Chapter Three
If you hear an owl hoot “to whom” instead of “to who,” you can make up your mind that he was born and educated in Boston.
—Anonymous
661b East Broadway, South Boston, Massachusetts
Weird, thought Cossima, does not begin to describe this. Whatever “this” might be. No matter; I am Cossima and I am afraid of nothing . . . except for bees, wasps, and hornets.
“Here” was, indeed, weird. It was neither light nor dark, but a sort of twilight, lighter towards the down and darker toward the up. The floor was spongy, just a little, and, if there were walls, she couldn’t see them. Several hundred glowing balls floated around above any level she could reach, even with a high jump. If there were any pattern to the balls, she couldn’t discern one. She had the impression that any sound she heard was coming from elsewhere; it was distorted and distant.
Far and near, there were ovals, much like the one she’d come through, which was . . . she turned around completely to ensure it was still there.
Whew! Gingerly, she put a foot out to ensure it would penetrate the oval from this side.
But, in any case, there they were, the ovals . . . the . . . well, doors, I guess they must be. I wonder . . .
Suddenly, a hairy arm shot out from one of the nearer of the doors. A voice said, in an accent much like her grandfather’s when he was in Boston, “Now where did I put that GI Joe?”
Automatically, the little girl crouched down to make herself as small and unnoticeable a target as possible.
There came a sound something like the crack of electricity, though tinnier and fainter. She looked toward the sound and saw one of the balls of light begin to change shape and color. Pulsating, it became a flat square, an oval, a rectangle, before finally settling on an elongated box, about a foot long and maybe three inches on a side.
As soon as the box was formed, it shot into the hand pushed through the other door, which hand grabbed the box and pulled it through.
“Holy crap,” she whispered to herself.
Cossima thought she heard some conversation coming from the other side of that other door, but it was far too faint to make out, except for one sentence. Someone, not whoever had put their arm into this place, said, loudly, “Thank God!”
Again the arm—well, this time, both arms—came through the other portal, as the voice said, “I’m sure I put that last Chatty Cathy here . . . some— Aha, here it is.”
Again, one of the light balls began to pulsate, to change shape, to expand, to contract, to spin and twirl until, finally, in the form of a box with a picture of a doll across the front, it flew across the twilit space into the hands sticking out from the door. Then it disappeared into the portal.
It was terribly difficult to get a sense of scale in this place, but Cossima’s impression was that the box had been about two feet long.
Carefully, gingerly, she duck-walked to the door into which the boxes—A GI Joe doll, that must have been; Grandpa has a few of those stuffed in a box in the garage—and looked out. There, not as plain as day, rather fuzzy, in fact, she caught a glimpse of a woman seated on tall stool next to a cash register. There was a man with her, speaking in tones too low to hear.
Just in front of the gate, Cossima felt something uneven on the floor. She bent down and felt around, then picked up a metal disc.
A tiny silver coin, maybe a paper clip’s worth? Still more weird and there looked to be quite a few of them down there.
She tucked the one she’d picked up into a pocket and then gave what she could see past the gate her full attention. “Narrow?” Cossima asked herself. “Check. Division in the middle? Check. Oh, jeez, that’s about sixty years ago . . .”
At that point the man who had been talking to the woman at the register turned around and looked right at her. Three long strides and he was there, climbing a short stepladder. In another moment, his face—only his face—stuck through the door, causing ripples not unlike one might get from tossing a stone in a pond.
He looked directly at her, his face fierce. Despite the fierceness, when he spoke he whispered, “Go back where you came from, little girl; you do not belong in there!”
With that, Cossima turned and ran for the door she’d come through, stepping gingerly through it.
“You just left,” Juliana said. “Like two seconds ago. Your foot popped out and disappeared just before you came back. Nothing there?”
“Something’s there,” the little girl said. “Something . . . I don’t know what.” She felt suddenly faint. “And I was there longer than that. I need to sit down, then I’ll tell you about it.”
Saying “If you weren’t already married, Dijana, I’d propose on the spot,” the Old Man came into the waiting room looking, feeling, walking, and talking a good deal more sprightly than when he’d gone in. Both girls stood up as if they’d done something terribly wrong. Juliana nudged Cossima with her elbow, saying, “Don’t just stand there with your teeth in your mouth; tell him.”
