This book has nothing to do with Conrad, except that this was how the time machine that Shanghaied him to the thirteenth century came to be. One of the characters in the 'interlude' sections, the boss, is a much older version of one of three young men involved in the 'inventing' of the time machine. Authors have very little say about titles.

This book was recently published, but I started thinking about it in the late fifties. The long delay was caused by my earlier inability to answer my basic question. If there was such a thing as a time machine, and you had one, what could you really do with one?

Too often, time travel stories consist of the hero going backwards or forwards in time, seeing something or doing something trivial, and then going home, never to use it again.

Well, bat puckey! If I built a time machine, it would be good for more than one trip! I think that the only real time machine story I've ever read was Jim Hogan's 'Thrice Upon A Time'. He used an extremely simple time machine, only capable of sending one bit of information one day back, and then he developed it rationally. Okay, Jim's heroes tend to be overly altruistic. One of my guys would have used it to make a fortune on the stock market, but that's a matter of taste.

This book is also largely based on my love of good conversation. In this case, the conversation of young men in what we called 'bull sessions', back then. It let me re-live my salad years, when everything was green and fresh. To keep the slang correct, I placed it in the mid sixties and early seventies.

I hope that I re-created those lovely bull sessions faithfully, as well as the rough jokes we played on each other.

Before I was through, my heroes were using time travel to make invincible weapons, to improve construction and machining techniques, and to do a whole new kind of plumbing.

It also made them fabulously rich, since one of their number, a non-technical psychologist, was so convinced that his friends would develop the device that he started using it before it was operational! From the future, he started sending his younger self copies of next week's Wall Street Journal.

Before long, these geeks found themselves living in palaces on a Caribbean island, surrounded by hundreds of beautiful, naked, and eager young ladies, and not sure if they can escape. The reasons for all of this takes them a while to work out.

Dave Grossman helped me a lot on this book, and most especially with the ending, but he didn't want any credit for it. Dave is a staunch Christian, and he didn't like the idea of his congregation seeing his name on anything with even very moderate sex scenes in it.

I found the book to be a delightful romp. I hope you do, too.

Enjoy.