Ring of Fire III

by Eric Flint

  “I don’t care if he’s a Jew,” Dorothea offered. “Can I eat too? I’ll eat what he can’t eat.”

  Former IOOF Building, Grantville, 24th of Av, 5394

  (T minus 4 minutes 32 seconds)

  “I don’t care if he is the Messiah! Get those yahoos off the street!” Julie watched as Press tried to place the radio back in its holder with one hand and rub his forehead with the other. “We got a bunch of drunks wandering around with crosses made out of pool cues looking for the Messiah. We got a full house at both the Catholic and Protestant churches. Are you sure Blaise is at your house?”

  “I don’t think it is fair to blame the boy for everything. Besides, he’s Catholic. Blaise wouldn’t be playing at being the Messiah, Chief.” Julie smiled at Rabbi Fonseca who was a few feet away listening politely to Jacqueline Pascal who was trying very hard to speak to the man. Julie wasn’t so far away that she couldn’t hear Jacqueline trying to speak Hebrew.

  “What does Blaise being Catholic have to do with this?” Press demanded.

  “Exactly, Chief. Exactly.” Julie turned to Chana and Gertrude, two of the women in her Flying Mothers Squad. “Any word?”

  “No,” Chana sighed. “There is no sign of the boy. I am most appreciative of the help we have received. I can think of few places where a lost Jewish child would have this effect. People want to find him to protect him.”

  “We have seen the effect of religious bickering, Chana. I have lost family trying to find refuge in religion and being dragged out and killed anyway. Protestants killing Catholics. Catholics massacring Protestants and both killing Jews. Grantville has taught many the lessons we should have learned.” Gertrude crossed her arms and dared any to argue. “If the boy is to be found, we will find him. Being Jewish will not stop us. God help the one who might harm the boy!”

  “I better go and save Rabbi Fonseca.” Julie sighed. “Hopefully her Hebrew is better than her Russian was at the beginning.”

  Rabbi Fonseca was listening politely as Jacqueline tried to hold open a book and speak in broken Hebrew to him.

  “Jacqueline has not said something wrong?” Julie asked as simply as she could. The Sephardic community in Grantville was quite young and its rabbi was not much older. Rabbi Fonseca spoke many languages but English was still new to him.

  “No,” Rabbi Fonseca smiled at Jacqueline and gently pulled the soft covered book from her hands and looked at it. “Cannot think English word...Chana...”

  There was an exchange of Hebrew and when it was over Chana nodded and turned to Julie.

  “The rabbi is amazed to hold in his hand a book to teach Hebrew that was written many centuries from now. It gives him hope that great things can be done. He asks me to thank you for the things you have helped to be done. The idea of having a special place in the...synagogue for non-Jews was a good idea. Such a thing has helped much in bringing all together. He cannot think of a place in the world where a Jew can walk so freely amongst those who are not Jews,” Chana translated.

  “And the boy?” Rabbi Fonseca asked, with what little English knowledge he had, giving Jacqueline the book back.

  “You didn’t check the book out of the library, did you?” Julie sighed, looking at Jacqueline.

  “We were in a hurry and I meant to. I will, Julie. I am sorry.” Jacqueline clutched the book to her.

  “The boy will be found,” Julie assured Rabbi Fonseca.

  “He knows where to come at sunset,” Chana translated for the rabbi. “He is a good boy and will find his way here if he can. And the rabbi agrees with you, Julie. You should have been told and so should the boy. This might not have happened if the boy had been told. And he...”

  There was a long pause.

  “Chana?” Julie asked.

  “He says...” Chana looked at Rabbi Fonseca for a long moment. “He says that he has sat in the library and contemplated that entry in the...encyclopedia. He says the knowledge, yes, knowledge should not have been withheld. It was wrong to let the boy discover this thing without those who love him around him. The boy is too smart, too full of his love of God, to be allowed to find this thing out by himself. He should have not been the object of...of...I do not know how to say. Loshon Hora, bad speech. The boy was looked at from the corner of the eye, whispered about. This should not have been done. I agree, too, Officer Julie Drahuta. Someone should talk to the boy’s father. Possibly you?”

