Grantville Gazette, Volume 26, 1 November 2009
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this magazine are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Grantville Gazette
A 1632, Inc. Publication
Grantville Gazette
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Moore, OK 73153-1488
The Grantville Gazette originated as a by-product of the ongoing and very active discussions which take place concerning the 1632 universe Eric Flint created in the novels 1632, 1633 and 1634: The Galileo Affair (the latter two books co-authored by David Weber and Andrew Dennis, respectively). This discussion is centered in three of the conferences in Baen's Bar, the discussion area of Baen Books' web site. The conferences are entitled "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments" and "1632 Tech Manual." They have been in operation for almost seven years now, during which time nearly two hundred thousand posts have been made by hundreds of participants.
Soon enough, the discussion began generating so-called "fanfic," stories written in the setting by fans of the series. A number of those were good enough to be published professionally. And, indeed, a number of them were—as part of the anthology Ring of Fire , which was published by Baen Books in January, 2004. ( Ring of Fire also includes stories written by established authors such as Eric Flint himself, as well as David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Dave Freer, K.D. Wentworth and S.L. Viehl.)
The decision to publish the Ring of Fire anthology triggered the writing of still more fanfic, even after submissions to the anthology were closed. Ring of Fire has been selling quite well since it came out, and a second anthology similar to it was published late in 2007. Another, Ring of Fire III, is forthcoming. It will also contain stories written by new writers, as well as professionals. But, in the meantime . . . the fanfic kept getting written, and people kept nudging Eric—well, pestering Eric—to give them feedback on their stories.
Hence . . . the Grantville Gazette. Once he realized how many stories were being written—a number of them of publishable quality—he raised with Jim Baen the idea of producing an online magazine which would pay for fiction and nonfiction articles set in the 1632 universe and would be sold through Baen Books' Webscriptions service. Jim was willing to try it, to see what happened.
As it turned out, the first issue of the electronic magazine sold well enough to make continuing the magazine a financially self-sustaining operation. Since then, even more volumes have been electronically published through the Baen Webscriptions site. As well, Grantville Gazette, Volume One was published in paperback in November of 2004. That has since been followed by hardcover editions of Grantville Gazette, Volumes Two, Three and Four.
Then, two big steps:
First: The magazine had been paying semi-pro rates for the electronic edition, increasing to pro rates upon transition to paper, but one of Eric's goals had long been to increase payments to the authors. Grantville Gazette, Volume Eleven is the first volume to pay the authors professional rates.
Second: This on-line version you're reading. The site here at http://www.grantvillegazette.com is the electronic version of an ARC, an advance readers copy where you can read the issues as we assemble them. There are stories posted here which won't be coming out in the magazine for more than a year.
How will it work out? Will we be able to continue at this rate? Well, we don't know. That's up to the readers. But we'll be here, continuing the saga, the soap opera, the drama and the comedy just as long as people are willing to read them.
—The Grantville Gazette Staff
"I love October's bright blue weather." The Reverend Mary Ellen Jones stood on the rectory porch, just breathing, and almost regretted it when she saw her next appointment walking down the street. It wasn't as bright and as blue in Thuringia as it had been in West Virginia, but on a good day, it was good enough. More than good enough. Winter would start in earnest any day now. Each nice day was a divine blessing. It wasn't, however, an excuse for neglecting her duties.
"Thank you for coming in, Clara," she said. "I do realize that you and Wes already got married in Fulda, but since he asked my husband for a Methodist ceremony in addition to the civil one, Simon feels that we should go through the premarital counseling procedure with you."
"That is fine." Clara Bachmeierin, now the wife of Wes Jenkins, smiled cheerfully. "You can hardly ask me more questions than Andrea's lawyer did. Or have me fill out more affidavits swearing on oath that we really meant to do it—to get married, that is."
Mary Ellen looked at her client. Client. She was a counselor today, not a minister. Clara was not a parishioner, not a Methodist, at least not yet.
She tried to prepare thoroughly for these sessions. Increasingly, since the Ring of Fire, they were divided in two. It had become quite clear that the down-time brides chosen by up-time Methodist men were usually far more willing to speak frankly to her than to her husband. She thought briefly of Kortney Pence's description of the utterly cold fish that Clara's first husband had apparently been, realizing reluctantly that she would have to ask whether this background was, er, inhibiting Clara's ability to respond to her second husband. Postponing that task, she started marching through the other sections of the manual. The status of marriage in civil law . . . that would be a good starting point.
"I think that I understand the legal theory behind your marriage," she said. "However, West Virginia law did not have anything comparable, so if you could give me the background from your perspective . . ."
"Then we were married," Clara finished up. "And after that . . ."
Mary Ellen reminded herself that the seventeenth century did not do euphemisms. It just didn't. Maybe, somewhere in Germany, there was someone who understood what a euphemism was, at least as a literary device. She would ask that nice Lutheran minister, Herr Meyfarth, who was also a poet, if he came to town again. The people she had met, though . . . Maybe in her spare time, between two o'clock and four o'clock in the morning, she could establish the Grantville Society for the Care and Feeding of Polite Euphemisms. Maybe . . . maybe she was a little delirious.
"That's fine," she said. "I don't need the details."
"Have you ever thought about how much skin people have?" Clara asked. "Somehow, in all that I imagined doing after I married Wesley some day, I imagined doing those things while Wesley was wearing a nightshirt and I was wearing a shift. But Wesley was sitting on the cot while he took his shoes off and he said that it was not just narrow, meant for one person to sleep on, but also tippy, so we had better slide the straw pallet onto the floor if we did not want to fall out of bed. So we did and I stood there, at one end of it. He came to me and took my shift off. He folded it up neatly and put it on the cot. Then he held me, just the way he had done when we danced at Christmas. It is really rather surprising to find out all at once how much skin there is on a person's body."
"Ah." Mary Ellen swallowed hard.
"And after . . . You never met my first husband Caspar. He was dead before the Ring of Fire happened. But he was older and, I think now, he perhaps did not really want a wife, even after he agreed that his mother should find him one because she was not really well and could no longer keep house for him. He always kept his own room, with his things around him. And went back there, to sleep. It was a little lonely, sometimes."
"I can understand that." Mary Ellen would happily have strangled the late Caspar Stade, if he weren't already dead.
"So, after . . . I said to Wesley, 'Bitte, geh' doch nicht weg. Bleib' bei mir.' So foolish. We were locked in a pantry that was not very big at all. Where could he have gone? But I couldn't help it."
Grasping at her memorized counseling routines for sustenance, Mary Ellen asked, "Was Wes, ah, responsive to your concerns?"
"He said, 'You couldn't pry me away with a crowbar.'"
In spite of herself, Mary Ellen smiled.
"So then we went to sleep. I was rather embarrassed the next morning," Clara said. "I waked—woke—up feeling . . ." She paused and searched for a word. "Feeling . . . unsure. Thinking that I had perhaps been more than a little crazy when I made our marriage the night before, when Wesley had not asked me. Especially since nobody had come back to torture us, so perhaps there had been no emergency to justify what I did."
"He hadn't asked you?" This was news to Mary Ellen.
"Not with words. With his eyes, he asked me the first time we met each other. It was strange. I was by the window. He was on the other side of the room, by the mantel. Everyone was standing up during the meeting because the cleaners had taken all of the furniture out of the conference room so they could mop and polish the floor. Sun came through the window and reflected from his spectacles, but I could see his eyes. With his eyes he said, 'I admire you. I want you. Come.' and with his mouth he said, 'Brief me.' With my mouth, I answered about the political problems of the abbot of Fulda and with my mind I thinked—thought—that I do not want to die before I have married this man. It was very strange, I assure you. As if I were in two different worlds at once."
"I, ah, yes. Well, I'm sure that it must have been."
Mary Ellen told herself not to sputter. She grasped the arm of her chair tightly. For the hundredth time at least since the Ring of Fire she reminded herself that seventeenth-century Germany was before the nineteenth century. That people in the here and now casually said the kinds of things that the Victorians had been at such pains to exile from parlor conversation. That talking to down-timers was like talking to the kind of late twentieth century young people who gathered in singles bars or populated bad television shows. That, if cultural historians had realized this, the Victorian era would never have gotten such a bad rep. The modern civilized world had owed those bowdlerizers a lot. As she forced herself to relax, Clara went right on talking.
"As I said, he had not asked me, even though his hands had also already said things to me that his mouth did not, every time he helped me mount my horse, or get down from the pony cart. So. I thought that maybe he would be angry. Instead, though, he said that he had waked—woken—up a lot of mornings dreaming that I was in bed with him. He said that it was much better to have me really there than just dreaming about it. Then he explained how much better it was. Mostly, though, his German lessons did not have words to talk abut these things and my English vocabulary lessons did not have the right words, either. We had no reliable basis for a detailed discussion of what we were trying to discuss just then. So he showed me. 'Explanatory gestures,' he said. We had a lot of explanatory gestures. And he said that he wished that he had a second set of hands."
All Mary Ellen managed to do was nod. She was proud of having managed this. It was preferable, she thought, to strangling where she sat.
"It was very comforting to know that Wesley had no regrets about being married to me." Clara paused. "My husband allayed my concerns entirely. It was also enjoyable. I felt much better after he explained how he felt."
Mary Ellen turned bright red by the time Clara finished explaining the precise sequence of events that had made her feel much better. "I'm sure," she said, searching for some suitably neutral comment, "that your happiness pleases Wes."
"It seems to," Clara answered with obvious satisfaction. "He says to me that I am 'just a cuddly little bundle of sexiness.' He finds this good."
Mary Ellen managed to transform her reaction to this unexpected insight into the nature of the Jenkins marital relationship into a discreet cough. No matter what Clara's first marriage had been like, it was pretty clear that lingering inhibitions would be way down toward the bottom of any listing of her potential matrimonial pitfalls.
"I think that we can probably skip over the rest of the chapter in the counseling manual that provides advice on the importance of expressing physical affection in a Christian marriage," she commented dryly. "Ah, what differences between you do you think might cause problems in your relationship?"
Clara cocked her head a little to one side. "Wesley is much more orderly than I am. That is a difference. I found that out right away. However, all I have to do is be more orderly myself, so I do not see that it will be a problem. When I waked—woke—up the second time the morning after we married, I wiggled away and shaked—shook—my leg that had been at the bottom of the pile of legs and my arm that had been under Wesley's head being a pillow until they were not numb any more. Then I saw that all his clothes were neat, so I quickly picked up all three petticoats I had dropped on the floor the night before and folded them up. Also my bodice and skirt and jeans in a pile. And found the pieces of hempcloth which the soldiers had used to tie us up and folded them next to the pitcher, for us to use to wash with, if Wesley thought we could spare some of the water. And I found my shoes and stockings and put them by the jeans. That was while I was looking under the cot to see if there was any vessel that we could use as a chamber pot."
I will not giggle, Mary Ellen thought. Not even hysterically. A slight gurgle emerged from her throat.
Clara looked at her seriously. "After a certain length of time has passed, no matter what is going on in life otherwise, a person is more interested in chamber pots than almost anything else."
Thinking back on several family visits to county fairs and similar outdoor events, Mary Ellen had to agree that this assessment was reasonable. She nodded.
"There was one there. We guessed later that Ritter von Schlitz had been hiding in that room, himself, after he escaped from the administration's custody, and had provided for his own comforts. Wesley was still snoring—his snores are very nice, soft and smooth—so I used it. Then I sat down on the pallet next to him and said my morning prayers until he woke up. The pantry was orderly by then, and I have made myself stay orderly ever since because I know that it will please him, even though it is not always easy."
"Is orderliness the only difference you have observed?"
"Well, there is another one. Wesley told me that he mostly says his prayers when he has a necktie on. But he doesn't mind now that I say my prayers in bed 'naked as a jaybird' if I feel like it, so I don't think it will be a problem, either. I pointed out to him that God should not mind. God sees everything, so surely it doesn't matter to him if I am wearing clothes. He could look right through them if he wanted to, after all."
"That is a very . . . interesting . . . practical application of the doctrine of divine omniscience," Mary Ellen said. Personally, being a Methodist herself, she could fully understand Wes' belief that the deity was best encountered on Sunday morning while appropriately dressed. "Are there any other significant differences?"
"No."
"Let's move on to the section that covers planning for children, then."
"I do not think we need to plan, except to arrange for Mrs. Kortney Pence to come and serve as my midwife, because I am almost certain that I am going to have a baby. But I have not told Wesley yet, because I want to be absolutely sure."
"You have missed a period?"
"Two." Clara beamed.
Mary Ellen mentally counted on her fingers the space of time from August to October and ended the counseling session ahead of schedule. Then she phoned Kortney, who attributed the whole sequence of events to pheromones.
"If Clara was ovulating at the very moment that this torturer threatened to pull Wes' nuts off," Kortney put it crudely, as Mary Ellen winced, "which it sounds like she must have been, then it's no wonder that she went a bit off the deep end, considering how patiently she had been waiting for him to make another move since that Christmas party last year. Honestly, Mary Ellen, the way they were dancing, none of the rest of us would have been really surprised if he had hauled her into the cloak room and shut the door then and there, leaving the rest of us to eat the leftover hors d'oeuvres."
Kortney giggled. "But he managed to let loose of her and deliver her back to Mom, who points out that 'chaperone' was not included in her job description when she went to Fulda. I said that it was probably under 'such other duties as may from time to time be assigned.' Anyway, according to Mom, he just kept on hovering, while every month Clara edged a bit nearer to menopause and cried herself quietly to sleep."
A sound came over the phone. Mary Ellen thought that it was probably Kortney tapping her fingers on her desk. Then the voice resumed.
"She is down-time, Mary Ellen. Barrenness is still a stigma, here in 1634. She wants children so bad you can't believe it. I admit that my explanation still leaves the deeper question of why her subconscious decided to broadcast the pheromones on a tight beam specifically at Wes Jenkins unexplained, but you're the minister, so that's your problem. I'm just a nurse. She wants children passionately, she wants them specifically from Wes, and when push came to shove, she did whatever was necessary for her to have them, I expect. That's just the way it is."
"Oh," Mary Ellen said. "Well, then. Thanks, Kortney."
* * *
"Did you finish your half of the marriage counseling session?" the Reverend Simon Jones asked.
"More or less. When you're doing counseling with a widower and widow who already 'married themselves to each other' a couple of months ago, a lot of the usual content seems a bit superfluous. Or irrelevant."
"And may we in good conscience extend them an ecclesiastical blessing, do you think?"
Mary Ellen looked at her husband, thinking that his tone of voice was not entirely ironic.
"Clara is perfectly willing to be nice and kind to her stepdaughters and their children. She was very anxious to assure me of that. Also that even though there was no prenuptial contract, she would never try to gain any unfair financial advantage for her own children, should she be fortunate enough to bear any. Lots of other stuff, equally conscientious."
"None of which had any bearing on the crucial issue of whether she loves Wes Jenkins or just considers him a 'good catch.' Although I did ask him if she has been demanding and he said not."
"Oh, Simon, don't be such a grump. She does love him. She loved him for a long time before they married one another, according to all reports from Fulda. Andrea Hill told Kortney that it was perfectly obvious to anyone who bothered to look that they were quite taken with each other at first sight. The whole Grantville delegation over there has been trying to cheer them on for nearly a year."
"Um, why? Not that Wes isn't a very fine person and all that, but . . ."
"Leave it in the unexplored gray area that exists somewhere between her brain and her reproductive hormones, Simon. She not only loves him—she thinks that he is a wonderful man and also an outstanding lover, which is somewhat different." She shook her head as a vision of Wes Jenkins' metal-rimmed glasses, long, narrow face, and prominent nose passed through her head. "Although, to some extent, I do have to share your sense of wonder."
Then she looked up. "Speaking of reproductive hormones . . . Did you ask him what his reaction would be if they happened to start a family? Another family, for Wes?"
"Sure. It's something we're supposed to cover. He looked a little startled, but he just said that he had survived diapers, baby food, and squabbling toddlers once already without going berserk, so he supposed he would manage to again if they showed up this time around. Well, he also said that he wouldn't have deliberately gone out and picked a young widow with two kids as his second wife the way Ed Monroe did down in Suhl, to maximize his chances, so to speak, after Diana and their two girls were left up-time. But he's not against the idea in principle."
Mary Ellen leaned forward and poured her husband another cup of tea. "Why are you so worried about this particular marriage?"
"I suppose that it's because Wes is so very much in love with her. Which he clearly is, in spite of the fact that the most I could get out of him was the rather stiff statement that 'at the very least, a man owes it to his wife to tell her that he appreciates her, every now and then.' He doesn't think that her first husband was very affectionate. Um, even though Clara was a widow and everything that went with it, Wes doesn't think that she had ever actually been kissed, at least not more than a peck on the cheek, which, as he put it, 'sort of has to make you wonder, considering how well she took to it after a little practice.'"
Mary Ellen mentally added a second garrote to the late Caspar Stade's neck, just to make sure he stayed dead.
Simon picked up his cup. "Do you know—I still sort of miss dunking tea bags up and down. Sassafras isn't quite the same. I wonder if real tea in tea bags will come back during our lifetimes?"
"Who knows? And considering what I got for selling my little aluminum tea balls to the girl who is running Morris Roth's jewelry store for him, we certainly couldn't afford to keep those just for the sake of having a comforting little 'dunk it up and down' routine when we're feeling nervous." She gave her husband and colleague a look which said plainly that he should get to the point.
"And he's still more than a little bemused by the whole thing. Not that he has any doubts, but . . . In my session, I acquired the information that in the midst of abduction, threatened torture, and impromptu, do-it-yourself matrimony, Wes made sure that the shirt he took off, being the only one he had, was neatly hanging from the back of the only chair in the room where they were imprisoned, with his slacks carefully folded on the seat, putting his glasses in their case on top of them, before he moved on to the next stage. What kind of impression would that make on a new bride? A bride who's quite a bit younger?"
"Well, this is Wes Jenkins, of course. The same Wes we have all known and loved at First Methodist for years. Not some generic hunk on a romance novel cover. Will you please relax, Simon? I keep trying to tell you that Clara loves him just the way he is. This very thing actually came up under 'differences that might become problems.' She noticed almost at once that Wes is very neat. A lot neater than she is naturally inclined to be, apparently. The way she reacted is that she resolved to become more orderly herself, so the difference would not become a problem."
"That's . . . an admirable reaction. I guess."
"Simon, you're being downright obstructionist about this. I hate to say it, but you are."
"So what do you think?"
"For one thing, he told her that she is beautiful and that he loves her, which she clearly regards as a level of exuberant demonstrativeness putting him somewhere up there with Sir Lancelot dramatically galloping in on a white charger to rescue Guinevere from trial by ordeal." Mary Ellen waved both hands in the air. "Marry them. Put his conscience at rest. If you don't, I will."
"Would that shake Clara up?"
"Not any more."
"All right. I'll do it." He got up. "I guess I had better get down to the school board meeting."
"Have a good evening."
Mary Ellen gave him a kiss that was considerably more than a peck on the cheek and sat back down to finish her own tea, wondering how long premarital counseling would survive contact with seventeenth-century culture. Thinking that there were some things that no minister (male) really needed to know about the members of his congregation, because it would just cause embarrassment to both parties. She laughed to herself. On the basis of Clara's report, when Wes undertook to "tell his wife that he appreciated her, every now and then," his definition was considerably more expansive than he had indicated to Simon or she had thought it was appropriate to repeat.
She shook her head over the nature of humanity. Outdoors, the wind was picking up. She decided that another cup of tea, sassafras or not, would be just the thing. Tomorrow morning, it would be winter.
* * *
"Werewolf?"
Denis Sesma caught himself chuckling as he retied three small strips of leather on his horse's saddle. This was not the first time that his traveling companion, Elizabeth "Betsy" Springer, had asked that question. Actually, it was more like the fifth time in the last two or three days, that the tall redhead had said the same thing.
The first time, Denis had grabbed for the pistol that hung from his saddle, only to hear his friend's laughter coming from just behind him.
This whole "werewolf" thing was one of those "movie quotes" that Betsy seemed inordinately fond of repeating. Denis wasn't all that sure just what "movies" were—other than they were something like theater. But he had a hard time grasping just exactly how.
He'd tried ignoring Betsy when she started spouting these lines, but there was one thing Denis had learned in the last five months since he'd met Elizabeth "Just call me Betsy" Springer in the offices of the Grantville Times: that was a nearly impossible task.
Betsy was a tall, thin girl with her shoulder-length red hair tied back in a pony tail, dressed in a red woolen work shirt and the blue trousers that Denis had learned were called "jeans." Denis had been in Grantville for just over six months and was still not accustomed to seeing women wearing what were normally considered "men's" clothes. His cousin Mirari had told him it was the Americans' way of doing things, and that he'd better get used to it.
Without even turning toward her, Denis replied "There wolf, there castle."
"You're learning," she said. At that moment, a wolf's howl rang out. It could have been anywhere from fifty feet to five miles away; the heavy forest and mountains here in southern France tended to play tricks with sound.
"Now that was timing." She looked in the direction the noise seemed to have come from. "I couldn't have planned it better myself."
"I'd be happy to take credit for it, but somehow I don't think you'd believe I was responsible," said Denis. "I think we had better find someplace protected to camp, or an inn. I am not fond of the idea of waking up and finding myself in the middle of a wolf pack."
"I told you: wolves are more afraid of humans than we are of them," Betsy said.
"Yes, but you also said that there are going to be a lot of wolf attacks in the next hundred years or so."
"Werewolf attacks," Betsy corrected.
"Wolf attacks," Denis restated firmly. He cleared his throat and began to recite. "'Over three thousand people were killed in France between 1580 and 1830 by wolves. And over a thousand of those were not rabid.' That's a statistic that they don't mention in your Time Life Books: Mysteries of the Unexplained, I'll wager."
"You read that?" Betsy blinked. "But . . ."
"You Americans were allowed to hunt animals," Denis cut across her argument. "Your wolves learned to be afraid of humans. Here a wolf knows who the predator and who the prey is. And when his natural prey runs out—" He threw a sly glance up at her red hair. "—Red Riding Hood looks quite tasty."
"Ha, ha. Very funny. I think I would prefer not to put wolf prey on my resume." Betsy sounded less sure of herself than she had a moment earlier. "Remember, it was not exactly a fortune in expense money that old man Kindrad gave us, so we might want to consider camping."
A wolf howled again. The sound was closer this time. "If we can find an inn, it might be safer," Denis said. "I have the distinct feeling that we are being followed."
Betsy immediately turned in her saddle. Denis winced and shook his head as she made a grand show of studying the terrain behind them.
"I don't see anyone," she reported.
"Nor will you. Especially since you've just alerted whoever it was to the fact that we're aware of them. Trust me, with some hunters there is no way you would see them if they were following you."
"Did you see a signpost anywhere to give us some clue where we are?" she asked.
"No. Nothing since we passed the crossroads."
"As long as there wasn't anyone playing a fiddle there, we're fine," said Betsy. "This is where Rand McNally would be a big help."
"Rand McNally? Who is that? A Scottish guide of some kind?"
"No, they're maps. Sometimes it seemed like it took a year for my father to get one folded back properly," Betsy said. "And he'd never let me do it. It always had to be folded back just the way it came."
"Well, there is no reason not to respect the wishes of your father," Denis deadpanned. "Until then, draw an X on the map and label it 'Here be Dragons.'"
"Werewolves," Betsy muttered.
"Those, too."
"We could stop and ask for directions at the first farmhouse we come to," she suggested.
Denis looked sideways at her. "One look at you and they will think we're mad. And that will be before you even open your mouth."
"So? Just tell them the truth. We're looking for missing blacksmith apprentices."
"Then they'll know we're mad for certain. After all, who would come all this way to find people that they aren't related to and don't even know? Should I leave out the part where we are on the road because you're fleeing from your engagement to Sven?"
"I'm not engaged to him and his name was Albert, not Sven," Betsy said. "And it was all a big cross-cultural misunderstanding."
"The kind that can only happen after one too many pints of Thuringen Gardens' best . . ." Denis trailed off and shook his head. "I'm not the one that you should be explaining things to; more like Sven . . . excuse me, Albert. I don't see why you didn't just let him ask your father's permission for your hand. Surely things would have been straightened out then."
"You don't know my dad like I do." Betsy rolled her eyes. "I love him, but he's hopeless. Besides, Albert should have figured things out by this point."
"And if he hasn't?"
"I'll just tell him that I eloped with you." Betsy batted her eyes at him.
"God save me!"
Another wolf howled off to the west; the sound was much closer than before.
"You may be right about us getting off the road." Betsy nodded in concession.
Denis pointed toward a small thatched hut that was set back from the road. It was a sturdy looking place with earth and wood walls. Its presence was masked by the trees and brush so that it was easy to miss if you weren't looking directly at it; though it looked like no one had lived there for many years.
"Great," muttered Betsy. "Just great, first werewolves and now this."
* * *
The hut was old; the air inside heavy with dust, its former owners long since gone. There were only two rooms, one that had served as kitchen, living and sleeping area for the residents, while the other had been for storage and possibly a pen for small animals.
This was not the first place that Denis had seen in this condition; he was fairly sure it wouldn't be the last. While war might have stayed away from this part of France for several years, the conflicts between Huguenot and Catholic were going strong. Any kind of unrest usually meant that bandits would come out to play and there were times when you couldn't tell them apart from the latest local authorities.
"I wish this place were big enough to bring the horses in with us," Betsy said. "If there are wolves around here I don't want to leave them out as a temptation."
The two horses they were riding were ancient beasts, only one or two steps removed from plow horses or someone's next meal. "Tempting morsel" would not be a description Denis would have used for either animal.
"Don't worry; I tethered them on the other side of this wall. If anyone or anything shows up they should make enough noise to alert us," he said.
"And we can't even have a fire. Wonderful."
Denis would have liked a fire as much as Betsy. It might be almost May, but there was still a chill in the air. A fire would scare away wolves, but it could also be a beacon to whoever might be following them, if there was actually someone out there in the darkness.
Betsy pulled herself to her feet and went into the hut's other room, where they had stored the saddles and other tack.
"Denis, come here a minute," said Betsy in a strange tone of voice.
Picking up his pistol, Denis went through the door in a half dozen steps. Betsy was kneeling down near a stack of refuse next to the wall.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Look at these. I almost tripped over them in the dark."
A heavy blanket had been pushed to one side and there were a good dozen rolls of canvas bundled together and piled one on top of each other. Betsy sat back on her heels and held the topmost roll out for Denis' inspection.
His questing fingers brushed the surface, enticing memories of the dried oil paint, the rough feel of canvas to the touch, and the hand of his old master on his shoulder as he worked on an under painting.
"Paintings? Who in their right mind would store paintings out here in the woods?" he asked.
"A good question. Perhaps you can ask my captain. But for now, if the two of you want to live long enough see the sun come up again, I suggest that you not move," a strange voice said.
* * *
"Papers! My Great Aunt Lilibeth has papers! It just depends on whether or not I believe your papers are real. And even if they are real, whether or not they actually belong to the two of you."
Denis looked around the room that was serving as the office for Captain Marcus Pohl. It was certainly not as opulent as he would expect to see occupied by someone who commanded the dragoons that served the bishop of Mende. But he was a military man, and these rooms definitely had the plain, Spartan look that went with that profession.
The region that governed Gévaudan, known as Mende, was at the crossroads of several major pilgrimage routes. Since bandits loved to prey on pilgrims, Pohl and his dragoons found much to keep them occupied.
"I've explained who we are: my name is Denis Semsa, and my companion is Elizabeth Springer," said Denis. "We work as writers for the Grantville Times. Why have we been arrested?"
"You haven't been arrested, just brought in for a friendly little chat. When my men find strangers lurking in the forest, I start asking questions about why they are there and who they are," said Pohl. "And I keep asking them until I am satisfied with the answers I receive."
When they had been brought before the captain, he studiously ignored them for a half an hour as he continued to sharpen a formidable looking sword. Once he was satisfied with his work, the blade had been resheathed and now lay on the desk in front of him. Once he looked at Denis and Betsy his scowl seemed to indicate that he knew that they were trouble, and wanted very little to do with them before beginning his questions.
"I . . ." Betsy stood up, a look of irritation on her face.
Denis automatically put a hand to Betsy's arm to stop the sarcastic reply that he knew she was about to make.
"Judging by your manner of dress, you are Americans."
"Actually, I'm not American. I'm part Belgian and part Basque," Denis started to explain. This was the third time he had told the story since the three dragoons had found the two of them in the hut. "A handful of blacksmith's apprentices who worked for an American company vanished in this region while transporting raw goods and our editor thought that it might be a good story."
"And you've come all this way for a newspaper story?" Pohl shook his head. "Why?"
"Because the the last reports of them were in Gévaudan," Betsy cut across Denis' explanation. "And there have been and will be reports of a lot of wolf killings in this area."
Pohl raised an eyebrow at that. "Wolves have been killing in this area for years. There have been rumors of wolves and men who turned into wolves all over this part of France for decades. What's different now?"
"Nothing, unless you happen to be a crazy, red-haired conspiracy theorist," Denis muttered.
The dragoon captain nodded. With a wave of his whetstone, he pointed at the rolls of canvas on top of their bags. "Very well then, explain that. My men said that you had those with you."
"We found them in the shack we were sheltering in," Betsy said. "Think about it, genius. Does our baggage have room for this stuff? Where are the bags that we carried it all in? Those nags we were riding had the extra space on their saddles for all of this?"
"Elizabeth," Denis said. "It might not be the smartest idea to offend someone who could have us killed and not have to worry about the paperwork."
Betsy went over to the canvas rolls, and untied the topmost one with fingers that shook in anger. Then she held it up for Pohl to see. "Caravaggio, if I'm not mistaken," she said.
Denis blinked at that. "What? Caravaggio? Let me see."
"It is," Betsy insisted. "It's called Fortune Teller. The subject is a gypsy girl."
Denis said, "I remember seeing it. It caused quite a stir in the art world. My old master had me study it." He gave Betsy an apprising look. "How do you know this?"
Betsy rolled her eyes. "I took a lot of art classes before the Ring of Fire. I switched to geology after that. My father wanted me to have a real career instead of knowing just enough to ask if you want fries with your burgers. Besides, I went through a phase where I thought that I couldn't possibly be related to the rest of my family. I was hoping I was a gypsy left on my parent's doorstep. So I studied everything about gypsies that I could get my hands on. That way when my real family came back for me, I would be ready."
Pohl looked at her, arching his eyebrows in surprise. "You wanted to be taken by gypsies?"
"Captain, on this trust me. Once you get to know her, that will make complete sense," Denis said. He reached for the next canvas in the roll, and surveyed the panting of seven men bowling. "I don't recognize this one."
"Game of Skittles, by Jacob Duck," Betsy said. "I think it is supposed to be painted sometime in the next year. These are all Baroque paintings."
"They look fine to me, nothing seems broken," Denis said.
"That's Baroque, not broken. Who's on first?" Betsy said. "That's what art teachers call art from this time period when they want to lump it all together."
It was Denis' turn to scoff. "I've seen books of your up-time artwork. Christo? Thomas Moore? If you ask me, modern art can stay in the future where it belongs. I don't understand how your Thomas Kinkade can be known as the painter of light when your people knew of Rembrandt."
"I think that's a marketing thing . . ." Betsy began to unroll a second bundle of canvases; there were a dozen bound tightly together. Her eyes went wide as she lifted the corners of first one and then another.
"The ones in this bundle are exactly the same as in the first one," she said, pursing her lips. "I'm going to make a bet that there are more of the same in the other batch. They are all Baroque. I think that whoever did these is good. Very good."
Denis groaned. "Copies! I was afraid of that. I know for a fact that the original Caravaggio is elsewhere."
"Since there are more than one, I don't think I am going to go out on a limb to say that we're looking at more than just the copies that art students make," said Pohl.
Denis and Betsy both jumped, and looked at each other guiltily. In the excitement of their investigation, they had forgotten about the captain. Now they looked at the man. In the space of just a few words he had gone from a menacing force ready to lock them up to someone sharing the same experience.
"You know about that system?" asked Denis. He remembered how he had sweated blood over copying any number of works by Rubens and the Carracci brothers. The only comment he would usually get from his late master was a growl and to have him point out where he had gone wrong.
"I'm not a total idiot who only knows that you put the pointy end of a sword into people," said Pohl. "My nephew is apprenticed to Jusepe de Ribera, and in exchange for giving him patronage, I get long detailed letters from him telling me all he has learned."
"Ribera? He was one of my old master's pupils."
"You studied with Francisco Ribalta? I heard of his passing," said Pohl.
"Yes. Unfortunately, I'm just not as talented as Ribera," said Denis. "After Master Ribalta's passing, I could find no other master to take me on. Thankfully, my cousin found me work as an illustrator for the Grantville Times."
Pohl walked over to where Betsy was kneeling and bent down next to her. "M'lady, if I may?"
"Of course, Captain." Betsy cast a quick glance over to Denis who simply shrugged. It wasn't as if either of them were in any position to stop the dragoon captain from doing what he wanted.
The captain pulled out one of the canvases.
"I know that one as well," said Betsy. "Landscape with Apollo and Mercury. I don't remember the artist's name, but I know the painting. I also am fairly certain that it won't be painted for at least another ten or twenty years."
Pohl looked at her oddly. "I don't really understand what is going on, but I do know one thing. I have seen this painting before, and within the last few days."
"Where?" asked Betsy.
"At the home of His Eminence, the bishop. He was showing off his latest acquisition."
* * *
Betsy held her compact mirror out at arm's length, trying to use the small surface to get an accurate picture of how she looked in the dress Captain Pohl had provided.
Hours ago, the captain had escorted them to a building located near the dragoon barracks, and requested that Betsy disguise herself as a member of the bourgeoisie while he made arrangements for her to meet with the art dealer who had sold the bishop the possibly forged painting.
Now she wore a gown that was edged in lace with a double layer collar. Betsy stuck her tongue out at her reflection as she dressed, but once or twice Denis did catch her smiling and preening a little, when she didn't think he was looking.
Her American jeans, along with the rest of her up-timer clothing, had vanished into their luggage.
"Personally, I think you look good, like a lady," said Denis. "Though that ponytail of yours, well. . . ."
"I feel like the time I dressed up as a Pilgrim girl for Thanksgiving."
"You're wearing far too much lace to look like the up-time idea of a Puritan," Denis said. "Although, if we fix your hair correctly, we may be able to convince someone that you are sideways royalty, or at least connected to some up-and-coming merchant house."
Betsy reached up behind her and pulled the rubber band off her pony tail, then shook her head to let her hair spread out. Then she curled the topmost layer into a bun, and let the rest hang in long, unruly curls. She stared at the mirror for a long moment, twisting her head to the right and left before muttering, "It still needs something."
With that, she turned away from him and her hands disappeared under the layers of her dress. A moment or two later, she held up a set of diamond earrings; something that Denis had never seen her wear and had not even known she had with her. She clipped them to her ears.
Pohl came walking into the room and inspected Betsy. She smiled, turned around for him and then curtsied. Denis raised one eyebrow. That was something that he had never seen Betsy do before, though it didn't surprise him that she knew how. Things had reached the point between the two of them that little she could do would surprise him.
"These are valuable?" Pohl asked, as his hand brushed the side of Betsy's face lightly touching the earrings
"Yeah, they are," Betsy said.
Another of Betsy's favorite expressions sprang to Denis' mind. "Lucy? You gotta lotta 'splainin' to do," Denis said. "Where did those come from? You don't make enough to buy diamonds. Besides, do you know how dangerous it is to be carrying things like that with you through the countryside?"
"Your friend is correct, m'lady," said Pohl. "Within a half mile of these barracks I could find a couple of dozen cutthroats who would be willing slit your throat, not to mention rape you, for these."
"That's why I had them hidden in my bra." Betsy rolled her eyes. "And they are mine. They belonged to my grandma; she left them to me. Usually I keep them in the family safety deposit box but I didn't want to take a chance that Albert might convince my father to give permission for him to marry me, and then have Dad want to use them as a dowry gift."
Denis rolled his eyes.
"You know," chuckled Pohl. "This time I'm not going to ask for an explanation. It would just make things too confusing."
* * *
"It is my pleasure to meet you, Mademoiselle."
The art dealer's name was Justin Quinniaro, and he lived in an opulent manor house just outside of Mende. Captain Pohl had brought a stylish coach to transport her to the place. Where he had procured it, Betsy hadn't asked; she'd learned that although as a journalist it was her job to ask questions, every now and then it was better to just sit back and say nothing.
Betsy disliked Quinniaro at first sight. She had seen his type before; tall and dark in a mafia kind of way, insufferably sure of himself . . . the kind who either ended up buried in a work cube somewhere or doing time in a federal country club prison.
"I'm pleased to meet you, Monsieur Quinniaro. Your French is good, but I detect a hint of an Italian accent," she said.
"You have a good ear, milady. My family is from Venice, though I have not been back for a few years."
The walls in the living room of Quinniaro's residence were awash in candlelight and shadows. Three paintings were placed at intervals on one wall. Betsy recognized one of them as another copy of Landscape with Apollo and Mercury. A masterful rendition and identical to the three others she had seen in the rolled up canvases that were back in the dragoon barracks.
"If you will excuse me, Monsieur Quinniaro, there is a small matter that I must attend to," said Pohl. "I'm sure that it won't take me more than a few minutes to deal with. One of my men will be close by, should he be needed." Although he looked at Quinnaro as he said this, Betsy knew that his words were for her benefit.
Pohl was gone with that, not waiting for a word from Quinniaro. The Italian looked at Betsy with an air of respect.
"I would be fascinated to know how you got that stick-in-the-mud to accept a bribe. I've been trying for months," he said.
"Let us just say that it didn't cost me a cent," said Betsy, smiling her most seductive smile. "But let's get down to business; he won't be gone that long. First: officially I am not here, I have never been here and this conversation is most definitely not taking place. Is that understood?"
"Of course. Should the question ever come up, I have been hunting with several of my good friends, in the forest to the south. I understand there have been reports of wolves. Dangerous filthy beasts," said Quinniaro.
"My bother and I are acquiring items for our family's new estates in the colonies; a place that, quite frankly, I find appalling to even consider. However, our parents have compelling reasons for the relocation. Thus, I suppose we shall have to endure for a few years," said Betsy with a melodramatic sigh. She watched the man carefully. There were reactions to her words, small signs that her poker-playing cousins would have been proud that she noticed; but, for the most part , Quinniaro kept his face unmoving.
"Good reasons? I would suspect those reasons might be political, but far be it from me to inquire into another's business," he said.
"Unless it might profit you," Betsy said. "And trust me, if you can supply what I need, you will make a profit. I require . . . shall we say . . . transportable investments. I'm not particularly interested in how you acquire them. It's not as if anyone would ask too many questions in the colonies. I was thinking perhaps artwork. Caravaggio, Duck, Carracci or even older works, such as the type made by the contemporaries of Titian and Durer, if they can be had for a decent price."
Quinniaro sat for a long time before speaking, his eyes not moving off of Betsy. She was reminded of the first time she had worn a bikini out at the lake. The boys' reaction was nice at first, but after a bit began to feel creepy.
"You must understand, I am simply a businessman. While it is true I do come across art work from time to time, I can make no promises that I would be able to find any such items for you at this moment," he said.
"Well, that's a pity." From inside her sleeve Betsy produced a small leather bag of coins. "I was going to leave this as earnest money to prove that I am prepared to pay for what I want without explanation. But since you can't provide what I need, I suppose I will have to look elsewhere."
"I didn't say I couldn't find what you were looking for." Quinniaro's eyes darted to the corner of the room as he spoke, an action that Betsy noted for later. "I believe that an associate who specializes in acquiring such things may be presently under my roof. If you will wait but a moment, Mademoiselle, I can consult him."
As soon as Quinniaro stepped from the room, Betsy looked over to the corner where he had glanced. An ornate trunk caught her attention. She jumped from her chair and hurried over to it. Although it was locked, that was no match for one of Betsy's hairpins. Inside was a hardbound book with the Grantville Public Library card catalog designation.
"Hello? You definitely didn't come from France." Betsy looked up at the door nervously. She figured that she didn't have much time. Hastily, she opened the book, and tore the title page from the inside. Then she replaced the tome before jamming the lid back in place.
She had just taken her seat again when Quinniaro returned. "I believe that I may have access to some of what we discussed." The smile on his face exuded the sort of calm confidence that Betsy had always detested.
"Very well. I will be in the area for a few more days. Let Captain Pohl know when we have business to conduct," she said.
* * *
"So, do you believe us now?" said Denis.
"I trust no one, and I believe only what I see," answered Pohl as he knelt on the ground, eying a set of horse's hoof prints. He'd said the same thing when Betsy had handed him the page she had liberated from Quinniaro.
"It's the title page from a book on Baroque art. It shows work that has been painted by this point and some that will be produced over the next few decades. I would have brought the whole thing out with me if I thought I could have stuffed it down my bra. Overall, I would say a book of this nature makes quite a handy bit of source material for forgers. So do you believe your own eyes now?"
Pohl shrugged. "I will concede that Monsieur Quinniaro's behavior is most suspicious. And now, Mademoiselle, I must ask that you and your intended take your places behind my men where it is safe. One of my scouts reports that Quinniaro went to a small cottage not far from here."
"Her . . . intended?" Denis jerked back.
Pohl winked at him. "I'm starting to understand how the lady thinks. Trust me on this, Monsieur Sesma. You may not realize it, but you are a doomed man."
Denis glanced over at Betsy and was surprised to see that her face was almost as red as her hair. With a laugh, the dragoon captain mounted his horse, and signaled for the dozen men who had been waiting quietly in the woods to follow him.
Betsy coughed. "Funny guy."
"Hilarious," Denis said
"Don't get any ideas," she said.
Denis caught a whiff of something that he thought might be perfume when she slid uncomfortably close to him as he helped her onto her horse. There hadn't been time to retrieve Betsy's "regular clothes," so she was forced to ride like many of the fine ladies Denis had seen, side saddle.
Once the others had passed by, Denis and Betsy fell in behind them as they had been instructed. It took half an hour for them to reach the small—although apparently Pohl's idea of a small cottage and Denis' were radically different. The outbuildings were rather dilapidated, but the main house was large and definitely looked livable. Denis could see light coming through several of the windows.
Denis and Betsy rode up beside Pohl who was conferring with a small man dressed in brown that neither of them had seen before.
"My associate here says that Monsieur Quinniaro went inside; he is certain that there are others there with him," said Pohl.
"A problem?" asked Betsy.
"Possibly," said Pohl. "Only one way to find out. You two stay here. In case of a fight, I don't want you injured. Especially you, Mademoiselle Springer."
"I can handle myself in a fight," snapped Betsy.
"Perhaps you can." He nodded. "But the dress is borrowed and I don't want to have to pay for a seamstress to repair it should it be damaged."
As shadows, the dragoons advanced on the entrances to the house. There was the sound of shattering wood and breaking glass, followed by silence. A few minutes later, a lanky young man of perhaps fifteen or sixteen years came out of the house and brought word that Captain Pohl thought it was safe for them to join him inside.
"That was quick," said Betsy
Denis just shook his head at her words. He was no soldier but he had learned that most fights, whether they were a major battle or a one-on-one run-in with a thief, were usually over quickly. Later, when you were painting the picture to honor the skirmish or retelling the story over the fifth or six mug of beer, the events were always inflated to the level of a high adventure.
Denis hadn't gone more than four or five steps through the front door before the smell of turpentine hit him. It was thick and pungent; causing him to cover his nose even as memories of his days spent in his master's workshop assailed him.
"I'm beginning to think that the Mademoiselle and you were correct," said Pohl as he stepped through a door at the far end of the room.
There were several dozen easels spread about the room, each with a canvas stretched out to work on. In the dim light from candles it was hard to see just what the pictures were, but Denis could make a few guesses.
"So where are the artists?" asked Betsy.
Pohl gestured for Betsy and Denis to follow him back into the next room. Crouching on the floor were five men, their hands tied behind them. Their faces showed the evidence of close-quarters fighting with the dragoons who stood nearby.
"I haven't had a chance to question them, but I think they will be willing to explain what is going on and who their 'patron' might be," Pohl said.
"So where is Quinniaro?" asked Denis. "These men are obviously just the hired help. I'm willing to bet that they are apprentices whose masters didn't think they were up to snuff."
"Apprentice!" one of the men on the floor yelled in heavily accented German. "I am no apprentice. I am a master at what I do. I have done nothing wrong!"
Denis looked at several paintings stacked to one side. A compelling portrait that seemed to show the painter Diego Velazquez standing before a canvas while a princess, two ladies in waiting, chaperones, a dog and two dwarves entertained themselves next to him. Behind the painter hung a painting of a very much older-looking Philip IV and a woman who Denis didn't recognize as the queen of Spain.
He looked to Betsy in question.
"Las Meninas. That has to be for practice, there is no way they could explain that one, much less sell it." Then she made a wave of dismissal. "I'll loan you my fine arts textbook to explain who most of those people are."
Denis rubbed his chin for a moment, then picked up a brush and made a series of strokes forming a shape in the lower right-hand corner.
"It needed something," he said looking at the man on the floor.
"Let's get back to the barracks," said Pohl.
"Then far be it from me to delay that," said Quinniaro, who came out of a nearby closet and grabbed Betsy around the shoulders with one arm. He yanked her up against him and stepped backwards. In his other hand he held a cocked pistol, the barrel only inches from her face.
"You must know that you cannot escape," said Pohl, taking a step toward the man.
"Oh, I think I will, my dear Captain Pohl. I've seen the way you and that idiot look at this girl. I don't think you want to see her brains spread all over this charming little retreat," said Quinniaro.
"If you harm her I will track you down, no matter where you go," said Denis.
Quinniaro, shook his head and chuckled, twisting to look over his shoulder. The inattention was all the invitation that Betsy needed. She threw herself backwards against him. The move was unexpected enough to throw them both off balance and cause him to loosen his grip around her. She pulled away, twisted and rammed her knee into his crotch.
"Aaaahhh," he screamed, the pistol dropping out of his hand. Betsy slammed her elbow up and into his throat. The pain drove Quinniaro to his knees in front of her.
"This dress is on loan," she said. "If you've caused me to tear it, Captain Pohl will be most unhappy."
* * *
Denis dropped a couple of pieces of wood into the campfire. The flames flared brightly orange, dancing high into the air for a moment before settling back into a comfortable yellow glow. "You realize that Captain Pohl would have been quite happy to have us stay. Or at least you . . ."
Betsy's head shot up from the other side of the campfire. "Don't you start in on that again! I had enough of that kind of thing from Albert back home."
"All right, all right." Denis laughed, turned to the saddle bags next to him and dug around inside of it until he found two wrapped packages. He passed one of them to Betsy then turned his attention to the remaining one.
Inside the cloth was a thick piece of bread and a reasonably fresh looking apple. At least that's what it looked like. Denis had been hungry too many times in his life to be that picky about his food. Besides, this and some of their other supplies had come from the bishop's kitchen, so it should pass muster. That, plus the wine that had been a parting gift from Captain Pohl, would serve to make a passable meal.
"Do you think that Quinniaro is going to hang?" Betsy asked after several bites.
"For forgery? I seriously doubt it," said Denis. "You can find bad copies of almost any painting on the streets of Amsterdam. Quinniaro should be more afraid that his customers, who thought they were buying originals, will find out what he did."
"Did you see the look on the bishop's face when he saw so many copies of the same painting that Quinniaro had sold him?" Becky snorted. "I thought he was going to explode. Somehow I doubt that our Italian friend will be seeing the outside of the dungeon for a long time."
The bishop had also sworn both of them to secrecy regarding his involvement, saying it was a matter of the church's honor, i.e. he didn't want anyone to know he had been fooled by a copy.
Denis leaned back against the fallen tree trunk and stared up at the sky. A gibbous moon looked down on them, and the stars were spread out like a blanket. Right now things felt rather good and sharing this quiet time with Betsy was nice, as well.
"Of course," he said finally, "we still haven't found any trace of those missing blacksmith's apprentices. That is the story that Kindrad sent us out here to get. Besides keeping you apart from Albert."
Betsy glared at Denis. For a moment he expected her to throw something at him but she didn't, instead, a smile slowly broke across her face. "The less said about Albert, the better. As for our wayward apprentices, one of the dragoons said that a few weeks ago he saw a couple of guys who matched their description sitting in a tavern and drinking through a windfall. I'll bet if we ask around, we'll probably find that they sold their master's raw goods and drank away their profits. Not much of a story there. But I do have an idea that might just satisfy old man Kindrad."
"Would you care to enlighten your traveling companion?" asked Denis. "Or do I have to guess?"
"Simple. I'll just write up a story about the forgery for the Inquisitor. We'll spin it differently, so that way the bishop won't get his cassock in a bunch. In our version, a group of werewolves was operating the forgery ring, killing off anyone who discovered their secret. You supply some very nice woodcuts and that will keep Kindrad happy with us."
Denis began to laugh, rocking back and forth. "You have an evil mind, woman."
"Thank you," Betsy said with a grin. "I do my best."
Just then a wolf's howl echoed through the forest from the south.
"Werewolf?" asked Denis.
"There wolf," replied Betsy.
* * *
Geri Kinney spun the knob on her keyless deadbolt. "Momentchen, ich komme," she said loudly. But her open door revealed no black-toothed, middle-aged German man and no awestruck university student. "Hi, Jimmy. Come in."
After Geri shut the door, James Alec Wild grinned and pulled out his wallet. "Ken Miller says we'll have food cans in under three years." He pulled two twenties out of his wallet. "So in three years, I can get a discount."
Geri took the twenties, and moved to the other room to hide them. She called back, "I haven't taken canned food in two years. And you're already getting a discount."
"Yeah?" Jimmy said.
Geri couldn't put the money into her Velcro-tabbed pouch with Jimmy here; he'd recognize the "ripping" sound. So instead, she jammed the money under her pillow. Meanwhile, she called back, "The Germans, I charge them more."
"No shit?" she heard.
"Yeah, and I take bills or guilders or florins. But the college boys, I'll do them for cheaper, if it's green paper."
"Cheaper than forty?"
By now, Jimmy was sitting in her overstuffed chair, with his pants down around his ankles. Geri walked up to him and said, "Everyone but you pays more than forty. That's all you need to know."
Then Geri knelt, and gave him what he'd paid for.
* * *
As Jimmy was zipping up his pants and fastening his belt, he said, "I just came from seeing Linda and the boys. And shit, looks like Linda and her new kraut husband are getting along."
Geri said, "Is that good for you, or bad for you? Your ex-wife—"
"You ever think about marriage?"
Geri let the smirk show. "All the time. I'd starve if not for married men."
He frowned. "I didn't ask this so you could make a joke."
"Yeah? Marriage is a joke. Wifey's supposed to stay all faithful and saintly, but 'boys will be boys' if Hubby steps out? Please."
"I'm just saying, if you stay in this life, sooner or later you'll get messed-up by some guy."
"Well, I have your gun. And I have those moves you and Dad showed me. I'll be okay."
"But if you got married—"
"What man is going to bring home a whore to meet Mutti and Vatti?"
"Haven't you heard? Us up-timers, we're all rich. And we all do wizard shit."
"Yeah? Abracadabra. Guess what, nothing happened. And I'm not rich either."
"Well, I think you're hot. You're prettier than Linda, and God knows you're better in bed."
Geri wasn't bantering anymore. "If you're going to bullshit me, if you're trying to sweet-talk me, maybe you should leave now."
"What? Bullshitting, why would you think that?"
"Because if I'm so goddamn pretty, if I'm so wonderful at sex, then why'd Philip Garrett honkytonk on me when I was fifteen and giving him the world?"
"Goddamn, I try to pay you a compliment, Geri, and you go all soap opera on me!" He was quiet for several seconds, then said, "There's something I'm trying to ask you, but you won't let me."
"A whore and an ex-con, married? It's divorce court waiting to happen."
"Not so. Sometimes they work out. As for the 'ex-con' thing, I was younger. And the guy, he was asking for it. It wasn't all my fault."
"It never is. You and my daddy should form a club."
Jimmy took half a step closer. "You calling me a liar?"
If Jimmy hadn't acted like an asshole right then, Geri would have apologized for hurting his feelings—maybe even on her knees. Instead, she glared at him. "If I say 'Yes, you're a liar,' you gonna beat me up?"
"I can't believe I'm taking shit from a whore."
"The whores of the world are kept in business by all the jerks of the world."
"To hell with you, Geri. You know, back in your Goth days, you looked like a black-and-white clown."
Geri went to the front door and jerked it open. "You need to leave. Now."
Jimmy didn't move. Instead, he said, "For a Grantville girl doing what you're doing, you sure are full of yourself!"
"Get the hell out!" When he didn't move, she turned toward the bedroom and said, "If you're still here when I come back, I'll blast you where you stand."
"Like I want to stay here." He walked to the door, then headed down the stairs. "Skanky slut whore!" he yelled, loud enough for the whole town to hear.
Geri flew to the top of the stairs and screamed, "You just doubled your price, you asshole. No more forty dollars for you—if I even let you through my door. You hear me, you jackass?"
Slamming the door made a nice boom. It almost made her feel better.
Soon after, her door got pounded on. "I said get out, Jimmy." She yanked the door open.
Then she gasped, embarrassed. "Ach, es tut mir leid. Bitte, bitte, kommen Sie ein!"
"Your Honor, Your Honor, please wake up."
"What's wrong, Ilse?" Pieter Freihofer asked, squinting at his cook in the dim light.
"The Town Council, they're all here. They wish to speak with you."
He sat up, though his body begged for more sleep. "Tell them it will take me time to get dressed."
When Pieter stepped into his parlor, waiting for him were indeed the four councilmen, plus Karl Strom, the young dean of the university law school. Pieter's five visitors looked like they'd been awake all night.
"Gentlemen, what's going on?" Pieter asked.
Stadtrat Gäbel said, "An up-timer woman, Geri Kinney, was murdered yesterday afternoon. Here in Jena."
"Politically, that is awkward."
"It's a mess, is what it is," said Stadtrat Dornhofer. "The likely murderer is an up-timer man."
"And you're here for me to advise you? I think Dean Strom here is better suited. He knows up-timer law better than I, and he's even talked to up-time women at the medical school."
Stadtrat Gundlach spoke up. "Advise us? No. We're asking you to accept the post of Special Investigator-Prosecutor for this murder."
"Well, certainly I did a lot of that, until recently," Pieter said. Before Jena's new law, passed less than a year earlier, judges (and only judges) questioned witnesses, arrested suspects, questioned suspects, and tried and sentenced those suspects. Pieter added, "But under our new laws, 'police' do crime investigation."
"Give this investigation to the police?" said Stadtrat Preisser. "Those jumped-up ex-watchmen? The ones who aren't stupid, lazy, drunk, or corrupt are all CoC, and those people think most up-timers are saints."
"So why me?" Pieter asked. "Why not Schiffer or . . . ?" Pieter stopped speaking when he realized that his five visitors were looking embarrassed.
Dean Strom said, "The problem is judicial torture. The Americans hate it—fiercely and implacably."
"Then how do Americans convict people of crime? Witnesses are often mistaken, and often sworn statements are lies."
Strom answered, "The Americans have—or they did have, at least—many up-time tricks for discovering reliable evidence. If one of us here raped your cook, for instance, the Americans up-time would know who."
"Wow," said Stadtrat Preisser.
"As a result," said Strom, "the Americans don't need confessions to convict criminals, and they think judges who torture to extract confessions are savages."
Pieter sighed. "Then all of us judges except Fassbinder, we're all tainted, so far as Americans go. You're back to your police."
Dean Strom shook his head. "But we've checked records, and you've done less judicial torture than the others. You often get suspects to confess during the pre-torture conference."
Pieter said, "It's no big secret, how to do it. Most people fear the torture, and their consciences bother them anyway. If I'm a good listener, they'll confess beforehand. Now, the Landschädlichen"—criminal class—"will not willingly confess except under torture, and sometimes lie even then. But because they all think themselves more clever than I, they can be tricked into confessing."
"Tricked how?" asked Stadtrat Gundlach.
Pieter smiled in mockery. "There is the truth I tell God, and the 'truth' I tell a suspect. But once they confess, does it matter what I said? Confessio est regina probationum, confession is the queen of evidence."
Stadtrat Gäbel said, "You prove again, you're our best man. What is your answer?"
Pieter said, "I will do this. I'll need to reassign my case load, though."
The five visitors looked relieved. Dean Strom pulled a slip of paper from his sleeve. "You want to talk to this young man. He is one of my law students and, so far as I know, he is the only good witness you have to the crime."
Pieter took the piece of paper. "'Horst Brecht.' I will speak to him today."
Pieter then added, "But first I must see the deceased."
Pieter was a little surprised by the policeman who was actually guarding the up-timer's door, rather than drinking beer in a tavern. But what really surprised him was the presence of an up-time bicycle, a large green knapsack, and an up-time red-haired woman in her thirties, all three of which leaned against the hallway's opposite wall.
Much about up-timers puzzled Pieter, and now this woman's clothing puzzled him. He knew that up-timers could dye clothing bright colors; and that up-time, they could buy already-made clothing that fit as well as any clothing made by tailor or seamstress. Yet the up-timer woman's pants and top were both loose and baggy, and both were the same dull-green color.
When Pieter had entered the hallway, she'd glanced at him. She kept watching him as he turned to speak to the policeman. Pieter then showed the policemen his commission from the Town Council. As the policeman was opening the door, and Pieter was rolling the paper back up, then retying the ribbon the woman spoke, "Mein Herr?"
Pieter turned around. "Yes?"
"Are you here to investigate the murder of Geri Kinney?" the woman asked. Her eyes were puffy and red, perhaps from lack of sleep.
"Yes. I am Judge Pieter Freihofer. How may I help you?"
"My name is Mary Patricia Flanagan, and I'm one of the Leahy group who's teaching at the medical school. I want to help in your investigation." Flanagan stood straight, and looked at Pieter squarely. She reminded him of a cavalry captain Pieter had known in younger days. The up-time pistol that was holstered at her hip strengthened this martial impression.
Pieter asked her, "How can you help?"
"Up-time medicine can determine facts about the person's death, and what happened just before. I know those tests. In addition, Elizabeth Pitre, who's a friend of mine, has been trained in forensic investigation, and she's sent me a step-by-step guide to what to do."
