Chapter 9: Problems

“Can we confirm the quality of the locus?” asked Paul Hammersmith. For the day’s tests, he had come to the control center to verify the results himself.

“The results seem to be about the same as before,” replied William Stevens, who was directly monitoring the locus system.

“Still higher than calculated noise level?”

“By at least an order of magnitude, maybe more.”

Hammersmith shook his head in confusion. “At which end?”

“Both.”

“We can’t use the system at this level of deviation. What if we altered the coordinates, changed X, Y, or Z?”

“Maybe, but we’d have to alter the control system. We’d have to change the programming on the interface, maybe add a translation package. It wouldn’t take more than a few days to try.”

“Okay, let’s shut it down.”

Stevens hit a few keys on the keyboard. “You got it, boss.” He turned to the backup controller and said, “We’ll do another diagnostic and then start figuring out a new control system.”

“We’ll need Jerry for the programming,” was the reply. Jerry Tolson was their main programmer for the locus interface.

“Yeah.”

The half-circle shrank down to nothing over about a thirty second period. Travis Shockley was making a video of it with his phone the entire time. When it disappeared, there was as much of an uproar as before.

Lars asked, “What was that, Travis?”

“Fuck if I know. Ask your friends.” He nodded towards the Vikings, who were all pointing out to sea and talking loudly and gesturing at each other.

Lars went over to the Vikings and spoke to Torvald. “ Hvat var at, Torvald? Gerði þú sjá þat fyrir?” {"What was that, Torvald? Did you see it before?"}

Lars became the focus of the yelling and handwaving. He just stood there nodding, though he told them he didn’t have a clue what had happened. Travis came over and asked, “So?”

“Well, they have definitely seen it, whatever it was. From what they were saying, they were rowing like crazy, trying to keep from sinking, when they noticed a big half-disk like what we just saw, only the one they saw was bright and sunny. They rowed for it and through it and saw the beach here. It seems they got to shore right before the ship started filling up with water. Nobody noticed what happened to the circle or what it looked like from the other side.”

“So that circle, or half circle, or whatever, that was the time machine they came through?”

“Travis, you hired me to speak Old Norse, not describe time travel. I have no idea.”

“Yeah, but at least we have pictures.” He waved his phone. “I need to download this and send it home. Maybe somebody there can figure it out.”

“You want to ask about letting them rebuild so they can put out to sea again, so they can invade England?”

“One crisis at a time.”

The collapse of the back third of the longship prevented the engineers from pulling the ship up to the gravel road. Without a better way to stabilize the wrecked ship, the best they could do was pull it further up the beach, to the edge of the escarpment. They wrapped it in more webbing in the hope that a storm wouldn’t take it back out to sea. At that point they called it a day and headed back to the base.

When they got back to the base, Torvald sent his men back to the bunkhouse while he went to the hospital, with Lars following. Lars told Travis it was so he could interpret, but Travis simply replied, “Hálfviti!” and rolled his eyes. “Remember what I told you about watching your balls sail out to sea.”

Helga was sitting up in her hospital bed and talking to several of the Viking women. As soon as Lars and Torvald entered, she began to excitedly chatter, along with the others, the gist of which was that Una was having a boy. “Una hafar sonr, sveinnr!” {"Una is having a son, a boy!"}

Torvald looked at the women and Lars and said, “ Hvernig gerþúr veit þessi? Eingodinr megveitr þessi!” {"How can you tell this? Only Odin Allfather can know this!"}

One of the nurses stuck her head in the room upon hearing the commotion. Lars said, “I hear we have a boy on the way.”

“Una, the young woman. Yes, we did an ultrasound on her. The newest Viking has a dingus.”

“Huh! How’d you get her to go along with that?”

“Girl talk.”

Lars gave her a skeptical look. “Really?”

“Okay, so it was a bit more than that. We showed her and Helga a stethoscope and let them listen to their heartbeats and showed them a medical textbook on anatomy. Then we wheeled in an ultrasound machine and showed it was harmless and got her on a table. Helga here did most of the talking. Since then, we’ve had a steady stream of women coming through. Una’s simply the most advanced, but two others are pregnant, too.”

“Huh!”

“It gives us a chance to check them for any problems and then we can look at the children,” she said.

“That’s a good idea, I guess.”

“There’s a reason women do well in nursing, Mister Ropstad, especially in obstetrics and gynecology.”

Lars felt amazingly inadequate at the turn the conversation was taking. Up until that point in his life, his primary concern with OB/GYNs was to make sure he didn’t need their services.

Torvald tapped him on the shoulder and began asking questions about how they knew Una was having a boy. Explaining an ultrasound was not easy. It finally came down to saying, “They looked inside her and saw the baby.”

“Ok?” {"And?"}

Lars gulped and balled up his right fist. “Torvald, dóttir.” Then he slowly extended his index finger. “Ok sonr.”

