TITLE: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVIII (ring of fire)

by Eric Flint

  "Allan…"

  "That boy out there wasn't scared that he almost died. He wasn't vandalizing the church or pulling a prank. He was applying math. It didn't work so he was going to show that stupid, cheap ruler… If he had the metal one I gave him this wouldn't have happened."

  "He was making a catapult with that ruler. Owen was right to have taken it from him. Imagine the chaos if every kid made a catapult in class… "

  "… a trebuchet… " Allan added.

  "Whatever! I don't care if he was making a nuclear reactor! He was

  …"

  "Blaise, the boy who is sitting outside your office right now, the same boy who is in this encyclopedia, was deriving equations to relate load arm length to trajectory. I have the math he was doing in my classroom."

  "He was misusing school property! Like the time he took apart the computer in class… "

  "Okay, fine, he was 'misusing' an expensive metal machinist's ruler which, by the way, I gave him. He's taught himself algebra and now he's working on calculus, Archie. He wasn't doing it because he wanted to get into college or because Dad wouldn't let him have the car if he didn't score above 1200 on the SAT. Learning and creating are what he does. You put him in a regular classroom then you're right, Archie, he should have broken his neck up there. He would be better off than he is in that classroom."

  "Allan, you're being melodramatic…"

  "You remember another kid who wasn't so lucky?"

  "Allan," Archie looked up at Allan with pleading eyes, "Don't. Don't even… "

  "We failed them. We failed him. He killed himself because someone thought it was better to put him with kids his own age and pretend he wasn't writing symphonies. Are we going to do that with Blaise, Mary and Jacqueline? We know what Blaise is capable of. And his sister, what about her? She's writing books and she's eight."

  "Allan…"

  "We don't need school board meetings and committees. We don't need to convince a mother that her boy is just like everyone else. We don't need to lie to anyone. The Ring of Fire gave us a brand new start."

  "We didn't lie, Allan. It was decided that… it would have been better for him… Allan… David Weller was different. He. .. he… "

  "Maybe we could have lied about David Weller and pretended it was a fluke and now that he's dead who's to say what he was or wasn't? He didn't get his name in an encyclopedia. He didn't have a chance. We didn't give him a chance. Owen didn't think the boy was gifted, then blamed his 'gift' for the suicide."

  "Enough!"

  The death of David Weller was a sore issue with Archie. Allan knew that. David Weller's grave came through the Ring of Fire. His parents and family didn't.

  "When will we admit to knowing we were wrong?"

  "Allan," Archie sighed, "you are not being fair."

  "Fair?" Allan whispered back like a judgment of guilt.

  No one likes to find a child dead. Finding a child dead by his own hand was far worse.

  "We were trying to make the best out of…" Archie closed his eyes again. "We did our best, Allan."

  "I don't blame you. They dumped him in your lap because the school board was too afraid to deal with it themselves. They asked me to put together a few math sheets for him. Keep him busy, I was told. Keep him busy and quiet."

  "Allan…"

  "No one likes the gifted. We had the Special Olympics and everyone clapped as the 'special' people staggered across the finish line or threw a ball. A ten year old writes symphonies and we hush him up and tell him to be like everyone else. Not again, Archie. Never. I won't hush him up. There is a genius waiting outside your office right now. Let's do better this time."

  Allan stood and left.

  Archie stared down at the book. The picture was covered by the piece of notebook paper but the name was not.

  BLAISE PASCAL (1623-1662)

  Archie looked down at the end of the entry.

  Whether we look at his pure mathematical or at his physical researches we receive the same impression of Pascal; we see the strongest marks of a great original genius creating new ideas, and seizing upon, mastering, and pursuing farther everything that was fresh and unfamiliar in his time. We can still point to much in exact science that is absolutely his; and we can indicate infinitely more which is due to his inspiration.

  With something that could be tears in his eyes he looked up at the walls of his office.

  He remembered when he had first accepted the position as principal. He had held it in his mind like he had held his first child.

  He remembered how his shoulders had gone back and the smile that refused to leave his face. He remembered how proud he had been.

  Now, looking at the pieces of paper on the walls of his office from places that probably wouldn't exist, ever, he remembered the opposite moment.

  He remembered finding a boy hanging from a pipe in the boy's washroom on the second floor.

  The tears in his eyes were real now.

  ***

  Julie hated being right.

  Of course, she loved it too. Her greatest successes had come from being right when everyone else had been wrong.

  "Tell me I didn't waste your time." Julie sighed, the crossbow dangling from her hand.

  Chief Matheny looked around the room. Stepping into it was beyond possibility without a wrecking bar and explosives. Someone, a very young and dangerous someone, had carefully planned this room to hold everything it contained and still allow a small body to worm its way in and breathe.

  "Swing a cat, hell," Chief Matheny whispered. "There's not enough room in here to think about swinging something." His eyes danced around the room.

  "Some of this stuff looked… dangerous. I called you right away."

  "How was this allowed?" Chief Matheny asked quietly. "How did he get those manuals on electrical contracting and how… how does an eleven year old boy read them then… are those the electrical blueprints he's got there? Damn. And how was it that he didn't electrocute himself when he did that?" Chief Matheny looked at the wall.

