Grantville Gazette-Volume XI

by Eric Flint

  Leota grinned. "Plus, Jim and Lolly just found out that Lolly's in for a lovely few months of non-stop morning-noon-and-night sickness. Susannah Shipley dropped the diagnosis on them last week."

  "She's not?" Cora was wandering by with refills. "At her age!"

  "So much for keeping it under wraps for a couple more months." Victor Saluzzo's tone was very dry. "But as for Shae, I hadn't realized that there was anything more to it than a little tempest in a teapot with the Scouts. Maybe someone ought to talk to Archie Clinter again."

  Fleming snorted. "The real problem is that it's not dying down. If anything, it's escalating, and has been for six months. It's gotten bad enough that Alice Clements talked to Price Ellis. Families are worrying whether Johnny Lee's wife should be kept on as head nurse at Prichard's. God, what the hell do they expect her to do? Poison the old ladies? Kamala's worked there at the extended care center since before the Ring of Fire. She started the same year Johnny Lee took the job at the high school. She didn't want to be driving to Fairmont, much less Morgantown, and working shifts, with kids at home. Ellis gives her a pretty regular, reliable, schedule. And just where do they think that he can pluck another registered nurse from? Out of thin air?"

  * * *

  Leota Grover laid her cards down on the table. "Isn't there anything you can do, Frank, to make people be kinder to Kamala and the kids? Just a little more . . . gracious . . . I guess?"

  He shook his head. "Hell, it's not that I don't give a shit. But there's other stuff involved."

  "Which you're not going to tell me about, because I'm not in the army. Got it. Don't think you're getting off scot-free, though. I'm going to send Henry to talk to you."

  * * *

  Frank Jackson leaned back in his chair. "The shittiest part of it is that if I'd been there, I'd have probably had more sympathy with what Horton and von Dantz were doing than with what Anse and Noelle did. The guns that Blumroder and his cohorts–our noble fellow-citizens of the New United States in its constituent city of Suhl–have sold to high bidders who aren't us will most likely be used to shoot holes in our soldiers one of these days."

  Frank stood up, his hands crossed behind his back. "But in spite of that. I'm the general of this piss-poor army, and the worst thing that I can do is not back up civilian control. Not back up the rule of law. The fact is that according to the laws, Blumroder could do what he did."

  P.H. Johnson nodded. "I know. Even my own son Pat was looking the other way. He said as much in one of his letters to me."

  Frank started pacing. "Mike authorized Anse and Noelle. They did what they had to. Horton and von Dantz were being a couple of cowboys leading a lynch mob, the way Anse saw it. A real nasty lynch mob. Not to mention that Horton had pretty much just sat on his hands until von Dantz got to Suhl, so he was probably letting himself be used. As far as the army is concerned, Horton was killed while resisting lawful orders and that's got to be an end to it. I'm not going to have my guys, when they get into a shooting situation, worrying about whether I'm going to back them up. Or not back them up."

  "Where does this get us?"

  "I'm not going to make some sort of mealy-mouthed announcement that says, 'It wasn't all black and white. There were at least ten different shades of gray and Johnny Lee Horton was somewhere in the middle.' When you get right down to it, he resisted lawful orders, he was shot while leading a mutiny, and the New United States has its first traitor. There's not a damn thing I can do to soften what Kamala and her kids are going through. Not without making things worse for the country."

  * * *

  "So, in the long run, according to Johnson, Frank sees it as unavoidable collateral damage." Kyle Fleming put his knife down on his plate. "Not that those are words that Frank would use."

  Karyn Sue looked at her father. "What do those words mean, Daddy?"

  Lori thought a moment. She had thirty-five years of experience in interpreting the verbal universe to her daughter. "Those words say that sometimes when you do what you have to do, somebody else gets hurt. A bystander. Somebody on the sidelines. And you can't help it."

  Karyn Sue frowned. "Mr. Jackson isn't going to do anything?"

  Kyle nodded. "That's right."

  "No," Karyn Sue said. "That's wrong. Shae and Shaun aren't even grown up. Shaun used to come to Toddler Haven for day care, after Johnny Lee and Kamala moved back to Grantville. He was in my group for two years before he started kindergarten. Do you know what I think?"

  "What?" Lori asked.

  "I think that people are just being plain mean. And you're all letting them get away with it. It I let the kids in my group get away with picking on someone like that, Heather would fire me. I know she would. And she'd be right to do it."

  * * *

  "The sickest part of it all," Ned Paxton said the next day, "is that they're both right. Frank and Karyn Sue."

  P.H. Johnson nodded. "And there's not a damned thing that we can do."

  Cora plopped five cups of coffee down on the table. "Except that you haven't heard what Karyn Sue did. This morning."

  Kyle Fleming looked at her. Warily.

  Cora grinned. "She marched every single kid in her Toddler Haven group over to Prichard's Extended Care, all holding hands like a row of little ducklings as they paraded down the street, and asked the receptionist to call Kamala down to the lobby. And then she had every single one of the kids hug her."

  Victor Saluzzo started to smile.