Helga and the other women all laughed and giggled, and Torvald gave him a very dry look. Lars decided a strategic withdrawal was a good idea and headed towards the door. He stopped when Helga called out, “ Lars, munu þú kommeðr eptir í nótt ok mælmitr mér?” {"Lars, will you come by tonight and talk with me?"}

Lars gulped again and glanced at Torvald, and nodded and replied, “ Ja.” Then he scooted out of the room before Torvald could cut his balls off and throw them in the North Sea.

The staff meeting that evening was an important one. Colonel Bellingham started it with a simple question. “Mister Ropstad, Miss Wiltshire, you are the experts. Are these people really and truly Vikings, from a thousand years ago?”

Jennifer Wiltshire answered, “Yes, by any method we have available here to tell, they are. We’ve taken some metal samples and sent them back to England for testing, but their equipment and ship was all handmade from hand hewn timber and hand forged steel and iron. Everything they are doing screams Norsemen.”

Lars nodded. “I can’t speak to the equipment, but their language is definitely the western dialect of Old Norse. We have written samples of it in the Latin alphabet, but they don’t even recognize that. They can only read runes, and only one or two can do that. That indicates almost universal illiteracy, which was common at the time.”

Jennifer added, “That just makes it more likely they are real. Nobody, I mean nobody, reads the Runic alphabet outside of some oddball university professors. That alone dates them to the Ninth Century, maybe 1,150 to 1,200 years ago.”

Bellingham looked around the room and nodded. “Okay, so how did they get here? I heard there was something that happened at the wreck site?”

Travis answered that. “Lars and I went with a few of them to the beach they landed their ship at, and at the end of the day, we saw something none of us could explain. Let me show you. I copied this from my phone. I made a video while we were there.” He turned on a large screen monitor and put his video on it. The motion was a little jerky to start with, but the half-disk of black was obvious, and they watched as it eventually disappeared. “We couldn’t figure out what is was, but the Vikings became very excited when they saw it. We asked, and they said that right before they thought they were going to sink, a half-disk like that appeared, only it was bright and sunny, and they were able to row towards it and go through it. Nobody noticed it disappear afterwards, but as you saw, that happened quickly. So, we don’t know how they got here, but whatever this phenomenon was, it seems to be the method.” Then he added, “I sent this video back to Langley and asked them to try and figure it out.”

Lieutenant Colonel Fowler asked, “How is the young woman doing? She is their leader’s daughter, correct? I would imagine that relations would go poorly if something happened to her.”

Several snorts sounded around the table. It was Doctor Cooper who answered. “That is working out very well. We did an emergency appendectomy last night, and she is responding very well to treatment. I would imagine we can take her back to the bunkhouse sometime tomorrow, and she should be walking freely in a week. In addition, several of the other women have been to see her and we’ve used their visits as chances to examine them and the children in the group. From what I can see, and I have to give our nurses a lot of the credit for this, they are very pleased with their medical care.”

“Good!”

Bellingham said, “By the way, what is the story on the young woman, their leader’s daughter? I’ve heard she’s sixteen. Isn’t that marriageable age? Why isn’t she already married? What’s she doing chasing Mister Ropstad here?”

Lars sputtered out a protest as the others laughed at him. It was Jennifer who protected him. “I think it’s because she’s Torvald Gunnarson’s daughter. He’s one of the jarls, what in England would be considered an earl, a nobleman. The rankings weren’t as rigid as they were in the rest of Europe. Anyway, as a noble daughter, she’d probably be used as a trading card and get married off to another jarl as a first or second wife. Maybe she gets married off to a local English noble when they land in England, payment for land or something.”

“A second wife?” exclaimed Lars.

The historian nodded. “Until Christianity came to Scandinavia a hundred years after their time, polygamy was not unheard of, at least among the classes that could afford it. Two wives cost twice what one does.”

“Not to mention, two mothers-in-law are twice as bad as one!” laughed Travis. “I wouldn’t mention it to her, but at least Lars won’t have to worry about a mother-in-law with Helga.”

“Very funny!” groused Lars as the others laughed at him.

The doctor said, “There’s another indication they are real Vikings. I got a report back this afternoon. We took cheek swabs from as many people as we could and sent them off for DNA testing, sort of like the public companies, 23andMe, Ancestry, those places. The preliminary results are that everybody came from a very small area, as in a single town or village.” The others looked at him curiously, and Cooper continued. “Nowadays, if I was to take a sampling of swabs from a typical Norwegian town, we would probably show ancestry from half of Europe, maybe more. We mix a lot more these days. People travel, meet other people, get married, have kids. That can be tested for. Maybe you have genes from people in Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, or wherever. These folks are almost universally from a very small area in Southwest Norway, with a sprinkling of genes from Scotland, probably from prisoners and slaves brought back from raids. It’s too soon to tell yet, but they are also doing familial matching. A small town or village, probably everybody is related to each other.”

