Conrad's Time Machine by Leo A Frankowski Page A

statistically likely, only it just hasn't happened. The books all say that women want permanence in a relationship, yet all of Hasenpfeffer's chicks have to know that he'll drop them in a week or three, just like he dropped all of the others. If either of us latched onto a girl as fine as any of his, we'd want to keep her forever. They've got to know that, too. But will one of them even talk to us for ten minutes? No!"
    "Tom, I don't think that we'll ever understand women. It's like they're a strange, alien species."
    "You could be right. You know, the biologists, or maybe the biochemists, figure the separation of two species by computing the time since the two groups had a common ancestor. If the chimpanzee's branch separated from the human branch five million years ago, then that's the measure of separation between the two species. Now then, biologically, sex was discovered back in the days when single celled critters were the most advanced things around. Even bacteria occasionally get together and exchange genetic information. So male was separated from female at least a billion years ago. By the rules the biologists use, you and I are two hundred times more closely related to the chimps that we are to women. That makes them a very alien species, indeed."
    "You tell me," Ian said.
    "That argument is so ridiculous that it's probably true. Shall we accuse Hasenpfeffer of sodomy? What I want to know is why I can't get laid."
    I said, "Look, don't ask me about it. All I know is that whatever the typical woman wants, it ain't me. Try asking Hasenpfeffer, or better still, one of his many chicks."
    "Dammit, I've done that very thing. Jim can't explain a thing, except to say it might have something to do with pheromones. The girls always say that there's a good woman out there for me somewhere, and then they take off at a dead run. I'm totally lost."
    "I was never found in the first place."
    After a silence, the conversation dropped back to an old, unresolved issue. The paradoxes of time travel.
    "So what are you going to do when I kill your grandfather?" I asked.
    "Well, I can't kill one of yours in retaliation, since nobody knows who they were. Anyway, why would you want to kill one of my grandfathers? By all accounts, they were both fine, decent gentlemen."
    "You know what I mean. If we can really get it together, and get our time machine built, and go into the past, what happens if we change something? It wouldn't have to be a big change, you know. The tiniest change in the wrong place could make everything different. How many alternate history science fiction stories have we read between the three of us? Dozens?"
    "I'd guess it to be more like hundreds, Tom, and fully a third of them seemed pretty plausible. If you really want to know what I think, it's that we shouldn't fuck with it."
    "You mean that we should build the thing and then not use it? That's crazy! If we aren't going to use it, why bother to build it in the first place?"
    "No, that's not what I mean, stupid. I just mean that we should at least try not to change anything. Even an atheist like you should know that none of us is God. We shouldn't try to act as if we are Him!"
    "I'll second that one," Hasenpfeffer said as he came in from the kitchen. "Be it moved that we should not play God."
    "Third, and be it so moved," I said. "At least at first, we've got to be super cautious, until we get a better handle on this thing, anyway."
    Before long we'd agreed that it would take a unanimous vote to change the rule. Nothing new, there, of course. All of our agreements were unanimous, the thought being that if one of us couldn't go along with the others, we just hadn't talked it over long enough, and anyway, none of us had any way of forcing anybody to do anything.
    Future planning is something that every company ought to do now and then, even though we were still a long way from having our time machine.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
Cosmology
    We still really didn't understand what