Instead of telling, Cossima walked to the portal which was invisible to the Old Man, put her arm right into the wall and said, “Now where did I put that GI Joe?”
In a fraction of a second, she withdrew her arm, clasping in her hand an absolutely mint GI Joe box. “America’s movable fighting man,” was emblazoned on the box in a rectangle at the lower right. This she handed over to a slack-jawed, nonplussed, utterly shocked grandfather.
“We need to talk, Grandpa,” Juliana supplied.
The Old Man didn’t really look at the box. Indeed, he let the hand holding it just drop. Instead, he reached up to touch the spot he’d seen Cossima’s arm disappear into. It was solid, just another wall.
“Put your arm in it again,” he said. When she did, he was able to put first his own arm, and then his head it. He looked briefly, then pulled his head out.
“It was real? You mean it was REAL? You’re telling me this was REAL? Holy crap . . . real . . . it was real. Let’s go get your brother.
“Tell NOBODY!”
Braintree, Massachusetts
His cousin, Lulu, and her husband were both out working. They had the house to themselves.
In the dining room, the kids gathered around the Old Man while he worked on his laptop, the laptop resting on an antique, white painted, round table. Looking up from his laptop, the Old Man held up the GI Joe and said to Cossima, “This is worth about four thousand dollars. That means about three weeks of college, I suppose, is paid for.
“Now the question is, what are we going to do with this knowledge. No, that’s not quite right; we need to first figure out just what we know.
“So, Cossima, once again, go over everything you saw, felt, and heard.”
The girl did, for the second time.
“Hmmm,” said the old man. “GI Joe and Chatty Cathy. Let me check . . .”
Fingers flew over the laptop. “Aha, GI Joe means it is not earlier than 1964 on the other side of the portal you described. And . . . let’s see, Chatty Cathy; she wasn’t produced after 1965, though, Slocum’s being Slocum’s, people might expect him to have one stashed away for another year.”
Cossima said, “He said so, Grandpa; the man who put his arms through the door said, ‘I’m sure I put that last Chatty Cathy here somewhere.’ Something like that, anyway.”
The Old Man went to a Facebook group, Originally From Southie, and hunted around until he found a particular picture of the front of Slocum’s Toyland. Out front, sitting in a folding chair, was a man.
Motioning Cossima over, her grandfather asked, “Does he look familiar to you?”
“Grandpa, that was the face in the other door.”
“So we know where the other door is, for certain; it’s here, only well in the past. And we can be pretty sure we’re looking at a potential two-year window, I think.
“It’s a pretty good time, back then. The United States is just getting heavily involved in Vietnam, and the war is still pretty popular. Well, it stayed pretty popular in Southie until we lost.
“Anyway, crime is fairly low, the streets are pretty safe, most places. Employment was high and unemployment was low, in fact and not just in statistics. And Boston . . . Boston was a great city to grow up in. And, yes, safer, then, too, than it is now. A lot safer.
“Would you like to see it?”
“Yes,” said Cossima, “but the man in the other door—Mr. Slocum?—told me I didn’t belong there.”
“He might have been worried about competition,” mused Eisen.
“I’m in,” said Patrick.
“Somebody with some sense has to watch out for you,” Juliana said, resignation replete in her voice. “What if we change something important and destroy our own universe?”
“That’s a concern,” the Old Man agreed, “at least in theory. I can see a few possibilities.
“One possibility is that what Cossima saw, and where we’d be going, is not, in fact, our universe, but some parallel one. In that case we could not possibly change ours.
“A second is that it is ours. But tell me, how could we change our universe so substantially, in the past, and even be here to go back to the past from our present?”
“I don’t know,” Juliana admitted.
“I think it’s a given that we cannot change the past in any way that would change the present, or we couldn’t have gone back to the past. Example; let’s imagine there were some way I could save your grandmother. Now imagine that I tried. If I’d succeeded, then I’d be with her right now and we’d not have come to Boston. But since we have come to Boston, obviously enough I did not try or succeed in saving her.”
“I guess,” the girl conceded, with ill grace.
“There’s another way to look at it, too. You may not be able to change the world, but you could screw it up for your own family or some other individual. Small events, small consequences. So we’d need to avoid that.
“And, then, too, there’s the obverse of going back to save someone. I would want to use my time back there to make a lot of money. A lot. Trump-weeping-for-envy levels of wealth. How can I do that since, if I had that money, I’d never have bothered to go back?