Pieter had no idea whether this Flanagan woman could help him. He likewise had no idea whether whatever judge eventually tried this case would let her testify. But he understood the politics: Grantville would accept the trial and execution of an up-timer, if it was based on up-time evidence. "Follow me," he said.
With a wave, Mary Pat declined Pieter's not-yet-spoken offer to carry the knapsack for her; but she clearly was struggling to get it through the door. Once in the room, she shut the door, walked to the corner farthest from the dead woman, set the knapsack down, and dumped the contents on the floor. She unholstered her pistol, did something to it with her thumb, then laid it on the floor as well. She spent a minute organizing the things she'd poured out of her bag.
Pieter didn't recognize many of the things lying at her feet. But the big rectangular bag with handgrips on the long sides, this he understood. The bag was black, and made of a strange material, but very poor German people buried their kin in something similar to it.
At the end of the room was another door, going to Kinney's bedroom, Pieter presumed. That door had a round brass bulb with a zigzag slot where the door lever and keyhole should be. Geri Kinney lay dead near that door.
Pieter knew the dead woman had to be Miss Kinney because the corpse had brunette hair cut in an up-time style. The corpse's light-purple skirt, which was hemmed above the knees, was also a hint. The corpse was laying on its back, its toes about three feet from the bedroom door. The body was in full rigor, with the wrists bent and the fingers making their ghastly curl. Pieter saw pale-yellow fly eggs that coated the corpse's lips and staring eyes and filled the dead woman's nostrils. Flies crawled on the pale face.
A few feet from Kinney's head was a two-foot length of twine. Kinney had a red line of matching width around her neck—a line that was dotted with fly eggs and visited by more crawling flies.
Mary Pat asked, "Do you have any suspects yet?"
Pieter said, "I'm not allowed to discuss that."
Flanagan frowned, then shrugged.
* * *
A man's voice loudly said, "I just want to put this on her table. I won't bother anything!"
Pieter went to the hallway door and opened it. The policeman's bulk was partly blocking his view, but facing him was a young man who wore the robes of a law student. The young man held a folded piece of paper in his hand.
Pieter tapped the policeman on the shoulder, then stepped forward. He said, "I am Judge Pieter Freihofer, and I am investigating this murder. Who are you, and what is your business here?"
"Your Honor, I am Rolf Krebs, a law student at the university. I also am . . . a friend of Miss Kinney." Krebs was craning his neck to see through the open door.
Pieter glanced back; Kinney's corpse and Mary Patricia Flanagan were plainly visible to young Krebs. Flanagan now gripped her pistol, but it was pointed at the ceiling. Turning back to the law student, Pieter held out his hand and said, "Do you have something for my investigation?"
Krebs blushed. "No, this isn't official. It's, ahem, personal. It's for her family."
Pieter kept his hand out. Blushing even redder, Krebs handed over the paper.
Pieter unfolded it. He saw a pen-and-ink drawing of a rose laying on a table, next to a burning candle. The drawing was detailed, and had clearly taken much time to make.
Pieter said, "I will ensure that her family gets this." He turned to go back into the room.
"Your Honor?"
Pieter turned back toward the law student.
Krebs said, "You're lucky to have an up-timer working for you. The murderer, whoever he is, has cause to worry."
* * *
When Pieter's attention returned to Flanagan, she was in the corner, exchanging her pistol for a pen, a paper with blue lines forming squares all over it, a device that clamped that paper to a flat board, and a strange device that extended a metal ribbon with ruler-markings on the ribbon. She began to make a map of the room.
When Flanagan was through locating all the furniture on her map, she then used her ruler-ribbon and some sketching to map the location of Kinney's corpse and the twine.
Then Flanagan stood and looked around the room, checking things against her map. She nodded, signed the map, and handed it to Pieter.
Pieter was puzzled anew. In all this time, Flanagan had not done anything more than glance at Kinney's corpse.
Flanagan went back to her pile and exchanged the ruler-ribbon and paper-clamping board for some printed papers, a strange device that looked like a giant silver nail (with a clock where the nail-head should be), and a pair of scissors. Flanagan laid these down on the floor by Kinney's body, then picked up the silver nail, gazed at its "clock," and wrote something at the top of the first printed page.
At last she knelt over Kinney's corpse. More flies were crawling on the body. Flanagan was pulling away clothing from the dead woman to expose her abdomen. Then she eyed Pieter and said, "This isn't sacrilege."
Pieter wondered, "Sacrilege"? What is she—
Flanagan took the silver nail and stabbed the corpse's exposed flesh. Pieter gasped in shock, and almost dived forward to stop this corpse-mutilation. But he caught himself and merely watched.
Flanagan was now staring at her up-time watch. After a time, she shifted her look to the silver nail's clock, then consulted her papers, and glanced again at her watch.
"Geri Kinney died between fourteen and sixteen hours ago," Flanagan announced. "Between four and six in the afternoon, yesterday."
Pieter looked at her sharply. "Did someone in Jena tell you that?"
"No," Flanagan said, and tapped her printed papers. "Geri's liver temperature told me that."
Flanagan then picked up her scissors. By well-planned cutting of Kinney's clothing, Flanagan was able to remove the clothing without moving the body at all. Pieter had to keep reminding himself, This isn't sacrilege. This isn't desecration.
Flanagan went back to her pile and exchanged the scissors and instructions for the paper-clamper board and a new sheet of blue-lined paper. She also picked up a strange box with a curved mirror in front. She grabbed something on the side of the box and made quick circular motions with her hand, while the box purred like a cat. After a minute of this, she stopped and touched something on top of the box. Then something in the middle of the curved mirror shone brightly. The box was a lantern, but one that didn't need oil and didn't smoke.
Within seconds, it was obvious to Pieter that Flanagan planned to map Kinney's corpse, just as she'd earlier mapped the room.
As the up-timer was training her up-time lantern's beam over every bit of the corpse's skin, Pieter asked, "What are you looking for?"
Flanagan said, "Surprises, basically. A stab wound would suggest that she actually died of stabbing, and the strangulation was done postmortem to fool you. I'm looking for bruises. They show up after death, and will say if her murderer hit her. Of course, broken bones say the same thing."
A few minutes later, Flanagan put her lantern down and said, "I'm ready to turn her over."
"Did you find anything?"
The up-timer woman looked puzzled. "There's no stabbing so far, which confirms strangulation. No broken bones—except for the hyoid bone, of course. No surprises so far. But I expected bruises on her wrists or face, to show that she struggled. Nothing. And look around the room—there's no furniture knocked over, nothing seems out of place. It's like she let the guy walk right up to her and strangle her!"
Flanagan rolled Kinney's corpse over. As Pieter expected, the body was statue-rigid. If Kinney's body had been unlifelike pale before, now much of what he saw was a dark red. The heels, calves, buttocks, elbows, and shoulders all were purple.
Pieter commented, "She wasn't moved. This is where she died."
"Look at that," Flanagan said, pointing. "The marks made by the twine don't go to the back of the neck. Instead, the skin on the back of the neck, between the twine marks, is darker. I think it's bruised."
Pieter realized what that meant: "She was strangled from behind." Then he thought about how the body had laid when they'd found it. "She turned her back on him, and let him get between her and the only door out of her apartment."
Flanagan nodded. "She trusted him. Then he strangled her."
As before, Flanagan and her lantern examined every bit of Kinney's skin; Flanagan even pulled Kinney's hair aside and checked the base of her skull for a stab wound.
A few minutes later, Flanagan rolled Kinney's corpse onto its back. "I can't check for bruises back there, but I saw no stab wounds, and no broken bones. No surprises."
Flanagan was marking her "corpse map" when Pieter saw her suddenly startle. She grabbed the lantern, shoved it at Pieter, and said, "Can you hold this? Shine it on her fingers!"
And while Pieter watched, she waved away two flies that had been half-hidden under the fingernails of the body's right hand. "Gloria in excelsis Deo!" she exclaimed. Then she added in German, "Blood under her fingernails. This is wonderful."
Nothing that brings flies can be "wonderful," Pieter thought.
Flanagan leaped across the floor to her pile in the corner, then hurried back. Now she was holding a tan-colored bag that had writing on it, and a roll of silver ribbon. But Pieter discovered, when he touched it, that the underside of the silver ribbon was strongly sticky. Flanagan pulled the bag over Kinney's right hand, then used the sticky silver ribbon to close-off the end of the bag against Kinney's right arm. "The plan is to cover her hand so that no more flies can get to it."
"But why?"
Flanagan's smile was bloodthirsty. "She might have scratched her killer. And if so, we maybe can tell you something about him. I hope so, in any case."
Flanagan handed her corpse-map to Pieter, then opened the black bag. "Will you help me put her in the body bag?" she asked Pieter.
Normally, Pieter would have given this task to an assistant. He hated handling corpses. But he refused to look squeamish to this up-timer woman. "Yes, I will help you."
It had been twenty years since Pieter had touched a corpse who wasn't family. Pieter discovered that his age and wisdom hadn't made this task easier.
The last thing that Flanagan did was to get a pair of tweezers, pick up another sack that had writing on it, pick up the twine with the tweezers, drop it into the sack and seal it with a green ring that could be stretched and twisted.
She looked at Pieter and sighed. "I'd hoped to take the murderer's Fingerabdrucke. But I can't get useful Fingerabdrucke from twine." So saying, Flanagan tucked the sacked twine into the black corpse-bag.
Pieter asked, "Is that an up-time word? I don't know what you mean by `finger marks.'"
Flanagan pointed to the fingertips of her left hand. "See these lines of skin? Mine are unique, yours are unique, every person on earth has a unique Fingerabdruck."
"So what do you use them for? Divination, like tea leaves?"
She paused for several seconds, as if trying to decide something; then she said, "I was hoping there would have been a fingerprint of the murderer that was visible to the naked eye—a bloody fingerprint on a drinking glass or a knife blade. But, our bad luck, there's nothing like that in the room. Still, let me show you what I'm talking about."
From her pile of mysteries, Flanagan brought forth a sheet of snow-white up-time paper, a tiny jar, and a tiny bowl that was so shallow that it was almost flat. Flanagan tore the white paper into two pieces, then opened the jar and poured into the bowl a gray powder that was unnaturally fine. She said, "These are graphite particles—think of it as artificial charcoal. Pretend it's blood. Now, please rub one of your fingertips around in the dust; get it shiny gray." After Pieter did that, Flanagan told him, "Now, mash your fingertip against one of the pieces of paper, then lift your finger straight up."
When Pieter did that, his fingerprint was clearly visible on the half-sheet of paper.
From her pile of mysterious items, Nurse Flanagan now picked up what she called "tape," a sticky ribbon as wide as her wrist, that was transparent like glass. By using the knife built into the tape dispenser, Flanagan was able to get herself a square of tape without needing to touch the sticky underside much. She pressed the square of tape down on Pieter's charcoal-gray fingerprint, peeled the tape loose—and the fingerprint came with it. Now Flanagan pressed the tape, with its captured fingerprint, against the other piece of paper. "Look at that," she said. "You left a bloody fingerprint, and now I have an accurate paper record of it."
"Criminals in Jena should quake in fear with you here, Nurse Flanagan."
She shook her head. "I'm not trained in this and I've never done this before. So I didn't even try to capture any invisible fingerprints, because I know I can't."
"Invisible fingerprints?"
She nodded. "Whenever you touch a smooth surface, you leave fingerprints." Pointing to her up-time lantern, she said, "My fingerprints are on this, just as yours are on the oil lantern."
Pieter picked up the lantern and examined it closely. "I don't see them."
"You can't, but they're there. I think my friend Elizabeth could make them show up," Flanagan said casually, "but she says that's a tricky job to do right, and she's got training. Me, the amateur? I'd either destroy evidence or waste time."
Flanagan looked at her watch, walked over to the body bag, and closed it. After that, she started to refill her knapsack. Pieter walked over and gestured to the up-time things still on the floor, the knapsack, and the filled black bag. "Whose idea was this? Whose idea to do all this?"
Flanagan said, "My idea. This needed doing." She said it as if that explained everything.
Soon Flanagan put everything back in her knapsack except for a small, odd-shaped thing; she picked up the oddity and held it in her hand. She eyed Pieter and said formally, "I am employed at the University of Jena Medical School. I ask for temporary custody of Geri Kinney's remains so that an autopsy can be performed."
"The woman is murdered, and you want to make her insides be entertainment for medical students?"
"It would be a murder-investigation autopsy, not a teaching autopsy. They would do medical tests that I cannot do here. They would again examine the outside of her body, and confirm my notes. They would test the blood under her fingernails. They would examine her vagina for bruising, which means nonconsensual sex. And yes, they . . . ahem . . . they might cut her open. They might look inside her."
"And their doing these things would help my investigation?" Pieter asked.
"Most definitely."
"Then I consent. Inform me when the family can have the body for burial."
The oddity Flanagan was holding turned out to be a hand-held radio. "On my way with the body," she told someone. She asked Pieter, "Will you help me carry the body outside?"
Of course Pieter agreed. Did he want up-timers snickering at him?
As he and Flanagan were carrying the body down the outside steps, she remarked, "Both the medical students and the law students have asked if we would do the autopsy in the operating theater, but that's the wrong place. It would be a circus."
A minute later, Nurse Flanagan, Pieter, and the black bag were at the street, waiting for a horse-drawn cart to come from the medical school. Nurse Flanagan turned to Pieter and said, "If you find a visible fingerprint in Geri's apartment, messenger me immediately. Even if you're sure the fingerprint is Geri's, I'll come back here with paper and tape and capture it. With one good fingerprint in the right place, and help from the angels, we can blow this case wide open."
The law-school dean, Karl Strom, had told Pieter that Horst Brecht was a "good witness" to Kinney's murder. Dean Strom had spoken less than truth, Pieter realized.
"I didn't actually see the murder," Brecht admitted.
"What did you see?" Pieter asked.
"I was walking back to my apartment house, when I heard Miss Kinney and a man shouting. In English. They both were angry."
"Do you speak English? Do you know what they were saying?"
"I speak some English, and read it better than I speak it. But they were using many words that aren't in West Virginia law books."
"Too much to hope for," Pieter said. "Continue your tale."
"To go into my apartment house, I had to walk around the up-timer's truck. About an hour after the up-timers were screaming, I was walking past Miss Kinney's apartment when I noticed her door was open. She never leaves it open. I went in to check on her, and found her on the floor. She had been strangled."
"You reported her murder at 5:47 p.m. What time do you think you discovered her body, and what time were the up-timers shouting at each other?"
"It didn't take me long to find a policeman, only about fifteen minutes after I found her. So that's around five-thirty. The shouting was about an hour before that—say, four-thirty."
"About an hour before? You're sure about that—not less time, not more?"
"Your Honor, what's the big idea? Are you saying I'm stupid? Or scatterbrained, or lying?"
Pieter smiled to soothe the youth, explaining, "She died after the argument, so I must be clear when that is."
"Of course, sure," Brecht said. "And yes, I'm certain about the time."
Pieter wrote all that down, then asked, "After you found the body, tell me exactly: What did you do?"
"After I threw my trash away—that's why I was walking in front of Miss Kinney's apartment—I came back to my apartment and wrote down everything I could remember about the truck the up-time man was driving. Then I found a policeman and told him about the murder."
"Let me see what you wrote down," Pieter said.
Brecht pulled out a paper from his sleeve. On it he had written:
white Truck
on left Door: MALLERS HARD_ _ _ _
tall Man, his Age in thirties? Pale blue Eyes. Walks with a Limp.
Pieter pointed to the bottom of the writing. "Who is this man?"
"That is the man who was with her yesterday."
Pieter looked at Brecht sharply. "You just told me you didn't see the murder, or the man she was arguing with."
Brecht shrugged. "I didn't. But this man I've described, he's come to visit Miss Kinney several times. I've never seen her with any other up-timer."
"So he's her betrothed, perhaps?" Pieter asked.
Brecht shook his head. "Um, Your Honor, did nobody tell you, um, about her? About Miss Kinney?"
"Tell me what?"
"Miss Kinney was a—she was a sister of Rahab, Your Honor."
Pieter stared open-mouthed at the young man. "An up-timer, a prostitute? As rich and sorcerous as they all are?"
"Yes, Your Honor. She entertained men."
"And how much did she charge, this up-timer prostitute?"
Horst quoted two prices, and Pieter nearly choked. Then Horst added in a matter-of-fact tone, "Of course, more time cost more money."
"And she didn't starve? She got men, at those prices?"
"Oh yes, Your Honor. Several of my friends at the law school visit her regularly—visited her regularly. My friend Rolf once stood in her apartment and read her a bawdy poem in Latin." Brecht lowered his voice and added, "Of course, being an up-timer, she couldn't understand it."
Pieter finished writing in the case's Akte (dossier). Now he looked at Brecht. "As soon as I can arrange it, you and I will go to Grantville. I need to find the truck and the up-timer you saw."
Brecht nodded. Then he said, "Your Honor, if it's all right with you, Rolf Krebs will wish to come too. Partly because he's interested in up-time law."
"The same Rolf Krebs who wrote a poem for Miss Kinney?"
"Indeed, Your Honor."
"Very well. But he'll have to pay his own way."
Brecht shrugged. "For Rolf, that won't be a problem."
Pieter had met with Judge Schiffer, to transfer one of Pieter's two active cases to him; and then had dumped his other case in Judge Fassbinder's lap. Now Pieter returned to "his" empty courtroom, and through the door into his office, in order to sign whatever paperwork his clerks had waiting for him. After doing that, Pieter planned to hit the streets—he had an English-language translator to recruit and a murder to solve.
But waiting in his judicial chamber was a young woman. She was in her late twenties, with straight brunette hair. Perhaps she was unmarried because her face was plain, and she was as thin as an up-timer, although her rich clothing told Pieter that she could certainly afford to eat. She had intelligent eyes. She sat by the room's second door—the one that led to the clerks' office—and Pieter wouldn't have been surprised if there were two or three big guards standing just outside that door.
"Can I help you?"
The woman leaped up and gave a well-practiced curtsy. "Your Honor, I am Anna Maria von Schurmann, from Utrecht. I have a letter of introduction from Kuhlbert von Regenberg in Pomerania." From a slit in her skirt, she pulled out a wax-sealed, folded piece of paper. "Herr von Regenberg knows you?"
"In a way. His young son and I once had business together," Pieter said. He managed to keep irony out of his voice.
As Pieter took the paper that Anna Maria was holding out to him, he said, "You have a German name, and yet you come from a Dutch city attacked by the Spanish. Which likely makes you a war refugee, yet you don't look or act like a war refugee." He raised an eyebrow.
"My father was German, but I have been raised in Utrecht since I was a small girl. Some months ago, my mother and aunts decided I should go on a grand tour. They decided this about the time the Spanish came to Utrecht," Anna Maria said, smiling at her own joke.
"A grand tour? A good idea," Pieter said, smiling at the joke himself. Anna Maria was about ten years too old, and the wrong sex, to really be going on a grand tour. But We're sending you all over Europe to see the sights sounds a whole lot better than We're sending you out of town before Spanish soldiers ravage you or disease kills you.
Anna Maria continued, "So after visiting interesting places elsewhere in Europe, here I am in Jena. And now I wish to visit Grantville."
"Ah, yes, Grantville," Pieter said. Then he broke the wax seal and began to read.
A minute later, Pieter said, "Herr von Regenberg writes that you draw, you paint, you speak many languages, and you are 'curious about everything.' All these will help you in Grantville."
"Oh?"
"The best minds in Europe, even brilliant children, are flocking to Grantville. Can you speak English?"
In reply, she spoke a sentence he could not understand, in an English accent.
He said, "The up-timers insist that their English is very different than the speech of England now. You will have an adventure, I bet, learning to talk with them!"
Anna Maria shrugged. Then her shoulders tensed and she asked, "So will you write me a letter of introduction to any up-timers, please?"
"There's no need for a letter as such. The up-timers hate being formal; a scribbled note will work. That is, if I can't give you a personal introduction."
She blinked. "You would do that for me, go with me to Grantville and make introductions? Grantville is a day's coach-ride from here."
He laughed. "First of all, the up-timers have set up a train"—Anna Maria looked puzzled, hearing the unfamiliar word—"that makes the trip to Grantville in only three hours. You can be in Grantville by early afternoon tomorrow, making your own introductions. Or I can walk you over to the medical school right now, and introduce you to the up-timer woman there who's helping me with my murder investigation."
Anna Maria choked. "The medical school has an up-timer woman?"
"Two women, actually."
"What—what do they do there?"
"They teach. They are nurses, which up-time had lower status and less responsibility than did up-time physicians. Still, these nurses know more about medicine than any man in the medical faculty."
Anna Maria stared, her mouth open. After a time, she said, "My goodness. But how can an up-timer nurse help you with a murder?" Clearly what she meant was Why do you need an up-timer nurse to help you take depositions?
"Come, I'll walk you to the Medical School while I explain. Then with luck, Nurse Flanagan will be there to further explain what I cannot. What I saw today was amazing."
* * *
Five minutes later, the judge, Anna Maria, and her two bodyguards were headed toward the medical school. ". . . And Nurse Flanagan seemed certain that if the murderer had left a bloody fingerprint, he would be in Jena's prison before the day is out."
"My goodness," Anna Maria said, well-bred enough to understate her total shock. Then she changed topics: "I wish not to embarrass myself around the Americans. Is there anything I should never do, around an up-timer?"
The judge said, "Yes. Never talk down to an up-timer, as to a social inferior. Even though any of them will tell you, his bloodline is no better than a peasant's."
"Is it because up-timers put on airs? Everyone I've talked to, says that everyone who meets an up-timer thinks he or she is Adel. I do not understand this—how can I meet a blacksmith and mistake him for a baron?"
"Equality," the judge said. "The idea that all men are equal before God. German pastors and priests say it, but the up-timers believe it."
They had entered the medical school and were walking down a hallway. Anna Maria smelled unusual smells, some awful, some merely odd, and heard a man screaming somewhere in the building. Two young men passed them in the hallway, talking about "bacteria of the colon." Anna Maria had no idea what "bacteria" were.
Only seconds had passed since the judge had spoken. Now Anna Maria replied, "So is living in Grantville how that—that witch got her unnatural ideas? That peasants are—Ha!—the equals of nobles? She is in Amsterdam this minute, spewing those ridiculous ideas."
Judge Freihofer had stopped in the hallway, in front of a wooden door. But instead of knocking, he turned to face Anna Maria. He said, "Many things about that woman offend me as much as they offend you. But here's a warning: Never criticize Gretchen Richter in front of any up-timer. Such as Nurse Flanagan here."
So saying, Judge Freihofer knocked on the door. A woman's voice with an unfamiliar accent said, "Kommen Sie ein, bitte."
He gripped the door lever, but then turned back toward Anna Maria. "Tomorrow morning, three of us will be taking the train to Grantville, in order to investigate this murder. You are welcome to ride with us."
Less than a minute later, the judge was headed home, and Anna Maria was seated facing a genuine up-timer, Mary Pat Flanagan.
Fifteen minutes after that, a stunned Anna Maria and her bodyguards were headed toward an inn for the night. Anna Maria had much to think about.
Frau Küster, Pieter's translator during this trip to Grantville, was about the same early-twenties age as Horst Brecht, Rolf Krebs, and Anna Maria von Schurmann. But right now Küster was showing the excitement of a child. Pieter smiled, recalling his own youth.
"What do you think, Rolf?" Horst Brecht asked. "The speed of this train, is it like a trot or a canter? I say it's a trot. A fast trot."
Rolf Krebs replied, "No, it's a canter."
"My friend, if this is a canter, you've ridden only sickly nags."
"It's a slow canter, but it's a canter," Krebs insisted.
"Objection: Arguing facts not in evidence. It's a trot," Brecht said.
Krebs said, "We need an independent ruling. Frau Küster, what say you?"
She shrugged. "My only experience with horses was my father's plowhorse. Who tells a plowhorse to trot or canter?"
A smiling Anna Maria laid down her sketchpad. "It's neither a trot nor a canter, because a horse is not pulling this train, a truck is."
Pieter was smiling as well. "A truck that is colored a most unhorsely blue, and that growls like a dog."
Krebs asked Frau Küster, "So you grew up on a farm? You didn't grow up in Jena?"
She nodded. "Our farm was north of Apolda."
Brecht asked her, "So why are you in Jena, and not at your home north of Apolda? Or on some other farm?"
The change was remarkable, Pieter thought. Frau Küster had been acting happy and lively since yesterday afternoon, when Pieter had asked her to translate for him in Grantville. But now, after Brecht's questions, Küster's smile disappeared and her eyes went dead.
With strained voice and stiff posture, Frau Küster said, "Why am I in Jena, instead of back home? Misfortunes."
* * *
A half-hour later, the train was leaving the Rudolstadt station. The youngsters were excited—and to be honest, so was Pieter. Off to the southwest was what looked like a forested mountain range. That had to be where the Ring of Fire was!
Rolf Krebs asked, "So Your Honor, what do you want to see in Grantville?"
Pieter replied, "The police house, to talk to Chief Richards. After all, that's why we came here."
"You don't want to see anything else?"
"Not today. If I am lucky, we'll all be leaving on the afternoon train, along with an up-time man in shackles." Pieter nudged the sack at his feet; it clanked.
Krebs then asked, "And what about you, Frau Küster? What would you like to see in Grantville?"
Her eyes glowed. "The original Freedom Arches. And definitely I want to see the high school."
Pieter said, "Yes. I must admit that, if I had the time, I would love to visit the library there. Imagine, looking up your friends' names, and finding out if the future remembers them."
"That too, I suppose," she said. "But I want to see the place where Jeff Higgins proposed to Gretchen Richter."
Anna Maria shot Frau Küster a sharp look, then said, "That legendary library, that's my preference too. As soon as we get to Grantville, I'm headed to the library as fast as I can go."
Krebs laughed. "Which is very fast, in Grantville." He turned to Horst Brecht and asked, "And what would you like to see in Grantville, Horst?"
Brecht shrugged. "Not much. I think Grantville is overrated. You?"
Krebs answered, "I wish I could walk around inside the high school for hours and hours, before I visited their library. Imagine, hundreds of up-time girls of marriageable age, all dressed to show their knees! Wonderful."
Pieter noticed what Krebs clearly wasn't noticing: that Frau Küster was scowling.
* * *
Minutes later, Anna Maria pointed out the window and said, "They weren't kidding!"
The train had been moving west, paralleling the Saale. Now the upriver direction of the Saale changed to southeast, but the train turned due south. After the train turned, the miracle done to the Thuringian landscape was clearly visible from the right side of the train.
To the passengers' immediate right, a gentle Thuringen hill rose up—and stopped. Beyond it, a tree-covered American hill towered above it.
The train was approaching a line of cliffs, up ahead and to the right, with a gap between them. But whereas cliffs normally were at least a little rough in their surface, these cliffs were shiny-smooth. They reminded Pieter of the side of a marble baptismal font, or the face of a granite headstone.
After several minutes, the train made a half-right turn; the shiny cliffs, and the gap between them, slid to the left. The American cliffs came closer, and now Pieter could see that the cliff faces were striped with different colors of rock, in different widths. As Pieter moved still closer to the cliffs, at last he could see imperfection there: mud smears, soot, rust stains; most of the stone stripes lost their luster when viewed closely. And yet a few other stone stripes, even three years after the Ring of Fire, gleamed. Closer, ever closer Pieter's eyes came to these scattered, smooth bands of rock, and still they kept the shine of a stonemason's masterpiece, till they vanished from sight.
The train soon passed between the cliffs, moving through the gap that Pieter had spotted earlier. The America-Thuringia boundary was marked by a wooden sign to the left of the track that read, "Die Ringwand hier." Beyond the sign was a creek, and beyond the creek was a road that looked to be made of molded tar.
Soon after the train passed the Ring wall, it slowed, then turned sharply right. The gentle hills of Thuringia had allowed the entire train ride from Jena to be traveled in straight lines; but now past the Ring, the land was filled with steep hills. Rather than try to climb those hills, the train made S-turns to stay in the valleys between the hills.
But geography wasn't the only thing that was new and strange to Pieter.
Everything was different. The trees were different; the plants were different. Dots of yellow told Pieter that safflowers were growing wild here, but everything else was unfamiliar. A bird flew from one tree to another, its color a brilliant red that would make a dyemaster weep. A creature chased its fellow around a tree; both were shaped like squirrels, but they were bigger than any squirrel that Pieter had ever seen, and they were colored gray-and-yellow instead of red.
Anna Maria was sketching like a woman possessed.
* * *
Not twenty minutes later, at the Grantville train station, Anna Maria and her bodyguards hurried off toward the high school, riding in a genuine up-time "taxi." Meanwhile, the four Jenaites were leaving the Grantville train station for the police headquarters, riding in their own up-time taxi. Pieter had wanted to take a horse-drawn taxi, it being much cheaper, but Krebs had offered to pay the extra money.
In only a minute, the taxi had stopped in front of the "police station." Pieter and Krebs paid the driver.
Rolf Krebs looked over at Frau Küster and grinned. "Such a short trip! We didn't see much of Grantville, did we?" He laughed, and added, "I think I wasted my money."
* * *
While Krebs and Frau Küster were talking, Pieter looked around. And listened. And smelled.
The smell was different here. It was springtime, and perfume was in the air, but it was not a perfume Pieter had ever smelled before. But mixed with that perfume were alien smells, not made by either beasts or sweating men.
Pieter heard the clip-clop of a horse, along with the clatter of a wagon. That, at least, was familiar. But when the wagon moved out from behind a shiny-leafed tree, Pieter saw that on the side of the wagon was a sign in English. With a Star of David in a corner of the sign! So much for some things staying the same.
The police station was near a main road, and now moving along that main road was an ear-splitting noise. It had the same artificial sound as a truck or car, and was moving quickly enough to burst the heart of even the fastest horse. But when Pieter turned to look, the source of the racket turned out to be not a truck or car, but rather a bearded man astride a—a thing. A two-wheeled monstrosity that looked like an up-time bicycle's mean first cousin.
And Jeff Higgins had come to Jena in September 1631, riding on a metal beast such as that? No wonder the university students and refugees had listened to his preaching—who would have dared walk away?
Pieter felt completely overwhelmed by Grantville. One of these up-timers was a murderer, and to catch him, Pieter had to outthink him. But how could Pieter succeed at that, when these people's thoughts were so alien to him? For the first time in decades, Pieter felt unequal to the task before him.
Still, it was his task, for he had promised the Town Council he'd do it. Pieter might fail, and live out his days knowing that a murderer walked free; or he might suffer humiliation and be removed from this position. But no matter how abject his failure, he would never quit.
Thus resolved anew, Pieter picked up his bag of manacles and fetters, and then the four Jenaites walked toward the police building. Peter's ears still were ringing from being blasted by the bearded man's car-bicycle.
Chief Richards was a trim up-timer man, late thirties, with close-cut hair. Now he was asking a question in English, his eyes moving between Horst Brecht and Frau Küster.
Frau Küster, translating, said, "Chief Richards wants to know if Mr. Brecht remembers the license plate on the white truck he saw."
"No," Horst Brecht said. "Sorry."
Chief Richards shrugged. Then he looked at Pieter and said, "I think I know the man this paper describes."
Chief Richards picked up a telephone, and began talking as if to a person. Küster translated—
"Hello Ken, this is Press, how are you? . . . Great. Listen, I have some people here from Jena about Geri Kinney's murder, is Marlene there? . . . We'll want to talk to her, yes. And James Alec Wild, is he there? . . . I can't tell you, Ken, but we'll have to talk to Wild too. Did he, or did he not, take one of your trucks into Jena, two days ago? . . . So nail him to the floor till we get there. . . . We're rolling in a few, see you soon."
Chief Richards put down the telephone, and walked to a set of tall, metal, gray cabinets. He stopped in front of one cabinet, opened a drawer, plucked something from it, carried it to his desk, and opened it. He beckoned Pieter and Horst Brecht over. "Ist er euer Mann?" he asked.
On one shiny piece of paper were two shades-of-gray pictures of the same man. In one picture, his face was looking straight ahead; the other picture showed him in profile. In neither picture did he seem happy.
Brecht said, "Yes, it's him, I think. That's the man I've seen going to visit Miss Kinney."
Krebs came over and eyed the pair of pictures. "He looks familiar. I might have seen him once."
Pieter said to Chief Richards, "So you know this man? What is his name?"
Richards replied, "His name is James Alec Wild, and he is a convicted criminal. Convicted for assault."
Frau Küster didn't know that last term, and had to confer with Chief Richards. A minute later, Pieter had the sense of it: Wild had been tried for beating-up a man.
"Beating someone up was a crime up-time?" Krebs said. "Amazing."
Wild was tried and convicted up-time? I've found the killer, Pieter thought. "You said he was convicted. Why didn't you carry out the sentence?"
Richards said, "We did. He served all the years of his sentence, they released him from prison, and he came back to Grantville."
"Why didn't the up-time judge order him executed? Then Miss Kinney would still be alive."
Chief Richards gave Pieter a steely look. "That's not our way. We don't kill men, except after they kill. We also don't torture suspects."
"We stopped doing that," Pieter countered, "mainly because of you people. Now the Landschädlichen lie to us judges, and laugh in our faces. It makes our work harder, and puts dangerous men on the streets."
Frau Küster said, "Ahem, Your Honor, most respectfully? Sometimes men weren't tortured because they were landschädlich but only because they were poor. A poor man who says 'I didn't do it' is never believed." Frau Küster turned to Chief Richards and said, "If we know who this man in the pictures is, shouldn't we go talk to him now?"
"Yes," Chief Richards said in a flat voice, while glaring at Pieter. "Sure. Let's go."
Pieter hid his annoyance at Frau Küster with an indulgent smile. "A poor man, innocent and unjustly tortured? I doubt this happened often. The old laws had safeguards."
As soon as the police car had stopped moving and had quit making noise, Horst Brecht was out the door and was running toward two white trucks. He walked around the nearer white truck, then the farther, then he yelled, "This is it!"
Everyone rushed over. Brecht was pointing to the door on the truck's right side. The door had an irregular, bowl-sized indentation, which had green specks in it.
Brecht said, "I remember this. The first time I saw this door, I wondered, 'Why is it green there?'"
Chief Richards pulled a small book from his pocket, walked behind the truck, wrote something down, then put the book away. "Shall we go talk to everyone? Your Honor, best you leave the shackles in my trunk for now."
Marlene Kinney demanded, "Where is he? Where is this judge who can tell me about Geri's murder?"
James Wild worked for Ken Miller. But so did Marlene Kinney, mother of Geri—and it was Mrs. Kinney who now came bursting through the door and into Miller's office. Already there and waiting were Pieter and the other Jenaites, Chief Richards, and Miller. "Jimmy the Wildman" was on site, Miller had assured everyone; but at the moment, Wild was "unloading the Mennonite wagon."
Pieter said to Mrs. Kinney, "I am Pieter Freihofer. My condolences on your loss. I am doing my best to make sure that justice is done."
"Such as?"
"An up-timer, Mary Patricia Flanagan, examined your daughter's body, and took it to the medical school for further examination."
A nagging little uncertainty made Pieter not mention the blood under the fingernails that had excited Flanagan so much. Why did Miss Kinney turn her back on her killer, after she and Wild screamed at each other?
"Do you know who her killer is?" Mrs. Kinney asked Pieter.
At that moment, Horst Brecht's chair creaked as Pieter saw Brecht lean forward. Rolf Kreb's foot-wagging stopped.
Pieter replied, "I am not free to say. But there is someone here who might have answers for me."
Mrs. Kinney said, "I'm afraid you wasted a trip. Geri didn't write to me much, she couldn't telephone me—as if she would!—and my husband Gil is out of town."
Ken Miller said, "Marlene, they're here—mainly they came to talk to Jimmy."
She said, "Jimmy the shit? Why do they—?" Then Mrs. Kinney's face got angry, and she started yelling in English, using words that Frau Küster was unable to translate.
Chief Richards leaned over and murmured to Pieter, "Jimmy Wild was Geri Kinney's first customer, I think."
Mrs. Kinney turned on her employer and yelled something accusatory; Pieter caught the words Jimmy, truck, and Jena. Ken Miller shrugged, and Mrs. Kinney gave him a venomous look.
Then the door opened, and a blue-eyed man limped in. From Chief Richards's pictures, Pieter recognized the man as James Wild; but Wild's face looked five or ten years older than in the pictures.
Wild said, "Yeah, Ken, you need something?" His eyes were on his boss; he gave the Jenaites no more than a glance.
Mrs. Kinney rushed forward, with violence obviously on her mind; but Chief Richards grabbed her around the waist from behind. Mrs. Kinney could no longer move, but she could still yell; and again, Frau Küster missed words.
When Mrs. Kinney finally had quieted herself, Brecht said, "Ist er." He pointed to Wild.
Wild finally took notice of the Jenaites. He looked at Horst Brecht in puzzlement.
Which was not the way Pieter expected a murderer to react, being identified by a witness.
Pieter stood. He said, with Frau Küster translating, "I am Judge Pieter Freihofer, from Jena. I have a commission to investigate the murder of Geri Kinney." Pieter took out the commission, untied the ribbon, and showed the paper to Wild. Pieter pointed to the words Geri Kinney, and Wild's face got serious.
But what Wild's face did not show was fright, anger, or defiance, the usual reactions when a criminal met Pieter, his questioner. Pieter thought, Something is odd here.
Wild, meanwhile, was saying, "I guess you know I was there Monday, huh?"
Pieter turned to Mrs. Kinney—who was yelling and waving her hands around—and said, "Please, I must ask you to be quiet."
Chief Richards said something in a stern voice, and pointed to the door. Mrs. Kinney shot him a look, closed her mouth, and took her seat.
* * *
Pieter replied, "Yes, I know you were there Monday. Was that spur of the moment, or planned?"
Wild said, "Planned. Well, I had hardware to deliver in Jena, and I did that, and then I dropped in, unofficial, on Linda and the boys."
"Linda?"
"My ex-wife."
"And after you visited your ex-wife and your sons . . . ?"
"Instead of driving to Grantville, I went to Geri's place."
Mrs. Kinney muttered something that was probably an insult.
Pieter said, "So what happened during your visit with Miss Kinney?"
Wild said, "I paid her, and then she got busy..."
Or so Frau Küster translated his words. But judging by how red Mrs. Kinney's face was getting, Wild had said something quite different than those bland words.
Wild continued, ". . . and then we talked, and then somehow the talk turned into an argument, and then I left."
So far, Wild had been completely cooperative. But Pieter knew that was about to change. Pieter asked, "So what was the argument about?"
Wild frowned and crossed his arms. "Sorry, that's personal."
Pieter nodded, and set the question aside. Instead he asked, "What was Geri doing when you left?"
"Yelling at me down the stairs, loud enough to bust an eardrum. Very unladylike. She told me, she might not let me see her again."
"Hallelujah," Mrs. Kinney said.
Pieter asked Wild, "By 'down the stairs,' you mean the argument took place in the hallway outside Miss Kinney's apartment?"
"We started arguing and yelling in her apartment. But the screaming ended up in the hallway, yeah."
"Did anyone see this argument? Did anyone come out into the hallway while you two were yelling, or was already in the hallway?"
"I can't recall anyone. Nah, I'm pretty sure nobody was there."
Pieter again asked Wild, "So what was your argument about?"
"Hey, buster, I just told you, I'm not telling you shit. All that stuff is personal, and it doesn't matter for catching Geri's killer."
Again Pieter laid that question aside. "So what time did you get to Miss Kinney's place, and what time did you leave?"
Wild said, "Hm . . . I got there at four-fifteen exactly, according to the dashboard clock. She finished up in under ten minutes." Pieter noted Mrs. Kinney fuming, and decided that Frau Küster had cleaned up Wild's words again. Now Wild gave Mrs. Kinney a challenging look, and spoke again. "Geri did a great job that day. She proved herself master-level in her craft." The words, as Frau Küster translated them, were as bland as porridge, but Mrs. Kinney looked ready to leap across the room and kill Wild.
He finished up: "And then, five minutes after I zipped up my pants, somehow Geri and I were in the hallway, screaming at each other. I was back in my truck at four-thirty."
"Four-thirty exactly, or four-thirty about?"
"Exactly. Straight-up four-thirty."
"And how do you remember that?"
"Because I remember thinking at the time, 'That was sure a sorry-ass way to spend fifteen minutes. What the hell just happened?'"
"And what did just happen? What was the argument about?"
"Jesus Christ, you are one pushy kraut bastard! I'm not telling you that, got it?"
Rolf Krebs said to Wild, with Frau Küster translating, "I am not a violent man, but we 'krauts' are three to your one, up-timer. Show respect."
Pieter waited to see if a fight would break out. When none did, Pieter said to Wild, "And Miss Kinney was alive when you left?"
"Didn't I just say that?"
"So what is your relationship with Miss Kinney, beyond the merchant part?"
Wild said, "Well, I first met her in 1996, four years before the Ring fell. I was just out of—I had just come home, and Geri had just started hooking. Geri needed money, and I wasn't getting much action from Linda, so it worked out."
"You liar," said Mrs. Kinney. To Pieter she said, "That year '96 that he's trying to gloss over? My daughter was sixteen, and wrecked up from a broken heart." She said to Wild, "Geri would've quit selling herself and gone back to school, if not for you putting bills in her hand."
"Yeah, sure," Wild said. "You think I was the only guy with her, down at the swimming hole? I wasn't. And I never asked her to do any nasty pervert stuff, so cut me slack."
"Oh, you are a good, good man," Mrs. Kinney said sarcastically.
The two up-timers glared at each other. In the silence, Frau Küster turned to Pieter and murmured, "Geri Kinney chose this life?"
Pieter looked at Wild and said, "Ahem. To repeat my question, what was your relationship with Miss Kinney, beyond exchanging money for services?"
Wild said, "I liked her. Even though in '96 she looked like a witch—black clothing, black lipstick, black nail polish, ghost-white makeup. No offense, but if you Germans had gotten hold of her during the first few months after the Ring of Fire, you krauts woulda burned her at the stake soon as you saw her! And yet, she wasn't scary or freaky in '96 despite how she looked, she was nice. And"—Wild smirked at Mrs. Kinney—"I think Geri has always liked me back."
"You're dreaming, Jimmy," Mrs. Kinney said.
Pieter said, "I have no more questions." He saw Wild relax.
* * *
So what do I know? Pieter asked himself.
The facts were these: Geri Kinney had argued with Wild, had gotten him angry. And Wild was a dangerous man when angry. And then about this same time, Kinney had turned her back on a man, and had been killed. Which meant that either Kinney was a fool for trusting Wild, or Wild was not the killer. The problem was, Pieter had no evidence that Kinney was foolish, and Pieter had no other suspect.
Karl Strom, the law-school dean, had once said something that had flabbergasted Pieter: "The up-timers don't worry about fugitives." If someone ran away, the up-time policemen could send messages faster than the fugitive could move, so that the fugitive would run straight into other policemen. Radio-with-pictures told the general public to look for the fugitive. The up-time police even had special glasses that could see a man hiding in a tree at night!
As a result, so Dean Strom had explained to Pieter, up-timers arrested someone only when the police had "probable cause," which is what the up-timers called sufficient indication. Up-time, even a man strongly suspected of a crime, if the evidence wasn't yet there, was allowed to leave after questioning.
Oh, to be a judge in such a paradise! Pieter thought. Because in Germany of the seventeenth century, if a man ran, he was gone. As a result, judges in Germany imprisoned suspects as soon as they became suspects, until they were tried or until they were no longer suspects. If a judge thought that a witness might disappear, the judge would imprison the witness as well, pending trial.
So despite Pieter's new misgivings about Wild's guilt, Pieter now declared, with Frau Küster translating, "James Wild, a resident of Grantville, I arrest you for the murder of Geri Kinney, a resident of Jena."
Wild's face turned white. Mrs. Kinney started screaming at him. Chief Richards rushed over to Wild and put up-time manacles on Wild's wrists—in the process, blocking the still-yelling Mrs. Kinney from reaching Wild.
Wild yelled, "Marlene, I didn't kill Geri!"
And Pieter wondered whether he'd arrested the wrong man.
* * *
Pieter and Mrs. Kinney set a time tomorrow when they would meet at Geri's apartment in Jena. Then Chief Richards took James Wild and Pieter in his car to the police station, Wild in the back seat, Pieter in the front. The other Jenaites were left at Miller's Hardware for the moment.
At the police station, Chief Richards pressed Wild's fingers against an ink pad, then pressed them against a white paper that was made for such things. Both up-timers acted like this was familiar. Chief Richards explained to Pieter that any fingerprints found at a crime scene would now be compared to Wild's fingerprints on these fingerprint cards.
Chief Richards then unlocked a desk drawer, and brought out a box smaller than a woman's hand. Putting it to his face, he took photos of Wild, again in face-front and profile views.
"If he escapes from your prison, we'll have pictures of him to show people," Richards explained.
Chief Richards and Pieter went to the back, to put Wild in lockup till it was time to take him to the train station. Pieter knew well that the prison at Jena was a dark and foul-smelling place; but the Grantville jail had no smell, and was lit as brightly as sunlight. The chief explained that the metal object in the corner of the cell was for bodily wastes.
With Wild put away, the chief glanced at his watch. "I have a little more paperwork to do before you and your prisoner leave, but I can finish that after I bring your people back here."
Chief Richards and Pieter, in the police car, found Frau Küster in the hardware-store parking lot, quite alone. "Those two boys are still inside," she laughed. "I'll go drag them out, but I might need help from the army."
A minute later, the three young people were approaching the police car. Rolf Krebs was carrying a strangely shaped black box with a metal red flag attached to it. "What is that?" Pieter asked, as Chief Richards opened the police car's back door.
"A genuine up-time-style mailbox," Krebs replied, as he, Brecht, and Frau Küster got into the back seat. "I write many letters to a young woman in Magdeburg, and so I need a sturdy mailbox."
Frau Küster smirked. "Your Honor, do you know what I found these two talking with Mr. Miller about, just now? Strongboxes! Mr. Miller has many pretty wooden yard ornaments, and these two were asking him about strongboxes!"
Brecht replied, "Because Mr. Miller sells the best strongboxes I've ever seen."
"They made even better ones up-time," Krebs added. "Is it true, Chief Richards, that the up-time strongboxes with spinning wheels on the front, nobody could break into them?"
The chief answered, "Yes and no. Even the best ones can be broken into, but you need to know how, have the right tools, and be patient."
On a desk that was in a corner of the room were several boxes connected by black ropes, along with a palm-sized, round-topped box, which had a gray rope. While sitting at that desk, Chief Richards moved the round-topped box around, and stared at the box that was in front of his face, which showed a changing picture. Two of the boxes on the desk made steady sounds.
Pieter and the youngsters watched all this in fascination.
Chief Richards did something to the round-topped box, and said "Done." One of the sound-making boxes got louder.
A minute later, that box pushed a piece of paper out. Chief Richards grabbed it and handed it to Pieter, who passed it to Frau Küster. Other than Wild's full name, which was underneath his two pictures, Pieter couldn't read it.
Horst Brecht said, "These pictures were made today?"
The chief smiled. "They were made while he was buying a mailbox."
Krebs started untying his money pouch from his belt. "Chief, I will pay you almost anything you can ask, if you make a picture of the four of us."
The chief's smile vanished. "The digital camera and the computer are for police business. I'm not running a tourist business here, kid."
Pieter said, "Chief, if your price is reasonable, I will pay the same amount, plus postage, for you to mail a picture to me in Jena."
When Chief Richards still looked rebellious, Pieter leaned down and murmured, "The truth is, I will be telling my nieces and nephews about this day for years to come. And has there ever been a government office in the history of the world that didn't need more money?"
Fifteen minutes later, Pieter smiled as Frau Küster wrote her name by her face—front row, left—in Rolf Krebs's picture.
"I did not kill Geri Kinney," Wild said, as soon as Pieter walked into the cell. "I would never hurt her."
Pieter knew better than to agree or to disagree with those statements. Instead, he said, "Please remove your shirt."
As Wild was pulling his shirt over his head, he asked, "Ain't I entitled to a lawyer?"
Pieter lifted up his lamp to light the right side of Wild's face. "Certainly you're entitled. If you wish to hire an attorney, we will let him visit you whenever he wishes." Pieter was looking for the scratches that Miss Kinney had made in her killer's skin.
Pieter saw no scratches on Wild's face. Pieter moved his lamp down near Wild's neck.
Wild said, "I ain't talking about hiring a lawyer. I can't afford that. I'm talking about Jena, or the SoTF, or USE, or somebody pays for my lawyer because I can't."
Pieter saw no scratches on Wild's neck.
Pieter replied, "That's right, you Americans did that up-time, didn't you? Well, the answer to your question is no. Jena can't afford to hire your attorney."
Pieter walked around Wild, holding the lamp close to Wild's arms.
Wild had no scratches on his hands, and none on his right arm. Pieter even checked Wild's left arm. No scratches.
This complicated Pieter's life. The killer, whoever he was, had to have scratches on him.
Maybe the light isn't good enough, Pieter thought. He got the jailer to let him out of Wild's cell, got a second lamp, and brought both lamps back.
With twice as much yellow light on Wild's skin, Pieter still could see no hint of scratches.
When the jailer answered the pounding of the door the second time, Pieter told him, "Bring fetters here; I wish to take the prisoner outside."
Minutes later, the jailer and a pike-carrying guardsman returned. Wild's ankles were shackled, and he, Pieter, and the pikeman went outside.
By sunlight, Pieter saw that Wild had a tattoo of a dragon that covered his entire back and then went over his shoulder and onto his chest, while the dragon's tail went around his waist. It was impressive, actually. But what Wild had no mark of, no sign of, not even a hint of, were fingernail scratches made by a healthy young woman who had been fighting for her life.
Pieter realized: He is not the killer.
Since Pieter had told Wild that he wouldn't be given a free attorney, Wild had said nothing. Now Pieter asked him, "Is there nothing else you wish to say to me?"
"Depends," Wild said. "Did Chief Richards tell you that I . . . ?"
"That you were imprisoned for a violent crime? Yes, I was told."
"Mount Olive Correctional. Which means, anything I say now, can and will be used to fuck me over."
"Tell me again, what you want from me?" Marlene Kinney said.
Mrs. Kinney had met Pieter at the Jena train station, and he had walked her over to Geri Kinney's apartment building. Pieter had just unlocked the hallway door with Geri's key then dropped that key into a pouch as he and Mrs. Kinney walked into the apartment. Mrs. Kinney was carrying a large but slim blue box by its blue handle.
As Pieter shut the door, he answered Mrs. Kinney: "Tell me if anything is amiss. Please inform me if you see something you expect not to see, or if you don't see something you expect."
"That won't work, Your Honor."
"Oh?" Pieter said. He was now lighting the oil lamp that was on the table.
"Do you have family, Your Honor?"
"No. I have no close family." There was a story behind that, but this was not the time to tell it.
Mrs. Kinney said, "My daughter is twenty-three—was twenty-three. She's been a stranger to me since she was thirteen, and I haven't talked to her hardly at all in the last two years."
Pieter's heart sank. "Hardly at all?"
"Gilbert and I helped her move to here, in '32. After that, she didn't want me to come here. To be truthful, I didn't push it—Lord knows what I'd find here."
"So did you talk to her at all in the last two years?"
"Oh, once a month she'd come to Grantville for a hair trim, and usually she'd let me know ahead of time. But sometimes the only way I'd know she'd come and gone was Cora or Velma or Veda saying something snotty."
"I'm sorry for that."
Mrs. Kinney sighed. "Enough. I got work to do here." She took two steps while carrying her blue box, stopped, and looked at Pieter. "Will I know where she died here? Did she bleed?"
Pieter said, "She didn't bleed. You won't know unless I tell you."
Mrs. Kinney shook her head fiercely, and then walked into her daughter's bedroom. Pieter followed, carrying the oil lamp.
In the bedroom, the wardrobe stood in a corner. At the room's opposite corner, a small table had a chair on one side of it and a big mirror attached to the other side of it; on the table were two of those box lanterns with rotating handles like Flanagan had used. The bed was clearly up-time.
Mrs. Kinney did something to the box she'd carried in. There were two snap sounds, and the blue box split open on the bed, creating two large but shallow tubs.
Mrs. Kinney walked to the mirror table, picked up one of the up-time lanterns, spent a minute rotating its handle to make it purr, and then made it shine.
She walked over to the wardrobe and opened its doors. She pointed to the inside of one of the open wardrobe doors. "This is what Geri looked like, from age thirteen till late 1631."
The giant color photograph showed three young men and a young woman. All four had black clothing, black hair, night-black lips, night-black fingernails, and snow-white faces. Two men held stringed instruments whose shape could only be described as an unholy parody of a Spanish guitar; each guitar even had a long black tail going down to the floor. Pieter couldn't tell what the woman was holding to her mouth, but it also had a black tail. The drums, at least, Pieter understood. At the top of the picture was printed the English word Futility—but the two ts had each been replaced with a photograph of a stone cemetery cross.
Stunned, Pieter said, "They look like a witch and three sorcerers."
"They do, don't they?" Mrs. Kinney said. "No, they're musicians."
Minutes passed. One by one, Mrs. Kinney was removing items of clothing, folding them, and putting them in the suitcase. On the bed a pile of hangers was growing.
Mrs. Kinney reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a long-sleeved wool garment that was pale pink. "I'm surprised Geri brought this here."
"Why?"
Mrs. Kinney was pulling the garment off the hanger. "Because she hated the color—" Mrs. Kinney looked surprised. "Something's inside this sweater."
She finished removing the garment. Revealed was a pouch made of blue-jeans cloth, that hung from the hanger's horizontal part by two looped straps. Mrs. Kinney pulled on the nearer end of each strap and, with a great ripping sound, it came free.
Seeing Pieter's reaction, she said, "That's Velcro. It's supposed to sound like that."
"What does Velcro do? Besides make noise."
"When you touch something with Velcro on it to something else with Velcro on it, the two things stick together. It's real useful."
Once the pouch was free of the hanger, she pulled on the front of the pouch, and with another r-r-rip, it opened. She reached a hand in, and pulled out—
—a lot of green USE bills. A minute later, she told Pieter, "There's five hundred ninety dollars here."
"What about men who didn't pay in paper money? There are no coins in that pouch, right?"
She shook it. "You're right, no coins here." She stood up from the bed, picked up the up-time lantern, and swung its beam around. "She'd keep the coins in that."
The light was shining on a large and strange-looking, tan-painted metal box. The front had a painted metal door, and in the middle of the door was a red round thing with numbers and marks on it. "My god," Mrs. Kinney.
"What? What's wrong?"
She stepped toward the box. "See the door on the safe? Someone tried to break in."
"Don't go any closer!" Pieter said. When she froze in place, he asked, "Now please tell me what that box is, and what do you see wrong with it?"
"That's her safe. The safe that Geri bought in Morgantown in 1999. It's a, it's an up-time . . . it's an up-time strongbox. See that round thing on the front? You spin that around, and if you do it right, you can open the door."
"But otherwise the door won't open, no matter what?"
"Yeah. It's a fire safe, which isn't as good against thieves, but still, see the door, the top edge and the side edge? The paint's chipped and scratched. Somebody tried to crowbar his way in."
In Pieter's head, church bells were going off. "Mrs. Kinney, you said, 'up-time strongbox'?"
"Um, yes," she said, clearly puzzled by his intensity.
Pieter picked up the other up-time lantern, made it purr for a minute, then walked up next to Mrs. Kinney. Sure enough, someone had worked on the safe, but had not popped open the door, or even deformed it.
Then Pieter got an idea. "Put your light on the floor," he said to Mrs. Kinney, as he squatted down and floored his own light.
The late Geri Kinney had not been a good housekeeper; the floor around the safe was dusty. By the low-angled light from the two lamps was revealed dustless ruts that showed that the safe had been pushed or dragged toward the bedroom door. The light on the dust also showed many copies of a man's shoeprints surrounding the safe. The footprints were where Pieter would stand if he tried to pick up the safe.
"How heavy is that safe?" Pieter asked.
"A hundred fifty pounds, empty. Gil and Joey had the devil's time getting it up the stairs."
Pieter moved the two up-time lamps this way and that way, but always at floor level. The lights revealed that the shoeprints right by the safe were smeared from sliding sideways, or trampled on each other—with one exception.
One shoeprint, two feet away from the safe and near the wall, was perfect—when lit from floor level.
Pieter, taking care to avoid the perfect shoeprint, walked up to the safe. He used his two lights to inspect the safe, hoping for visible fingerprints. No luck.
He looked over at where he knew the perfect shoeprint was. By regular light, it was again invisible. Think like Nurse Flanagan, he told himself. How would Nurse Flanagan capture a shoeprint made out of dust?
Pieter gave Mrs. Kinney her up-time lantern back, and put his own back on the table. As he did so, he thought, Now I have a motive for murder, and only two suspects. But which one did it, Horst or Rolf?
* * *
Five minutes later the suitcase was much more full, as Mrs. Kinney was muttering something in English as she was folding a dress. Pieter caught the words Geri, Jimmy, and safe. Mrs. Kinney put the folded, bright-red dress in the suitcase, walked over to the wardrobe, and picked up something from the bottom.
What Mrs. Kinney had picked up was a yellowing copy of an English-language newspaper, the Jena World. But as she was carrying it to the bed, things fell out of it.
Mrs. Kinney gathered them up: Six coverless thin books, each showing on the front a color photograph of a slim and barely-dressed young woman, lots of English-language words, and at the top in big letters, the English word COSMOPOLITAN.
"Aha, something else Jimmy missed!"
Pieter said, "What are they?"
Mrs. Kinney sighed. "These are copies of Cosmo, an up-time magazine for young women who, um, are sexually active. Every issue has many advertisements showing beautiful women who are dressed sexy. Two years ago, right after Geri cut off her black hair, she started buying up copies of Cosmo—"
"Why?"
"To show the pictures to seamstresses in Jena, so they'd copy the clothing for her." Mrs. Kinney looked away. "After all, what says 'I'm a high-priced up-time whore' better than dressing like a Cosmo Girl?"
"So are these magazines valuable?"
"Valuable? In '32, Geri told me she had to spend nearly all the cash she had, just to buy these six copies. Now in '34, if I sold these magazines, I could feed everyone in this building for a year with the money."
Mrs. Kinney dropped the Cosmopolitans into the suitcase, closed it and carried it to the bedroom door.
She glanced at the open wardrobe, then said, "I still got more clothes to pack up," as she walked to the head of the bed. She grabbed a pillow—
—and green-and-black things fluttered to the floor.
