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Canst Thou Send Lightnings?

Written by Rick Boatright

In like manner the lightning when it breaketh forth is easy to be seen; and after the same manner the wind bloweth in every country.

(Deuterocanonical Apocrypha, The Epistle of Jeremiah:61)

To: The Provincial of the Society of Jesus in Rome

From: Adolph Wise S.J., University of Eichstaett.

Enclosed with this letter you will find an example of the 'Crystal Radio' that is being distributed throughout Thuringia. I enclose also instructions for the construction of more of these Radios as distributed by the American government.

I testify, of my own knowledge, further attested by the witnesses signatures hereto affixed and sealed, that anywhere within fifty miles of Grantville on most evenings, when you place your ear next to the opening in the box, you can hear voices and music and other sounds which originate miles away in Grantville. These voices are sent through the air itself by the lightnings into the wires of the Radio. The Radio is delicate and fails to function with the least mis-adjustment. However, when adjusted properly, at the correct time of day anyone can hear the Voice of America sent forth from the great stone tower of the Radio Station in Grantville.

No one that I have spoken with here in the university can begin to understand how this works. The Americans insist that this is nothing but another of their mechanical arts, related to the "electricity" of which I wrote in an earlier letter. They maintain that there is nothing more involved than the proper arrangement and composition of mundane physical materials. If so, then, as with so many other devices to be found in and around Grantville, it is the knowledge they possess that is important.

I have spoken with the local clergy, and they inform me that the Radios are being built mostly by jewelers and others who are used to working with fine wires and small detail work. There are others who are working on the equipment to send the lightnings from the great tower to the Radios. Again, the local clergy tell me that this equipment, although considerably more robust than the Radios, is still remarkably delicate in some ways and requires the deft touch of jewelers and similar folk.

The Americans insist that they welcome students. They also are training workers to assist in building their next "Radio Station," which they plan to locate in Magdeburg. When completed, it will be placed at Gustav Adolphus’ disposal. It is said that he intends to use this voice to promote Lutheranism.

I beg of you to find within our ranks a young man, skilled in the jeweler’s arts and firm in the Church, and send him to us. Some one of us must take this training, in order that we may first gain the knowledge of how this art works, and second, perhaps in some way delay or prevent the establishment of Gustavus Adolphus' Voice of Luther. Simultaneously, we must work to produce a Radio Station that can bring to the people the saving grace of the Holy Mother Church.

Signed

Adolph Wise S.J.

(and 12 other witnesses.)

Father Nicholas Smithson lowered the letter, and looked at Father Andrew White, his superior in the Society of Jesus. "Do you believe this, Father Andrew?"

"It does not matter what I believe, Nicholas. The Father General of the Society may or may not believe it, but he has indicated it shall be treated as fact until it is proved otherwise."

"So be it. What the Father General orders shall be done." Nicholas nodded, then pursed his lips. "This is all very interesting, Father, but why is this letter here in London, and why are you discussing it with a humble parish priest?"

Father Andrew smiled. "Read the letter again. Paying particular attention to the skills of the workmen and the request made by Father Adolph."

When Nicholas set the letter down again, he was stunned. He could feel that his eyes were wide. He opened his mouth a time or two, but nothing came out. Finally, he coughed. "They have chosen me?"

"Aye, Nicholas." Father Andrew was sympathetic. "You are the son of a jeweler, trained in his craft, who is also a Jesuit. You are the very man that Father Adolph has called for."

"But . . . but what of my parish? Who will serve Mass, and catechism, and the rites to those hidden members of the true church if I leave?"

"My son." Father Andrew stood and walked to the window to stare out at the busy evening London street scene. "The situation in London—indeed, in all England—grows ever grimmer. Despite the fact that King Charles at one time did seem disposed to provide some little relief to those who follow Rome, since the advent of Grantville he is of no mind to tolerate dissent of any kind, even from priests. I am afraid he sees gunpowder under every chair. It may well be that we are returning to the dark times we walked under during Elizabeth's reign."

Turning back to the room, the older priest leaned against the window sill. "Nicholas, I do not doubt your courage. I am aware that if a martyr's crown called, you would respond willingly. The society has many brave, fervent men who can and will serve as priests in the darkness of London, perhaps to become martyrs if God so wills. But you, you are best suited to another task. You are called to a different work."

Nicholas sat quietly, staring at the hands folded in his lap. There was only one decision he could make, as much as he might desire otherwise. When he accepted that, peace descended. When he finally raised his head to look at Father Andrew, he felt calm.

"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 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.”

There was a moment of quiet. John shook his head. “It isn't Mike Stearn's fault. Gayle Mason is the best QRP CW operator in the world. I agreed that she had to go to London. But that means that the best source of knowledge about radio tubes is hundreds of miles away."

Father Athanasius picked up John's mug, and waved at a waitress.

"It isn't Morris Roth's fault that every jeweler in the world wants to be near the world’s only source of knowledge about faceted gems. But that means that the people with skills in working with very small wires and parts that I need don't come to Grantville anymore.

"It isn't my fault that I have an associate’s degree in business, not a masters in electronic engineering. I'm the best available for running VOA, but I don't know the background of the history and development of radio. No one in Grantville does."

The waitress arrived with two fresh mugs. John took his without even noticing it.

"It's nobody's fault. But you put it all together, and Murphy has arranged the world so that we cannot get Gustav's Radio station on the air. And I have to. Mike is counting on me.”

“We have talked about this Murphy before, John,” the priest said gently. “Most would blame Satan when faced with such adversity.”

John shook his head. “It isn't evil I'm dealing with, Father. It's just perversity. It's like the bread always falling butter side down. If things can go wrong, they will. Wasn't that true when you built your water organs?”

