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Chapter 14

Moon Mission


Plains


August 31, 1006 CE


It was midafternoon and a small group of attackers, in their haste to get away from the battle, had run in the direction of the country store, part of which had been transferred by the Ring of Fire.

They were about halfway between the country store and Fort Peterbilt when they saw a glowing ball of lightning. It was three meters across, and when it was gone there was a cylinder lying on the ground. They ran again.

Inside the cylinder, Jerry Jefferson checked the readouts, then pushed a button. The top of the cylinder opened and he sat up. He looked around and cursed. He was supposed to have arrived at the country store. He moved controls and pressed buttons in the capsule, activating sensors. His sensor pack was much better than the one that had gone back in time attached to the Peterbilt.

Twenty-four years improves understanding a lot.

So Malcolm O’Connell had been right. The guidance of the temporal bolides sucked. So picking up Alyssa and the kids and going home was not going to be possible. Not until the tech got a lot better anyway.

Twenty-four years studying the slowly diminishing traces of the temporal bolide that had taken his wife and children had taught them a lot. The atoms from the twenty-first century were subtly different in charge from the atoms of the eleventh. That was what had let them track his wife and children and the Anderles. It had also been what let them track the Peterbilt and the pickup truck as they moved about. They didn’t know the details about what was going on even yet, but they knew rather a lot.

And knowing that, they had figured out a way for Jerry to send back messages. Unfortunately, there was no way for them to send Jerry a message except to make another temporal bolide, which was unlikely. This one had cost as much as the whole Apollo program had, adjusted for inflation. But at least he could tell them what was going on. He got out of his capsule and set up the signal.

It was simple in concept and a pain in the ass to construct. And it was based on the fact that an atom from this time had a subtly different atomic signature than an atom from Jerry’s time. To make the readings easier they had a heavy concentration of the sort of atom that wouldn’t be concentrated in this time. In this case, depleted uranium. Then they used a machine to move it back and forth at a controlled rate. That got you ones and zeros, and you were in.

The drawback was depleted uranium is a heavy material, and they needed fairly large chunks. Moving the eight chunks of depleted uranium back and forth took a lot of power and didn’t happen fast, at least not fast when compared with computer speeds. The transmitter was energy-intensive and it had a slow data-transfer rate. About as good as a modem from early in the computer age. It had the equivalent of a 474 baud rate. Sucked for most things, but plenty for basic communication.

He turned it on now, let it warm up, and sent the code for “arrived safely.”

Having done that, Jerry collected his rifle and backpack, and closed and locked the capsule. Then he started to call Alyssa. Started to, then didn’t. He could, assuming her cell phone still worked. Part of what the capsule carried was a small but decent cell “tower,” but he had spent the last twenty-four years trying to get here and only months, maybe a year, had passed for Alyssa. No one was sure how accurate the shot was going to be and Jerry knew that it wasn’t anywhere near accurate enough spatially.

But the reason he didn’t call was because he wanted Alyssa to see him before she heard him. The man she left was thirty-three years old. The man she was about to meet was fifty-seven. That was clear when you looked at him, but might be less clear over the phone. It was better if she saw him first. He was a healthy fifty-seven. Medical tech had improved over the last twenty-four years.

But he was still fifty-seven.

So he put on his backpack and started walking to where the Peterbilt and, more importantly, Alyssa and the kids had mostly been since shortly after they arrived in this time.

It took him four hours to walk, and he was in good shape, having trained for this for the last five years, ever since the science had led to engineering.

* * *

The lone man in a helmet and armor that walked up to the scene of the battle that evening was a shock to the natives, but at the same time, he wasn’t. He was alike in many ways to the Peterbilt people they already knew.

Immediately, Alyssa, Melanie and Michael were called.

The man was wearing camouflage armor and a combat helmet with a faceplate visor that had a heads-up display built in. As soon as he saw them, he took off the helmet.

It was Jerry, Alyssa saw.

Jerry. But a Jerry changed. Older. There was gray peppering her thirty-three-year-old husband’s black hair, and lines around his eyes and mouth.

“Sorry it took so long. But we had to figure out how to do it.”

“How long did it take?” Melanie Anderle asked.

“Twenty-four years, two months, and three days since the temporal bolide sent you folks here.”

“Are you here to bring us home?” Melanie asked. Alyssa was still just looking at him. Then she ran forward, grabbed him, hugged him, and kissed him. She was crying and so was he. It took a while before Melanie got her question answered.