While Mrs. Kinney was dumping the pillow out of the pillowcase, Pieter rushed over to pick up the green things. They were two twenty-dollar bills.
"What's forty dollars doing under her pillow?" Mrs. Kinney asked.
Pieter thought, That's an excellent question.
"Let's see if there's more money around here," Pieter said.
He looked under the other pillow. Pieter dumped that other pillow out, and looked in its pillowcase. He and Mrs. Kinney shook out the blanket and each of the two sheets. They lifted up the mattress. They pushed the bed away from the wall. Pieter grabbed the other up-time lantern off the mirror table and looked under the bed. Not one more pfennig was found.
Pieter had been thinking. Now he said, "Mrs. Kinney, the material in the money pouch that makes the ripping sound—"
"The Velcro?"
"Would Mr. Wild recognize that sound if he heard it? Would he know that he wasn't hearing cloth ripping?"
"Sure, any up-timer older than four would know that sound."
"Hmm," Pieter said.
Mrs. Kinney whipped her head around and eyed the bed. She asked, "Did you find an up-time gun while you were searching the bed? Under a pillow, on the floor, anywhere at all?"
"No. Was I supposed to?"
Pieter and Mrs. Kinney went through the motions of searching the bed again but—no surprise—didn't find an up-time gun.
"Geri had a leather holster for the gun," Mrs. Kinney said. "That's missing too."
* * *
After the stolen handgun and the mysteriously appearing twenty-dollar bills, there were no more unpleasant surprises.
Half an hour after Pieter had discovered the hidden forty dollars, Mrs. Kinney had filled both pillowcases. The pillowcases, as well as the suitcase, were by the hallway door. As Pieter was putting the oil lamp back on the table, he saw Kreb's pen-and-ink drawing there.
Pieter picked up the drawing and gave it to Mrs. Kinney. He explained, "This was left here by Rolf Krebs, one of the two young men who came to Grantville yesterday."
She unfolded the drawing and looked at the drawing of the rose and candle; her eyes widened. "Wow. This is so sweet. This Mr. Krebs, was he . . . ?" One of my daughter's sex customers? was what Mrs. Kinney couldn't make herself say.
Pieter nodded.
She sighed. "I feel a hundred different emotions right now." She was silent for a long time, as she looked at the drawing, and as tears ran down her face. At last she said, "Nobody in Grantville was this nice to Geri."
Pieter thought, Then I hope for your sake that Rolf Krebs isn't the man who killed her.
Mrs. Kinney turned her wet face toward Pieter. "Fact is, Geri was always a victim. People in Grantville were always acting mean to Geri, because she was different. Why? She seldom did drugs, she just dressed weird! Is that so wrong?"
"Perhaps she was a victim, yet it seems it was her choice to become a prostitute."
Mrs. Kinney slapped the table. "How dare you? Geri was a victim! She wouldn't have dropped out of school and become a—become a whore, if not for that boy Philip, who broke her heart and laughed at her! And once she started doing you-know-what, Jimmy Wild was always there with money, to lure her into keeping that life. And then Gil . . ."
Mrs. Kinney had stopped speaking; Pieter prompted, "And then Gil . . . ?"
Mrs. Kinney now was looking at the oil lamp, not at Pieter. "My husband Gil was not a good father to Daphne or Geri." She saw Pieter's face and added, "It's not what you think. Gil isn't a pervert, he's just a complete bum of a father. He's a bully. And maybe I should have—"
Someone knocked several times on the hallway door. Before either Pieter or Mrs. Kinney could stand up, the door opened and Horst Brecht stepped in. His eyes went wide when he saw Pieter. "Your Honor! I didn't know you were here—"
"Obviously. Why are you here, then?"
Brecht squirmed. "I saw that the policeman was gone, and I heard a woman's voice—I didn't know it was you, Mrs. Kinney, honestly!—and so I thought the apartment had already been rented out, and I came to warn the new people about the murder here."
Pieter put on his I-believe-you face and said, "Mrs. Kinney, may I present Horst Brecht? Of course you recognize him as the other young man from yesterday."
Mrs. Kinney said, "Were you . . . ?"
"The person who found your daughter and reported her homicide, yes," Brecht said.
Pieter thought, That wasn't the question Mrs. Kinney was asking. Were you aware of that, Brecht?
Aloud, Pieter said, "I told the policeman to take lunch, while I'm in Miss Kinney's apartment with her mother. But your thoughtfulness for the new tenant is commendable."
Red-faced Brecht said, "Um, thanks. I'll be going now. Mrs. Kinney, my condolences. Goodbye." Two seconds later, the door shut behind him.
* * *
As soon as Horst shut the hallway door, Pieter stood up. "Mrs. Kinney, thank you for examining your daughter's property with me. May I carry your things to the train station?"
Mrs. Kinney waved a hand in agreement, but then said, "Your Honor, what happens now? When will you bring Jimmy to court?"
Pieter might still need Mrs. Kinney's help, so he wasn't about to say I don't intend to put Mr. Wild on trial. Pieter instead said, "My investigation isn't yet finished. For instance, soon I must talk to Mary Patricia Flanagan, who examined your daughter's body."
Mrs. Kinney said, "Mary Patri—? Oh right, she's . . . a nurse, right?" Then Mrs. Kinney's eyes went wide. "There's something she needs to know. Something she'll want to know," Mrs. Kinney said, as she was reaching into her purse. She pulled out a pencil and piece of paper. She scribbled something, and then shoved the paper toward Pieter.
Mrs. Kinney looked Pieter in the eyes. "Please give this to Mary—uh, to Nurse Flanagan. It's very important."
* * *
Pieter walked Mrs. Kinney from her daughter's apartment to the train station. He then said goodbye to Mrs. Kinney, but he didn't immediately leave the train station. Instead, he went to the station telegraph office. Pieter sent Police Chief Richards a telegram.
JAMES WILD NOT MURDERER
ONE OF TWO MEN I BROUGHT YESTERDAY IS MURDERER IF PHOTO NOT ALREADY SENT I NEED IT FAST FAST FAST KILLER TRIED TO OPEN GERI KINNEY'S SAFE ASK MR. MILLER WHO STARTED TALK YESTERDAY ABOUT SAFES
Pieter had explained to Mary Patricia Flanagan about the shoeprint in the dust. Now he asked, "So do you know any up-time tricks to capture it?"
"Depends. Can you see it when you're looking straight down at it?"
"No."
"There's no mud in the shoeprint, no dirt, nothing a different color?"
"Everything's gray dust."
She shook her head. "We could capture it with enough tape, yes, and transfer it to paper, yes. But if it's all dust and you can't see any of it, what's the point?"
Sighing, Pieter changed the subject: "So did your up-time tests on Miss Kinney's body uncover much new information?"
Flanagan made a fist, and slapped it against her hip. "Hardly any. There wasn't enough blood under her nails for us to type, and forget DNA profiling! We can do neither X-rays nor tox screens—well, except for alcohol. I can tell you that she wasn't raped, and that's the only new info I have. Basically, I got your hopes up, and wasted people's time. I'm sorry."
Pieter gave her a reassuring smile. "You needn't apologize for not solving my case for me."
She sighed. "But if we were back in the year 2000, there's so much more that I could tell you!"
Pieter smiled again. "But if this were the year 2000, I'd be long buried, so it wouldn't matter whether you told me or not."
She smiled, for a second, then went back to her frustration-face. "There's a blood test that it's very important that we give her, but we can't, here and now. And because we can't, people might die."
Both Flanagan and Mrs. Kinney had used the same words, very important. Noting this, Pieter loosened the strings of his pouch, pulled out Mrs. Kinney's paper, and handed it to Flanagan. Pieter asked, "Does this help?"
Whatever was on the paper made Flanagan happy. "This is an answer to prayer!" she exclaimed.
"It is?" Pieter said. "What does it say?"
Pieter of course didn't understand most of what Flanagan told him next, but he got this much: A sexually transmitted disease came to America from Africa in 1980. By then, the Americans had erased smallpox and polio (Flanagan said casually), but this African disease laughed at American physicians. The only good news: It was possible to prevent catching the virus, and not everyone who got the virus got the disease.
So why was Flanagan now so happy? Because in March of 2000, Geri Kinney got tested for this virus. At the end of March, 2000, Geri got her test results back. As of one month before the Ring of Fire, she officially did not carry this sexual-disease virus.
Which meant, in turn, that this up-time disease had stayed up-time; Geri Kinney had not brought it to the seventeenth century.
An epidemic had been averted.
Pieter was pacing the floor in the front hallway. When he heard the door knocker, he rushed to answer the door.
Standing there was a youth, flushed with exertion. Beyond him, at the bottom of Pieter's front steps, was a downtime bicycle.
The boy held a telegram in his hand. Pieter tipped him well for bringing it.
PHOTO ALREADY SENT
SPECIAL DELIVERY
YOU WILL GET TOMORROW
KEN MILLER SAYS HE FIRST TO MENTION SAFES
HE DOESN'T REMEMBER WHO SPOKE NEXT
SORRY
HAVE YOU RELEASED WILD
Pieter thought, Thor's hammer, I'd better answer this quickly! He jerked open the door, ready to run out to the street and call the boy back.
But Pieter needn't have worried. The bicycle remained by his front steps, and the boy was astride the bicycle, looking up at Pieter expectantly. "Yes, sir, do you wish to send a reply?"
When Pieter nodded, the boy took off the knapsack he was wearing, and from it removed a telegram form. Pieter filled out the form.
WILD IS HELD NOW AS WITNESS
HAVE NOT TOLD WILD HE NO LONGER SUSPECT
JAILER MIGHT TALK
Pieter and the boy both counted the words, and then the boy quoted a fee.
"That's more than I was charged at the railroad station!" Pieter said.
"Yes, sir. But you're paying for convenience."
"And how do I know you won't try to steal the money?"
"See here? Every blank is numbered. If I don't turn in the blank and its money, I'll go up before a judge."
"You're up before a judge right now. See to it that this telegram gets sent promptly."
The boy gulped, leaped onto his bicycle, and sped away.
Once Pieter had received the photograph that Chief Richards had sent by special delivery, Pieter had dashed to City Hall. Once inside the building, Pieter had hurried straight to the room where Frau Küster and other clerks worked.
"Your Honor," Frau Küster said, "it's good to see you again."
Frau Küster and the other clerks worked in a big room that was lit only by windowlight and a candle on each desk. The more senior clerks sat with their backs to the windows, and sat facing the more junior clerks. Pieter had been in rooms like this all his life, and had never before thought them to be lacking; but now he thought, This room is too dark. It's gloomy in here. In Chief Richards's office, Pieter could have stood anywhere and read a book without eyestrain; now it seemed unchristian to keep anyone working in the dark.
Frau Küster was one of the junior clerks laboring in deeper darkness. On her desk, Pieter could barely see an up-time-printed document in English, and next to it was a paper on which she was making notes in German about "water treatment." Frau Küster's penmanship was awful.
Pieter said, "Frau Küster, I have a favor to ask of you."
"Name it," she said, grinning at him. "After taking me to Grantville, I will do anything for you."
"The matter is delicate. Please come with me outside."
Seconds later, they both were blinking in the sunlight, as Pieter pulled the photograph from its yellowish-tan mailing envelope. He and Frau Küster spent several delightful minutes sharing their impressions of the town from the future.
At one point, Pieter was chuckling. "And the faster that man went, the louder his machine got! I thought to myself, 'Grantville will make me deaf for the rest of my life!'"
She laughed. "Oh, a motorcycle is loud, I agree. But when I saw Jeff Higgins riding his, my thought was, 'How is the American making it not fall over?'"
Frau Küster was still smiling when Pieter turned to stare at an oak tree. He said, "When Mr. Wild was talking about acts he performed with Miss Kinney, he used many vulgar terms of English that related to prostitutes and sex acts. I know they were vulgar, because they angered Mrs. Kinney to hear them. Yet you knew every word. You didn't pause, or stammer, or act uncertain. That speaks well for your drive to master English."
She was silent for a time, and Pieter could only guess at the expression on her face. At last she said, "I am blessed to have this job. I want to do well at it."
Pieter nodded, then said, "I have a problem: The murderer tried very hard to steal Miss Kinney's safe from her bedroom." Of course, Pieter had to use the English word.
"I, um, do not know that word, safe. Not as you use it."
"It's an up-time strongbox. It's made all of steel, and it's heavy. It has a door, and uses a spinning wheel to somehow keep that door locked."
Her eyes went wide. "Mr. Krebs and Mr. Brecht—"
"Exactly. One of them was trying to trick information out of Mr. Miller. One of them is the murderer."
"That's terrible," she said. Then she asked, "So how can I help you?"
Pieter turned to gaze at the oak tree again. "There was a time, not so long ago, when Jena was bursting with women who would sell themselves for a piece of bread."
Her voice was wary: "Yes, before God brought the Americans and they drove the evildoers away."
He nodded. "You are a married woman and a city clerk, very respectable, but I'm hoping that you know women who were prostitutes in those troubled times."
Again, her voice was wary: "I . . . know several such women, yes."
Pieter turned to look at her, as he pushed the photograph and envelope into her hands. "This is yours to keep, regardless. But I ask you to show it to all those unfortunate women, and ask them if they recognize either of these men."
Frau Küster looked puzzled. "Why? Do you think a former refugee prostitute saw Miss Kinney's murder?"
"No. But a man who would kill one prostitute might well have hurt others. Especially when the woman he hurt didn't dare fight back." Pieter then tapped his finger on Horst Brecht's face and then Rolf Krebs's. "I have two suspects. That is one too many."
She nodded, and then her chin went up. "Count on me. Any man who hurts a starving woman is worth less than a grain rat, and any man who kills a woman deserves the wheel."
Anna Maria von Schurmann and her bodyguards had dropped in to pay Pieter an unexpected visit. Now she was gushing, ". . . a day, two at the most, then on to Magdeburg, that was the plan, but Grantville is fascinating, and so now I'm here only to collect my things, and I'll be spending the next month at the Inn of The Maddened Queen, and that place is a story in itself, and I feel so fortunate to visit a place like Grantville!"
Pieter smiled. "Well, you saw more of it than I did. I went there, questioned a man, arrested him, and brought him back."
She nodded. "It's the talk of Grantville. He's an up-timer."
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to discuss the case."
"Then let me show you what you missed in Grantville." She gave an order to one of her men, who rushed out the front door and returned a minute later with her sketchpad. Anna Maria said, "I bought this right here in Jena. Tuesday evening it was empty, but look at it now!"
The sketchpad was close to complete. The first three sketches were of Pieter himself, sitting on a train seat; Frau Küster pointing out a train window, her face excited; and Rolf Krebs sitting and laughing about something, while next to him, Horst Brecht sat looking solemn. Next came sketches of the Ring cliffs, from a distance; the Ring cliffs, seen close; a many-windowed up-time building that the train had passed near, with up-time and down-time children playing in front; and then finally Grantville buildings, scenery, and people that Pieter didn't recognize.
She explained all her sketches, so it was almost as if Pieter had toured Grantville with her. Minutes later, she was saying, "I drew this one, sitting in my chair at a table at the SoTF State Library." Seconds later, she turned the page in the sketchpad, and a sheet of up-time paper with up-time printing fell to the floor.
Pieter couldn't read the English, but he recognized the write-up's illustration. "Is that you?" he said.
She nodded. "An older version of me, and I'm remembered by my Dutch name." She added in a tone of wonder, "Up-time history remembers me as an exceptional woman scholar. This paper tells everything I ever did in the other seventeenth century, and it's a long list." She looked in Pieter's eyes. "Leaving me to ask myself, 'What do I do now?'"
At that moment, Pieter's housekeeper entered the parlor. "You have callers, Your Honor: Pastor Eberhard Bartsch and his wife, Mari Küster." The housekeeper added, her disapproval only partly masked, "They insist she be allowed to talk to you."
"What's wrong, Minna?"
Minna sniffed. "For a so-called Lutheran pastor, his clothing is shabby."
Seconds later, stone-faced Minna was leading Frau Küster and a man into Pieter's parlor. Frau Küster was holding the tan up-time envelope that Pieter had given to her only hours before.
"Your Honor, I messed up, and I'm very sorry," Frau Küster said. "But first, let me introduce my husband Eberhard Bartsch, pastor of Jesus the Carpenter Lutheran Church."
She said that proudly, which was puzzling. Jesus the Carpenter Lutheran Church had the poorest congregation in Jena, and was undoubtedly a punishment assignment for pastors.
Pieter's first thought was, What did you do to make someone angry at you? Instead, he tactfully said, "Well, you're young yet."
Bartsch replied, "Yes, Your Honor, I was ordained a little less than a year ago. But I asked for Jesus the Carpenter, please know."
Pieter didn't know what to make of that. So he smiled and said, "I've never met a saint before."
"Not so, Your Honor, I'm chief among sinners. But God used my sin and weakness to give me a wonderful woman and a holy mission." Bartsch smiled at his wife.
Anna Maria asked, "Is Jesus the Carpenter Lutheran in a good part of town?"
"No, ma'am, it's in the dangerous part of town," Bartsch replied.
"I . . . see."
Before things could get more embarrassing for someone, Pieter asked, "So why have you come here, Frau Küster?"
She opened the envelope and took out the picture that Chief Richards had made of the four Jenaites. The image was wrinkled, and blotched with brown on the left side. It was also torn. Frau Küster said, "The wind caught it, and blew it out of my hand into a mud puddle, and before I could pick it up, a horse stepped on it and tore it. I'm so sorry."
"What a remarkable picture," Anna Maria said. "I would love to make art like that." Then she thought of something: "This is just a souvenir, right? Of your trip to Grantville? So why did she come here to apologize for ruining it?"
"I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to discuss that," Pieter said.
"Wait, this picture is part of your murder investigation?"
This woman is way too sharp. "Let me say only that it is vital that Frau Küster be able to show a picture of these two young men to certain people in Jena." Pieter then said to Frau Küster, "I'll go send a telegram to Chief Richards as soon as I can, asking him to send another picture. When I get it, I'll inform you."
"Why trouble him?" Anna Maria said. "If this drawing is important, then time is important, and you have an alternative."
"I do? What?"
"Maarten, go get my drawing supplies. Hurry!" As one of Anna Maria's bodyguards rushed out the front door, she went to her sketchpad, found the drawing she'd made of Rolf Krebs and Horst Brecht, and tore it out. "I didn't take time to detail their faces," Anna Maria said. "But now I think that between the three of us and this up-time picture, I can draw how they look."
* * *
With charcoal for drawing and wax balls for erasing nearby, Anna Maria was bent over the drawing of Krebs and Brecht. She was filling in facial features, as her bodyguards and Pastor Bartsch watched.
Anna Maria asked Pieter, "You won't tell me why I'm drawing these two men?"
"That's correct, I can say nothing." Pieter pointed. "His eyes need to be just a tiny bit farther apart."
"I think they're okay," she said.
"She's right, Your Honor," Frau Küster said. "Right now, his eyes look perfect."
"Make his nose a little thinner," Pieter said.
"I agree," Frau Küster said.
"Not even a hint why?" Anna Maria asked.
* * *
Anna Maria finished the drawing in time for her and her bodyguards to catch the afternoon train back to Grantville, though without much time to spare. Frau Küster and Pastor Bartsch had already departed with the new drawing when Anna Maria stood in Pieter's front hallway. Anna Maria eyed Pieter and said, "This has been so exciting, helping investigate a murder. If there's any other way I can help, send me a telegram at the Inn of the Maddened Queen."
"Come now. Once you return to Grantville, you'll forget Jena exists."
She shook her head. "This murder, it matters, to her family at least. Listen, I'm eager to attend the salon that the Encyclopedia Society is hosting next Friday; but send me a message to help you, and I'll skip that salon without a second thought."
Rather than tell her That will never happen, Pieter said politely, "I'll keep that in mind."
Pastor Bartsch and Frau Küster paid Pieter a second visit—but this time, their faces wore smiles. Frau Küster greeted him with "The two suspects are now only one." She was pointing to a face in Anna Maria's sketch.
"So what have you discovered about Rolf Krebs and Horst Brecht?"
After she told him, Pieter said, "I can't believe I'm saying this, but—shall we walk to the Freedom Arches on this beautiful May morning?"
On the walk across town, Pieter remarked, "I'm sure there are plenty of sinners for you to preach to, there at the Freedom Arches."
Frau Küster smiled. "Plenty, yes. Of course, it helps that we're active in the Committees of Correspondence, and that Eberhard teaches reading at the Freedom Arches on Monday. The poor in Jena know us."
Pieter shook his head at the oddness of life. I'm headed to the Freedom Arches of all places, in the company of a religious fanatic and a former refugee prostitute. What will my friends say?
Who said Lutheran pastors were dull? Pieter thought.
Pastor Bartsch was preaching to him. "As Jesus died for both Gustav II Adolf and for Lazarus the beggar, so did the Americans recently give the vote to both Michael Stearns and to Gretchen Richter—a woman and a one-time refugee."
"And former camp whore," Frau Küster added.
Bartsch nodded. "So you see, Your Honor, God's plan for mankind's redemption, applied to government—that's what democracy is."
Pieter held up a hand. "This discussion has been fascinating, but now I need to think about catching that murderer."
The Freedom Arches was located at the intersection of two streets. On one street or the other were small groups of tough-looking men, and a few women, who all stopped their conversations to eye Pieter. Pieter noticed that even the so-called drunks who clutched bottles watched him alertly. Several of the tough men standing on the street began to drift toward him, and they all looked ready to fight.
And then they stopped moving, and their faces and postures relaxed. Some.
Startled, Pieter looked around. His two companions were making a gesture of thumb and index finger brought together to make a circle. When she noticed Pieter looking at her hand, Frau Küster smiled at him and said, "We don't want misunderstandings."
When Pieter stepped through the Freedom Arches door, the noise level dropped. Then a man's voice said, "That's Judge Freihofer," and the room went silent. Every eye was staring at Pieter.
Pastor Bartsch took a half-step forward. "Friends and brothers, the up-time prostitute Geri Kinney was murdered, and Judge Freihofer seeks her killer. He suspects none of us, but he is here because Miss Scholz maybe has seen something. Be kind to him, he's not a kinggeorge."
"Oh yeah?" a man's voice yelled from a corner of the room. "I say he is a kinggeorge, and he's bamboozled you, Pastor Eberhard."
Frau Küster grabbed Pieter's arm, and made a show of spinning him around to face a picture on the wall. "Do you know Chip Jenkins?" she asked loudly. "He's an up-timer who is at the law school as both student and lecturer. Have you met him? He brought us this. Isn't it a wonderful picture?"
On the wall near the door was an up-time-printed color photo of an up-time oil painting. A meeting was in progress, and among some seated people a man stood, speaking to someone not shown. The speaker stood straight, with head held high, and five men and a woman were listening to him. This was amazing to Pieter, for the speaker was dressed in a laborer's clothing, while at least two of his respectful listeners were wearing jackets and ties.
Pieter knew better than to give his honest reaction. So he groped for words: "Oh yes, very wonderful, the painting is very—it's very . . ."
Pieter was very aware that while the room was no longer graveyard-quiet, whatever he said about this picture would be easily heard by many people who were carrying knives.
"It's very democratic," Pieter said.
Pastor Bartsch slapped Pieter on the back. "And we thank the Lord for that!"
Now Pieter felt safe facing the people in the room. And when he faced them and looked around, he was surprised. Not by the sight of poorly dressed people eating and drinking—this he expected—but by the printing press and aproned printer in the middle of the common room. By the printing press, Pieter saw a liveried servant holding an unfolded pamphlet by a corner, the man moving his lips as he read. The printing press added the odor of ink to the smells of sweat and tobacco that Pieter had expected.
A familiar-looking man sitting in a corner was glaring at Pieter. After some moments of trying to place his face, Pieter recalled him. Last year, Pieter had tried Corner Man's brother for robbery, and had ordered the defendant put to the sword. Perhaps Corner Man bore a grudge.
While Pieter was staring-down Corner Man, he felt a touch on his arm. Frau Küster told Pieter, "I'll go get Ludkanne." Frau Küster hurried off as much as the press of bodies allowed.
* * *
Ludkanne Scholz smelled of both sweat and fresh-baked bread. Her arms were snow-white from flour. Her figure was solid, tending toward fat. Her center-parted hair was braided.
Miss Scholz, Pieter, Pastor Bartsch, and Frau Küster all were sitting around a table in the Freedom Arches' common room. Laying on the table was Anna Maria's drawing of Rolf Krebs and Horst Brecht.
Miss Scholz pointed. "It was him. Definitely him."
Pieter asked, "Are you sure?"
In a courtroom, Miss Scholz would politely reply, "Yes, I am sure." But in the Freedom Arches, she gave Pieter a look saying Are you an idiot?
"When did this happen?" Pieter asked.
"It was in 1631, I'm certain. There was snow on the ground, and I hadn't heard of Americans or the Ring of Fire yet. February? March?"
Pieter nodded. "So what happened?"
"I went out that day, though I was sick. I ran into him, and he wanted . . . a service, for one pfennig. Even though the price was two pfennig then. But I was starving, and cold, and feverish, so I didn't argue much. He paid me, then I started to . . . you know, and then I vomited on him. And he punched me, and kicked me, and took my money pouch."
I know who killed Geri Kinney now. But I still have to prove it. Aloud, Pieter said, "Miss Scholz, where do you live? I'll need it for court records."
* * *
A few minutes later, Pieter, Pastor Bartsch, and Frau Küster were starting toward the exit door when Corner Man yelled, "Hey, Judge! This time, make sure the man you execute is the actual bastard murderer, and not some innocent patsy, okay?"
The room went silent again.
Pastor Bartsch said, "Arni, you—"
Pieter touched Bartsch's shoulder, then stepped in front of him. Pieter raised his voice and replied, "Thieves steal. Murderers kill. Most men are good, but a few men are beyond repair. Your brother stole once before. Can you deny it?"
Corner Man glared. "In '29 he stole a leg of lamb. Our mother was sick, our father was gone, and we and our sisters were starving."
"Perhaps that is why the first judge showed kindness; your—"
"'Kindness'? He ordered Helmut flogged!"
"—your brother's second judge"—Pieter tapped his own chest—"followed the law. Your brother was now twice a thief; he died."
The crowd murmured angry words.
Corner Man, who had been sitting, now rose up like an angry bear. Pieter saw that he was wearing a knife at his side. He leaned on the table, eyed Pieter, and said in a quiet voice, "And how do you know that Helmut was a thief a second time?"
Pastor Bartsch said, "Arni. Please sit down."
Corner Man remained standing, remained staring at Pieter, and remained armed.
Pieter shook his head. "Arni, leave the word tricks for men who've read law. That emerald ring and the money pouch were found in your brother's house. Under his bed. He confessed to stealing them."
"Under torture," Corner Man added.
Pieter shrugged.
Seeing Pieter's shrug, Corner Man laughed bitterly. Then he said, "Mr. Weissberg said in court that his robber was a tall man. My brother was shorter than Pastor Bartsch."
"So what? Often victims say that the criminals are tall and strong and fast."
"Romhilda's current husband Rutger is tall. Did you know that?"
"Many men are tall," Pieter replied.
"Mr. Weissberg said in court that his tall robber had a deep voice."
"I'll say it again: Many crime victims, their testimony—"
"Helmut had an ordinary voice. I'll bet you don't even remember it, though you heard him scream so much. But Rutger? He has a voice like a bullfrog. And Romhilda and Rutger married only hours after Helmut was put to the sword. Did you know that?"
Oh no. Aloud, Pieter said, "No, I did not know that."
Corner Man's hand flew to his knife; he jerked the weapon straight up above his head. Holding the knife high, he said to the entire room, "See my blade!" He brought the blade down slowly, then handed it to a companion. "Let no one fear that I will kill this judge, though I have good cause!"
Walking toward Pieter, and with his gaze locked on Pieter's face, Corner Man again spoke loudly enough for the entire room to hear: "Pastor Bartsch will tell you, he refused to marry Romhilda and Rutger. Not before a year had passed."
"That's true," Bartsch said. "To marry sooner, that would not have been respectful to Helmut."
"So do you know how Rutger got married? He took Helmut's 'grieving' widow to Grantville! They were on the train before Helmut was even cold!"
"And you have to wonder," Frau Küster murmured, "how he could afford that. Train rides were even more expensive a year ago."
By now, Corner Man was standing in front of Pieter. "'Thieves steal. Most men are good.' Rutger knew you would think that. He fooled you."
"I think," Pieter said, "that you don't want to admit that Helmut was the thief."
Corner Man laughed in scorn. "But Your Honor, I knew Helmut much better than you—though I never made him scream like you did. I know Rutger, who you never tried to meet. I especially know Romhilda—that woman could make the Black Pope swear off celibacy! Try again."
"Helmut had been flogged for stealing before!"
"True. And when you learned about the leg of lamb, did you stop? Did you quit? Did you look at anyone but my brother for stealing the emerald ring? I know you never talked to Rutger."
Pieter didn't want to admit it. He certainly didn't want to admit it in a room full of people he was accustomed to putting on trial. But Pieter needed to believe that he was a fair man. "No," Pieter said, "I never suspected anyone but Helmut."
Corner Man bowed. "Thank you." He started to turn away, then whirled back around and punched Pieter in the upper abdomen. Gasping Pieter dropped to the floor.
It was minutes before Pieter could speak again. Corner Man stood there, smiling with hands on hips, the entire time.
When Pieter could stand and speak both, he asked Corner Man, "Why did you do that? I admitted I was wrong."
"Why?" Corner's Man's smile was wolfish. "Because here and now, I can cause pain, and you must suffer it."
Corner Man looked at Pastor Bartsch and made a dismissive hand motion. Get this trash out of here.
Pieter, with help from Pastor Bartsch, struggled to the door. Corner Man called out, "The American police think a rich man can be a thief, and American judges think a poor man can be a saint. I think the Americans make much fewer screwups that way."
But Pieter only half-heard him. I sentenced an innocent man to death. This is awful.
At the parsonage, Pieter thanked Pastor Bartsch and Frau Küster for their help. But he was too proud to thank them for possibly saving his life. At least twice.
Then Pieter walked to the prison. He urgently needed for James Wild to answer one question.
For the past two days, Pieter's cook had been delivering a noontime meal to Wild at the prison. Pieter figured that Wild, who at the moment would be enjoying a full stomach, should feel cooperative.
But when a guard brought Pieter down the walkway to Wild's cell, Pieter saw two people he wasn't expecting.
The first surprise was an up-time woman, who was talking to Wild through the cell door.
The second unexpected person was a guard already outside Wild's cell. A guard who was leaning against the wall opposite the door; a guard whose jaws were working, and whose feet were surrounded by blue-and-white dishes. Only half of those blue-and-white dishes still had food.
"What, you couldn't save some for me?" Pieter's escort said to the other guard.
"What are you eating?" Pieter demanded.
The woman gave Pieter a look saying Please, mister, don't make trouble!
The eating guard smirked. "The prisoner was generous, and decided to share some food with me. Of course I said yes."
Pieter turned to his escort and said, "You! Go back to the guardhouse! Now!"
"But I must—"
"Now."
One guard hurried away. Then Pieter turned his eyes on the other guard and on the woman. "Ma'am, I am Judge Pieter Freihofer, commissioned to investigate the murder of Geri Kinney—"
She dropped an unpracticed curtsy. "I'm Edith Wild, Jimmy's mother. Pleased to meet you."
The guard, Pieter noticed, had stopped chomping.
Pieter asked Edith Wild, "What has happened here?" When she made a covert glance toward the guard, Pieter added, "I can help you, but you must tell me everything."
She said, "He brought me here to visit my son. When I got here, I saw a man, someone's cook, who had brought a basket of food for my son to eat—"
The guard said, "Those rich up-timer-lovers all can afford cooks. I asked the prisoner, real polite, if he'd share some food with me."
Edith Wild shook her head. "He told my son that he would haul me back outside right away, unless Jimmy gave up food."
"How much food?" Pieter asked.
"Not all that much," the guard said. He sounded cocky.
"Half," Edith Wild said.
Pieter eyeballed the guard. "You are aware, aren't you, what the penalty for extortion is?"
The guard laughed. "Who would testify against me? The prisoner? Ooh, I'm worried. His mother? Women can't testify—you of all people should know that."
Pieter's smile was reptilian. "Seems to me, you're betting your life on an invalid point of law. Up-time, women testified all the time; and if a Jena judge lets this up-time woman testify nowadays, it's unfortunate for you." Then Pieter erased his fake smile. "But there's one thing you've overlooked, regardless of a court ruling."
"Oh yeah, 'Your Honor'? And what could that be?"
"That was my cook you met, those are my dishes, and that is my food you've eaten. I hope for your sake that the judge who takes your case shows mercy. Otherwise? Up-timers say our sentences are barbaric."
The guard was a big man, but he moved quickly to put dishes into James Wild's outstretched hand.
When all the food and all the empty dishes were out of the walkway, Pieter told the guard, "Leave us. Leave the lantern too."
"No, it's forbidden, I can't leave you—"
"Yes, you can."
"How am I supposed to get back to the guardhouse without the lantern?"
"Oh, come now!" Pieter said, laughing. "Maybe your full belly will light your way."
* * *
When the guard's bulk could no longer be seen, Edith Wild said to Pieter, "My son is not the murderer of Geri Kinney."
Pieter almost said I know that. But he caught himself, and said instead, "I'm no longer certain of his guilt. But I'm not free to release him."
James Wild, who had kept silent since Pieter had arrived, now said, "Then screw you."
Edith Wild admonished her son in English. James Wild answered her with an unwilling tone of voice.
Then Wild said, "So Judge, why are you here? What do you want to know?"
Pieter said, "My one question is this: Last Monday, how much money did Miss Kinney charge you?"
"And then you'll ask me what our argument was about, right? You're trying to trick me?"
"No, I came here to ask you only one question. Then I won't say another word until your mother is ready to leave."
Mother and son exchanged words in English.
Wild told Pieter, "Geri charged me forty dollars."
And for Pieter, a whole bunch of things that had been confusing about this case suddenly made sense.
But not all of Pieter's confusion ended. Pieter said, "She lowered her price for you, which sounds kind, but then she told you she wouldn't let you come back, which sounds unkind."
"She told me she maybe wouldn't let me come back. But if she let me come back, I'd get no more discount."
"How much more?"
"Eighty. Geri's very last words to me, ever, were 'You just doubled your price—no more forty dollars for you, you hear me?'"
"And Miss Kinney told you this in English?"
"Yeah. At the top of the stairs, as I was leaving. But she didn't say it, she yelled it. I'll bet they heard her in Grantville."
Aha, Pieter thought. Motive.
* * *
Some time later, Pieter and Edith Wild were walking in daylight outside the prison, toward her carriage. Pieter had learned that she was a widow, and that she was Wallenstein's personal nurse in Prague.
He and Mrs. Wild were surrounded by six tough-looking Bohemian hulks, who'd appeared as soon as she stepped outside.
"Ma'am, your son is innocent. I know who killed Geri Kinney, and I know why he murdered her—"
"So why haven't you freed my son?" she demanded.
"I can't release him now, because I don't trust the jailer not to talk. And because the true murderer is a law student, so he might have some courtroom tricks planned, should I arrest him."
"While you are fretting about legal fine points—"
"Woman, I know this law student is the murderer, but I can't prove he's the murderer! And soon as he knows that I know that your son is not the killer, he can run away! And if I arrest him now and try him now, without proof, he'll walk away a free man."
"Then I demand that you find the proof, Your Honor. My Jimmy does not deserve to be in that sewer of a jail."
* * *
Pieter walked to the telegraph office, his heart heavy. Minutes later, as he paid for the telegram, he thought, It's official: I'm stupid. But I won't let a killer go free because of my pride.
ANNA MARIA VON SCHURMANN
INN OF THE MADDENED QUEEN
GRANTVILLE
I NEED IDEAS
PLEASE HURRY HERE
Both turn-crank lanterns set on the floor, and their focused brilliance made it easy for Pieter to show the dusty shoeprint to Anna Maria.
"You could have told me all this, you know," Anna Maria said. "I can keep a secret."
"What's done is done," Pieter replied. "You're here now. Do you have any idea what to do?"
She turned to him and smiled. "I do indeed. Remember how Nurse Flanagan captured your fingerprint? You told me that it became visible using dust made from 'artificial charcoal'?"
He could have kicked himself. "And you have real charcoal, to outline the shoeprint with. Charcoal which at any time I could have asked you for."
Anna Maria gave him a steady look. "I'm used to men not asking for my help. Not because they didn't think of it, but because of their pride."
"Well, it seems ridiculous to say, 'Women are silly, women are stupid, women are weak,' now that I've met Nurse Flanagan."
"True."
"And Rebecca Stearns, she's not that way, either."
"Very strong. Very smart. I want to be like her."
"Then there's Gretchen Richter—"
"Enough talk. I need to buy a new piece of charcoal and a new sketchpad, and we need to borrow that tape."
* * *
It wasn't till Monday morning that Pieter and Anna Maria could accomplish their tasks. At the medical school, Anna Maria surprised Pieter again by asking Nurse Flanagan if there was an up-time trick for working near dust without breathing on it. Anna Maria's question prompted Nurse Flanagan to loan Anna Maria a surgical mask.
Back in Miss Kinney's bedroom, Pieter cranked the up-time lanterns and put them on the floor, as Anna Maria donned the surgical mask. Then she got on hands and knees, Pieter gave her the charcoal, and she slowly and carefully outlined the shoeprint.
Next came the tricky part. Pieter tore off a foot-long piece of tape, which he carefully passed to still-masked Anna Maria. She pressed the tape-strip down on the floor to cover the left edge of the shoe outline. He gave her another strip; this soon covered the right edge of the shoe outline. She laid the third piece between and atop the other two pieces of tape. The shoeprint's charcoal outline now was covered with a sheet of tape.
Pieter tore the first page out of the new sketchpad and brought it near the tape that covered the floor. With trial and error, and one near-disaster, Pietter and Anna Maria got the tape-sheet off the floor intact. Then it was just a matter of pressing it onto the paper. Which they did—with only a few problems. That tape was sticky!
When they were done, the tape sheet was wrinkled in two places, instead of laying down smoothly. Still, Pieter had a piece of paper he could show in any courtroom in the world and say, "The man who wore this shoe tried to move Geri Kinney's safe."
Pieter's note to them all had said the same thing: "Please meet with me and the others in my chamber at nine a.m. I might get there late, but please don't leave." And sure enough, it was almost ten o'clock when Pieter walked into the room, with him carrying a box. He put the box on the floor behind his desk, and took his seat.
Standing or sitting were the four people who had ridden with him on the train to Grantville, nearly a week before.
Pieter said, "I apologize for the wait, but I had court business to take care of. There will be more people joining us soon."
"I'm wondering why you called us here," Horst Brecht said.
"I suppose you are," Pieter agreed. Pieter looked around, into the eyes of Brecht, Rolf Krebs, Frau Küster, and Anna Maria von Schurmann. Then he continued, "I've called you here to tell you what I've learned in my investigation, since each of you has been involved somehow in the case. Divulging this is highly irregular, but the murder of the up-timer Miss Geri Kinney was irregular."
"Why did you ask Miss von Schurmann here?" Rolf Krebs asked. "She has no connection to the case at all."
"I have my reasons," Pieter said. Krebs gave Pieter and Anna Maria a saucy smile, as if to say, So you two are sleeping together, huh?
"It's not what you think, Mister Krebs," Anna Maria said. Krebs gave her the saucy smile again.
Pieter continued, "All of us except for Miss von Schurmann were present when I arrested Mister James Wild for the murder of Miss Kinney. Soon after, Mister Wild told me that he had not murdered Miss Kinney—"
"Of course he'd say that," Brecht said.
"Under the laws we had until recently, my task would have been easy. I would have pressed Mister Wild for a confession, under the principle of 'Confession is the queen of evidence.' Had he not confessed voluntarily, I would have questioned him more forcefully until he did. But I did not do that because, one, the laws now forbid judicial torture; and two, Grantville would not accept one of their own being condemned to death after a tortured confession. But let me add that I am heartily glad that I am forbidden to torture Mister Wild."
"Why?" Brecht demanded. "Without torture during his questioning, he can lie to you."
Pieter gave Brecht a long look, then said, "I say it again: I am glad I no longer must choose whether to torture."
Rolf Krebs said, "So where does that leave your case? You have no witness to the actual murder, you have only one suspect, he won't confess and you can't make him confess."
"Correction: I had only one suspect," Pieter said. He walked to the courtroom door and opened it.
Into the room stepped a fettered Jimmy Wild, a jailer who was holding a pike and wearing a key ring, and Edith Wild.
"What's he doing here?" Brecht demanded.
Pieter said, "Nurse Flanagan of the medical school examined Miss Kinney's corpse. She figured out that Miss Kinney scratched her strangler. But look at Mister Wild—no scratches on his face, his neck, his arms, or his hands."
"So?" Krebs said. "Everyone knows that up-timers heal fast."
Widow Wild shot Krebs a look that said, Are you really that stupid?
Pieter got up and walked over to Krebs and Brecht. He peered closely into their faces and said, "I see no marks on your faces. Now I ask you to turn around so I can examine your necks better."
"What? I don't have to do that," Brecht said. "We're not suspects here!"
"I'm afraid one of you is, Mister Brecht, because of something you two did in Grantville. Now please do as I ask, or I will have to be—" Pieter glanced toward the man with the pike. "—insistent."
Both Brecht and Krebs turned their backs to him. Pieter pulled up their hair and examined the sides and back of their necks. "No scratches on your necks. You may turn around now."
Brecht and Krebs flashed each other relieved looks.
"Now each of you, pull up your right sleeve as far as it will go, then let me examine your right arms." Pieter looked and said, "You're clean, Mr. Krebs." After that, "You too, Mister Brecht."
Both young men stood looking at Pieter, their faces relaxed. Then Pieter said, "Now each of you, pull up your left sleeve as far as it will go."
Rolf Krebs looked resigned, and pulled up his left sleeve; while Horst Brecht—
Horst Brecht exploded. "This is ridiculous! Why do Rolf and I have to suffer this? We aren't the murderer, he is!"
"Jailer, come here!" Pieter commanded.
Horst Brecht turned his head to look at something behind Pieter and to his right; then froze. Pieter grabbed Brecht's left sleeve and jerked it up his unresisting arm. Three red, inflamed, and parallel lines showed clearly.
"God in heaven, Horst," Krebs exclaimed, "you've got scratches on your wrist! Did you kill Geri?"
Brecht jerked his arm out of Pieter's grip. "No, Rolf! I caught my hand on a sharp corner on my table, I swear."
"Do you believe your friend, Mister Krebs?" Pieter asked.
"I . . . suppose so, Your Honor."
"In any case," Brecht said, "you can't convict me of murder only for having scratches on my wrist."
"That is true, Mister Brecht," Pieter said. "If that were all I had." Pieter opened a drawer on his desk and pulled out the shoeprint. "Miss Kinney had by her bed a safe, and someone tried hard to break into it, or to carry it from the room. Not only did he fail at both tasks, but he left his footprints in the dust."
Pieter got up and walked to the center of the room, where he laid the shoeprint on the floor. "I helped make this, but most of the work, and all of the cleverness, is to the credit of Miss von Schurmann here. Mister Wild, please step on this."
Widow Wild announced the result. "Jimmy's foot is too big. Jimmy's not the man!"
"I agree," Pieter said. "Jailer, remove the fetters from Mister Wild's ankles. Mister Krebs, please oblige me."
"Why?" Krebs asked.
"Because Miss Kinney owned a safe, and in Grantville, you and Mister Brecht were asking how to break into a safe. Mister Krebs, I'm waiting."
The jailer had laid down his pike and had pulled the key ring off his belt, and was now squatting down at Jimmy Wild's feet. Rolf Krebs glanced at Horst Brecht, then stepped forward to plant his shoe atop the shoeprint.
Pieter said, "Mister Krebs's shoe is a little too long. Your turn, Mister Brecht."
Horst Brecht didn't move.
"Mister Brecht, you will cooperate. The only question now is, what happens to you beforehand."
"Please do it, Horst," Krebs said.
Horst stomped forward and stomped his foot onto the charcoal outline.
"Your shoe matches, Mister Brecht," Pieter said.
Brecht glared at him. "The lines are blurry on this drawing—crooked, too! I'm sure there are a hundred men in Jena whose shoe seems to match this drawing. Help me out here, Rolf."
Krebs reluctantly stepped closer. Horst Brecht lifted his foot off the shoeprint for several seconds, then put it back down. Krebs looked at Pieter and said, "He's right, Your Honor, it's not a perfect match." But then Krebs looked at Brecht and said, "But it's a good match. Did you try to rob a dead woman, Horst?"
"He did, Mister Krebs," Pieter said, as he walked back to his desk. Pieter picked up the box he had brought in, minutes earlier, and set the box on his desk. Pieter with his right hand removed a leather holster from the box; and with his left hand, Pieter removed an up-time handgun from the holster. Pieter told the room, "Once Mister Brecht left to come here, a policeman and I searched his apartment. Eight days ago, this was in Miss Kinney's bedroom."
"What the hell?" Brecht said. "Why did you search my apartment?"
"Suffice it to say that I played a hunch and I was right."
"And how do you know it's Geri's gun? Maybe I bought it from a different up-timer."
"Try again, pencil stub," Jimmy Wild said. "I gave Geri her gun. Check the serial number, and if it's got the numbers six-six-seven in there, the judge owns your sorry ass. June of 1967 is when I was born. Um, Your Honor, please don't touch the trigger while you're looking."
Pieter examined the gun more closely. "Sure enough. There's a big number engraved into the barrel, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth numerals are six-six-seven." Pieter put the gun back in the holster, and then the holster back in the box, as both Jimmy and Edith Wild looked relieved.
"All right, fine," Brecht said, "I went into her bedroom, and I took her gun, and I tried to take her safe. She was already dead. I was in her place for only a few minutes. It's not nice to rob a dead person, I admit it, but I didn't kill her."
Krebs frowned. "Then why are there scratches on your wrist, Horst? You lied about trying to steal the safe, so why should anyone believe you about not killing her?"
Frau Küster spoke up. "I don't understand why you would rob her. What did she ever do to you?"
Pieter answered before Brecht could. "She overcharged him. Mister Wild, tell Mister Krebs there—the young man who didn't steal Miss Kinney's gun—how much you paid that last time to Miss Kinney."
Jimmy Wild said, "Forty dollars."
Krebs said, "What? But—"
Pieter said, "Yes, even with your `discount,' you and Mister Brecht paid more than that. And Mister Wild, when Miss Kinney yelled at you at the top of the stairs, she mentioned the forty dollars, did she not?"
Wild nodded. "Yeah, she said—"
"What she said, she said loudly, correct?"
"Yeah, she yelled her head off."
Frau Küster said to Horst Brecht, "Wait, I thought you were just her neighbor. You were one of her johns?"
Krebs said, "Go ahead, Horst, I dare you to lie about this."
Brecht shrugged. Then he turned to Pieter and said, "But if they were arguing about her doubling his price, you can't prove I understood it."
"But I can, Mister Brecht. When I talked to you on the morning after the murder, I asked you, 'Do you speak English? Do you know what they were saying?' You didn't say no. Instead, you said, 'I speak some English, and read it better than I speak it. But they were using many words that aren't in West Virginia law books.' You evaded my second question."
Brecht said, "Well, if I heard her say that she was only charging him forty dollars, why would I kill her?"
Pieter said, "I'll let Miss Scholz answer that." Pieter walked over to the door to his clerks' office, and opened it. Into the room stepped Ludkanne Scholz. Pieter turned around to see Brecht look at Ludkanne with his face showing puzzlement, then shocked recognition, then fear and panic.
"Who is this, Your Honor?" Anna Maria asked.
Pieter said, "This is Miss Ludkanne Scholz. Three days ago she recognized Mister Brecht from the picture you drew, and then she told me an interesting story about him."
Ludkanne glared at Brecht, then told the room, "I am a good woman, who three years ago was a refugee forced to sell her body." Ludkanne told a gripping tale, ending with ". . . and then when I was already cold, and sick, and desperate, this man was kicking me and robbing me, yelling, 'How dare you cheat me!' He was so angry about one pfennig."
Pieter thanked Ludkanne for speaking, then eyed the room. "So what can I prove happened? Last Monday afternoon, Miss Kinney and Mister Wild got into an argument. At the top of the stairs, she yelled at him in English, 'No more forty dollars for you.' Mister Brecht heard the words, understood them, and got angry. Soon after, he talked his way into Miss Kinney's apartment, saying or doing nothing to alarm her. As she was walking toward her bedroom door, he pulled out the twine he'd brought and strangled her. He took her gun and tried unsuccessfully to take her safe. After a while, he informed the police of her murder, not mentioning his own involvement."
Pieter eyed Horst Brecht and repeated, "All this I can prove, with more than sworn statements."
Brecht laughed. "And here's one thing you haven't proven, 'Your Honor.' Geri Kinney deserved to die. I admit it, I killed her. Why? All the time she told us down-time students that she was doing us a 'favor,' by giving us a 'discount,' she was laughing at us. The up-timer over there, he got the favors and he got the discounts. Monday after he left, I showed up at the whore's door, and all I had was guilders. Meaning, I had to pay and pay and pay for the privilege of an up-time woman giving me sex. And just like every time, before she'd do anything with me, that day she took my money and headed for her bedroom. Well, I didn't get any sex that day, but I did get my guilders back."
Pieter said, "Thank you for that admission, Mister Brecht, in the presence of eight witnesses."
"You mean, because confessio est regina—"
Horst Brecht bolted for the door to Pieter's courtroom, yanked open the door, and was gone before anyone in the judicial chamber could give chase.
Pieter waited, calm, even as everyone else in the room acted every way except calm.
"HEY, LET GO!" A fist hit flesh. "OW!" Two fists hit flesh. "STOP IT!" A rain of fists followed. "STOP IT, STOP, GOD IN HEAVEN, STOP!"
Three of Widow Wild's Bohemian bodyguards squeezed themselves through the door, pushing and dragging Horst Brecht. Pieter walked to the other door out of his chamber—the door that led to his clerks' office—opened the door, and beckoned with his hand. Widow Wild's other three bodyguards stepped in. They gave Horst Brecht an eager smile.
"Jailer," Pieter said, "I arrest Horst Brecht, a citizen of Jena, for the murder of Geri Kinney, a citizen of Jena. Fetter him and take him away."
When Brecht was fettered, Rolf Krebs stepped in front of him. "You killed Geri," Krebs said. "You." He punched Horst Brecht in the nose.
* * *
An hour later, Pieter, Anna Maria, and her bodyguards were at the train station. Pieter sent a telegram to Police Chief Richards.
HORST BRECHT ARRESTED FOR MURDER OF GERI KINNEY
BACK ROW ON RIGHT IN PHOTOGRAPH
ANNA MARIA VON SCHURMANN DESERVES MUCH CREDIT
I FREED JAMES WILD
TELL EVERYONE
Pieter walked over to Anna Maria, who was sitting on the train platform. He said, "Enjoy your time in Grantville. I thank you for the help you gave me."
She smiled. "This isn't goodbye. You will see me again, believe it."
"Of course, for Brecht's trial."
Her face became serious. "No. My goal now is to enter the medical school here. But I don't just want to become one of the few up-time-trained woman physicians in all of Europe. Eventually I want to learn how to become a medical examiner."
"What is that?"
"A physician who examines dead bodies to determine how they died; if they were murdered, what happened during the murder."
"I see. What Nurse Flanagan did in Miss Kinney's apartment."
"Yes, and Nurse Flanagan admitted to me that every minute she was there, she was guessing what to do. Being a medical examiner is work that needs doing. It needs to be done right, and it helps the victims' families."
"That will be a very different life than yours in the other world."
She shrugged. "I was a scholar in the other seventeenth century, I don't need to be a scholar in this new one." Then she asked, "And you, what now?"
He said, "I still having atoning to do. I sent an innocent man to die because I believed a lie, then I made the innocent man lie that he was guilty. My penance is to punish the criminals, free the innocent, and find evidence to show that liars are lying."
She nodded. "So in the years ahead, we each will be a . . . I believe the up-time word is detective."
* * *
"Mayday, mayday, mayday. Bravo Charlie Zero One."
Markus Gärtner erupted from his chair as the urgency of Bravo Charlie Zero One's call penetrated the quiet of the control tower, the mug of freshly brewed coffee in his hand forgotten for just a moment. Then he squealed as the very hot coffee he'd spilt penetrated his trousers and hit his skin.
"You all right?" Johannes Schöppner, an air force pilot on temporary assignment to the control tower while he recovered from a parachute-training accident, asked.
"I'm fine." Markus waved Johannes away as he reached for the microphone.
"Bravo Charlie Zero One, Alfa Papa Two One, I have you in sight. What is your emergency?"
Rudi Kastner, of the Air Post Service, had beaten him to it. Markus tugged at his trousers to try and keep the wet material away from his flesh while he listened to Rudi talking to the pilot of Bravo Charlie Zero One. It soon became clear that Bravo Charlie Zero One was going to make a forced landing in very inhospitable terrain.
"I know Rudi, but who's Bravo Charlie Zero One?" Johannes asked.
"Heinrich Rottenberger. He's piloting Bamberg Charters' new Ziermann Flugzeugwerke Dragonfly."
"Passengers?"
"Three very important passengers," Markus confirmed. He'd seen them boarding the charter flight when it left Grantville on Monday morning. "You're closest. Could you grab the procedures manual."
Johannes pulled the red procedures manual from the shelf and laid it down beside Markus. "Do we know who the passengers are?"
"Yes," Markus muttered.
The impact threw Helene Gundelfinger hard into her seat. The little air left in her lungs escaped in a scream when she realized Duke Johann Philipp was flying toward her.
Johann's plunge was caught by his three-point seatbelt and he hung dangling above her. She glanced to her left where Duchess Elisabeth was slowly emerging from a pile of blankets and hand luggage. "Are you okay?" she asked.
Elisabeth ran hands over her body. "I think so." Then she looked up. "Oh, dear. Are you all right, Johann?"
"Get me down from here," he muttered as he struggled not to fall out of the safety harness.
Elisabeth stood in her seat and reached out for Johann's dangling right arm. He screamed and she hastily released it.
Together the women struggled to take Johann's weight off the harness so the quick release would work. They could barely support his weight and when Elisabeth managed to operate the quick release the sudden loss of support was too much. They all collapsed in an ungainly heap.
The aircraft swayed under the impact and branches rattled on the fuselage. The three of them froze, fearful that the aircraft was about to fall. Thirty seconds of silence passed with nothing happening.
Johann broke the silence. "I think I've broken my arm."
"Oh, Johann let me help you," Elisabeth said
"I'll see if I can find some bandages." Helene let Elisabeth comfort her husband while she picked through the contents of the overhead baggage racks and the first aid cabinet which were now scattered around the cabin.
"Here, Elisabeth. I'll keep looking for something to use as a splint." Helene tossed a couple of rolls of crepe bandage and a packaged triangular bandage to Elisabeth. She couldn't find anything suitable in the cabin but through the open door she could see tree branches close to the fuselage. She reached for the nearest branch of a suitable size and started to twist and turn it with one hand while she hacked at it with her belt knife.
"What's that noise?" Elisabeth demanded, interrupting Helene's concentration.
Helene listened. "Another aircraft." She crawled back toward her companions and gave Elisabeth the branch she'd just cut, then crawled back to the door and looked skyward. A small single-engine airplane in the livery of the Air Post Service was circling high above them. "Elisabeth, quick, I need something to wave."
"Use this," Elisabeth said. "But give it back. I need it for Johann's arm."
Helene took the triangular bandage Elisabeth handed her, then waved it at the aircraft.
The plane circled closer and closer until Helene could clearly see the pilot. For a brief moment their eyes met and the pilot lifted a hand. Then he started to climb away. Helene watched until the plane was little more than a dot in the sky. When it finally disappeared from view she closed her eyes and dropped her head into her hands. People knew where they were and help would soon be on its way. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then opened her eyes.
And immediately wished she hadn't. "Mein Gott!"
There was nothing more than a few branches supporting the aircraft . . . some thirty feet in the air.
* * *
Helene slid back from the door and glanced over at her companions. Philipp was a strong and healthy man in his late thirties and Elisabeth was just a few years older. Even with a broken arm he should be able to climb down with some assistance, but what about the pilot? With all the excitement they'd completely forgotten about him.
Helene pulled aside the curtain that separated the pilot from the passengers and poked her head into the cockpit. It was a mess. The glass panels of the wind shield were shattered and she could see the ground below them.
She reached over to the pilot and placed a tentative finger against his throat. There was no pulse, which considering the pieces of aircraft sticking into his chest, wasn't too surprising.
"The pilot's dead," Helene said.
"What about the radio?" Philipp asked.
"I forgot to check." She climbed over the pilot to reach the radio. The impact had crushed it. She hastily backed out of the cockpit. "The radio's dead too."
"Shouldn't we get out of here?" Elisabeth asked.
"That won't be quite as easy as you think," Helene muttered.
After what seemed an eternity while they listened to Alfa Papa Two One trying to make radio contact with Bravo Charlie Zero One, they got the radio call they'd been waiting for.
"Mayday, mayday, mayday. Alfa Papa Two One."
Markus settled in his chair and took a deep breath. "Grantville Tower, what is your emergency?"
"Alfa Papa Two One, Bravo Charlie Zero One crashed in treetops, six miles west of River Werra, south east of Kaltenortheim. One survivor waving."
Markus checked that Johannes was operating the radio direction finder. "Alfa Papa Two One, Roger. We're taking a bearing on you. Are you over the site?"
"Alfa Papa Two One, affirm."
"Alfa Papa Two One, call Erfurt Tower this frequency, request a bearing and relay to us," Markus said.
"Erfurt Tower, Alfa Papa Two One requests a bearing.
Markus glanced over at Johannes, who was waiting ready to plot the bearing from Erfurt tower.
Alfa Papa Two One relayed the bearing a couple of minutes later. "Grantville Tower, Erfurt Tower reports the bearing is two three seven degrees."
Johannes drew a line from Erfurt Tower and grimaced when he crossed the bearing line from Hans Richter Field. "It's a stinker of a place to come down. There's nothing but forest-covered hills for miles."
Markus checked the procedures folder and spoke into the microphone again. "Alfa Papa Two One, Grantville Tower, what are your intentions?"
