Chapter 13

The next day we had a tour of Alexandria. Photos were taken of the buildings and the people. Some cadets were given permission to climb the famous lighthouse and take pictures from the tallest building on earth at this time.

The libraries themselves were photographed and I had the librarians standing in front with their employees or slaves. Tomorrow they would get some of the prints to treasure. I hoped this would also get us help when we needed it.

I slipped a gratuity to each of the librarians and they helped us list the titles of all the books they had. There were already a lists of such documents and we found where various copies of book were. The copies were compared and the best preserved ones were photographed.

The cadets worked in teams. A given book was photographed by two different cameras. Photography at this time was poor and we needed lots of light. We brought out own arc lights and used mirrors to put the illumination where we wanted it and to extend the time we could use to photograph.

Some books were quite lengthy. One on Zarathushtra was over a million lines in length. When the project was well along, my family and I went around photographing the interior of buildings and some lesser known statuary.

We went to the famous schools in the city and listened to a few of the lecturers. Women were not usually here but the lecturers were happy to make an exception in our case. I was asked to talk about education. I spoke a few words and introduced KhAvar who then carried the ball for me. The students had to learn that women are very capable too.

Education to the students meant a classical education. I did not study the Greek or Roman philosophers but physics, chemistry, electronics, mechanics and much more mathematics than these boys now knew.

KhAvar talked to a few of the students about their level of training in math and then she began to talk about statistics used in predicting trends. This was foretelling the future in a way and the students listened avidly.

Patricia talked later and gave a lesson in algebra. Our number system had been adopted by only a few lecturers but not all. She bluntly said that the old system was good to count sheep but not anything complicated. She got a chuckle from the class and a glower from the lecturer. She went on to describe how aeronautics needed mathematics. This example was used to show that Roman numerals simply would not work.

When I regained the podium, I said, "My mind was sent to the far future. Roman numerals are used to number pages in the index of a book or on the face of some clocks but little else. You came here to be educated but by now you must know that a full education is going to be difficult to get. Philosophy is good but you need physics too. There is so much to learn that in the future it takes thousands of men to understand the parts of just one subject. They learn to such a depth that it is impossible to have one man know everything about any given subject. Those men had to specialise."

The students didn't ask questions so KhAvar said, "Tell them about what it takes to make your planes."

I smiled at her and silently thanked her. "One facet of engineering is to construct aeroplanes. This is just the frame of the plane we are talking about. Another man may work his entire lifetime studying and making the engines. Another man will try to make metal that is very strong but light. Still another will make the instruments that will one day go in a plane.

"The first instrument is the radio. The radio will become more and more complicated as it does its job better and better. All this was just an example because many more engineers are needed to build other parts.

"The world is changing rapidly now. Your attitude on work will certainly change. If you are to feed your family, you will have to know something valuable in addition to philosophy.

"The education you are now getting is good too but I am just saying that you need more subjects to get a well rounded education."

Now the questions came and I answered them honestly. I could tell that some of the young men were very intelligent and very articulate too. Each of the basic subjects I had mentioned earlier was expanded and then I went into the small parts of each. All of the audience was lost so I did not pursue this very far, just enough to show that they had much more to learn.

One young man said, "How can we learn what you are talking about?"

"You have started to learn in this school. When you have completed this you could apply to become a cadet. Not all of you are very young. You are taught half a day and work the other half. Your education here will be of benefit. Then you could teach what you know to others. Your education will never end. You will start to bring inventions into the world that have never been seen before."

That night I got seventeen long letters from some of the earnest students telling me how they could assist me in whatever I wanted done. I simply arranged interview times where the cadets could tell them how it was to work with me on my projects.

We were going through a prodigious amount of film. There were 650,000 different books. Some were plays, art, religion, philosophy, medical thesis, and every other topic imaginable. Most books were short but the average was estimated to be around twenty seven pages.

Our film was fifty millimetres in size because of our poor quality and came on a roll of fifty possible images. The first image had to be an image of a sheet of paper telling what was on the rest of the roll. There was other overhead especially when there was artwork. With pictures of each page on two different cameras, the total number of exposures were over thirty five million.

One man would take well over ten years to complete this task. Seven teams even with help to gather the books would cut the job down to about a year and a half. I was not shocked at the time but I had only estimated this to last a year.

I got on the radio to the office in Constantinople and ordered more cameras and a sooner date for delivery of the film.

