And it wasn’t only multi-spatial engineering that he was lecturing about. The Travelers were way ahead of us in almost everything scientific, cultural, mathematical or philosophic. The Teacher was prepared to teach anything to anybody at any time. New textbooks somehow materialized on a regular basis and were sent to our print shops for duplication. Of course, you had to be a Smoothie, a Killer, or a member of the Historical Core to get on the island, so enrollment at the university was somewhat restricted. Maybe we’ll change the rules, later. Maybe much later.
The Teacher always dressed very well. He discovered that with a little re-tailoring, Ian’s worn-once outfits fit him very well, and that he liked them. My old clothes, being a bit small for him, continued to fill up the closets in my palace.
The ladies of the island were as attracted to the Teacher as they were to the three of us, but I think for different reasons. He liked them as well, and he found sex to be as marvelous a thing as I had promised him it would be. Sex, but not reproduction. For whatever reason, he proved to be sterile, with human women, anyway.
Ian and I got private tutoring, of course, but we didn’t do all that well at it. We’d been the boss for too long to slip easily back into the role of being mere schoolboys, but we did pick up a few pointers.
One thing that I was delighted to learn was that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a purely local phenomenon that only applied to some aspects of a three dimensional universe. I’d known it all along. With a bit of digging, I found plans for a simple device that turned water into ice cubes, and produced electricity as a by-product.
I also finally learned why it took time to travel in time. The way the Travelers looked at it, what we were doing when we traveled in time was taking a defined portion of our space-time continuum, and bending it into the other dimensions. Within that defined portion (think of it as sort of a pipe), space and time remain completely normal. They have to, since if they ever became discontinuous, even for an instant, anyone inside would cease to live, or even to exist.
Now, this wasn’t the way I had been looking at what we were doing. It seemed to me that I was working with fields and forces, not bending continuums. I don’t know. Maybe I never did really understand time travel. I’ve heard that DeForrest never really understood what was going on in a vacuum tube. He only invented the thing. Other people, like Major Armstrong, figured out why it worked.
So our island was finding a new role in life. It was now becoming a university town. This was good, since its other functions were starting to shut down.
At the shop, all of our subordinates had enrolled at the university as soon as it was opened, and doubled forward and back as necessary, usually completing several years of graduate work in what appeared to us to be a single night.
Within a few days, all of the people in our little company were retrained, barring two of the janitors (a musicologist and a history major, who weren’t interested in technical things), and within a few weeks, all of our old machinery and weapons were operational in the new, safe mode.
Sometimes, when there was some bit of trash that we were sure that the world would never need again, we would simply dump it into the sun. More often, it was sent to a recycling center where the stuff was broken down into its constituent atoms, sorted, and stored. Well, things like pure oxygen, argon and nitrogen were usually just released into the environment. Then, if you needed a few tons of pure silicon, titanium or gold, well, you knew where to go.
Now that our engineers had textbooks to go by, they didn’t need to be creative at all. They had all the answers that a culture a thousand times older than our own had come up with. If you had a problem, all you had to do was look it up. The girls turned out some marvelous things, but for Ian and me, well, they didn’t need us anymore.
We were still in charge and all, but there weren’t many opportunities to earn the undying admiration of our loyal workers because of our astounding creativity.
Work got very boring, for me at least. Ian was so wrapped up with getting his Historical Core going that he usually didn’t have time to eat, let alone talk to old friends.
In many of the manufacturing plants around, work was getting nonexistent. One day I noticed that the window frame plant, which we had toured in one of our first weeks on the island, was closing down. All of the stock bins were empty, the last of the finished windows were being hauled away, and the machinery was being packed into shipping containers.
Ian and I found the plant manager.
“What goes on here?” I asked.
“Why, we’re closing down, sir.”
“I can see that. But why?”
“Lack of work, I suppose. We’ve filled all of our orders and used up all of our raw materials, so it is time to close it all up.”
“They stopped ordering windows? Strange. But then, I never could figure out where all of those windows were going in the first place.”
“Going, sir? Why, look around you! Every window on this entire island was manufactured right here in this plant, and so was every window at Atlantic Ridge City. All of the necessary repair and replacement windows have been manufactured and stored, so they won’t be needing this facility ever again. The machinery is all being sold to a company in Mexico, they tell me. It will be working for many years yet, but I won’t. I’ll be retiring as soon as we finish getting the building cleaned out.”
“I hope you enjoy the rest,” Ian said. “But what was that you were saying about a city on the Atlantic Ridge?”
“They never told you about that, sir? How odd. Well, anyway, during the Ice Age before last, the level of the oceans got so low that a few hundred square miles of the Atlantic Ridge became exposed to the air. It’s a perfect place for all of us Smoothies to live, for thousands of years. The climate is lovely, there’s no local ecology to disrupt, so we can bring in modern plants and farm animals without endangering existing species, and when it eventually sinks back into the sea, there won’t be any possibility of problems with causality. My plant made all the windows we’ll ever need for the city and all the surrounding countryside.”
“I guess they never told us because we never asked. What are they going to do with your old factory building?” I asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know, sir. Maybe the university will find some use for it. It’s not my concern. I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.”
“You’re going to Atlantic Ridge City?”
“Yes. The wife and I have bought a nice apartment there, with a good view of the ocean. It’s a two week trip, going back that far, but we’ve booked a private canister, and we’re looking forward to the trip. The wife is calling it our second honeymoon.”
“Well, enjoy yourself. I wish you both the best of everything.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll give the wife your regards.”
As the weeks went on, more and more factories and shops were closing down, their purposes for existing having been completed. In time, I began to notice that the crowds were thinning down, that the concert halls were no longer full, and that the plays often had fewer actors and were being given shorter runs.
Ian asked me if I didn’t want to go back and see this Atlantic Ridge City that everybody was abandoning our island for, but I didn’t want to do it, not now, anyway. When we got to talking about it, he said that he felt about the same way as I did. Later. We’d do it later.
Then one night I found a new woman in my bed.
Barbara’s depression had grown until she had stopped sleeping with me. The doctors couldn’t seem to do anything for her. I figured that maybe if I let her have her space, and gave her enough time, she would eventually recover. It wasn’t like I needed the sex, what with all the other girls around.
Anyway, having lived with them for years, I had of course gotten to know my household staff pretty well, as well as the ladies who worked at the shop under Ian.
Natually, I asked the new girl what she was doing there.
She said that she worked at Camelot now, in gardening, replacing a woman who had decided to get married to a man who was going to the Atlantic Ridge.