’t take us all that long to build and test. There were books and papers available on how to make any electrical circuit more reliable, provided that you didn’t mind spending money, space, and power to get it. Nothing creative was required on our parts. I had a lot of good engineers who could do a very competent job under those conditions.
Within two weeks, we tested the new circuit out on a small test canister, and it worked. We ran two hundred more tests, going as far back as fifty thousand years, and had a success rate that was almost twice as good as we’d ever had before, all of which was pretty damned embarrassing. It meant that we had lost thousands of canisters on our earlier tests, not because of problems with making machinery last fifty thousand years, or because of geological accidents, but because of a simple electronic glitch!
Ian ragged me about it for years, and while the Smoothies were all far too polite to ever mention it, the people in his mechanical design team acted smug, aloof, and superior to my electronic people from that day on.
We then ran ten tests on full-sized canisters, shuttling back and forth from 1735 to our newly rebuilt terminal in 1972. We were now ready to make our trip into the past, except that I had this wedding to attend.
My own.
* * *
Even though Ian promised that there wouldn’t be any bachelor party stunts, I was increasingly watchful as the day of the wedding approached. I knew that he was going to pull something. But nothing happened.
With the ceremony less than an hour away, my bath girls got me into the formal, full-dress with tails outfit that somebody had decided was absolutely necessary. Just as well, since I never could have figured out how to get into it on my own, what with the shirt studs, the bow tie, the gaiters and all. It even came with a spring-loaded top hat, an opera cape, and a walking stick. I’d hoped that there was a sword hidden in the walking stick, but no such luck. Or if there was one in there, I couldn’t figure out how to get the damned thing out.
My usual accessories, my calculator and my temporal sword, didn’t seem appropriate with the formal outfit, and what with all the new stuff, I failed to notice the lack of a red button on the belt buckle.
Ian showed up with six other friends of mine, Killer drinking buddies from the Bucket of Blood, who had volunteered to act as ushers. They were all in the same uniform that I was, and they said that they were going to escort me to the church.
“Sort of an honor guard, as it were,” Leftenant Fitzsimmon said, as we got into the subway car.
But when the car door opened, I could see that we weren’t in the basement of the church. We were in the time canister test chamber below our shop!
“What? You pressed the wrong button by mistake, Ian?”
“No . . . Tom, listen to me. First, you must understand that I am your best friend. That all of us here are friends of yours. And as your friends, we can’t let you go out and make the biggest mistake of your life! Deep down inside, we know that you realize that Barbara is simply not the right girl for you, and that by marrying her, you would not only be making yourself miserable for the rest of your life, you would be ruining her life as well.”
“I realize no such God damned thing!” I said, standing up and trying to make it to to the car’s control panel.
I never got there. All seven of those guys piled on me, and while they did no damage to anything but my pride, they held me down in the aisle.
“We were afraid that you would take it this way,” Ian said. “We sincerely regret being forced to put you in bondage, but sadly, you leave us no choice.”
My arms were forced behind my back, and a set of handcuffs was snapped on my wrists. I was furious! Not only were they doing their damndest to upset a ceremony that I had been looking forward to for months, but they were actually overpowering me, physically! Such a thing had never happened to me before. I had always been the strongest person I knew, and I hadn’t realized how much of my ego was involved with that fact.
But the seven of them were more that I could handle. I was helpless against the fighting skills of the six Killers, and Ian’s towering strength. I never even got a single good lick on any one of them.
Once the handcuffs were on, most of them worked their way down to my feet, and put a set of leg irons on me. I was squirming and shouting loudly for help. At first it didn’t seem to bother them, but my increasingly vulgar cursing ended when they held my nose closed and stuffed a ball gag into my mouth.
“Now don’t get yourself into too much of a dither,” Ian said calmly as they carried me at shoulder height over to a time canister. “We’re only sending you back ten years, to when the island was unpopulated. That ought to give even you enough time to get over your present, doubtless temporary, insanity.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Kidnaped!
With Ian giving directions, my six other “friends” carried me from the subway car to the back of a big canister, half loaded with boxes and crates that were strapped down to the deck. They laid me down, face up, on a big, inflated air mattress.