  "Chief?" a firefighter asked from just over his shoulder.

  "… This is what we are going to do. First, I want the power shut off to this entire building while I try to figure out what that boy was trying to do to that junction box and outlet. Then, I want everything in this room dismantled and removed from this room. This is a hotel, not a research lab. People live here and they could have died here, Julie. That's a container of hydrochloric acid. Either someone has a pool somewhere with a missing container of pool acid or young Blaise found a meth-lab. I don't think there are pools big enough.. . if he got his hands on pool acid, what has he got in those bottles. ..?"

  "Where do you want us to put everything, Chief?" a firefighter asked.

  "In the shed behind the firehouse." Chief Matheny turned and fixed Julie with a stare that made her back up a step. "That boy is going to need to be as close to emergency response as I can get him. Your job, Officer Drahuta, is to protect children from the predations of adults, correct?"

  Julie nodded.

  "Keep the boy away from me until I control my temper. Then I suggest you find someone to protect the town of Grantville from the predations of this boy. I have a book with some color pictures in it back at the firehouse he needs to see and I agree with Bill. Keep his little ass away from the power station until someone teaches him that you do not do that to a junction box in a structure with people sleeping in it!"

  The silence was profound.

  No one had ever heard Chief Matheny shout. They did know that Chief Steven Matheny hated fires. Even small, well-tended ones.

  ***

  Blaise hated that ruler.

  He hated it with an intensity that Satan must save for mankind.

  Tears dripped in fearful, trembling streams from angry eyes.

  The ruler had been off by at least a thirty-second of one of those God cursed things called inches. The metric system, invented by the French of course, was better. The metric system w
ouldn't have failed him.

  The angle was measured perfectly. His calculations were flawless.

  It should have worked! He had been wrong. Wrong!

  Because of that damn ruler…

  Blaise shook himself. Or, rather, someone else did.

  "Snap out of it!" Mr. Sebastian shook him. "We'll go to my room. I think you've been punished enough just by sitting here all this time."

  "At least a thirty-second of an inch." Blaise glared up at Allan Sebastian with tears in his eyes. "I hate that ruler! I had to prove it was wrong, not me!"

  Allan Sebastian leaned in close. So close his nose almost touched Blaise's.

  "No mathematical equation is worth dying for," he whispered harshly. "Do you understand?"

  "Yes, Mr. Sebastian." The world's greatest mathematician nodded.

  "Your punishment is… I want ten rulers to replace the plastic one you broke. They will be accurate to at least a thirty-second of an inch… no! One sixty-fourth of an inch. Ten, Blaise. I want ten. You will make them. I want them all by the end of the week. Understand? Whatever else you have to do, whatever other punishments, that one is mine. You want my help? I need yours."

  "Yes." Blaise nodded and stood up. He didn't expect the slap. It came, at least to him, from out of absolutely nowhere.

  "You fool!" Jacqueline would have hit him again had Allan not grabbed her arm and spun the girl about and wrapped her in his arms. "Let me go! I will kill him! He is my brother! I have the right to kill him! What would Father say?"

  "Hold her!" Blaise begged Mr. Sebastian. His sister had hit him with her prized notebook. Blaise knew, though didn't fully appreciate, that his sister saw writing in much the same way he saw mathematical equations.

  For his sister to hit him with her notebook meant she was very angry, possibly worse.

  "Fool!" Jacqueline screamed, tears in her eyes.

  ***

  Jacqueline loved her brother.

  She had waited and watched all day as Blaise was berated and shouted at. One thing she knew without any uncertainty. The adults hadn't been merely angry. They had been scared too. Her brother had almost died.

  She loved him even if some fool book declared him the world's greatest mathematician, which had caused something of a panic in their father's circle. Because of that stupid book they had been sent fleeing from Paris.

  She loved her brother enough to want to kill him because she would have very much hated to see him dead.

  ***

  Archie hated making this kind of decision.

  He looked at the eleven rulers on his desk.

  "That one was the most difficult." Blaise pointed at the last ruler he laid on Archie's desk.

  Allan laughed. It was a short, quick laugh.

  "This one," Blaise pointed at the first ruler he had put down, "is the best, I think. If there are to be twelve of these inches in a foot then one should use the base twelve system to number the units. I could do one in base two…"

  Allan raised his hand. Blaise subsided but only barely.

  "Okay, this is what we'll do," Archie began firmly; his words humming with official tones. "After Christmas break I'll make you the gifted… the GATE teacher. Owen won't like it, but tough. Okay? I said it. Don't say a thing, Allan. I don't want that boy's name mentioned again. I don't have the time to remember what for all intents and purposes never was."

  "You are talking of me?" Blaise asked.

  "No," Jacqueline snapped. "not everything is about you. He means David Weller."

  "I'll put Jacqueline in your class with Mary Timm. Just don't.. . "

  "How did you learn about him, Jackie?" Allan asked.

  Jacqueline wasn't sure if she liked being called Jackie. It made her name sound all American.

  "Logan showed me his grave. She told me about them. She told me all about him. He would make a good story."

