Craftsmen

Gordon moved cautiously toward the doorway to his own parlour, paused in the darkness of the hallway, and peered through into the room. The rapid pace of industrialization had made the United States of 1880 very different, in many ways, from the nation it was 40 years ago, when he was a small boy but, really, some standards were necessary.
Besides, no casual trespasser could make it past his evening security, but the clink of glass indicated that, indeed, someone had done exactly that.
Clink of...? Oh.
"You know, most people send a card around a few days before they plan to visit."
James West, graying at the temples but still roguishly handsome in a way only enhanced by the pattern of old white scars on his face, glanced up for a moment, and then finished filling a glass from a crystal decanter of Gordon's best bourbon.
"We need a quiet chat, Artie, and if I'd made this a formal call, it would've been all over the gossip sheets. Even your neighbors like to talk. Or their servants do."
Dr. Artemus Gordon took the cold glass of whiskey (he'd installed an ice machine some time ago) and settled in the least uncomfortable chair in the room. Parlour furniture was meant to impress more than comfort. His visitor poured another. Neat, of course.
"Well, I can think of several things that might prompt the visit. Which one brings you around, at an hour when most respectable folk have retired?"
West snorted.
"You and I haven't ever been 'respectable,' Artie. We just make a good show of it."
He took a snip.
"The president has some... concerns."
Gordon scowled.
"The president would have a lot fewer concerns if he used his brain more and his silver tongue less. There are reasons you and I don't ride the same train to work, any longer, and one President Edward J. Phelps is near the top of that list."
"What do you want me to say, Artie? That you were right? You already know I think that. Phelps' 'stability at any cost' is what got him elected four years ago, but we both know it's never been anything but short-sighted. His isolationist foreign policy and willingness to accommodate the Old Planters, rather than take the bulls by the horns, only makes it more certain the lid will blow off down the line, and leave a worse mess for somebody else to clean up."
Gordon barked out a laugh.
"It might have even worked out for him, until last year. What's the word from those two future Earths?"
"That President Roosevelt on Earth-E, the one with the war, is generally too focused on his own problems to pay much attention to us, and most of the other leaders, there, are in the same pickle. The British and the Russians seem to think our history is different enough that Earth-C's archives might not be as useful to them, when it comes to dealing with us, though."
"That's what I understand, as well."
West blinked, and Gordon grinned.
"You gentlemen down in Washington aren't the only ones who can intercept and decode a diplomatic message sent through the aether, Jim, and the fact that the astroneves sent by the Tsar and Queen Victoria use wireless telegraphy make the codes much easier to break. I may no longer actively engage in the trade-craft, but I've hardly let myself go completely to seed."
"I should've guessed. Have you been listening to the radio from Earth-E?"
"When I can. That fella, Murrow, is a phenomenal news man, Roosevelt and Churchill are powerful orators, and I really like Burns and Allen."
"What about from Earth-C?"
"That's a lot harder. They have that frequency modulation technique, which is manageable, but use it to broadcast that digital stuff. You need a special Babbage engine just to render that into something you can hear. The amplitude modulation signals don't carry as well, so they have more interference, but those carry a lot of news -- and a lot of vulgar demagoguery. I like the CBS Radio News and the BBC, and that National Public Radio."
"How far have you gotten on decryption of military and government broadcasts?"
Gordon shrugged and took a drink.
"Come on, Artie! I know you've been working at it. You've made a fair fortune with those 'Flippo' lighters, especially after you sold the rights to the Diamond Match Company. Not all of it went to buy this house in Oyster Bay, either. You also own the telegraphy company down at the rail head, in Brooklyn, and the difference engines you have, down there, are much better than anything you could possibly need for sending letters to people -- or even monitoring stock-tickers."
Gordon eyed his former partner for a long moment.
"Do you have me under surveillance, Jim?"
"Don't be a fool. Of course I do. You know where a lot of bodies are buried, because you and I buried them. You also left the service under circumstances rather less than pleasant, three years ago. You've made clear your distaste for the current administration, and you've made a lot of money in less than a year's time. You know what that looks like."
"A successful start to my third career as an eccentric genius inventor?"
"Spare me. Your acting days are long done."
"Afraid I'm going to turn into another Miguelito Loveless?"
West glanced at Gordon sharply and stood perfectly still for a long moment, the web of scars on the left side of his face sharply contrasting with his tan complexion. West was never one to permit himself to get trapped behind a desk.
"If I thought that, Artie, we wouldn't be having a quiet little conversation."
