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complexion go from dead white to beet red, starting at the top of his slightly
balding head and progressing downward. He started to move toward the opened
canister when I heard a hissing, crackling sound.
A thin line appeared on the pavement in front of Hasenpfeffer's polished,
wingtip brogues. He came to an abrupt stop, and his face went from red back to
white again.
Ian had his temporal sword in his hand.
"Jim, we just had a meeting of the Board of Directors, and you were outvoted on
this one. Tom and I want to take a ride in our new time machine, and we're going
to do it. Now, go back to your office and administer something. Leave the
technical stuff to the technical people."
I could tell that Hasenpfeffer wanted to rant and rave a bit, but seeing that we
were willing to use both force and violence, he thought better of it. He stalked
away, muttering under his breath like a very old man.
I said, "Lieutenant, get your men in the canister. The train is leaving the
station."
As we sealed the door on the stationary vacuum canister and then the door on the
traveling can, the orange, glowing Nixie tube numbers on the countdown timer
said that we had four and a half minutes to go.
The controls used on these big canisters were almost exactly the same as those
used on the small test canisters we'd used in the early part of the program.
After all, we knew they worked, and we were producing them on an assembly line,
so they were fairly cheap. They were automatic, and worked whether people were
around or not. The only difference was that on the big canisters, there was a
keyboard available, and if you knew what you were doing, you could reprogram the
thing. Normally, though, it was to be just a matter of going aboard and letting
it take you where you were supposed to go.
I sat down next to Ian, carefully sliding my steel sword down between the seats,
and said, "Maybe we were a bit rough on our old friend. Maybe we shouldn't have
humiliated him in public the way we did."
"Well, he was the one who made it public in the first damn place! If he wanted
to talk it over with us, he could have come over to our places, or to our
offices, or even invited us over to his. We could have discussed it privately,
but no, he had to round up all of our managers at the shop, and our girlfriends,
and act the thing out in front of them."
"I didn't like Barb and Ming Po being there either. I mean, yes, they're both
managers subordinate to us, but they both are a lot more than that, too. Jim
used to be so slick when it came to handling people, but he sure botched this
one. He didn't really leave us much choice but to do what we did. It's like he
was having some sort of mental aberration, or delusions of power."
"I don't think he's gone crazy. I mean, all three of us are getting used to
being big shots, and generally getting things done our own way, but you and I
have had the advantage of being engineers. Mother nature has a way of
maintaining the humility of a man who works with her. Jim has had nothing to
work with but people. It's like you said, he's not the same man any more. He's
gotten so used to having his every word be the law that he's forgotten that he
has partners in this business.We are the ones who made this whole thing
possible. Jim just helped out with the business side of things," Ian said.
"I don't think that he looks at it that way. I think that he really has gotten
old, administering this island and everything else. I think that he has put
many, many years of his life into this project, doubling back and forth through
time in machines that we haven't even thought of yet."
"So? Did we ask him to do that? Did we ever authorize him to go off on his own,
and create this sick little society of time travelers who can't think up a new
joke, or invent a widget, or even whistle a tune unless somebody else plays it
for them first? Was our opinion asked before the fruits of our labors were used
to create an entire culture that I, for one, consider to be downright immoral?"
"Well, no, to all of your questions. But you've also got to ask, could we have
done all of this without him? And you've got to answer no to that one, too."
"True, but neither of us would havewanted to do all of this. We would have been
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quite content to run a profitable little business just outside of Ann Arbor, and
maybe not so little a one at that. We probably wouldn't have had all the
palaces, and certainly not all the women, but we would have built a good life
for ourselves, Tom."
"I can't argue with you. But things are what they are right now, and we've got
to play it from here."
"Right. And what we'll do now is make our first trip into history."
Ian's timing was dead on, because just then the Nixie tubes read six zeros, and
we left home.
Our first surprise was the lack of gravity. It was just like being in a space
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