Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(24)
“Your plans have just changed.” Turenne finally smiled at the American. “And if all your hypotheses are correct, you will need to clear your itinerary for the next six months.”
Off Luebeck, Baltic Sea
Eddie watched the slide and tilt of the inclinometer diminish, peripherally saw that his ship’s hull was nearing the center of a long, smooth trough between the modest Baltic swells, and shouted, “Fire!”
The second gunner pulled the lanyard; the percussion lock atop the breech of the eight-inch naval rifle snapped down.
Flame jumped out of the weapon’s muzzle. The blast shook the deck, rattled all the ship’s fixtures, and buffeted Eddie’s clothes and those of the gun crew as if, for a moment, they had been standing sideways to a hurricane. The gun leaped backward in its carriage, slamming furiously against its hydraulic recoil compensators as smoke gushed out of it in a long, lateral plume.
A moment later, water geysered up approximately half a mile off the starboard beam.
Beside Eddie, Admiral Simpson adjusted his binoculars slightly. “Thirty yards long of the target, Commander Cantrell, but you were dead-on the line. Your azimuth needs no adjustment.”
“I just wish I could adjust the waves,” Eddie muttered.
Simpson’s wooden features seemed ready to warp. Eddie knew to read that as a small, but well-suppressed smile. “Sounds like a request for the twentieth-century luxury of electric ignition systems, slaved to adequate inclinometers.”
Eddie tapped the deck fitfully with his false foot. “I guess so, sir.” Chagrined that he hadn’t hit the target once in ten attempts, he was reluctant to stop this part of the gun’s first sea trial, but the protocols were set. “Swap out the ignition system,” he ordered the gun crew.
Simpson raised an eyebrow. “You look annoyed, Commander.” His tone turned ironic. “Well, don’t fret over getting a proper inclinometer. I’m sure the arbiters of our destiny, the Department of Economic Resources back in Grantville, will put it on the top of their ‘to fund’ list when they get these test results. Even though they ignored my seven-page brief which predicted this outcome.”
Eddie was glad that Simpson hadn’t phrased his facetious assessment of the navy’s budgetary overseers as a request for his subordinate’s opinion of them. Because, truth be told, Eddie could see both sides of the funding argument. Grantville’s resources were pinched more tightly than ever. Despite being part of the populous and productive State of Thuringia-Franconia, the town-become-a-city had less, rather than more, wiggle room when it came to supporting cutting-edge technologies.
It hadn’t started out that way, of course. When Grantville had materialized, no one understood what it represented in terms of knowledge and advanced materials. Hell, there had been a lot of people who simply refused to believe in its existence. But then, with its decisive intervention in the Thirty Years’ War in support of Gustav’s Swedes, Grantville became an object of intense scrutiny. And as it integrated into the economic and fiscal life of the United States of Europe that it had largely midwifed into existence, and the broader domain of world events, its singular features came under singular pressure. Every monarch, great and small, wanted devices from the future, yes, but that wasn’t the greatest drain. It was all the extraordinary down-time innovators who realized the potentials of steel, of rubber, of electric motors, of plastic, and then designed genius-level devices or processes based on them. All they needed was just a modest amount of x, y, and/or z, and they could usher in a bold new era of—well, whatever bold new era their invention was sure to usher in.
The crowning irony of it was that, after you filtered out the crackpots (which was usually not very difficult; they tended to be self-eliminating), the great majority of these extraordinary innovations would probably have done exactly what their inventors claimed: they would have revolutionized some aspect of life as it was in the 1630s.
But there were thousands of such innovators, and only one Grantville. Only one source for all that up-time-quality steel, and rubber, and plastic, and everything else that was both handmaiden and midwife to these new inventions. And while Mike Stearns had led Grantville in the direction of sharing out its unique wealth rather than hoarding it, there were practical limits as to how far that could go. By now, the daily influx of inventors, treasure seekers, and curio hunters into the precincts of Grantville had emerged as both a singular fiscal opportunity (inns, hotels, eateries, short-term rental properties had sprung up like weeds) and a singular civic headache (congested streets, overburdened utilities, inflation, and a far more complicated and multi-lingual law enforcement environment). And straddling it all was the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s beleaguered Department of Economic Resources, which had to set policy on how the town’s unique resources should be meted out.