Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
Lieutenant Commander Eddie Cantrell looked down at the stump six inches below his left knee as an orderly removed his almost ornate peg leg. Physician Assistant Jessica Porter—formerly Nurse Porter—approached with his new fiberglass prosthetic. The jaundiced-gray color of the object was not appealing. “Wow, that’s uglier than I thought it would be,” Eddie confessed as the orderly left.
Jessica shrugged. “It may look like hell, but it works like a charm. We’ve special-cast more than a hundred of these, now.” She fitted it tentatively onto the stump, and looked up at Eddie.
He concentrated on how it felt: a little odd—smooth and cool—compared to the wood and leather lashings that had just been removed. He supposed anything else might feel strange now, having spent a year and a half getting used to the cranky, creaky peg leg that had been specially fashioned for him by King Christian IV of Denmark’s medical artisans. But now that Eddie paid closer attention to the new sensations of this prosthetic—“Actually, that feels much better. No rubbing.”
Jessica snorted in response. “Yeah, it ought to feel better. It’s custom-made. That’s why we made you stop by when you brought your princess bride with you last fall, to get a wax mold of your—” Jessica missed a beat, floundered. “Of your—your—”
“My stump,” Eddie supplied for her. “That’s okay; might as well call it what it is.” Which, he reflected, Jessica must do dozens of times a week with other amputees. But it was probably different with him. He was a fellow up-timer, a person she had known before the Ring of Fire had whisked their whole town back through time to Germany of 1631. And so, right in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, into which meat-grinder Eddie himself had been thrown.
He looked down at the stump that had gotten caught in those pitiless gears of a new history-in-the-making. “So, that wax mold you took of my stump—?”
Jessica nodded as she secured the new leg. “We filled that mold with a mix of fiberglass and pine resin and presto: your new prosthetic.”
Eddie moved the new false limb tentatively. The weight was negligible. “It’s hard to believe that’s local—uh, down-time—manufacture.”
“Every bit of it,” nodded Jessica as she stood and stepped back to take a look. “They got the process from us, of course. We made the first few here at the Leahy Medical Center. But after that, there was no stopping all the down-time medical folks, particularly in the new university programs, from dominating the business. Good thing, too: we couldn’t have kept up with the demand, here.”
“I thought fiberglass would be too hard for the local industries to make.”
Jessica shook her head. “That’s because you’re thinking of the stuff we made speedboats out of, back up-time in the twentieth century. That’s ultra-high strength fiberglass. The individual strands were very thin, and very uniform. I doubt any of us will still be alive when that technology makes its debut in this world. But this,”—she tapped the prosthesis; it made a much duller sound than the wood—“this is made of much cruder fibers. Down-timers can make them with a number of different drip-and-spin processes. Then they just pack it into the mold as tight as they can, pour in the pine resin, and, after a little more processing, out comes the prosthesis.
“That’s not the end of the process, of course. It needs smoothing and careful finishing where it fits onto the stump. But we didn’t stop there,” she said, her smile finally returning. “We added something special for you.”
“Oh?” Eddie wondered if maybe it had secret compartments. That would be kind of cool.
“Yep. Try stepping on it, then stepping off.”
Eddie shrugged: no secret compartments, then. He took hold of his cane, pushed off the examining table, stood tentatively on both legs, then stepped forward with the prosthesis. Well, that felt just fine. And step two—
—almost dropped him to the ground. As his real foot came down and he shifted his primary weight onto it, the heel of the prosthetic seemed to start rising up a little, as if it was eager to take its own next step. It wasn’t a particularly strong push, but he hadn’t been expecting it, and he flailed for balance.
“Wha—what was that?” he asked, not minding one bit that Jessica had jumped over to steady him.
“That was the spring-loaded heel wedge. Cool, huh? When the sole of the prosthesis is fully compressed, and then you start to shift your weight off it to take the next step, it gives you a little boost. Like your own foot does.”