“Easy; I’d set it up so the money was not in my hands until after we came back from our trip. Hence no temporal paradox. Yes, I think there’s a very subjective element to the classic temporal paradox.”
Finishing, he said, “Lastly, though chaos theory might wax lyrical about the end of the world from a crushed butterfly, I think it’s a fraudulent notion. You make one little change and it changes everything? It changes everything when an entire world’s facts are arrayed against it? Not a chance; it’s simply outweighed. Physics forbids, as does logic. The world forces the—let’s call it ‘the path’—back to where it would have been anyway.
“Now, any other objections?”
“Other than stinging, flying insects, I’m not afraid of anything,” Cossima agreed. “Count me in.”
“All right,” said the Old Man, “there’s a lot that has to happen. For one thing I’m going to rent us a mail drop and find us a hotel room not too far away. Then we’re going to go to the computer store to buy three more laptops. Yes, they’ll be yours to keep. Then we’re going to check into that hotel room so we can do our work there. Most days we’ll go visit things in and around the city. But for the next three or, if necessary, four days we’ll work on this. When our time here is done we all go back to Virginia and continue our preparations. And I’ll need to go see a company I do some consulting for up in Vermont.”
“This is going to be so cool,” said Patrick. “But, Grandpa, how are we going to get through locked doors?”
“How do you think? We’re going to break in.”
“See?” said the boy. “I knew we came from criminals.”
“Shut up, Patrick. Breaking and entering, to be a felony, requires the intent to commit a felony therein. Even assuming Massachusetts law counts the business as an occupied dwelling, which I doubt. We’re not going to commit a felony; we’re going sightseeing.”
“Yessir.”
“Oh, one other thing, Grandpa,” said Cossima. She pulled the silver coin from her pocket. “There were a bunch of these scattered around the far gate. I didn’t see any at the near one, but they might be there.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t even look.”
The Old Man took the silver coin and examined it from all sides. On the front was a Saint George’s Cross inside a wreath, all rather off center. Turning it over, he saw two shields, one containing another Saint George’s Cross, and the other the Hibernian harp, complete with bare-breasted woman’s bust, with a Roman number I at the top, flanked by two dots.
“Hmmm . . . this is old. Way out of my skill set to say just how old, but that it’s old I am certain.”
50 Royall Street, Canton, Massachusetts
The hotel was decent for the price, some two hundred dollars a night plus the usual outrageous taxes. Given what hotels were often used for, Eisen consciously decided to forego his usual flirting with the girl at the counter.
“We’ll work here days, then go sleep at my cousin’s in the evening,” the Old Man said.
If the clerk thought it odd that three kids and one old man checked in without much in the way of luggage, she said nothing. Indeed, all they brought in was a single suitcase, which happened to be full of office supplies, though the clerk had no way of knowing that, and four computer bags. Had they not looked enough alike to be presumptively relatives, the clerk would probably have called the police anyway, just to be safe.
The Old Man divided up the work. “I want each of you to get on eBay. Juliana, your job is finding four outfits each, two summer, two winter, for yourself, Patrick, and Cossima. They must be 1963, 1964, 1965, or 1966 appropriate. Make sure your brother and sister approve what you order. Have them sent to the mail drop. You’ll need to get the sizes before you start.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll take care of my own clothes.
“Patrick?”
“Yes, Grandpa?”
“I don’t want you to order anything yet, but search through eBay and online, generally, for currency. It must all be from before 1966. I won’t say it has to be American, because you might find some bargains with foreign currency. Just remember that, even though most of Europe uses the Euro now, back in the 1960s Germany used the Deutschmark, Italy used the Lira, and France used the Franc. Then, as now, the United Kingdom used the Pound Sterling, though then it wasn’t decimalized, the pound having twenty shillings of twenty-four pence each.
“Bookmark everything you find and then we’ll go through it together.”
“How are you going to pay for it?” the boy asked.
“I’ll raid savings and retirement if I have to. But I probably won’t since your grandmother left me a fair amount, too.
“Now, Cossima?”
“Yes, Grandpa.”
