July 10
Grantville looked a lot different ever since the food crisis in '31 made a deep dent in ornamental gardening. Olivia sat on the back patio resting her eyes for a while on the two white rose bushes they'd kept, turning over in her mind the problem of cutting three verses of poetry down to two, and still bringing it to a clean ending. Finally, she decided the best thing was to leave it for a while, and turned her hands to the potato patch.
Finally the sun got her attention. The afternoon was getting on, and she hadn't gone off yet to Miller's Hardware for some string, or to Sternbock's in town to replenish the espresso. She scribbled a note to Carlos and the girls to let them know she'd be back around six, and left it by the drain board in the kitchen, weighed down with a salt shaker to make it stay put. It was so hot, she left the French doors in back open, with just the screen doors closed.
On the way out, she saw Will's pocket notebook lying on the dining room floor under the chair he'd sat in the night before. "Oh, fiddle!" The traffic around the high school would be a mess that time of day. Better to do the shopping first, then run it out to his place.
****
Olivia pulled up by the path to Will's cabin, intending to leave his notebook in the mailbox if he wasn't home. But she heard him all the way down where she was, talking to somebody, the loudest she'd ever heard him, maybe arguing. She parked and started up the path.
Next thing she knew, she was face-to-face with a man in a lavender coat. By the long, blond, curly hair, he was some kind of upper-class down-timer, but by the way he'd suddenly materialized from behind a bush and planted himself in her way, he didn't look friendly. She turned to run for the truck; if she could slam the door and hit the lock button with her elbow, she'd be able to drive off before he could do anything else. If he knifed a tire, there was always the pistol in the glove compartment.
Before she was halfway around, somebody else grabbed her from behind. She tried to grab the one she could reach and pull him in, so she could slam her knee into him. Then she'd only have the one behind her to fight; if she could shift her footing enough she could probably throw him. But that blond hair came off in her hands, and she saw a shaved head covered with scars and sores. Before she could get hold of him some other way, or just try a kick below the belt, his hand came up at her face. She heard a crackle, then smelled something obscenely sweet. The world spun around her. There was a sensation of dragging, and lifting, and dropping, and pain, like someone kicked her between her legs. Somewhere along the way she got her eyes open and saw only black, then a face, then nothing.
****
Much, much later, Olivia woke to a faint breeze. Her head pounded. She felt shaky. Her whole right side felt like pins-and-needles. Everything was spinning. Light, what there was, came from somewhere on the far end of a crooked passage. By the texture of the rock all around her and over her head, there was only one place she could be; this far in, though, there were glittery crystals. How in hell had she gotten here?
With her free hand she touched her body, and felt only chilled flesh, not clothing. She was shaking, she was so cold. She cried for a long while.
Carlos would explode in fury when he found out.
I . . .
God, I feel stupid, leaving my gun in the glove compartment like that.
She got up on her hands and knees, still too shaky to balance upright. Her legs and hips and middle hurt. One arm was bloody from a slice, and there was more blood on the cave floor, but it didn't seem to be bleeding now. Must have gotten slammed into a sharp edge, being hauled up here. She crawled toward where the breeze was coming from, and reached an opening. In the twilight she discovered that she was right above the road that slammed into the wall, if hundreds of feet was right above. The mine buildings below told her for sure.
Whatever way she'd gotten here, the rock shop had likely rented the equipment to the wrong people. But there was no climbing gear here now. Try free climbing? Not on that wall.
Just behind where she'd been lying on some kind of mat, there were camping supplies piled on a rickety table: food, water, toilet paper, a small oil lamp and striker, and a chemical toilet behind that. Her framed photograph from Gozo was standing up on top of it, leaning against the cave wall-what the hell? Never mind, that could wait. Drink some water right away, eat something. That was a start.
Who were these maniacs? She cried, and passed out again.
Evening
When Will Oughtred came to tell Carlos and Olivia of the mad sensation their stolen gemstones had ignited among the rich and mighty of Europe, and the commodity of influence and power they'd become, there was a police car out front, along with a fire truck and eight or nine other cars and trucks. The house was dark. In the wisps drifting across the headlight beams came the smell of charred wood. The neighbors were telling the police they'd seen a couple of strangers go around back, one of them wearing a fancy purple coat, and a while later they'd heard a smoke alarm go off and seen flames coming up over the back patio. They'd caught the blaze right away, and fought it back with a garden hose while the firemen were on the way.
Carlos was standing just outside the door with a flashlight in his hand, pointing out something to a police technician inside. Will came and stood by his shoulder, and saw; the house was a shambles. The big portrait of Olivia was gone entirely, leaving empty wall above the fireplace.
Olivia could not be found anywhere, only her note, and it was long past the hour she'd written of. There was nothing to be said, until Officer Neubert came to him with a notepad in his hand.