  " No!" Archie spun about. His eyes were looking for a taller person, presumably older, to shout at. He almost didn't look down at Jacqueline. "I mean, I would rather… you did not. Besides, to do the story right you would need to talk to the person who found him. I know he won't speak to you. Hear me?"

  Archie turned back to Allan. "You win, okay? What else do you want? Huh? You're the GATE teacher now. You won. Two eighth grade math classes in the morning then you get them. All of them. Okay? All I ask is that we forget the past. Finally. Can we do that? Can we…"

  Archie turned to go then stopped. He looked about frantically.

  "Mary? Where's Mary?"

  "Upstairs." Jacqueline whispered, "She is in the boy's room. She is looking for ghosts on the glass."

  Archie stared at the door leading out of Allan's classroom.

  "I'll go get her, Archie."

  "No," Archie said softly. "I will."

  With that he turned and faced Jacqueline with a look he might have hoped looked stern and forbidding. Jacqueline saw something else.

  "I normally don't talk to eight-year-olds like this, but I will now. Do not write about David Weller. Do not write his story. If you do I will expel you and you will have to buy all that paper you use."

  Jacqueline clutched her notebook closer to her.

  "Can I write a story about the death of Fluffy Bunny? I can write a book…"

  Archie raised his hand. "Deal."

  He shook her hand and left in search of Mary Timm.

  The upstairs boy's room had large windows.

  ***

  Jacqueline loved human emotions.

  She collected them like a painter collects pigments, as a warrior collects scars and stories.

  Now, for the first time, young Jackie wasn't so certain of her love of those things.

  She had, in her short life, never seen desolation before. She wasn't sure if she could write David Weller's story now that she saw what it might mean.

  "Are you okay, Jackie?"

  Jacqueline plummeted into Allan's arms.

  "Jackie?" he asked.

  "Promise me." She prayed the prayer of all artists, punctuated by tears. "Promise me that when I die you won't try to forget about me."

  "I won't. I promise."

  Quintessentially Blonde

  Virginia DeMarce

  Grantville, January 1635

  "Why are you asking, Missy?" Debbie Jenkins asked.

  "You know Pam Hardesty. In the going-to-be-a-librarian-someday classes with me. She's thinking about when she comes to get married. If she does. And what she's going to tell a respectable down-time man about that blank spot on her birth certificate. If she should marry one. A respectable down-time man, that is. Not that he's asked her, yet. If there was one on the horizon. So I thought, maybe… Well, everyone knows what Velma Hardesty was like, so maybe nobody knows. But I thought that maybe you and Dad had picked up some gossip back then. About who her father was, I mean. Or might have been."

  "If even Velma knew." Debbie could be a little catty at times.

  "Someone else had that tow-blond hair like Pam's," Chad Jenkins said.

  Debbie raised her eyebrows.

  "Cory Joe has it. Her brother," Missy pointed out.

  "He's obviously not her father," Debbie said. "Cory Joe was only two when Pam was born."

  "Besides Cory Joe," Chad said. "George Trimble."

  "You're right." Debbi nodded. "George Trimble and all three of his sons, before they went prematurely gray. And George's mother. Mary Margaret Lang, she was. She just died last year."

  Chad folded his newspaper and put it down. "Betty Mae Trimble's boys had it too-the Lunds, George's nephews. It ran all through those Langs. Harry and Tom Lund both had to get married. Either one of them would have been perfectly capable of it."

  Debbie nodded her head. "I'd put my money on Rodney Trimble, though. If I were a betting woman."

  "You know what?" Missy said.

  "What?"

  "They've all gone prematurely gray. Every single one of them. More like prematurely white. Pam is not going to be pleased at the
thought that she's likely to have snow white hair by the time she's forty."

  February 1635

  Pam Hardesty climbed the steps to the assisted living center. She hadn't wanted to come, really. But after Missy told her what she had gotten from her parents, she couldn't seem to let it go. Mr. Trimble might be the easiest one to talk to. He hadn't married for, oh, years and years after she was born, and his wife was from California. She might not be so uptight about past history as Harry Lund's widow was likely to be.

  If she didn't learn anything from Rodney Trimble, maybe she would screw up her courage and talk to Tom Lund next. His first wife had died in 1632 and his new wife was German. Past history for her, too. Harry Lund was dead. No way did she intend to tackle his widow Cheryl about it. Ever. She'd been in the same high school class as Jonathan Lund, Harry's son. His mom was a holy terror.

  The only thing was that Rodney Trimble had been in the army. He might not have been around at the right time, no matter what Missy's mom thought.

  But he might know something, even so. All the people who had this kind of hair were his cousins on the Lang side. And even if he got mad at her for coming, he was crippled up real bad, everyone said. So bad that he had to be in the center. His wife couldn't take care of him at home, any more. He wasn't going to hurt her.

  ***

  But it wasn't that hard.

  It was sort of like looking into a mirror, except that his hair was snow white.

  When she said her name, he just looked at her for a while. Then he said, "Well, I guess Velma got it wrong when she decided to collect child support off the books from the lawyer who handled her divorce from Joe Lang."

  Then he said, "I'm sorry I said that about your mother."