“We’re going to need ID once we get there. I want you to hunt through death records for the Massachusetts area for someone who died, as a baby, in 1915, and 1953 through 1956. If it’s not obvious, we need a girl’s death for the oldest and newest, and a boy’s for the middle.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Back then,” he explained, “records security in cities was awful and no office really talked to another. We’re going to get birth certificates either now or when we go back, possibly both. If we do go for back then, the birth registry isn’t going to know about what’s in the death registry, because they never talk, so, with those, we can get social security numbers and I can get a driver’s license. Got it?”
“Not really, but I can at least look for the records.”
“Good girl! Spread it out, too; stay away from small Massachusetts towns, everybody knows everyone else in those; go for the cities there, along with southern New Hampshire and Maine, as well as Rhode Island and Connecticut.
“In the meantime, I am going to contact those people in Vermont I mentioned, order a parts kit for a Sterling submachine gun, and get an eighty percent complete frame for an M1911. And then I’ll start work on assembling a list of everything we’re likely to need that isn’t as obvious as clothes, ID, money, and arms.”
“Grandpa?” asked Juliana, the sensible one.
“Yes?”
“If it’s so safe back then—you insist it was safe—why the armaments? Yeah, I’m not stupid; I fired your Sterling. You’re not ordering a parts kit to be a club.”
“Well . . . hon; it is safer back there than it is now. But if I could get away with it I’d be carrying a Sterling here. The short version, little one, is that I am getting something, a weapon, made up because I can, because it doesn’t hurt anything to get it, and because, as your sister agreed in the garage under the Common, I’m paranoid.”
“Hey, Grandpa,” asked Patrick, “if there’s a chance we get there in winter aren’t we going to need winter coats?”
“Good point! Juliana?”
“I’m on it,” said the eldest, “but this is a lot harder than you think.”
“Why?” the Old Man asked.
“Because so much of this stuff is downright hideous.”
“Nothing is hideous, Juliana, if it makes you blend in.”
“I am not wearing that crap,” Patrick said, vehemently. “It’s totally hideous.”
“But there’s nothing else for boys on eBay from that time period,” his elder sister insisted.
“Grandpa,” the boy complained, “you can’t expect me to wear green corduroy shorts with suspenders in public. You just can’t.”
“No . . . no, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t have worn that in 1965 even if every other boy in the city was wearing the same thing, which they were not. I suspect what’s going on is that boys’ clothes wear out, then get thrown away or given to the ragman. Yes, there were such things as ragmen; I can remember watching the horse and cart of one of them, the horse dumping a load on I Street back when it was still cobblestones. In any case, that means that what’s left is what nobody would wear that their maiden aunt gave them. Picture the bunny suit Ralphie’s aunt bought him in A Christmas Story.”
“Try Etsy, Juliana,” the Old Man said.
“Now that’s a little better,” Patrick said after a few minutes. “At least it doesn’t make me want to hurl. But there’s not that much of it in my size.”
“Suggestion, Juliana,” said the Old Man.
“Yes, Grandpa?”
“Find the 1965 Sears catalogs, preferably the summer and Christmas ones, and see what boys were wearing then that we can find something like now.”
“Good thought! I will.”
“Okay,” said Eisen, “at vast expense—mine—Juliana has acquired for us two Sears catalogues, one summer, one Christmas. I’ve made a phone call to an online acquaintance, one Heather Knight, down in Rhode Island. She does sewing, has patterns, and can get fabrics. So we’re all going to board the car and drive to East Warwick, Rhode Island, to get you mob measured and outfitted, two outfits each, hot weather and cold.
“You can look at the catalogs on the way for some things you think you might like. So, boots and saddles, brats; into the car with you.
“And bring the Sears catalogues!”
The door was opened by someone Eisen knew from Facebook was not Heather. The confused look on his face, coupled to the quizzically tiled head, prompted the woman to say, “I’m Jo, Heather’s . . . friend. I’ll go get her. She’ll be out in a minute.”
“And very lovely, you are, too,” Eisen said, and meant it. The woman was short-haired, but had fine bone structure and extremely cute ears. Because just because a girl prefers girls it doesn’t necessarily follow that she doesn’t like a compliment from any corner.
“Oh, Grandpa,” whispered Juliana, “flirting with a lesbian is just too much.”
“You think so,” he whispered back. “Remind me to tell you about the hot blonde lesbian psychiatric nurse practitioner, paired up with a lesbian psychiatrist, back home. Although who was flirting with whom, in that case, was an open question . . .”