"James Rothrock called on me at home today . . . foster son of the earl of Arundel, residing at Padua . . . What was it we spoke of? Other than some difficulty with letters, he sought to know the origin of a gem called the Ring's Fire, reputedly forged in the cataclysm . . . No, Officer, stolen property of the Villareals, found all-unknowing and innocently sold . . . "
Chief Richards arrived just as Will finished telling everything he could think of that might be remotely useful. Richards listened to Neubert's clipped summary, then went to the radio in his patrol car and issued his first orders. Within fifteen minutes the passes through the Ring were all guarded, and VOA was broadcasting the call for volunteers to join in the search for Olivia. The chief brought writing materials from his car, and asked for a sketch of Rothrock.
At the cemetery above Grantville
James Rothrock stopped his furious pacing on the graveled path and matched Bennet glare for glare. Even in the dimness up here, he could make out the black eye and the gash on the man's face easily enough; he had no doubt there were more scratches beneath Bennet's clothing. He put as much fury into his tone as it was possible to project without raising his voice so that it could be heard at a distance. "Do you have the least idea how stupid you are, George? We can never return to our lodgings!"
"What? Why ever not?"
"Why not? Because of the hue and cry rising all around us! If I hadn't heard a radio blare as I passed an open window . . . Have you entirely lost your wits? You and that scruffy little man you hired were to do no more than keep watch, to distract and delay anyone who might blunder into the meeting with Oughtred! But seizing her and stealing her away, and then going to her house afterward and rampaging through it to make it blindlingly clear that she didn't merely forget the time on some ordinary errand! You have kicked open a raging hornets' nest! I can no longer appear on the street in daylight; my name is heard everywhere and Oughtred's sketch of my face is on the television! Our business here could have already been concluded successfully; there is no difficulty with Oughtred beyond the unexplained missing courier. But now . . . George Bennet, what have you done with Olivia Villareal?"
"I did nothing wrong." Bennet's tone could have belonged to a naughty child.
"Her family and her fellow citizens disagree."
"So, pleasuring myself, like a man should, you'd begrudge? James, she is so much like a real goddess."
Rothrock's bowels clenc
hed in terror. "You raped her?"
"So? Did you see how she was attired? She's a whore! I eliminate the mistress . . ."
"By Mars and Janus! Thor and Odin! She's not Oughtred's mistress! Stripping her! Ravaging her-Hellfire, George, this is beyond madness! Olivia Villareal is a married woman, a greatly respected and loved one! You should hear what the radio announcer said about her! She's an up-timer, George! They all dress that way, it doesn't make her a whore anymore than the queen was a whore, God rest her . . ."
"Ha! It wasn't ravaging. We gave her opium and she was not inhibited after that. Besides, she was stupid enough to come."
"Did you leave her clothing? Did you leave her food? What about water? Who else did you share her with? Is she even alive? Damme, you were to do nothing but keep whoever came from discovering the meeting with Oughtred, and if at all possible, without noticing that they were being deliberately fended off!"
"Rothrock, you're an ass. Of course she is a whore and a witch. Why should I listen to you? You have been seduced by this place-only try to put me off."
"Put you off? Put you off!? You have overthrown everything Oughtred achieved, everything Arundel hoped for, and put an end to any hope that we could stay and profit by the gemstones we found. No, they are not Ring's Fire, but they would have been enough for us."
"Damnation, Rothrock! Listen to me, you are nothing but a hasty witted, impertinent, wet behind your ass, jolt-headed, bastard if you think exactly why Arundel wants Oughtred is the reason he gave you. We shall take his Ring's Fire. I do not much care what you think. Then we can sink Oughtred in that lake and tell Arundel we could not find him."
"What? Bastardy is nothing to what you propose now! Murder? Robbery? And as to telling Arundel anything, my letter recounting the meeting with Oughtred is well on its way by now."
Bennet was no longer listening, he only ranted on. "I'll buy myself a Genovese countess! You can buy yourself a damned pedigree and move to damned Spain and turn damned Catholic and claim Arundel as your rightful father. I'm still going to kill Oughtred's damned mistress and take my half of the money."
Rothrock's mind whirled in chaos. He could not imagine why Bennet had called the woman a goddess-then he remembered the painting at the palazzo in Padua. The resemblance to the television picture of the missing woman was astonishing. But a blinding realization drove that thought right out of his head. He suddenly was certain of where she must be.
He had one final word as he turned and started down the hill. "George Bennet, if you place any value upon your life, be out of Grantville within the hour and never stop until you are beyond the borders of this state. I shall not be far behind, after I do what I can to repair what you have done, if that is still possible."
Highways of the Sky
Written by Iver P. Cooper
In late twentieth-century America and Europe, freight and passengers are transported by autos and trucks, trains, ships and aircraft. However, there was once a dream that lighter-than-air airships, capable of powered flight, could play an important role in the transport network. Both Kevin Evans and Kerryn Offord have explored the possibility that airships could be built at a relatively early date in the 1632 universe, and carve out a niche for themselves.
In this article, I will consider what routes an airship of given capabilities can fly, and how the choice of route can compensate for the deficiencies that can be expected in early airships, i.e., that they are under-powered and have limited fuel capacity.
I'll take the High Road, You Take the Low Road . . .
