Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette Volume 24

So it was that I set out for the power plant with Jurgen Neubert and Rick McCabe. Rick would have been enough, but Chief Frost wanted Jurgen along for the experience. By the time the evening shift began to arrive, we were all hidden away. Scott and I were in an upper room he called the steam project office, a room cluttered with drawings and books, while I had Rick and Jurgen waiting behind a closed door across the hallway.

The guard at the gate phoned us when Martel checked in, and then Scott gave him ten minutes before phoning the machine shop and asking for Martel. Two minutes later, the Frenchman came into the office.

"Charles Martel?" I asked. He was a small man, dark haired and thin.

" Monsieur? " he asked, looking puzzled at the sight of me.

"You left Paris in May, and you arrived in Grantville on or before the fifth day in June. Why would a Paris locksmith be in such a hurry to come to Grantville?"

Charles gave a weak smile. "Ah, c'est comme sa. Un, a man in Paris give me un cadinas, a lock. Il a dit, he say it is from here. I am un maitre serrurier, quel est le mot, master locksmith? I never see such a lock before, so I come to here."

"How did a lock from Grantville come all the way to Paris and to you?"

" Je ne sais pas, " Charles said. "A man, he come and he give it for me. Il a dit, if you want learn this thing, go to Grantville."

"So you came five hundred miles in less than thirty days. I'll bet you didn't travel on the Lord's day, so you came at least twenty miles a day. You didn't carry that great big Bible of yours on your back, who paid for the horses? Surely a locksmith can't afford to abandon his family to run halfway across Europe."

The look on his face shifted from confidence to fear, but he said nothing. I glanced to the doorway, checking to see if Rick and Jurgen were in place.

"And your family, why did Cardinal Richelieu throw them in prison? Did he do it to force you into his service? Did he pay for the horses? What did he ask you to do when you got here?"

"Cardinal Richelieu," he said, and then spat. " Il est un diable. He did say that I only need make the petites choses to save my woman and my girl."

"Just little things," I repeated. "Like telling that Franconian jager where to shoot?"

" Je ne sai pas who did shoot on the insulators. I just send a letter expliquant les insulators."

Scott Hilton had kept his silence, but now he spoke. "You almost killed Franz Schneider!"

"I not want to make bad to anyone," he said, with a sigh, letting his head drop. " Tout est perdu, " he added, and then exploded out the door.

As I turned to follow, Rick was on the floor holding his gut where Charles had butted him. Jurgen disappeared down the steps at the end of the hall as I passed Rick. I joined in the chase, and the next minute was crazy. Charles Martel may have been a small man, but he was fast.

As I came out into the hall where the new steam engines were being built, Martel was halfway up a ladder to an overhead walkway. A siren sounded as Jurgen started up the ladder. "Attention, achtung, stop, halt." It was Scott's voice coming through a speaking machine so it was louder than life.

I started for the ladder, but Jurgen was already there, so I stopped. Martel would have to come down somewhere if he was to get out of the building. It seemed that the best thing to do was to follow him from below.

The catwalk along the top of the hall rang as Martel ran, and then he started across the bridge that spanned the hall to hold up the crane. There was a little cabin on the bridge right above the hook, and before Jurgen was halfway to the bridge, Martel was in the cabin and the bridge was moving. It did not move quickly, but it moved toward Jurgen fast enough that Jurgen retreated to the safety of the ladder as the bridge came at him. At the same time, the cabin and the great hook moved away from the catwalk and the hook began to drop.

A woman's voice rang out through the speaking machine. "Someone kill the six-hundred-volt power," she said. The moving crane drifted to a stop, with the hook swinging ponderously below it, coming close to the spinning flywheel of the new engine with each swing. Jurgen warily climbed back onto the catwalk and began edging toward the crane as Scott and Rick came out beside me.

"That was close," Scott said, as we stood watching the crane.

"What?" I asked.

"If he'd kept going, lowering the hook and coming this way, he could have hit Unit 6. If he'd hooked the flywheel while it was running, he could have wrecked the crane and the engine. Good thing Nissa noticed the threat and killed the motor generator set."

"How'd he know how to work the crane?" Rick asked, as Jurgen stepped onto the catwalk that led along the beam toward the crane cabin.

"We do a lot of cross training," Scott said. "We don't want to be stuck with just one person who can…"

He fell silent as Martel bolted from the little cabin above the hook, making for the opposite end of the bridge from Jurgen. There was no catwalk at that end, just a narrow ledge along the south wall of the building. As Martel walked along the ledge, he was sharply outlined against the windows behind him.

"He'll not get down from there easily," I said.

Scott scanned the wall. "See that loop of chain at the east end? It works the windows, he could shinny down." He ran for the bottom of the chain just as Martel began pulling up on it.

The chain rose up out of reach just before Scott got there. As Martel pulled the chain, it turned a wheel at the top. The wheel turned a shaft that pulled the tops of the windows inward while their bottoms opened out. I didn't understand what was happening at first, but Martel was letting the chain out the window behind him.

" Va au diable, vous tous! " Martel called, as he began backing out the window.

I turned to run for the outside door, but that was at the west end of the hall, and Martel was escaping to the east. Rick and I made it to the door together, and he beat me around the corner of the building to the south. A row of great wooden boxes separated the plant from the Buffalo Creek, with clouds of fog rising from three of them accompanied by a sound like a waterfall. I came around the corner of the building just in time to see Martel jump to the ground and flee toward the creek between two of the boxes.

Scott Hilton came around the east corner of the plant running toward us, and as we met, Jurgen's head appeared in the open window above. The three of us on the ground followed Martel between the great boxes, but when we arrived at the creek, it wasn't obvious which way to go. The creek was shallow, Martel could have crossed it, but he could just as easily have gone upstream or down.

We split up, but there were too many places to hide and it was already getting dark in the shade of the ring wall, although the sky was still bright. We never did find Martel, even after we went back inside and organized every man the plant could spare for a search. I learned that the giant boxes were cooling towers, even though they weren't towers. I learned that the coal pile had a faint sulfur smell when you walked around it, and I learned that the fence around the power plant was over a mile long. Officially, the fence had only three gates, the main gate, the railroad gate at the east end, and the old railroad gate at the west end, by the refugee camp, but there were also gaps in the fence where the creek flowed through.

My guess is that Martel got away after dark and fled the Ring of Fire. How he got out of the plant, we may never know. The gates were all locked or guarded, but he could have waded out along the creek, and the railroad gate was opened every time the railroad brought in another load of coal from the mine.

When I got back to the police station, Chief Frost was still there, and he was furious. He knew what had happened, Scott had telephoned from the plant. "Damn it, Sergeant Leslie, you should have just slapped the cuffs on him and brought him in. No need to try for a parlor scene like in an Agatha Christie story. And you should never have let Jurgen go climbing around on that gantry crane! He could have fallen. Leave that kind of monkey business to the folks at the plant."