"Grantville Tower, I have a scheduled mail stop over Suhl before heading for Grantville. Should I miss that and divert straight for Grantville?"
Markus shook his head even though the pilot couldn't see him. The few minutes it would take to exchange mail at Suhl wouldn't make much difference. "Negative on diversion. Keep your schedule."
"Alfa Papa Two One, Roger."
Markus knew how stressed the emergency services still were as a result of the events of the previous Sunday and didn't really want to be the person to add to their problems, but someone had to tell them that an airplane was down. "You want to make the phone call?" he asked Johannes.
Johannes shook his head and pushed the phone set across to Markus. "Oh no. The privilege is all yours."
Chief of Police Press Richards had been living in his office since Sunday, trying to stay on top of the investigation into what they were already calling the March Fourth Conspiracy, and he was short on sleep. He rubbed his tied eyes. "I suppose it would be too much to ask of Divine Providence that we only get one emergency at a time?"
The faces of the people sitting around the table remained unresponsive.
"Oh, yeah. I get it. Of course it would." He pointed to an area of the map. "You say the plane went down about here?"
Johannes nodded. "That's where the pilot of Alfa Papa Two One reports it going down. Our radio bearings put the crash site east of the River Werra on this map and, well, we don't think the pilot got his east and west mixed."
Press glared at the map. It was a newly drawn combination of the down-time maps of Thuringia and Franconia, and no matter how good anybody claimed it to be, it didn't speak to him. It wasn't a proper topographical map with contours. It was more artistic than accurate. The few hills that were shown had no connection with the reality of the terrain, and the rivers and towns were only roughly in the right place. "What's the terrain like?"
"It's heavily wooded and mountainous, much like the land immediately south of Grantville," Johannes answered. "That's why there aren't as many villages as you'd expect in that area."
"Can we get ground parties in to the crash site?" Steve Matheny, the Grantville fire chief, asked.
Press shook his head. "Even if we can, there's not a man I can spare. What happened on the fourth, the funerals . . . what with trying to investigate, the state funerals, VIPs coming out our ears . . . not even the Mounted Constabulary has anyone free."
"Fulda is assembling a search party," Markus put in. "But it's at least twenty hours by horse just to get to the search area, let alone actually finding it."
Steve looked at his watch. "Sunset's at seventeen hundred and sunrise tomorrow is about oh-six-hundred. Horses don't like traveling in the dark, so that makes it sometime Friday morning before they reach the search area. What about vehicles? They could get there tonight."
"How?" Press asked. "Have a look at the map, Steve. The nearest thing to a proper road in the area is the old trade route that follows the River Werra, and even that's nine or ten miles east of where we think the aircraft crashed. Even if vehicles could get to the Werra before nightfall—and given the condition of the roads at this time of year, I somehow doubt it—the search party will take another four or five hours to walk in, even if they knew where they were going. So we have a plane containing . . ." Press looked toward Markus in the expectation he'd know.
"A pilot and three passengers," Markus supplied.
". . . four people, some of them possibly seriously injured, aboard a plane stuck in tree tops from which it could fall at any time. We're going to miss the golden hour, but there must be a way to get a medical team to them sooner than sometime tomorrow." He paused as a thought hit him. "What's the weather forecast?"
Markus passed over the latest weather reports. "Fulda reports the barometer has been falling since early this morning and Frankfurt am Main reports a westerly front approaching. It'll hit them within the hour and it's expected to hit Fulda inside three hours."
Press knew what that meant on the eastern side of the Thuringerwald, but he wasn't so sure of what it meant on the western side. "What sort of weather can we expect over the crash site?"
"Rain before nightfall, unless it's a storm front, then they could get sleet or even a late snowfall," Markus answered.
Press sighed. Bad weather, an air crash, and no doubt some very important people at risk . . . what a fun week this was turning out to be. "Well, that just makes it more imperative that we get to them as soon as possible. But how the heck can we get anybody to them before the front arrives?"
That question was met by silence as the four men thought about the situation.
After a few moments Steve spoke up. "What about the people who live near the crash site? Won't they be searching?
"Someone might be," Markus answered. "But we have no way of knowing, so we still need to send in our own people."
"We don't have any of 'our own people,'" Press repeated.
"Then we've got to ask for outside help," Steve said. "This isn't any time to be territorial about SoTF jurisdictions and things like that."
"But who is there?" Press rubbed his eyes again.
"There was a group of Marines doing jump training when I was at the Daedalus Parachute School in Magdeburg recently." Johannes gestured to his plaster encased foot as if to indicate just how recently. "Maybe if you were to ask . . ."
"Parachute in? You mean like Smoke Jumpers?" Press asked.
Johannes stared back at him blankly.
For the first time since Sunday morning, when his world suddenly got turned upside-down, Press smiled. "Sorry, you've probably never heard of them. But parachuting in, that might be possible. We'll need to get Ed or the Vice President to make the request . . ."
"It'll have to be the president," Markus muttered.
"What was that?" Press asked.
"Duke Johann Philipp, his wife, Duchess Elisabeth, and Her Excellency, Frau Gundelfinger were aboard Bravo Charlie Zero One," Markus explained.
"Shit! You mean the Vice President was on that flight?" Press demanded.
Markus nodded.
Steve reached for the phone. "I'll get right on to Ed."
"Hold it," Press called.
Steve paused with his hand on the phone.
"Even if they do let us have the Marines what do they jump out of?"
"TEA has a Jupiter in for maintenance." Markus took the phone from Steve. "I'll call and see if it can be made available."
"Okay, Markus, you do that. Steve, wait until we know if we can get a plane. It's no good asking Ed to call in the Marines if we can't deliver them to the crash site." Press looked at his watch. It read just after eight thirty. "Even if it's ready to fly now, it'll take at least six hours to get to Magdeburg and back. Add a couple of hours checking things out, it'll be three at the earliest before they can leave Hans Richter Field. That'll have them heading for the crash site about the same time the weather front hits, and they'll only have two hours before the sun sets to find the crash site, parachute down, and trek in to meet up with the survivors."
"It's the best we can do, Herr Richards," Johannes said.
* * *
Bang!
The sound of the door hitting the wall made everyone jump.
"Just what the hell is going on?" The intimidating figure of the Vice President's very concerned husband strode in. Behind him someone called out, "I'm sorry, but I couldn't stop him."
Press stood and bravely offered his hand to Helene Gundelfinger's husband. "Walter, how much do you know?"
Walter Goodluck stared at Press' hand for a moment before reaching out and shaking it. "I know that a plane went down. That the plane left Fulda this morning, and that my wife was supposed to be on board."
Press sighed. Too many people had nothing better to do than listen in on the radio channels. All he needed now was a bunch of paparazzi sticking microphones in his face, and trying to tie the loss of the plane carrying the Vice President to the events of last Sunday.
As if he'd heard Pres' thoughts Walter elaborated. "I only know Helene was coming home today because she sent a radiogram last night to say that they'd be leaving Fulda early this morning. I've already left a message telling Elisabeth Sofie to go to her Cousin Emilie's place rather than turn up at the airport."
Press was distracted by the names. "Elisabeth Sofie? Cousin Emilie?"
"Elisabeth Sofie's parents were also aboard that flight. I told her to stay with her cousin, Countess Emilie, Ludwig Guenther's wife, until we know what is happening."
"Right," Press managed to choke out the word. Walter sure had risen in the world if he was calling the local nobility by their first names. "Well, as best we know, the plane went down in wooded hill country west of the River Werra. The pilot deadsticked into the tree tops, and last we heard it was still hanging up there."
"Is Helene okay?" Walter demanded.
"I'm sorry, but I don't know. Another pilot saw the crash and he reports a woman waved at him."
"Can I talk to him?"
"He hasn't landed yet," Press said. "Markus, when will he land?"
Markus held a hand over the phone while he answered. "Alfa Papa Two One should arrive about ten hundred hours."
"So what are you doing about rescuing my wife, and what can I do to help?" Walter asked.
Press almost suggested that Walter could best help them by leaving, but then he remembered Walter, as the local manager of Kelly Construction, had access to a supply of manpower, which was just one of the things the emergency services were currently short of. "Fulda has already sent in a mounted party and we're planning on sending a four by four from Grantville, but neither is likely to reach them before tomorrow afternoon, so we're exploring a faster possibility.
Markus choose that moment to call out. "TEA says it'll be at least two, maybe three hours before they can get the Jupiter ready, and they have no planes scheduled to reach Magdeburg until tomorrow."
"Damn!" Press said. "It'll be dark before the Marines can get here even on an express train."
"What Marines?" Walter asked.
"One of our options is asking the military for the loan of some of their parachute trained Marines and having them parachute in close to the downed airplane," Press explained. "But if they have to come by train we might as well forget about them. A four by four can get there almost as fast and they'll be able to carry them out as well."
"If they're near Magdeburg then I might be able to help," Walter said. "Neil O'Connor sold his hovercraft to the guy who built Kelly Construction's transport barges. He's based in Schönebeck and he uses it to commute to and from Magdeburg. He's quite proud of how he's improved it, and he's claimed it could do a run from Magdeburg to Grantville faster than any aircraft." Walter grinned. "I bet he'd love a chance to prove it."
"Well, if everything's all settled I better get on to Ed about requesting the Marines then," Steve said and held out his hand for the phone Markus was holding.
Ed Piazza, president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, entered the incident room with Tanya Newcomb, his communications expert, trailing behind. "The navy has agreed to loan us some of their jump-trained Marines, but since the only jumps they've done have been from the jump school's tethered balloon they want Ted or Tracy Kubiak to act as jump master. Also, they're asking if Tracy has completed any of the tandem rigs she was supposed to be making, because their medic isn't jump trained yet.
"And if she hasn't?" Press asked.
"Then they make do with their team EMT, who is probably very good, but not the same as a fully trained medic," Ed answered.
"How are they getting to Grantville, Ed? Because Walter says he knows someone with a hovercraft . . ."
"So does the navy. They say they'll be here inside four hours," Ed answered.
Rudi Kastner was happy to get away from the rescue command center at Hans Richter Field and back flying his plane. He glanced over his shoulder at the small package in the net bag sitting in his postal basket. It contained a small handi-talkie radio, a flashlight, several smoke generators, a couple of flares, four survival blankets, a small survival kit, some chocolate candy, and a flask of hot chicken-noodle soup. All up the package weighed about eight pounds, and it was his job to deliver it to whoever was mobile in the downed Dragonfly.
His first problem was going to be finding the plane. Coming from Grantville he was traveling the wrong way to easily identify the landmarks he'd picked out earlier, so he was going to head toward Fulda and loop round and try and match the course he'd flown earlier.
Twenty minutes later he looped around and headed toward Fulda again. He'd flown on the flight path from Fulda to Grantville the Dragonfly should have been on and there had been no sign of the downed plane. Rudi hoped the plane hadn't fallen out of the trees, otherwise it'd be nearly impossible to find.
Over the settlement of Hilders, on the River Vister, Rudi turned and headed east again. This time he took a more northerly course. He knew the basic shape of the hills he was looking for. It was just a matter of checking out the possibilities as he came to them. Then, just ahead, he saw smoke filtering through the tree tops. It might just be local loggers, but surely they'd know how to prevent their fire smoking that badly. It was something unusual in the area he was searching, so he flew closer.
Yes! There was the tail of the Dragonfly sticking out of the treetops. Rudi reached for his radio. "Grantville Tower. Alfa Papa Two One. I have located the downed aircraft. I am now going to attempt to deliver the package."
"Roger, Alfa Papa Two One. Good luck."
Rudi had the choice of two methods of delivery. If there was nobody on the plane he would have to drop the package through the trees. The package had been carefully packed so such a drop shouldn't break anything. However, "shouldn't" wasn't the same as "couldn't." Also, a dropped package could easily catch on some branches out of reach of the survivors. He flew closer, hoping that Frau Gundelfinger was still on the plane.
* * *
Johann tossed another stick onto the fire. "I still think we should have looked for a clearing and waited there for rescue."
Helene sighed. "What clearing? You looked out from the plane before we came down. Could you see a clearing?"
"No, of course not, we were below the tree tops. However, this wood is managed, so there must be clearings," Johann said.
"Sure, but we don't know where they are, and nobody would know where we were," Helene said.
"We'd just have to light a signal fire."
"But that Air Post plane pilot knows where our plane came down and everything I've read says survivors should stay with their vehicle," Helene said.
"And what can anybody do for us here?" Johann asked.
Helene looked upwards. The sky was visible through the naked branches of the trees. "They could drop something down to us," she suggested.
"If that Air Post pilot comes back maybe he could lower something to us, like they do when they deliver mail sometimes," Elisabeth suggested.
"He'd never get the rope through the treetops," Johann said.
"Then we'll just have to climb back up to the plane and hope he can deliver it that far," Helene said. She looked up at the wreckage of their plane. It didn't actually look that bad. The plane had hit a tree and plowed away branches until it hit one it couldn't break. That had compressed the nose a little. The wings were mostly still intact and looked to be held securely by some large branches. Even though it had swayed a little when they climbed down three hours ago there had never been a feeling that it would fall out of the trees.
Gradually Helene became aware of a new noise in the forest. She met the hopeful eyes of Johann and Elisabeth before all three of them looked up through the naked branches. It was a plane. Surely it was a plane.
"Quick, Philipp, make smoke," Helene ordered as she headed toward the tree they'd climbed down from earlier.
"I should be the one to take the risk climbing back to the aircraft," Johann protested.
"Not with that arm, Hans-Lips," Elisabeth said. "You keep the fire making smoke while Helene and I climb back up to the plane."
A few minutes later Helene and Elisabeth were safely back in the cabin of the Dragonfly. She spared a glance for the curtain hiding the dead pilot before looking around for something to wave. "Damn!" They'd already taken everything down with them. The only bit of cloth remaining was the curtain. She closed her eyes so she couldn't see the pilot and unhooked it.
With the curtain in her hand Helene waited by the door and prayed that the plane would see the smoke and return to investigate.
"He's coming back," she called when she finally saw a plane heading toward them. She gripped the door frame with one hand and leaned out the door and waved the curtain. The plane swooped down and circled them. "It's an Air Post plane. Maybe it's the same plane that found us earlier." She ducked her head into the cabin to smile at Elisabeth. "That means they must have plans to rescue us."
* * *
Rudi spotted someone at the door of the downed Dragonfly and smiled. It looked like delivery of the package would be by option two. He pulled the aircraft into a tighter turn and lost altitude. The maneuver he was about to perform was one he'd done hundreds of times delivering and collecting mail from places where the terrain made landing impossible, or they just didn't have enough mail to warrant wasting fuel landing and taking off again. It involved doing what his instructor had called a "pylon turn" while an electric winch—one of the few electric items other than the radio on his aircraft—let out cable. The constant banked turn allowed him to lower the basket on the cable while keeping the basket almost stationary at the center of his turn. Of course, this time he was going to be trying to lower the basket to someone in an aircraft stuck up a tree, but that just made it more of a challenge. At least he'd been assured that someone in the plane would know to take whatever was in the basket. Walter Goodluck, the tall, dark-skinned up-timer, insisted his wife, who matched the description of the woman who'd waved at Rudi, would know what to do.
* * *
Helene snatched at the basket as it swung close, but it was just that little bit out of reach. "Elisabeth, I need to get higher so the pilot can lower the basket to me. It's catching on the trees when he tries to bring it down to the door."
Helene kicked off her shoes and grabbed a firm hold of the door frame with both hands. Then she backed up onto the door frame until she was standing up outside the cabin. She hung on tightly while she tentatively reached out with her left foot for the wing root of the top wing. She moved her left hand from its hold on the door frame and reached out to the fabric covered portion of the fuselage where she forced her fingers through a tear in the doped linen and wrapped her fingers around one of the wooden ribs. With her left hand holding on tightly, her left foot on the wing root and the right foot balanced on the door frame Helene looked outward and upward, over her right shoulder, toward the basket.
The pilot had obviously been watching, because he immediately brought the basket lower. In less than a minute Helene was able to reach out for the basket, and pulling it gently, she moved it closer to the door. "Get ready to take whatever's in the basket," she called.
Two hands appeared at the door, reaching for the basket. They reached in and immediately came out again dragging a net wrapped package.
The sudden change in mass must have affected the plane because suddenly the basket moved and Helene lost her already precarious balance. "Help!" she screamed, as both feet lost contact with the aircraft.
Hands pulled on her belt and Elisabeth screamed at her to let go of the basket.
Helene did as she was told, and discovered that her left hand still had a firm grip on the fuselage. With one hand hold and Elisabeth supporting her by the belt Helene quickly found footholds and scrambled back into the cabin. She took a deep breath and looked at Elisabeth. "Walter doesn't have to hear about that."
Elisabeth nodded and slumped onto a chair with the package they'd risked so much to recover. "Of course not, he'd only worry," she said as she examined the contents of the package. The first thing out was a letter. She glanced at it and passed it to Helene. "Here, this is for you."
She took the letter. The handwriting told her it was from her husband. She eagerly tore it open and started reading. "Elisabeth Sofie is safe and well. Walter sent her to stay with Emilie when he heard our aircraft had gone down," she reported. "In the package is a short range radio . . ." Helene watched Elisabeth undo the impact resistant packaging to reveal a walkie-talkie radio. ". . . which can be used to communicate with the pilot." She grinned at Elisabeth. "Well, that's good. We can tell him we're okay and he can pass it on to our families." Helene took the radio and paused. What to use as a call sign? Oh, well, there was always the obvious. "Air Post Plane. This is Downed Plane. Are you listening?"
"Air Post Plane receives you, Downed Plane. Who is aboard and what injuries do you have?"
Helene quickly related their names and the injuries to Duke Philipp and the pilot.
"Downed Plane, I have to leave you now. A rescue mission is being assembled. Please read the instructions for the smoke generators and signal flares. They will make locating you again much easier."
"Just a minute. How long is this rescue going to be?" Helene listened, but the Air Post plane was already out of range. "Damn!"
Elisabeth smiled at Helene and passed her some chocolate. "It'll take as long as it takes, Helene. Just be patient."
"I don't do patient," she protested.
Elisabeth just smiled and bit off a piece of chocolate.
Press approached the six men climbing out of the vehicles. There were going to be complaints about the noise the hovercraft had made, he just knew it, but at least they'd had plenty of warning that it was getting close and been able to save time by sending a couple of vehicles ahead to meet them. He looked for their leader, and managed to pick out the insignia of a captain. "Am I glad to see you and your men."
The captain reached out and shook Press' hand. "Captain Wilhelm Finck, USE Marines. Are you the man in charge?"
"Yes. Police Chief Press Richards, Grantville Police. Steve Matheny, the fire chief is inside. We've got what maps we have spread out in the incident room if you'll just step this way."
Captain Finck glanced over at his men. "Corporal Müller, see to the men. Sergeant Fels, follow me." He turned to Press. "Are the Kubiaks here?"
"Yes." Press said. "Tracy's doing final checks before she packs a tandem parachute and Ted's helping modify the plane for the mission."
There was the hint of a smile on Sergeant Fels' face when he glanced over at Pres. "Modify?"
"Yes. Apparently the door has to come off, and the TEA people aren't very happy about it," Press answered.
"It would just be in the way when we bail out," Sergeant Fels explained.
"Tracy says that Ted better take the tandem chute as none of your men have any experience with it."
"That's good to hear. I wasn't looking forward to doing my first jump from an aircraft strapped to Lance Corporal Böhm," Sergeant Fels said.
Press guided them into the incident room. "We've made radio contact with the Vice President. Her Excellency and the duke and duchess are alive and well, other than a broken arm for the duke. The pilot is dead." He waited for the Marines to absorb that information before continuing. "She says they can climb down from the plane, but will wait immediately below it in case we want to drop off another package."
Captain Finck frowned. "So you no longer need us?"
"Well . . . yes and no. They aren't in immediate danger, but it'll still be sometime tomorrow before we can get anybody to them any other way and, well, something caused both engines to fail on that plane. We need to know what happened, and if it's connected in any way with the events of March fourth. We'd like you and your Marines to protect the aircraft from potential looters until we can get a crash inspector to the site."
"We are happy to be of assistance," Captain Finck said.
The passenger seats in the Jupiter had been removed as part of the maintenance work and the TEA mechanics had been told not to put them back. It meant the Marines were sitting on the floor with their backs to the fuselage, which wasn't the most comfortable way to travel, but it made it easier for the equipment-laden men to move about.
Sergeant Christoph Fels watched Tracy work her way toward him, stepping carefully over the spread-out legs of his men and their equipment. She bent down beside him and spoke into his ear. "We've located the drop zone. The pilot is going to take us around again so I can drop a marker on what looks like a small meadow. It's about half a mile from the crash site, but unless you want to try landing in the trees . . ." Tracy left the rest of her sentence hanging.
"And risk a few broken bones? No thanks. I'll see to my men while you mark the drop zone," Christoph said.
Tracy nodded and returned to the cockpit. Christoph meanwhile checked on his men. With only a broken arm to worry about they'd decided they didn't need Lance Corporal Böhm's medical skills—much to his obvious disgust—so he and Ted had been left behind with the captain, who was running interference for them back in Grantville. The four of them should have little trouble on what was turning out to be a simple training exercise, and all on someone else's budget.
A hand grabbed his shoulder. Christoph looked up to see Tracy. She was pointing toward the exit. With no door the wind noise made normal conversation impossible. Not that he needed to hear her to know what he was supposed to do. He joined his men near the door in hooking up his static line, made sure that his backpack was secure around his legs and attached the rope that would suspend it from his harness. Then, standing semi-crouched so the pack wouldn't fall from its position, he waited for his turn to jump.
Tracy slapped the back of Lance Corporal Fabricius, the team scout and EMT. He stepped out onto the wing, took three steps, and disappeared off the trailing edge. Ten seconds later Corporal Nik Müller, the radio operator, followed him out the door. Another ten seconds and Lance Corporal "Al" Dinckeler, the team engineering specialist, followed. Christoph shuffled to the door. To his right, past the leading edge of the Jupiter's left wing, he could see the orange smoke from the markers Tracy had dropped on a previous pass. To his left the wing blocked any sight of his men. Tracy slapped his shoulder and he stepped onto the wing, took three steps and went off the trailing edge.
Tracy had warned them that jumping from a moving aircraft was different than jumping from the balloon back in Magdeburg, but he hadn't realized how different. Now, as the slipstream caught him, he understood why she'd insisted they use static-lines to deploy their parachutes on their first "combat" jump from an aircraft. It was nothing like parachuting from the jump school balloon.
There was a reassuring "crack" as the canopy deployed and he looked up to check that his parachute had deployed cleanly. It had, so as soon as he was stable Christoph lowered his backpack. Backpacks suspended thirty feet below a jumper offered a number of benefits. It stabilized them in flight, reducing any tendency to swing like a pendulum under the canopy; it gave a thirty foot warning that landing was imminent; and when the pack hit the ground it gave the parachute a moment of extra braking as it no longer carried the extra weight, making the landing that little bit easier. The fact that a man could parachute with a couple of hundred pounds of equipment and land without busting his knees was also a consideration. The backpack was fine, hanging properly, so Christoph took hold of the steering toggles and took up his position behind his men as they glided toward the orange smoke marking the landing zone.
The delay between jumpers had been deliberate. From the air the meadow had looked extremely small. The delay was intended to be long enough to allow the jumpers enough time to secure their canopies and get out of the way before the next man arrived, but not so long that all four jumpers couldn't leave the plane before it passed the target.
As he approached the target, Christoph could appreciate just how small it was. He turned so that he was heading into the smoke, and thus heading into the wind. This would slow his forward momentum, which was going to be important in such a small space.
Seconds later he performed a parachute-roll to reduce the impact of landing. He quickly scrambled to his feet and collapsed the parachute canopy, then turned and started to wind it in before a gust of wind could catch it. While he bundled up his parachute Christoph looked around the meadow. It appeared to be well cared for, but then, these Wüstung fields, where the original village had been abandoned for some reason, were useful places to hide livestock from foraging armies. He looked up at the sky. A lot of people weren't going to like the idea that their safe hidey holes could now be easily located by aircraft.
Five minutes later, with their parachutes stuffed into sacks that were tied to their backpacks, the men of the 1st Reconnaissance Company, First Marines, were ready to move out. "Fabricius, lead the way," Christoph called to his lead scout.
Johann Fabricius checked the location of the smoke marking the crash site—the survivors had been asked to let off a couple of their smoke markers from the top of their tree—against his compass, then he stared into the woods. A moment later he set off.
The rest of the Marines followed. First Christoph, then Corporal Müller, and finally, Al Dinckeler brought up the rear. They each had a military-issue lever-action magazine rifle held ready for use, not because they expected to face an enemy, but because that was how they'd been trained. Besides, there were other dangers you could run into in the forest. Wolves, bears, and most dangerous of all—because unlike most wild animals which tended to avoid humans—pigs.
Every fifty or so yards Fabricius stopped and checked his bearings before moving again. Christoph knew that Fabricius was picking out a landmark on the right bearing and walking to it before picking out the next landmark. This was to stop them drifting off target, which could easily happen if they blindly followed a compass bearing while walking around obstacles.
Half an hour later they came across the survivors wrapped in survival blankets sitting staring at their fire.
* * *
The sound of heavy packs hitting the ground had Helene almost jumping out of her skin. She looked up to see four tough looking men in combat fatigues studying her and her companions. "Hello," she said tentatively, her grip on the pistol Walter insisted she carry with her tightened, ready in case she needed to use it.
One man stepped closer and snapped to attention. "Sergeant Christoph Fels of the USE Marines at your service, Your Excellency."
Helene smiled at the term of address she still hadn't got used to. She rose to her feet, tucking her pistol into her belt holster as she did so, and gestured toward Duke Johann Philipp. "Thank you, Sergeant Fels. Do you have a doctor? The duke has broken his arm."
The sergeant called out, "Fabricius, see to his grace."
Helene watched a Marine with a first aid kit slung over his shoulder dump a small bright orange sack beside Sergeant Fels before walking over to Philipp. She turned from watching the man examine the duke's arm and was surprised to see the sergeant had emptied the sack and was erecting the tent it had contained. Surely sergeants had privates to do things like that? She looked around to see what the other Marines were doing. One was setting up the aerial for a radio while the fourth man had one tent already up and was erecting a third. It wasn't what she expected, but she supposed that when there were only four of them even sergeants had to do their share.
She turned back to the sergeant. "What happens now?"
"Are you fit to walk out or do you need to be carried?"
Helene looked down at her previously very glamorous divided skirt and the toes that were peeking out from under it. She extended her leg so the sergeant could see the shoes she was wearing, which were totally unsuitable for walking in the woods, and looked pointedly back at the sergeant.
"Your husband thought about that, Your Excellency."
The sergeant burrowed into his backpack. First he pulled out her favorite pair of walking half boots, then a similar pair that had Elisabeth calling out, and a pair of custom tramping boots that could only belong to Philipp. These were followed by bundles of clothes suitable for hunting on foot. Helene took the bundle that looked like hers and passed the others over to Elisabeth. With her new clothes and boots grasped to her chest she looked from the tents to the sergeant. "I assume we're staying put tonight?"
"Yes," Sergeant Fels answered. "Although we might not be leaving tomorrow either," he continued.
"Not leave tomorrow? Why ever not?" Elisabeth asked.
Sergeant Fels turned to address the duchess. "I'm sorry, Your Grace, but our orders are to stay with the aircraft until a crash investigation team arrives."
"Why?" she demanded. "It's not going anywhere."
"We've been ordered to protect the aircraft, Your Grace. There are people about who'd steal anything that isn't nailed down . . ."
A sound from above had the sergeant looking up. "What are you doing up there, Fabricius?" he bellowed.
Helene followed the Sergeant's gaze up to the aircraft. The man who'd attended to Philipp was standing on the lower wing with a small cooking pot in one hand and a length of hose in the other.
"Checking the pilot, Sarge. They were right. He's dead."
Sergeant Fels looked at the cooking pot and hose in Fabricius' hands. "And to discover that you needed a cooking pot?"
"No, Sarge. But it's going to rain and I thought there's a lot of avgas on board this plane, nobody's going to miss it if we take a quart or two to help keep the fire going."
Sergeant Fels gave Helene a "what can you do" shrug before asking, "is there anything left on the plane that you or your companions would like to rescue before the local plague of locusts takes anything that isn't nailed down?"
Helene smiled at the sergeant's obvious discomfort. It had been the worst possible timing for poor Fabricius to decide to liberate some fuel just when his commander was explaining that they were supposed to be protecting the aircraft from looters. She glanced over at Elisabeth, who had her hand clamped firmly over her mouth. Philipp just smiled and mimed lifting a case, reminding her of the question the sergeant had asked. "Our baggage is in the rear compartment." She glanced up and located the external door of the baggage compartment. Fabricius might be able to reach it if he climbed up the fuselage, but it looked risky. "That is, if it's not too much trouble."
Sergeant Fels snorted. "Fabricius is used to trouble." He yelled up to Fabricius. "Leave the fuel for now. The passengers would like their baggage."
Fabricius stowed the cooking pot and hose in the cabin and climbed up to the baggage door which he forced open with a vicious looking knife. A short time later he pulled out a case and shouted down. "Ready?"
"Don't throw it," Sergeant Fels bellowed. "Lower the bags gently."
Helene released a breath she didn't remember taking. That had been her case, and she was still hopeful that the crash hadn't broken the gifts she'd bought on this trip.
She watched Fabricius tie a line to the handle and lower the bag to the ground. Although calling the way he let the line slide through his gloved hands "lower" was being generous. Only at the last moment, just before it reached the outstretched hands of Lance Corporal Dinckeler, did he slow it down. Dinckeler untied the bag and Fabricius hauled the line up to repeat the exercise.
"That's the last of them," Fabricius called a few minutes later.
"Very well, Fabricius. You may now get your fuel," Sergeant Fels called.
Helene joined Philipp and Elisabeth around Dinckeler as they picked out their property. There was a single case left.
"Who does it belong to?" Dinckeler asked.
Helene shrugged. "I don't know. Probably the pilot."
Dinckeler picked up the bag and carried it to his Sergeant. "Sarge, this might belong to the pilot."
"I heard." Sergeant Fels opened the bag and was about to examine the contents when a there was a plaintive cry from above.
"Sarge, the effing fuel tank is empty."
Helene had no difficulty detecting the absolute disgust in Fabricius' voice.
Captain Wilhelm Finck entered the situation room behind Tanya Newcomb. He held her seat for her before handing the President a copy of the decoded transcript of the exchange he and Fraülein Newcomb had just completed with Sergeant Fels. He then took his own seat and addressed the people around the table. "My men have reached the survivors. Other than a broken bone in the duke's forearm, which has been attended to, and minor scrapes and bruises, Duke Johann Philipp, Duchess Elisabeth, and Her Excellency, Frau Gundelfinger have come through relatively unharmed. The same can't be said for the pilot, who died on or soon after impact.
"The passengers confirm that both engines stopped suddenly. Her Excellency claims familiarity with modern vehicles and says there was no warning before the engines 'cut out.' Her Excellency claims that this is proof that the crash did not happen because the plane ran out of gas, even though the tanks were empty when my men checked them." Wilhelm paused in case anybody had anything to say.
"That sounds right," Johannes Schöppner said. "The engines would have started to cough and splutter before they cut out if the plane ran out of fuel."
"So why were the tanks empty?" Steve Matheny asked.
"Probably because the pilot decided to dump fuel to reduce the fire risk when he committed to making a forced landing," Johannes answered.
"I've heard they have problems with fuel theft in Fulda. Couldn't someone have stolen fuel and the pilot not noticed?" Press Richards asked.
"That's not going to happen," Johannes said, shaking his head. "Oh, sure, Fulda has problems with people stealing fuel, but part of the pre-flight involves checking the fuel level with a dipstick."
Wilhelm rapped his knuckles on the table to gain everyone's attention. When he had it he continued making his report. "The pilot then spent some time trying to restart the engines before indicating to the passengers that he intended to make an emergency landing without engine power, and instructed them to unlatch the doors before assuming the crash position."
"That sounded very official," Press said to Johannes.
"There's an official checklist titled 'Emergency Landing Without Engine Power.' I think unlatching the doors is step seven. You unlatch the doors so the impact doesn't jam them shut, and the slipstream keeps them closed until the plane stops," Johannes explained.
After a pause to be sure everyone was listening, Wilhelm continued. "The pilot was attempting to land in the tree tops when suddenly the plane fell nose first into the forest." He looked around the table. "The passengers climbed down and lit a fire. When Alfa Papa Two One returned, the two ladies climbed back up and recovered the basket the pilot lowered. They then climbed down again and waited for my men to arrive."
"Thank you, Captain, that's enough," Ed said. "We all know the story from that point on. I understand your men will stay with the aircraft until ground parties arrive to relieve them."
"That is correct, Herr President. My men will then escort the passengers out, probably to Kaltenortheim, where Herr Goodluck has said he will pick them up."
"What? You mean Walter's already headed off?" Press demanded.
"There is a problem?" Wilhelm asked.
"I'll say there is a problem. We still haven't put together a crash investigation team," Press said.
"Herr Goodluck has two mechanics from the Hans Richter Field Maintenance Department with him." Wilhelm carefully didn't relate Walter's statement that it would take forever to get anything done if he left it up to the "bods in the situation room." He was just glad that someone had taken charge and started making decisions.
"So what does that leave for us to do?" Ed asked.
Press sighed. "Sleep sounds like a good idea. The survivors are being looked after, someone is heading that way to investigate the cause of the crash, and Bamberg is checking on the pilot's next of kin. Until we know what caused the plane to crash there isn't a lot we can, or need, to do."
Johann Fabricius, United States of Europe Marines, stopped and listened. Yes, there were people approaching. He moved closer so he could identify them. There were at least a dozen of them. The ones he could see looked like ordinary foresters, and they appeared to be following the trail the Marines had made the previous day. Fabricius backed off and made a hasty, but quiet, beeline for the camp.
He slid up beside Sergeant Fels' tent. "Sarge, there's a group of woodsmen heading this way."
Sergeant Fels put down the report he was writing and crawled out of his tent. He looked up to the sky to get an estimate of the time. "They might just be locals coming to investigate the goings on, or they might be guiding the people who left Grantville with Frau Gundelfinger's husband late yesterday." The sergeant gestured toward the civilians. "Warn them that strangers are approaching and until we know who they are and their intentions they are to lay low and follow your orders. Her Excellency has a pistol. Tell her to have that ready just in case."
"His Grace has a Glock," Fabricius informed his sergeant. "I saw it when I worked on his arm yesterday. He had it tucked away in his sling."
"Good, that just leaves Her Grace without a weapon." Fels paused to look around the camp before pointing to a large tree stump on the edge of the camp. "Hide them over there until I call you back, and stay out of sight."
"Yes, Sergeant," Fabricius replied and ran off to talk to the civilians.
He found them seated by the fire. "Your Grace, ladies. We're about to have visitors and the sergeant wants you out of the camp until we know their intentions. Your Excellency, Your Grace, are you carrying your pistols?"
Frau Gundelfinger pulled up her jacket to show her pistol tucked into a belt holster while the duke pulled the butt of his pistol out of his sling for Fabricius to see before letting it fall back into it's hiding place.
"What about me?" Duchess Elisabeth asked.
Fabricius was about to explain that she didn't have a gun when he discovered that she did in fact have one. And what a gun it was! He walked over to have a better look at the monstrous revolver she had pulled out of her muff. "I didn't know you had that."
"You didn't ask," Elisabeth informed Fabricius.
"Please, could I have a look?" Fabricius asked, bravely fighting the urge to snatch the revolver from her hands so he could examine it closely.
The duchess thumbed the cylinder catch and flicked out the cylinder before passing it over.
Fabricius fondled it gently. He was amazed to see the bases of eight cartridges in the cylinder. Imagine that, a revolver that could fire eight times. That would catch out anybody expecting you to only have six shots like in a regular revolver. He also noticed that the cartridges were all base-stamped as being .357 Magnum, and just managed to stop himself asking the duchess if she was sure she could handle such a powerful weapon. Nobody carried that much gun unless they were confident they could use it. Reluctantly, he handed the revolver back. "That's not the sort of gun I'd expect a lady to carry."
She smiled at him. "Ah, but then, I'm not a lady. I'm a duchess." She closed the cylinder and tucked the revolver back in her muff. "It is, of course, a perfectly suitable gun for a duchess to carry."
"Anything you say," Fabricius said, still unable to drag his envious eyes from where the duchess had hidden her revolver.
"Herr Fabricius, aren't we supposed to be heading out of the camp?" Helene Gundelfinger prompted.
"What?" Fabricius turned in surprise. "Oh yes. Quick, follow me. The strangers are only a few minutes away."
* * *
Fabricius watched the men arrive. There were fourteen of them, and one of them was an up-timer who he had no difficulty identifying."
"Walter!" Helene Gundelfinger cried out.
Fabricius sighed as he watched Frau Gundelfinger break cover and run toward her husband. So much for having the civilians obey my orders. He helped the duke and duchess out of hiding and the three of them trailed Frau Gundelfinger back to the camp.
The next hour was coordinated bedlam as ten of the men, all local woodsmen judging by their clothing, worked under the supervision of a man wearing a "Kelly Construction" high-visibility jacket to construct platforms that would allow the two men in "Hans Richter Field Maintenance Staff" shirts easy and safe access to the engines and fuselage of the suspended aircraft.
The first platform was under the cockpit. Someone had obviously decided to get the dead pilot out of the way first. Not that Fabricius could blame them. The man had been dead nearly two days and even in the cool weather, he was starting to smell. And besides, who wanted to work around a dead body any longer than they had too? He turned and left them to it. The crash inspectors were here. That meant their job was over and they could go home, or at least return to civilization, where he could have a hot bath, a hot meal, and a soft bed. Fabricius headed for the tent he shared with Al Dinckeler to start packing.
Johann Fabricius added his rifle, backpack, and newly repacked parachute (courtesy of Tracy Kubiak) to the line of equipment against the wall of the team's temporary lodgings and walked over to where his colleagues were seated in "deck" chairs watching the workings of the camp. He slumped into one of the free seats and pulled a wrapped bread roll from one of his combat jacket pockets and took a bite. "Captain, I'd like to transfer to pilot training."
Captain Finck turned half-closed eyes onto Fabricius. "What's brought on this sudden desire to be a pilot?"
"I reckon the pay's better."
"Not that much better," Captain Finck said.
"It's got to be a lot better, Captain. Did you see what that dead pilot was wearing? He had a Nikolaus Treiber Three-Hand Wrist-Chronometer, his leather jacket was made by Knodt's of Fulda, and his shirt was hand made by Paul Hoffmann."
Captain Finck opened his eyes fully and stared at Fabricius. "How do you know all this?"
"When I was checking the body to confirm the cause of death I happened to notice the labels, Captain."
"And how do you know that they are expensive?"
"Because I've seen them advertised in the mail order catalogs, Captain," Fabricius explained.
"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, Fabricius, but I have no intention of recommending you for pilot training. However, you can rest easy. You aren't missing out on your fortune. The dead man was a civilian pilot. They earn more than military pilots."
"Then I want to be a civilian pilot," Fabricius insisted.
"Can you afford the training?"
Fabricius shook his head.
"There you are then. Civilian pilots all had to pay for their own training. Otherwise they'd still be in the air force, wouldn't they?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Then I don't want to hear any more about transferring to pilot training from you, Fabricius."
"No, Captain."
It was just over a week since the assassinations of Mayor Dreeson and Enoch Wiley, and Press' world was in turmoil. He was running short-staffed because of the casualties the police had taken on March fourth, and the fit officers he did have were pulling double shifts chasing everything and anything that could be a lead on who was behind the assassinations. And now, just to cap off the perfect week from hell, the plane carrying the Vice President elect had to crash. Fortunately, because the passengers had all survived virtually unscathed, the news media had decided the accident was just another aviation accident and hadn't asked to be present when the two mechanics Walter Goodluck had taken to the crash site presented their preliminary findings as to the cause of the accident. Press couldn't really spare the time, but he had to be there to hear what caused the accident just in case it was connected to the March Fourth Conspiracy.
They'd set up the room with a trestle table in the middle with chairs in a semi-circle around it. The seats were taken by a select group of people. In addition to Terri Chehab of the president's office, who was there to record what was said, there were the three survivors from the downed Dragonfly; Walter Goodluck; Steve Matheny, the Grantville fire chief; Ed Piazza; and Marine Captain Wilhelm Finck.
The two aviation mechanics filed in and took their seats on the other side of the table. Both of them looked extremely uncomfortable, so Press tried to break the ice by asking them to introduce themselves.
"I am Stephan Ziermann and my colleague is Adam Wachter. In accordance with . . ."
"Any relation to the guy who built the Dragonfly?" Steve Matheny interrupted.
Stephan nodded. "I am proud to say Hans Ziermann is my uncle." He paused to look at the faces gathered to listen to him. There were no more interruptions, and he continued. "In accordance with Herr Goodluck's request we journeyed to the site of the crashed Ziermann Flugzeugwerke Dragonfly to ascertain the cause of the crash. First of all we checked the fuel tank for possible damage or foreign objects that might have blocked the fuel supply. We found none, and we are able to confirm that the pilot deliberately dumped fuel some time before impact. This was most likely done to limit the risk of fire from a forced landing."
He paused for breath. "Based on our experience with aircraft Adam and I decided that the probable cause of the engine failures was an electrical fault. As both engines had failed at the same time we started our search in the cockpit." Stephan looked at his audience. "However, the cockpit had taken the brunt of the impact and much of the instrument panel suffered significant damage, making it difficult to identify any faults that might have existed before the crash. As it was getting quite dark by this time, we stopped work for the evening and discussed our best course of action for the next day. The next morning we requested that the starboard engine, which was the engine closest to the ground, and the most damaged, be lowered to the ground where we could examine it."
Stephan removed a cloth bundle from the satchel he was carrying and carefully unrolled it on the table. "We found this." He stepped back so that everyone could see the item he'd just revealed.
"What is it? Press demanded. He knew it had to be significant, but all he could see was a small box with a wire coming out of it.
Stephan poked the box with a finger. "This was the cause of the engine failure."
"I don't recognize it. What does it do?" Steve Matheny asked.
"Of course you don't recognize it, Herr Matheny. It's not a standard engine part. It shouldn't have been in the engine bay of Bravo Charlie Zero One." Stephan played his eyes over the group seated in the room while he picked up the device and held it up. "This was deliberate sabotage. Someone placed this item, and another like it, between the coil primary wire and the coil on each of the Dragonfly's engines. Each box contains a barometer rigged to break the primary connection to the coil when Bravo Charlie Zero One reached a predetermined altitude. Without power to the coils, the engines stopped firing. This is consistent with the witnesses description of the incident. Both Adam and I are convinced that someone deliberately sabotaged Bravo Charlie Zero One, and that the devices were most probably installed between the aircraft arriving in Fulda on March sixth, and the departure the next day."
Press' head sank into his arms. This was the last thing he needed to hear. He looked up at Stephan. "Are you sure? Couldn't those devices have had a legitimate . . ." Press stopped. The look the mechanic was giving him said enough. Shit! He rubbed his tired eyes and glanced around the semi-circle of listeners. They looked as shocked as he felt. Deliberate sabotage? Who would do it? And why?
"Why do you think they had to be installed at Fulda?" Press asked. He was desperate for any information he could get. He desperately didn't want there to be any connection between the deliberate sabotage of the Vice President's plane and the assassinations of Mayor Dreeson and Enoch Wiley, but the way his luck had been going lately, they were sure to be connected.
"Because the devices were activated while Bravo Charlie Zero One was still climbing after leaving Fulda. If they had been put in place earlier, say in Bamberg, then the engines would have failed as the aircraft climbed to cruising altitude after leaving Bamberg," Stephan explained.
Press almost smiled. He had a starting point, something to limit the investigation. "Thank you, Herr Ziermann. Does anyone have a question or can we let Herr Ziermann and Herr Wachter go?"
"How difficult would it be to make these devices?" Ed Piazza asked.
"Stephan and I could make similar devices easily," Adam Wachter said. "All it is is a simple barometer releasing a switch." He paused to think for a moment. "Think of it as being used to trigger a mousetrap. Once it is sprung the circuit is broken and it will stay broken until the device is reset."
Ouch! So they were easy to make. That just opened up the field of possible suspects. "How long would it take to install the device," Press asked.
"Less than a minute," Stephan said. "First you pull the primary wire out of the connector slot on the coil. You insert that connector into the back of the device here." Stephan pointed to the back of the device where a copper connector could be seen. "Then you take the long wire and plug that into the coil. It is ingenious in its simplicity. The wire from the device is long enough that it can be hidden in the back of the engine bay close to where the coil primary wire emerges. In any standard pre-flight check it would be most unlikely that anybody would detect it."
Press could see that Helene Gundelfinger and the duke had things they wanted to say that it might be better the two mechanics didn't hear. He leapt to his feet and guided them out of the room.
He returned having extracted promises of confidentiality over their findings from the mechanics to a deadly silence. Nobody was speaking and he could feel everyone's eyes following him. He settled into the chair Stephan had vacated. "Well?" he asked.
"Who would want to kill us?" Helene Gundelfinger demanded.
"And if they want to kill people, why not use a bomb?" Captain Finck asked.
Press took the captain's question first. "It's not that easy to obtain the materials to make a reliable bomb, but you do raise an interesting point. Either the cutout devices were much easier to make, whoever placed them couldn't get a reliable bomb, or the idea was to make the crash look like an accident. And as for who would want to kill you, Helene, you're forgetting that you're the Vice President of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. For some people that's enough to make you a target. And for that reason, I'm going to insist that both you and Ed have personal bodyguards."
"Now just a minute," Ed protested. "I am not going to have some hulking big bouncer following me around."
"Neither am I," Helene said.
"Until we determine who is responsible for the sabotage, we have to take every precaution," Press said. "Especially since . . ."
Ed nodded. The deaths of Mayor Dreeson and Enoch Wiley were still raw wounds. "Not that a bodyguard could have done either of them any good the way those shots went down."
"So, we need to look at motives. First, we have to figure out if the people who brought the plane down were connected with the March fourth conspirators, of course . . ."
Ed interrupted. "We're not doing any wild conspiracy theories today. We're just not."
Press kept right on going. ". . . but we can't stop there." He looked at Helene Gundelfinger. "Who stands to benefit from your death?"
Helene stared at Press visibly outraged. "The very idea . . ."
"It sucks, but I have to ask," Press said.
"Helene's daughter is her heir," Walter said.
Press relaxed a little. The girl couldn't be more than seven or eight. That was way too young to put together a scheme to murder her mother. "Who manages the estate though?" he asked, because Walter could still benefit as the girl's guardian.
"Walter wouldn't . . ." Helene protested.
"It's okay, love. He's just being a policeman," Walter assured her. "And Sofie Elisabeth would be well protected. Yes, I would be her guardian, but the trustees are His Grace," he gestured toward Philipp, "and Count Ludwig Guenther over at Rudolstadt."
"And if His Grace had died?" Press asked.
"Then I believe his daughter's betrothed, one of Prime Minister-elect Wilhelm Wettin's younger brothers, takes his place." Walter glanced over at Philipp for confirmation.
"Ernst, currently regent of the Upper Palatinate," the duke agreed.
"And you and your wife's heir is your daughter, Your Grace?" Press asked.
"Only of the nonentailed property," Philipp answered. "However, my lawyer has prepared a codicil for me to sign leaving my third of my father's entailed property to Ernst when he and Elisabeth Sofie marry. He is eligible to inherit the entailed property, and that way Elisabeth Sofie would benefit."
Press felt torn. Here was a possible motive that didn't involve the March Fourth conspiracy. That was good. However, he wasn't comfortable with who the suspects were. There was no way he could haul in a couple of dukes for questioning. He'd have to investigate them discreetly. "Do your brothers know you are trying to disinherit them, Your Grace?"
"Ernst's eligibility was central to the negotiations of my daughter's betrothal," Philipp replied.
Press managed not to smile. This was sounding better and better. Duke Philipp's brothers probably did know their brother was intending to leave his share of their father's entailed property, which should normally be divided between them on his death, to his daughter's future husband, and that the duke wouldn't sign the codicil before the wedding. It made for an attractive motive, but it still had a few problems. The biggest of which was the timing, since the wedding was still some time in the future. However, it did nicely explain why the sabotage had been designed to look like an accident. If foul play was suspected his heirs would have been amongst the first to have suspicion fall on them.
Press stood and paced around the room. "We have two potential motives for the sabotage of Bravo Charlie Zero One. Either there is money at stake, or someone has a political motive for trying to kill Her Excellency, the Vice President." Press stopped pacing and stared at the faces following him. "But why strike at Helene? She has no power. She's just there in case anything happens to Ed."
"Thank you, I'm sure," Helene muttered.
"I'm just stating the facts, Helene. Any Vice President only has as much power and influence as the President lets him or her have. That leaves money, and you're not the most likely target." Press stared at Duke Johann Philipp. "I'm sorry, Your Grace, but it looks very much as if you were the target."
"I find it very hard to believe my brothers would want to have me murdered," Philipp protested.
"It fits the facts, Your Grace, and I've found that when there's money involved, anything is possible," Press said. "Now we just have to see if there is any evidence to support our suspicions."
"How do you plan to do that?" Duke Philipp asked.
"Well, someone with a sound knowledge of up-time engines worked out that cut out device, and someone installed them. I intend asking Fulda to check out anybody who had access to Bravo Charlie Zero One while it was in Fulda. However, I have to warn you, Your Grace, that we may never find any proof."
Captain Wilhelm Finck was having unexpected difficulty falling asleep on the long train ride from Grantville to Magdeburg. As a professional soldier he'd learned to fall asleep within minutes even in the most uncomfortable of situations. However, the events of that morning continued to pass through his mind. He needed something to distract his mind, so he went looking for something to read.
He returned to his seat disappointed. All he'd found were a few copies of the Grantville newspapers that he'd already read and a tatty old Burke's catalog. He slumped into his seat and opened the catalog. Maybe he'd find something interesting.
He flicked through the pages, sparing each page a quick glance in the vain hope it would prove interesting. The advertisement for lessons in Kirlian Image interpretation raised a smile, he knew people who swore by it, but personally, he considered it quackery. A few pages later he came across advertisements for Dr. Gribbleflotz' little blue pills. Lance Corporal Böhm, one of his Marine reconnaissance unit's medics, claimed they were superior to competing brands of aspirin, but then, he didn't have to pay for them. Wilhelm flicked through some more pages. The name Nikolaus Treiber caught his eye and he read on. Then he whistled. Wrist chronometers cost that much?
Suddenly he sat up. What else was it Fabricius had said the dead pilot was wearing? He was pretty sure it was a leather jacket and a shirt. Wilhelm went straight to the index of advertisers at the back of the catalog as he struggled to remember the names Fabricius had rattled off so effortlessly more than two days ago.
He stumbled across "Knodt's of Fulda" under "leather goods." Knodt's leather jackets weren't the most expensive in the catalog, but they did offer the most expensive made-to-order "aviator" jacket. It cost three month's captain's pay, which was considerably more than Wilhelm would ever willingly pay for an article of clothing.
Now Wilhelm's mind was churning. Just how much was a commercial pilot paid? He tried to remember what the pilot in the control tower at Hans Richter Field had been wearing, but nothing stood out. He glanced at the two advertisements again. Those products were designed to stand out. If Johannes Whatshisname had been wearing anything like that surely he would have noticed. Which raised the question, how could the dead man afford them on a pilot's pay? The obvious answer was that he couldn't, and that he had private means. And where there were private means there was always an heir waiting, sometimes very impatiently.
Wilhelm pulled out his notebook and wrote a message. He'd send it at the next stop.
Press Richards stared at the message Mimi Rowland had placed on his desk. "What about the pilot?" What the heck was the captain driving at? Who cared about the pilot? Well, Captain Finck obviously, but the pilot was dead and couldn't tell anybody anything. He glanced up to see Mimi watching him.
"Was I supposed to answer that question?" Mimi asked.
"No." He passed the message form to Mimi so she could officially know what it said.
Mimi tapped her hand with it. "This is the pilot of the Vice President's plane he's talking about?"
"Probably."
"Then I bet he's not asking 'what about the pilot' did he sabotage his own aircraft. So that leaves, does anyone have a motive to kill the pilot?"
"Aghhh!" Press slammed his hands onto his desk. "Just what I need, more complications."
"You want me to call Bamberg and ask them to do a background check on our boy?"
Press sighed. "You might as well."
Steve Ennis of the SoTF Mounted Constabulary made his painful way along the cobbled streets of Bamberg. How his wife managed to walk all day in high heels he couldn't understand. At last he and his companion, the most slovenly Watchman he had ever met, arrived at the boarding house where Bamberg Charters' records showed Heinrich Rottenberger had lived for the last six weeks. He put the balls of his feet on the step, and holding onto the short railing, stretched his calves. His boots were perfect for riding, but the heels made walking any distance painful. The amused smirk on the face of his companion didn't help things.
"Is everything all right, Herr Ennis?" Jobst Weybrecht asked.
Steve glared at Jobst. Couldn't the man see he was in agony? "Everything is just hunky dory."
Jobst smiled at Steve before knocking on the door. A woman in her forties answered it.
"You again. What do you want now?" she demanded.
"And a pleasant good afternoon to yourself, Frau Ulner. The State Police want to ask some questions about Heinrich Rottenberger." Jobst stepped aside to let Frau Ulner see Steve.
Steve felt the full brunt of the woman's contemptuous stare. What he'd done to deserve it, he couldn't understand, especially when she'd had an almost friendly smile for Jobst. "Frau Ulner, we are trying to learn more about Heinrich Rottenberger, if I could just ask a few questions?"
Anna Ulner folded her arms and leaned against the door of her boarding house. "Ask away."
"I don't suppose we could come in and have a look at Herr Rottenberger's rooms?" Steve asked.
"What? I'll have you know I run a respectable boarding house. My tenants rely on me to protect them from any of the disreputable riff-raff."
Steve had heard that some people considered policemen on the same social level as knackers, but he wasn't sure he liked being called riff-raff. "Herr Rottenberger is dead, Frau Ulner. He's unlikely to complain."
It was a standoff. Steve and the landlady exchanged silent glares, neither willing to back down. They could have spent the rest of the day like that if Jobst hadn't whispered in his ear that a little greasing of the palms might work wonders.
Steve reached under his jacket for his billfold. He just hoped he was going to get reimbursed for this; otherwise Phoebe was going to murder him. He flipped open the billfold and pulled off a couple of ten dollar notes and waved them at Frau Ulner.
"Only a pair of measly Loaves?" Frau Ulner snatched the bills from Steve's hand and checked them for the watermark. Satisfied she gestured for Steve, and a little reluctantly, Jobst, to enter her house. "I thought up-timers were supposed to be rich. Heinrich always had a wad of Johnnies big enough to choke a horse."
She led them into a three-room apartment consisting of a lounge, a dining room, and a large bedroom with its own bathroom. Steve looked around taking in everything he could see. The furniture obviously came with the apartment, but the books in the bookcase probably belonged to the deceased. He checked each book by holding them by the spine and shaking them. Nothing fell out. Disappointed he moved onto the bedroom closet and checked the pockets of the clothes hanging there. Then he checked each shoe and boot on the shoe rack. He found nothing and moved on to the chest of drawers. With Frau Ulner's eyes following his every move he pulled out each drawer and examined it all over before putting it back.
Next he went into the dining room. The drinks bar seemed well stocked. Steve turned to Frau Ulner. "Herr Rottenberger entertained regularly?"
"Oh, yes, all the time, and only the best food and wine would do."
"Did Herr Rottenberger owe you any money, Frau Ulner?" Steve asked.
"Oh, no. Heinrich always paid his rent on time, and whenever he was planning on entertaining he'd give me enough Johnnies to buy whatever was needed. Very free with his money was Heinrich."
"Do you know any of his friends?" Steve asked. "I'd like to ask them a few questions."
Frau Ulner smirked at Steve. "Heinrich didn't entertain friends, Mr. State Policeman. He entertained 'ladies,' and never the same one twice."
From the landlady's attitude Steve assumed the "ladies" were either prostitutes or "good time girls." He sighed and shoved his notebook into his pocket. "Thank you for your time, Frau Ulner. You have been extremely helpful." He pulled out a pasteboard calling card and held it out to her. "If you learn anything about Heinrich Rottenberger, please contact me."
Steve saw the blank look in her eyes and realized the cooperation his twenty dollars had bought had expired. He left his card on the bookcase and gestured for Jobst to follow him.
Halfway back to the Bamberg watch house Jobst spoke to him for only the second time that day. "How big a wad of Johnnies would it take to choke a horse?"
"Nobody's going to try and choke a horse, Jobst. It's just a way of saying someone's carrying a wad of money about the size of a fist." Steve held up his clenched fist to illustrate what he was saying, and then he stopped and stared at it. How many twenty dollar notes, because that's what "Johnnies" were, did it take to make a wad that big? "Let's get back to the watch house and cut up some paper."
Press Richards had assigned the case of the sabotage of the Vice President's plane to Sergeants Frost and Fleischer. They'd asked to talk to him to discuss the lack of progress.
"Last night Fulda reported that an airfield guard who was on duty the night in question hasn't been seen since the Vice President's plane crashed," Erika Fleischer reported.
"I assume he had something to do with the security of the plane?" Press asked.
"He was the sole guard that night," Estes Frost answered.
"So did he run, or was he pushed?" Press asked.
Erika turned to Estes and raised her eyebrows in question.
"The chief means, did he sabotage the plane or did he see someone doing it?" Estes turned toward Press. "I don't know, but Fulda reports that he emptied his room and disappeared sometime on Wednesday."
Press wondered if the man had been planted to commit the sabotage. "How long had he been working at Fulda field?"
"He'd been working there since just before Christmas," Erika said.
Press sighed. He'd heard of careful planning, but that seemed a little on the long and drawn out side. "So someone got to him and paid him to either look the other way or to sabotage the plane himself."
"I go more for turning a blind eye myself," Estes said. "The sabotage required some special knowledge."
"So where does that leave the investigation?" Press asked.
"Floundering," Estes answered. "I've asked Fulda to try and find the man, but it'll be like hunting for a needle in a haystack." He sighed and picked up another report. "Meanwhile, the Mounted Constabulary detailed Steve Ennis to make inquiries for us about the deceased pilot, Heinrich Rottenberger. He couldn't find any paperwork in Herr Rottenberger's apartment. About the only things of note he picked up were comments by the landlady that Herr Rottenberger always carried 'a wad of Johnnies big enough to choke a horse,' that he was popular with a certain class of 'lady,' and was very free with his money. Steve cut up some paper and thinks it'd take at least a hundred bills to make a wad that big."