It was, indeed, a minute before Heather popped out from a back room, looking rather matronly and showing a wide, friendly smile.
She spoke with a good Rhode Island accent, showing more New England to it than had become the modern wont. “Are these the ruffians of whom you spoke, Sean?”
“The same. How long to outfit them?”
“I can do the measurements today for all three. Call it three more days to sew them. Do you want to bring them back to check and redo?”
“No, there’s really no time for that. If things are a little off . . . well, they’re supposed to be dressed more or less off the rack anyway.”
“Let’s get to it,” Heather said. “This will be fun!”
“Can you FedEx everything to an address I’ll give you?” Eisen asked.
“Sure, easy.”
“We’ve brought some Sears catalogues. They’ve dog-eared the pages of things they like.”
“Funny thing about Sears catalogue,” Heather said. “They tend to be somewhat regional. Let me see these.”
The kids passed those over and, in less than a minute, she had judged, “The Summer edition is Dallas. It will have a lot more western wear and less that’s suitable here. Christmas is the Philadelphia edition, and that will be fine.
“Is this for some kind of costume thing or play?”
“Something like that,” Eisen agreed, “but they’re for more than one wearing.”
“Okay, kids,” said Heather, bending slightly and slapping her hands against her thighs, “let’s look in the catalogue for things you actually like.”
“I think I’ve got our dead people, Grandpa,” Cossima announced, the next day, back in the rental room. “A whole family was killed in a fire in 1965. Six kids killed and three of them match our ages or close enough to them. But I’m having trouble with yours. Seems the parents weren’t home.”
“Sad and creepy, both; poor kids. Well, get their names and . . . I doubt it’s possible but see if you can find social security numbers for the ones we’ll be using.”
“Grandpa,” said the boy, “I think I’ve got a line on our currency, but how much did you want?”
“Thirty-five to seventy thousand pre-1966 dollars’ worth.”
“I only see one dealer who looks like he can do that, Sam’s Coins of California. I think you had better call him, though. This is going to be serious money.”
“Why him?”
“He seems to have a lot of older currency, his prices are lower, and buying from one man means less shipping to be paid. Shipping and handling will kill you here.”
“Clever lad. All right, send me his ad from eBay and I’ll handle it from there.”
“Just go to samstraus.com,” Patrick said. “All the info is there.”
Eisen dialed the number. “818 . . . 404 . . . . . .”
“Sam Straus,” came the answer. The voice sounded younger than expected, but that didn’t matter.
“Sam,” the Old Man began, cheerily, “you don’t know me from Adam. My name’s Sean Eisen . . . yeah, I’m an associate member of the tribe but only that; my mom was a shiksa, grandmother, too, for that matter. In any case, I’m looking for a fairly substantial quantity of old United States paper currency, preferably mostly in larger denominations.”
“How much of it are you looking for?” the young voice asked. “And how old?”
“How much am I looking for? Something between thirty-five and seventy thousand. I need it to be pre-1966 but I don’t really want any of the older, oversized bills. Can you come up with that much?”
“If pressed,” Straus answered, “I could probably come up with fifty thousand and it would cost you on the order of seventy thousand.”
Eisen said, “I was looking at some of the old gold certificates. I understand that, even though you can’t exchange them for gold, they’re still legal tender. I even saw where you could get the ten-thousand-dollar ones for less than ten thousand dollars.”
“Oh, no, Mr. Eisen; those ones are worthless. Oh, yes, they’re real but there’s a story there. You see, they’d just about all been redeemed and the Treasury had cancelled them; you can tell because they’ve got punch holes in them, most of them. Well, a bunch of them were sitting in a post office in Washington, DC, near the Treasury, awaiting destruction, when the building caught fire. This was back in the mid-thirties. The postal workers saved what they could by throwing boxes into the street. Some of them burst open and at least one of those was full of the ten-thousand-dollar gold certificates. People who were making twelve bucks a week saw those, stuffed their pockets, and ran with them. But they were worthless. They’re all, in fact, stolen property but the Feds won’t go after anyone for selling them because they’re worthless. And the lesser denominations cost, oh, a lot more than regular currency because of the rarity.”