  “I certainly will consider...” It was the prayer that caught Julie’s attention.

  “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha-olam,” Rabbi Fonseca began the blessing. Julie had heard blessings like that before the Ring of Fire when she worked in Wheeling, north of Grantville when it was still in the twentieth century and in America, and here, in Grantville, in 1634.

  Who would have thought an IOOF building would have become a synagogue? Who would have thought a False Messiah would be something a social worker would have to worry about? What would they have done if the Ring of Fire had dropped them onto, say, Jerusalem in the year ten or fifteen?

  God, a fifteen-year-old son of God...

  Julie turned in the direction Rabbi Fonseca was praying in and, for a moment, didn’t know whether to scream, cry or just remain silent.

  “I know, I know, Mom, let me explain.” Joseph had his father’s impish smile. Julie found it hard not to smile back. “I locked up the house, Mom. Shabbethai said he was lost and needed to go to church and since he is a Jew I had to bring him here. He’s too young to be wandering around by himself. Honest, Mom. That’s why we left the house. I know you said to stay there until you got home, but there, I said it. It’s my fault.”

  “I just translated into Greek,” Blaise said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Ha-gomel lahayavim tovot sheg’malani kol tov,” Rabbi Fonseca finished his prayer.

  “Ah-men,” Chana added. Julie would find out later that this was the blessing for, amongst other things, surviving illness or danger.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Joseph, truly his father’s son, had no clue what he had done, only that he had done something. “We played some stick ball. Is Shab in trouble?”

  “I think you are,” Sibylla whispered loudly.

  “What did I do?” Joseph looked around, his eyes fixed on the chief of Grantville’s police department.

  “See? Blaise is involved!” Press shouted. “Is that the boy?”

  There was a burst of strong Hebrew from the boy in the crowd of Drahuta and Kubiak children.

  “He says—” Chana was trying not to laugh. “Shabbethai says we should all be glad of the Shabbos, not arguing. He wishes all a good Sabbath and that we should go inside. He tells us it is almost time of the Sabbath.”

  With that Shabbethai Zebi ben Mordecai led his friends into the former IOOF building which was now the first Sephardic synagogue of Grantville, though Julie heard the Portuguese Jews called it something else.

  “And a little child shall lead them.” Julie shook her head. “Is that him?” Julie asked Jacqueline, who was hiding behind her.

  “How does he do that? How does my brother get in the middle of everything? Yes, Julie, that is the boy.” Jacqueline nodded. “That is the False Messiah.”

  “Let’s stick to Shabbethai Zebi for now, okay, Jackie?”

  “Will come?” Rabbi Fonseca asked politely, indicating the front door with a smile.

  “Certainly,” Julie smiled. “Would it break the Sabbath if I drove him back to Deborah after the service?”

  “It would be better if you walked,” Rabbi Fonseca answered and Chana translated. “Or may he stay here for the night? There are certain laws to be followed, Julie.”

  “I could put him up in the guest room.” Julie shrugged. “Would that tick off his father?”

  “Yes.” Chana smiled. “Maybe it will teach the father not to lose his son. Yes, Julie, it would be good for the boy’s father to come to your house and speak to you about his son.”

  “Don’t tell my father,” Blai
se muttered as the sounds of the Sabbath service began inside the building. “He is still angry that I called Descartes a dinosaur. What will he think if he knew I went into a Jewish church?”

  Royal Dutch Airlines

  Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

  There is a King in the Low Countries

  “His Majesty, Fernando I, King in the Low Countries wants us to come and visit,” Herr van Bradt said. He hid a snicker as best he could. Really, the clothing women were wearing these days!