"He always carried two thousand in cash?" Press realized he hadn't seen any mention of the pilot's personal effects. "Was he carrying it when he died?"
"I don't know? Erika?" Estes asked his partner.
Erika shook her head and rose to her feet. "I'll get Heinrich Rottenberger's personal effects from the property locker."
A few minutes later she returned with a soft suitcase and a large paper evidence bag and placed them on Press' desk.
Press opened the paper bag and looked in. It contained the personal clothing Heinrich Rottenberger had been wearing when he died, and it hadn't been cleaned. He put the bag on the floor by his feet and turned his attention to the suitcase. He unbuckled the belts holding it closed and opened it to reveal clothes and footwear. He checked the inside of the lid for any information. There was Heinrich Rottenberger's name, and nothing else, so he emptied the bag one item at a time, passing them on to Estes after checking them.
He didn't find anything in the pockets or linings of the clothes, but he struck pay-dirt when he stuck his hand into a calf-length boot. He felt a small box forced deep into the boot. He hauled out his prize and opened it. "Well, I guess we know how he paid off his lady-friends," Press said of the dozen or so sets of gold and silver earrings.
Estes dug into the companion boot and emerged with an envelope. He passed it over to Press. "You can do the honors, Chief."
"Thanks." Press flipped open the envelope, saw it contained money, and tipped the contents onto his desk.
Erika reached out and spread the bank bills out. "They're all Bucks. Not one Johnnie." She stared at Press. "Why would someone who has a wad of Johnnies carry around a bunch of Bucks?"
"Aren't Bamberg and Fulda suffering from a shortage of dollar notes in circulation?" Estes asked. "Maybe some of the merchants are offering a premium for them. Like happened back up-time when they had that shortage of pennies. Some places were giving a dollar-fifty for a hundred pennies."
"But would that be worth Heinrich's while?" Erika asked.
Press finished counting the dollar bills. "Not if all he has is forty-six of them. No, there has to be another reason for him collecting dollar bills."
"Just a minute," Estes interrupted. "We're missing Heinrich's wad of twenties. What happened to that? Did he blow his roll?"
"He might have been carrying it at the time," Press suggested. "Erika, could you clear the desk?"
Press bent down for the paper bag of effects and emptied it onto his desk. Out fell a torn and bloodied flying jacket, a bloodied woolen sweater, a bloodied and torn white linen shirt, trousers, undergarments, socks, and boots. He stared at the pilot's personal effects. "No wallet, and certainly no wad of notes big enough to choke a horse. So much for our rich pilot as a target for the sabotage."
Erika held up the jacket she'd been examining. "Maybe he was rich and someone got to the money first."
"What makes you say that?" Press asked.
She held out the jacket so Press could see. "Look here, the buttons have all been cut off. And where's the pilot's watch? I thought all pilots had a watch. I think the pilot's body has been looted."
"So he could have still had his wad when he started out from Fulda? That's nice to know, but were does it get us?" Estes asked.
"Looking for a source of all the money," Press said. "That jacket wasn't cheap, and neither are the shirts. Heinrich had very expensive tastes. Where's the money coming from?"
"Not from Bamberg Charter," Estes said. "Steve asked what they were paying Heinrich, and it isn't enough to support the lifestyle he was leading."
"So he has a private income, or he was doing something illegal," Press stated.
"I don't think he had a private income," Estes said. "Steve says Heinrich was living in pretty grotty digs up until six weeks ago, and he wasn't much of a party animal then either."
"He could have won or inherited the money six weeks ago," Press said.
"Sure, but where is it?" Estes asked. "Steve didn't find any paperwork in his apartment, and the local bank only shows his pay from Bamberg Charter passing through his account."
"What could a pilot do to earn that much money?" Erika asked.
"Well, back up-time, a lot of pilots made extra money transporting goods 'off the record,'" Press answered.
"But what can he transport that would pay that well?" Estes asked. "The big thing up-time was drugs, but that only works if they're illegal."
"And why kill him? Erika asked. "That's like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."
"Maybe, but what's the one thing any illegal operation doesn't want?" Press asked.
"The police on their tail," Estes suggested.
"Funny," Press said. "No, what they don't want is anybody to notice them."
"But if they hadn't killed Heinrich Rottenberger, we'd probably never have heard of him," Erika protested.
"It doesn't have to be the police who noticed. Maybe someone wondered where all Heinrich's money was coming from and started to ask questions," Press suggested.
"So the smugglers killed him," Erika said. "Do you think the Vice President's flight was picked deliberately?"
"I don't know. It certainly confuses things. Okay, I like the idea that Heinrich Rottenberger was the target and the Vice President and the duke and duchess were just distractions, but we need evidence," Press said. "What do we have that marks Heinrich as the target?"
"What would you like? Erika asked.
"Knowing what he was supposed to be smuggling would be a good place to start," Press said.
Erika looked at the items spread over Press' desk. "Those one-dollar bills bother me. Could I take them to the bank and ask if there is anything special about them?"
Press handed them over. "Sure, but they look like ordinary dollar bills to me."
"Aren't we forgetting something?" Estes asked.
"What?" Press asked.
"Someone looted the pilot's body. Shouldn't we be investigating that?"
"Oh, sure. Now where would you like to start? Maybe the Vice President? Or how about Duke Johann Philipp and his wife?" Press didn't think he was overdoing the sarcasm.
"Of course I'm not suggesting they looted the pilot's body," Estes protested.
"Then maybe you'd like to question the Marines?" Press asked. "They were after all, the first people to arrive, and they had the opportunity."
"Hell no! The Marines wouldn't do a thing like that," Estes declared.
"Why not?" Erika asked.
"Because looting bodies is what mercenaries do, not Marines," Estes protested.
"Yeah, right." Erika shook her head. "Maybe in your rose-tinted ideal up-time world Marines don't loot bodies, but don't expect your twentieth century standards to apply in the seventeenth century. In the real here and now world, looting bodies is a soldier's perk."
"But the other Marines would turn anybody looting a body in," Estes said.
"You think they couldn't have agreements to share?" Erika demanded.
"Children, children, settle down. I'll ask Captain Finck if any of his people know anything about the body being looted," Press said.
"And what will you do when they deny any knowledge?" Erika asked.
Press sighed. That was a good question, and it was a forgone conclusion that Captain Finck would deny any of his men looted the pilot's body. "Not a lot. We'll just have to hope the new Marines live up to our ideals."
"What about the civilians who helped remove the body from the aircraft?" Estes asked.
Erika snorted. "You're welcome to travel to Kaltenortheim to ask if any of them looted the body, just as long as I get to watch from a safe distance."
Press winced. He knew exactly what Erika meant. Just like the Marines, the village would deny any knowledge of the looting, and they'd take offense at the suggestion that any of them would loot the dead. "Well, that leaves Walter, his foreman, the two mechanics, and the people in the four by four that brought the body back."
"I'll ask Walter if he saw anybody near the body," Estes offered.
"And I'll wander over to the bank and ask about the bundle of Bucks," Erika said. She smiled at Press. "Have fun talking to the Marines, Chief."
Press glared at his sergeants. "Get outa here."
Sergeant Erika Fleischer waited patiently while the manager of the Bank of Grantville used a jeweler's glass to carefully examine each of the dollar bills Heinrich Rottenberger had been carrying.
Coleman Walker held the last bill up to the light. "Well, I don't see anything unusual about these dollar bills." He turned to Erika. "They look completely normal."
Erika sighed. She'd been so hopeful that there was something special about the bills. "But why would a man who typically had a large wad of twenty-dollar bills bother to carry forty-six one-dollar bills in his baggage? From what I've heard he was very free with his money. It just doesn't make sense."
"Do you have any of that wad of twenties that I could examine?"
"Sorry," Erika shook her head. "The body wasn't secured until it arrived in Grantville, by which time anything of value had been stolen. We're lucky that those dollar bills were in the baggage in the custody of the Marines who made first contact with the survivors, otherwise we probably wouldn't have them."
Coleman tapped the bill against his desk. "You say the deceased spent freely of his wad of twenty-dollar bills. I don't suppose you could track any down?"
Erika looked closely at the bank manager. What was he driving at? Not that it mattered. "It's been a week since Heinrich Rottenberger would have made his last purchase. The bills could be anywhere now."
"That's a pity." Coleman stared down at the dollar bill in his hands for a few seconds in silence before pushing it, and its companions toward Erika. "I'm afraid I can't help you then, Sergeant."
Erika stood up and collected the dollar bills from the desk. She was stuffing them back into their envelope when her curiosity got the better of her. "What good would looking at the twenties do?"
Coleman leaned back in his chair and looked up at Erika. "I'd be looking to see if he was passing off forgeries."
"Forgeries? How do you connect forgeries with Heinrich Rottenberger?" Erika demanded.
"It's the only profitable use I can imagine for good condition dollar bills," Coleman said.
Erika sank back into the chair she'd just recently vacated. "Explain," she demanded.
Coleman reached into his jacket and brought out his wallet. He removed a single twenty-dollar bill and laid it on his desk beside one of the bills Erika hadn't yet picked up. "What are the differences between those?"
Erika picked up the bills and studied them. "They have different things printed on them?"
"Other than that," Coleman said.
She looked at them again. She put one over the other and checked the size. She held them side by side. She couldn't see any difference. Defeated she looked at the bank manager. "I don't know, what is the difference?"
"Other than the printing, there isn't any," Coleman answered.
For a moment Erika considered charging the bank manager with wasting police time, but thinking about how the Chief might react, thought better of it. "Is that important?"
"You have to understand that there has always been a constant battle between the banks that issue bank bills and people who attempt to forge them. The prime weapon against successful forgery is early detection. If we can catch the people trying to launder the bills we can backtrack the bills to the source. At least that's how it worked up-time. The feel of the money is the most obvious clue something is wrong. Back up-time there was an increase in people trying to pass forgeries when the first high quality color photocopiers came out, and there was another surge when home computers got scanners and ink-jet printers, but those were mostly passed by amateurs, kids usually, and they were easily caught because they used ordinary printer paper."
"Was that how the bank detected the forgeries a couple of kids made on their home computer?" Erika asked.
"Yes, and Judge Riddle ordering the forfeiture of the equipment used in the crime certainly put a stop to that game."
Erika could only nod. The parents of the boys involved had tried to claim that the penalty far outstripped the crime, as the computer system was worth orders of magnitude more than the one hundred dollars the boys had tried to spend. However, Judge Riddle had pointed out that he was already being generous by not imposing a custodial sentence on the offenders, and that a firm message had to be sent to anybody who might contemplate manufacturing forgeries and trying to launder them.
"We might never have caught those boys if they'd used down-time paper." Coleman visibly shuddered. "That was a problem with our first bills. We were in a rush and had to buy the paper when and where we could. If it hadn't been for Tom Stone's dyes we would have really been in trouble, as anybody could get the same paper we were using. But we did have Tom, and that let us rely on the second obvious feature of bank bills, the color."
"But there are plenty of alchemists making all sorts of colored dyes and inks these days," Erika protested.
"Sure," Coleman agreed, "but for the last two years we've been making our own paper using a secret blend of fibers, and we've added a silk thread and a watermark portrait of the Captain-General. We started removing the old bills from circulation as soon as we had the new design, so there aren't that many of the first generation bills left in circulation."
Erika picked up a dollar bill and checked the features. Her fingers easily detected the silk thread that passed from top to bottom, while by holding the bill up to the light she could see the watermark. It wasn't as sharp as the images printed on the bill, but the Captain-General could easily be identified. "So any forgeries will have a different feel to the real thing, even if they can get the same colors?"
"Normally I'd say yes, but if someone's been collecting good condition dollar bills, then we might have a problem. You see, if they bleach those one dollar bills then they have the same paper as we use, and they can print any denomination they like."
"You mean they could make undetectable forgeries?" Erika asked.
"Oh, they'll be detectible, but only to someone who bothers to look. That's why the feel and color of the bills is so important. How many people actually look at a bank bill when someone hands one over?"
Erika tried to visualize her most recent shopping trip. Certainly the shop attendant hadn't paid the bills she passed over any special attention, and she surely hadn't done more than count the change. "Is there anything that can be done?"
Coleman shook his head. "It's only supposition until such forged bills turn up. I could be completely wrong and there could be a perfectly innocent explanation why the deceased had those dollars," he suggested.
Erika kept her expression blank. She didn't think the bank manager was wrong. She stood, collected the scattered dollar bills and stuffed them into their envelope, and then she held out her hand. "Thank you for your cooperation, Herr Walker."
Coleman took her hand. "Sorry I couldn't be more help, but if you come across any of the deceased's twenty-dollar bills, I'd like to look at them."
"What am I looking for?" Erika asked.
"It could be something as obvious as the watermark facing the wrong way, or they only print the back in green instead of printing the numbers and seal in black, or they might spell words incorrectly or print them in the wrong font. Alternatively, if they spend a lot of time and effort making their plates you'll probably need a jeweler's glass to check the micro printing around the illustrations to know they're forgeries."
Erika winced. "That's not going to help the innocent trader who has a business to run. They don't have time to carefully examine every bill that passes through their hands."
"I know, but until we know there are forgeries out there and know what serial numbers they're using, we can't warn the merchants what bills to be wary of."
Press Richards finished reading Sergeant Fleischer's report. He was torn between loving the idea that the plane crash was not part of the March fourth conspiracy, and horrified at the idea that someone was passing virtually undetectable forgeries.
If, as he was starting to suspect, those Johnnies the pilot had been passing around like water were forgeries, then the man might have become a liability to the forgery ring. The trouble was the whole forgery hypothesis was born of those dollar bills the dead pilot had collected. There was no actual proof there was a forgery ring active, let alone that they'd sabotaged an aircraft to kill the pilot.
"Have you heard anything more on the looting of the pilot?" Erika asked.
Press winced. It'd been bad enough talking to Captain Finck, who at least had been able to provide the information that the deceased had had all his buttons and his wrist watch before Walter and the rest arrived. The rescue team who brought back the body had responded with outraged denial. "The Marines say the body was intact when they turned over responsibility for the aircraft, and Estes reports that Walter said neither he, his foreman, or the mechanics ever went near the body."
"So that leaves Kaltenortheim," Erika said.
"Yes, that leaves Kaltenortheim. Would you like to go on a trip?" Press asked.
"No thanks. Besides, isn't Kaltenortheim out of our jurisdiction?" Erika asked.
Press smiled. "Just joking. And yes, Kaltenortheim is out of our jurisdiction. I'll ask the Mounted Constabulary if they can spare someone to ride over and ask some questions."
"Oh, fun. I wonder who gets that plum job?"
"No doubt they have someone suitably deserving of the assignment," Press said.
Steve Ennis sat in the cafeteria staring in disbelief at the orders he'd just been given.
"Herr Ennis, you look upset?"
Steve was surprised to see concern in the eyes of the watchman he'd been working with. "I've just been given new orders."
"You are leaving us?" Jobst Weybrecht asked.
"I wish that's what it said. Anything would be better than what they've told me to do." Steve passed the papers across the table to Jobst. "Here, read for yourself."
Jobst sat down and read the orders. He looked up, and Steve could have done without the obvious sympathy in Jobst's face. "They are fools. They want you to ask a village if anybody found a wad of Johnnies on the body. They will deny it even as they search the homes of those that had the opportunity."
"You know that, and I know that, but whoever cut those orders doesn't seem to know that," Steve said. "Maybe I should just hole up in an inn for a few days before coming back and say the village denies any knowledge of who might have looted the body."
"It would save you an uncomfortable ride, but maybe a villager saw an outsider interfering with the body."
Steve collected his orders from Jobst and stood. "Well, the sooner I start, the sooner I can get it over with."
"Enjoy your ride," Jobst said. "Will you be riding on your own?"
"The Constabulary has found a boy to guide me," Steve said. He wasn't happy about going in without proper support either, but this inquiry had been allocated a low priority. The Mounted Constabulary was too thinly stretched investigating leads to the conspirators responsible for the rioting in Grantville on March fourth.
Jobst stood and shook Steve's hand. "Be careful, Herr Ennis, and don't tilt at any windmills."
Just as the watchman disappeared from view Steve registered his final comment. Tilt at windmills indeed. Well, he had absolutely no intention of being foolishly heroic like Don Quixote. He was going to visit Kaltenortheim, ask if they knew anything about the possible looting of the dead man's body, and hurry back. He might strike it lucky and find out something about Heinrich Rottenberger's wad of Johnnies, but he doubted it.
That comment about tilting at windmills bothered Steve. How would Jobst know the story of Don Quixote? It wasn't as if the Grantville libraries had copies of the book in German, so he must have read it in English. Steve shook his head at the thought. There was obviously much more to the old watchman than met the eye.
"Steve Ennis reports that the village of Kaltenortheim knows nothing about the looting of Heinrich Rottenberger's body. However, they do suggest that the Marines are the most likely suspects, as everyone knows what soldiers are like." Press Richards tossed the report from Bamberg onto his desk and sat back to watch how sergeants Frost and Fleischer took the news.
"Well, that's no more than we expected, Chief," Erika said.
"Yes, but the cheek of them, suggesting the Marines were responsible," Estes said.
"Soldiers don't get any respect." Erika turned to Press. "What do we do now, Chief? We have suspicions, but no evidence to support any of them."
"Don't remind me," Press said. "Our only lead is the security officer." He looked up in case Estes or Erika remembered the name of the security man from Fulda.
"Wolfgang Bendeer," Estes supplied. "He seems to have left town in a hurry, but nobody knows where he might have gone."
"Do we have a photograph of him?" Press asked.
Estes shook his head. "Sorry. No photographs. He's a local boy, born and bred in Fulda, but nobody seems able to give a useful description. He's average height, average build, average smallpox scarring, brown eyes, and mousy brown shoulder-length hair. He's so average he might as well be invisible."
"If he's got money he could easily disappear into one of the booming industrial centers. There are so many people moving from so many different places nobody would notice one more," Erika said.
"Thank you, Sergeant Fleischer. I didn't need to hear that," Press said.
"So what do we do, Chief?" Estes asked.
"Our only lead is Wolfgang Bendeer, but we don't know where to find him, and even if we knew where to look, we don't know what he looks like. So there's not a lot we can do. No, I tell a lie. There is a lot we can do. The trouble is that it all revolves around assuming the worst and improving the personal security of the President and Vice President." Press sighed. That meant he had to tell Ed that he had to have a personal bodyguard. Thank god Walter Goodluck had already employed a minder for his wife.
"Will that be all, Chief?"
Press blinked and looked across at Sergeant Fleischer. "Sorry, I'm just thinking that Ed's not going to like having a bodyguard assigned to him."
"Explain the situation to his wife. I'm sure she will lend you her support."
Press smiled weakly. "Thanks, I'm sure Ed'll be a bit more cooperative if Annabelle is on our side."
He watched sergeants Frost and Fleischer leave his office. Beyond them, in the main office area there were police officers working furiously. He hated to give up on a case, but he didn't have the resources to waste on dead-end cases, and this was the granddaddy of dead-end cases. The only honest-to-God fact they had was that the aircraft had been deliberately sabotaged, but they didn't know enough to be sure why it had been sabotaged. Had it been a strike at the Vice President? Had one or both of Duke Johann Philipp's brothers attempted to murder him so they could inherit the entailed property? Or had some criminal element wanted to silence the pilot because he had become a liability? He hated to do it, but it was another file destined for the cold case collection. He wrote on the cover of the case folder and tossed it into his out basket. Then he took the next file from the bottom of the tower of files in his in-basket and started reading.
* * *
"We need to build something."
Paulus shook his head. "Forget it. The sewing machine has been done. The washing machine has been done. As have the typewriter and the bicycle. A steam car would take a machine shop, which we cannot afford. It's already being worked on, anyway. Anything we can do that can be done, has been done. Sure, we can make wooden toy planes in the open shop time after school and sell them to Woody's so he can sell them by the gross but we won't get rich that way. We won't even make a good living at it.
"What is left will take lots of money. We do not have a room full of dolls or a garage full of plastic bottles to sell and no one is going to lend us large amounts of money. So even if you come up with the next great invention we cannot build it anyway."
Peter sighed. He knew Paulus was right. It just didn't seem fair. All summer, and every weekend now that school was in session, he pushed a food cart around town selling ice cream sandwiches. Shortly, when the weather got cold, the company would go back to selling hot food. The man he worked for was only a few years older than he, and the guy had been plucking chickens down at the market until he started making dumplings. Now he was rich. "Surely we can come up with some way to make a fortune."
"Peter," Paulus countered, "I didn't say we couldn't. All I said was that if it's easy or obvious, it's already been done. The only people in Grantville who aren't trying to get rich already are rich. There are so many students wanting to take the business program they have to have more than one class, and every student in there is dreaming of getting rich."
"Not everybody," Ebert chirped. "Some people are just trying to save enough money to go home."
"Shut up, Ebert." Paulus said.
Peter knew what Paulus' kid brother was talking about. If their father had the money to go home an open a cobbler's shop, he'd do it. Even knowing he couldn't compete with the shoes in the catalog and would go broke eventually, he would still try it. He was a cobbler and that was the life he knew.
Peter also knew he didn't have room to talk. If his own father had the money they would go back to the village and farm. When they fled, and the village was looted and burned, his dad shared a half-farm with his uncle, so they had a quarter-farm, and did a bit of blacksmithing on the side. Right now his uncle was farming the whole half-farm and doing all the smithing the village needed and he was just getting by.
Papa dreamed of having the money to lease a whole farm. There were two still idle in the village. But it would take a lot to get started and the landlord wouldn't provide any help.
Peter nodded. "I don't want to go home and farm. That's no way to get rich. It's not even a good way to make a living." He paused. "We need something. Shoveling snow is not going to get-er-done." Two winters ago clearing sidewalks had been a big deal and seemed like a lot of money at the time.
Ludwig looked up from his lunch. "What we have got to do is figure out what is being overlooked. What do we see that no one else has thought of yet?"
"Well, what ever it is it has to be something that doesn't take a lot of money to get started," Paulus said.
Peter scooped the last of his cold soup out of the plastic bowl, put the lid back on tight to keep the dribbles from leaking out, and put it back into his lunch pail. A bowl of soup and a heel of bread was lunch five days a week when there was leftover soup. Otherwise lunch was just the bread, even though the school served a good lunch menu at a very good price. They actually sold lunch for less than it cost to make, but it still wasn't in the family's budget. "The people making paper bowls are getting rich. The guy who is steaming horn in a pressure cooker and using a press to make fake plastic spoons is getting rich, even if he isn't passing them off as being up-time plastic any more." He put the lid back on his lunch bucket. "The tinkers aren't getting rich but they are making a good living. It's too bad we can't make paper bags."
"Yeah!" Ludwig replied.
Paulus mumbled around his apple. "Paper bags, paper bowls, plastic spoons, plastic bottles . . . they had so much money they could throw it away."
"I wish we could go to a dump and dig them up," quiet little Ebert, Paulus' kid brother, squeaked.
Peter looked at Ebert, the youngest of the gang of four and probably the brightest. He was studying over his age level. "Ebert, you're a genius. Sometimes. But there isn't a dump in Grantville. I've heard a bunch of up-timers complain about that. Besides, my brother worked with the Garbage Guys for awhile, before he joined the army. Less and less is getting put in the trash cans and what is, is all getting sorted and recycled now."
"Hey, didn't Herman say there used to be a coal mine on the farm where his family works?" Paulus asked.
Ludwig got excited. "Yeah! He said when the coal ran out they started using it for a dump. But it isn't very big."
"Right, and you know good and well Herman isn't about to share it with us," Peter answered.
Ludwig slumped. "Yeah." Then his eyes got big. "That's it. That is what we know that everyone else is overlooking. Do you remember that abandoned mine we found when we were looking for mushrooms? What if it got used as a dump?"
"Old mines are dangerous," Peter said. They had a lecture about it in class once. The point being that they should stay out.
"Yeah, they can blow up if you light a candle," Ebert said.
"So?" Ludwig reasoned. "We take a flash light. There is one at the house. It needs new batteries but we can afford to buy them. There's rope in the garage. We can go out there Saturday."
"What do you need a rope for?" Ebert asked. "You might want a shovel, though."
Peter answered, "A rope might come in handy, and a shovel is a good idea." Peter pictured the spot in a ravine on a hillside, near one of the high edges of the Ring Wall, where an opening to a closed dog mine had been exposed. There was a spring farther up the hill and there had once been a small dam for some reason. When it gave way, from neglect, the flash flood had wallowed out the ravine and washed way enough of the dirt covering the opening to the mine so the boys could wiggle through. They knew it was a coal mine. The short shaft was small. It was supported with timbers. But the sunlight did not penetrate very far. Before they'd had a chance to go back with candles for a second look, the lecture on safety warned them off. Now, though, they weren't going just for the fun of it. Now, there might be a fortune in up-time trash down there. Now was different.
"I've got to work Saturday," Peter said. He was the oldest of the crew. He was also the farthest behind in school. This didn't stop him from being the leader of the pack. "I'll buy the batteries. That will cover my share. Then if you find anything I can quit my job and we can go to work for ourselves."
* * *
Peter pushed the ice cream cart up the hill to the garage attached to the caterer's kitchen. It had been a long day and he was tired. He could see his friends waiting for him at one of the picnic tables in the side lot next to the kitchen. When they saw him, Ludwig stayed with the backpacks on the table. The others hurried down the hill to help him. He really didn't need help, but they were excited and in a rush.
"You found something," Peter said. It wasn't a question. There was no need to ask. Their body language was screaming loud and clear.
Ebert looked at Paulus and giggled. "Some glass jars."
"Shush," Paulus said, glaring at his younger brother.
"Glass?" Peter asked, disappointed. Of the up-time relics, glass bottles were the least marketable.
"You'll like these," Paulus said. "You've seen the big half-gallon canning jars with metal rings and lids, right?"
Peter perked up. Canning jars were worth more than old bottles, especially if they still had a useable lid. "How many?"
Ebert giggled again. "Four hundred."
"Ebert, shut up!" Paulus hissed.
Now Peter knew why they were excited. Or at least, he thought he knew. "What can we get per jar from Old Solomon?"
Ebert giggled again.
Before he could say a word, Paulus said, "I said, shut up Ebert. We don't know what he will give us for them, Peter. I don't think we want to sell them to Solomon."
"Why not? Of all the relic buyers in town, Solomon pays the best price for junk."
"This is a bit outside of his field." Paulus said. "You'll see. Let's get you checked in and then we can talk about it."
* * *
At the house, where their families each had a sleeping-room with privileges—they shared the kitchen, bathroom, living and dining rooms—the boys retreated to the tree house in the back yard. The shared residence had brought them together. All three of their fathers worked in the coal mine and dreamed of returning to a past that was gone forever. The boys had a different dream. Ebert's tote was handed up and the rest of the baggage was left on the ground.
"Okay, let's see it," a very excited Peter demanded.
Ebert lifted a jar out. It was full of mushrooms.
"Mushrooms?" Peter asked.
"Hey," Ebert said, "My mother likes them."
Paulus stuck his hand in the bag. "There were a few growing down there, so Ebert brought them home. That's not important. There was a slight breeze when we first got in, so we followed it and found a place where we could see daylight. We couldn't stand up and the sides, they looked caved in. The beams holding the roof up didn't look too good, either. There was a streak of light twenty or thirty feet long and no more than a foot or so wide, but there was a drop off. So we tied the rope to Ebert and he squirmed out to the edge. Good thing we did too, because the lip gave away and we had to pull him back."
"Yeah, and it was long way down too," Ebert chipped in.
Paulus continued, "So we went back to where there was an electrical line."
"That should be worth something," Peter said.
"We would have brought the wire but we found something better."
Well, we can get it later, I guess."
"Yeah, anyway, we followed the wire. You can stand up doing that. And the worst of the beams looked like they'd been replaced and the floor was mostly clear. So we followed the line to see where it went and to make sure nobody owned it. Scavenging is okay, but we're not thieves."
The boys nodded.
"The tunnel ended in daylight, high over the lake. So we followed it back the other way and more wire went down a side tunnel. There was a lot of new wood holding the roof up and we found where the wire was going."
"Yeah," Ebert butted in. "And there was buried water hose that went back to where we came in."
"Ebert . . ." Paulus voice was full of annoyance. "We think that's where it went," Paulus said, squashing his little brother's enthusiasm. "We didn't dig it up all the way, but it looked like that was where it was going.
He pulled out a second half-gallon canning jar with a half burnt stick in it, which didn't account for the weight. At a second glance, Peter could see it was full of a nearly clear liquid.
"Is that . . . ?" Peter let the question hang unfinished.
Three heads nodded.
"It was in the mine?"
Again three heads nodded. "Along with four hundred others, just like it, all stacked in boxes!" Ebert volunteered. "And that's the full ones. There are hundreds more empty ones."
Paulus saw the question in Peter's eyes and nodded a confirmation of Ebert's statement.
"We are rich." Ebert giggled.
"But it belongs to someone," Peter objected.
"I don't think anyone knows it's there. Everything was covered in dust or bat droppings. There were no footprints at all. Well, no people prints anyway.
"There were overhead lights and an electric range like the old one that was out in the garage before the landlord hauled it off for scrap when he rented the garage out for storage. There is a big copper still, sitting on all four burners. But the first thing we saw was over a dozen dried-out old beer barrels.
"Whoever it belonged to was left up-time, Peter. This batch has been sitting there for at least four years now. We've found it; I figure it's ours."
Ludwig and Ebert were both nodding like bobble heads.
Peter thought it over. "Let's take this one down to the Gardens and ask what it's worth."
"Why not?" Peter asked.
* * *
At the back door to Grantville's most popular bar, the boys asked to speak to the manager.
"What about?" a cook asked.
"Whiskey." Ebert giggled.
"He won't sell it to kids," the cook said. "Beer is one thing, hard stuff, though, will get the up-time crazy women picketing the place."
"We want him to buy it, not sell it," Peter said.
"He's got a regular supplier. He don't need something you kids have cooked up. Try across the street."
* * *
At the back door to Club 250, Julio yelled, "You kids get out of here. You don't need to be hanging around."
"We want to talk to the manager," Peter said.
"Yeah, well he don't want to talk to you," Julio growled.
"Yes, he does." Peter lifted the jar out of the tote.
"Get los—" Julio stopped in mid-word. "You boys wait right there. I'll get Ken."
* * *
Ken looked up when Julio stepped in from the backroom without a load of glasses.
"Ken, I'll cover the bar. You need to talk to some boys at the back door."
"Julio, you know I don't sell out the back door, especially to kids. You want to get us shut down?" Ken shuddered. "Remember the League of Women Voters? Damn, those broads are scary."
"You do remember old man McAdams, don't you." It wasn't a question. Old Jack died in a car crash caused by a heart attack, or a heart attack caused by a car wreck. Either way, it happened years ago. "His property taxes were due so he was raising some cash money. The trunk of his car was full of moonshine he was carrying into Pittsburg."
Ken nodded. "How could I forget?"
"You remember how he sold it in half-gallon canning jars with a toasted piece of oak so it would taste like it was aged in barrels." Again, it was not a question.
Ken looked a bit dreamy. "Oh, yes."
"Well the boys you need to talk to just showed me what I think is one of McAdams' jars."
Ken's eyes widened just a hair. Running a rowdy bar takes a good poker face.
"Nobody ever did find where he kept his still," Julio said. "I'll cover the bar. You go talk to the kids."
Ken handed Julio the bar towel. "If you're right and someone has found Jack McAdams' stash, anything they found has to be over ten years old. McAdams was the best. Pure corn liquor, no sugar, or other grains."
McAdams, Ken knew, didn't even use brewer's yeast, just corn malt, corn, and spring water. Jack was one of the old-timers who appreciated the art, took pride in his craftsmanship, and usually only sold his product to people he knew. Other bootleggers bought his stock when they wanted something to drink and weren't about to drink their own product. If someone had turned up the fabled lost McAdams' stash, Ken's financial salvation might be to hand.
The bar was falling on hard times. His customer base kept shrinking as people moved away or left with the army or got too cozy with the locals and did their drinking elsewhere. Ken was hanging on, but pretty soon he was going to have to open the private club up to the general public Yes, that meant letting krauts drink in Club 250. If they would come, considering everything. Like his nephew and that kraut girl. And that whole business with Dreeson. Ken was going to have to do it, though, or go out of business.
But having the only supply around of aged corn liquor would make a difference. It might even bring in enough business to make enough of a difference to stay open without compromising too much. Ken hoped so. His wife was hinting that he really should shut down and let her turn the club into a beauty parlor since she had more business than she could handle running it out of the front room of their home.
* * *
Ken looked at the jar. It sure looked like what McAdams used to sell. A two-quart canning jar with a one by four inch charred oak stick floating in it. That was practically McAdams' trademark. Best of all, the stick wasn't floating at the top like it would if this was newly made liquor. Old Jack didn't sell it until the stick was floating free without touching the top. This stick was touching the bottom. He held it up to the late sunlight. It wasn't water clear, new white lighting. It was the slightly amber shade of charcoal-aged whisky.
"Can I taste it?" Ken asked.
"Are you going to buy it?" one of the boys countered.
"If it is what I think it is, yeah, I'm going to buy it."
"Sure, go ahead."
Ken twisted the top off, sniffed the contents like it was brandy, then took a sip. He rolled it over his tongue, then closed his eyes. He could feel the smile on his face, and took a long hit. It went down as smooth as . . . in his mind he could hear old Jack's voice . . . "as smooth as a baby's bottom on wash day."
"Where did you get this, boys?"
"We found it."
"Where?"
The boy shrugged.
"How much do you have?"
"We've got four more."
"Kid, let's cut the bullshit. If you can get more of these—" He held up the jar. "—then, I know who made this." Ken could see the boys looking at each other and getting ready to run. He took another sip. Ten-year-old McAdams corn liquor was just plain good.
"Now he's dead and gone and ain't none of his kin in town. All the kids and grand kids moved off to Detroit years and years ago. The old home place wasn't much and the family sold it off after Jack died. It was over the line anyway, so it stayed up-time.
"If I didn't have this in my hands, and someone claimed to have found it, I wouldn't have believed them. It's a local legend, like the lost Dutchman's gold mine, but you wouldn't know about that. I can tell you this much, I can't count the number of people over the years who've gone looking for it. Some of them were cops, and some of them were moon shiners. The cops generally swear up and down that it doesn't exist. The shiners claim it was hidden by the devil himself. There's even supposed to be a map. But I always figured it was a fake. Jack sure didn't need it. So, if you found it, good for you. As far as I'm concerned it's yours."
The boys relaxed.
"Now, I don't know how you found it, but if you didn't find over a hundred of these, then keep looking because there's at least that many, probably more. Maybe a lot more. And I want every last one of them." Ken named a price and hid his smile while the young men's eyes tried to pop out of their faces and swallow their heads.
"That price is good for all you can find." Ken paused. "But only if you promise not to sell any of it anywhere else. I'm paying top dollar. I don't need this turning up with the competition. Do we have a deal?" Ken stuck out his hand.
The oldest-looking boy shook on it, then turned to the youngest ones. "Go get the other six."
The two younger boys left at a dead run.
Ken caught the discrepancy. "Six? I thought you said you only had four."
"We wanted the other two to shop around. But you're going to buy them all so we don't need to keep a sample."
Ken smiled at the boy, took another sip, fished the charcoal stick out of the jar and put the lid on. "Good." That one word described the moonshine he just bought, the deal he just made, and his opinion of the kid he'd just made it with.
* * *
After they delivered six jars to Ken and pocketed the money, Peter got in touch with Friedrich to cover for him with the ice cream cart. Then they went shopping and bought two big backpacks, one for Peter and one for Paulus. Ebert inherited his brother's old one.
Sunday morning, dark and early, Paulus and Ebert stirred about.
"Where are you two getting off to?" their mother asked. "It's Sunday." Meaning they needed to go to mass as a family.
"We went last night, Momma," Paulus said.
"Well, you still haven't said where you're going."
"Back to where we found the mushrooms, Momma. I want to see if we can find any more," Ebert answered.
"Let them go," their father said. "If they went to mass last night, then it's all right."
* * *
When they brought in the second load from the hidden cave, the Club 250 was open, so they stopped there instead of taking it to the tree house, like they had the first trip. Ken counted forty jars, which was all they could get in the backpacks. At somewhere close to five pounds a jar, it was a brutal load to be humping up and down the steep West Virginian hillsides. "Let me get you the money," he said.
"Why don't you wait until the end of the day?" Peter suggested. "I don't want to carry the money around."
"I can do that."
* * *
At the end of the day, with the fifth trip behind them and the light of day fully spent, they had delivered a hundred and sixty jars. The first forty were still in the tree house, it was nine o'clock at night and the lads were dragging. For twelve hours they had argued and dreamed, schemed and planned, discussed and priced one option after another. Through the long day of debate over how to spend the money; no one said a word about stopping. It was more money than they knew what to do with, more money than they had dreamed of having. They wanted the golden liquid out of the mine where it belonged to anyone who found it, and safely turned into hard cold cash.
With the last of the bottles counted, Ken said, "You're calling it a night, right?" It wasn't really a question. He could see they were beat and while he didn't know where they were going, other than the fact it wasn't much less than a three-hour round trip, he was worried about them trying to hike up and down the hills in the dark. "Let me write you a check. I don't have this much cash on hand."
* * *
On Monday right at twelve noon the pack train was back. It was their second trip of the day. Now there were eighty jars in the tree house. "What are you kids doing?" Ken demanded. "It's Monday. You're supposed to be in school."
"Yeah, but if the treasure is ours because we found it, then it could belong to anyone else who finds it before we get it out."
Ken couldn't argue with the logic. Still he had visions of the cops complaining that he was contributing to truancy. "How much more do you have to go?" Ken asked.
"There's not quite a hundred more full jars," Ebert volunteered. "We figure to have them out today. Tomorrow will take care of the empties and the other stuff."
Paulus glared at him.
"What?" Ebert asked in response to the dirty look.
"Do your parents know you're cutting school?" Ken asked.
No one said a word. Not even Ebert. Ken just shook his head.
When they got home that night, after only making four trips instead of Sunday's five, three irate mothers and a not-quite-as-irate father were waiting for them.
"Where have you been?"
"The school called!"
"They knew you all couldn't be sick."
"Education is important!"
"I ought to take a belt to your backside."
"Well, what do you have to say for yourselves?"
"You've been seen running in and out of the back side of Club 250. You've got no business hanging around a place like that."
By prior agreement, the checks were not mentioned. Peter pulled the rest of the cash out. "We've got a job cleaning out for somebody. Mister Beasley is willing to buy some of what we agreed to get rid of. But it has to be done right now. We will be finished tomorrow."
"You will be in school tomorrow," Paulus' mother said.
"If they've agreed to do a job, then they need to finish it," her husband countered.
"You should have asked," another mother scolded.
"You will be done tomorrow?" the third mother asked.
"Yes, Momma, and it pays very well."
"Well." That last was the winning argument. Her husband had a job, but things were tight. If little Ludwig could help, then it was a good thing. "Next time, tell us beforehand!"
"Yes, Momma."
* * *
Tuesday saw a total of one hundred and twenty jars of white lighting in the tree house. The rest of it was bought and paid for and sitting in Ken's stockroom or overflowing into the kitchen.
Ludwig sat down on a rock behind Ken's bar. "I'm beat."
"There's a lot of empties up there. And the wire and the still, plus the light fixtures," Paulus said.
Ebert flopped down next to Ludwig. "I'm beat, too."
"Look, we've only made two trips today," Paulus reasoned.
"Yes, but the good stuff is out. The rest isn't worth that much. It can wait till Saturday," Ludwig countered.
"You wouldn't have said that last Friday," Paulus said.
"Last Friday I hadn't made a dozen trips up the hill and back carrying half a ton on my back. Last Friday we didn't have three checks to put in the bank. Besides, we've got to carry what we've got in the tree house over here."
"Not, today, though," Peter said when he joined them after going inside to get the day's check. "Mister Beastly asked us to wait. He doesn't have anywhere to put it, so we'll store it there for a few days.
"Let's go deposit this in the account and get some cash, then we can decide what to do."
* * *
The teller did not ask the usual, "May I help you" question. His eyes singled out little Ebert and he asked, "Shouldn't you be in school?"
"We need to make a deposit," Peter said.
The teller stared sharply at them before he asked, "Checking or savings?"
"Savings, for now," Peter said. "We will need to open a checking account later, we hope."
"And how much are you depositing?"
Peter put all three checks in the window. "All of it except for two hundred and eighty dollars." They had agreed that they deserved some spending money, and they would have to give some money to their parents. It needed to be enough to justify two days work.
When the teller saw the dollar amounts, he said, "Please wait," and left with the checks. After a considerable amount of time he returned with the manager.
"Where did you boys get these?" the manager asked looking at the checks in his hand.
"From Mister Beasley, like the check says," Peter answered.
"What seems to be the problem?" Another adult male voice entered the conversation from behind them. The boys turned around to see Officer Lyndon Johnson of the Grantville police. The bank manager had left the boys standing there and only approached them when he saw Lyndon answering the call they put in to the station.
"These boys are wanting to deposit some questionable, possibly fraudulent checks," the manager said. "That's why we called." He handed the checks to Lyndon.
The officer looked at the checks and asked, "What's wrong with them?"
"Look at the amounts. And the circumstances are suspicious. It's a school day, and usually when minors come in to deposit or withdraw large sums of money they're accompanied by their parents."
"Have you called Ken?"
"No."
"Why don't you do that? Sort of seems like you could have saved me a trip, if you'd called him in the first place."
The manager picked up a phone at a desk.
Lyndon asked the boys, "Shouldn't you guys be in school?"
"Our parents know we are working today."
"I can check that out, too," Lyndon said.
Peter shrugged. "Go ahead."
After a bit, the bank manager put his hand over the receiver and waved Lyndon over and handed him the phone.
"Mister Beasley, do you know about some young truants who are trying to deposit some sizable checks written against your account?"
"Tell me about it," Ken said sarcastically. "I ain't got that kind of money in reserve. I wrote those checks against my line of credit."
"Can you tell me what's going on?"
"Sure, Lyndon. You've known about the lost McAdams' still?"
Lyndon said, "People have been looking for it for years."
"Well, it looks like the boys found it. I figure it qualifies as abandoned property, so it was theirs to salvage. McAdams is dead and his family is long gone."
"Yeah, I see your point," Lyndon said.
Lyndon concluded the conversation and hung up the phone. He chatted briefly with the manager.
When the manager returned to the counter he told the teller, "Go ahead and make the deposit."
"No." Peter said. The comment about being accompanied by a parent to make a withdrawal had not gone unnoticed. "If we have trouble putting the money in, we might have trouble getting it out. Cash the checks. We will take our money to the Abrabanels."
"That's a lot of money!" the manager objected.
Lyndon stifled a snort which focused the manager's attention.
"We should check with their parents," the manager said.
"No," the word came out of four young mouths almost as if it were one voice.
"I don't think we need to do that," Lyndon said. "These boys made that money; the checks were made out to them." There had been some trouble between working minors and their parents over just how much of what they made the parents were entitled to.
"It is the bank's policy: when a minor wants to withdraw a large sum of money we ask for parental consent," the manager objected.
"Yeah, but since it was never deposited then they aren't withdrawing it . . . are they?"
"No, I guess not."
"Look," Lyndon said, "if they're old enough to make it, it seems to me they should be old enough to put it in the bank of their choice. You've got some unhappy customers. Why don't you just give the boys the checks back? I'll run them over to the Abrabanel's office.
"You fellows don't need cash," Lyndon told the boys. "The Abrabanels can handle checks just fine."
"But . . ." the manager sputtered.
"It seems they don't like the service here." Lyndon held out his hand for the checks and the teller gave them to him. "And I can't say I blame them." He handed the checks to Peter. "Come on. I'll give you a ride to the Abrabanel office and then I'll take you home and make sure your parents really did know you were cutting school."
* * *
In the car Lyndon asked, "You wouldn't care to tell me where you found what you sold to Mister Beasley, would you?"
Four quiet boys became even quieter.
"I see. Well, I was just curious. You've found something people have been looking for for years. So, unless someone else found it first and you're stealing it from them or you had to break in someplace someone is actively keeping locked up, it's yours."
"No," Peter said. "We aren't stealing it and it wasn't locked up. It was just lost."
"Let me guess," Lyndon said, "You aren't through clearing it out and you want to keep it secret."
Again the only answer he got was total silence.
"Well, when you're through cleaning it out, if you ever decide to tell anyone about it, I'd like to see where it was. Grantville isn't that big a place and there are people who think they know every rock and hollow and they couldn't find it. I'd offer you a reward for the information. But, with the kind of money you guys are sitting on, I don't think I can tempt you with what I could afford to offer.
"Here we are. Let's get your account opened."
* * *
Joshua Abrabanel was surprised when a uniformed police officer and four school boys were directed to his desk. "How can I help you?" he asked, making eye contact with Lyndon.
"These young gentlemen need to open an account," Lyndon said.
"Well, Officer. . ." Joshua left the end of the title on a rising tone making it a question and a prompt.
"Johnson. Lyndon Johnson."
"Officer Johnson, we normally only handle business accounts."
"Yes, we know. That's why we came here. Give the man the checks, Peter."
When Joshua saw the amount on the checks his attitude changed. Finally he addressed the boys. "Do you want a deposit account, a money market account or mutual funds?" Joshua assumed, correctly, that he wouldn't have to explain the difference. Students, starting in junior high, seemed to soak the language of finance in over the lunch table.
Four young head came together for a quick conference. "Mutual funds, please."
"I'll set you up with the ninety/ten fund. That's ninety percent low risk with a ten percent high risk, high gain venture. There will be some paperwork to fill out. Can you stop in tomorrow with your parents?"
"The boys would like to keep their business dealings separate from their family life," Lyndon said.
"Lyndon, I can't put their money at risk without a legally consenting adult's signature. I probably shouldn't even open the account."
"I see." Lyndon looked at Peter, "How old are you?"
"Seventeen next month."
"Guys, is there someone else? Someone, any grown up one of you is related to, who could agree to this for you?"
The boys fell to muttering amongst themselves. Finally, Ludwig said, "Maybe. Maybe my mother. She likes it here. Do we have to tell her how much?"
"I don't see why." Joshua said as he opened a desk drawer and took a form out of a file. "We can fill this out, then. Officer Johnson can take it home for you and witness her signature. I'll keep the checks and give you a receipt for them, all right? Now what do you want to call your joint venture?"
The boys looked blank.
"Well, if you want people to know who you are, then you can combine your names. If not, you pick a name that says something about what you plan to do or how you made your money. You know, like Barbie Consortium, or Higgins Sewing Machine, or Other People's Money?"
The boys looked at each other. Joshua could almost see the gears of thought turning.
"Not our names," Peter said. There were nods of agreement.
Ebert spoke up, "How about, 'We want to be rich'?"
Joshua and Lyndon tried but did not manage to completely swallow their laughter. The agreement in the eyes of the boys changed.
"So, not our names and not our goal, which leaves where the money came from."
"McAdams' mine?" Ebert asked.
Paulus shrugged. "Why not?"
When silence answered all, Joshua said, "McAdams Mining it is then."
* * *
On the way to their home to get an adult signature, Lyndon tried to probe the boy's desire to keep their parents out of the loop. He wanted to make sure there wasn't any child abuse going on. The boys were keeping one secret. They might be keeping more than one.
"No," Peter said. "It's not that we're afraid of our parents. The problem is that if our parents . . . especially our fathers . . . had the money, they'd leave Grantville and go back home. We don't want to leave. We like it here."
"Yeah," Ebert said. "I don't want to be a cobbler; I want to be rich."
Ludwig agreed. "My dad is working in the mine. He doesn't want to be a miner. I don't blame him. I don't want to, either. Here I can be anything I want to be. Nobody is going to assume that I will do the same thing my dad did."
"So, that's it?" Lyndon asked. "The only reason you don't want your parents to know about the money is that they would use it to leave town?"
"Mom wants new winter coats for everybody. Dad says we can't afford them. We don't really need them. But if she knew we had the money, she'd spend it," Ebert said.
"Shut up, Ebert," Paulus whispered.
* * *
The members of McAdams Mining stood looking at the electric range with the copper boiler for the still sitting on all four burners. The only other things left were the half-rotted cardboard boxes and the dried out wooden staves of the barrels McAdams had use to ferment his mash before he ran it through the still. Even the barrel hoops were gone.
"How are we going to get this out of here?" Ludwig asked. "We can take the stove apart, it's scrap anyway. But there is no way we are going to get that thing—"He pointed to the hundred gallon boiler. "—out the opening."
"Not without a lot of digging," Paulus said.
"And that would mess up the mushrooms," Ebert objected. There always seemed to be a few of them growing in the mulch near the entrance.
They were still debating whether the tunnel they came in through was dug by the miners for an air shaft or the distiller to bring in water. There was no way it was ever used to take coal out. It wasn't large enough to stand up in, or wide enough to pass a coal car and there had never been a road to it. They didn't dare ask anyone who might know for fear of losing their secret, so the debate went on. . Every time it rained, more dirt and leaves washed in. Clearly there was no way the boiler was going down the tunnel much less out the opening, which was smaller still.
"It would be a crying shame to cut it up. Then it's only copper scrap. If we can keep it whole we should be able to get a good price for it as a still," Paulus said.
Ebert chipped in, "Hey, there's two more openings you know."
"Hush up, Ebert," Paulus said. "They both give out into thin air."
"So? There's a lake down there. We can push it out and then go get it with a boat."
"Or we can lower it with a rope," Peter said. "Let's go look."
"Not without a rope we don't," Ebert squeaked. "I'd have fallen out last time without a rope."
"Let's bust the stove up and get it out of here. We'll bring a rope tomorrow," Peter said.
* * *
A month after he'd last seen them, the boys stopped by the station after school looking for Lyndon. "What's up?" Lyndon asked.
"You still want to see where McAdams ran his still?" Peter asked.
"Yeah."
"You mentioned a reward?"
"Well, it won't be big enough to make a difference to the likes of you fellows."
"Actually, we thought we'd let you work it off. The only thing left is the still. We could take it apart like we did the stove and sell it for scrap. But it will be worth a whole lot more if we can get it out and home in one piece. If you can get a four-wheel-drive pickup Saturday morning and help us get it into town, you'd know where it came from."
"Yeah," Lyndon said. "I can do that."
* * *
On Saturday Lyndon was surprised when Peter climbed into the cab of the truck alone. "Where are your cohorts?" Lyndon asked.
"They'll meet us there," Peter replied.
Then Lyndon was even more surprised when Peter sent him across the Ring and around the south side of the cliff face. By and by Peter pointed and said, "Do you see the white sheet hanging off the cliff there? Get as close to it as you can without getting stuck."
Lyndon recognized one of the holes in the cliff wall where coal had been mined out. He knew for a fact that in '32 someone had rappelled down from the top for a look. The report said it was stripped and unsafe. Two other seams had been scouted the same way. One was now in production. When Lyndon stopped at the edge of the new lake Peter told him, "Flash your lights."
When he did, the sheet disappeared. Then a big copper ball popped out of the hole and started slowly down on a rope.
"This is going to be cold," Peter said. He got out of the cab, left his shoes at the water's edge and walked into the lake.
Lyndon, struck by a premonition, ran down to the edge of the water and yelled, "Peter, that water is too cold to go swimming. You come back here right now."
"I'll be fine," Peter said.
But Lyndon could hear the boy's teeth rattling. "If you don't come back here right now, I'll leave you." It was an empty threat but it might work.
Peter called his bluff. "Then I guess I will get plenty cold rolling it back to town."
"Shit," Lyndon said quietly, not wanting the lad to hear him. There was nothing he could do but wait and worry.
As he watched the water around Peter started splashing. Lyndon looked up to see the edge of the mine crumbling. Either the rope broke or the boys let it go. The copper ball finished the decent at the speed of gravity. "Look out, Peter!" Lyndon yelled pointlessly. It was all he could do. From the bank it looked like the young man was right under the falling still.
When the big copper pot hit the surface of the lake it threw water everywhere. Lyndon lost sight of Peter in the flying wetness for an eternally long fraction of a second, which was more than enough time for Lyndon to put in a prayer, "Help." When the air cleared Peter was still there, alive and afloat. A second prayer followed the first. This one was also one word long. "Thanks." The copper kettle plunged completely under the water, bobbed to the surface and started to sink again. Peter swam toward it frantically. At about one-third full it stabilized, and bobbed in the ripples. Peter fished up the rope and headed for shore.
When he came out of the water, Lyndon shook his head. "Are you crazy? You could have gotten killed! You still might. Get in the truck before you freeze to death."
"After we load the still," a shivering Peter objected.
Lyndon took the rope. "I'll get this. You get in the truck and get warm."
Peter hesitated.
"Now."
The boy nodded and complied.
By the time Lyndon had the still to the shore Peter was back, still shivering but dressed in the dry clothes he'd had the foresight to bring along. "Get back in the truck. That thing is half full of water. I'll have to use the truck to drag it up the bank and then we can pour the water out. When it's empty, will the two of us be able to lift it into the truck or will we need a ramp to roll it up?"
"We can lift it." Peter's teeth chattered.
"Get back in the truck or I swear I'll leave this thing where it is and take you to the hospital right now."
"Let me get my shoes," was all Peter said.
* * *
"So, I rappelled down to the opening and followed the boys trail back to where they came in."
"That was it?" Chief Richards asked with a chuckle. "McAdams was running his still down an old coal mine?"
"Yeah," Lyndon said.
"I'd have liked to have seen that."
"Well, there isn't much left. Those kids took everything except the skin off of a dead cat."
"I hear they got a good price for the still."
"They would if anybody could. Yeah. It was all copper, including the rivets. I guess McAdams always did do things right. Old-timers talked about his whisky like it was the holy grail. I always thought it was just so much good old boy bullshit until I had a shot. That stuff is everything they claimed it was. I tried to buy a jar from the boys wholesale. They still got a tree house full. I'm not about to pay what Ken is asking. But they said they couldn't sell it to anyone one other than Ken. He's got dibs on it but asked them to wait a while. Then they shocked the life out of me when they gave me a jar for hauling the still into town for them."
"As I recall, McAdams' whisky was first rate," the chief said.
"It's as smooth as anything I've ever tasted. Bar none. Ken's fortune is made and so is the boys."
"What do you think they'll do with the money?" the chief asked.
"I don't know. But I'm sure of one thing. Every last penny of it is going to be screaming in pain before it gets away from them.
"Come to think of it, there is another thing I'm sure of. They were lucky this time. Someone had better keep an eye on those hooligans before they get into something they can't get out of."
* * *
Friday when the boys got home from school there was a note from Lyndon asking them to come down to the station in the morning. When he left it he assured Ebert's mother that the boys were not in trouble, he just wanted to talk to them.
At eight o'clock Lyndon had five cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream waiting in the conference room.
"Did you fellows notice the mushrooms growing in McAdams' mine?"
"Sure!" Ebert said without thinking. "Momma likes them."
"How many have you picked?" Lyndon asked.
"Nearly a gallon altogether. Why?"
"Well, I picked a pocket full when I was there. If you've picked a gallon then it seems to me that we've got a small, self-seeding mushroom garden going. Fresh mushrooms sell well, especially off season. If we hauled in some stable muck they just might take off. If they do then someone is sitting on a regular income.
"I've checked to make sure. The mine is government property. We can register a claim to it for a percentage of what we bring out. That can apply to mushrooms as well as coal.
"If you fellows want to do the work, I'll pay half the expenses against half the profit until the startup capital is recovered. After that I want twenty percent of the net profit.
"It will take a while most likely, so we're looking at a long term investment."
The boys put their heads together for a quick conference. Two heads were bobbing up and down. A third was wagging back and forth.
Finally Paulus looked up. "Officer Johnson, why don't we put up the labor and you put up the capital, and split fifty/fifty."
"I may not have that much spare cash," Lyndon said. "And you should have some liability."
"But we do. We're putting up our labor. If you're short of cash, we can loan it to you. But that is a separate deal. You pay it back whether your mushroom scheme works out or not."
"Tell you what. You guys pay the filing fee under the joint venture. That gives you some coverage if anybody ever objects to you looting the site. After that, I'll put up the money for a half of the gross.
"Half of net," Peter said.
"Nope. If you want to split the net then cough up the cash. Otherwise it's fifty/fifty gross."
Four serious heads came together. When they separated a smiling face said, "Deal."
"Any thought on where we can get the best deal on mucking out and hauling off for someone?" Paulus asked Lyndon.
"Hadn't thought of that yet," Lyndon said. Actually he had priced having it delivered. He was pleased that his new business partners weren't about to pay someone else to do the work.
"Have you priced wheel barrows?" Paulus asked.
"I've got one to start with."
"Is it from up-time with a rubber tire?"
"Yeah."
"If we sell it, we can get four made up with iron wheels and still have money left over for shovels and rakes. Unless you don't want to sell it, in which case we probably shouldn't use it because it could get damaged or stolen," Paulus said.
Lyndon smiled. The amount of actual cash he needed to get started just went down significantly.
"Hey," Ebert chirped, "Is this mushroom mining or mushroom farming? Either way, one of us is doing something he said he'd never do!"
All four voices, including Ebert's, spoke the same words at the same time. "Shut up, Ebert."
* * *
Art Director's Note: The 250 Club Bar illustration is based on a photo by Wood Hughes of a bar in Mannington. The image is not canon, it is my interpretation. -Garrett W. Vance
Helmut Strauss pounded the table in frustration. "I don't care what you do, you have got to get this thing working. Der Adler has about reached the end of his patience, and so have I!"
"But Herr Strauss," Betha Klepsch protested, "we've tried everything we could think of to make it work. Followed every suggestion we've been given! Everything we do just seems to make it worse. At this point we simply don't know what else to do."
"You were able to repair the up-time gyro instrument for Herr Smith. I do not understand why you cannot make the new unit work. Der Adler is very anxious to be able to install these gyro instruments in all of his aircraft. Do something! Use stronger springs! Lubricate the bearings! Do something!"
Strauss stood abruptly and stalked out of the shop. He headed back to the procurement office at the air base.
"You know, Woody, I'd never even heard of a graveyard spiral before," Kevin Clements said.