“Kills that theory,” the Old Man said. “Shame. How quickly can you come up with the fifty thousand? Oh, and I need a roll of silver quarters, a roll of dimes, a roll or nickels and a roll of pennies, all from that time period.”
“The coins are easy. Currency’s somewhat tougher. Give me a month? Maybe I can get it all within three weeks, but I can promise it for a month from now.”
“Done. Do you need an advance to help you buy? Some earnest money?”
“Send me five thousand as a deposit and as earnest money. I can work with that.”
“Done. Give me your snail mail address.”
“Could you Venmo it to me?” Sam asked.
Eisen sighed. “If you didn’t guess it, I’m technologically challenged. But, yeah, I can send you the five grand via Venmo.”
It took the full three days, plus an extra one, for the Old Man and the kids to find and order, if not everything they might need, everything that could be found online that they might need. While waiting for things to arrive at the mail drop, the Old Man rented a storage space in Quincy. The people running it struck him as greedy swine, but it wasn’t like he was going to keep it for very long. He put a very heavy, extremely strong, and highly lockable trunk in it, even so. His gay cousin, Danny, the dancer, who was a hell of a lot stronger than the Old Man was, and had a deeper voice, to boot, helped him move it.
A few items for Patrick and himself he ordered at the downtown tailor’s shop, Frank’s, on Winter Street. They’d be delivered to the drop.
Among the last items to arrive at the mail drop were the Sterling submachine gun parts kit and a complete kit for an M1911. Once these were in hand, he made a phone call to a certain custom arms company in Vermont, called, appropriately, Vermont Custom Armory.
Vermont Custom Armory, and its subsidiary, Brattleboro Air Repeating Arms, were perfectly capable of making conventional small arms; they had the design capability, the machinery, and the skill. But their particular niche was pneumatic, ranging from hunting arms to fully automatic—but legal, because pneumatic—weapons, to crew served weapons and, possibly soon to be, military training simulators. The Old Man had been a consultant for them for about a year at this point, generally pointing out the rocks and shoals of trying to get a defense contract on a military ecological niche that was already filled, and pointing out niches that could be filled.
The Old Man’s phone already had the number on speed dial.
“Jake? This is Sean. I need to ask a few questions.”
“Shoot,” answered the voice on the other end. “I’m all ears.”
“I bought a couple of kits. The first one is a remarkably complete, the kind you can hardly ever find now, parts kit for a Sterling. No, of course, I don’t want you to make me an actual submachine gun. I didn’t buy a templated tube for it just in case BATFE follows those things more closely than people think. What I want is to convert it to pneumatic, make ammunition that can use the magazines as they are, and add a permanent suppressor to it, welded on so it can’t be removed, hence the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives can’t bitch.”
“That’s all pretty doable,” Jake replied. “But I’ve got a couple of caveats and suggestions to it.”
“Go on,” the Old Man urged.
“In the first place, it’s going to need a largish air storage tank, maybe four inches in diameter by eighteen or so. So it won’t be as pretty and would have limited capability. It would also be ungainly. We could weld one on in place of the folding stock, make it like an old-fashioned Girondoni, if the collapsing stock doesn’t matter. Limited shots with that, though. Otherwise, it has to be attachable either above, below, or to one side. If it absolutely must go on the gun, I’d recommend putting it to one side, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. That said, I don’t think that putting it on the gun in any position is your best solution.”
“I will want to keep the collapsing stock,” the Old Man said.
“All right, then,” Jake replied. “Then, if it’s to go on the gun, then the tank probably needs to go on top or to the right side. Why? Because the magazines . . . well, to make them work, we’re better off just making big, solid, cast nine-millimeter bullets, the width of the casing and the length of a complete cartridge, and boring out the barrel and chamber. That’s going to be heavy, much heavier than a standard magazine. Close to three times more. It will throw you off without a compensating weight on the other side. Hence, we should put the tank there. That, however, means we’d better attach a handle to the gun, underneath.”
“I can deal with the extra weight,” the Old Man assured him. “Don’t sweat that. Though a handle might be nice, yes, if we go that route.”