  "While Karyn Sue told every adult standing around, in plain and simple words, that it was because people were being mean to Mrs. Horton."

  Saluzzo's smile faded.

  "Not that most people are likely to take what she did seriously." Cora looked at Kyle Fleming a little apologetically.

  "I know," he sighed. "They can always claim that Karyn Sue didn't understand because she's . . . like that old Christmas song Granny used to sing in the days before we all got politically correct. 'Johnny wants a pair of skates, Susy wants a dolly. Nellie wants a story book; she thinks dolls are folly. As for me, my little brain isn't very bright. Choose for me, old Santa Claus, what you think is right.' The gossips aren't likely to take Karyn Sue's notion of what's right very seriously. I'm sure her intentions were good, but maybe she's just made things worse."

  * * *

  "I just wanted to thank you." Kamala Horton stared at the phone. She'd been crying for two hours before she managed get her voice enough under control enough to pick it up and call Karyn Sue McDougal. "But . . . but I don't think you ought to do it again. Gary's in the army and you don't want to be getting your husband in trouble. I know he's up at the oil field in Wietze and you might think that's far enough away, but. . . . Karyn Sue, honey, the head guy up at the oil field is Quentin Underwood. I don't think that he'd be very . . . understanding . . . if he got it into his head that Gary was a sympathizer to what Johnny Lee did. Or something like that."

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then, "It doesn't have anything to do with Gary. Or with what Johnny Lee did. It's about the way people are treating you and Shae and Shaun."

  Kamala bit her upper lip. "Talk to your mom and dad, Karyn Sue. You don't want people to start treating Michael and Allyson the way they're treating Shae and Shaun. Believe me on this. You don't want them to do that."

  "I don't think that they would. Do you?"

  Kamala didn't know quite what to answer. Then she decided that she had to be honest. "Yeah, I do. Right now, I do think they would."

  Karyn Sue laughed. "Boy, do you ever need another hug."

  "Yeah," Kamala said. "I could use one. Believe me. And thanks again. But . . . maybe you had better just stay out of it. That's as fair as I can be to you. To Gary and your kids. And your folks. I don't want to make things worse by sucking other people–good people–down into my troubles."

  * * *

  "It's not as if I have a choice," Kamala said to Alice Clements. "Up-time, if something like this happened, I could move. Get a recomme
ndation from Price, take the kids, and find a job in some other town. Some other state, where nobody would ever have heard about it. But the way things, are, with the Ring of Fire, I'm stuck in Grantville. Even if they do get this medical school in Jena going, nobody's invited me to be part of it, and what's the point in going to Jena. The NUS army has people there, too. I expect that they'd be sure to let everyone know about Johnny Lee." She laughed a little. "So we'd be in the same kind of situation, just without modern plumbing. I guess I'm just grateful that Price isn't going to fire me. And if you're the one who persuaded him not to–which has to have been hard for you to do, with Jack volunteering to go back into the navy and go all the way up to Wismar to pilot one of those boats–I owe you a lot of thanks."

  "Maybe it will die down over time."

  Kamala shook her head. "I'm not counting on it. Everybody pretty much knows that the king of Sweden is winding up to a shooting war with the League of Ostend this fall. That'll mean patriotism and heroism and everything of the sort. People in town who aren't heroes and aren't ever going to be heroes will take it out by coming down on Shae and Shaun."

  "And on you."

  "Well, on me, too. But I'm the adult here." Kamala picked up a pen from the blotting pad on Alice's desk and twisted it in her fingers. "Since you're the business manager here at Prichard, I'll warn you now. Fair and square. If things ever develop in such a way that someone does offer me a real job out of town, someplace where there aren't any NUS soldiers to badmouth us, I'll take it. Plumbing or not. So fast you won't even see the blur as I go by. And it won't matter much to me who makes the offer."

  Lessons in Astronomy

  Written by Peter Hobson

  "Your Eminence, I'm fluent in Latin, German and Italian. My French is passable. My Greek is a little weak and I've forgotten most of the smattering of Hebrew the seminary inflicted on me." Father Scheiner knew he shouldn't be taking that tone with a prince of the church, but it was just so frustrating. So much knowledge locked away behind the wall of up-timer English. "And now I've got to learn English? Why can't you people speak a reasonable language? Or, at least write in a reasonable language?"

  "I'm sorry, Father Scheiner," Cardinal Lawrence Mazzare replied. "If we'd known we were coming, we'd have been better prepared."

  Christopher Scheiner noted the gentle reproof in the cardinal's tone, and the reminder that he probably failed to realize he had given. Cardinal Mazzare wasn't just a prince of the church. He was a prince of the church who had been put in his position by the hand of God. Yet none of that really penetrated Father Scheiner's frustration with the situation. He picked up a book and flipped through it. "This is supposed to be a basic astronomy text for the beginning student. I can't even understand most of these pictures. What is this Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram supposed to tell me? I can guess that luminosity, from the Latin lumen, is brightness, but what is a spectral class?"

  "Don't ask me. There's nine planets and a bunch of stars and that's about all I know."

  "Nine planets?" Scheiner shook his head in dismay. "What can you tell me about the extra three?"