"Yeah, well, I'd just barely heard of it," Woody Woodsill replied. "They mentioned it in AFROTC when we were getting ready for the instrument familiarization. It makes a difference when it kills a buddy, doesn't it?"
"It sure does. Poor Rudy. He never had a chance! Haze can be as bad as fog when it gets thick." Kevin hesitated. "The boss sure seems to be taking it hard."
"That's the truth. I worry about him. He keeps trying to do everything himself, at least when he's here. He blames himself every time we lose a pilot and it really frustrates him that we don't have any decent instruments or navaids yet."
Woody got a thoughtful look on his face. "Navaids . . . navigational aids. Up-time we had VOR, TACAN, and GPS. What I wouldn't give for GPS now. I know VOR and TACAN were just radio stuff, but pretty sophisticated by our current standards."
"Jesse mentioned something about radio ranges and low freq homers, once, but we didn't have time, then, for him to explain about them. He just said that they were pretty basic and that some of the old heads had talked about them, but he'd never used them himself."
"We could sure use something like that," Woody continued, "we need something bad."
Traditionally, at least back up-time, the graduating cadet class was supposed to pass in review for all of the assembled dignitaries and family members. In the USE Air Force, the graduating cadet class would barely have constituted a squad, hardly enough people to provide a reasonable review.
Instead, the ceremony held in the new hangar was pretty low key and relatively brief. Colonel Wood had returned just in time to make the traditional remarks, the chaplain provided a non-denominational blessing, the cadets received a commission and a training certificate, and the sweethearts and mothers pinned the new gold bars of a second lieutenant on their shoulders and a pilot's wings on their chests.
Major Woodsill was circulating among the new lieutenants congratulating them on their achievement and wishing them well for the future. When he came to the newly-minted Lt. Joseph Glazer he grinned and said, "Congratulations, Joe. You did a great job, and you really earned those wings and bars. Good luck to you!" He turned away, then turned back. "Oh, before I forget, the boss has a job for you. Why don't you stop by the colonel's office before you take off and let him tell you what he has in mind."
* * *
"Hi there, Joe. Congratulations on winning your wings. If you're like me, you'll remember today for a long time." Colonel Wood looked exhausted.
"You wanted to see me, sir?"
"Yes, I did." He stared into space for a moment or two while he gathered his thoughts. "Joe, you know what happened to Rudy in the weather. What you may not know is that last summer I almost busted my ass by going out and trying to fly in marginal weather, too." Jesse stopped for a moment.
Joe was startled. This was The Colonel, Der Adler, the man who knew more about flying than anybody! He just didn't do things like that!
Jesse smiled grimly. "Yeah, it really happened. Mother Nature is, indeed, a bitch! I had forgotten just how fast you can get yourself in trouble without gauges.
"We've been trying to fix that, but so far we haven't gotten the damned thing to work. I've had KSI working on a turn needle for about a year, and it certainly looks almost identical to the one usable one we've got, but somehow it just doesn't work right. I'd like for you to try and help out to see if you can get it to work."
Again, Joe was startled. "Me, sir? What . . . ?"
"We really need to be able to fly in bad weather, which means we really need gyro instruments and radio navigation aids. In fact, we're already damn late, considering Rudy." Lines furrowed the colonel's forehead.
"Major Woodsill tells me that you've done some gyro work. Is that true?"
"Well yes sir, I did try to make a gyro autopilot for a model back before the Ring of Fire, but I don't know if that really qualifies in this case. It didn't work too well, either."
"Joe, that gives you a hell of a lot more experience than anybody else I know down-time. I need to leverage that experience to try to get this thing going. I've got an old manual, Instrument Flying, and it gives you a pretty good introduction to the things we need and how they're used, but it only gives us principles, not designs.
"What I'm hoping you can do is figure out how to translate those principles into something we can build and use." He held up his hand before Joe could protest. "We've gone over everybody's records and you seem to be the only one in our bunch that might have a chance to do this."
Joe started to say something, then he closed his mouth and sat back, his mind racing through the implications of what he had just heard. He recognized that his modeling work did give him just a little bit of a leg up for a job like this, and probably no one else had even done that. But it was certainly a big step to go from there to any kind of gyro instrument. He didn't know anything about navaids! "I don't know whether I can figure out how to fix the turn needle or not, but I'm willing to give it a try. I know we really need them. I don't know anything about navigation aids, though."
"I'd have been surprised if you did." Jesse tapped the manual lying on the desk. "Read through this and see if it makes any sense to you. If you have questions, come see me and I'll try to help. I don't expect you to make this stuff on your own, but you need to be able to talk intelligently to somebody like GE and get them to make something we can use. I think I can carve out a budget for you."
"I'm sure willing to give it a try, sir."
"All right, Joe, why don't I take you and introduce you to Helmut Strauss? He's my chief of procurement, and he does a good job getting supplies and services for the air force. Do you know him by any chance?"
"I think I've seen him around, sir, but we haven't been introduced."
"Well, let me warn you that he is a pretty crusty sort of guy and he's really frustrated that he hasn't been able to get this gyro delivered. He may not take it too well if he thinks I'm replacing him with you, which I guess I really am, to some extent. Just remember, he's the procurement officer and you're his technical advisor. I want to make it clear that you're working with him, not for him. You'll be working directly for me as a coequal technical assistant to Helmut. Notwithstanding all that, it would be a big help if you could be as diplomatic as possible with him. The last thing I need is to have my folks fighting with each other."
"Yessir, I'll do my best."
Strauss was rather stiff and formal when he found out what Joe was going to be doing, but he agreed to introduce Joe to the people at KSI who were working on the turn needle, on the following afternoon.
Sophia Glotz opened the front door in response to Joe's knock. "Why, good evening Herr . . . no, I guess I should say Lieutenant Glazer, now. What brings you here this evening?"
About that time a young woman in a sweater and jeans came down the stairs. "Ah! I thought I heard strange voices. Hi, Joe. What are you doing here tonight?"
Joe and Maria Glotz had been classmates in high school for the years since the Glotzs had arrived in Grantville in 1631, and shared a lot of classes because both of their family names began with "G." Neither Joe nor Maria had realized that the other had applied for Cadets until they found themselves standing next to each other in formation at their first muster.
"Hi, Maria. Oh, and congratulations, Lieutenant Glotz! I was just about to tell your mother that the colonel has given me a project that means I'll probably have to make use of my workshop in the basement. I hope that won't be too much of a bother for you folks."
"And congratulations to you, too, Lieutenant Glazer!" Maria made a mock curtsey. "I don't think there'd be any problem unless you got particularly noisy or smelly down there."
Maria's mother said, "We really shouldn't stand here in the door. Please, Joe, why don't you come into the living room and sit down?"
It was an odd sensation for Joe. This was the house he'd lived in for most of his life. Even most of the furniture remained, except for some small pieces that his parents had taken to Badenburg. And yet, it felt different. It even smelled different.
When they were seated, Joe shook off the feeling of strangeness and turned to Maria, who was more likely to understand. "The colonel wants me to see if I can help get some instruments made that we can use to fly in weather. They will have to be gyro instruments, so I may need to use my shop to do some machine work."
"I think I remember a little about gyros from science class," Maria said. "Are you a good enough machinist to make something like that?"
"Well, I don't have to make a complete gyro. KSI has been working on a prototype for some time. The colonel hopes that I can help sort out the problems they're having. I have a little experience building a gyro autopilot for a model airplane, but that was just before the Ring of Fire, so I never finished it. I'm not real sure I can do what the colonel wants, but I can at least give it a try. Maybe I can help."
"The other thing we need is more difficult, at least for me. The colonel wants me to get some navigational aids, navaids, started. They're radios that allow you to figure out where you are in flight. I just barely got through the electrical stuff in school, and I don't know anything about radios. I wouldn't even try to make something like that on my own, but GE should be able do it. Anyway, I need to use the shop."
"Ooo! Can I come along and see your secret laboratory, Doctor Frankenstein?"
Joe shook his head in mock disgust. Shy and retiring she was not! "You might as well come along," he said, and headed for the basement stairs.
* * *
His shop looked smaller than he remembered it, and messier, which was not helped by the dust that had accumulated in the time since he'd been there last. Joe turned on the two lights over his workbench, then pulled off the dust cover that covered his modeler's lathe.
"What's that?" asked Maria.
"Hmm?" responded Joe absentmindedly as he examined the machine minutely. "Oh, this is the combination lathe/milling machine. Compared to what you'd see in a machine shop this looks like a toy, but if you're careful, you can do pretty good work with these little things. I've already used it a lot to make things for my models. One of them was the small gyro that I mentioned." He searched through the clutter on the bench for a few moments and then held up the gyro.
Maria didn't know what a gyro should look like, but she could see that what he was holding was neat, smooth and gave the appearance of good workmanship. She was impressed. He blew most of the dust off and spun the wheel experimentally. She noticed that it spun very smoothly, and continued spinning for some time.
When it finally stopped, Joe wrinkled his nose. "Not too good. It used to spin much longer than that. I guess the dust has gotten into the bearings." He put it back and wandered along the bench sorting through the clutter to see what was buried there. He opened the drawers one at a time and shoved stuff around till he could get a good idea what was in each one. He walked over to the set of shelves along the other wall and inventoried the odds and ends on them. Finally he pawed through some boxes that were under the bench.
He stood back and ran his hand through his shock of short, unruly brown hair. "Well, are you properly impressed by my secret laboratory? Is there anything more you'd like to see? I'm sorry, Igor has the day off so I can't fire up the lightning machine."
Maria laughed.
While everyone was stiffly correct, it was obvious to Joe that the relationship between Herr Strauss and the artisans at KSI was not the best. After Herr Strauss had made the somewhat stilted introductions and left, Joe tried to ease the tensions.
"Look guys, I'm no expert, no master as you might say. I'm just a fellow who had a little bit of experience with gyros back up-time. I know they can be tricky to work with, and it may be that I can see something that's causing your difficulty when it's not obvious to you. Why don't we sit down and get a good look at this thing and see if there's something that sticks out."
When they brought over the covered tray and pulled the dust cover off, Joe was immediately impressed with the appearance of the assembly. Whatever their problem might be, it was not lack of craftsmanship. Joe praised their workmanship, which caused a noticeable lessening of tension around the table.
Joe looked up. "Do you have an air or vacuum source we can use to power this up?"
"Yes, of course. Just a few minutes," Elise responded.
When the air source was connected the rotor spun up handily, but to Joe it did not sound quite right. He put a finger very lightly on the gimbal. He could feel just the faintest evidence of a tremor. He sat back and thought for a moment. "Do you know how fast the rotor is turning?"
"Yes," Jakob answered. "The rotor is spinning at almost 12,000 rpm. We could go even faster if it were not for the vibration."
Joe thought That's too slow, and it needs to be balanced better. He sat back and signaled for them to turn it off. "Tell me about how you got started in this."
"Yes, of course. Herr Smith loaned us the only available up-time unit to study last year," Betha explained. "He apologized that it was not performing properly, but said we could use it as a pattern. We disassembled it, making note of every screw and every adjustment so we could restore it accurately. Drawings were made of every piece, and each process and procedure was written up. In doing that we cleaned every part thoroughly so we could make precise measurements. When the unit was re-assembled and returned to Herr Smith he discovered that it was once more functioning properly, and later installed it into one of his airplanes. That gave us a great deal of confidence that we would be able to produce new units. Unfortunately, we seem to have been mistaken, at least so far."
"And did you make your new unit exactly like the up-time unit?"
Jakob, Betha and Elise exchanged looks. Elise took up the explanation. "It is as close as we can make it. We could not obtain the jeweled bearings, so we had to substitute bronze. Because of vibration we couldn't spin the rotor quite as fast, plus the nozzle would have to be opened up to get a little more air. It was Herr Strauss' opinion that this would not make any difference, so we did not try to run it faster."
Joe stared at his steepled fingers for several moments. "Have you ever done anything with gyros before? Do you understand how they work?"
Jakob looked embarrassed. He shrugged and replied, "Unfortunately, no. None of us have ever worked with gyros before, and I've found no one who can explain them more than the most basic theory. All of us have had problems grasping the principles behind this device."
"That's because you don't think at right angles." Joe grinned at him. "You shouldn't be embarrassed. Gyro instruments were not invented until the late nineteenth century in the old time line, about two hundred and fifty years from now. If you can be available tomorrow, why don't I come back and provide a little introduction to how gyros work?"
Betha spoke up quickly. "If you could do that, we would be forever in your debt. Do you have any idea how difficult, how frustrating it is to work with something you don't understand?"
The next day Joe came back with the toy gyro his father had found in a flea market when he was a kid, and with the manual that the colonel had given him. After a half hour or so of demonstrating the basic principles of the gyro, Joe then went through the illustrations of each of the basic gyro instruments in the manual and showed how the principles were applied. Joe had never thought of himself as a teacher, but it was actually thrilling to see the light of understanding dawn in the eyes of his new friends.
Joe and Maria were headed back to the briefing room to debrief after their afternoon training mission. A cold north wind was blowing, and it cut like a knife after the relative warmth of the Gustav cockpits. They were both huddled down in their winter flying gear.
Maria raised her voice to be heard over the wind. "You goin' over to the Club for a brew after we debrief?"
"Naw, I got to hurry back to the shop. KSI has done some more things to clean up their gyro and I want to run some turntable tests on it tonight," responded Joe.
"You sure spend a lot of time on that stuff. How's the work going?"
"Tell you about it after debrief," Joe said as he turned up his fur-lined collar and pulled his chin down into its protection.
Later, Joe spent a few minutes trying to explain to Maria just how a turn needle worked. She was having a hard time grasping the ideas.
"But I don't understand! Why do you need this gyro thing? Couldn't you just use a plumb bob, or something like that?"
"A plumb bob can't tell when you're turning. It only tells you whether you're coordinated. That's the kind of thing that killed Rudy Hocheim."
"I'm still confused, and I still don't understand what you're telling me."
"Okay, tell you what. Come down to the shop tonight and I'll try to show you how this thing is supposed to work."
"Gee," she teased, "a date?"
"Nope," he responded, straight faced, "a training session."
"Ah well, too bad."
* * *
Joe hung up his coat and headed back to the kitchen where the basement door was. Sophia Glotz was busily getting dinner ready for her husband, Hubert, and Maria.
Joe stopped for a moment. "Hi, Missus G. How are you this cold, chilly evening?"
"Good evening, Joe. It certainly is cold. I almost froze walking home after work!" Sophia worked as a housekeeper at the Higgins Hotel. Her husband had been a farmer, but now he had worked his way up to foreman at one of the large firms that had sprung up in the area around Grantville.
"Have you had any supper yet, Joe? Should I set another place?" Joe had been spending so many afternoons and evenings in his shop that the Glotzs had taken to inviting him regularly for dinner. Joe had finally accepted with the condition that he be allowed to contribute some money toward the food budget.
The same circumstance had led to Joe frequently spending the night in what had been his old room instead of at the air base. Joe found his old room comfortably familiar, although it was not nearly as cluttered as it had been when he had lived there. He did discover that he had to be a little more circumspect about using the bathroom. He'd never had a sister, so dealing with two females in the house took some adjustment.
Joe had grown up in the old foursquare and knew most of its quirks. He knew how to stop the toilet from running, how to relight the pilot light in the furnace when it blew out, and which gland nut to tighten under the kitchen sink when the drain started to leak. It didn't take too long for Joe to begin to seem like one of the Glotz family.
They heard the thumpety-thump of someone coming down the stairs, and shortly Maria breezed into the kitchen. "Well, are you ready for the training session, oh lord-and-master instructor!"
Joe made a face at her and then looked helplessly at Sophia. Sophia grinned at the two of them. It was obvious to her that Maria was "interested" in Joe. It was equally obvious that Joe hadn't a clue!
"Come on," Joe said and led the way downstairs, Maria following closely behind. Early on, Maria had followed Joe down to his shop every visit, but she soon found that, for her, things got pretty dull in a hurry. Once Joe started working he became very absorbed in what he was doing, and Maria discovered it wasn't very exciting to watch someone else work. She quickly became bored with that and went back to doing whatever it was that girls did, while Joe toiled away. About the only time they saw each other at the house was over the dinner table on the days when Joe ate there.
Joe switched on the lights and pulled the dust cover off of a stand in front of the bench. He started his guided tour. "I salvaged an old phonograph to make the turntable." Joe pointed to the middle of the assemblage of things on the stand. "Of course, I had to change the gearing with these belts and pulleys so I could run it at either a half rpm, or a quarter rpm. The motor is a synchronous motor, so that it stays phase-locked to the commercial power."
Maria rolled her eyes.
Joe saw it and grinned ruefully. "Okay, okay, okay. I guess I need to start another way. Let's see . . . all right, the first instrument we're trying to build is what's called a turn needle." Joe launched into a detailed discussion of what a pilot would see and how he would use the instrument.
"That seems easy enough," she said, "but what does the rest of this stuff do?"
"Those are the guts that make the turn needle work, just like those are the guts that make you work." He poked her in the midsection.
"Hands off the bod!" she shot back.
Embarrassed, Joe felt his ears turning red. "Sorry," he mumbled. He changed the subject.
"I guess you need to get some idea how gyros work." He rummaged around in one of the drawers for a minute or so, then held up the object of his search. "Okay, this is a toy gyro I got as a kid.Gyros do two things: they stand still, or they turn over."
"Huh?"
Joe demonstrated the basic gyro principles again with his old toy gyro and then explained how they were used in the prototype, ending up with "What I want to do is power up the latest version and then start the turntable to see if it works. Assuming it does, then I'll try to calibrate it. They got everything put together yesterday, so if it doesn't blow up when we power everything up we should be able to run the test tonight."
"Blow up?" exclaimed Maria, sounding alarmed.
"Well, no! It's just a figure of speech."
"I'm certainly glad of that! You never know what to expect in a secret laboratory!" Maria said with mock severity.
Joe laughed, and then Sophia called down the stairs. "Joe, Maria, dinner is ready and Papa is at the table, please come up to eat."
* * *
The tests that night were, at best, partially successful, which was still far better than before. The turn needle sort of worked, but it had a tendency to hang up sometimes and then jump. Joe thought that part of the problem was the need for better bearings, and it seemed like the speed was still vibration limited, too. Joe knew that KSI had about reached the limit of their high speed balance capability. He knew that jeweled bearings would work, but he didn't have any experience with those, and he didn't know where they might find such a thing down-time, anyhow. The only other thing he'd heard about that might have lower friction was air bearings, but they required finer tolerances than either KSI or Joe could achieve. Then too, he'd need to figure out how to get the air to the bearings through the gimbals. In addition, he figured that he would have to get the services of an up-time machine shop to balance the rotor to reach 20,000 rpm.
The testing finished up fairly late, and Joe spent the night in his old room. The next morning Joe and Maria caught the bus out to the air field. Joe owed the colonel a progress report, so he brought along the latest version for show and tell.
* * *
The colonel sat quietly while Joe pointed out the changes they'd made since the last status report and then discussed the results of last night's testing. He asked a few technical questions, which Joe was able to answer readily. Then he commented, "Joe, you're making much more progress than I had hoped. I think you're on the right track with the air bearing idea. Why don't you go down to Marcantonio's and see if they can provide any help? Hal Smith says they do pretty good work. Do you have any drawings of these bits and pieces?"
"Yes, sir, I do. KSI made up drawings and I've copied them to my computer. Do you want me to bypass Herr Strauss on this?"
The colonel shuffled some papers on his desk and came up with that day's flying schedule. After perusing it for a moment he said, "Okay, Joe. Looks like you're not on the flying schedule today. Helmut is all wrapped up in trying to negotiate a big buy right now, and I don't want to wait. Why don't you go ahead and take this down to Marcantonio's and explain what you're trying to do." Then he rummaged through a desk drawer and found a piece of paper with project numbers on it, copied one of them to one of the requisition forms and handed it to Joe. "They can charge any work on this project to this number. I shouldn't have to tell you to be sparing in its use."
"Yes, sir."
* * *
When Joe and Dave Marcantonio got down to talking about the purpose of his visit, Dave asked a lot of penetrating questions, most of which Joe was able to answer. He'd brought along his archive of drawings and he and Dave pored over them, talking about how they might be modified for air bearings and for easier machine work. The price Dave quoted seemed astronomical, but Joe swallowed hard and told him they'd go ahead with it. On the other hand, when Joe reported the price to the colonel, it didn't seem to faze him.
The hardest part was waiting for his project to come up in the queue at the machine shop. Joe went in a couple of times, mostly to discuss proposed changes for various reasons, and most of which he agreed with.
It was almost a let down to go into Marcantonio's to pick up the turn needle to take to his shop for testing, along with some auxiliary stuff. After setting things up and mounting the latest example on the turntable they headed upstairs to dinner.
After dinner he and Maria headed down to the basement, fired up the system, and found that it performed just exactly like it was supposed to. The only thing needed was calibration of the needle in each direction. Joe timed the rotation of the turntable each way to be sure that the rate was correct, and then adjusted the tension on the tiny springs inside the unit to get the needle in exactly the right position. It looked like the air bearings had done the trick.
Joe had carefully avoided touching Maria after that one night, so he was a little startled when she threw her arms around him and hugged him after the test was seen to be a clear success.
* * *
The next step was to get the instrument into an airplane. After reporting to the colonel the next morning, Joe went over to see Hal Smith. Some time earlier they had agreed to use Belle 01 as the test bed. Hal had stayed abreast of the progress on the turn needle, so he was ready when Joe showed up and announced he was ready to put it in the airplane. It took the better part of two days to get the prototype installed in the airplane and all of the checks completed.
Since it was Joe's project, he had the job of conducting the first test flight. The flight itself was an anticlimax. He spent about a half hour, first checking that the turn needle functioned in the airplane like it did on the turntable, and then practicing standard rate and half-standard rate turns.
When Joe landed, Colonel Wood was waiting in the parking area. Joe climbed out, the colonel climbed in, then the whole system got a second shakedown.
"That's really great," Colonel Wood said after he landed. "Maybe there's a little light at the end of this tunnel. Maybe we can actually do this!"
Jesse invited Joe to his office and sent someone to get Major Woodsill. When Woody arrived Jesse got right down to business. "Okay, what do you think? Can we build this thing now and start an instrument training program pretty soon?"
"We already had a decent set of drawings and Marcantonio's has updated the drawings for the precision parts and the air bearings, so we have a good set of technical data. Air bearings don't wear out like others do because there's not normally contact between the bearing surfaces. As long as we keep the bearings from being contaminated by dust or dirt they should last for a long time. Other than that, I can't think of anything that we'd need to worry about," Joe said.
Jesse looked at Major Woodsill. "What do you think, Woody?"
"I've got a simple-minded partial panel training program blocked out in my head. It's really not very involved. It's just giving the students practice under the hood until they can fly straight and level with just needle, ball, airspeed, and whiskey compass, and do it fairly reliably, then learn to make timed turns, and finally have them fly a series of three-cornered round-robin cross countries under the hood. Until we have some navaids, there's not a lot more we can do."
The colonel stared at Woody, thinking. After what seemed like a long time he returned from wherever he had been. "Okay! Joe, I'll call Marcantonio's and get a price for twenty-five units. You work with Major Woodsill to schedule airplanes into the shop for modification. I'll set up with Hal to do the mods. We'll start with the Gustavs first, but I want all of the birds modified before we get through. Woody, let's get that training program down on paper and start breaking it down into training sorties. Any questions?"
Joe stuck up his hand. "Sir, one of the reasons the price was so high was that Dave Marcantonio doesn't really like to do the fiddly little assembly work. Mostly he just likes to make things out of metal. It might make sense to have KSI be a prime contractor and have them hire Marcantonio's as a sub for the high precision stuff. I think they'd both be happier and we might end up with a better price."
The colonel thought for a moment. "Okay, Joe, you've been working with both those guys more than I have. I'll buy going that way. Rather than me getting involved, why don't you work with Helmut to get them on contract ASAP. Try to be diplomatic in how you approach it with him. Anything else?"
Neither Joe nor Woody could think of anything.
"Okay, you guys better get at it . . . No, wait! Joe, stick around for a minute."
After Woody had left Jesse asked Joe, "Have you done anything yet with the navaid problem?"
"Well, sir, not a heck of a lot. Early on, I did go down to GE and spent an afternoon talking to them about the project, but I haven't been back since. They seemed to think that there were no fundamental stumbling blocks, and the only thing they were concerned about was getting the radios small enough and light enough to fit in the airplanes. Now that my time is freed up a bit, I'll get down there and see what's going on."
"You do that. Let me know how they're doing."
"Yes, sir. Is there anything else?"
"No . . . Yes. Damn fine job so far, Joe. Keep up the good work."
* * *
Since Joe hadn't heard anything from GE, he just assumed that they'd either forgotten about the project, or not made any progress. When he got there, they led him back to one of the labs and showed him some equipment on the bench. He saw what he took to be a loop antenna on a stand, and what looked like a car radio nearby. Sitting on the bench not too far away was a wooden board with some electrical stuff on it and a wire connected to it that Joe realized was a makeshift antenna.
"Actually, we've been looking for a use for old car radios," Jennifer Hanson told him. "They don't have any components that we use for our other radio requirements, so they're just sitting around. This operates in the regular broadcast band, where VOA operates. That means that it's susceptible to electronic noise, like lightning. While it's not as good as citizen's band, at least there are lots of them available. We've cobbled it together with a simple loop antenna so that we have a basic system of the type you and I were talking about before." Joe was flabbergasted, but Jennifer wasn't through.
"Now that," she said, pointing to the varnished wooden board with a few electronic components mounted on it, "is a signal generator Rolf put together for a class assignment in high school electronics shop. It's only meant for lab work, but Else did some back-of-the-envelope figuring, and she thinks if we give it a good antenna, an airplane could pick it up at least twenty miles away. Rolf rigged it with a tone generator so you can identify it on the AM receiver. I'll show you how to take bearings on it, and if it works out for you, we'll build one that'll stand up in the field. It'll run a few months on a car battery, so you don't need to fool with windmills and stuff.
"So, over there you have your radio direction finder for your airplane, and here you have a low frequency homer to put at a ground station. They've both held up fairly well during testing, here, but of course that's not the same as service use."
"I'm really surprised that you have been able to put this together so fast," Joe said.
"These were really pretty simple stuff that didn't use resources we needed elsewhere. It wasn't a big deal to adapt them to meet your needs."
Joe thanked Jennifer profusely and made his way back to the base and headed for the O'Club. It was a Friday, and Happy Hour, and he ran into Maria and bent her ear mercilessly while they put away a few more than the usual number of beers. Finally she suggested, "Look, why don't you go change into something besides a uniform and go home with me? I'll change into some glad rags and we'll go out and celebrate, my treat." That sounded good to Joe, and the result was their first real date, even if she did end up inviting him, and paying for it.
* * *
On Monday Joe brought the colonel up to date and laid out his plans for the test program. The colonel gave his go ahead.
The mod to install the radio in the airplane was rather more involved than the instrument mod since they had to modify the aircraft structure to mount the loop.
Altogether they gave up about twenty pounds of useful load capacity, assuming they stayed within the established max gross weight limits. The whole process took all of fifteen days. The additional weight was barely noticeable the first time Joe flew Belle 01 after the mod.
Siting the homer was not the problem they had feared and they were able to get it up on battery power while they waited for commercial power to get out to the site.
"Hey! Look! It's the Bobbsey Twins!" Dev Martin yelled over the usual hubbub.
"Oh, buzz off Dev!" responded Maria, grinning.
Joe and Maria picked up mugs of beer and headed for a more-or-less quiet corner where they could talk.
"Well, wha'd'ya think? Are we getting any better?" Joe had been working to develop an instrument approach for the base.
Maria studied Joe's earnest face for a few moments. "You split the runway three times out of four. The fourth time you could have corrected, no sweat, if you'd broken out at minimums. I'd say that was pretty damn good."
"I don't know. I was having so much trouble switching back and forth between the RDF and the turn needle/compass that it just felt all wrong. I didn't feel like I really had the airplane under control."
Maria took a deep breath. "Joe, you were a little rough, sure. But you still ended up in the right place at the right time. That's what counts. Don't keep beating yourself up over it. I don't think there's anyone here . . ." Maria gestured at the rest of the room ". . . who could do as well, let alone better. I know I couldn't, and I'm pretty good." She smirked.
"Actually, that's one thing I'm worried about," Joe said. "I think I screwed up the human factors on this setup. I've got to find some way to get the antenna indication on the instrument panel. Every time you have to move your head the way you need to now, the vertigo gets really bad."
"Yeah! I know that time you put me in the left seat I had a lot of trouble with that. Do you think there's some way we can fix that?"
"I really don't know. We could do it up-time, no sweat, but down-time . . . I don't know."
* * *
The next flying day was something of a bust. It was miserably cold, and a plane coming back from the south reported snow moving north. Joe's flight in the Gustav that afternoon was already canceled because of the impending snow. He flew 01 on his usual practice flight that morning, but Maria had been detailed to take a passenger to Magdeburg, so he flew with Major Woodsill, instead. For whatever reason, Major Woodsill was crotchety that morning, so it hadn't been a pleasant flight. As far as Joe could tell, it was nothing that he was doing that caused it. In fact, it seemed to Joe that he was finally getting tolerable on the approaches.
It was about time to land when they heard a faint call on the radio.
"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Belle 03. I have a fuel leak and I'm down to just the header tank remaining. I've only got a few minutes of fuel left. I'm somewhere northwest of Halle, close to the west bank of the Saale River. I'm going to try to set her down while I have some power." Maria's voice was remarkably calm and businesslike.
"Shit!" Major Woodsill's voice was not calm and businesslike. "Let's get this thing on the ground so I can talk to the boss!"
The colonel was waiting as they taxied into their parking spot. Major Woodsill jumped out of the airplane and headed over to the colonel.
"You heard?" Jesse nodded. "Do we have any way to get hold of Halle?" Jesse shook his head. His face was a mask. "No, the phone lines are still down after that mess yesterday in Grantville."
Joe climbed out of the airplane and headed over to the line chief. "Sarge, let's get this thing fueled up right now."
"Yes, sir. We'll get on it right away." The sergeant hurried off to get some help getting the fuel bowser dragged over to the airplane.
"Colonel, if I leave as soon as 01 is refueled I can get to the search area before the snow moves in," Joe said.
The colonel's head jerked around. "Forget it Joe! I'm not putting any more lives at risk today!" His eyes had a haunted look. "I'm sorry, but I've already lost too many people. I just can't send anyone out with that snow moving in."
"But, Colonel, if you insist on that and she's not dead already, she'll freeze to death tonight. Even if somebody helps her, what if she's hurt bad? It might be important to get her back here right away. You could be killing her!"
"Oh God! I know that, Joe," the colonel said in a more reasonable tone. "Maybe I'll go, but I just can't send anyone else out in this stuff. I have more experience than anybody here, so if anybody goes it'll be me."
Woody chimed in, "Sir, let me go instead. You're needed here."
A humorless smile passed over Jesse's face. "Thanks, Woody, but if anybody goes, it's me."
"Begging your pardons, sirs, but neither of you is as experienced in flying this airplane with this set up as I am." A brief, crooked grin passed over Joe's face. "Besides, if it comes to that, I'm more expendable than either one of you."
He turned to look very intently at the colonel. "Respectfully, sir, if you don't have someone hold me down, I'm going as soon as I can get 01 turned around. You can have me court-martialed when I get back." Joe turned to walk to the airplane.
"Joe!" called Jesse. Joe stopped. "You're right." He sighed. "God help me, I won't try to stop you. Look, I know that you and Maria have a sort of 'special relationship.' Don't let that special relationship make you do anything stupid. Up until now you've shown pretty good judgment. Don't let this become an exception."
A look of surprise on Joe's face was followed by a slow smile. "You know, sir, that 'special relationship' actually never occurred to me! I think you're right, though. I can't guarantee I won't do something stupid, but I'll really try not to. After all, I may be the only hope she has." Joe smiled briefly, went into base ops and took their first aid kit, and headed for the airplane.
"Grantville Tower, this is Belle 01 for takeoff. Did you get a bearing on Belle 03's last transmission?"
"Belle 01, Grantville, you are cleared for takeoff at your discretion. Belle 03 was weak but we got a bearing of approximately 027 degrees."
"Roger, 027, Belle 01 rolling now."
Once in the air, Joe turned left to a heading of 027 and looked around. There was a solid overcast, but the visibility underneath seemed to be holding up. He settled down and tried to fly the heading as closely as he could.
When he got near Halle, Joe dropped down to about a thousand feet and tried to fly right up the middle of the Saale River. Maria had said she was near the west bank, so if he flew up the middle, she'd be where he had the best chance of seeing her from the left seat. He scanned every field he came across anxiously. Nothing there, next one . . . nope, nothing there either. After what seemed like an eternity he caught a glimpse of something orange. He turned left and pulled the power back a little to slow down.
There it was! Thank goodness for the orange tail and wingtips. He dropped down to get a closer look. Belle 03 was lying on its back. No sign of life. He let down even more and anxiously scanned the area around the airplane. No footsteps in the snow around it. He climbed back up and surveyed the area around the wreckage. It was actually two fields with what looked like a road dividing them. He could see that there were snow drifts up to two feet deep in the fields. That was probably what had flipped 03 on her back. It was clear he couldn't land in one of the fields.
He dropped down to take a good close look at the road. It was fairly straight where it ran across the fields. Like many down-time roads, there were low stone walls on either side where the farmers had cleared their fields of rocks, but they looked far enough apart to clear the landing gear with a little to spare, and low enough to be below the wing struts. On the road the snow seemed to be packed down pretty well. Must get a lot of traffic. He turned around and flew back the other way, checking the other side. There were some ruts, so it could be tricky trying to keep her straight, but if he could do that there was room, just barely, to land on the road. His mind made up, Joe climbed back up to a thousand feet.
"Grantville Tower, this is Belle 01, over."
"Belle 01, Grantville reads you weak but clear, over."
"Grantville, please pass the following message to Colonel Wood: I have found Belle 03 in a field. She's pretty much intact but on her back. There are no footprints in the snow around the airplane. My intention is to land on a nearby road and investigate. I will call when I am airborne again."
"Belle 01, Grantville, Roger. The colonel is right here, so he has your message."
"Roger, Grantville. Belle 01 going below your horizon for a while."
Joe dragged the road one more time, right down at the tops of the rock walls. There was no turbulence, and no wind that he could detect. Just as he reached the end he saw that there was a local headed down the road. He pulled up and came around to land before the villager could walk far enough to obstruct his landing. He slowed it down as much as he dared, and dropped it in on the first straight stretch of road. Belle 01 wallowed and darted on the packed, rutted, snow but Joe managed a tap dance on the rudder pedals that kept her clear of the rocks. It seemed like forever, but he actually stopped rather quickly. He just sat there for a minute, and remembered to breathe again. He wiped a hand across his forehead and grinned wryly. Imagine sweating at 25°F!
Joe wormed his way out of the airplane and looked around. The villager had stopped, and was watching from a distance, then he waved and walked back the way he had come. Must have decided I had things under control, mused Joe. I hope he's right. Belle 03 was about forty yards away. He grabbed the first aid kit from behind the seat and walked back down the road to the nearest point to the airplane, and then climbed over the pile of rocks that was the wall. As he plowed his way through the snow he tried to tramp down a trail for the return trip. He came up on the right side of the airplane. Heedless of the wing fabric under foot he worked his way to the right door. It stuck a little bit, but his exasperated heave got it open. He knelt down and looked inside.
Maria was still in her seat on the left side, hanging from her seat belt. Her arms were hanging down, her face and head were swollen, and there was a slow drip of blood from her scalp. Joe's heart fell in a cold lump into the pit of his stomach.
Then she turned her head slowly and looked at him through slitted eyes that were almost swollen shut. She worked her mouth a couple of times and then whispered, "Took you long enough!"
"I came as fast as I could," he protested.
"I know," she whispered back and then turned her face forward again. "Damn seatbelt buckle wouldn't release. Not my preferred kind of hanging out."
"Okay," he said, "how are you otherwise?"
"Left arm hurts like hell, may be broken. I have this cut on my forehead. Legs and feet have gone to sleep from hanging upside down. Other than that, everything's just hunky dory." She'd picked up a lot of American slang in school.
He looked around the inside of the cockpit, then he ripped the seat cushions out of the right seat and slid them in below Maria on top of the puddle of blood, the splintered wood, and the broken glass from the windshield. "Now," he said, "I'm going to try to lift you up to take the strain off the buckle and see if it will unlatch."
It was awkward trying to do that in the restricted confines of the cockpit, but after a struggle he was able to lift her a little bit. Didn't help, the buckle stayed securely latched.
"I guess I'll have to cut it." He pulled out his knife and began sawing away on the tough fabric of the belt. After a few minutes he said to Maria, "Okay, I've cut most of the way through.I won't be able to catch you, so when it lets go you're going to fall on your head without any warning. It's probably going to hurt, but I can't think of any way to avoid that."
Maria pulled her left arm up against her chest with her right hand and nodded. Joe started sawing away again and in a moment the belt parted and Maria crumpled onto the seat cushions with a sharp cry. She lay there in a fetal position, eyes tightly closed, cradling her left arm with her right. Joe let her just lay there for a few moments.
Then, "Maria, I've got to get you out of here and into 01. We need to get back to the base. It's probably going to hurt, again, for me to drag you out, but there's no other way."
Again she nodded. He repositioned himself on his knees and caught her under her arms. As gently as possible he dragged her out of the airplane and onto the wing. She moaned just a little bit.
He grabbed the first aid kit and said, "I guess we'd better get you patched up. Can't have you bleeding all over my airplane." She stuck out her tongue at him, but didn't open her eyes. "Let's start with the arm. I'll be as gentle as I can but it'll probably hurt some. Once I get it splinted and in a sling, it should help." Again she nodded. Working as quickly as he could, he secured her arm to the splint. He helped her to an upright sitting position, cradled her arm in the sling and tied the sling around her neck.
He dug around in the kit and found a bandage and a flask of alcohol. He saturated the bandage and used it to clean up her hair and face around the cut as best he could. It looked nasty and was certainly bloody, but he remembered from first aid class that scalp wounds were usually bloody and looked worse than they were. He hoped they were right. He put a clean bandage over the cut and began to wrap bandages around her head to hold it in place. "You're beginning to look like the Spirit of '76," he commented.
She opened one eye and looked at him. "Huh?"
"Tell you about it later. "Do you think you could walk?" he asked.
She shifted around a little, testing her various body parts. She shook her head. "Nope, I'm still pretty numb and shaky."
"Guess I'll have to carry you then. Good luck to me!"
She opened both eyes and glared at him. "I'm not that heavy!"
"I wouldn't know," he shot back. "Well, we'd better get going. Not much more we can do here. If you can stand up, it'll help."
Hanging onto his shoulder, with his arm around her back, she managed to stand up. She swayed a little bit, but then stood by herself, leaning against the side of the fuselage. Joe tramped out a path around the wing to his entry path so he wouldn't need to break trail while he was carrying her.
"Okay, here we go." He turned her so she could get her good arm around his neck, then bent over and scooped her up. He stood there a moment testing his balance and footing. The thought passed through his mind that it was kind of nice, holding her like this, but then he went on to more practical matters. She was solid, but not as heavy as he had feared. He was young and reasonably fit, but he was no muscle man. This was still going to be a challenge, particularly in the snow.
He stopped a couple of times to catch his breath, but they got to the wall in fairly short order, slipping and sliding at spots along the way. No way he was going to carry her across that wall. He set her on her feet and swept the snow off a moderate size rock so she could sit down. "I'll have to go drag the airplane back here so we'll have enough room to take off. After I do that, I'll help you across the wall and we can load you up and get out of here."
Joe clambered back over the wall and walked down the road to the airplane. Going to the tail, he picked the tail up by the handle placed there for the ground crew, and tugged. Nothing happened. He stopped and looked carefully at the airplane. Again he picked up the tail and this time rocked it from side to side, finally breaking the main wheels loose. Once more he pulled, slipping some on the packed snow, but it did start moving, and when he finally had it rolling it continued rolling relatively easily. Soon he was back where Maria was sitting on the stone. By now some of the swelling had gone out of her face, and she was giving him an impish grin.
"Boy, am I glad to see you! My butt's about to freeze to this rock."
He shook his head sadly. "Jeez! Nothing but complaints! Next time I'll just leave you here."
He helped her get over the wall and up into the right seat.
She looked out the windshield at the road. "You know, that's pretty narrow up there ahead. Are you sure you can get us off okay?"
"Well, I got it down, so maybe I can get it off. It won't be easy, though, so a few prayers wouldn't hurt."
There were a few scary moments until he could get the tail up and get some rudder effectiveness, but after that, even though the heavy airplane took a while to get off the ground, he kept her right down the groove. As the heavily laden airplane slowly climbed out, both Joe and Maria started breathing again. Joe looked over at Maria. "Now, the only thing we have to worry about is the snow."
"Snow? What snow?"
"After you left this morning one of the guys came back from a round robin cross country to the south and reported there was snow moving north. In fact, looks like it's starting here, now. I had to risk a court-martial to come and get you. We may have to use our instrument approach." Maria looked out. Sure enough random flakes were beginning to filter down.
Maria sighed. "You really do like to live dangerously, don't you? Do you think you can do it?"
"Well, I may have to, but, yes, I think I can do it. Practice went pretty well this morning."
"Oh great! Just when I was starting to feel safe, you have to go play Superman with X-Ray vision that can see through snowstorms."
They had reached 1000 feet and Joe fired up the radio.
"Grantville Tower, Belle 01, over"
"Belle 01, Grantville, go"
"Roger, Grantville. Belle 01 is southbound with Lieutenant Glotz on board. She has a possible broken arm and a scalp wound, but otherwise she's her usual snotty self so she can't be too badly hurt. I guess we should have the meat wagon standing by. We're estimating Grantville in about thirty minutes. How's the weather there? Over."
There was silence for a moment, then "Belle 01, Grantville, light snow started about twenty-five minutes ago. What are your intentions?"
Joe looked over at Maria. She made a face at him. "Grantville, Belle 01. We should be high station at GTV in about thirty minutes. If necessary we will use the provisional instrument approach to Runway 07, over."
"Roger, Belle 01. Call high station. Grantville, standing by."
Joe looked over at Maria. "I suppose we could have tried for Halle or Magdeburg, but this stuff seems to be moving fast. We'd be screwed if we went to either of those places and they were socked in when we got there. At least at Grantville we have the homer and an approach that I know."
As they got closer to Grantville the snow got heavier and Joe found that he had to stay on the instruments. If he looked out at the swirling snow he got vertigo in a hurry.
* * *
The colonel was pacing back and forth in the tower. Suddenly his head jerked up and he looked at Woody.
"Woody, go get some help and build some bonfires at the approach end of the field, on either side of the threshold! Use some gas if you need to, to get them started. We need them going before they start their approach."
"I'm on it!" Woody flung over his shoulder as he ran down the stairs. Woody raced through the briefing room, grabbing anyone there to help. Then he went up to Smith's and recruited more help there. They took scraps from the shops, old furniture, anything that would burn, and piled them in heaps at the corners of the field. A couple of crew chiefs brought jerry cans of gasoline and doused the piles. Somebody handed Woody an old, lit, Zippo. He lit a torch and flung it on the pile, which lit with a whoosh. Someone else went through a batch of kitchen matches before they got the other pile lit. He lost some hair and eyebrows in the process, but now both piles were blazing fiercely.
* * *
"Grantville, Belle 01 is stabilized on the back course approaching high station at 1500 feet. Estimating high station momentarily."
"Belle 01, Grantville. Past high station cleared to descend to 500 feet and execute a GTV 1 approach to Grantville, Runway 07. Over."
"Grantville, Zero One. Copy cleared for a GTV 1 to 07. Zero One is high station now, departing 1500 feet for 500 feet."
"Roger, Zero One, cleared for approach. Call low station, inbound."
"Zero One, WILCO."
Joe had hacked his watch at high station. He was flying with his left hand and furiously working the RDF with his right. Back and forth, back and forth with the loop, adjust the null, check the time, bring the turn needle into the scan, watch the altitude as they descended.
Time! Joe rolled into a right turn and checked the watch. Now he concentrated on the turn needle. He dropped his hand from the RDF and handed the CB radio to Maria. "Call at low station. I'm going to be pretty busy."
"Rog," responded Maria briskly.
Time! Roll from a right turn into a left turn. Check altitude . . . coming up on 500 feet, shift hands, add a little power, level at 500 feet, check the watch, set the RDF straight ahead, coming up on rollout, watch the altitude!
Time! Joe rolled her upright and centered the turn needle, then he checked the mag compass. Over-turned slightly, half needle right, roll out again, check the compass, okay, work the loop, left, right, left, right, adjust the null, watch your altitude! Add a little power, adjust the null, left, right, left, right.
Joe was concentrating so hard that he was startled when Maria reported "Low station inbound" as he swung the loop around to the rear.
"Roger Zero One, cleared for approach." A different voice. "Joe, we have bonfires on both sides of the threshold. It may help."
Maria rogered the message.
Joe risked a glance outside. Nothing but snow! He pulled the power back slightly and started a slow descent. He sensed Maria looking at him. He was going below minimums. Left, right, left, right, adjust the null, watch the turn needle, check the altitude . . . 300 feet, left, right, left, right, check the compass, check the altitude . . . 250 feet, airspeed good.
"Joe," said Maria quietly, fearful of breaking his concentration, "I see some lights ahead on either side. Must be the bonfires. Looks good as far as I can tell."
Joe just grunted. Left, right, left, right, 200 feet, 071 on the compass, left, right, left, right.
"Joe, we're way below minimums," Maria said quietly.
Joe grunted acknowledgment. He glanced outside again, saw the light from the fires ahead and a few streaks from the terrain below. Now he gradually began to bring the outside into his scan. Slowly, he transitioned from the gauges in the cockpit to what he could see outside. It was still murky, but now he had a pretty good view down. He let down to 100 feet, searching ahead for the rocky outcrop at the threshold. There! "Maria, tell them 'field in sight'!"
It was not his best landing, but at least it was in the right place, and the landing gear didn't collapse.
Joe took the radio from Maria and took a deep breath. "Grantville, Belle 01 on rollout. Where do you want us to park?"
"Belle 01, Grantville." There seemed to be more emotion than usual in the tower operator's voice. He started over, "Belle 01, you can park at Hangar Two. The ambulance is waiting for your passenger there."
Joe cut the switches. They looked at each other for a long moment. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world for Joe to put his arm around Maria and hug her tightly to him.
* * *
With much appreciation to Jack Carroll and Karen Bergstrahl for their help.
***
Art Director's Note: The Belle aircraft illustration is based on a line drawing by Mike Spehar and descriptions from 1633. The image is not canon, it is my interpretation. -Garrett W. Vance
Tom Quiney rested his elbows on the balustrade of the concrete bridge that was such a landmark feature in downtown Grantville. Their goal, a white-painted storefront office, was just in sight.
"Should we?" his brother Dick asked.
"The bill was good."
"I guess he was sick. He died. So someone in the company in London probably called a doctor." Dick shook his head. "But you don't have to be sick first to die. Not in Grandpa's business. Think of Kit Marlowe. Think of . . . ."
"He was sick. Somehow, the bill didn't get paid. The doctor's been annoyed about it ever since."
"It's a lot of money. Especially with fifteen-plus years of interest."
"Aunt Sue sent the money with Marmion when he came, along with the manuscripts and stuff, especially to pay it off."
"Uncle Hall sent it with Marmion, if you ask me."
"Yes, but they're married," Tom protested. "'The two shall become as one flesh,' and all that."
"In this case, 'with all my worldly goods I thee endow' comes closer. I still say that it's a lot of money."
"My dear brother . . ."
Dick made a face. "Oh, all right."
* * *
Leslie Snider looked up from the desk at the medical offices of Adams, Nichols, and Abrabanel. The two boys looked harmless enough–maybe fifteen and sixteen. Shouldn't they be in school in the middle of a weekday? Still . . . "Yes?"
"We're here about an overdue bill."
"Just let me pull the records. Your names?"
"Umm," the taller boy said. "It wasn't for us."
"It wasn't here, either," the shorter one chimed in.
"It wasn't there either–I mean that it wasn't up-timer."
"It was actually quite a while ago."
"Some time back, if I do say so myself."
The volleys from one boy to the other made her blink.
Finally, the older one–the taller one, at least–said, "We need to see Dr. Abrabanel."
"It's an old bill."
"Real old. Nearly superannuated."
"If only it were obsolete." The shorter one sighed. "I can think of a lot of other things to do with the money."
"If it's that old," Leslie said, "Dr. Abrabanel may not remember."
"Oh, he remembers all right."
"Is he in?" the taller one asked.
"May we see him?"
Leslie sighed. "He should be resting after lunch, but let me check."
After she let them into his office, she remembered that she never had gotten their names.
* * *
"I can't say," Balthasar said, "that I ever expected to see this money."
"Somehow, we guessed that."
"Aunt Sue married well," Dick said to the ceiling.
"Her husband is a physician, too . . . sensitive about these things," Tom commented to the radiator.
'Happy now?" Dick sounded hopeful. "Ready to stop dissing Grandpa just because his executors didn't pay his medical bills?"
Balthasar assumed a mildly quizzical expression.
"Don't give me that look," Dick said. "We're actors. We live for body language."
"What he means," Tom specified, "is the 'Earl of Oxford' business that you gave to Prime Minister Stearns."
"It's gotten around."
"We feel that a little correction is in order."
"Maybe even a big correction."
"A mention at a fancy diplomatic reception with dozens of important people standing around, for instance."
"Or a lecture in the high school auditorium."
"With reporters present."
"That's it. Something in the papers."
"Or?" Balthasar asked. "Did I hear an 'or'? I never really expected the joke to go so far or be taken so seriously."
Tom smiled. "Well, we're writing skits now."
"They're not just openers for Master Massinger any more," Dick added.
"VOA has bought some of them for the variety hour."
"They're short, so they make nice space fillers."
"We'll be doing a couple for the Christmas program at the high school, too. We'll go on while the stage hands change scenes behind the curtains."
"So you can tell Prime Minister Stearns the truth about Grandpa's plays."
"Or you can have a starring role in our skits," Dick said. "Honestly, Dr. Abrabanel, it's entirely up to you."
* * *
Magdeburg Times-Journal
July 18, 1634
The Royal Arts Council announced today that the contract for designing and constructing an organ for the new Royal Opera Hall and Fine Arts Complex has been awarded to Johann Bach of Wechmar. Herr Bach is a musician and organist of note who has studied under Herr Johann Christoph Hoffmann, Stadtpfeifer in Suhl. He has served as organist at Suhl, Arnstadt and Schweinfurt, where his responsibilities included maintenance of the organs. This is his first commission to construct an organ.
* * *
"Impossible."
The word seemed to echo in the room for a moment. Johann Bach heard it, and folded his hands together before responding. "It had better not be impossible, or there will not be an organ in the opera hall."
"But the plans are finished, the detailed drawings are almost complete, they've begun digging the trenches for the foundations." Josef Furttenbach the architect, senior partner of Furttenbach and Parigi, clamped his jaw after making that statement. He and Carl Schockley, the general contractor's project manager for the building project, glowered at Johann in concert. Antonio Parigi, the other architect in the partnership, had a trace of a smile on his face.
Johann smiled back at them all. "I am sorry that you seemed to have received bad advice before now. The space you have allotted for the organ is adequate as far as the organ cabinet and pipe space and the wind chest, but you have left little room for the bellows. Without the bellows, there is no wind for the wind chest. That would be like God making Adam without lungs."
Furttenbach and Schockley continued to glare across the table at him. Lady Beth Haygood cleared her throat. "You're serious." There was a hint of question in her tone.
Johann suppressed a sigh. "Very serious. An organ without bellows is like a flute that has been hung upon the wall: it may be made of the finest materials and the greatest of the craftsman's art, but without moving wind it makes no music."
"Can't you . . ." Lady Beth moved both hands in the air as if trying to shape something, ". . . reduce the size somehow? Can we use electric fans or something?"
Johann did sigh now. "Perhaps. I will study it. But it would be best if we plan now for what I know will work. If another approach can be adopted later that will save space . . ." he shrugged.
"So what would we do with the wasted space then?" challenged Furttenbach.
"Make storage closets," Johann smiled. "If musicians and artists are going to be using the building, there will always be a need for more storage."
No one else smiled, but Lady Beth did jot a note on the pad in front of her. She looked up at the architects and contractor. "Fix it."
"But Lady Beth . . ." Schockley began.
"Fix it, Carl. I'm not going to explain to Mary Simpson when she gets back from her trip that her opera hall doesn't have an organ in it."
"All right, but you know that changing plans after they've been finalized and the work's begun is the first step to cost overruns. This one's not our fault, and I don't want to hear about it later." Now he bent his glower on Lady Beth, who was singularly unaffected by it as far as Johann could tell.
"Then I suggest you get word to your excavator operator and stop digging until you know what the changes are going to be. I don't want to hear about you pouring foundations in the wrong place, either." She closed her pad and gathered her jacket and purse. "Send me word when the revised plans are ready and I'll come and go over them with you." She left the room.
Schockley ran his hand through his hair and looked to Furttenbach. "Fix it, she says." He shook his head. "Well, like she says, I'd better go get the digging stopped." His glance now included Johann. "Work it out as soon as you can. I really don't want to lose any time if we can help it." He followed Lady Beth out the door.
Furttenbach looked at his partner, jerked his head at Johann and left. Parigi looked at Johann, sighed, and flipped through the drawing packet until he found the sheet he wanted. "Okay, show me what you need."
The two men bent their heads together over the page. "See, this wall is too close." Johann traced a line with his finger.
"How much room do you really need?"
"Well, I was planning on twelve bellows, each about eight feet by four feet. And we'll need at least two feet between each to get between them.'
Parigi looked horrified. "Mio Dio, Signor Bach. Excuse me, please, but that's over one hundred and twenty feet!"
"No, no," Johann laughed. "I was not clear, my friend. The narrow end of the bellows connects to the wind chest. The length of them will go this way," and his finger traced on the plan again.
"So, it is a mere seventy-two feet that we must allow for." The Italian smiled and snapped his fingers. "That is nothing. A piece of cake, as Carl would say."
"Perhaps a bit more difficult than that," Johann said. "To get the most even wind pressure, it would be best if they were lined up on each side of the wind box."
Parigi's brow furrowed. The two of them bent over the plans again. Fingers pointed and drew lines and thumped emphatically several times before they reached agreement. The architect laid a very thin piece of paper over the plan and traced out the new dimensions that would be needed. "It is fortunate," he said, "that this is actually outside the main support wall of the auditorium. If it had been necessary to move that, ai, old Joseph would throw a fury such as would make my old papa proud."
"Is Master Furttenbach difficult to work with, then?" Johann was not looking forward to working with the man if the answer was yes.
"No, not so much. He dislikes changes after things are supposed to be final. He's German." Parigi gave a fluid shrug. "He is a good architect, though, very good. He studied with my father in Italy years ago when he was young. When I told Papa I was going to come north to work with him, he harrumphed and said that I could do worse."
"You will get the changes made, then?"
"Two days for the foundations and walls. We will not need to settle things like doors and crawlspaces just yet."
"Good, because I have not yet done the details for the wind chambers and wind trunks yet."
"Well, come by my office and maybe I can help with that. I would really like to understand this organ stuff in case I have to deal with one in another design."
"Good. Meanwhile, go tell Herr Schockley where he can dig and then let's go find an ale."
"Un' idea eccellente!"
* * *
The Green Horse tavern was busy, as it was every evening when Marla Linder and her husband Franz Sylwester and their friends came to play and sing. Johann Bach sat at a table near the front of the room. His command of up-time English was improving, so he understood most of the words, and where he didn't he just enjoyed the music. He especially enjoyed what they called the Irish songs. There was a lilt and a bounce to them that was unique in his experience.
Marla was singing one of the best of them now. It was a song that could easily have been dreary, but somehow in her hands, with her voice, it was fun.
The song was drawing to its close. Marla, eyes sparkling, was grinning at Franz as he played his violin like a dervish.
When the Captain came downstairs, though he saw me situation
In despite of all me prayers I was marched off to the station
For me they'd take no bail, but to get home I was itchin'
And I had to tell the tale, how I came into the kitchen
With me toora loora la and me toora loora laddie
And me toora loora la and me toora loora laddie
Franz grinned back at his wife. Marla turned back to the audience and sang the last verse.
Now, I said she did invite me, but she gave a flat denial
For assault she did indict me, and I was sent for trial
She swore I robbed the house and in spite of all her schreechin'
And I got six months hard for me courtin' in the kitchen
With me toora loora la and me toora loora laddie
And me toora loora la and me toora loora laddie
With me toora loora la and me toora loora laddie
And me toora loora la and me toora loora laddie
They finished the song with a flourish. Marla joined hands with Franz to take a bow to loud applause. She waved as the applause crested and died. "We'll be back in a while to sing some more."
Violins were put in cases, pipes were wiped and a harp was hung from a peg in the wall. Marla and company crowded onto the benches around a table at the front.
"Johann!"
He looked up to see Franz beckoning to him.
"Is there room?"
Franz looked around, then nodded. "We will make room. Come." Johann picked up his mug and squeezed onto the end of the bench next to Rudolf Tuchman, exchanging a nod with the young Hanoverian.
Marla and Franz were across the table from him. He bowed to them with a grin. "Well sung, Frau Marla. Very sprightly. But was that not a man's song?"
She laughed, then said, "You got me there. But it's so fun to sing I just had to do it."
"Fun it is," Johann's smile widened. "One could dance to it easily."
Marla started laughing again. Johann looked to Franz with raised eyebrows. That worthy sighed. "For all that she likes to sing sacred songs, she has a devilish sense of humor, and we never know what will set it off." Franz leaned over and poked his wife in the ribs. "Enough, woman. Either tell us the joke or leave off your laughing."
Marla managed to stifle her laughter, wiping her eyes as she did so. "Oh . . . oh, my. That just caught me off guard."
"So, tell." Franz growled with a fierce expression. Marla poked him back in his own ribs.
"Okay, it goes like this: when my parents were kids, there was a television show for teenagers on Saturdays. They'd play rock and roll music for the kids to dance to, and every week they'd play at least one new song. Then they'd get a couple of the kids in the studio to come up and rate the song. And the comment they heard most of the time was . . ." She paused for effect, causing Franz to raise a finger and aim it at her. ". . . 'It's got a good beat and it's easy to dance to.' Then he hears a song I know darn well he's never heard before," she pointed at Johann, voice unsteady as her laughter threatened to break out again, "and what does he say?"