“Something is bugging me about these people,” said Major Smythe. “The age distribution seems off. We have adults, and we have young children, but where are the teens? As far as I can tell, we only have one teenager, Helga, the daughter of their boss, Torvald. Where are the teenagers?”

Lars and Travis looked at each other in confusion. It was Jennifer who provided the answer. “Probably at home back in medieval Norway. You have to remember that people married very young. Males were considered an adult at sixteen. There really wasn’t an adult age for women; they were considered an adult when they had their first child, usually at fourteen or fifteen.”

“So, the teenagers?” asked Smythe.

“They are probably back home with their husbands and wives farming or fishing or doing whatever it is they do. The only children who would have been brought along would have been the ones too young to marry,” she finished.

“Except Helga, who is old enough to marry but is probably being held as a trading card,” said Lars.

“Right.”

Lars shrugged and looked around. He asked Bellingham, “Sir, what are we going to do with these people. They’re beginning to ask that themselves. Today, when we were out at the ship, they wanted to know if we could help them get wood or timber, oak trees, so they could rebuild their ship. Sir, they expect to be able to fix their ship and put out to sea, so they can leave this magical land and get back on their original course and sail south.”

“You mean...”, started Bellingham.

“Yes, sir! They want to keep sailing south, so they can invade Scotland or England!” Lars finished.

“Oh shit!” he exclaimed. He looked over at his American counterpart. “What are your thoughts?”

“I think I’m glad it’s your problem and not mine! We might be here with you, but the Cudlow Islands are part of the United Kingdom. They’ve already invaded you guys; they just don’t know it yet.”

Bellingham looked back at Travis, Lars, and Jennifer. “Do they understand they are now, what, twelve-hundred years in their future?”

He got back a trio of blank looks. Lars spoke for them all when he replied, “Colonel, I don’t even know how to explain that to them.”

Travis said, “There’s something else we need to discuss. The Vikings know we have their belongings under guard, and they want their stuff back. I know we can’t give them their weapons, but we’ve told them we aren’t thieves and robbers, and they want their possessions. They also asked us about what happened to the body of the man we killed. Whatever happened to his body, anyway?”

Cooper responded, “We have him over at the hospital. We didn’t do an autopsy, since it was obvious what killed him, but we have him stashed in a morgue cooler. How do they bury people, anyway? Do we have to give him a funeral at sea? Like in the movies?”

All eyes turned to Jennifer, their expert in Viking history. “They only did that for the great kings and war leaders. I don’t know much about boats, but a longship is incredibly expensive. They’re handmade and the sails alone might take a year to collect the wool for and weave. No, they buried people, though not in coffins. They simply dug a hole and buried them, usually with a few possessions.”

“Can we bury them here?” asked Cooper.

“Sure, though I am not at all sure of the legality,” replied the British colonel. Then he shrugged and said, “What is it you Yanks say, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, something like that?”

The Royal Engineers captain said, “Just tell us where and I can have a hole dug in twenty minutes. If I get enough warning, we can build a simple coffin, too. A headstone will take longer.”

“Find us a spot that won’t be in the way,” ordered Bellingham. The engineer nodded.

Travis then said, “Colonel, this goes along with giving them back their gear. These people used to drink a lot of beer, a lot! I know we can’t do that, not much anyway, but I think we should bring in some beer and give them a party. Maybe combine it with a funeral wake, drink the dead guy off to Valhalla or something. We need to show them we like them and trust them. It’s going to make things a whole lot easier when we finally tell them we aren’t going to let them sail south and invade England.”

“You want us to bring in some beer?” Bellingham asked incredulously.

“I say we have a party, a nice big party. Bring in some beer and invite your troops and ours. What could it hurt? After that, we can start letting them loose a little. It’s going to happen soon enough anyway.”

“What do you mean?” asked Major Smythe, the British second-in-command.

“It’s like I was telling Miss Wiltshire the other day. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, the secret is going to be out. Between our troops and yours, we probably have at least a thousand people who know we have time-traveling Vikings here. Somebody is going to talk! This is not some spy thriller where we can kill everybody who knows. It just won’t work! Somebody is going to tell their girlfriend, or show them a cell phone video, or something equally stupid. We have only a matter of days or weeks before this comes out. We need to figure out what we are doing with them. We can’t jail them in the Shetlands forever.”

The Brits collectively groaned. Smythe looked over at Fowler and asked, “Sure you don’t want some immigrants?”

“Like I said earlier, they’ve already invaded you. Our immigration laws are even screwier than yours!” answered Fowler.

Lars spoke up as it became obvious the meeting was winding down. “One last thing. If we can’t send them back in time, and we can’t lock them up here, then we need to start teaching them English. Maybe we need to draft a few schoolteachers.”