“Your people don’t inherit anything when your parents die?”
“Not in the normal course of things. So many of our older people spend their time traveling up the time stream, that not all that many of them have actually died. When they do, it’s often by arrangement, and any property is given out as gifts by the person dying.”
“They arrange their own deaths? You mean suicide?”
“Hardly ever that. But there are limits to what the doctors can do, and when those are reached, and the body is failing, a person usually simply gets tired of living, and welcomes death. One’s best friends generally attend the gathering.”
“I’ll bet that they sometimes go to each other’s Death Party. ‘I’ll go to yours if you’ll come to mine.’ ”
“Yes, of course.”
“You know, this is one hell of a topic of conversation for a wedding night! What I was trying to get around to was that since I am now officially our children’s father, I want to see the little buggers! I want them brought here, to the palace, by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, so I can start getting to know them.”
“Tom, I don’t like that idea. We’ve talked about it before. This is a dangerous world up here! Too dangerous to raise children in!”
“I am going to meet and have a hand in raising my own children! The causality laws won’t let me go back to when ever it is that you keep them, so they will have to come here to me!”
“You’d risk their lives just to satisfy your ego?”
“I’m not risking anybody’s life, my ego has nothing to do with this, and my children are not going to be raised to be three more of your dull, cowardly, uncreative drones! They are going to have every possible chance of becoming bright, curious and inventive people. The kind of people their ancestors were, out there in the real world.”
“Tom, you can’t make me do this.”
“Maybe I can’t, but if you don’t bring them here, I’ll have a military platoon go back and get them for me.”
“You’d never do that!”
“Oh, yes I would, lady. Don’t make me prove it!”
“Tom, I believe you would.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you!”
“Tom . . . Could I have a few weeks, to, to get used to the idea?”
“Well . . . Okay, if you need it. But one limitation. You may not go back to see them until the day they leave for here and now. I don’t want to discover that they’re all fifteen years old when they arrive.”
* * *
The honeymoon was not the delightful affair I’d hoped it would be. I’d made arrangements for us to tour Niagara Falls, plus the four other biggest and/or tallest waterfalls in the world, with fake ID and so on, but Barb couldn’t see them as being anything but examples of the horrible, powerful destructiveness of the world I lived in. I finally gave in, and called the tour off after five days.
“You got back early,” Ian said as I sitting down at my desk. “You want to talk about it?”
“No, I just want to get back to work.”
“When you’re ready, then. Your managers tell me that everything is pretty much on schedule, but you’ll want to get the details from them. Our first time trip is ready to go, again. I’ve had it on hold, pending your return.”
“Thanks. How about if I spend the day around here, and we leave for the eighteenth century in the morning?”
“Suits. There’s one other thing that I want to talk about, Tom. They tell me that after you cold cocked me at the party, somebody hit a red button, and you saw the whole procedure.”
“You figure that you didn’t have it coming?”
“No, it’s not that. What’s a broken bone or two, between friends? It’s not like I felt any pain. I went out like a light, and woke up feeling fine in the hospital. I even went back to the party, once you were too drunk to notice. No. What bothers me is that we’re now up against a violation of causality, and from everything I’ve heard about it, that’s about the most dangerous thing a man can possibly do.”
“Naah. Don’t worry about it.”
“You’ve got a new slant on causality?”
“Nope, but I’ve got a fix for the problem at hand.”
“Enlighten me, my master.”
“Now, you’re showing the proper attitude! The solution is simple. I saw the Red Button Drill, and how they took you to the hospital. You didn’t, since you were out cold, enjoying your just deserts on the floor. Therefore, I won’t tell you what I saw, and you will have to invent the whole thing all by yourself, without any input from me.”
“Yeah, I guess that would work. I’ll do some thinking about it this afternoon.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Second Expedition
This time, there wasn’t anybody waiting for us near the opened time chamber except for a few guards, the construction crew and the military squad who were scheduled to go along. Everybody who was going was all decked out, as we were, in eighteenth-century finery.
We were getting ready to shut the steel doors when Barbara, Ming Po, and a half dozen other women arived in the wide-bottomed feminine equivalents of our outfits, and tried to join us inside.
“Whoops! Hold on, there!” I said. “You people can’t come with us!”
“And why not? We are man and wife, joined until death do us part, in your theory of things. Where you go, I go.”
“But you can’t! It might be dangerous!”
“If it is, then it’s all the more reason for me to be along, to protect you. But it’s not. You’ve said so repeatedly.”
“But . . .”
“Two minutes, Tom. Give in or give up for today,” Ian said.
“But . . .”
“You should have thought of that before you insisted on marrying the girl.”
“But . . .”
Barb and her friends brushed by me, and I had no choice but to step in after them.
The interior of the canister had been redesigned with the storage area nearest the door, where the dirty work of digging up to the surface could go on without messing up the living quarters in the back. The pile of supplies and machinery was bigger than it had been last time. There was so much stuff that I had to duck my head and go sideways through the storage area.
The passenger area resembled the first-class section of a modern airliner, with wide, tilt-back seats, a small kitchen, and two rest rooms. There were eight more seats than there had been before, and feminine-looking suitcases were strapped to three walls and the ceiling. Damn. I’d been had, again.
I managed to sit in a chair next to Barb without getting my long sword tangled up in the armrest. “Extra supplies, two johns and eight extra seats. You had the canister redesigned for this expedition.”
“Not really, darling. I merely wrote a note to the design team that was working on this canister, and made a few suggestions.”
“It would seem that a suggestion from the boss’s wife has a lot in common with an order.”
“So it would seem.”
“I trust that you arranged for extra compressed air for breathing, as well?”
“They said that it wouldn’t be necessary. They’re using tanks of liquid air, now, since they discovered that the field that surrounds the canister is a perfect reflector of heat. Ian used the same sort of field to surround the liquid air tanks. It’s safer, and holds a lot more air in the same space.”
So she’d done more than just write a note. She’d had a hand in the design! But, there was nothing I could do but take the Chinaman’s advice, and let the adventure we’d been looking forward to for years get turned into a family outing. Shit.
“So you and Ming Po just had to come along. Okay. But what are the other six women for?” I asked.
“Somebody has to take care of the two of you and keep you neat and clean, or you’d fall back on your old slovenly habits. Also, from a management standpoint, your men might get frustrated if they had to stay celibate when their bosses didn’t.”
“Yeah, sure. Anything for the troops’ morale.”
It was shaping up to be a dull trip, and as it turned out, I wasn’t disapointed. For a while, anyway.
We arrived precisely on schedule, and the construction crew dug us up to the surface in about five hours.
When Ian opened the second, huge, air-tight door, we found ourselves facing a solid granite wall. The first machine to go out was the tunneler, a sturdy tracked vehicle that cut a hole eight feet wide and eight feet tall. The square front of the thing was one big “shovel” that made dirt and rock go away. Behind it was a gadget that cut down on the air we would otherwise send elsewhen with the rock, followed by a sturdy, air-tight cage that protected the operator in the event of a cave-in.