“I know what we need, and I made the suggestion to corporate management. They agree with me.” He rattled the paper again.
Klondike remained in scowling silence.
“What we need is a superconductor that works at ordinary temperature, so we won’t have to keep it cold with liquid—uh, nitrogen.”
Klondike lifted his chin off his shaggy arms. “You mean we oughtta produce a room-temperature superconductor?”
“That’s exactly right,” said Ratner. “And the corporate management agrees with me. This directive orders you to produce a room-temperature superconductor.”
Barely suppressing his disdain, Klondike replied, “Orders me, huh? And when do they want it? This week or next?”
Ratner smiled shrewdly. “I’m not a neophyte at this, you know. I understand that breakthroughs can’t be made on a preconceived schedule.”
Klondike glanced ceiling ward as if giving swift thanks for small mercies.
“Any time this fiscal year will do.”
“This fiscal year?”
“That gives you nearly six months to get the task done.”
“Produce a room-temperature superconductor in less than six months.”
“Yes,” said Ratner. “Or we’ll have to find someone else who can.”
Five months and fourteen days went by.
In all mat time Ratner hardly saw Klondike at all. The man had barricaded himself in his lab, working night and day. His weekly reports were terse to the point of insult: Week 1: Working on room-temperature superconductor.
Week 7: Still working on r-t s.
Week 14: Continuing work on rts.
Week 20: Making progress on rts.
Week 21: Demonstration of rts scheduled for next Monday.
Ratner had been worried, at first, that Klondike was simply ignoring his instruction. But once he saw that a demonstration was being set up, he realized that his management technique had worked just the way they had told him it would in business school. Set a goal for your employees, then make certain they reach your goal.
“So where is it?” Ratner asked. “Where is the demonstration?”
Klondike had personally escorted his boss down hallways and through workshops from the director’s office to his own lab, deep in the bowels of the building.
“Right through there,” Klondike said, gesturing to the closed door with the sign that read: ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTOR TEST IN PROGRESS.
ENTRY BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!
Feeling flushed with triumph, Ratner flung open the insulated door and stepped into a solid wall of frozen air. He banged his nose painfully and bounced off, staggering back into Klondike’s waiting arms.
Eyes tearful, nose throbbing, he could see dimly through the frozen-solid air a small magnet coil sitting atop a lab bench. It was a superconductor, of course, working fine in the room temperature of that particular room.
Klondike smiled grimly. “There it is, boss, just like management asked for. I couldn’t raise the bridge so I lowered the river.”
THE CAFÉ COUP
This tale also deals with time travel, and the intriguing question of whether history could be changed by time travelers.
One of the standard arguments against the possibility of time travel is that if time travel actually existed, time travelers would be deliberately or accidentally changing history. Since we have not seen our history changing, time travel has not happened. If it hasn’t happened yet, it never will. QED.
But if time travelers were altering history, would we notice? Or would our history books and even our memories be changed each time a time traveler finagled with our past?
Leaving aside such philosophical speculations, this story originated in a panel discussion of time travel at a science-fiction convention. It occurred to me during the panel’s discussion of time-travel stones that while many, many tales have been written about a world in which Nazi Germany won World War II, no one that I know of has tackled the idea of having Imperial Germany win World War I. Introduction to “The Café Coup”
The Kaiser’s Germany actually came very close to winning the First World War. It was the intervention of the United States, brought about by U-boat sinkings of ships with Americans aboard them, that turned the tide against Germany.
Prevent the sinking of the Lusitania, I reasoned, and Germany could win World War I. In a victorious Germany, Hitler would never have risen to power. No Hitler, no World War II. No Holocaust. No Hiroshima.
Maybe.
Paris was not friendly to Americans in the soft springtime of 1922. The French didn’t care much for the English, either, and they hated the victorious Germans, of course.
I couldn’t blame them very much. The Great War had been over for more than three years, yet Paris had still not recovered its gaiety, its light and color, despite the hordes of boisterous German tourists who spent so freely on the boulevards. More likely, because of them.
I sat in one of the crowded sidewalk cafes beneath a splendid warm sun, waiting for my lovely wife to show up. Because of all the Germans, I was forced to share my minuscule round table with a tall, gaunt Frenchman who looked me over with suspicious eyes.
“You are an American?” he asked, looking down his prominent nose at me. His accent was worse than mine, certainly not Parisian.
“No,” I answered truthfully. Then I lied, “I’m from New Zealand.” It was as far away in distance as my real birthplace was in time.
“Ah,” he said with an exhalation of breath that was somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Your countrymen fought well at Gallipoli. Were you there?”
“No,” I said. “I was too young.”
That apparently puzzled him. Obviously I was of an age to fight in the Great War. But in fact, I hadn’t been born when the British Empire troops were decimated at Gallipoli. I hadn’t been born in the twentieth century at all.
“Were you in the war?” I asked needlessly.
