“How does he do that? How does my brother get in the middle of everything? Yes, Julie, that is the boy.” Jacqueline nodded. “That is the False Messiah.”
“Let’s stick to Shabbethai Zebi for now, okay, Jackie?”
“Will come?” Rabbi Fonseca asked politely, indicating the front door with a smile.
“Certainly,” Julie smiled. “Would it break the Sabbath if I drove him back to Deborah after the service?”
“It would be better if you walked,” Rabbi Fonseca answered and Chana translated. “Or may he stay here for the night? There are certain laws to be followed, Julie.”
“I could put him up in the guest room.” Julie shrugged. “Would that tick off his father?”
“Yes.” Chana smiled. “Maybe it will teach the father not to lose his son. Yes, Julie, it would be good for the boy’s father to come to your house and speak to you about his son.”
“Don’t tell my father,” Blaise muttered as the sounds of the Sabbath service began inside the building. “He is still angry that I called Descartes a dinosaur. What will he think if he knew I went into a Jewish church?”
Royal Dutch Airlines
There is a King in the Low Countries
“His Majesty, Fernando I, King in the Low Countries wants us to come and visit,” Herr van Bradt said. He hid a snicker as best he could. Really, the clothing women were wearing these days!
“What?” Magdalena van de Passe asked, ignoring the snicker. She knew what it was about, since she’d heard it all before. She was wearing a pair of the new bloomers, long puffy pants that tightened up again at the ankles. Also a leather flight jacket and leather flight helmet with goggles pushed up on her head. It wasn’t a fashion statement. At least not an intentional one. The bloomers were warmer than the more common split skirt; the leather flight jacket was fur-lined and warm and the flight helmet kept her ears warm. None of that would be particularly necessary in one of the Jupiters, but the Neptune was another matter. The Neptune was a minimalist approach to carrying cargo, a two engine monoplane, with a seventy-foot wingspan. Like the Jupiters, they had a low air speed and a very good power-to-weight ratio. But they didn’t carry passengers. The Neptune carried packages; it had no amenities that could be avoided. Anything to save weight and it got darn cold in them, two miles up, in the winter in Germany.
“His Majesty wants us to visit. And he wants us to come in one of the Jupiters.”
“We can’t. The schedule is messed up as it is.”
“I know, but His Majesty insists and Frederik Hendrick added a note as well.” Van Bradt paused. “Magdalena, most of my investments are there. I can’t afford to have the two most powerful men in the Netherlands angry at me. The new engines are going to be ready in a month. Your young man already has the Jupiter Two and two Jupiter Threes sitting there waiting for them. This is politics. The schedule is just going to have to get a bit more out of whack.”
Magdalena argued a bit more, but the decision was out of her hands. The Monster took off from Grantville International Airport at dawn three days later. On board were Magdalena van de Passe, Vrijheer Abros Thys van Bradt and three other major stockholders in TransEuropean Airlines.
Magdalena looked over at the copilot of the week. Most flights had one experienced pilot and one less experienced pilot. The idea was that by the time the new planes were ready they would have pilots for them. “You want to take a sighting, Karl?” They had just reached their cruising altitude so it was practice time.
“Sure.” Karl bent over the periscopelike device and started fiddling with knobs as Magdalena held the plane straight and level. The knobs adjusted a couple of mirrors to align two images collected from almost ten feet apart on the front belly of the plane. When he got the best view, he looked at the dial on the knob and read off a number, which Magdalena wrote down. Some calculations with a slide rule would give them their height above ground. Those calculations would be done in a minute or so, after Karl took some more observations. He flipped a handle and looked in to the eyepiece again. This time he was looking for a landmark out in front of the plane. Anything recognizable would do; a tree, a barn, a really big rock. In this case he found a barn and called out “mark” as he clicked on a stop watch. He flipped another lever so that he was now looking straight down instead down and ahead at a forty-five degree angle, and waited for the landmark to reappear. How long it took for the landmark to show up again and how much it had shifted to the left or right would tell them, with more calculations, their true ground speed and how much drift they were experiencing from crosswinds.
“Mark!” Karl clicked the stopwatch again, then got out the special purpose slide rule. Magdalena looked over his shoulder as he did the calculations.
“First check at 8:04 AM.” Magdalena said. “What do you get for H over G? Remember, if we miss a major check point, you’re the one that’s going to have to get out and ask directions.”
Karl looked at her like she was crazy.
“We land first,” Magdalena reassured him. “But it’s happened more than once. In fact, it’s procedure if probable location permits and you’re more than half an hour past a projected major check point without finding it. So what do you get for H over G.”
After another minute with the slide rule, he gave her the answer.
“Okay. The angle is forty-five degrees so the leg that’s on the ground is the same length assuming that the ground is flat as a pancake which it never is. So, what’s our ground speed and drift?”
Magdalena watched as he set the slide rule, moved the slider, and got the numbers.
“Indicated airspeed is sixty-nine and compass heading is two eight three. So calculate the wind speed and direction, and give me our true heading.” After he’d done that she continued, “Now we know what our speed and direction were a few minutes ago. We can guess that it’s still close to that and make a guess about where we would end up if we continued on this course and the wind didn’t change.” Where they would have ended up was about seventy-five miles south of Kassel in just under ninety minutes. Since they would rather miss Kassel to the north they adjusted their course just a touch, then set about looking not so much for individual landmarks as for the general lay of the land. Patterns that would be recognizable from this altitude. Not a pond but a pond that was just to the right of a village with another village ahead of it. And a mountain peak in the background. They marked features on the map and made notes then made another set of sightings.
Aside from the sightings that they did every ten minutes or so, they took a bearing at Kassel. Which was done by looking out the window and finding Kassel, then comparing where it actually was to where they thought it should be. The sightings taken on random landmarks could give them a pretty good estimate of how fast they were going and in what direction, but couldn’t tell them where they were. Not without better maps. They took another bearing at Dortmund, a third at Arnhem and landed near Amsterdam not quite five hours after takeoff. They had been a bit off on their bearings at Dortmund and Arnhem, and had had a bit of a headwind for part of the flight.
“Now this is the way a princess should be rescued!” Maria Anna, the queen in the Low Countries, said with an arch look at her husband.
His Majesty didn’t seem overly concerned with the reproach. “But where would be the excitement in that?” He grinned, looking like a naughty schoolboy. “Besides, there’s altogether too much room. There’s an aisle between the seats.”
Magdalena looked back and forth between the king and his now blushing bride, and decided that this was not a conversation she wanted to get involved in. Luckily, His Majesty had other things on his mind. He turned to Magdalena. “It has a range of over three hundred miles?