* * *
The next day Brandon’s concern became fact as the eggs started hatching. Before they reached Vienna, he had thirty-eight chicks. There were chicken sexers in Grantville now, but Brandon wasn’t one of them. The chicks would have to wait till they got older before he would know how many of each sort he had. He hoped for more hens than roosters, but it would probably be about even. Meanwhile he had all those chicks to take care of in circumstances that were hardly ideal.
“Brandon! When is that chicken pen going to be ready?” Dana Fortney was trying to sound severe, but it was hard. First, the chicks were cute as buttons. Chicks usually are. Second, it was hardly Brandon’s fault that the trip had taken longer than expected. He had expected to be in Vienna when they hatched. Meanwhile, he had hired one of the boatmen to help him weave a fence out of tree branches and currently had boxes containing the chicks. Well, almost containing the chicks.
Docks, Vienna, Austria
The barges pulled up to Vienna carrying two cars and several tons of up-time or up-time-designed goods. They were met at the docks by a royal factotum, who set about organizing the transport of the cars through Vienna and out to what would become the race track. Oh, and the rest of them, too.
“Chicks?” the official said, in slightly offended tones. “Why on Earth did you people bring chickens? We have chickens. What do we need with up-time chickens?”
“Not like my chickens, you don’t,” Brandon said stoutly. “My chickens lay bigger eggs and more of them. They are also bigger than your chickens, more meat. And they are my chickens, not yours. We just need a coop to hold them.”
“We have the cars, the prince’s 240Z,” Bob Sanderlin said. “And ours as well, but there isn’t a lot of room for them here in the city. I doubt the 240Z could get through a lot of your streets. They ain’t wide enough.”
“The emperor!” the royal flunky said haughtily, and Hayley suppressed a grin.
“Where does His Imperial Majesty want us to set up?” her dad asked.
What followed was confusion and irritation for all concerned, till His Majesty, Emperor Ferdinand III, turned up and put matters right. The new emperor was there to meet them. Well, he was there to meet his new car. It was pretty clear that in his mind the mechanics were secondary. He swept in, asked lots of questions and swept out, leaving them in the care of the same official who now had a different attitude and clear directions.
Cars and wagons were unloaded and made a parade through Vienna.
* * *
Father Wilhelm Germain Lamormaini watched the parade through Vienna and knew that Prince Ferdinand had betrayed both his father and church by hiding his pet up-timers till his father died. Even the father’s death was the fault of the Ring of Fire. It had to be. The histories in the Ring of Fire had Ferdinand II living to 1637.
The Ring of Fire must be an act of great evil, not of the Good Lord, because if God had been a party to it the church would have been warned. No, the very fact that it was a surprise to faith was evidence of its evil nature. The Ring of Fire was an act of the great deceiver: poison coated in honey to distract the poor and weak-willed from eternal salvation. Satan walked the world as he always had, but his agents-knowing or unknowing-were the up-timers.
Yet everyone was being drawn in by Satan’s trap. Even Pope Urban had elevated the up-time priest Mazzare, making him a prince of the church.
Lamormaini turned back to the Hofburg. He still had his rooms there, but who knew how long that would last? He was no longer the emperor’s confessor and his influence at court was greatly diminished. What was the pope thinking to elevate that up-timer who was no true Catholic? Not if he followed the unholy strictures of Vatican II. There must be something he could do. There must be.
Liechtenstein House, Vienna
“Prince Gundaker, it is good of you to see me.” Father Lamormaini bowed as was the due to a person of Gundaker von Liechtenstein’s status, and perhaps a little more.
“You always gave the old emperor good counsel, Father. And I, for one, miss it.” The prince gestured Father Lamormaini to a chair with fine condescension.
“Thank you, Your Serene Highness. It is always good to hear that one’s counsel is appreciated and it’s something I have heard little of of late. All I wish is that I didn’t feel that the restoration of Europe to the true faith hadn’t suffered a severe blow when the Ring of Fire happened. It has cast doubt on all our goals as I am increasingly convinced was its intent.”
“You do not believe that it was an act of God?”
“No. I can’t convince myself that God would force us into such a state of doubt. The effect of that event was to separate the wheat from the chaff. There will be an answer in Jerusalem. I think that the six mile circle is the beast itself. Six miles across in height, six miles across in width, and six miles across in length. A perfect sphere of evil to counter the celestial spheres of which it denies the existence.”
Father Lamormaini stopped in sudden realization. He had not thought of that before. He had had a feeling of evil from the place and what it stood for from the moment that he had heard of it. The notion of Catholic and heretic living together in peace was a betrayal of faith so basic as to demand abhorrence from any person who truly sought God’s grace. But until just now, he had never realized that the Bible actually spoke of the place, recorded its evil for those with eyes to see. But there it was.
Prince Gundaker was staring at him in horror. “How could you fail to to report this to the Holy See? How could you fail to report it to the old emperor?”
“I failed to see it, Your Serene Highness. I failed to see it till just this moment. The words came out of my mouth before their meaning reached me. They came out of my knowledge of mathematics and they were so simple, so straightforward, that I am shocked that we didn’t see it from the beginning. All of us should have seen it from the very first. The radius of the sphere was three miles, the diameter six. But it was called the Ring of Fire, not the Sphere of Fire. So the terms were wrong. A ring with a radius of three miles. What of six six six is in that? The devil was subtle, but God was more subtle still, and gave us a warning. . if we had the native wit to see it.
“The American dollar. It rapidly comes to pass that you cannot buy or sell without possession of American dollars. Yet what are they? They are not gold or silver, not even copper or iron. No. They are just marks on paper. As Revelations warned us, it has come to pass that to buy or sell you must be possessed of those marks on paper.”
* * *
Gundaker wasn’t convinced that Father Lamormaini was correct. . but it was a worrying thought. He decided that he would put a watch on the up-timers.
CHAPTER 10
September 1634
Village of Simmering, Austria
“You know anything about oil wells, Sonny?” Ron Sanderlin passed the well-worn book over and took a seat in the sitting room of the large house that they had been situated in. The house was in the village of Simmering, about three miles from the walls of Vienna, and it was where Prince Ferdinand had decided to set up his race track. It was near an imperial hunting lodge established by Maximilian II and there were extensive gardens nearby.
“I know I wish I’d owned one up-time,” Sonny Fortney told him. “But other than that, nada.” One single sentence in the book mentioned that the Matzen oil field was about twelve miles northeast of Vienna and was the largest in Austria. But it didn’t say another thing about it. It was a book on sights to see in and around Vienna and that line was in the vital statistics portion of the book. It didn’t even say whether “largest” referred to land area or barrels of oil.