When fitted with some stabilizing fins, the same nose cone could be used as a gravity bomb. Once somebody else had designed, built, and installed suitable bomb racks, they gave one of our fighter jets the firepower of a World War II style thousand-plane raid.
And, of course, the Navy got its own version, to its own specifications, for its rockets, guns, and depth charges.
Near the end of the Temporal Bomb Project, Ian and I heard one of my engineers referring to the thing as a “Time Bomb.” I chuckled at the pun, but Ian’s reaction was a bit different.
“Tom, have you ever heard a Smoothie tell a joke before?”
“Well, no, thinking about it.”
“Right. That’s because in order to be funny, a joke has to be new. But these people already know everything that is going to happen to them. They don’t tell jokes, ordinarily. Making up a new joke, even a silly pun, is an act of creation, something that these people are not capable of. Yet here we just heard one of them use a pun. Did one of them think it up herself?”
“I don’t know, but I can find out. Who knows? Maybe there’s hope for these people yet.”
I put one of the junior assistant secretaries on it. I asked her to trace the joke back, going from person to person, asking each of them when and where they had first heard the pun, and who they had heard it from.
The result was disappointing. It turned out that the originator of the pun was none other than my friend, Leftenant Fitzsimmons, and he wasn’t a Smoothie at all.
* * *
Farther down the pipeline were bigger, longer-ranged versions of the temporal sword, with ranges of up to fifty miles. They replaced our infantry rifle, various army machine guns, aircraft machine guns, and so on. All told, there were twenty-three distinct versions of these high-powered swords. Or perhaps I should say relatively high powered, since the biggest of them only consumed nine and a half watts.
The military gadget that I was proudest of was the “Escape Harness.” This thing looked like a pair of epaulets with arm loops under them, and straps across the back and chest. The chest strap had an arming button, a kill button, and a control knob on it.
The tops of the epaulets functioned like the beam of a temporal sword, except that instead of focusing the temporal distortion into a fine thread, the entire tops of the shoulder boards became active. Air rushed into the things at almost supersonic speeds, to be sent a short while into the future. The undersides of the epaulets were still at normal atmospheric pressure, of course, but the tops felt only a hard vacuum. Since the total active area was about forty square inches, the escape harness had an effective lift of up to six hundred pounds at sea level.
This was plenty of power to pull a pilot right up out of his aircraft at four Gs, eliminating the need for the ejection seat as well as for the parachute.
The real beauty of the gadget was that here was something that you could wear on a regular basis, that weighed less than a pound, but that would let you fly! It was easy enough to steer. You just moved your legs one way or the other. The knob on your chest controlled the amount of active area, and thus the lift.
It was noisy as all hell, but the pilot’s crash helmet protected his ears well enough.
I thought of these things as being strictly for emergency use, since the amount of air they sucked out of the present was pretty huge. They seemed wasteful to me, but Preston proved that there was no danger of dropping the world’s air pressure by any measurable amount, even if everyone in the world used one all the time. The air being sent elsewhen wasn’t being wasted, after all. It all came back in a short while.
* * *
The night after the first successful test, I was having a drink at the Bucket of Blood with Captain Stepanski, an Air Force pilot. I showed him one of the prototype escape harnesses my people had made up, to get his opinion of it, and, well, to show off.
He was impressed, and after a few more beers, we went outside so he could try it out, ear plugs and some helmets having been scrounged out of the sporting equipment in the basement.
Naturally, a crowd followed us, so I had to explain all over again, loudly this time, what it was and how it operated.
Captain Stepanski was a natural pilot, with a plane or without one. In moments, he had it all figured out, and he was doing aerial acrobatics in minutes. Once he came down, Leftenant Fitzsimmon of the Navy stepped up, and thinking that he wanted to try his hand at flying, Stepanski gave him the harness.
Instead of putting it on, the leftenant proceeded to fasten the harness to a log, a big section of tree trunk that was set upright in the concrete, and normally used as a target for knife, sword, and javelin throwing.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“Just trying out an idea I had. I won’t be but a minute, sir.”
Soon, the harness was howling away, trying without success to pull the log over sideways. Fitzsimmon walked back ten paces, borrowed a snub-nosed .44 Magnum pistol from one of his men, and proceeded to put all six slugs into the harness!
I was at first shocked, that someone would dare to try to destroy my latest brainchild, but I quickly saw that it was unharmed. The leftenant went over and shut off the screaming harness, so we could talk again.
“What? You missed all six times?” I said.
“No sir, I could hardly miss at that distance. All six rounds went into the active area of your new device. Where they went after that is something that you’ll have to tell me about. You have more than an escape device or a flying machine here, sir. You have also invented the world’s first perfect armor!”
* * *
After Ian watched the first test of the escape harness, he went back to his desk to sketch up an “Emergency Power Generator.” This had an area at the back that was essentially the same as the top of an epaulet, creating a hard vacuum. Before getting there, inflowing air was ducted over an air turbine, which was in turn connected to a standard electrical generator.
It worked the first time we tried it out. As we watched it run, I gave Ian a copy of Prescott’s writeup on air consumption, and told Ian that he had to take the word “Emergency” out of the name of the thing. There was no need to burn coal, oil, or any other fossil fuel at all, ever again.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Second Law
“You know, Tom, I think that I was happier back when the Second Law of Thermodynamics still worked.”
For whatever reason, our best conversations always seemed to take place at the breakfast table. It was my table this time, and my serving wenches.
“Nah. You were just brainwashed like almost everybody else in the technical world, except for me, of course, and Einstein and Bronowski.”
Over the months, my ladies had refined their appearance to coincide with what they had apparently decided was what attracted me the most. This involved very long hair, usually straight, but curly if it was naturally so. They wore high-heeled shoes, and were otherwise naked, devoid even of body hair. They had light suntans, without strap marks. Facial makeup was minimal to nonexistent, but more and more lately I was beginning to notice a slight glistening of body oil.
“I’d heard that Einstein had doubts about the Second Law. Who’s Bronowski?” Ian asked.
“A mathematician. He did a show called ‘The Ascent of Man.’ You should watch more television.”
“I shudder at the thought.”
“Elitist.”
It’s odd to think that my tastes had been so carefully studied, by so many and for so long, with this as the result. I would have thought that I would have preferred more variety, but there it was. And the high-heeled shoes! For many years, I had ridiculed women for wearing them despite the pain they caused and the damage they did to the feet.
Now, they were apparently being worn by hundreds of women because I found them to be attractive!
On reflection, I begin to think that what attracts me is not the shoes per se, but the way a woman walks when she’s wearing them.
“You never believed in the Second Law?”
“Of course not. Among other things, it implies that the universe as a whole is constantly getting more random. But if you’ll look around you, you’ll see that everything around us is not getting more random. It is obviously getting more ordered.”