* * *

“I’m afraid not,” Jerry told them later, after he’d been reintroduced to his kids. They weren’t as comfortable with Daddy coming back as Alyssa. And that wasn’t because of how much he’d changed, at least not mostly. It was simply that a year is a long time for a girl who’s just turned seven, and even longer for a boy who is five and a half.

“Why not?” Michael asked. “Melanie is pregnant. We need to get her to modern obstetrics.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that, none of us did. But the reason we can’t go back, any of us, is aim. Our aim sucks, and according to Malcolm O’Connell, it’s not going to get better until there is a theoretical breakthrough. The whole thing about sending men or robots to a specific place on the moon or Mars is misleading. You can refine your targeting en route when you’re doing that. This is like shooting a pistol or throwing a spear. Once you shoot it’s over, you can’t correct it. If they tried to send a bolide to get us, replacing us with, say, machines, it would probably miss and you know what happens to anything that happens to be in the way of the bolide wall. I don’t want to risk having you guys cut in half.”

“What about a bigger bolide?” Shane asked.

“Energy increases by the eleventh power of the mass transferred. Best estimate is that the one that moved the cruise ship required as much energy as our sun puts out in about twenty years.

“There is good news. I brought chicken eggs and a bunch of vegetable seeds. As soon as we move my capsule here, we can unload those and start sending them data on what’s happening in this time.

“In fact, I had to promise to do that faithfully in order to get the government to pay for the project.”

“Good for you. But I didn’t make any promises,” Michael said. He was still angry that he wasn’t going to be able to get Melanie back to modern obstetrics. “And Hamadi here certainly didn’t.” Michael wasn’t happy to learn that they were stuck here for life, not after that brief moment of hope that they could go home.

“No, but I didn’t come empty-handed. Like I said I brought equipment, eggs and seeds, and, more importantly, I brought knowledge.”

“What sort of knowledge?” Alyssa asked, still keeping one of Jerry’s arms in a viselike grip.

“First, let me clear up a few questions. Okay, love?” Jerry asked. “The first thing that the temporal bolides taught us is that the multi-world theory is basically accurate. The second thing it taught us is that the part of that theory that says those worlds can’t interact is total crap. That much was pretty much obvious from the fact that they never found the remains of Grantville in modern Germany. Well, that and the fact that our world didn’t disappear. The various probability universes can interact, and anytime they do, which is pretty much constantly, a new universe is created.

“But having that sort of interaction on anything more than a subatomic scale takes a massive amount of energy.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Melanie said, “and I would like to hear much more about it sometime over a cold brew. But, right now, what did you bring? What sort of knowledge? Anything on obstetrics, perhaps, or prenatal foods?”

Jerry grinned. “Sure. Both those and more. It’s really a question of what knowledge I didn’t bring. That may be overstating things a bit, but using a lot of compression and a triple redundancy, we have about ten petabytes of data. That’s the equivalent of about half the stuff in the Library of Congress. It’s not the Library of Congress. For one thing, the Library of Congress has a lot of redundancy, pictures and phrases that appear in hundreds of books. The system I brought stores the picture or phrase in one place and then just references it. Well, in three places, we used triple redundancy for everything.

“But we have effective instructions about how to make most everything ever made. And about medical care, including obstetrics and surgery. That doesn’t make me into a surgeon, or mean that we can make everything we might want now. But we will be able to, once we build the tools to build the tools. I did bring some of those tools. Perhaps the most important is a micro 3D printer. It’s slow, but it works. And there is the information to teach someone to be a doctor, even expert systems to help identify diseases and injuries, and come up with treatments. So though I can’t get you back to Johns Hopkins, I brought some of Johns Hopkins with me.”

“In that case, Mr. Jefferson, let’s go get your capsule.”

* * *

Michael used the Peterbilt to go fetch the capsule and bring it to the fort. Once it was in place and hooked up to one of the generators, Jerry pulled out a dozen more “cell phones,” and pointed out that there were the chips for a thousand more once they could build bodies for them. The “cell phones” Jerry brought out weren’t the cell phones of the twenty-thirties. They were glasses. Wraparound glasses that produced a heads-up display that provided the wearer with what amounted to a wearable personal computer with cell phone functions as well.