Everyone around the table, including Johann, chorused, "One could dance to it easily." And laughter reigned supreme for a time.
Once they settled down to mere chuckles, Franz looked back over to Johann. "So, Johann, how goes the organ building?"
"Well enough, for a start." He looked across at Marla. "I reviewed the plans for the organ spaces with the architects, and it is a good thing I did." He shook his head. "They had not allowed enough room for the wind chest and bellows, and it took a bit of talking to get them to see the need for the change. In truth, if not for Frau Haygood, we'd probably still be arguing."
"Ah, Lady Beth to the rescue," Franz drawled.
Johann considered that statement. "Indeed." He shrugged. "Anyway, once that got settled, I started looking for craftsmen. As it happens, the main builder, the 'contractor' I think they called the company, has already found most of the people I will need to build the organ. They have a good cabinet maker, and of course regular carpenters abound. So I am down to two craftsmen that I need: a bellows maker, and a whitesmith."
"Bellows?" Marla asked.
"For the wind chest," Franz leaned over.
"Ah. I never thought of that. The only pipe organ I've ever been close to is the one in the Methodist church in Grantville, and it uses electric motors and fans to force the air. I've never seen an old style organ."
Johann was taken aback for a moment. He was planning on using the best and latest approaches to organ building, and to hear them called "old style" caused him a moment of disorientation. But he made note of the electric motors. This was the second time that had been mentioned. He would need to look into that.
"I know what a blacksmith is," Marla continued. "What's a whitesmith?"
"A metal worker who works with metals like tin." Johann regained his aplomb.
"And you need him why?"
Johann struggled to keep incredulity from his face. "To make the pipes for the organ, of course."
Marla giggled. "Sorry. I never thought of tin being used for that. I think of tin, I think of cans with food in them." She giggled again.
"When do you think you will be able to begin building the organ?" Franz asked.
"We will start making the pipes and other pieces as soon as we can. Putting it together will have to wait for the building shell and roof to be complete enough to keep the weather off. That will be a while yet; several months."
"They keep saying it will be ready in a year." Marla made a rude noise. "Ha! I bet it takes longer."
Johann shrugged. "It will take as long as it takes."
A thought crossed Johann's mind. "Fraulein Linder, can I ask you something?"
"Call me Marla, and sure."
"Why do all the up-timers, when they first hear my name, get such strange expressions on their faces?"
The whole table broke into laughter again, with Marla's voice skirling over the top of them all. Johann sat back and crossed his arms, offended.
"We're sorry," Marla said as the laughter dwindled into chuckles. "It's just that your name . . . Have you had a chance to study any of the music history from the up-time yet?"
"Not really, no." Johann knew he sounded surly. He uncrossed his arms and continued. "Mostly I just know what I have seen in the concert programs and heard from those of you who have been to Grantville."
"Umm, well, you see, Bach is a pretty familiar name to us."
Johann sat back again, this time in astonishment. He knew the Bach family was well-known in Thuringia, but how would the up-timers know of them?
"We consider Johann Sebastian Bach to be one of the greatest musicians who ever lived."
Johann . . . Sebastian . . . Bach . . . Johann shook his head. "I do not know that name," he murmured.
"That's because he hasn't been born yet."
Now Johann was truly confused. Has not been born yet? How . . . ?
Marla and Franz both looked at him with sympathy. "Yeah, now you're starting to understand just how weird this whole Ring of Fire thing can be," Marla said. "You think this is weird, go talk to Kappellmeister Schütz about how he felt when he read a biography of his whole life."
That thought had never crossed Johann's mind—he might be able to read about his future. "Do you think I . . ."
"I don't know," Marla shook her head. "There might be a little information about you in the library, but probably not a lot. No offense, but I'd never heard of you before you showed up at the concert a few weeks ago."
"But this Johann Sebastian . . ."
"Lots of information about him, sure."
"And he was famous?"
"Yep. Wrote tons of stuff." She frowned. "I don't know how much of it came back through the Ring of Fire. Grantville wasn't exactly a hotbed of musical culture, but I know some of it did. If nothing else, there are a lot of recordings, especially of the organ music."
"Organ music?" Johann sat up straight.
"Oh, yes," Marla grinned. "The greatest organ music ever written. I envy you," she sighed, "getting to hear the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for the first time."
Johann sat silent for a moment. "How do I find this organ music?"
"Go to Grantville," everyone at the table chorused.
Johann looked at the book in front of him. "Johann Sebastian Bach. German Musician. 1685-1750." Somehow seeing it in print in a book from the future seemed to have more weight than just hearing Marla and the others talk about it. He looked up at the young monk who was assisting him in the library. "This is the man?"
"You asked for Johann Sebastian Bach. This is the only article about him in this encyclopedia." The monk looked apologetic.
Johann began reading the article, but after a paragraph or two realized he was struggling. The type face, the spellings, the English of it, made for hard going for him. "Please, Brother . . ." he realized he didn't even know the monk's name.
"I am Brother Johann." A smile crossed both their faces at the realization that not only did they have the same name, but so did the subject of their hunt.
"Please, can you help me read this?"
Brother Johann pulled out a chair and sat down next to him. Their heads bent together as they read through the text. At the end, Johann sat back, dissatisfied. "I was told he wrote great organ music. This man says nothing of that."
"It is the nature of encyclopedias," Brother Johann replied, "that they are summaries. There will be more detail available elsewhere in the library."
"And I am not mentioned in this Encyclopedia Britannica?"
The monk shrugged. "There are five articles about Bach musicians in the encyclopedia: this one, and articles about four of his sons. Nothing about those who came before."
Johann drummed his fingers on the table. He looked up at his namesake. "There are those who know the library, who do research?"
"Aye."
"I want to know everything there is to know about this man and his ancestors and his music. How long to produce it?"
The monk thought for a moment. "Perhaps a week to do the initial search and indexing. Perhaps two, maybe three weeks after that to gather all the material. Another week or two to put it in final form."
Johann frowned. "I will be back in Magdeburg before then."
"No problem," Brother Johann smiled as he used the up-timer phrase. "The bank offers a service. You deposit the fee into an escrow account. When we are done preparing the research, we take it to the bank, the escrow officer reviews it, and if it looks good, she releases the money to us and sends the results to you."
"Hmm. That might work." Johann fingered his beard.
"Oh, we do this kind of thing all the time."
"Indeed." Johann thought about a world where knowledge was a commodity to be bought and sold. He wasn't sure he liked the idea.
* * *
The more he stared at the picture, the more disquieted Johann became. It didn't matter if he looked from left to right or top to bottom, every time his eyes got near the center of the picture everything twisted and suddenly his perspective would change. He tried again, and it resulted in a frown. He turned to his host. "Master Wendell, please, what is the purpose for this picture?"
"Call me Marcus. It's called Convex and Concave, and it's by a Dutch artist named M. C. Escher who died in the 1970's."
"An up-timer, then." Just as he finished his response, Johann realized that it was a silly observation. Of course the artist was an up-timer. No down-timer would think of drawing such a mind-twisting picture.
"Oh, yes," Marcus continued. "He was well known for making drawings like this, representations of things that would be impossible in real life. Sort of like jokes on those who look at them. I keep that there to remind me that things are not always as they seem."
"Indeed." Johann looked at it one more time, then turned away. "I think it is a good thing the Inquisition holds no sway here. That picture might bring them visiting." Marcus laughed, but Johann wasn't sure he was joking.
"So, Herr Bach," Marcus said as he led his guest to the chairs, "you are interested in old Johann Sebastian Bach."
"Please, call me Johann." Johann took a seat. "Of course I am. As soon as Frau Marla and Herr Franz and their friends told me of him, I knew I had to come to Grantville and learn as much as I could about him."
"So, what do you know so far?"
` "Only what the encyclopedia could tell me. He was apparently fairly well known in his later career, fell out of favor for about a hundred years or so, then was rediscovered."
"Are you related to him?"
"Probably, but the encyclopedia did not have that knowledge. I have asked Brother Johann at the library to find everything they can about him and his family."
"That's good," Marcus nodded. "Either he or Father Nick will dig out everything there is to be found."
"But that is still only words. Still only dry and dusty knowledge. I need to hear the man, feel him, feel his art and his passion. From the article I know that he wrote much music of different kinds, and I want to hear it all. But most of all I want to hear what he wrote for the King of Instruments."
"The organ." A slow smile crossed Marcus' face. "Oh, Johann. I envy you hearing him for the first time."
"That is what Marla said." Johann sat forward. "Is there someone who can play for me?"
"I don't think so," Marcus replied, "not as the music deserves. However," he held up a finger as disappointment crossed Johann's face, "I do have some recordings."
Johann's breath came a little quicker. "Ah, yes. Fraulein Linder and the others mentioned these 'recordings.' I look forward to seeing and hearing them."
Marcus levered himself to his feet. "Then come with me. No time like the present." He pulled a few flat parcels off of a shelf, then led Johann out of the office and into the band room. "Take a seat over there while I get ready." Johann walked to the area of chairs that Marcus' hand had generally waved at and sat down.
"Are you ready?" Marcus looked to him from beside a cabinet loaded with up-time devices. Johann nodded, although he wasn't sure what to expect. So far he hadn't heard a single note. Marcus pushed on something, then lifted a thin arm and carefully positioned it over the edge of a black disk. A faint hissing sound came from a couple of large wooden boxes that flanked the cabinet. Ah . . . this is something like the Trommler player, then. But where is the horn? He was proud for a moment that he had made that deduction based on seeing a Trommler player once at a burgher's home in Erfurt.
Music came out of the air. Marcus grinned at him, so he relaxed and listened.
The opening motif was a simple tremolo, followed by a downward run of notes. It was repeated twice, an octave lower each time.
Hmm. The registration is different each time—so the figure was played on three different manuals. Probably a three manual organ, then: Schwellwerke, Hauptwerke, Brustwerke.
Johann's eyes widened as a pedal tone was played to lay the foundation for a chord that was rapidly built. It was a large chord, very full of resonator timbre, very loud. That the instrument in the 'recording' didn't lose wind in playing that chord meant it was a good organ, well-designed and well-built.
The chord moved and changed and resolved into a D minor tonic chord. Johann wasn't sure yet if this piece would be a Dorian mode work in the D tonality, or if it would actually be in D minor. Either way, he expected to be pleased with it.
The chord ended. The recording reproduced echoes and reverberations, as if the work was being played in a great cathedral. How odd to hear that in this square room.
The organist in the recording was a man of great skill. The next passage was a bravura passage of fingers moving in patterns up the keys, followed by several chords. This figure was repeated on a different manual. But to break pattern, the figure went down the keyboard next, played in octaves on two manuals, then melded into another of the thunderous loud chords, followed by a ripple of single notes and ended in yet another massive chord.
A new motif began, rapid runs of notes on the Brustwerke, leading into chords first on the Brustwerke, then on the Hauptwerke, finally leading into a slow run on the Pedal which culminated in a slow series of heavy resonant chords on the Hauptwerke and Pedal. The Toccata had come to its conclusion.
Johan took a slow breath in the moment of silence. Master Marcus said nothing, waiting.
The fugue began. It was a light rapid figure begun on the Schwellwerke. It began passing back and forth between the manuals, still at that rapid tempo. Johann abandoned trying to analyze the music as it was played. He sat back, closed his eyes, and let it pour into him.
It was like listening to the springtime flood of a river—ironic, since Bach meant brook. Figure followed figure, seemingly tumbling along. The voicing jumped from manual to manual to manual. The music flowed, almost bubbling. The pedals came in, like large rocks the music had to flow around.
Still it poured along, rapid, even joyous in nature. The sound invaded Johann's mind, his heart, his soul. His fingers and feet began to twitch involuntarily, reaching for keys as he listened to this . . . this masterpiece. He had no other word for it.
The pedals came back in, rumbling along below the work of the manuals. Soon enough—or an eternity later, Johann wasn't sure—the flow poured into a series of heavy chords. The pedals sounded again, with the Hauptwerke coming in on top of them. One more rapid figure, then chords, many chords with little ripples between them. It was as if the river had reached the sea.
A final series of massive chords sounded. Johann felt the gravitas of them as they slowly moved from one to another. The player in the recording let up on the keys, and once again Johann heard the reverberation of a great space.
Marcus had arisen toward the end and stepped to the cabinet. Now he lifted the thin arm from the disk. The hissing sound disappeared from the cabinets. He turned to Johann.
"Before the Ring of Fire, this was the single most widely known piece of organ music; not in America, not in Germany, but in the entire world. Six billion people in our world, and if they knew any organ work at all, this was it."
Johann struggled for words. "I . . . It . . ." He swallowed. "Magnificent. It is truly a master work. A bravura piece that tests the organist as much as the organ."
Marcus chuckled. "Yeah, it does. I play at the piano, but I've never had the finger control to attempt this one, never mind the feet. Oddly enough, there are—were—some music historians who think that old Johann wrote that specifically to test organs, to test their registrations and in particular their wind delivery capabilities."
"Indeed." Johann nodded thoughtfully. "It definitely has me thinking about the design for the new opera house organ."
"That's right, you're doing that, aren't you? How's it going?"
"Ideas only at this point. A few doodles on paper. I will not begin the serious work until I get back to Magdeburg."
"Cool. Keep me posted on how it goes. I'd really like to hear it when you're done.
"Now, what do you want to hear next by old Johann: instrumental music, choral music or more organ work?"
"Oh, organ, by all means."
As Marcus turned back to the cabinet, Johann had a thought occur to him. "Master Marcus?"
"Yes?"
"You keep referring to 'old' Johann? How old was he when he wrote what we just heard?"
Marcus looked over his shoulder with a grin. "Music historians think he was twenty-two, maybe a little older, when he wrote that."
* * *
It was night out. Johann wandered down the streets of Grantville with his hands in his pockets. He had been hit in the head once, hard. He remembered how he felt then; woozy, disoriented, not certain what was real and concrete.
He felt that same way now. That a Bach, a member of his family, possibly a descendant of his own loins, could write that music . . . He shook his head, trying to clear his thinking.
Marcus had explained the Butterfly Effect to him. This Bach—this Johann Sebastian—would never exist in his future. He had been stolen from them by the Ring of Fire. Marcus had explained how little of his music had come back with Grantville. Johann could weep at the knowledge of what had been lost.
But what had come back—ah, what greatness. The world of music would be changed by this.
Johann stopped at the edge of town in a place where there were no nearby houses and no bright lights. He looked up at the sky. The moon hadn't risen yet, and the stars were shining brightly in the velvet black of the night.
"God," he said. "All the great men say that Grantville is your doing. That the Ring of Fire is a divine work, a miracle either of blessing or of judgment. But what if it is a test?"
He lowered his head and brooded on that. After a while, he looked back up at the sky. "Are you an Escher, God? Is Grantville like that picture in Marcus' office? We cannot see it straight on, we cannot look at it from the side, everything is different and twisted and not what we expect?"
Johann took his hands out of his pocket and pounded a fist into the opposite palm, then looked up once more.
"Escher or not, God, the music is real. You cannot play with our ears like Escher does with our eyes. I have heard the music. I have heard the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. I claim him as ours. He will not languish in our time. His renown will be as great now as it was in Grantville's world before the fall of the Ring."
He gave a definite nod. "He is ours." He turned and began striding back toward Grantville, toward his room. He had work to do. And a picture to buy.
* * *
Sexually transmitted infections (formerly called venereal diseases) caused a surprising amount of discomfort, loss of fertility, madness and even death in the early modern era. There was a lack of understanding of the diseases, of the corresponding public health measures that should have been in effect, and of reliable treatments. Advances in bacteriology and serology starting in the 1890s in this time line provided the first consistent ability to diagnose the infections early in their course. Effective treatment started a decade later, with the discovery first of arsenicals for syphilis. Several decades later the sulfa class drugs and finally penicillin and chloramphenicol were developed. All of these drugs are (by canon) producible with 1630's technology and guidance from up-time sources. It is important to note that one of the most critical tenets of public health is that treatment is needed for not only the presenting patient, but also all identifiable intimate contacts of that patient.
Please note that any prospective dates given in this article are my own personal first approximation SWAGs, and based on my estimation of the progress from 1631 to the 1660 time frame as compared to the 1900 to 1970 time frame in this time line. Iver Cooper's excellent article on Organic Chemistry (Industrial Alchemy Parts III and IV) contains references to the antibiotics in canon, and I have adapted those as the baseline.
Syphilis was named for a shepherd in the 1530 epic poem, "Syphilis, or the French disease" by Girolamo Fracastoro, an Italian physician trained at Padua. As a disease, syphilis was first characterized in 1494 with an outbreak in Naples that was linked to some of Columbus' crewmen. Other names for the disease include the Great Pox (to distinguish it from Small Pox), the French Pox (by the English, Italians and Germans), the English Disease by the French and South Sea Islanders, and the Turkish Disease by the Russians. Notice the pattern of blaming the disease on one's enemies!
The causative agent, Treponema pallidum, is a pale, spiral shaped, mobile single celled organism that normally lives in humans. Various ideas of the source of the original infection have been proposed, with arguments about the antiquity of this disease having extended for several centuries. Currently, there are two competing ideas, first, the Old World theory, where syphilis is derived from the skin disease bejel, which has been known since antiquity, mostly in the western end of the Mediterranean. It is caused by a Treponema that is closely related to T. pallidum. It, like most of the New World forms, is a skin infection not requiring intimate sexual contact. There is some suggestion that bejel may have been confused with leprosy at times, as both produce painless ulcers, can result in scarring with loss of sensation, leading to further risk of damage from recurrent minor trauma, and both cause soft tissue and bony destruction over time. Bejel is more transmissible than leprosy, and occasionally undergoes spontaneous cure, both of which are arguments towards bejel being the Biblical Tzaraath, not what we know as leprosy today. Possible evidence of Treponema related bony changes have been noted in pre-Columbian skeletons from Pompeii, among other places.
The New World, or Columbian, theory which theorizes that Columbus and his men brought the disease back after sexual contact with New World natives, is related to various treponemal New World tropical diseases, including yaws and pinta. As with bejel, these are skin infections not requiring intimate genital contact. Recent research tends to favor Columbian origin, as genetic testing suggests that syphilis is more closely related to yaws than bejel, and there appears to be an intermediate form (between yaws and syphilis) that occurs along the northeast coast of South America.
Wherever syphilis originated, the epidemic form was noted with numerous cases starting in the 1493-94 timeframe, and continued unchecked through the middle 1500s, and then, in a somewhat milder form, through the late 1800s. While the treponemal skin infections show evidence of having been long associated with humans, the epidemic suggests that during the change of the tropical form to a venereal form, suitable for transmission in the colder areas of Europe, a more aggressive subtype was selected. An interesting correlation can be noted here, as when experimental rabbits are partially shaved and then infected with T. pallidum, the shaved (cooler) areas of the rabbit's body show substantially more and worse lesions than the fully furred areas.
Similar problems with an aggressive disease were noted in the first stages of the AIDS epidemic, but the public health authorities in the 1632 universe, lead by Dr. Balthazar Abrabanel, are determined to avoid the mistakes made in the 1980s in this time line. Like AIDS and the viral hepatitis infections, syphilis can be blood borne, and this will be a major threat to the blood supply in the early stages of blood banking.
Several stages are associated with syphilis, which is one of the most important diseases in the 1632 time line. In the primary infection, a flat red patch (macula) is noted at the point of infection. This develops into a painless ulcer with a raw, red base, hard, smooth edges (called a chancre) and often no other symptoms. There is a latent period of 10 days to 3 months, with an average 3 weeks from the time of exposure to the appearance of the chancre. The patient is mildly infectious after the appearance of the ulcer. One to six months after the initial infection, with an average 6-8 weeks, the secondary stage starts with the appearance of a rash that occurs anywhere on the body. This is one of the very few rashes that shows up on the palms of hands and the soles of feet, and any patient in the 1632 universe with a rash on the palms and soles will be considered to have syphilis until proven otherwise.
In this time line, the rash is reddish pink and appears evenly on both sides of the body, extending to the extremities. In the 1630s, the rash was more pronounced, often with open sores that gave rise to the name "Great Pox" to differentiate it from smallpox. Flat, pale, fleshy masses, called condyloma lata, occur in skin folds and other moist areas of the body and, like the palmar rash, are considered diagnostic for the disease. Other signs of generalized inflammation including swollen lymph nodes, fever, sore throat, malaise and headache also occur. In about 2% of the cases in any stage of the disease, a form of meningitis may occur, which is a dire sign. Because infective treponema can be found in the rashes, condylomata and ulcers, the secondary stage is the most infective stage of the disease. An interesting sign is a patchy loss of hair on the head, where the rash interferes with hair growth, that occurs in about 5% of the patients. The outer edges of the eyebrows can also be affected.
The latent stage starts with resolution of rash and healing of any active ulcers and disappearance of any condylomata, which may occur two weeks after the rash starts, but is most often a month or more later. At this point, there is little physical evidence of the disease, however the patient remains infective, but much less so than secondary stage. The progression of the infection from here shows that roughly one quarter of the cases result in spontaneous resolution, another quarter remain in the latent state for long periods of time (possibly the rest of their life), and ultimately one half progress to the tertiary stage, from one year to a decade or more later.
It is at this stage that syphilis becomes known as "The Great Imitator," because the presentation of the disease is so variable. Rashes may occur across any area of the body, and again occur on the palms and the soles. In the 1630s, these rashes also included open sores. Gummas, formed of reactive granuloma tissue, occur in many areas of the body, most typically in the liver and on the face. These non-cancerous tumors (swellings) are firm, rounded, and not tender. They may resolve spontaneously, leaving either a scar or a lump, or may persist for years. Some of them will cause bone or cartilage damage, leading to such problems as collapsing of the nose or ears. Heart failure due to muscle damage, aortic arch aneurysms (which were noted in Sherlockian canon), stomach ulcers, nose bleeds and kidney damage were also common.
Neurosyphilis was one of the most feared complications of long-term syphilis, and was ultimately a terminal condition prior to the advent of antibiotics. While most common in the tertiary stage, neurosyphilis could actually occur in any stage. Common findings included tabes dorsalis (a wide based gait with "slapping" steps due to the loss of sensory feedback from the legs and feet), and Argyll Robertson pupils (or "whore's eyes," described as "accommodating, but not reactive" because the pupils of the eyes will narrow as the patient tries to track a finger moving closer to the patient's face (accommodation), but will not narrow when a light is flashed into the eyes (reactivity)). Ultimately, psychosis, insanity and a particular form of flaccid (limp) paralysis called general paresis of the insane will occur, leading to death. In this time line, the connection between general paresis and syphilis was not made until the late 1850s and finally confirmed by the finding of active spirochetes in damaged brains in 1913.
A history of sexual contact with known infected persons or of birth to an infected mother (perinatal transmission) is the most important single factor in the diagnosis of syphilis until the development of serological tests for syphilis (STS), which will probably be sometime after 1636. Secondary history findings of the patient having any other sexually transmitted disease, or having what I will politely call a "rakehell" history, will be as highly suspicious for syphilis exposure in the 1630s as it is today. Additionally, a history of receiving a blood transfusion, followed by typical physical findings, will be highly suspicious for syphilis.
I have already discussed the physical findings above, starting with the chancre, the rash (especially on the palms and soles), the "Great Pox" and progressing to the findings of neurosyphilis.
Serologic tests for syphilis (STS) have been the mainstay of screening for syphilis in this time line since the development of the Wasserman test prior to WWI. All of the screening tests are based on the cross reaction of beef cardiolipin antigen (diphosphatidyl glycerol, an alcoholic extract of beef heart that has the same structure as part of the treponema cell membrane), and are thus referred to as non-treponemal antigen tests.
It must be noted that these tests are not specific for syphilis, but can also cross react to other antibodies produced by the body in response to autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, and a number of other infections, including non-syphilis treponemal infections, tuberculosis and viral diseases. Additionally, because of the peculiarities of serologic testing and the relationship between the antibodies and antigens as they are tested, high levels of antibodies can result in a false negative test, even in a highly infectious patient. If there is a high degree of suspicion, the patient's serum will be diluted (several times if needed) and retested.
The non-treponemal serologic tests for syphilis (STS) fall into two broad categories, hemolysis and flocculation.
Hemolysis testing, most notably the Wasserman test, is where sheep red blood cells (sRBCs) are mixed with the cardiolipin solution, which results in the blood cells being "tagged" with the cardiolipin. Antibodies in the serum being tested cause the sRBCs to break down or "hemolyse" in a process known as complement fixation. This hemolysis is measured on a scale from zero to four depending on the measurement of free hemoglobin in the solution after all of the sRBCs have settled out. Syphilis patients can expect to remain at least weakly positive for the rest of their lives. Several modifications of Wasserman's original test were developed before hemolysis testing was superseded in the 1940s by the development of flocculation testing.
Flocculation tests, developed initially by Hinton, and further developed to the Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) test, and then the Rapid Protein Reagin (RPR) test, are easier to perform, as well as both more sensitive and more specific than the hemolysis tests. These tests depend on antibodies cross-linking small particles that have been tagged with cardiolipin, resulting in the fluid changing from a smooth appearance to a clumpy one. The big difference between the VDRL and the RPR tests is that RPR substrates are cross-linked in such a way as to allow for testing without a microscope. Both of these tests can be used with serum dilutions to quantify the degree of infection (titration or "titer"), and a four-fold decrease in the titer (say from a dilution of 1 part serum to 32 parts of saline to 1 part serum to 8 parts of saline) indicates that the patient is recovering from the disease. The RPR test, in particular, is suitable for rapid screening of blood donations, as well as prenuptial and prenatal testing.
The VDRL test can be also used with Cerebral Spinal Fluid (CSF—fluid around the brain and spinal cord) obtained by a "spinal tap" for the diagnosis of and evaluation of treatment for neurosyphilis. This is needed because the blood brain barrier, especially if inflamed from infection, will not allow the passage of the antibodies we want the test to find. As a result, someone may have an active, life-threatening neurosyphilis but without active infection elsewhere in the body the serum tests may well be negative.
The basic serologic tests for syphilis will probably be within 1630's tech after 1633, as the public health authorities will be pressing for their urgent development, to secure the blood supply if for no other reason. I expect that the hemolysis type tests will used only long enough to develop the easier to use flocculation tests, which should not take more than another year once the cardiolipin is isolated. I am working up a more detailed timeline on serology and blood banking, which will have more detailed information on this subject.
The other class of serological testing for syphilis either uses live treponema organisms (immobilization tests) or specific antigens derived from treponema (FTA-ABS, and TPHA), and are thus more sensitive and specific for treponemal infections. Because T. pallidum will survive in rabbits, and form lesions that can be "harvested" for live treponema, the treponemal immobilization test may be available in the 1633 time frame, but it is a time consuming (approximately a full day) and fairly complex test. As an interesting aside, it was noted prior to 1973 that rabbits infected with the milder organisms of yaws initially developed skin lesions consistent with that disease. However, as other rabbits were infected from the initial carriers, more invasive lesions, more consistent with syphilis were noted, adding to the early arguments for the Columbian theory. I do not expect the other specific tests to be available until 165x based on expected expansion of tech based on developments in this time line. Look for more details in the serology and blood-banking article.
Dark field microscopy of scrapings from open sores will be an important diagnostic and confirmation test for quite a while in the 1630s. This requires a special condenser set (light source) on an otherwise standard laboratory microscope, a number of which should be at the high school biology laboratory. If the laboratory does not have dark field or phase contrast condensers, the descriptions in the various encyclopedias should be enough for up-time machinists and down-time lens grinders to manufacture those items in short order, even as early as late 1632. Some special staining techniques are available in this time line that allow a technologist with a conventional microscope to identify the treponemal organisms, but these are more suitable for pathologic specimens (surgical tissues, post mortem brain samples, etc). The dark field technique using wet preparations made from scrapings of chancres or sores in rashes needs to be done rapidly on fresh specimens. While this takes some experience on the part of the examiner, it is faster and easier than the special stains.
Metallic treatments were the first treatments developed in OTL, with mercury being current in 1632. This type of treatment will be mostly bypassed in Grantville, but I expect that they will continue to be used by areas not able to initially support adequate production of antibiotics and not able to obtain stocks of antibiotics from elsewhere. Both metallic mercury and the inorganic salts of that metal were used as early as 1025 and are mentioned in Avicenna's textbook. It wasn't until Prof. Paul Ehrlich's collaborators developed Salvarsan (compound 606, as there were 605 other organic compounds of arsenic tested before hitting on the effective one) in 1906, the same year that Dr. Wasserman described his test for syphilis. Refinement to the point of marketing the drug took another four years or so, and the drug was released in 1910. It is well within 1630's tech once the structure and up-time tricks of making it are known. Both of the metallic systems require long term (months to years) treatment for full effect. Additionally, while Salvarsan is much less toxic than mercury, both cause significant toxicity in humans, and both depend on treponema being more sensitive to the heavy metal poisoning than humans. A point raised by Iver Cooper is that the information on producing Salvarsan is limited in Grantville, and that, in this time line there were many problems with the conversion of the drug from the shipped form into a form that can be delivered to the patient through an IV. Based on his comments, and further reading on the subject, I now expect that penicillin will be available in quantity well before Salvarsan can be produced.
It was known for some years by 1632 that the use of heat treatments along with mercury treatments seemed to slow the progression of advanced cases of syphilis. This was usually delivered by using a "steam cabinet" type of apparatus (enclosing the body, but leaving the head exposed) with a bowl of mercury in the cabinet. Additionally, deliberate infection with malaria, shown in 1917 to slow or even reverse the progression of neurosyphilis in OTL, won the Nobel Prize for Wagner-Jauregg in 1927. Given the up-time information of how malaria is spread, this treatment will also be well within 1630's tech by the end of 1632. Various forms of pyrotherapy may also be of use with antibiotics in severe cases. Support for this includes the rabbit shaving experiments, and the point that the tropical forms are much more indolent than syphilis was in the 1500-1630's time frame.
Chloramphenicol will be the first reasonably safe treatment for syphilis in the 1630s. Easiest dosing is orally, but it can also be used intramuscularly (IM) or intravenously (IV). Dosages are 50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day (mg/kg/day) for moderate infections, up to 100 mg/kg/day for more serious infections. Total doses for adults are about 500-1000 mg per dose, four times a day. Interestingly enough, chloramphenicol may work better than penicillin for severe cases of neurosyphilis due to improved penetration into fluid around the brain (CSF). Due to factors involved in the metabolism of the drug in the liver and elimination of the drug through the kidneys, generally the preference of therapy is oral then IM, and then IV. Due to these same factors, the blood concentration of the IV medication is only about one third of the others. Syphilis can be expected to be sensitive enough that the course of therapy will be a few days to a couple of weeks at the most, compared to the months or years of the metallic compounds.
Penicillin is, in this time line, the definitive treatment for syphilis, especially for pregnant women. In early cases, primary or secondary, the treatment is a simple, one dose of Benzathine Penicillin LA (long acting), 1.2 million Units, usually given IM (in the buttock). Later cases, late secondary or tertiary, will need several doses over days to weeks of IV or IM treatment. Even today, T. pallidum remains exquisitely sensitive to penicillin, and as stocks of this drug increase, it will essentially replace all others for the treatment of syphilis, unless a patient is actually allergic to the drug. Even then, there are techniques of desensitization that can be used to allow appropriate treatment.
Probenicid is not an antibiotic itself, but by actions on the kidney, it reduces elimination of penicillin class drugs from the body, extending the effectiveness of the antibiotics and thus conserving the initial limited stores. Even after penicillin is freely available, Probenicid will continue to be used with oral forms to increase their effectiveness.
The tetracycline group and streptomycin, when available, will be the primary alternate treatments for syphilis infections, especially in non-pregnant penicillin-allergic patients. That availability will depend, however, on finding the appropriate species of Streptomyces, a soil organism of the Actinobacter group. Most of the tetracyclines can be given orally, but streptomycin is only given IM in this time line.
Frequently, a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction will occur as the antibiotic kills the treponema. This is due to the release of cell components (endotoxins) that cause fevers, chills, malaise and rashes and is not an allergic reaction. This normally occurs within 24 hours of initiation of treatment and resolves within another 24 to 48 hours. The reaction occurs in 50% of treated primary cases and 90% of treated secondary cases, the more aggressive form of syphilis seen in the 1630s could be expected to cause even more significant reactions in an even higher percentage of the patients. Teaching the patients and their families to expect this problem will go a long way to prevent a significant scare reaction from the families, which would probably result in a nasty backlash.
Prevention of disease in this time line (from the 1906 Wasserman test up to the 1940s widespread use of penicillin for treatment), by the consistent and widespread use of prenuptial and prenatal testing, went a long way to reducing the transmission of disease. "Safer sex" and the use of latex condoms do help prevent transmission, however, since syphilis can infect any area of the body that has been in contact with an active infection, antibiotic cure will be much more effective. I expect that the down-time authorities will be much more willing to use physical quarantine of syphilitics and other folks with chronic, incurable infectious diseases much more readily than has happened in this time line since the 1950s. I base this on laws such as the Scots Grandgore act of 1497, where known syphilitics were sent to the Island of Inchkeith for the rest of their lives.
Untreated, chronic syphilis infections will result in bone, joint and soft tissue damage, at least partially from the body's reaction to the infection. About one case of six infections develop gummas, inflammatory masses which can cause pressure effects and damage to bones and joints as well as soft tissues. One of the classic situations results in damage to the bridge of nose, causing a "ski slope" curve to that organ. There can also be significant joint damage from loss of sensation as well as the mass effect. About one case in ten will develop heart and blood vessel damage as noted in Sherlockian canon (a syphilitic aortic aneurysm was a major plot point in "A Study in Scarlet"). In addition to marked aortic aneurysms (abnormal balloon like weakening of the largest blood vessel in the body), significant heart enlargement and heart failure is known to occur, and is a frequent cause of death in late stage syphilis. About one case in fifteen will end up developing neurosyphilis, with the resulting central loss of sensation as shown by tabes dorsalis and Argyll Robertson Pupils, and ending up with madness and general paresis if untreated.
Congenital Syphilis displays multiple problems including various birth defects as well as a marked increase in preterm births and miscarriages. This was more common prior to the advent of effective STS and treatment in the First and Second Worlds, and continues to this day in the Third World. The initial situation in the 1630s is most similar to that of the Third World today. Early congenital syphilis (age less than 2 years at presentation) may appear as an exaggerated secondary stage, with a rash, mucosal lesions and enlargement of the liver and spleen. Notched teeth (Hutchinson's incisors) and problems with walking due to loss of nerve function and eventually joint problems (Clutton's joints), show up in the first 18 months or so. A number of characteristic facial changes have been documented over the years, including enlargement of the forehead (frontal bossing), palate changes, and saddle nose. Eighth nerve damage resulting in deafness may be present in less than 5% of the cases. Fortunately, congenital syphilis may be prevented by treatment of the mother, which is the reason for the requirement for prenatal testing.
A number of prominent persons who are relevant to 1632 are suspected of having advanced syphilis, including Henry VIII, Ivan the Terrible, and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
Unlike syphilis, the infective organism of gonorrhea, Neiserria gonorrhoeae, also known as the gonococcus, only infects specific types of mucus membranes, which makes it a bit easier to prevent. Other common names for the infection include "the clap," "the drip," and "the pipe bending pee pains." There are several forms of gonococcal infections, depending on the area of infection. These include female cervical, urethral, tonsillar, and rectal forms in both sexes. Men pass the infection to women at a rate of 50-70% per episode of unprotected vaginal intercourse, while the reverse rate is only about 25% effective per episode.
Contact tracing is one of the most important forms in history for this infection. Since the majority of women have no history of problems with infection, finding contacts (female and male) of symptomatic males is of primary importance. Routine screening of women at the time of physical exam ("pap and pelvic" when those are resumed), finds many cases (of both gonorrhea and Chlamydia) in this time line. The most important presenting complaints in men involve a purulent (pus) discharge from the penis (approximately 90% of cases) and marked pain on urination (75-80% of cases). The pain has been described as "peeing broken glass," or "pipe bending." These symptoms start between 3 and 10 days after exposure. Roughly 10% of the male cases have few or no symptoms, and it is felt that these male cases contribute to the continued spread of the disease.
In men, the classic discharge can be demonstrated by "milking" the penis (after retracting the foreskin of uncircumcised males), and then obtaining a swab for Gram's stain and culture. Mild irritation to the meatal opening may also be noted. Few other signs or symptoms are noted in otherwise uncomplicated infections. More serious cases may present with swelling or tenderness of the scrotum, indicating that epididymus (part of the tube between the testicle and the urethra) has become inflamed, either from the gonococcus or from a concurrent infection with another STI.
In women, there may be a similar purulent discharge from the cervix, from the urethra or from one or more of the various accessory glands of the female genitalia. Again, in mild disease, there may not be any other significant findings.
Concurrent infections of gonococcus and Chlamydia (see below) are so common that if there is evidence of one type of infection, treatment for both should be undertaken.
Classically, the discharge from the afflicted male's urethra is stained using Gram's technique, and show small, paired cocci (round bacteria), that are actually inside the white blood cells. If the female has a urethral discharge, it will be useful to Gram stain that material. However, because of the wide variety of normal bacterial flora in the throat, vagina and rectum, trying to stain material from those areas looking for these bacteria is useless.
If there is a suspicion of an infection, a quick microscopic examination of the patient's urine using a technique sometimes called a "split stream specimen," where two and sometimes three specimens are collected from a single urination, has the ability to quickly screen for a number of different urinary tract infections in both men and women. The specimens are obtained from the first, middle, and occasionally the final part of the urine stream. Part of each specimen is centrifuged to concentrate any pus, bacteria and/or sediment, and another portion is reserved for culture if indicated. If there are a large number of white blood (pus) cells in the initial urine specimen, but not in the middle or last parts, then urethritis is the most probable diagnosis. Pus in the middle portion of the specimen indicates an acute bladder infection, and pus, especially associated with certain types of crystals, in the last portion of the specimen can indicate chronic bladder or kidney problems. Gram's staining of the uncentrifuged second portion of the specimen can help different the different kinds of bladder infections, and offer predictions as to what the urine culture might be expected to show.
The use of urine screening to help decide further testing is used frequently in this time line, admittedly mostly with urine dipsticks. It is well documented as a technique, and has the advantage of being relatively simple, fast and available at the point of care. While not commonly used as such in this time line, it can be used as a quick test of cure after treatment (supplementing repeat cultures), something that will help prevent missed relapses or reinfections. Clearing of the discharge in both men and women is a good indicator of cure.
A sterile swab or wire loop is used to transfer a small portion of the discharge or urine onto so-called "chocolate Agar" in order to make a more definite diagnosis. Chocolate agar is classically made by the addition of sheep's blood to a standard agar mixture and then slowly heating the mixture to 56 degrees C before making the plates. The antibiotics added to chocolate agar to make the more specialized Thayer Martin agar will probably not be available until the mid-1640 time frames, which means one or more repeat "sub cultures" might need to be made to finish making the diagnosis.. After swabbing the material on the plates, the plates are placed in a sealable jar, a lit candle is placed in the jar and the jar is sealed. The candle will snuff itself out in a few minutes, leaving an atmosphere that is moist and enriched in carbon dioxide at the expense of the oxygen in the jar. This "candle jar" technique is essential in preferentially promoting the growth of Neiserria species over most other bacteria. There are several other tests that will need to be made on the isolated bacteria to confirm the diagnosis, including the oxidase, and peroxidase tests; and sugar fermentation studies, but those tests are all within the capability of 1630's tech, as they were developed in the 1900-1930 time frame.
Chloramphenicol will probably be the first line of treatment until adequate stores of penicillin are available. In this time line, the gonococcus was one of the more active bacteria in developing antibiotic resistance, perhaps second only to the common Staphylococcus. It was less than twenty years between the introduction of penicillin treatment for gonorrhea and the first cases of resistant forms being found during the Southeast Asian Conflict. This was as much due, like most bacterial development of resistance, to incomplete treatment with, inadequate dosages of, and/or inappropriate use of antibiotics. The use of probenicid will reduce the chance of resistance developing by extending the time that there is an effective concentration of penicillin class drugs in the system, and allows the use of either IM or oral penicillin or amoxicillin. When available, an advanced cephalosporin may also be used to treat the gonococcus, however, follow up with a tetracycline class drug is also needed to treat the common Chlamydia co-infection.
Silver nitrate or chloramphenicol eye drops at birth will prevent a possibly blinding infection called opthalmalagica neonatorum.
As noted above, the first resistant strains were noted in the 1960s, and the frequency of antibiotic resistance has continued to increase ever since, probably due to under treatment of gonorrhea in Third World countries. There will be public health efforts to combat this with a combination of more aggressive case tracking, an emphasis on adequate initial treatment, and follow up visits for test of cure.
Latex condoms are effective in preventing transmission, as is advising patients to abstain from sexual activity for at least seven days after treatment of both/all parties involved. The reported price of rubber in the 1630s will be on the order of a gram of rubber for a gram of silver, so condoms will not be cheap. If I understand the time line correctly, condoms will be available on at least a limited basis, by the end of 1634. This is at least partially due to the efforts of the military (which has uses of condoms beyond that of the common prophylactic practices).
Untreated, gonococcal infection can spread throughout the body. This is more common in women than in men because of the ease that the infection can spread inside the body cavity. In a small, but significant, segment of the infected female population, Fitz-Hugh Curtis syndrome, typified by inflammation of the capsule around the liver, right upper abdominal pain radiating to the right shoulder, abdominal tenderness, and intra abdominal scarring (adhesions) occurs. While painful, Fitz-Hugh Curtis syndrome is more important as a marker for an occult pelvic infection that may become PID (see below).
Septic Arthritis is also a rare problem, seen mostly in young, active and sexually active patients, most often attacking one major joint (most commonly a knee). Diagnosis is made by using a needle to drain pus from the affected joint, and then the bacterial is identified by a combination of Gram staining and culture. High dose antibiotics, probably intravenously, will be needed. In severe cases, the joint will need to be surgically opened, and washed out, possibly repeatedly.
Urethral scarring producing strictures was a common problem in the 1630s, mostly in males, requiring the passage of smooth, tapered metal probes called "sounds" on a repeated basis to allow the afflicted male to empty his bladder. Similar scarring of the epididymus may cause sterility.
PID is a serious enough complication of gonorrhea and Chlamydia, to warrant a separate discussion below.
Infected adults who do not practice good personal and hand hygiene can contract a rather nasty eye infection from gonorrhea. Similarly, a baby born to a woman with an active infection is at risk for serious eye infections. Both cases can be treated with several days of antibiotic eye drops, usually of chloramphenicol or tetracycline. At least early in the 1630s, silver nitrate drops will be more useful for treating newborns, as it is more stable and easier to keep sterile and fresh in field situations.
This infection is caused by an obligate intracellular bacteria known as Chlamydia trachomatis. In this time line, chlamydial infections were differentiated from gonorrhea only after reliable culture methods for the gonococcus were developed. Chlamydia only infects specific types of cells, but can enter the body either through the mucus membranes or through breaks elsewhere in the skin. Several types of chlamydial infections are known, depending on the area of the body that is afflicted.
Urethritis is perhaps the most common form and, like gonorrhea, is somewhat more commonly diagnosed in the male partners in the absence of up-time testing. Again, males tend to display problems, in this case with a mild discharge and occasionally painful urination. Tragically, women rarely show significant signs or symptoms until much damage has been done in the form of PID. As with gonorrhea, the best way to determine if a woman needs treatment is to check her male partners and treat all of them. When the technology levels allow a resumption of "routine pap and pelvic" exams, screening for both gonorrhea and chlamydia will produce a surprising number of cases.
The second most common form is trachoma, an infection of one or both eyes that is still a leading cause of blindness in Third World countries, accounting for some 15% of world wide blindness in 1995. This can occur as a neonatal infection, may be sexually transmitted, or may be associated with poor hygiene, either from a lack of hand washing or from flies that carry the infective organisms.
Perhaps the most serious form in men is Lympho Granuloma Venereum, or LGV. (The most serious form in women is PID, see below) In the US and Europe in OTL, the type of Chlamydia that causes this infection is much more rare than the form that causes urethritis. It is more commonly seen in the Third World, and as a result, may be expected to be more common in the 1630s. As an acute disease, LGV is easily confused with several other infections, including plague.
The first stage of LGV is a painless ulcer that may be mistaken for chancre if it is noticed, but the sore is only seen in 1/3 of men, and even fewer women. In the second stage of LGV, in most males but only in 25% of females, swollen inguinal lymph nodes occur that may be mistaken for plague buboes, especially if they become abscesses. Female cases usually (75%) have the swollen nodes in the intra-abdominal node chains, which do not tend to become abscesses. Other signs and symptoms of advancing disease include rectal inflammation and often abdominal masses and pain.
There will probably be no definite diagnosis available until the 1640s or 1650s, as culture is difficult and serology testing moderately complex even by current standards. This means that the diagnosis is one of exclusion, or you must treat on history and suspicion. Exclusion points for LGV include lack of treponemal forms in scrapings of the ulcers, "sterile" aspirates from the swollen lymph nodes (no bacterial seen on Gram's staining, nor do any bacteria grow when the pus is cultured), and that this disease, untreated, rarely results in death as compared to bubonic plague.
A large percentage of cases will show spontaneous resolution without treatment, and with only a small chance of future recurrence. Cases that are more serious may need drainage of abscesses, which may also lead to spontaneous resolution. This drainage is best done by inserting a needle into the abscess, rather than cutting it open, which may lead to severe scarring. Medications including chloramphenicol, sulfas, and when available, tetracycline class drugs, are all effective in treating this disease; however, the course of therapy may extend to as much as three weeks. Currently, tetracycline class antibiotics are considered the drug of choice, due to the potential side effects of the others.
Unlike ocular gonorrhea, silver nitrate drops are not effective for the treatment of chlamydia. The use of chloramphenicol or sulfa eye drops is effective and quite safe even in small children and infants
Latex condoms are somewhat effective in preventing the transmission of chlamydial infections. However, as with syphilis, the infection can enter the body through small cuts or abrasions in the skin as well as through mucus membranes.
See PID in the next section. The relatively mild chlamydial urethritis can result in epididymitis in males and reactive arthritis in both men and women. Reactive arthritis is more common in men than women, and involves a low grade fever, inflammation of the eyes, and one or more joints, more commonly of the lower body. Unlike the gonococcal arthritis, aspiration of joint fluid shows only white blood cells, and no evidence of infection. In this time line, Fitz-Hugh Curtis syndrome is now more often associated with a chlamydial infection than with gonorrhea, but this may be true due to missed co-infections. Up to 5% of patients with LGV may suffer from urethral or rectal strictures or peri-rectal fistulas. Neonatal infections may include a nasty pneumonia as well as eye infections. This is one of the few reasons to use silver nitrate drops for the prevention of eye infections in newborn infants, as any silver nitrate treated infant with an eye infection that persists for more than 48 hours after birth should also be treated with systemic antibiotics for a chlamydial infection. This is to prevent the chlamydial pneumonia that might otherwise show up one to three months after delivery.
Pelvic Inflammatory Disease is a serious and potentially life-threatening infection of women, usually associated with un- or under-treated Gonorrhea or Chlamydia.
In this time line, any female with a history of exposure to any previous episode of STI, especially with a long and/or varied history of sexual activity, and no good evidence of cure after appropriate treatment is at risk for PID. Even without this history, any non-virgin female with the typical physical exam findings of: the shuffle (where the patient takes small shuffling steps to decrease the pain of movement), fever, lower abdominal or back pain, pain on "intimate" examination, and a lower abdominal mass is considered highly likely to have PID. The diagnosis is not absolute, as similar findings occur in appendicitis, tubal pregnancy, and even severe ovarian cysts. Since three of the four primary diagnoses can become life threatening in a frighteningly short time, appropriate care needs to be started rapidly. This will include consultation with Dr. Nichols or one of the other surgeons.
Cultures of abscesses will probably show many types of bacteria, and anaerobic cultures are needed as well. White blood counts will be elevated, sometimes to very high levels (normals are 4,000 to 10,000 cells per cubic millimeter; PID can show between 15,000 and 30,000).
Initial treatment is with high doses of intravenous antibiotics, probably starting with a combination of chloramphenicol and penicillin in the 1632 timeline. Metronidazole (a deceptively simple synthetic antibiotic that probably will not be available until the late 1630s or early 1640s) is also helpful. Cephalosporins, when available, will have good effects. However, any moderate to severe cases will probably require surgical drainage of abscess and for the removal of scar tissue. As there are three major and one minor conditions that have many of the same signs, surgery is also the only way to make the definite diagnosis. Exploratory surgery also treats the other two life-threatening conditions if one of them is found instead.
Mild cases of PID will often result in tubal scarring with the attendant problems of sterility and a marked increase in the chances of tubal pregnancy. There is also a chance of Fitz-Hugh Curtis syndrome. The scars can also result in problems with twisted ovaries, uncomfortable as a minimum, and the source of future problems as well. More serious cases, as noted above, can result in tubal/ovarian abscesses, and even death from an associated ruptured tubal pregnancy.
Several different bacteria in the mycoplasma/ureaplasma group can also cause mild urinary tract infections in both men and women. Diagnosis is similar to that for Chlamydia, as is the treatment. Many cases resolve spontaneously. Generally, there is no sequale to untreated infection, just misery. NGU is mentioned because it can sometimes mimic the more serious infections.
Ectoparasites include crab or pubic lice, body lice, and head lice, all of which should be well known in the 1630s. Probably less well known would be the intradermal parasite known as scabies in our time line. The diagnosis is made by finding unexpected livestock on body or in clothing, by finding typical bite marks in areas of the body, by finding the burrows of scabies, or by finding the eggs (nits) attached to the hair.
Treatment in the 1630s will be initially with DDT dusting of sleeping quarters, disinfecting clothing with the use of DDT or steam laundry, and the use of fine-toothed nit combs on hairy areas of the body. Some groups will prefer to shave those areas to help reduce the chance of passing the infestation around. Oddly enough, the Roman technique of using olive oil as a precursor to bathing might have helped control lice, as medium weight oils (vegetable oil, light mineral oils) can be effective at killing the adult lice by smothering the critters.
Gamma Hexane (formerly Benzene) Hexachloride (GHH or Lindane) is cheap and relatively simple to make once the coal plants are turning out benzene. Like DDT and Chloramphenicol, it can be used with relative safety, at least by 1630's standards, although there are waste compounds associated with the production of GHH that are much more toxic to mammals, and much less toxic to insects. Canon has it starting in the winter of 1633-34 by the Essen Chemical Company. As with DDT and chloramphenicol, its use in this time line has been restricted because we have safer, less persistent alternatives. GHH is effective when used as shampoo for hairy areas in the treatment of lice or as a lotion for non-hairy areas in the treatment of scabies, but has age limitations and should only be used on intact skin.
The use of pyrethrum derivatives (from chrysanthemums) along with piperonyl butoxide can be expected in the mid-1630s time frame as a safer treatment for most forms of arthropod infestation. The exact timeframe will depend on the growth of sufficient chrysanthemum plants and sassafras trees to supply the needed precursors. This combination is most effective in the form of shampoos and lotions similar to Lindane, but is safe enough to use on infants and on irritated skin. Additionally, the flowers, dried and powdered, make a decent pediculcidal powder for use in linens, clothing presses, and on clothing itself. This is well within the capabilities of most of the herb wives once the flowers are grown in sufficient quantities.
Body lice are known to carry a number of different diseases that have been touched on elsewhere. The others are more benign.
There are a number of other sexually transmitted infections which exist in this time line. Among them are the bacterial infections of Donovanosis, and chancroid, the viral infections of herpes (two types, as well as other, related infections), warts, and hepatitis (five types, three of which also affect the blood bank), and assorted fungal skin infections. There are also several infections associated with pregnancy and childbirth that have significant effects on both the mother and baby. I'll cover these in a separate article, as the impact most of them have is less than the ones I have already discussed. The impact of aseptic technique on childbirth is worth an article on its own.
There was one known case of HIV in Grantville at the time of the Ring of Fire, who deceased shortly thereafter without transmission. (Venus and Mercury, Grantville Gazette 24) By authorial fiat, there will be no transmission of the T-cell Lymphocytic virus from African monkeys to humans in the 1632 universe.
Any other common infections (such as influenza, the common cold, strep throat, and various skin infections) are more easily transmitted by the close, intimate contact involved in sexual intercourse.
Diseases of childhood will be discussed in another article.
Guiding principle 1: The most important risk factor for any particular sexually transmitted infection is the presence of any other sexually transmitted infection, especially in patients who do not fit the typical "rakehell" profile. Patients who fit the "rakehell" profile should be considered to have AT LEAST ONE sexually transmitted infection any time they are evaluated. (Sorry, Captain Lefferts!)
Guiding principle 2: Intimate contacts of a known case must be tracked and treated, and all of their contacts must be tracked and treated as well. In this time line, there have been many studies showing that one missed contact can start the whole process all over again, and that there is often more to a "social circle" than just crumpets for high tea.
Guiding principle 3: Even without the hazard of HIV, any sexually transmitted infection that produces open sores markedly increases the chances of transmitting or catching any other sexually transmitted infection. Patients with known chronic, untreated or incurable sores must be followed closely. (See GP 4 below)
Guiding principle 4: Dr. Abrabanel takes the lessons from And the Band Played OnVERY seriously. Public Health measures do not need to include demonization of particular life style choices, but rather education on choices that improve disease prevention. However, persons with known active disease who are not curable and who will not cooperate with appropriate measures to prevent transmission to other persons should be dealt with appropriately. Certainly some authorities prior to 1631 are already proven (with the Scots Grandgore Act of 1497 as an example) to be willing to forcibly isolate syphilis patients who were incurable at that time.
Public health measures contributed to a reduction in the spread of venereal infections starting in the mid to late 1800s, and made significant inroads into the infectious problem after the development of the germ theory and definitive testing in the 1870-1910 era. Note that period is well before effective treatments for most of these infections existed. These measures include, but are not limited to:
Prenuptial and prenatal testing for syphilis (and later Hepatitis B) in particular
Testing of the blood supplies for syphilis and Hepatitis B as the blood banks come on line and then tracking infected donors.
Contact tracking for treatment.
Physical quarantine of flagrant re-offenders to prevent further spread of disease.
Water purification/pasteurization to help break the waterborne cycle of infections including Hepatitis A, Giardia, and many other diseases.
Uncircumcised males are known in this time line to be at significantly more risk for both contracting and passing many of these infections, due to the more sensitive nature of the anatomy involved. Good hygiene (including washing under the foreskin) will help with this problem if circumcision is not an option. As this point was first noted in OTL in the 1930s, it will be interesting to see if circumcision penetrates the culture by the 1650s as it did in this time line in the 1950s.
I am indebted to Iver Cooper's work for this section. Iver saved me major amounts of time with the posting of Industrial Alchemy Parts III and IV to the Slush Pile.
Penicillin in and of itself is being produced in small amounts in the USE by 1634, and a small but apparently viable sample of a "high producing" strain has been passed on to a manufacturer in Cologne for further development. I expect that at least three forms will be developed. In OTL, they are known as Benzathine Penicillin, a long-acting, intramuscular form; Penicillin Potassium (Crystal Pen), a fast-acting form that is generally given intravenously; and Penicillin VK, a fast-acting form that is suitable for oral administration. While penicillin allergies are among the most common allergies reported (totaling about 10% of all allergies), true penicillin allergies are relatively rare, and there are techniques available in the up-time information for overcoming this problem if penicillin is needed to treat a particular infection.
Probenicid is an organic acid that competes with the penicillin class and other drugs for excretion through the kidneys. This competition for excretion increases both the level and the time duration of the penicillin class drugs in the blood stream. A substituted benzoic acid derivative, probenicid should be easy for various pharmaceutical manufacturers to make as soon as the coal tar recovery system is on line. It will be vital in extending the effectiveness of penicillin when it first comes on line.
Chloramphenicol is available in small amounts in canon as of 1633, and the formula and manufacturing information was passed on to the King in the Low Countries at that time. (Grantville Gazette II) Thiamphenicol has been advocated for use in the 1632 universe by some, but here in the US, this drug is limited to veterinary use. Research shows that thiamphenicol has been used overseas (particularly in Brazil) in humans for the treatment of Donavanosis and chancroid. That same research does show that there appears to be no evidence of aplastic anemia associated with thiamphenicol, but the absolute numbers of treated patients published is not enough to consider it safer. There is some question as to the relative effectiveness compared to the chloro form. The big questions then become, "what is the chance that there were veterinary stocks in Grantville at the time of the Ring of Fire?" and "Would someone recognize that it might be easier to make than the chloro form?'
Sulfas of various sorts are being produced in fair quantities by early 1633.
Metronidazole is another drug that will vastly improve the treatment of many diseases, not just STIs. Deceptively simple, it probably won't be available until the end of the 1630s. The antifungal azoles are more complex, related compounds, and will probably be available in early 1640.
Other antibiotic medications (the tetracycline group, the erythromycin group, the aminoglycosides, and the derivatives of penicillin known as cephalosporins) will probably have to wait for assorted American (both North and South), Polish, Ukrainian and Russian soil samples, and the further development of tech levels in the late 1640 and into the 1650 time frame. Iver also pointed out that most of them were serendipitous discoveries from various mold specimens, so the various fungal derived antibiotics may not be exactly reproduced compared to the structures known today.
Ultimately, the "venereal diseases" (sexually transmitted infections) are controllable with a combination of careful population surveillance, by prenuptial, prenatal and blood bank testing; breaking the chain of infection by treating both the index case and all intimate partners (where possible); and good hygiene with plenty of soap and clean water. Ultimately, quarantine for patients who are both chronically infected and unable or unwilling to avoid intimate contact with others must be considered. Treatments available will improve over the span of several years, as the knowledge of how to make chloramphenicol, penicillins and sulfa drugs start to spread across the continent.
Online medical dictionary: http://www2.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/mwmednlm?book=Medical&va=
Online medical encyclopedia: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/encyclopedia.html
Cooper, Iver: Industrial Alchemy, Parts III and IV, pending publication
"Venus and Mercury" Grantville Gazette, Volume 24
http://www.cdc.gov/std/treatment/2006/rr5511.pdf (This is the current version, however I have filtered the recommendations based on what would be available in the 1998-2000 edition, adapted to the 1630's tech base.)