At the time of the Ring of Fire, trade routes linked together Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Some routes were by land, others by sea, and these could be in competition. The sea route between Europe and India required circumnavigating Africa, and thus was much longer than the overland route across the Middle East. However, it was also safer (despite navigation errors, storms and pirates), faster (a ship in a good wind was several times faster than a train of pack mules), and able to accommodate larger volumes of cargo (it takes a lot of pack mules to carry as much as a single large merchant ship).
An airship can travel at least as fast as a watership and can take an overland route (at least if there are no mountains in the way). It is not vulnerable to piracy (except when it lands) and it can safely sail at night (except in mountainous regions).
Since airships can travel over land just as easily as over sea, they are likely to first make their commercial mark on those trade routes for which the land route is much shorter.
The shortest distance between two points on the Earth's surface is a great circle route, and I'll explain how to calculate that distance in the next section. Unless a mountain barrier blocks the way, an airship can fly a great circle route (although there are reasons that we will reveal that it might want to deviate from such a route). Waterships are more constrained, since any intervening land forces them to find a way around.
To calculate the length of a sea route, use the Portworld calculator:
www.portworld.com/map/
Be sure to disallow the Panama and Suez Canals!
For example, the sea distance from Amsterdam to Chennai is 12,634 miles (and that's for a modern ship, that isn't worrying about catching the right winds). That's more than twice the great circle distance (4,899 miles)!
There are similar advantages to flying from Europe to China, or from Europe to the west coast of the Americas (e.g., Spain to Peru).
That said, airships can compete on the normal oceanic shipping routes, too. If they have enough fuel and engine power, they can behave like steamships, more or less ignoring the wind (although the wind will have more effect on any airship than it would on a water-bound steamship, because the airship doesn't have an underwater section to confer lateral resistance if the wind is coming cross-course). If the airship needs to conserve fuel, then it behaves like a hybrid sail-steam watership, powering through regions of neutral or unfavorable wind (horse latitudes, doldrums) and taking advantage of favorable winds.
Route Selection: Great Circle, Rhumb Line and Composite Routes
Since the Earth is (more or less) spherical, the shortest path between any two points on the surface is a great circle route. The great circle is defined by the intersection of that surface with a plane containing the origin, the destination, and the center of the earth.
If you have the longitude and latitude, you may calculate the great circle distance using the Great Circle worksheet on my spreadsheet.
However, it's nice to be able to actually see the route displayed graphically. If you have Google Earth, use that. Draw a line with the ruler between your origin and destination; that line is a great circle route. You can see where it crosses coastlines, or particular latitudes or longitudes. In addition, if you save the line as a path, you can right-click on the pathname in the sidebar and pick "show elevation profile." This is by far the easiest way to figure out what is the minimum altitude you need to fly at to avoid an embarrassing tete-a-tete with a mountain (the mountain always wins).
If for some reason you can't use Google Earth, you may try use Great Circle Mapper
www.gcmap.com/.
Prior to the Ring of Fire, it was impractical to sail a great circle route. On such a route, the course (the angle of the ship's track relative to true north) is continuously changing. You must adjust your heading depending on where you are. However, pre-RoF navigation capabilities were gravely limited. Latitude was determined by sightings of the sun at noon, or stars at night, and the accuracy was no better than a quarter-degree. Longitude was determined by dead reckoning and could be wildly in error (tens of degrees!) if you had spent a long time at sea.
I discussed the possible improvements in the art Sof marine navigation in my two part article, "Soundings and Sextants" (Part I, "Navigational Instruments Old and New" in Grantville Gazette 14; Part II, "Celestial Navigation Methods," in 15). Ultimately, of course, we will have sophisticated sextants and accurate chronometers, but it will take ye
ars, if not decades, for these to become commonplace.
Moreover, since an airship travels substantially faster than a watership, the time between celestial observations is more of a factor, and there are obvious problems with measuring the elevation of a celestial object above the horizon when you are in the air.
The Hindenburg didn't in fact rely much on celestial navigation. Rather, it used the combination of a gyroscopic compass and dead reckoning. If it were traveling in still air, its position could be accurately calculated from its airspeed and heading. Wind could be assessed by flying a special pattern; every hour, head 45 degrees off course, first to port and then to starboard, and take drift readings. (Dick 60). The zeppelin was equipped with a searchlight and a telescope; water ripples or landmarks below were studied to determine the ships angle of drift (the angle between its heading and its course). (Grossman).
Prior to RoF, the standard navigational practice was either to follow a coastline (or other landmarks), or to sail a rhumb line (loxodrome). The latter means to sail with a constant compass heading. Even that had its difficulties, as it was difficult to correct compasses for magnetic deviation or variation, but at least at night the Pole Star provided a check on the accuracy of your compass reading. Even so, navigators preferred whenever possible to "run down a line of latitude," that is, sail directly east or west, as that way the noon sun sightings could be used to verify that they were still on course.
Even after the introduction of the sextant and chronometer, mariners didn't follow a perfect great circle route even when the winds were not an issue. For one thing, taking a great circle path could force the ship into high latitudes with stormy weather. Hence, even modern sailors sometimes follow a "composite" route in which they truncate the great circle at a particular maximum latitude, thus following a great circle route at the ends and a rhumb line (of constant latitude) in the middle.
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