  “What?” Magdalena van de Passe asked, ignoring the snicker. She knew what it was about, since she’d heard it all before. She was wearing a pair of the new bloomers, long puffy pants that tightened up again at the ankles. Also a leather flight jacket and leather flight helmet with goggles pushed up on her head. It wasn’t a fashion statement. At least not an intentional one. The bloomers were warmer than the more common split skirt; the leather flight jacket was fur-lined and warm and the flight helmet kept her ears warm. None of that would be particularly necessary in one of the Jupiters, but the Neptune was another matter. The Neptune was a minimalist approach to carrying cargo, a two engine monoplane, with a seventy-foot wingspan. Like the Jupiters, they had a low air speed and a very good power-to-weight ratio. But they didn’t carry passengers. The Neptune carried packages; it had no amenities that could be avoided. Anything to save weight and it got darn cold in them, two miles up, in the winter in Germany.

  “His Majesty wants us to visit. And he wants us to come in one of the Jupiters.”

  “We can’t. The schedule is messed up as it is.”

  “I know, but His Majesty insists and Frederik Hendrick added a note as well.” Van Bradt paused. “Magdalena, most of my investments are there. I can’t afford to have the two most powerful men in the Netherlands angry at me. The new engines are going to be ready in a month. Your young man already has the Jupiter Two and two Jupiter Threes sitting there waiting for them. This is politics. The schedule is just going to have to get a bit more out of whack.”

  Magdalena argued a bit more, but the decision was out of her hands. The Monster took off from Grantville International Airport at dawn three days later. On board were Magdalena van de Passe, Vrijheer Abros Thys van Bradt and three other major stockholders in TransEuropean Airlines.

  * * *

  Magdalena looked over at the copilot of the week. Most flights had one experienced pilot and one less experienced pilot. The idea was that by the time the new planes were ready they would have pilots for them. “You want to take a sighting, Karl?” They had just reached their cruising altitude so it was practice time.

  “Sure.” Karl bent over the periscopelike device and started fiddling with knobs as Magdalena held the plane straight and level. The knobs adjusted a couple of mirrors to align two images collected from almost ten feet apart on the front belly of the plane. When he got the best view, he looked at the dial on the knob and read off a number, which Magdalena wrote down. Some calculations with a slide rule would give them their height above ground. Those calculations would be done in a minute or so, after Karl took some more observations. He flipped a handle and looked in to the eyepiece again. This time he was looking for a landmark out in front of the plane. Anything recognizable would do; a tree, a barn, a really big rock. In this case he found a barn and called out “mark” as he clicked on a stop watch. He flipped another lever so that he was now looking straight down instead down and ahead at a forty-five degree angle, and waited for the landmark to reappear. How long it took for the landmark to show up again and how much it had shifted to the left or right would tell them, with more calculations, their true ground speed and how much drift they were experiencing from crosswinds.

  “Mark!” Karl clicked the stopwatch again, then got out the special purpose slide rule. Magdalena looked over his shoulder as he did the calculations.

  “First check at 8:04 AM.” Magdalena said. “What do you get for H over G? Remember, if we miss a major check point, you’re the one that’s going to have to get out and ask directions.”

  Karl looked at her like she was crazy.

  “We land first,” Magdalena reassured him. “But it’s happened more than once. In fact, it’s procedure if probable location permits and you’re more than half an hour past a projected major check point without finding it. So what do you get for H over G.”

  After another minute with the slide rule, he gave her the answer.

  “Okay. The angle is forty-five degrees so the leg that’s on the ground is the same length assuming that the ground is flat as a pancake which it never is. So, what’s our ground speed and drift?”

  Magdalena watched as he set the slide rule, moved the slider, and got the numbers.

  “Indicated airspeed is sixty-nine and compass heading is two eight three. So calculate the wind speed and direction, and give me our true heading.” After he’d done that she continued, “Now we know what our speed and direction were a few minutes ago. We can guess that it’s still close to that and make a guess about where we would end up if we continued on this course and the wind didn’t change.” Where they would have ended up was about seventy-five miles south of Kassel in just under ninety minutes. Since they would rather miss Kassel to the north they adjusted their course just a touch, then set about looking not so much for individual landmarks as for the general lay of the land. Patterns that would be recognizable from this altitude. Not a pond but a pond that was just to the right of a village with another village ahead of it. And a mountain peak in the background. They marked features on the map and made notes then made another set of sightings.

