Seas of Fortune(34)
Philip gave Heyndrick an anxious look. “What’s got the captain upset? It isn’t me, again, I hope.”
“No, no, it’s not you. The captain got all these newfangled navigation instruments in Grantville. Most of them work fine. The sextant, it beats a cross-staff any day. Maybe ten times as accurate, and you don’t go blind trying to sight the sun.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The clock. It’s supposed to keep Nürnberg time, so we can calculate our longitude. It worked just fine . . . on land. And it’s supposed to work at sea. Uses springs, not a pendulum.”
“But . . .”
“But whoever designed it never tested it at sea. Or at least, not on waters this rough. We know where we are, more or less, from soundings and sightings, and either the clock is wrong, or our computations are. And since the captain’s figures and mine agree . . .”
“How bad an error are you talking about?”
“Well, the old pendulum clocks, if you took them to sea, accumulated ten or fifteen minutes error a day. This one, oh, a minute or two. But an error of one minute clock time still throws off the longitude by”—he frowned for a moment—“seven and a half degrees. A few hundred miles. And after a month at sea, the clock won’t even tell you which ocean you’re in.”
“Really. In that case, I have a proposition I want to put before the captain.”
“Pardon me if I wait here. I have no desire to join you on the execution block.”
* * *
“Captain, you don’t want me to leave,” Philip said.
David turned to face him. “Oh? Why the hell not?”
Philip took a deep breath. “Because of this.” He pulled back his sleeve.
David didn’t understand, at first. Then he did. Philip was wearing a self-winding wristwatch. A timepiece which worked at sea would let David accurately determine his longitude each day. If the timepiece kept the correct time for a place of known longitude, like Grantville, then it could be compared with the ship’s local time, inferred from the position of the sun, to find the ship’s longitude.
“How accurate is your watch?”
Philip hesitated. “I’m not sure. I guess it might lose or gain a few minutes a year.”
“A year,” repeated David dumbly.
“Yep,” Phillip affirmed, this time more confidently.
David took a deep breath. “You are offering me your watch in return for the passage, and your maintenance in the colony?”
“Are you kidding? I bet this watch is worth more than your entire ship.”
“Not this ship.” David said. But he couldn’t help thinking, But it is perhaps worth as much as one of the yachts. And it would be worth a lot more if only I could shoot the sun with equivalent accuracy.
Philip clarified his position. “What I meant was that I—and my watch—would be at your disposal for the duration of the voyage.”
“Aren’t you worried that I might just seize it from you? Or perhaps contrive your murder?”
Phil took a step back. “I . . . The things I heard about you . . . I didn’t think you’d do something like that. You could have killed the Indians who wiped out the Zwanandael settlement, and you didn’t. At least, Joe Buckley said you didn’t.”
“You might bear in mind that Joe Buckley got the story from me. But you’re right, I didn’t. And I won’t. But I would advise you to be very cautious about whom you show that watch to.”
* * *
“Philip.” She stared at him, eyes half-slitted, fists on hips.
He either didn’t recognize the warning signs, or chose to ignore them. “Hi, Maria, I’m—”
“Why are you here?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We’ve been seeing each other a while, and I couldn’t stomach your being away for a year, maybe forever.”
“Seeing me? You mean courting me? Dating, as you call it?”
“Well, yeah.”
“But you never wrote to my brother, and asked his permission to court me. Or even asked Lolly, whose roof I live under.”
“Jeesh, guys haven’t done that for, I dunno—”
“Centuries? Almost four centuries? As in, the way it was done back in 1633? Oops, it is 1633, isn’t it?”
“Well, you’ve lived in Grantville for two years, so it didn’t occur to me—”
“Didn’t occur to you to say anything to me, either.”
“You mean, like saying, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’ or ‘Would you like to go steady?’ That’s so old fashioned, you know. Kids my age just hang out, and that’s what we were doing.”