Control of Communicable Diseases in Man, 14th edition 1985 US CDC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_Transmitted_Infection
http://www2a.cdc.gov/stdtraining/Self-Study/ (requires registration and professional status, sorry)
http://www.cdc.gov/STD/training/
The Travel and Tropical Medicine Manual, Second Edition, Section V, Jong & McMullen, Saunders 1995
Davis, BD; Dulbecco, R; et al, Microbiology, 2nd ed Harper and Row, 1973 (a common microbiology text book for laboratory, pre medical and advanced nursing students in the mid 1970s)
The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapeutics, 17th Ed, Merck Research Laboratories, 1999 (centennial edition)
Merck's Manual of Materia Medica, Merck & Co, 1899
From time to time we have had people drop in to 1632 Tech and ask, "What about oxen?" It is a fair question and we've suggested that someone familiar with oxen write a facts article. So far we've had no takers and, as the defacto livestock expert*, it appears that I am the one to attempt to fill this gap. I have no personal experience with oxen and what I know is gleaned from research. If anyone with experience spots a misstatement please contact me and I will do my best to correct it.
This piece is intended only as a very basic guide for our writers. Anyone writing a story that includes more than a passing mention of oxen is encouraged to do further research. In the Bibliography and Sources I've included The Rural Heritage website where one can post specific questions that will be answered by people who know and use oxen every day.
The ox may have been mankind's earliest draft animal. Written sources, paintings, and sculptures indicate their usage dates back a minimum of five thousand years. They are found in art and records from Egypt, Ur, and Babylon. Every farming civilization that has had access to some breed of bovine has used them for draft purposes.
An ox is defined as a neutered male bovine trained for and used as a draft animal. Steers are neutered male bovines that are not intended for use as draft animals. If a male calf is castrated before sexual maturity its growth patterns and personality are different than those of an unneutered male or a male neutered later. The changes, including longer legs and a more docile temperament, make the ox more suited for draft purposes than uncastrated stock or animals that are castrated after sexual maturity.
Not all bovines used for draft are oxen. I've found references to times and places where cows and the occasional bull have been used. At times and under some conditions any bovine might be used. If the only animals you have are a pair of cows, then your "ox" team will be a pair of cows.
Bovines are naturals for draft as both the horns and the neck area just in front of the shoulder blades lend themselves to the use of a simple wooden yoke. Yokes appear in three basic forms. The most familiar is the neck or bow yoke which consists of a shaped crosspiece (the yoke) that rests on the top of the ox's neck, just in front of his shoulder blades, and a U-shaped piece (the bow) that goes under the neck with its ends going up through two holes in the yoke. This type of yoke can be a single or a double yoke.
The horn or head yoke is a shaped piece of wood that rests behind the ox's horns and is strapped directly to the horns. The head yoke also comes in both single and double forms. The head yoke must be well fitted to the specific ox or oxen it is used with or it will quickly gall the sensitive areas at the base of the horns. Such a yoke cannot be used on polled (hornless) cattle.
The third form, the withers yoke, is a version of the neck yoke adapted for use with humped cattle such as the Zebu. Finding a Zebu in seventeenth century Europe is unlikely so such a yoke is unlikely to be either needed or known.
The earliest methods of harnessing onangers, donkeys, and horses to vehicles were derived from the ox yoke. Equine anatomy differs significantly from bovine so this was not a satisfactory method. The development of the horse collar can be traced back to man's attempts to replicate the usefulness of the neck and head yokes. The horse collar serves the same function, in that it allows the draft animal to put its full body weight and muscle power to use.
For stories set in the 1632 universe, some additional research may be needed by writers since both the neck yoke and head yoke were used throughout Europe. One source indicated that the head yoke was preferred in the mountain areas but there is enough evidence to indicate that it was used within all regions. Basically, either neck yokes or head yokes could appear anywhere. A farmer is most likely to use whichever type his father and grandfather used.
By the seventeenth century the use of oxen in agriculture was declining. It had not and would not completely disappear. Those farmers who could afford to preferred to use horses. Using oxen for farming had, to some extent, begun to carry the social stigma of being "backward" or indicating that the ox team's owner was too poor to afford horses. Heavy freighting still depended on ox teams and would do so in this timeline into the mid- to late-nineteenth century.
Despite the social stigma, oxen were the quickest and cheapest way to replace dead or stolen animals. In a pinch, cows could be used until their calves were old enough to work. In some areas of Bavaria farmers used cows for draft teams well into the twentieth century.
Oxen historically have always been cheaper than horses. As late as the mid-nineteenth century a pair or yoke of oxen cost half what a pair of horses or mules cost. This price ratio seems to have held true as far back as the 1100's. Cattle were cheap to buy and raise.
An ox is generally considered fully grown and ready for heavy work by age two [1] and will work until between seven and ten years old, giving you a five- to eight-year work-life. At the end of their useful work-life they can be fattened up and turned into meat for the larder or sale.
A pair of oxen is known as a span or a yoke. Building a span starts with selecting a pair of male calves, either still nursing or just weaned. Training starts when the calves are small and a child as young as eight or nine can manage it, freeing adults for other labor. [2] Both members of a future ox team should be the same age and close to the same size and shape. Other things such as breed and color are a matter of personal choice. A nice matched pair with nearly identical markings paints a pretty picture. It does not make plowing any easier.
Ox teams can consist of a single span or multiple spans. Spans would be hitched together into teams sized to suit the work. For our time period, the most common ox team used in plowing was four spans or eight oxen. This number appears across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. I've found links to Roman writings on agriculture that may explain its widespread usage as the Romans were still considered "The Authorities" on agriculture.
For denser soils or those with a high clay content, eight oxen might well have been needed to drag the heavy wooden plow then in use. Custom and the authority of the ancient Roman writers might explain why people working lighter soils still felt that eight oxen were required. Custom also could explain why when horses replaced oxen we see the teams consisting of eight horses. Do not, however, assume that eight oxen or horses were always used. Customs aside, practicality and local conditions often would require the use of more or less animals. For those circumstances where eight oxen were needed to efficiently work the land, fewer could do the job but they did it more slowly and ran a higher risk of injury. "Work worn" is a term for animals that were overworked to the point of no longer being able to do any but the lightest work.
An ox span or team has one man with a prod or stick who walks beside the lead animals and directs them. For plowing with the heavy wooden plow two additional men were required to keep the plow upright and steer it. With the newly introduced iron walking plow only one man will be needed to handle the plow and one to direct the oxen. For large teams of oxen pulling freight wagons and carts there may be additional drovers who walk beside the ox team, directing them. Freighters often preferred oxen over horses because when faced with deep mud the oxen would keep pulling where horses would usually give up. The fact that the oxen might get the wagon out of the mud without additional help did have to be balanced against them continuing to pull until one or more dropped dead from the exertion.
So why were horses replacing oxen on the farms? Speed is one answer. A horse team moves faster than an ox team. Mixed teams, horses and oxen, were not uncommon during the transition and some sources feel that while mixing the teams slowed the horses down, at the same time it forced the oxen to move a bit faster. Another factor was that horses could work longer than oxen, especially on hot days. The horse is slower maturing, not being fully grown until four or five years old. However, horses generally have a longer work-life of twelve to fourteen years. On the down side for horses is their greater cost and that, except in famine situations, they were not used as food animals at the end of their lives.
When one of a span is injured or falls ill there is a problem with oxen. The surviving ox will refuse to work alongside any animal other than the one he was raised and trained with. This means that if one of a span cannot work both oxen must be replaced in the team. I first ran across this problem in a book on military logistics of the Revolutionary War. The author complained about it being difficult enough to find sufficient oxen and getting replacement pairs was impossible.
This is another area in which horses and mules differ from oxen. Some horses do have strong preferences for a certain position in the team. Others may object to specific horses being hitched beside them or in front or back of them. The teamster might have to shuffle the placement of the horses within the hitch but he doesn't have to replace two animals when one goes down. A harness-trained horse is willing to work next to strange horses. The new horse may require a bit of time to settle in, but he won't refuse to work.
*Expert is variously defined as "someone more than ten miles from home" and "Ex as in a has-been and 'spurt' as in a drip under pressure."
[1] Some sources disagree about oxen being mature enough for heavy work at two, stating that four is the earliest that they should be put to heavy work. I've elected to go with the majority of sources, including a number of those currently using oxen to farm or log. This age difference may also reflect newer breeds of cattle that take longer to reach maturity.
[2] In the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada it is common for the younger 4-H members to select and train a span of oxen. For older teamsters, ox pulling contests are very popular.
Bibliography and Sources
Oxen: A Teamster's Guide
Drew Conroy
Storey Publishing. North Adams, MA
2007 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-58017-692-7
The Horse in the Middle Ages
Ann Hyland
Sutton Publishing Limited
1999 (Hardback)
ISBN 0-7509-1067-4
Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066-1500
John Langdon and Lyndal Roper
1986
Cambridge University Press; New Ed edition (July 4, 2002)
ISBN: 052152508X
The Draft Horse Primer
Maurice Telleen
Draft Horse Journal, Inc
1977 (Paperback)
ISBN 0-9629076-1-8
On the Internet:
Rural Heritage Ox Paddock
http://www.ruralheritage.com/ox_paddock/index.htm
* * *
Organic Chemistry is both a new discipline, and an old one. New, in that the first artificial synthesis of an organic compound didn't occur until 1828. Old, in that organic compounds, in dilute form, have been produced for centuries: ethyl alcohol and acetic acid (vinegar) by the beer and wine industry; fatty acid salts by the soap industry; dyestuffs by the dyers, and various pharmaceuticals in the extracts of the herbalists.
There are probably at least a score of copies of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics in Grantville. And they probably represent nearly as many different editions. To give the reader an idea just how useful the "CRC" is, the organic chemistry specific data in the 70th edition (1989-90) includes
—Physical Constants of Organic Compounds: molecular formula, molecular weight, color, crystalline form, specific rotation, lambda-max, boiling and melting points, density, refractive index, and solubility.
—structural formulae for the tabulated organic compounds
—indexes to those same compounds, ordering them by melting point, boiling point, or molecular formula.
and much more.
There is a fairly good chance of finding Lange's Handbook of Chemistry in Grantville. Some of the information provided is similar to that in CRC, but there is more chemical content, such as specific tables concerning "fats, oils and waxes," and "petroleum products".
The pharmacists will have several editions of The Merck Index (MI). It provides structures and activities for thousands of pharmaceuticals and intermediates, and final synthetic steps for some of them. Most editions (not 11th!) have a section describing "Organic Name Reactions" which is a nice supplement to the basic organic chemistry texts.
Any one who holds a chemistry degree is guaranteed to have taken introductory organic chemistry (usually as a sophomore), and it is almost certain that however long ago he or she graduated college, that organic chemistry textbook is still around the house or office somewhere.
Figuring out which organic chemistry textbooks are most likely to be present in Grantville is a little trickier. As a criterion, I looked at how many OCLC libraries had a copy of any edition of a basic organic chem textbook for which there was an edition published in 1998 or 1999. The clear winners were (1) Morrison and Boyd, 4th ed ,1998; (2) Solomons, 7th ed,1999; and (3) McMurray, 5th ed, 1999. (Here, all M&B references are to the 1966 edition, and Solomons, to the 1992 or 1996 editions.)
A chemistry major is likely to have a copy of the Condensed Chemical Dictionary (CCD). For quite a few compounds, it has a "derivation" section that explains the final step in synthesizing that compound. You can work your way backward.
Besides the familiar encyclopedias, the Grantville high school, like its Mannington counterpart, has the fifteen volume McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1977)(McGHEST).
Organic chemistry can be considered the study of hydrocarbons and their derivatives. Hydrocarbons are compounds consisting solely of carbon and hydrogen; in a derivative, one or more hydrogens is replaced by a new atom or atoms (at least one being something other than carbon or hydrogen).
Forget derivatives for now. Hydrocarbons can be grouped into several broad classes depending on how their carbon atoms are connected.
One classification is based on the topology of the "carbon skeleton" (the chain, or chains, of carbon atoms which are bonded together):
linear
branched
cyclic (contains one or more rings, fused or unfused)
.. carbocylic (all atoms carbon)
.. heterocylic (includes non-carbon atom)
The number of carbon atoms may be indicated, e.g., C1 (methane), C2 (ethane, ethylene and acetylene), etc. The carbon skeleton may be discontinuous in which case the compound will have some linking group (typically -O-, -S- or -NH-) which connects the carbon chains. In ethers and esters, it's -O-.
Another classification is based on the nature of the bonds. If a compound has both single and double bonds (not necessarily carbon-carbon) in the right arrangement, electron delocalization can occur, which stabilizes the molecule. An aromatic compound is one in which electron delocalization occurs over a ring, such as the benzene ring.
All hydrocarbons which aren't aromatic are "aliphatic," these are classified as follows:
alkanes (paraffins; saturated): just single strength (C-C) bonds
alkenes (olefins): at least one double strength (C=C) bonds, nothing stronger
alkynes: at least one triple strength (C=C) bond
(alkenes and alkynes are also called "unsaturated" because you can add hydrogen to them)
"Functional groups" are clumps of one or more atoms which impart some reactivity not possessed by an alkane. For a long list, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_groups . Derivatives have one or more functional groups not found in hydrocarbons. Such functional groups can be side chains, or they can link one hydrocarbon moiety to another.
Organic chemical synthesis can be thought of as the manipulation of the carbon skeleton and the attached functional groups of the various reactants.
The starting points for the organic chemical industry are natural "feedstocks," that is, natural sources, usually complex mixtures, of organic chemicals. These fall into three major categories: coal, petroleum/natural gas, and biomass, which we will discuss in some detail in part 4. The same chemical, of course, may be available from feedstocks of different types.
All organic chemicals contain carbon, which means that all organic compounds have an energy value—they can be burnt, generating carbon oxide and releasing energy. That means that all of the feedstocks are at least potentially subject to competing demands for organic chemicals and for fuel. That is particularly true of coal, petroleum, natural gas, and wood. Wood, of course, additionally is in demand as a structural material.
In the twentieth century, the organic chemical industry could compete with the energy industry for use of the same starting materials because it could charge a lot more by weight for its products.
The product of one organic chemical process can be the feedstock for another. Thus, organic chemical operations fall into two categories: those which process a natural feedstock, usually a crude mixture of a multitude of chemicals, and those which start with a pure chemical (or at least a relatively simple mixture) and convert it into another chemical.
The crude feedstock probably contains chemicals which vary in economic value and the facility may be designed to process one of those chemicals and discard the rest. For example, the first petroleum refineries extracted kerosene and dumped everything else. That, of course, not only means that no economic value is realized from the waste chemicals, it also results in pollution.
Other facilities are designed to separate the mixture and process each of several components for ultimate use or sale. The coal gas plant in Magdeburg (Flint, 1634: The Baltic War, Chapter 2) is in that category, since it produces ammonium nitrate, illuminating gas, light benzoil, and pitch.
In theory, the methods used to separate the feedstock chemicals would not change them in any way. In practice, if the distillation temperature is high enough, some chemicals will decompose, altering the "mix" which is fractionated. That's an unavoidable consequence of the pyrolysis (destructive distillation) of coal. And chemists will sometimes voluntarily do things during the refining process which will modify the low-value chemicals into high-value ones.
It is not uncommon for a chemical to initially be supplied as a natural product. As the natural sources are depleted, the incentive to duplicate it synthetically increases.
Synthetic chemicals may be simply duplicates of naturally occurring products (e.g., alizarin, a dye originally extracted from the madder root, or indigo) or a non-naturally occurring analogue (as aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, was of salicylic acid). Often, these analogues are "semi-synthetic"; that is, synthesized, in a small number of steps, from the natural product whose activity they mimic. This may be a matter of necessity, if the total synthesis of the natural product hasn't been achieved.
In the strictest sense, total synthesis is the non-biological synthesis of an organic chemical, by one or more steps, from inorganic precursors. The term is informally used to refer to synthesis from the primary chemicals isolated from coal and petroleum feedstocks (but not from fermentation products). Of course, as the chemical industry makes more chemicals commercially available, it will be less common to synthesize new ones completely from scratch.
The bare minimum of information needed for the synthesis of an organic compound is knowledge of its complete structure. Usually that will be conveyed by a structural formula, or a systematic chemical name. Those are usually found either in a chemistry textbook, or in a reference work (CRC; MI).
The next step up is a schematic synthesis, specifying the reactants and products for one or more synthetic steps. A standard organic chemistry text might set forth several hundred synthetic steps. You might find a complete synthesis for the compound of interest, or just a relevant step or two (and you then have to fill in the gaps).
Best of all is a synthesis protocol. By way of example, M&B757 just says that acetanilide can be reacted with chlorosulfonic acid to make p-acetamidobenzenesulfonyl chloride (this is the second step in the disclosed synthesis of the antibiotic sulfonilamide). In contrast, the lab-oriented Lehman, Operational Organic Chemistry (395-6) devotes two pages to that one step.
If all you have is a structure, then you have to devise the synthesis yourself, relying on general principles. It is best to work backwards from the desired product, "disconnecting" it into fragments which are likely to be manipulable by standard steps, and then figuring out which reactants would introduce the needed fragments in the desired way. It is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle . . . when you are given the pieces for several different puzzles simultaneously.
When you plan a synthesis, you take a close look at the carbon skeleton. The standard synthetic steps typically are either (1) changing the carbon skeleton (adding or removing carbons, opening or closing a ring, or saturating or desaturating carbon-carbon bonds), or (2) adding, eliminating or replacing one or more non-hydrocarbon substituents.
These steps take advantage of the functional groups present in the reactants. A functional group is an atom, or group of atoms, which gives the compound a characteristic chemical reactivity. The major classes of hydrocarbon derivatives are classified according to the functional groups which they contain. For example, amines contain NH2; alcohols, hydroxyl (OH); aldehydes and ketones, carbonyl (>C=O); and so on.
A single compound can have more than one functional group, which can be the same or different. Sometimes they act independently, and other times (especially when close to each other) they interact, changing each other's reactivity. So, if you are synthesizing a compound with several functional groups, you have to worry about those interactions. The order in which you add functional groups can make a big difference.
If the skeleton we need isn't available from a natural feedstock, we build it. One of the neater tricks converts a Grignard Reagent (see below) into an alcohol with one additional carbon. (A different reaction turns it, similarly, into a longer carboxylic acid.) Many schemes of adding and subtracting carbons exist, but they have their limitations. (Payne, 11-20).
You have to exercise a certain amount of caution about reliance on "standard steps." You may know that a compound of class A reacts with a compound of class B. But depending on the specific compounds involved, one reaction may work fine at room temperature, and another might need heat or a catalyst, or an equilibrium-shifting trick (see Part 1, Inorganics).
You may also need to use an indirect approach. This can involve use of a special synthesis intermediate (see below), in essence, a compound of a type known for the ease in which it can be converted into many other compounds.
Even without resort to the special intermediates, you may find it best to have an intervening step. For example, instead of aminating (introducing NH2 into) a benzene directly with ammonia, you would more likely nitrate it (introduce NO2 into it) first, and then reduce the nitrate group to the desired amino group. That's two steps, rather than one, but the yield will be a lot higher.
The indirect approach may also be necessary when you are trying to synthesize a polyfunctional compound. The reagent intended to add the second functionality may damage the one already on the molecule. The solution is to protect the first functionality, add the second, then deprotect the first one. That's done in, for example, the standard synthesis of the antibiotic chloramphenicol.
All else being equal, it's best to minimize the steps. Even if the yield of each step is 90%, six such steps means the overall yield is only 53%. Also consider atom economy; how many of the atoms in the reactants are unused in the desired product(s)? And to keep costs down, when possible add the most expensive reactants last.
Linear synthesis involves forming each intermediate from the one before. In convergent synthesis, large fragments are synthesized independently, then combined at the end; this usually results in fewer steps and higher yields.
It's worth noting that there was a revolution a few decades ago in the teaching of organic chemistry. Early textbooks were organized according to the structure of the compound, and stated the principal preparative methods and characteristic reactions of each functional groups. The modern approach is to emphasize the mechanism that underlies the reactions. There is probably a steeper learning curve to actually making new compounds with the modern approach, but it allows one to make more educated guesses about how some new structure will behave than did the old method.
These are highly reactive materials that can be converted into a wide variety of organic compounds.
Synthesis Gas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The principal commercial method of making methanol uses synthesis gas. But its versatility was best demonstrated by the Fischer-Tropsch process, which was essentially a polymerization reaction (using a metal oxide catalyst), creating a large variety of aliphatic hydrocarbons (EA). It was developed to solve Germany's fuel crisis of the Twenties.
Synthesis gas can be produced from pretty much any hydrocarbon source (including natural gas, petroleum, coal, and biomass) If you heat coal in the presence of lots of air, the oxygen converts it all to carbon dioxide. That's ordinary combustion. If you heat it in the absence of air, you get destructive distillation to coal gas and coke. To make synthesis gas, you want incomplete combustion. You heat the coal with steam (H2O) in the presence of a little bit of air. When this process is properly adjusted, the reactions which take place result in production of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and only a trifling amount of carbon dioxide. This reaction is actually alluded to in EB11/Fuel, in the discussion of "blue water gas," which was first made in 1780 by Felice Fontana.
Acetylene (HC=CH) is one of the most important potential carbichemicals. In World War I, Germany used acetylene in the production of a rather inferior synthetic rubber ("methyl rubber"). History somewhat repeated itself in World War II, when acetylene was used by Germany in the production of ethylene and butadiene (for a better synthetic rubber), Acetylene has also been used to produce vinyl choloride, vinyl acetate, vinyl fluoride, acrylonitrile, acetaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. (KO 1:195; Wittcoff 112). It's also the fuel of the oxyacetylene torch.
Unlike most carbichemicals, acetylene is derived from coke, not coal tar. In 1892, it was discovered that lime (calcium oxide) and coke could be cooked together at 2000°C in an electric arc furnace (ordinary combustion doesn't generate a high enough temperature) to produce calcium carbide, which in turn was reacted with water to form acetylene (M&B 239; EB11/Acetylene).
Calcium carbide production is a bit problematic. First of all, you need lots of cheap electricity, preferably near coal mines. Grantville is one possibility, Lyons might eventually be another. The reactants and product are solids, which makes them difficult to handle. And they are also corrosive, so don't expect the reactor to have a long working life. (Wittcoff 111).
A more modern route to acetylene involves high temperature (1500°C) controlled oxidation of methane from natural gas or petroleum. (M&B 240). I think that the high temperature and the necessary process controls make this method unattractive for the foreseeable future.
Acetylene is tricky stuff to handle; for storage, pressurized acetylene is introduced into a cylinder filled with a porous material soaked with acetone. It is probably wise to transport it only short distances, and use it promptly.
In modern industry, alkyl halides are made by high-temperature halogenation of alkanes. In the laboratory, they are more likely to be made from alcohols or carboxylic acids (thionyl chloride needed, available perhaps in 1635), or occasionally from alkenes or alkynes.
Alkyl halides (usually chlorides) can be converted, in a single step reaction, into nitrile, alcohol, thiol, ester, ether, thioether, hydride, and other derivatives by displacement of the halogen. They can also be converted into alkanes and alkenes, and into an even more useful intermediate called a Grignard reagent.
To make a Grignard reagent, you react an alkyl halide with metallic magnesium. The Grignard reagent is extremely reactive, so it is generated for immediate use. But because of that reactivity, it can be used to make derivatives which can't be prepared directly from an alkyl halide.
To make a diazonium salt, you need an aromatic amine, sodium nitrite, and a hydrogen halide. Diazonium salts allow you to make many different derivatives of aromatic compounds. These derivatives include some important dyes, such as Congo Red, Trypan Blue, and tartrazine.
As our chemists attempt synthesis of complex compounds, with multiple functional groups, they will find that they have difficulty limiting the reaction to the site they wish to affect. They may inadvertently add a functionality somewhere it isn't wanted, or even degrade the intermediate they are working with. The standard solution to this problem is to selectively protect and later deprotect the sensitive functional group. Chemists have developed standard protecting group chemistries for hydroxyl, amine, carbonyl, and other common moieties. McGHEST/Organic Synthesis has a useful discussion.
Enzymes (biocatalysts) can be found in microorganisms, plants and animals, and isolated enzymes can be used to carry out very complex transformations in a few steps, and with stereospecificity. Rennet (chymosin) was the first (OTL 1874) enzyme purified (from calf stomachs) for industrial use. Pancreatic proteases were used to bate hides (1907), degum raw silk, and prewash clothes, and papain to stabilize beer (1911). (Uhlig 6ff).
Trading with tropical colonies will give us access to pineapple and papaya, and thus to the proteases bromelain and papain. Bacteria and fungi are rich sources of other enzymes.
In order to make use of complex natural feedstocks, you have to separate the mixture into the component chemicals, or at least into fractions of sufficiently consistent physical and chemical properties so that they form a salable product.
If you conduct a chemical synthesis, you have to separate the desired product from the solvent, any excess reactants, and any byproducts. The most important organic chemical separation methods are distillation, extraction and recrystallization.
This relies on the difference in the volatility (the tendency to pass from the liquid to the gaseous state), at the distillation temperature, of the components. In general, this is closely related to the boiling point; the lower boiling components tend to be concentrated in the vapor. But it is good to realize that it isn't an all or nothing situation; there will be some vaporization of a compound before its boiling point is reached.
For distillation, you need a heat source (usually operating on a heating bath), a pot (in which the liquid mixture is boiled), a head (through which the vapor rises) , a condenser (in which the vapor is condensed back to a liquid), and a receiver (in which the liquid is stored). The heat source is usually outside the pot. However, in steam distillation, steam is bubbled through the mixture.
When Grantville popped out of nowhere, the alchemists had been distilling chemicals for centuries. Hieronymous Braunschweig wrote The Art of Distillation in 1500. The big distillation breakthrough of the early-seventeenth century was the continuously water-cooled, counter-flow worm (Graham) condenser. (McCuster, 195). This is a spiral pipe (carrying the vapor) which is run through a large reservoir (holding liquid coolant). Or the vapor and the coolant can be reversed.
Stoner taught the Venetian glassmakers how to make a Liebig condenser (invented by Wiegel in 1771), which is a simple vapor tube running through a concentric outer coolant tube with a coolant inlet and outlet. "When I drew a Liebig condenser for them, there were a few guys slapping foreheads, and a couple of the glassware shops did a roaring trade in the things for a couple of weeks. They use copper pipes and leather fittings, but they work." (Flint and Dennis, 1634: The Galileo Affair, Chapter 33).
Dry distillation. Solid materials could be heated at high temperatures so they were converted directly into gases. The operation was known in classical times, and alchemists used it to produce several organic compounds.
Fractional distillation. When some components have similar boiling points (less than 25°C apart), you need to conduct repeated vaporization-condensation cycles, so that there is a gradual enrichment in favor of the lower boiling component. This is achieved by elongating the simple distillation head into a fractionating column. The column has trays or a packing material on which vapor can condense, and from which it can vaporize again as it gets heated by rising vapor. The column may be designed so that the condensate can be withdrawn from different heights in the column.
It appears that in the thirteenth century Taddeo Alderotti concentrated alcohol by means of a crude fractional distillation apparatus with a single withdrawal point. However, it was not a commonly used technique. (Holmyard 53ff).
There is no free lunch. While fractional distillation can separate more similar compounds, the distillation apparatus is more expensive (especially on an industrial scale), and the distillation takes longer and requires more energy to keep re-evaporating the liquid. The separation power depends on the structure of the column, but I think a good rule of thumb would be that our heroes can achieve a useful separation if there is more than a 6°C boiling point difference.
Freeze Distillation. Instead of separating compounds on the basis of the difference in their boiling points, you can exploit differences in melting points, cooling the mixture to an intermediate temperature and separating the frozen material from that still liquid. If you then melt and refreeze the frozen material, you have fractional freezing.
Freeze distillation was used in medieval Central Asia to concentrate ethyl alcohol, but this "frozen-out wine" has the problem (from a drinkers' standpoint) that it also concentrates the other, poisonous alcohols. For the new organic chemical industry, that might be an advantage.
Vacuum distillation. A general problem with distillation is that the high temperatures can cause some compounds to decompose. This can be avoided by vacuum distillation; if pressure is reduced, the boiling points are lowered. Vacuum distillation was not known down-time.
Extraction.
Liquid-liquid extraction takes advantage of differences in the relative solubility of the components in two immiscible liquids. The important characteristics of the extractive solvent are its selectivity (preference for the desired component), capacity (the solubility of the component in it), toxicity, corrosiveness, liquid temperature range, availability, and price. It also has to be quite pure.
The alchemists macerated a variety of botanical extracts; the catch was that they had only a limited choice of solvents, and their extracts were primarily with water or alcohol, or mixtures of the two. Perfumers placed botanicals on animal fat, allowed the fragrance chemicals to diffuse into the fat, and then extracted them from the fat with alcohol (enfleurage).
Ethers, chloroform, and carbon disulfide or tetrachloride have very different solvent properties (Rydberg 28) and their availability would revolutionize extraction technology.
Crystallization.
Crystallization takes advantage of differences in solubility. It was known to the alchemists; Biringuccio used it to purify saltpeter. (Feigelson 1).
In fractional recrystallization, the crystals are redissolved and then recrystallized, thereby losing residual impurities.
Some organic chemical reactions result in isomerization. One variety occurs when the reagent has more than one point of attack on the starting material. If, in some starting material molecules, it adds a group to an end carbon, and in other molecules, to the penultimate carbon, then you end up with a mixture of molecules with different structural formulae, that is, different bond connections. Those are called "structural isomers."
The standard synthesis for DDT produces not only the desired p,p-isomer, but also ones in which one or both chlorines end up in the wrong position relative to the ethane bridge (o,p- and o,o-isomers). The three isomers all have pesticidal activity, but the p,p-isomer is several times more active than the others.
Sometimes, a compound's three-dimensional structure will be such that an atom can be approached from distinctly different "sides." If so, then the reaction may result in a functional group being linked to that atom on one side in some molecules and on the other side in others. Two compounds with different 3-D structures result, which are considered "stereoisomers" of each other, and the "two-sided" atom is called a stereogenic center. This is important because if a pharmaceutical has stereoisomers, it is not uncommon that one is active and the other isn't.
It is worth noting that a drug might have more than one stereogenic center, hence more than two stereoisomers. That's a concern with chloramphenicol, which has two centers and thus four stereoisomers.
The chemist has three choices for dealing with stereoisomers:
(1) just produce a "racemic mixture" of all the stereoisomers. It won't be as active as the desired one, but it's better than nothing (or the wrong one).
(2) produce the racemic mixture and then "resolve" it, that is, separate the stereoisomers (or reversible derivatives of them) based on some physical property (boiling point, melting point, solubility, etc.)
(3) use a stereochemically-specific reaction ("asymmetric chemistry"), that is, one which for some reason (perhaps the configuration of a catalyst) favors one stereoisomer over another.
In the case of chloramphenicol, the trick used in the Forties was to form the tartrate salts of one of the intermediates, and then separate them by fractional crystallization. More recently, asymmetric chemical pathways have been developed.
There are several reasons why you may have to identify an organic compound. Perhaps you are trying to isolate or synthesize a particular compound. If so, you need to know whether you have succeeded. Or perhaps you isolated the biologically active ingredient of, say, a plant oil, and you want to know what it is so you that you can design a synthesis for it. Or you have separated a natural feedstock into its components and you want to know what they are.
Elemental analysis tells you which atoms are present (qualitative analysis) and more preferably in what proportions (quantitative analysis) in the compound. Morrison and Boyd describe methods of assaying carbon, hydrogen, halogen, nitrogen and sulfur.
It is also important to determine the molecular weight of the compound. If you know the molecular weight, and the elemental proportions (and the atomic weights of each element), you can write the molecular formula. For example, the molecular weight of glucose is 180.16 grams per mole, and the molecular formula is C6H12O6.
There are a number of methods of determining the molecular weight of a compound. If it is volatile (gaseous at room temperature), you can measure the volume occupied by a known weight of the gas at a known temperature and pressure. Otherwise, you can dissolve a known weight of the compound in a known weight of a solvent, and measure how much it reduces the freezing point (cryoscopic method) or increases the boiling point (ebullioscopic method), since the change is proportional to the concentration of the solute.
A popular solvent for the cryoscopic method is camphor, one mole of solute in 100 grams of camphor lowers its freezing point by 39.7*C. The gold standard for determining molecular weights is mass spectrometry, which is not something I am expecting to be reinvented in the near future.
The molecular formula gives the number of atoms of each element, but not how the atoms are connected. Those connections are depicted in the structural formula.
Ideally, to determine the structure of a complete unknown, we would subject it to spectroscopic analysis. I don't expect any form of spectroscopic study (see Appendix) to be feasible within the first decade after the Ring of Fire.
So what can we do? We are left with the laborious process of inferring structure from the compound's physical and chemical properties. The physical properties (solubility, melting and boiling point, density, refractive index, and optical activity) are most likely to be diagnostic if we find that they match the values for a known compound (and there is voluminous data in CRC).
Chemical properties are also useful, but in general they just tell you the class of compound involved. For example, you are probably dealing with a primary or secondary alcohol, or perhaps an aldehyde, if adding the substance to a clear orange solution of chromic anhydride in aqueous sulfuric acid changes to an opaque blue-green. (M&B 544).
During the investigation of the mysterious illness at the 1634 senior class picnic, a lab analysis reveals that the beer the students were drinking was laced with methanol. Offord's "Class of '34" (Grantville Gazette 4). The question is, how was the analysis conducted with the limited post-Ring of Fire resources? My best guess is that they ran a distillation. and found that they had a fraction boiling off at the boiling point of methanol (64.5oC), which is less than the boiling point of water or of ethanol (78.3oC). And if that fraction satisfied the various chemical tests for alcohol, then the police could be fairly confident that methanol was present.
If that known compound is available (we may just have legacy data from the CRC), then we can mix a pure sample of the known compound with the purified unknown. If the "mixture" has the same melting and boiling points as that of the known compound, then we know that the added unknown is identical to the latter.
If there is no match or no reference, then we are more reliant on chemical analysis. What happens if the unknown is exposed to water, cold or hot sodium hydroxide, dilute hydrochloric acid, concentrated sulfuric acid, acetyl chloride, sodium, bromine or other reagents? The reactivity patterns will suggest that particular functional groups are present, but they are not likely to do so definitively, and they don't prove where each such functional group is located.
So, we cheat. We degrade the compound into fragments, and analyze the fragments. If need be, we break the fragments down further. Sooner or later, we will find ourselves dealing with fragments which correspond to known fragments. We can then make an educated guess as to how the known fragments are connected. We design a synthesis based on the hypothetical structure, carry it out, and see if the properties of the synthesized compound match those of the original one.
For this to provide proof, we of course have to be able to devise a synthetic route which we are sure is reliable.
In the late twentieth century, the highest volume organic chemicals were primarily those used as intermediates in the production of other chemicals, especially plastics, rather than for "end use" chemicals. I don't know whether that will be true in the new time line and, if it is, whether plastics industry intermediates will have the same importance. At a guess, the dyestuffs, drugs and explosives industries will loom larger in the early post-Ring of Fire period. But I am sure that many of the organic chemicals which were "top" chemicals in the late-twentieth century will be important in the first post-Ring of Fire decade too.
There are 31 organic chemicals among the fifty top chemicals of the U.S. chemical industry of 1995 (C&EN), and I have looked at what the encyclopedias, and if need be, the standard organic chemistry textbook Morrison & Boyd, have to say about how they are used and produced.
The top forty organic chemicals fall into six structural groups, as shown in Table 3-1. MTBE, used just for anti-knock, is a chemical which will be in much less demand in the 1632 universe, at least until gasoline is plentiful. On the other hand, the antiseptic phenol will be in much greater demand, given the limited medicinal arsenal.
A number of organic chemicals were isolated or synthesized prior to 1631, although of course there was no knowledge of their true chemical nature (Lemery in late-seventeenth century classified all chemicals as mineral, vegetable or animal), and their purity was doubtful.
Ethyl alcohol has been known since antiquity, and distillation (or freezing) made it possible to obtain it in concentrations that would kill the fermentation yeast. Acetic acid was first known in dilute form as vinegar, and supposedly it was concentrated by Geber in the eighth century. (Payen 961).
Tartrate salts were used as medicines in the sixteenth century. Valerius Cordus (1515-1544) made diethyl ether ("sweet oil of vitriol") in 1540 by adding sulfuric acid to ethyl alcohol. The details were published in De Artificiosis Extractionibus (1561). (Sneader 79). Succinic acid was isolated by George Baeyer (Agricola) from Baltic amber in 1546. (Poinar 23) Benzoic acid was prepared by Blaise de Vigenere, by subliming gum benzoin, in the late-sixteenth century. (Von Meyer, 103ff). Lead acetate was dry-distilled by Jean Beguin in 1610, obtaining acetone, the "burning spirit of Saturn" (Bourzat).
Of course, West Virginia has a long tradition of distilling moonshine. This tradition is referred to in Offord's "Class of '34" (Grantville Gazette 4). Homemade booze can contain both methanol and ethanol. Methanol fractions off at a lower temperature than ethanol, which is why "people who know what they are doing throw out the first couple of ounces of flow to get rid of the methanol."
Ethanol is a fuel for machines, not just a pick-me-up (or knock-me-down) for people. The tractor in Lutz and Zeek, "Elizabeth" (Grantville Gazette 8) was converted to run on ethanol. In Mackey, "Ounces of Prevention" (Grantville Gazette 5), Nicki Jo Prickett tells Rubens and Scaglia that high-proof alcohol is a good antiseptic.
A "methanol plant" is in operation in Grantville by May, 1632. (Mackey, "The Prepared Mind." Grantville Gazette 10), but the particulars of its operation aren't disclosed. The logical way to make methanol is by destructive distillation of wood.
In 1633, the USE builds its first aircraft and fuels them with "M85," meaning a mixture which is 85% methanol, 15% gasoline. (Flint, 1633, Chapter 27). The same concoction is used by the first civilian airliner. (Huff and Goodlett, "The Monster", Grantville Gazette 12).
Diethyl ether, the anesthetic, is used by Sharon Nichols during the operation on Ruy Sanchez in April 1634. Flint and Dennis, 1634: The Galileo Affair (Chapter 39). It was clearly made by Stoner, not a leftover from year 2000. It couldn't have been available until after December 1632 since Doctor Sims then was still pulling teeth without anesthetizing his patients. Wentworth, "Here Comes Santa Claus" (Ring of Fire).
In July 1631, Dr. Phil was fascinated by Tasha Kubiak's cigarette lighter. It used a piezoelectric crystal, and Dr. Phil obtained a cheat sheet for preparing Rochelle's salt, which has piezoelectric properties. He succeeded. Because of their utility in radios, he calls them "Gribbleflotz Aeolian Crystals." See Offord, "Dr. Phil's Amazing Lightning Crystal" (Grantville Gazette 11)
We can guess what the cheat sheet said. "Tartrate" means a salt of tartaric acid, an organic acid. Cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) is a crystalline deposit found in wine casks, and was known to the downtime alchemists. Dissolving cream of tartar in a hot solution of sodium carbonate forms Rochelle's salt (EB11/Tartar). Rochelle's salt was first prepared around 1675, so there wasn't much doubt that it was within down-time capabilities.
Stoner daydreams about "Victorian coal tar dyes . . . reds, purples, good God, mauve!" at the end of Lackey, "To Dye For" (Ring of Fire). There is reference to "Mr. Stoner's dye shops" in Huff, "Other People's Money," Grantville Gazette 3. In March 1634, Rita, Melissa and Sharon are wearing makeup incorporating Stoner's chemicals. (Flint and Dennis, 1635: The Cannon Law, Chapter 23). In winter 1633-34, Nicki Jo tells the Spanish that most of Essen Chemical's benzene feedstock is "going to produce aniline dyes." (Mackey, "Ounces of Prevention," Grantville Gazette 5).
Bob Gottlieb has pointed out ("They've Got Bread Mold, So Why Can't They Make Penicillin?" Grantville Gazette 1) the problems of isolating microorganisms which produce antibiotics in useful concentrations. Fortunately, in May 1632, Amy Kubiak and Lori Fleming discovered that Grantville's high school science lab had a sample of "high yield" Penicillium notatum. (For justification of this find, see Mackey, "Crude Penicillin: Potential and Limitations," Grantville Gazette 10.) Amy and Lori passed their find on to two visitors from Cologne. Who in turn set up a laboratory and worked on finding just the right culture medium.
By April 1634, the Antonite hospital in Cologne was ready, with some reluctance, to administer penicillin to people. At that point, they only had enough to treat one person for ten days, but by January 1635, they had stock enough to meet the needs of the entire city . . . some forty thousand people. See Mackey, "The Prepared Mind" (Grantville Gazette 10). Nonetheless, in June 1634, Bill Hudson complains that the up-timers in Amberg don't have penicillin (or the macrolide antibiotic erythromycin). Flint and DeMarce, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, Chapter 25.
In May, 1632, Nicki Jo Prickett tells Franz Dubois that the synthesis for sulfanilamide is in one of her organic chem textbooks. (Mackey, "The Prepared Mind", Grantville Gazette 10), but it's clear that no one had made it yet. Grantville does have it by fall, 1633—the cabinet votes to "send our existing stock of chloramphenicol and most of our sulfa drugs to Luebeck and Amsterdam, along with as much DDT as we can manage . . ." (1633, Chapter 35).
By the winter 1633-34, the Essen Chemical Company is producing small quantities of sulfanilamide (apparently in preference to Grantville's premiere antibiotic, chloramphenicol).
See Mackey, "Ounces of Prevention" (Grantville Gazette 5).
Sharon uses "sulfa powder" on Ruy Sanchez in April, 1634 (Flint and Dennis, 1634: The Galileo Affair, Chapter 43). And when the Archduchess Maria Anna's infected hands are treated in August 1634 (Flint and DeMarce, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, Chapter 53), it's with "sulfa."
A fairly complete synthesis of sulfanilamide appears in M&B 757. The starting material is aniline (aminobenzene); the reagents are acetic anhydride, chlorosulfonic acid (nasty stuff!), ammonia, and acid.
It isn't a difficult synthesis; it's a common assignment in a sophomore organic chem lab (Lehman 389). Of course, the sophomores don't have to make the chlorosulfonic acid themselves. That requires reacting chlorine gas with sulfuric acid under pressure.
The intermediate resulting from the acetylation of aniline is acetanilide, and it has some interesting uses. EA "Reaction, Chemical" says that it retards the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. EB11 mentions ("Edgar Quinet" and "Pharmacology") that acetanilide is an antipyretic (reduces fever), albeit not a very safe one. Acetanilide is structurally related to a modern antipyretic and analgesic, acetaminophen (Tylenol®). In fact, if you react the acetic anhydride with hydroxyaniline rather than with aniline, you get acetaminophen.
By the winter 1633-34, the Essen Chemical Company is producing hexachlorobenzene, and marketing it as an insecticide (remember, fleas carry the plague). See Mackey, "Ounces of Prevention" (Grantville Gazette 5). This is most likely done in the obvious way; bubbling chlorine gas into benzene. Based on the discussion in EB11/Benzene, this reaction might be facilitated by ferric chloride. But there are other chlorinating agents, notably sulfuryl chloride and the chlorosulfonic acid. EB11/Chloroform mentions that when gaseous chloroform (trichlormethane) is passed through a red-hot tube, hexachlorobenzene is obtained, together with perchloroethane and perchlorethylene.
The USE delegation to England brought with it "several pounds of the DDT which the fledgling American chemical industry was starting to produce." (Flint, 1633, Chap. 21). There aren't a lot of date cues as to when the delegation left home (Eric's motto is "vague is good") John Bogan's proposed timeline has the delegation departing in June, 1633.
In the standard synthesis of DDT, you react two equivalents of chlorobenzene with one of trichloroacetaldehyde, in the presence of sulfuric acid. (M&B650, problem 11; Bailey, 252; CCD; Solomons 1024).
In order to have DDT in June 1633, the reactants (chlorobenzene and trichloracetaldehyde) must have been synthesized earlier. But neither are natural products; both of them must be intermediates synthesized from other chemicals.
The chlorobenzene certainly would have been obtained by chlorinating benzene. The standard reagent for this purpose is chlorine gas in combination with a ferric chloride catalyst, and the reaction is one taught in introductory organic chemistry classes. (M&B 351-2). Benzene, in turn, can be obtained from oil or coal.
Chlorine reacts with acetaldehyde at room temperature to yield monochloroacetaldehyde. To get the trichlorinated analogue, you need to increase the temperature to 80-90 deg. C. (McKetta, 121). I imagine this was discovered by a moderate amount of trial and error. The acetaldehyde might be isolated from plants, but an alternative is to oxidize ethyl alcohol with a strong oxidizing agent, and remove the acetaldehyde before it is oxidized any further. (M&B 621, 625).
So this all implies the availability, by June 1633, of the following organic chemicals in respectable purity: DDT, chlorobenzene, benzene, mono- di- and trichloroacetaldehydes, acetaldehyde, and ethyl alcohol.
Trichloroacetaldehyde is interesting in its own right. It reacts with water to form chloral hydrate—the solution of chloral hydrate in alcohol is known as "knockout drops" or a "Mickey Finn."
Gottlieb, "They've Got Bread Mold, So Why Can't They Make Penicillin? " (Grantville Gazette 1) opined that "While it will not be easy to produce chloramphenicol with the resources at hand, it can be done—with a lot of Grantville's money and skilled people. Early production would probably be limited to bucket quantities, however, enough to treat perhaps a hundred people per month. Only with the advent of stainless steel and chemical plants will production on a larger scale become likely."
It appears that the chloramphenicol project was originally assigned to Stoner. By sometime before September 1633 (the date cue is in 1633, Chap. 18), he is already at the "yield improvement" stage. (Flint, 1633, Chapter 15).
In the course of the siege of Amsterdam, Anne Jefferson, on Stearns' orders, contrives to pass a monograph entitled, "How to Make Chloramphenicol" to Rubens, and thus to Don Fernando. Flint, "Portraits" (Grantville Gazette 1, paper only). This identifies the ingredients needed to make chloramphenicol, recites the steps by which they are reacted, and diagrams the apparatus required.
After Gustavus Adolphus learns of this surreptitious tech transfer, Mike Stearns attempts to calm down the angry emperor by pointing out that chloramphenicol "is so hard to make in any quantities—even for us, much less the Spaniards—that providing them with the formula was almost entirely a symbolic gesture. I doubt if more than a dozen Spanish soldiers will benefit from it, over the next year—and they will be entirely top officers, not the men who would be storming the ramparts." (TBW Chapter 25).
That's different from what Rubens tells Don Fernando, but Rubens is hardly an expert on alchemical matters. Rubens is correct that the Low Countries are well supplied with artisans and workshops, but being able to make the apparatus isn't the same as being able to figure out the formulae and make the chemicals in pure form.
Chloramphenicol is actually more complex than DDT, even though it has only one phenyl ring. To complicate matters further, this structure has two "optical centers," which means that it has four optical isomers . . . and only one of them is antibacterially active.
There are several possible synthetic strategies, and it is not clear which one was used by the Grantvillers. I think the most likely documentary source of the synthesis is a problem set forth in Solomons, Organic Chemistry (page 967, 1992 edition; page 996, 1995 and 1996 editions). Intermediates A-E are given only as molecular formulae so the reader has to deduce them. The steps are
(1) condensation of benzaldehyde with 2-nitroethanol
(2) reduction of nitro group to an amino group
(3) chlorination with dichloroacetyl chloride
(4) acetylation of hydroxyls with acetic anhydride (this is a protective step)
(5) ring nitration with nitric acid in presence of sulfuric acid (mentioned by Mackey, "Ounces of Prevention" (Grantville Gazette 5))
(6) hydrolysis to remove the acetyl groups
I have a few comments. In step (1), nitroethanol is explosive; alternative syntheses exist (Ishar 232). In step (2), the reduction as taught by Solomons is with hydrogen and an unidentified catalyst. The catalyst of choice is palladium but that isn't available in the 1630s. So Stoner probably experimented with other reducing agents. The basic chloramphenicol patent (2483884) suggests possible use of stannous chloride, sodium hydrosulfite, ferrous sulfate, iron-acetic acid or zinc-sulfuric acid. Solomons' synthesis yields a mixture of four isomers, but Solomons doesn't explain how to resolve them. Finally, the chlorination step can be deferred until after hydrolysis and isomer resolution (Bhat 731); this might reduce costs.
Aspirin.
With up-time aspirin selling for $20 a tablet on the "black market," Katie Jackson asked her boss, the Nobili of Nobili's Pharmacy, for a cheat sheet for aspirin. Ted and Tracy passed it on to Dr. Phillip Gribbleflotz, who reluctantly became the "Aspirin King" in July or August 1631. See Offord, "Dr. Phil's Amazing Lightning Crystal" (Grantville Gazette 11). He preferred to call it Sal Vin Betula, however. Offord, "Feng Shui for the Soul" (Grantville Gazette 17)
We don't know how Dr. Phil made aspirin, but we can guess. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid (or its salt), which is itself a derivative of salicylic acid (ortho-hydroxybenzoic acid). Salicylic acid can be isolated from the bark of the willow tree (Salyx), hence its name, and then acetylated, making aspirin an example of a semisynthetic biochemical. Back in 1859, acetyl chloride was the reagent. Later, Hoffman (1893) exploited salicylic acid's reaction with acetic anhydride, catalyzed by phosphoric acid.
In "Sal vin betula," "sal" means "salt" and betula" is the birch tree. The word "vin" is not Latin, but perhaps Phil was thinking of vinum, wine. Salicylic acid is also found in the volatile oil distilled from the bark of the sweet birch (Betula lenta). My guess is that Phil used acetyl chloride, itself made by reacting acetic acid (distilled from vinegar) with thionyl dichloride. (If so, then thionyl chloride was available at a much earlier date than that predicted in part 2 of this series.)
The salicylic acid can itself be synthesized by one of the methods set forth in EB11/"Salicylic Acid." One example is to take sodium phenolate (a salt of phenol, which is found in coal tar), react it with carbon dioxide, and then acidify. This is a high pressure reaction and is therefore not so likely to have been practiced in the early post-Ring of Fire period.
No, no one has actually made Sildenafil. Rather, in September, 1635, Dr. Phil was asked to make it. Offord, "The Creamed Madonna" (Grantville Gazette 19). It has several heterocycles, and I think it beyond 1630s capabilities (see Appendix).
In June 1631, Chad Jenkins recognized that he could sell cars if he could convert them to run on natural gas. He urged his employees to "buy lots of pressure tanks and their connections first," because "cars are everywhere but not pressure tanks." Rittgers, "Von Grantville" (Grantville Gazette 7).
In mid-1633, LeeAnn thought, "Thank God natural gas supply wasn't a problem in Grantville." (Schillawski and Rigby, "Recycling," Grantville Gazette 6). In 1634, Frau Hollister's house is still heated with natural gas. (DeMarce, "Not At All the Type," Grantville Gazette 7).
In Offord and Boatright, "Dr. Phil's Amazing Essence of Fire Tablets," Dr. Phil complains that as of 1633, "there had been talk of producing 'propane,' but for now that was as far off as his much-needed aluminum." This suggests that Grantville's natural gas was mostly methane (see part 4).
This simple organic chemical has clearly been made by 1633, when Dr. Phil experiments with formalin. He uses it first to make hexamine, and later, bakelite (see below).
In 1633, Dr. Phil reacts spirits of hartshorn (ammonia) with formalin (formaldehyde). Offord and Boatright, "Dr. Phil's Amazing Essence of Fire Tablets," Grantville Gazette 7. It turns out that's exactly what you need to make hexamine, the key ingredient of fuel tablets. (MI/Methenamine).
It's also clear that this is dumb luck. Dr. Phil got a new chemical and was mixing it with a chemical he already had to see what happened. He didn't know whether the reaction product would be poisonous or not, and when his laborant told him it tasted "sweet," Phil hoped that he had succeeded in synthesizing sugar! (The synthesis of sucrose, by the way, has been called the "Mount Everest of Chemistry" and it was accomplished by Raymond Lemieux in 1953. Who, in the Eighties, was one of my patent clients.)
But the hexamine wasn't sweet enough. Fiddling around, they discovered that when ignited, it produced a strong heat with little soot.
The hexamine, in turn, was subsequently used by Brennerei und Chemiefabrik Schwarza, as early as winter 1633, to make the explosive RDX, albeit at pounds per week levels.
This is one of the early plastics, and Georg Heinz made bakelite insulators in 1634. EA/"Bakelite" would have told him that it is a copolymer of phenol and formaldehyde. Offord, "Feng Shui for the Soul," Grantville Gazette 17. According to his colleague, Michael Siebenhorn, the bakelite was derived, ultimately, from "chemicals from the gas works." This is probably a reference to coal gas.
In winter 1631-32, casein plastic is made by heating a mixture of milk and vinegar. (Offord, "Bootstrapping," Grantville Gazette 11). Casein is also referred to in DeMarce, "Songs and Ballads" (Grantville Gazette 14).
Stoner is growing both marijuana and poppies, for analgesic use. Flint 1633; Ewing, "An Invisible War," (Grantville Gazette 3); Huff and Goodlett, "Birdie's Village" (1634: The Ram Rebellion).
The healer Tibelda has yarrow), tincture of meadwort (contains salicylic acid), a tonic comprising lily of the valley (various poisonous cardiac glycosides), and foxglove (digoxin). Viehl, "A Matter of Consultation" (Ring of Fire).
Natural rubber is a polymer of isoprene. It is a 1, 3-diene, meaning that it has two C=C bonds separated by a single bond. There are two possible configurations for hooking up the isoprene units. Natural rubber features the cis configuration (rendering it elastic) and gutta percha, another isoprene polymer, the trans configuration (making it more crystalline).
Natural rubber has been trickling into post-Ring of Fire Europe. This was initially thanks to Hevea brasiliensis tapping by Amazonian Indians under the direction of Henrique Pereira da Costa. (Cooper, "Stretching Out, Part Two: Amazon Adventure", Grantville Gazette 12). Tapping began sometime in 1633, but ceased abruptly in early 1634 when Henrique was forced to flee into the rain forest to avoid arrest by the Inquisition.
In 1634, rubber from Hevea guianiensis of Suriname, and Castilla elastica from Nicaragua, was collected under the direction of Maria Vorst, Philip Jenkins and David Pieterszoon de Vries. Cooper, "Stretching Out, Part One: Second Starts" (Grantville Gazette 11), Part Three: Maria's Mission" (Grantville Gazette 14) ; "Part Four: Beyond the Line" (Grantville Gazette 16). Their first shipment arrived in Hamburg in late 1634. There should be additional shipments every six months or so, at least as long as the colony of Gustavus by the mouth of the Suriname River survives.
And then there's milkweed rubber. In 1634, Dr. Phil gets milkweed latex from Celeste's daughter and her friends. (Offord, "Feng Shui for the Soul," Grantville Gazette 17).
In winter 1633-34, captured Brazilian rubber (Henrique's first shipment?) was vulcanized by Henri Beaubriand-Lévesque, Henri figured out the methodology from his set of the fifteenth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Perhaps with a little help from Doctor Gribbleflotz. Offord, "Letters from France" (Grantville Gazette 12).
A rather weird method of synthesizing isoprene is given in EB11/terpenes. Isoprene can also be made by decomposing turpentine (1882), or by chlorinating isopentane (found in petroleum) and then removing units of HCl to create the necessary double bonds (Molinari, 109). These alternative methods would need to be reinvented.
Quinine, an antimalarial agent made from the South American cinchona bark, was the Holy Grail of the nineteenth century chemical industry. (It wasn't actually synthesized until 1944 or 2001, depending on who you ask, and synthetic quinine is not commercially significant.) Mbandi delivers 50,000 seeds of the cinchona roja to Dr. Nichols in winter 1634-35. (Cresswell-Jones, "Mulungu Seed," Ring of Fire II).
Artemisia is another antimalarial drug, but it is an herb derived from the leaves of the shrub Artemisia annua, and used in Chinese medicine since the fourth century AD. Nichols, talking to Piazza, says that a "private expedition" to "another continent," apparently led by "Dieter," was carrying Artemisia "last year." (Cresswell-Jones, "Mulungu Seed," Ring of Fire II). By "Artemisia," I assume that he means the drug in herbal form, which the Chinese call Qinghao.
The active ingredient, artemisinin (Chinese Qinghaosu), was purified by the Chinese in 1972. The purification was tricky; extracts of Artemisia had been screened several years earlier but found inactive (artemisinin wasn't soluble in the initially tried solvents, water and ether).The first English academic publication regarding artemisinin appeared in 1979. (Hsu; Arnold).
While it is possible that Nichols came across a medical journal article about it, it's more likely Diane Jackson knew of Qinghao's use in Vietnam (either as a traditional remedy, or information passed on by the Chinese government to the Viet Cong, which eventually became known to a larger circle of Vietnamese).
Artemisia annua is hardy to zone 7. While not found in the wild in Marion County WV (USDA), it has been spotted in Mannington gardens (Runkle, private communication). It produces 0.01-1% artemisinin, and greater quantities of convertible artemisinic acid (ienica.net).
In OTL, the first successful medicinal use of insulin was in 1922. The insulin in question was an ox-extract.
In Spring, 1632, the diabetic "Slam Dunk" Cunningham supports research on purifying animal insulin. Small quantities are purified by an alchemist-hireling in summer 1632. Evans, "Dog Days" (Grantville Gazette 15).
Continued, part 4.
Author's note: Bibliography will be in Appendix published in "Gazette Extras" on www.1632.org after Part 5 is published.
Come see us!
The 1632 crew (as many as can make it) will be getting together in Raleigh, NC, in August 2010. We'll be running our mini-con within Reconstruction/NASFIC.
Their website is here: http://www.reconstructionsf.org/
There will be panels and discussions, we'll get together for dinner, we'll sit around and talk until we're hoarse. You know, the usual stuff for a con. And it just won't be worth a hoot without YOU!
Come see us!
We've got a small problem in our Cafe Press store. If you're due some of the gifts for subscribing, I want to assure you that you haven't been forgotten. We are working on it, however the person who maintains the store and has the passwords, etc., has been in the hospital for a couple of months.
We'll keep after it and it will eventually be fixed, at which time I'll catch up on sending out the gifts.
—Paula