The bodies that would house the molecular chips didn’t have to be standard cell phone bodies. They could be built into just about any device or put in stations elsewhere as long as they could wire the chips into them. And part of the information Jerry brought with him was how-to videos on how to build the housings and devices to hook up to the chips. The glasses fit into helmets, and turned the helmet into an interactive learning center.

And in the capsule was a projector to project movies, both entertaining and informative, onto any flat white surface, so that the classes full of people could be taught all at once. This was all in English for the simple reason that no one in the future knew the local language.

But the medical information that Jerry brought included pictures and videos of how to do a great deal, and that was vital because Melanie wasn’t the only pregnant woman in Fort Peterbilt and certainly wasn’t the only person in need of treatment.

Over the next weeks, months, and years, Jerry Jefferson’s capsule would train doctors, engineers, scientists, and much more. But that would take years of work and the training of experts and building of tools.


Fort Peterbilt


September 1, 1006 CE


Jerry Jefferson opened the capsule as he’d practiced hundreds of times during training. Now, as then, he had an audience. “I’ll never be a scientist,” Jerry said. “That was obvious when I married supernerd here.” He waved to indicate Alyssa. “But after years of training, I’m a competent technician, at least with this gear.”

Alyssa snorted in derision.

“It’s true,” Jerry said. “I admit even the nerds at NTSA admitted that electrons hate me.” He pronounced it Natsa.

“Natsa?” Michael asked.

“National Temporal and Space Administration. The name change came out of the research for this project. Just like the moonshot back in the twentieth, it had spinoffs. Including a much cheaper way to climb out of a gravity well.” He plugged a cable in and checked the charge. “Anyway, as I was saying, even the nerds at NTSA were finally forced to admit that I would never be a scientist.”

“I could have told them that,” Alyssa said.

“But they did manage, by dint of extensive training over the course of years, to turn me into a competent technician, at least in regard to this gear.

“Alyssa’s right, though,” he continued. “I knew I’d never be as smart as my wife before I asked Nerdgirl to marry me. I was always a good salesman and I can tell a good story in a bar or in front of a congressional committee, but even after decades of trying, the scientists back in the twenty-first century weren’t able to make me into a scientist. Which almost got me dumped from the project in spite of my personal connection.” He looked and smiled at his wife.

“But like I said, I can tell a good story even before a congressional committee. Once the brain cases knew they were stuck with me, they turned their efforts to teaching me what I could learn. I am a skilled tech, at least with this gear, and, more importantly, I’m a fully trained librarian. At least in regard to this library. But that’s less important to you right now than this.”

He pulled out another panel and took out a collection of seeds in sealed plastic containers, all carefully marked. He pulled one. “This is winter wheat. Short stalked and robust.” He handed the container to Alyssa and continued. “I’ll pull up the particulars of how and when to plant it later. I also brought watermelon, cantaloupe, apple trees of several varieties, walnuts, all sorts of things, at least twenty seeds for each of over two hundred sorts of plant. And for some, like the winter wheat, hundreds of seeds. Some will have to wait for spring, but a few you’ll be able to plant now or at least soon. What is the date?”

As it happened, the locals had had means of determining the time of year based on what twenty-first-century archaeologists called woodhenges placed in Hocha, what twenty-first-century archaeologists called Cahokia. Using those over the last year and a half had reset the clocks on their phones to match their best estimate of the date according to the position of the sun at sunrise.

It was the first of September by their clocks, and given when they calculated the shortest and longest day of the year, by the one in the capsule as well.

The next thing he pulled out of the capsule was a small box with a lens in the front. “Do you have a flat wall, preferably painted white?”

They did. The houses in Fort Peterbilt were painted in a variety of colors but several of them were white. It took him about an hour, but he set up the projector on a table pointed at the wall and started it playing educational films from the digital library in the capsule. Then, while so many of the natives were watching movies, Jerry climbed back in his capsule, put on his glasses phone so as to provide him with a heads-up screen, and started typing on a virtual keyboard. Whatever Michael said about him not being a party to any deals with the people from the twenty-first century, Jerry had made those deals and meant to keep faith with them.

The capsule was three meters long and two wide and tall, and better than half of it had arrived underground. They had learned through tests and models that sending an object back in time replaced it with an equal amount of mass from that time. That was why the ground level was a little lower in the circle around the country store. The mass of the Peterbilt, the pickup, and the building all put together amounted to about two and a half inches of extra soil back in the twenty-first century. And that meant that you couldn’t drop something onto a plane a thousand years ago. Air has a lot less mass than earth and both mass and total volume within the transfer locus must match.