Jake continued, “Okay, the other reason to make the bullets like that is because air is unavoidably slower than an explosive propellent, so you want to hit with a heavier bullet to keep something like the same level of energy on the target. The weight of the bullet won’t change the velocity much and it will tend to keep more velocity—well, a greater percentage of velocity—at range. Hmmm . . . let me do some figuring . . . okay, if we went with a solid slug, of pure lead, with a domed front for feed purpose, it would run around three hundred and sixty grains, which is maybe too much. If we hollow point it, and I think we should, we can get it down around two hundred and maybe eighty grains, which is still too much. But if we swag the bullets, using soft lead, and add in two aluminum balls, one each front and rear, we can get it around two hundred grains, hollow-pointed, and that’s plenty. And at that weight we can push it out of the barrel at twelve to thirteen hundred feet per second. That’s about seven hundred to seven hundred and fifty foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. That’s right in there with a non-fancy, lower end, Remington forty-four magnum. Which is, you know, not bad. However, I don’t think we should do that. Instead, we need to keep velocity down to under eleven hundred feet per second.”
“To keep the bullet from breaking the sound barrier? Okay, makes sense. Go on.”
“At a thousand and sixty feet per second, that gives around five hundred foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, which is still good, roughly .357 Magnum levels of good. The suppressor could be a problem; we don’t have a license for those and, if we did, the turn around on the form four can be lengthy.”
“That’s not a problem,” the Old Man said. “The trick would be to weld the exterior can to the Sterling and the barrel to the tube before putting in the internals. Or . . . maybe . . . you on your computer? You are? Good. Look up the L34A1; that’s the Brits’ suppressed version. Can we do that? But with the same deal; we weld the barrel to the tube and the can to the barrel before filling it so there’s no question but that it was never legally a suppressor.”
The was a momentary pause while Jake thought about that. “Hmmm . . . so it never could have been a suppressor because it was always affixed to an air rifle? I can see that. And, yeah, I see the L34 . . . we can do that. Port the barrel, too. But BATFE is often inconsistent and sometimes fairly lawless, and will screw you by process if they can’t screw you at law.”
“Can you keep something perfectly legal a secret, Jake? I can.”
“Good point,” the arms maker conceded. “So, in any case, yes, we can modify your parts kit into a functioning, pneumatic, suppressed submachine gun. It will take about three weeks.
“But let’s get back to the pneumatic tanks. If you really insist on it being part of the gun, I could make something here that can hold nine thousand PSI. But you would probably have to come here every time you wanted to fill it; that kind of capacity is pretty uncommon. I could make you a hand pump but it would never get that high and would take a thousand strokes to get anything decent. Instead, I suggest getting a plate carrier and mounting two tanks in it, front and rear, connected to each other and to the gun by hoses. Give you five hundred shots, easy . . .”
“I don’t need nearly that much.”
“Probably not,” Jake agreed, “but you want the balance, don’t you? And besides, they really will be highly bullet resistant.”
“Ah. Good points,” the Old Man conceded. “Okay, front and rear tanks on a plate carrier. We’ll go with that, though if we can save some weight by reducing the number of shots to the two to three hundred range . . .”
“And a third, smaller tank, those two will feed into.”
“Okay,” the Old Man agreed. “My other project is to create an M1911, in .45 caliber, from a kit.”
“Now that we can’t do,” Jake said. “That would be ‘manufacturing’ and we have no license for that, in the first place, while, if we did, we’d have to serial number it, which kind of destroys the point, no?”
“Puhleeze,” said the Old Man. “Give me some credit here. I don’t want you to make it. I want to show up with the kit and have you and your people talk me through using your machinery for me to make it. Indeed, I’ll pay a whole ten dollars on the rental of the machinery and give you the jig, to boot.”
“That would work,” Jake agreed. “Except you can’t pay us a dime for it. ATF, again, and their, shall we say, nuanced view of the law. Has anyone ever told you that you are a wicked, evil man?”
“Yes,” said the Old Man. “Very frequently.”
USS Constitution Museum, Charlestown, Massachusetts
“You know,” said the Old Man, leading the kids through the Museum, “USS Constitution was funny. Leaving aside that it was the first instance of a massive cost overrun in American military or naval history, it was also an example of a cost overrun proving to be worth every penny. In addition, it was, in practice, one of the most powerful warships afloat, arguably more powerful even than HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar. This is even though Victory had twice as many guns.
“How can that be?” Patrick asked.
