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Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume VII

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Grantville Gazette.Volume VII: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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"Adsum, Domine. Here am I, Lord."


***

For when the lightning lightens, the thunder utters its voice, and the spirit enforces a pause during the peal.

(Apocrypha, The Book of Enoch 60:15)

John Grover, head of Voice of America and de facto head of radio communications in the USE, rubbed his eyes and massaged his aching temples. This weeks' staff meeting hadn't gone any better than the previous meetings had gone. Oh, they were making progress on the mundane stuff, things that just needed the application of some brute force and some material, like putting up lightning arresters and lightning rods in various locations in town. Likewise, those issues that just required the application of money were going pretty well; witness the report of the purchase of two more video cameras and the completion of the second studio setup.

Even the weekly Murphy report, detailing the things that had gone inexplicably wrong-such as the episode where someone took a glass of water into the studio and inadvertently poured it into the primary beta recorder, or the Marine radio man who for some unknown-but-very-stupid reason elected to save his rifle and powder instead of the radio when he fell into a creek-wasn't too bad. Every Murphy incident caused rules and procedures to either be amended or created. But the ability of people and situations to be act outside of those rules and procedures was ever astonishing.

John rubbed his eyes again.

Bottom line-the local cable TV team, the communications team and the Voice of America team all had enough up-time resources to keep going for a few years, more or less, unless a major disaster occurred. The problem was preparing for what would happen when those up-time resources began to burn up, blow up, or otherwise quit functioning and the spares were used up.

John fingered the screwdriver he kept in his shirt pocket, thinking hard. Everything depended on tubes. Everything. The sniping and the infighting at the staff meetings was starting to move from sarcastic to vitriolic. If they didn't make some real progress soon, he didn't know what he was going to do, especially since his only real tube-head, Gayle Mason, was stuck in the Tower of London.

Opening a drawer, John rooted around until he found his aspirin. Dry swallowing three of them, he looked at the clock on his desk. Six p.m. Time to leave. Maybe something would happen tomorrow… correction, maybe something good would happen tomorrow.


***

Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?

(King James Bible, Job 38:34-35)

Claude Yardley had been a power plant operator for a lot of years. He had torn apart his share of alternators and put the pieces back together. But he had never seen anything like this. He pushed back from the paper and debris covered table. "I'd say Murphy got to you again, John."

John snorted. "Yeah. He really got behind us on this one. This design should have been a non-starter. Look at this stuff." John gestured. "Wires stretched beyond their breaking points, coils ripped from their armatures, and we got what? 1000 Hz out of it?"

"Something like that." Claude looked at his notes. "3600 RPM router feeding a sixteen lobe alternator gives 960 Hz."

"We need seventy-five times more."

Claude pointed at what was left of the radio team's latest creation. "You won't get it this way. I understand why you came to me. Bill Porter and I probably know more about alternators than anyone else in the world at this point." He chuckled. "Not that that's saying much. But you need something like no alternator we've ever heard of. I think it was fictional."

John pushed the photo of the Brant Rock installation across the table.

Claude shook his head. "I don't care, John. Look, walk through it with me one more time. That thing is what? Five feet across?"

Nod.

"Okay. That makes it fifteen feet eight inches around. Times twelve is a hundred eighty-eight inches. Assume one inch coils around the rim. There's no way to modulate the coil less than it's full width, so if you assume that they alternate north and south, then you have eighty-four sine waves per rotation."

Nod.

"So, to get eighty thousand waves per second, you have to rotate the thing a thousand times per second, or sixty thousand RPM."

Nod.

"So, any one coil is going around a fifteen foot circumference a thousand times a second, or traveling fifteen thousand feet per second, or call it three miles a second, or something in the neighborhood of eleven thousand miles an hour. Just under mach twenty, in other words. And they say it was done in 1906?"

Nod.

"It's impossible." Claude shook his head. "It must have been a fake."

John pushed the photo across the table again.

"I don't care. I don't believe they had materials that would handle those stresses, and we definitely don't."

The room was quiet.

"John, I'm sorry," Claude said gently, "but I'm fresh out of ideas. I'm going home."


***

His lightnings enlightened the world: the earth saw, and trembled.

(King James Bible, Psalms 97:4)

Father Athanasius Kircher watched as John Grover wandered from one empty table to the next. For once, it wasn't that crowded in the Thuringen Gardens. John banged each table with his pewter mug. Curious, Father Athanasius began following him. Once he got close enough, he heard John mutter, "Too hard."

Now Father Athanasius was really intrigued. Most of the tables in the Thuringen Gardens were quite new, solidly built against the general gaiety of a popular tavern. Sturdy was not a description that did them justice.

John hadn't noticed the priest. He drained his mug and looked around the Gardens. "There!" He headed for a table in one of the back corners. Father Athanasius trailed behind.

The table was one of the up-time folding tables, matched up with metal folding chairs that were also up-time in origin. Having been around Grantville for some little time now, Father Athanasius was certain that they represented an unauthorized loan from a school, or church, or one of the "civic organizations" of Grantville.

John sat carefully in a chair and banged his mug against the table top. The priest saw that it was that strange wood-like substance called "masonite." Unlike the other tables in the room, it was not sturdy, and when struck by the mug, it flexed and boomed.

"Perfect." John carefully set his cup down on the floor, and centered his chair on the table. He pressed the center of the table firmly with the heel of his hand. It flexed.

"Yes." John leaned forward, and banged his head against the center of the table.

Shocked, Father Athanasius stepped forward and grabbed John by the shoulder. John stopped in mid-bang. "No, John!"

John looked up at him. "Oh, hi, Father A."

"Let me buy you another round, John." Father Athanasius sat down across from John. "We'll talk it through. Whatever the problem is, it should not drive you to self abuse."

"I've been beating my head against a wall at work," John said, somewhat truculently. "I might as well do it here as well. Maybe it will break an idea loose." Father Athanasius reserved comment, and just looked steadily at one of the men he thought of as a friend.

John slumped a little. His voice grew quieter. "You're a good man, Father." He sighed and his hand crept toward his shirt pocket. He started stroking the screwdriver he kept there. "But you can't bring Gayle back from the damned Tower of London, you can't bring all those jewelers back from Prague, and you can't push skills I don't have into these hands."

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