  Aside from the sightings that they did every ten minutes or so, they took a bearing at Kassel. Which was done by looking out the window and finding Kassel, then comparing where it actually was to where they thought it should be. The sightings taken on random landmarks could give them a pretty good estimate of how fast they were going and in what direction, but couldn’t tell them where they were. Not without better maps. They took another bearing at Dortmund, a third at Arnhem and landed near Amsterdam not quite five hours after takeoff. They had been a bit off on their bearings at Dortmund and Arnhem, and had had a bit of a headwind for part of the flight.

  * * *

  “Now this is the way a princess should be rescued!” Maria Anna, the queen in the Low Countries, said with an arch look at her husband.

  His Majesty didn’t seem overly concerned with the reproach. “But where would be the excitement in that?” He grinned, looking like a naughty schoolboy. “Besides, there’s altogether too much room. There’s an aisle between the seats.”

  Magdalena looked back and forth between the king and his now blushing bride, and decided that this was not a conversation she wanted to get involved in. Luckily, His Majesty had other things on his mind. He turned to Magdalena. “It has a range of over three hundred miles?

  “Yes, Your Majesty. More still if it’s lightly loaded and carrying extra fuel.”

  “And you’ve contracted for more of them.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. We’ve committed to buying ten more as soon as they are ready. They won’t be exactly the same as these. We’ve been providing feedback on the performance and some problems have come up. We have a Jupiter Two and two Jupiter Threes waiting for engines now. TEA also owns a Neptune, which would be a Jupiter except that we could only get two matching engines. It’s good enough for cargo but not suitable for passengers. Also, it doesn’t have the range of a Jupiter.”

  “Excellent!” King Fernando said.

  They continued to discuss the ins and outs of the airline business, as well as the technology of the of the Jupiter-class passenger plane for a while. Then the king and queen took their leave. “It seems a very sound enterprise,” King Fernando said in parting. “But I don’t think the name is quite suitable. We’ll call it Royal Dutch Airlines, I think.”

  It took Magdalena a few minutes to figure out the true import of the king’s parting comment. Which was probably a good thing
because it wouldn’t have been a good idea to go off on King Fernando. Instead, as soon as she could find him, she went off on Herr van Bradt.

  * * *

  “Have you lost your mind?” were the first words out of Magdalena’s mouth when she found Herr van Bradt. “What is this business about renaming TEA Royal Dutch Airlines?”

  “His Majesty wants an airline,” Herr van Bradt said. “And the last time I looked my mind was right where it was supposed to be.”

  Perhaps going off on her boss and family patron hadn’t been the best idea she ever had either. “But we’re a USE corporation registered in the State of Thuringia-Franconia.” Magdalena was trying to sound reasonable but even she could tell she wasn’t doing a great job of it. “Look, Herr van Bradt. We’ve sweated blood getting TEA going. Now it’s paying off, why should we move it to the Netherlands and change the name?”

  “More than that His Majesty wants to buy the airline? He doesn’t insist on owning every share, but he does insist on controlling interest.”

  “So why doesn’t he start his own?” Maggie asked. “Why not pick on the Kitts? They’re an airline and an aircraft manufacturer all in one. At least according to Vanessa Holcomb.” She paused. There might be a way out of this. “I think aircraft may be one of the few technologies that the USE is unwilling to share. Would it even be legal for us to sell the airline to the Netherlands? After all, they’re neutral and it wasn’t all that long ago that they were the enemy. Can we sell airplanes to the Netherlands?”

  Herr van Bradt grinned at her, but shook his head. “Nice try, Magdalena. But it won’t work for a couple of reasons. First, His Majesty has already talked it over with Prime Minister Stearns and Emperor Gustav. Second, the reason they agreed is that Muscovy already has a dirigible and is working on a bigger one. France is working on aircraft in a little town south of Paris and Austria-Hungary stole one—well, a lot of the parts to one anyway. And your Herr O’Connor went with them and knows how the Monster was built.”