Father Kircher nodded firmly. “It was. It is.” He thought back to those days, and grimaced. “Everything that could go wrong did. Indeed. We just did not express it so compactly.”

“Imps, daemons, gremlins . . . name them as you will, Father. But Murphy acts in the world as sure as God does. But he isn't evil." John took a swallow from his mug. "The best decisions have been made. I know that. Gayle being in London, Morris being in Prague, are absolutely for the best. Godly. But Murphy arranges that the Godly best causes something else to go wrong. We have the Voice of America running, but we can't make the tubes for Gustav's station.”

Father Kircher nodded. “I know. The station manager has asked each religious leader in town to give the morning invocation before the dawn news broadcast. Yesterday was my turn! It is amazing to have your words carried by the lightnings across the heavens to say, ‘Here I am!’”

John smiled at the nod to Job. He remembered using the line himself when defending his interest in getting his Ham license to his Baptist pastor thirty years earlier. My sword John thought.

John heaved a big sigh. He took his screwdriver out of his pocket and fidgeted with it. "The worst is the alternator."

“Alternator?” Father Kircher prompted gently.

“That's the most perverse of all, Father. It's a tease. We know that Reginald Fessenden and Ernst Alexanderson built an RF alternator in 1906. We know they broadcast voice to crystal radios without tubes. We know they were heard over a hundred miles away. We know all that. We even have a picture. A poor, dark, grainy picture, but a picture nonetheless. We can look at that picture of Fessenden's alternator at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. But that's all. We have no idea what was inside that round case. Just that it was 'an alternator.’ I can't build a photo. It's a tease. We have to invent an alternator. And so I started, thinking, ‘Gee, we have all the alternators out at the power plant, every car has an alternator, how hard can it be?’” John looked back towards the folding table. He looked back at Father Kircher. “So we pulled most of the people off Gunter's team, since working on tubes without Gayle was very slow going, and started in on the alternator. I know now how hard it can be. It can be very hard.”

Father Kircher's hand made the beginnings of a gesture that he knew would be of no comfort to his Protestant friend. "I know, John. I will think on it. Perhaps we can find someone to help. Perhaps we can find a way to put Murphy behind us.”

John shuddered. “No! Never behind you, Father. You always have to keep Murphy in front of you. Dead in your sights, never allowing him a moment to screw anything up. Out of sight, out of mind. We need a way to keep Murphy before us.”

“A talisman, then. Something to help you remember to focus on the possibilities both good and bad, to keep at the work.”

“Yes, exactly. Well, that and a jeweler with an interest in radio who can help with the wire and the forms and the work on the damned alternator.”

“I will think on it, John, and I will pray.”

“No one can ask more, Father.” John drained his cup and stood. “Thanks for listening.”

“You're welcome.” Father Athanasius' "my son" was unspoken, but heard nonetheless.

***

The vision of dreams is the resemblance of one thing to another, even as the likeness of a face to a face.

(Deuterocanonical Apocrypha, 3 Sirach)

"Nick? Is that you?"

Nicholas Smithson froze. God in Heaven, how could this happen? How could it be that there would be someone in Grantville who knew him?

"Nick? Nicholas Smithson!" The voice was insistent. Nick slowly turned around, and almost groaned. Of all people. Father Augustus Heinzerling. What was Heinzerling doing here, and why hadn't that information been given to him? There was no possible way that he could convince Augustus that he was someone other than Nick Smithson. They had spent too much time together at the English college in Rome.

"Hello, Gus."

"It is you!" Heinzerling looked delighted, but then suspicion began to creep across his face. "It is you. What are you doing here?"

"I. . . ." Nick hesitated, torn between telling the truth and concealing his mission. "I cannot tell you that, Gus."

Now Heinzerling's face took on the appearance of a thunder cloud. "What do you mean, you cannot tell me?"

"I have orders."

Heinzerling's jaw tightened. He took a firm hold of Nick's arm. "You will come with me and explain yourself to Father Mazzare, then." He started off, and Nick perforce went with him. Father Gus in a mood was no one to trifle with.

***

Father Lawrence Mazzare looked at the young man accompanying his curate with some confusion. Father Kircher watched from the back of the room. “Okay, Augustus. What exactly is your problem again?”

“Where do I start?” Father Heinzerling ran his hands through his hair. “I see this man at the radio station this morning asking for work. I knew him when he was at the English College of the Society in Rome studying. We spent many hours together in Rome attempting to find an Italian who knew how to brew beer. I thought he was my friend.” Heinzerling glared at the young man.

“Go on.”

“I greet him as brother of the Society and as a friend, calling him by his name, and he refuses to tell me what he is doing. He is dressed in common garb, had not come to see you. I say he's a spy for the Jesuits!" Heinzerling looked confused for a moment, then surged on. "Or a spy at least for someone in the Society. I am the official spy for the Society in Grantville, not some upstart impudent Englishman!” His frown was truly impressive.

Larry repressed a grin. No wonder Gus had looked confused. He turned to the young man. “And you are?”

Nicholas looked at this up-time priest, Father Lawrence Mazzare. What little he had been able to find out on his way to Grantville indicated the man was very well educated, and could give lessons to a saint in propriety, probity and rectitude. However, no one had mentioned his gaze—that calm, straight gaze that seemed as though it could see through four inches of oak, much less his own flimsy pretenses. It reminded him very strongly of the Father General of the Society. Nicholas abandoned all hope of dissembling; forthrightness was the only course with a man like this.

“I am Father Nicholas Smithson of the Society of Jesus, late of London.”

“Nicholas?” Are you named after Father Christmas or Saint Nicholas Owen ...