“It was because, in the first place, Constitution carried mostly heavy guns, while Victory’s guns included a lot of twelve-pounders, while, in the second place, not being intended to patrol all the world’s seas, as HMS Victory was, and so not needing so much food and drink aboard, Constitution carried enough crew to man both broadsides at once, where Victory could only man one side or the other, but not both. Mind, if Constitution had met Victory, Victory would have blown her to bits, because even if you can man both sides’ guns, you can only use one at a time. One Victory against one Constitution, Constitution loses. But, if you put three Constitutions, four effective broadsides in all, against two Victories, I’d give odds on the Constitutions.”
They came to a short pillar with a poem inscribed on one side.
“Okay, brats,” said the Old Man, “watch this.”
With that, he turned his back to a poem, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior’s, Old Ironsides, and began to recite:
“Aye, tear her tattered ensign down;
Long has it waved on high . . .”
He finished with:
“And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!”
The Old Man felt a gentle tapping on his shoulder. He turned around to see one of the museum’s workers or supervisors standing there, holding out a deformed penny, oval, flat on one side and, on the other, emblazoned with “USS Constitution,” a silhouette of the ship, and “Old Ironsides.”
“You didn’t make any mistakes,” said the man, wonderingly. “I know the poem, too, and I know you didn’t make any mistakes. I’ve worked here for fifteen years. In all that time I’ve never seen anyone do that. I’ve never seen anyone even try. Take this as a memento, please, as a gift from me.”
“Thanks,” said the Old Man.
“Can I have that?” Cossima asked.
“When I’m dead, it’s yours,” he agreed.
“I meant now.”
“Yes, I gathered that, but I meant ‘no,’ not until I’m dead.”
“How do you do that, Grandpa?” asked Juliana.
“The memory thing? I can’t take any credit; it was a gift from my parents, a genetic gift. I’ve just always had it. Unfortunately,” he said, with a sigh, “while long-term memory remains excellent, short-term memory has just recently begun to go. And I will be very much lost without it. What is commonly considered intelligence is often just a good memory, you know. Same with humor. It wasn’t, I assure you, intelligence, in the main, that had me reading so young; it was memory.
“You brats ready for Bunker Hill, or are you hungry, as usual?”
“I’m a growing boy,” said Patrick, which explained his position on the matter perfectly.
“I could eat something,” said Cossima, “provided there’s no pork in it.” It wasn’t that the eight-year-old girl was contemplating embracing Judaism. Oh, no; she’d just decided that a) pigs were people, too, and b) she was not interested in cannibalism.
“Sure,” Juliana agreed.
“Okay, no sense in tackling on an empty stomach the hill it took the British Army nearly all day to take. Let’s hit the Warren Tavern; it doesn’t go back to the battle, itself, since most of the town was burnt down in the course of the fighting. But it’s either the oldest or, at least, one of the oldest buildings, in Charlestown, built about five years after the battle. Ought to be interesting.”
Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown, Massachusetts
“We won the Revolution here,” the Old Man said to the kids. “Oh, it wasn’t obvious at the time, but we won here nonetheless. ‘How?’ you may well ask.”
“Yes,” agreed Cossima, “how?”
“We won here, little weedhopper, because here we broke William Howe’s confidence that he could overrun us and drive us from any fortifications. Oh, yes, they drove us from the fortifications here, but they did it at a cost they were never again willing to repeat. Never, not even once. After that, they had to be fancy, to maneuver us out of one position after another. And, sure, they did maneuver us out of one position after another, but because of it, our army always got away to learn, to train, and to fight again.
“You would have thought Howe would have taken advantage of our position at Valley Forge to exterminate Washington’s army there. But, no, the memory of this battle, right here, froze Howe’s mind and stayed Howe’s hand. This saved the army, thus saved the Revolution and the country. You would also think he’d have assaulted Dorchester Heights when John Thomas set up an overnight defense for the guns Henry Knox brought from Ticonderoga. But, no; Howe was terrified of a replay of Bunker Hill.
“In terms of its ultimate effect on the world, this may well be the greatest pyrrhic victory in history.”
“Grandpa,” asked Patrick, “what’s a ‘pyrrhic victory’?”
“It’s one that costs the winner so much that defeat, provided it was early enough, before too much blood had been spent, would have been preferable. It’s named after an ancient king, Pyrrhus of Epirus, who fought the Romans and discovered they could bleed him white, as we did to the Brits, here, and replace all their own losses in an instant.”