"I'd say that you were lying."
"You'd be wrong. Such a type two perpetual-motion machine is quite possible, and in fact this 'apartment' that we're in right now is powered by one. After all, we're in a temporal loop here, so there's no place we could possibly put a radiator. Without our 'impossible' power source, it would get pretty warm in here after a while. What I'm trying to tell you is that cultures all develop blind spots, things that they don't even think about because they know the truth about them. Your blind belief in the absurd second law is a case in point. Something similar on a bigger scale stopped the ancient Romans from developing science at all, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that for a time we fell into the same mental trap, until you shook us out of it."
"It was all my doing?" I asked.
"Correct. You came along and threw all our theories right out of the window! Do you realize that you have created an entirely new world here? That you have not only duplicated most of the eastern hemisphere but that in some places you have shredded it? Made dozens of worlds? And that the shredding in some cases went back for thousands of years?"
"Huh. I think I follow you except for these 'shreds' going backward in time," I said.
"They can do that if you are taking information, artifacts, and people from several parallel timelines back down to what had been a single line. When that happens, you shred the past, and oscillations can be set up."
"Oh. Okay. So then the other thirteenth century, the one in my own past, still exists? I was worried about that," I said.
"You should have been. You have caused us no end of trouble and damage. I managed to give you sufficient wealth for you to survive comfortably until we could pick you up. You didn't have to tear a hole in the whole universe!"
"Tom, all I did was try to survive. If I've hurt you, well, I never asked to come here. The fault is yours, not mine."
"You're mostly right. But you could have just left for France and lived a pleasant life. Western Europe was fairly peaceful in this century. You never had to build factories and steamboats! "
"You're saying that I should have abandoned my country to the Mongols? That I should have stood by and watched half the babies born die because of a lack of simple sanitation? What kind of a man do you think I am?"
"I know exactly what kind of man you are, Conrad. You're a hero, and you do the things that heroes do. Anyway, we're getting a handle on the time-shredding problem, and things are starting to settle out."
"I still don't understand this multiple shredding that you're talking about. What did I do to start things coming apart?"
"We don't understand it all that well ourselves, and the math is such that even I have trouble following it. You see, the world we know isn't just one single world. It's a finite but astronomically large number of worlds, lying close to one another like the pages of a book. These worlds interact with one another and tend to keep one another identical. Philosophically, they are normally one single world with slight variations. As a crude analogy, think of a book that has been left out in the rain and then dried. The pages are wrinkled and dimpled, but they still fit into one another fairly well. That is to say, to a certain extent they interact with one another. What you did was to make two pages pop apart from each other and get some different dimples, to be slightly different from each other. Going down the page, in the direction of the normal direction of time, they continued to separate and become more different. It isn't just one page, though. You seem to have taken half the book with you! In some places, especially around the battlefields, several pages came apart, although they are starting to converge now."
"Somehow, this smacks of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle."
"Uh, sort of, as a theory, although most people misunderstand Heisenberg. He was not saying that a thing can be and not be at the same time. He was only saying that there are limits to what we can know. One of the philosophical stupidities of the twentieth century was the confusion of what we think we know with what actually is, but that's not what we should be talking about now. Yes, there is a divergence principle. Small changes happen all the time between the pages of that ruined book I was talking about. A coin comes up heads or tails, a seed is eaten by a bug of grows into a tree, and so on. It even happens all the time in our own human experience. Have you ever been sure that you had your keys in your pocket, only to find out that they were still on your dresser? Well, some of the time you really did both put them in your pocket and leave them behind."
"You see, there is also a convergence principle operating here, analogous to the force that is trying to force the pages of the ruined book into the same shape. The vast majority of differences are soon smoothed out. In the end, the small changes settle out and make no difference at all. The time line is not so much a monolithic pillar as a rope made of millions of fibers that are all going in the same general direction."
"Except where you are concerned. There's something about you, cousin, that makes you different. We don't know what it is, but with you, things don't settle out. The first split that you caused happened a month after you got to this century, when you had to decide whether to abandon a child in a snowy woods or try to save her, even though it looked impossible. Well, you did both. And that's the point where you split the world in half!"
"I remember that. I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, and I christened her Ignacy," I said.
"Right. Now, before we go any further, there's something I need to know. Conrad, I can take you home now. If you want, you can be back at your desk at the Katowice Machinery Works tomorrow morning. Do you want to go?"
Now, that was a kick in the head! Did I want to leave this brutal world and go back to my safe little home? I had to think about it, and Tom was silent while I thought. The serving girl refilled our glasses and left in silence. There was my mother there. How would she take my loss? Yet there were so many people here that needed me, people that I loved. And while I really don't care much about material things, could I go back to standing in lines at the government stores after my loyal troops had slaughtered millions of the enemy? Could I give up my wife and servants, my world-shaping plans, and go back to designing nothing but machine tool controls? Did I really want to become unimportant again? No, by God, I did not!
"I think that I have a better life here, Tom. I'll stay. But try and do something for my mother, okay?"
"I'll do better than that. I'll give her back her son. You see, when you split the world in that snowy woods, you split yourself, too. Your mundane, less heroic self, the one who obeyed his employer and abandoned a child to freeze to death, did not make out as well as you did. I found him in poor straits in Legnica, and he was most eager to go home to his mother. He can warm your chair at the factory and tell himself that it was all some crazy dream."
"Well, that's settled, then. But look, Tom, I have a battle to conduct soon, and the morning is not far away."
"We have all the time we want. It's my stock-in-trade, after all. When you go out that door, not a minute will have gone by in the world outside. Why don't you stick around for a while longer. There's more to discuss, and I'd like you to have a medical checkup while I'm here. If you're tired, there's a spare bedroom with a modern bed, and the wench will get you anything you need."
"Can I have a cup of coffee in the morning? You can't imagine how many times I've dreamed of a cup of coffee."
"We stock the best."
"Then I'll stay, cousin."
I was deadly tired, and in my years in the Middle Ages I had never gotten around to making a really decent box spring mattress. The girl came out a poor third in my priorities, but then, I really hadn't been offered her.