“That seems like an extreme statement,” Hasenpfeffer said.
“Extreme, Hell. Those guys with their super expensive toys haven’t come up with anything useful and new since they came up with atomic power, long before the beginning of World War II.”
“But surely, all of the dozens and hundreds of subatomic particles must count for something, even to one of your sadly restricted intellect.”
“For the last part of that, up your ass, Hasenpfeffer! For the first, I said ‘useful.’ Nobody has ever found a use for a Mu-Meson, an Electron-Neutrino, or a Left-Handed Boson.”
“I met a left-handed bos’n’s mate, once,” I said, but was ignored.
“Furthermore,” Ian continued, “I doubt the very existence of the things. Subatomic particles are things that their inventors have painted with the colors of their own minds, and then glued together with their own shit. Data? They don’t have no stinking data! Those overpaid academicians sit around and try to ‘interpret’ tiny, meaningless squiggles on photographic plates the way ancient Roman soothsayers tried to predict the future by interpreting the bumps on the liver of a sacrificed owl. And in both cases, the stupid politicians lap up every irrational word of it, and reward the rip-off artists with gold from the public coffers! If we had spent on biology what we’ve wasted on all those cyclotrons and accelerators and what not, the world would be a lot better off!”
Hasenpfeffer whispered aside to me, “Oh, my. I do believe the poor boy is going to start in on Taxes again. Try and head him off, won’t you?”
I turned to Jim and said quietly, “You feel that way because you have never had to pay any, or found a way around it if you did. You fork out a major chunk of your income very week and see what you think about taxes, and what the bozos spend it all on.”
Ian had indeed started in on his often told Speech On Taxes before noticing that he had lost his audience. Eventually, his sermon wound itself down.
“Be that as it may,” Hasenpfeffer said in a normal voice, “I wonder if the reason that Ian is such a regular churchgoer is that his is one of those sects where they let lay people get up and speak. I mean, with a less critical audience, he could go on ranting for hours about anything that comes into his curious little mind.”
Ian glowered at him, but didn’t say anything, so I suppose that much of what Hasenpfeffer said about Ian’s church was true. I was curious, but not quite curious enough to take Ian up on one of his frequent offers to take me to church.
CHAPTER NINE
Autum Leaves and Temporal Swords
About the only non-time-travel thing the three of us did agree on was that the smell of burning autumn leaves was the finest of perfumes, gaseous ambrosia and vastly superior to all commercial olfactory products. Also, that any governmental official who called it pollution was obviously a Fascist Left-Wing Atheist. (As named by Jim, me, and Ian, respectively.)
One day, just as Hasenpfeffer completed raking all the leaves from our huge front lawn into a humongous pile on the gravel drive in front of the shop, Ian came screeching up in the Corvette. He had this bright idea burning a hole in his mind, and was so eager to try it out that he simply didn’t notice the six-foot high pile of leaves on the driveway. He just plowed through them, jumped out of the car and hobbled as fast as his damaged foot would take him into the shop.
Hasenpfeffer, less than amused, proceeded to pack the little car solid with leaves, raise the rag top, and then bury the car with the rest of the pile. This procedure left him with a feeling of contentment, accomplishment, and proper vindication.
An hour later, Ian realized that he needed a few parts from the industrial supply store down the road. He rushed to what he still thought of as “his” car, jumped in and actually fired it up before he realized that he couldn’t see out the windshield, or breathe either, for that matter.
The next day, Hasenpfeffer’s bedroom was stuffed nearly solid with leaves, leaving Ian looking smug while Jim, with a new lady friend on his arm, screamed.
And the day after that it was Ian’s bed and closet that got the full treatment.
I watched this leafy dialogue go on all winter, the same pile of leaves being handed back and forth, and growing smaller and increasingly tattered in the process.
Wisely, I stayed neutral.
Toward spring, they were down to one leaf. You might pull on a roll of toilet paper and out would float this battered tree leaf.
If I happened to find it, I always returned it to its place. After all, they weren’t talking to me. I didn’t want to get involved, it wasn’t my fight, and furthermore, in the service I had seen this sort of thing get dangerously out of hand.
Still, they played it safe enough, this time. Usually, an exchange of practical jokes tends to escalate, each side trying to out do the other, every round, but in this case they were saved by the self-destructibility of autumn leaves.
The leaf appeared in magazines and books, under the place mats and in the breakfast cereal. Finally, it had been abraded down to a stem and six fragile veins before it was retired by mutual consent.
* * *
Meanwhile, the work went on. We learned to calibrate our circuits to amazing accuracies—things sent for weeks reemerged within micro-seconds of the predicted time.
We learned how to focus the field and project it as tight as a laser beam, which made an incredible knife or sword. This was nothing like a Star Wars light saber. It was a lot better. Switched on, it projected a thin needle of nothingness that looked like a tightly stretched black thread. Everything that entered that line was sent forward, an atom at a time, I think, for hundreds and thousands of years, reemerging imperceptibly except as an immeasurably tiny addition to the background radiation.
It was a neat toy, and I spent a few weeks “polishing” it into a tidy, hand-held package. For safety reasons, I put in four trigger switches, complete with anti-tiedowns. To turn it on, you had to have a finger on each trigger, and lifting any one of them turned the beam off. Then, you had to release all the buttons before it could be turned back on. This was so that Hasenpfeffer wouldn’t try to tape down three of the buttons, and hurt himself, or me either.
The blade length was adjustable from an eighth of an inch out to twelve feet, by means of a sliding potentiometer built into the side, easily reachable with your right thumb. For power, it had solar cells charging Ni-Cad batteries, and everything that had to penetrate the housing—switches and so forth—were guaranteed to be dust tight and water tight, down to thirty meters.
Ian machined up three stainless steel housings for them, complete with belt clips, and these were hermetically sealed at well.
We christened them “Temporal Swords.”
Switched on, it made a crackly hissing sound that was caused by air molecules leaving rapidly for elsewhen. The sword was a glorious thing, the ultimate cutting tool and the deadliest possible short-range weapon.
As a cutting tool, it could cut absolutely anything as quickly and as smoothly as you could feed the stock to the tool. There were no vibrations, and with the right beam width, no chips to clear away. Over the coming months, Ian adapted all of his cutting tools from conventional cutting bits to temporal swords. The lathes didn’t look much different, but the Bridgeports looked like they were decapitated with their motors and gearboxes gone. And the saws were reduced down to being little more than holding fixtures! Eventually, Ian replaced all five of his saws with simple clamps to hold the swords accurately, and had Hasenpfeffer sell the surplus machine tools.
At the other end of the spectrum, as a weapon, it was something to make a combat veteran perk up, drool, and pant with lust. With a flick of your wrist, you could cut through anything with this puppy! I mean that if a Sherman tank offended you, you could turn it into a pile of small metal chunks in seconds. And the only sounds anybody would hear would be a quiet hiss and the much louder sound of bits of dead tank hitting the ground.
But you couldn’t fence with one because you couldn’t parry. Two beams interpenetrated without difficulty. I figured that it was just as well, since I think that Hasenpfeffer has a Zorro streak in him, and a temporal sword wasn’t a play toy.
I put a light bulb in the butt, letting it serve as a flashlight as well as a cutting tool. This use was not encouraged because it quickly ran down the batteries.