  "The seventh one is Uranus. The name causes some unfunny jokes you'll appreciate when your English is better. The others are Neptune and Pluto."

  "Uranus. That's the Latin form of Ouranos, the Greek god of the sky. It's a reasonable name for a planet, I suppose." Scheiner paused. "But how do they know it's there? Diligent men have been looking at the sky for millennia, how was it missed?"

  "Father, I can't answer that question," Mazzare said. "However, in the next week or so Johnnie Farrell will be coming from Grantville. He's been an amateur astronomer for years and has a really good, up-time telescope. Hopefully, he can answer all your questions."

  * * *

  "Father Scheiner, there's an up-time man with a large box who says he's supposed to see you."

  "Thank you, Herr Reichter. Please ask him to come in."

  A small, rather stout man in his early sixties walked into the room. "Hi, there. You must be Father Scheiner. I'm Johnnie Farrell and this here's my telescope. I'll be happy to tell you what I can about astronomy."

  "I'm pleased to meet you, Herr Farrell." Scheiner walked over and shook Farrell's hand. "I have so many questions and my English is not good enough to get them from the books."

  "Well, I've got plenty of books and magazines to show you." Farrell beamed. "I can explain a lot that's in them and probably figure out the rest since I've been reading astronomy books for most of my life. I think I know something about it.

  "But first let me show you an indispensable tool for any astronomer." Farrell lifted the box onto a table, snapped several clasps, and opened the lid. "This is a Schmidt-Cassegrain eight-inch reflector with an equatorial mount and go-to. Just point this baby at three stars and it'll show you thirty-thousand other celestial objects just by pressing a few buttons."

  "I'm sorry, Herr Farrell. I didn't understand any of that."

  Farrell sighed. "I guess I'll have to start with the basics. This is a reflector telescope. It uses mirrors to collect the light."

  "An astronomer in Rome, Father Zucchi, devised a telescope that uses a mirror, but I have not seen one before. It does look rather strange. I think of telescopes as being long and thin, not short and wide."

  Farrell stroked his telescope fondly. "Okay, let me explain how this one works . . ."

  Father Scheiner listened to the explanation and found himself growing more confused. Mirrors, computers, the go-to . . . it all required more explanation "I think I understand how a telescope uses mirrors but it does not look like what I think of a telescope looks like."

  "Okay, Father, let's discuss telescopes. There's two main types . . ."

  More explanation, until he felt his head must be spinning. Light waves then photons, spherical aberration. "Just a minute, Herr Farrell, wave lengths of light? Light is a wave? And what is a photon?"

  "Look, we'll get into the nature of light in a little while. Let's not get sidetracked. I'm still explaining telescopes." Farrell continued with more unfamiliar terms and explanations.

  Scheiner could feel himself moving from puzzlement to frustration. "I thought you said that light came in waves. Now you say light is particles?"

  "Father, light's complicated. Sometimes it acts as a particle, sometimes it's a wave. I don't really understand how it works. A guy named Maxwell described light in four equations. Trouble is, those equations are calculus, which I don't know. Let's just stick with telescopes. I know telescopes. Anyway, what we got here is a Schmidt-Cassegrain, which is a different type of reflector. When the light enters the telescope, it goes through a corrector lens which fixes the spherical aberration."

  Scheiner interrupted. "So the light goes into this lens here . . ."

  Farrell seemed to be getting as frustrated as Scheiner was. "Hey, Father, don't touch the lens. This telescope is the only one of its kind in the world and it's irreplaceable. It'll take probably decades before technology is up to duplicating it. We'll have to baby this 'scope, which means no touching the glass. I'll let you use it, but I'm going to supervise you all the time."

  "If we use this tonight, can you show me Uranus?"

  "I'll just drop my drawers and show it to you now." Farrell blushed. "Oops, sorry, Father. I shouldn't be so crude."

  Scheiner couldn't hide the grin. "I now understand something that Cardinal Mazzare told me recently. I really want to see the planet Uranus. Can you show it to me tonight?"

  "Sorry, Father, but I can't. I don't know where it is and the go-to doesn't either."

  This was even more confusing. "I thought you said that one could just press some buttons and the telescope would point to several thousand different objects."

  Farrell blushed again. "Sure, sure, fixed objects, no problem. You want to look at stars, galaxies, nebulas, things that don't move, the go-to can find 'em. But for moving stuff, like planets and comets, the go-to doesn't work. It needs to know what the time and date is for those
and I can't tell it what the date is. Yeah, I know that it's May 15, 1635, but that doesn't help. The go-to won't use any dates before January 1, 1990."

  Scheiner pondered for a moment. "Can you give me any data on Uranus's orbit? Perhaps we can calculate its position."

  "I've got lots of old copies of Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines, I'm sure they'll give the right ascension and declination of Uranus for various dates. But those dates will be almost four hundred years in the future. What good will that do?"

  More unfamiliar terms. Scheiner did his best not to snap his question. "What, pray tell, is right ascension and declination? Or rather, since I can guess they're parts of a system of positioning, what is the basis for the system?"