Gordon acknowledged that with a slow nod, and took another taste of his drink. West waited patiently.
“We might be able to unravel some of the simpler encryptions used on Earth-E in a few months time. They have a solid fifty or sixty year lead on us, and their engines are pretty good. High military codes will take longer. We may secure some valuable intelligence by the time their war ends, assuming they don’t change everything. Which they probably will.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Their history parallels that of Earth-C’s much more closely than ours. President Roosevelt and his colleagues must know the decryption engines available to the political powers on Earth-C likely already have broken their coding, and will quickly do the same with any other scheme they attempt. Earth-E must keep changing things around, or abandon aether communications, entirely, and send everything by courier.”
“They're already starting to do some of that.”
Gordon arched an eyebrow.
“Disguise and infiltration, and coming up with mechanical widgets to give us an edge were always your areas of expertise, Artie. Getting people to talk, willingly or not, was mine.”
“Which government that sent delegations to Earth-E includes talkative friends of yours?”
West allowed a grin to appear, briefly.
“That would be telling. They also have only limited usefulness. What little we know about what goes behind the curtains on Earth-C is based what we can learn about what Earth-E guesses, most of which comes from the need to coordinate the war effort. They also have a lot more communication between individuals on Earth C and E, and that helps them.”
West abruptly began to pace back and forth.
“Still, it’s not very much, and we get only a thin trickle of that. We need more direct information about Earth-C policy-making, and we need it in a more timely way. Since we can’t put eyes in place, there, until we start producing your astroneves, we have to use our ears. So, what can you tell me?”
Gordon gave a rueful shake of his head.
“Basically? Nothing. Honestly! According to what I’ve been able to gather, the Earth-C United States leads that world in engine science, and they have an entire service that uses that science to encrypt their own communications and decrypt others’, in ways no one else can match. They encrypt their messages, and squeeze them down into highly compact forms, and then scramble the signal, and then broadcast it in high-speed bursts, probably with different sections on different frequencies because, why the hell wouldn’t they? We can’t even find their signals in the sheer quantity of noise coming from that world. You could feed a savant on a diet of nothing but Haversham’s, every single day, and it would avail you nothing, because he can’t even see what he’s supposed to try to decrypt.”
West rubbed his forehead.
“You don’t give me a lot to work with, Artie. I’ve got a president who’s constitutionally incapable of lateral thinking, barely holding together a governing coalition of northern and southern conservatives that’s in danger of unraveling every single day. That probably wouldn't have changed very much, the next four years, and Phelps badly wanted a second term to be as uneventful as his first was, until last year.
"Artie, our savants say he'll probably win re-election, but he won't get the quiet second term he'd prefer. He's staring across the aether at a Negro president with awesome power at his command, who has already demonstrated the ability to strike other worlds at will, and whose number of aethercraft seems to double every four months – heavy aethercraft with a wide variety of astoundingly advanced designs, by the way. According to the trickle we do get, they can see a lot of what goes on, here, and they read our news straight off the telegraph and the wireless. They know about the riots that took place on this Barack Obama’s birthday, last year, and we think they may be turning their attention to the matter of the slaves we still have.”
“I don’t have much to give you, Jim. If I had tens of millions of dollars in gold, thousands of savants with all the Haversham’s they could stomach, and a hundred years to work, I might be able to crack what Earth-C can do, today. That’s the hard truth of it. You have no choice but to work the human angle – the engine techniques are beyond us.”
West sighed and shook his head.
“Well, I’d hoped for a better answer, but I can’t truthfully say I expected one. We’ll have to devote our attention to heading off the worst of the domestic repercussions, since we have no way to penetrate Earth-C security, just now.”
Gordon took a deep breath, and blew it out slowly.
“What sort of ‘domestic repercussions’ do you anticipate?”
West walked over to the coat-tree, and pulled a thick envelope out of a large inner pocket of the greatcoat he’d hung there.
“We’ve learned that some of our southern brethren have grown concerned enough about so-called ‘cross-aether coercion’ that they’ve started to quietly form what they call ‘defense organizations’ -- heavily-armed organizations that function outside the law.”
Gordon paused a moment when he saw the U.S. Secret Service “eyes only” seal on the tab of the envelope. It had been awhile. He broke it, cut open the envelope and began to riffle through the contents.
West leaned back against the sideboard, and crossed his arms.