You had to drop it into that plane with enough mass coming as going. And the capsule was heavy. There was a lot of dense circuitry built into the thing, and to get the government to pay for the project had required that there be some way for him to let them know that he’d gotten here and what he’d found.


Report: 2

Jerry Jefferson

Fort Peterbilt

September 2, 1006 CE


Tell George not to blame me. The name was chosen by the natives. And so was the idea of building a fort, so I am assured by the natives. A case of cultural appropriation by the natives, not cultural imperialism by the time travelers.

The natives consider the Missouri and the Mississippi below the convergence to be one river that they call the Talak River. Talak is a mother goddess and the name, as I understand it, simply means mother of rivers. The Mississippi above the convergence is called the Falast River, the Kaskaskia is called the Agla, and Fort Peterbilt is located on the small river, read creek, Bashk.

As it happens, my family and the Anderles arrived in the middle of a slow takeover shift from a matrilineal culture to a patriarchal one. The city of Hocha, what we knew as Cahokia, has god kings, or to be a bit more accurate, is moving in the god king direction. To do that, they have been systematically weakening the power of local chiefs and the tribal women’s councils.


Jerry stopped and considered. He was, so far, only getting one side, the version of events from the point of view of the Kadlo clan, and mostly only those members of the Kadlo who lived in the village of Jabir. It was likely that the priesthood of Hocha, which just about everyone here called the Pharisees, would tell a different story.

On the other hand, it wasn’t like the people of Jabir had climbed on the Peterbilt and attacked Hocha. And the way the natives were telling it, the reason that they chose Christianity was that it didn’t involve strangling young women to take messages to the gods or to accompany a god king to the afterlife.

So, in spite of what his archaeologist and Native American friends might think, Jerry figured the side he was getting was pretty accurate. Still, there was a lot more for him to fill in that didn’t have the bias of reports on a war that were all from one side of the conflict. He decided to spend the rest of this report on local names, geography and the status of the stuff he’d brought.

Jerry went back to typing.


The eggs have hatched and my children have claimed them and are taking care of them under the supervision of a local young woman named Jogida. The seeds have been distributed and the projector set up. The frozen sperm samples are locked away in the freezer and will have to wait till we have cows, goats, pigs and horses to implant them in. A mission to Europe is years, perhaps decades, away and even a trip to Greenland to meet Leif Ericson and buy cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and possibly horses is a couple of years off. So for now, at least, it’s steam.


There was a big argument going on, back in the twenty-first century, about whether it was better to introduce work animals like cattle and horses or engines. And like a lot of the arguments over the project, politics and perception tended to trump science. In this case the hard scientific fact was there were no horses, cattle, goats or whatever to carry the frozen sperm or fertilized eggs. But politics had put the little freezer in the capsule anyway. It was lined in aerogels and would stay frozen for weeks even without power. With power, the frozen sperm and eggs could be kept indefinitely before implanting. In order to get the horse sperm and eggs, they had leaned heavily on the supposed Vineland colony as a place to get animals for gestation. Many of the Native American tribes wanted horses because in the twenty-first it was part of their heritage and tradition. The politics and alliances had gotten pretty convoluted. Jerry went back to his report.


I have been recording the local language with the help of my children and I will leave it to the scholars to determine where the tribal languages of the river people fit into the linguistic history of North America. For myself I am starting to wonder if Doctor Rodriguez’s “insane notions” might have a bit more validity than we thought. Several of the words sound a little Nahuanic to me.


Doctor Rodriguez had the notion that when Cahokia fell the priest kings and their followers had retreated down the Mississippi to the Gulf Coast then been pushed farther south to Mexico to form the Aztecs. No one else had thought much of the idea, but Jerry, after hearing a bit of the local language, especially the names of the gods of Hocha, was starting to wonder. Not that it mattered in the here and now or the there and then, but it was interesting. He attached the audio files to the message and decided that was enough for now.

He pushed the button to start transmitting the report.

Deep in the capsule, a set of very heavy depleted uranium balls started moving back and forth from one side of the capsule to the other, then back in a choreographed dance. It was slow, very slow, but the computer had compressed the data and the people in the twenty-first century had the code book to decompress it. Still, his little report and the recorded words along with pictures of him, his wife and kids and the Anderles, as well as a few snaps of the natives, would take most of the night to send.


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