“I’ll give you the synopsis. We need whatever you can learn from whatever history records you can get from Earth-C and Earth-E about any terror activities that may have been sponsored by their versions of Lousiana Congressman Alcibiades DeBlanc. We think he may be mixed up with something called the Knights of the White Camelia. We’d also like to know what you can find out about some group called the Secret Six, and one John Brown, Jr.”The Wild Wild West episode "The Night of the Flaming Ghost" has James West face off against a man claiming to be the original John Brown.
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<Two days later>
President Edward J. Phelps always liked to say that one couldn’t be a great statesman unless one was first a good president, that one couldn’t become a good president without first being a good politician, and that to be a good politician required one to be a good judge of character.
In Phelps’ judgment, the scarred thug sitting across from him was one of the most dangerous characters he’d ever met, and he’d met any number of dangerous men in his long and varied career in law and politics. As a general rule, he found it distasteful that such men hovered ‘round the fringes of the gentlemanly art of diplomacy, but that seemed to be the nature of today’s fallen world.
It didn’t help that this particular dangerous character had an unfortunate tendency to say deucedly unpleasant things early in the morning, which guaranteed that Phelps’ ulcers would act up, for the rest of the day.
“And you’re certain that your former colleague gave you a forthright assessment of the technological capacity commanded by this Earth-C nigra president?”
“Yes, Mr. President, I do. He has no reason to lie, and he merely confirmed what we’ve heard from multiple sources, anyway. We cannot stand against Earth-C’s machinery, and we cannot penetrate their security by remote means. He did agree to help us try to learn more about possible local insurgent groups, though.”
“Hmmph. Well, that’s something at least. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised Dr. Gordon was willing to do even that much on behalf of a, ah, ‘guilded-tongue toad who can’t see past the edge of his lily pad,’ end-quote.”
“Well, to speak perfectly frankly, Mr. President, I rather doubt Dr. Gordon had any interest in doing anything on your behalf. However, his love for this country is beyond doubt, and he doesn’t want to see it torn apart by violent extremists any more than anyone else does.”
Violent extremists. Blasted ulcer.
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Gordon shouted to be heard over the clatter of the engines. It never ceased to amaze him that Jeremiah hadn’t gone stone deaf, already.
“How soon can you have Emilia operational? We need to start sorting through whatever history or documentary broadcasts we can hear!”
“A new project, sir?”
“Yes! Something for an old friend!”
“Not for another week, sir! But we can have Beatrice ready by tomorrow!”
“I thought she was still listening to those files we received from that NASA organization about the reclamation of water!”
“Oh, yes! We finished that, last evening! Rather a disgusting topic, really! But it addresses an important logistical problem in the astronef design!”
“Excellent! I have punched in the parameters, already, and have the cards available once you’ve got her cleared out and ready to receive them!”
“Edmund would like to lube her wheels and check some of the connections, after we clear her out, but we could have that done by this evening!”
“That will do nicely! Carry on!”
Gordon retreated from the noisy floor of the engine room to his much quieter office, said hello to Spencer, his clark, and went through to his inner office. A distracted Veronica offered a soft olive cheek for a quick kiss, but her eyes never left the typed sheets in front of her.
“Is that the latest from Beatrice? It's a very unladylike thing to read, I understand.”
“Yes. This water reclamation system -- they use the term, "recycling" -- is a bit revolting to contemplate, but the sheer utility is beyond question. How did you know?”
“I spoke to Jeremiah, on my way in. We have a new project.”
“Something you received from Mr. West?”
Gordon smiled ruefully.
“You heard us, did you?”
“Hardly. I’ve learned that I sleep better if I avoid listening to the conversations between the two of you, during one of his fortunately rare evening visits. Still, what would you think of me if I didn’t know who comes and goes in my own house?”
“I should never think of you as anything other than perfectly wonderful, my dear.”
“How sweet. What is it you want, this time?”
“Forbearance, I’m afraid. Jim is worried that Earth-C has begun to turn its thoughts to what remains of the peculiar institution, in such a way as to have… unsettling consequences, in the near term. I thought I should post a note to our acquaintance in Langley.”
A pause. Hardly unexpected.
“The peculiar institution is a grotesque remnant of barbarism, and if anyone deserves a bit of unsettling, it’s the Old Planters. Still, you know I don’t like it when you speak with our acquaintance in that Central Intelligence Agency. He’s the sort that sets hooks.”
“Oh, of that I’m well aware. But if he can give us some insight into the position his President Obama will likely take, towards us, it might be a barb worth bearing.”
==References==
Category:Five Earths - Vignettes