Patricia and KhAvar went up the Nile with me and we took the railway over to the Red Sea. The line was underutilised because Sapor wanted the price kept high. He had the majority of the trade with the east now and wanted to keep it that way. He also knew that I planned on trading too. The road beside the tracks was used much more.

We stayed in Alexandria only another two weeks. There already was a sales outlet here. I knew about the tidal wave that would come and constructed a strong walls around the property. It was in the far south and I hoped that the wave would diminish by the time it got there.

I had told the inhabitants about what was going to happen. My inability to remember just when made the job of warning the people difficult. They either planned on fleeing or were indifferent to their fate. A higher break wall was planned but money was hard to find in the city budget.

The number of cadets doing the photography doubled. They were left with the job of getting the images. A lot of students served as part time cadets while some of the cadets took part in a classical education. This way the educators would not be as angry at me and I would give them an opportunity to adapt.

The Discovery picked us up in Constantinople later. Julian had started the dry dock we needed at the mouth of the Ruhr. We talked about the ship he would need though we had gone over this ground untold numbers of times before. He wanted one like the Discovery but with a longer flight deck. I showed him what a modern carrier looked like and he wanted something like this. He was not going to use this military ship for trade.

Sapor could easily get worried about the Romans having a ship like this so the dry dock was enlarged and a similar one started. They were war ships even without large guns. There was nobody to fight except pirates and they were few and far between now. A UN navy was a good idea but men like to test themselves and there was no worthy enemy except each other.

I got the two men to agree that Julian would protect the Mediterranean while Sapor protected us from the Indian Ocean. A further stipulation was that neither of the ships were to have just one nationality in the command structure.

Patricia and KhAvar had daughters that year and I planned to have only one more set of children. The mothers were happy to go on having children until old age if it pleased me.

Nothing major was invented but everything worked a bit better as cadets experimented on everything imaginable. Aeroplanes got larger and the engines grew in power. We had a plane that would land on water and had eight engines. A wheeled version needed some long runways to land and take off. It did not fly well but they would get better as we experimented more.

Balimir was doing well as a farmer. He radioed me that his scouts reported a very large band of people moving his way. He feared that he was going to be attacked Julian had a thousand men there in five days. The nomads attacked a supposedly innocent Roman fort on the Russian steppe and they were suddenly bombarded by cannon fire and then bombs from the air.

We saved enough people to set up another city north east of the one Balimir had. They could farm, help with the railway or go into manufacturing.

Balimir was now more than a king. He was a regional manager for the Hand of Woden and he was reasonably happy in this position. He had his own plane now which made all the difference.

A magazine came out with photographs of partially clothed women. Lazeez had found a way of transferring the image on a negative to a sheet of paper that was not photo paper. I had to get him to tell us how it was done so we could do the same thing.

The stories Lazeez wrote were put in amongst the pictures as well as those of other writers. He knew that I was going to bitch, so he put in the same kind of information that I had in a magazine. His slant was to health and pleasing the ladies. Conception was covered in depth as well as how to take care of babies not babes. The work a mother had to do was put in print so that the consequences of mating were understood.

I caught a lot of shit over the magazine but I denied owning it or even approving it. The magazines sold very well I hear and there were seven reprints before he went onto the second volume.

In another year, Lazeez started a mansion the equal of mine along with a large pool, yacht and three large aircraft. He eventually had twelve children that he adored.

Cadets were rotated constantly but I always kept my eyes out for mages among them. I had found a few people with the ability that did not know it themselves.

The academy split into eleven schools so far. They still went to every academy to gain more training. The schools competed like universities at my time and the students went all out in sports or into seeing which school could perfect something and gain fame.

Universal education was still not complete but a good portion of the population of the children were enrolled. I paid most of this but Sapor and Julian were now contributing too.

In 380, the calenders all over the three empires changed to the year 23. I had been in this time that many years plus a little bit. I still looked very young and kept myself that way. With a little bit of tweaking my wives were the same way.

The steel mill in Syria was very productive. We found oil and gas only a few hundred kilometres away and built a chemical plant near the site. We made nitrates but the phosphates only came from Germania so far.

A new rage was going through the combined empires. Greenhouses were built where the temperature and the humidity regulated. We had lots of food now but it was just a fad that I hoped would never peter-out.

Sapor and Julian made another deal. A shipyard was started in Berytus and two destroyers were started. One for each boy. The guns though used black powder.

I encouraged Clovis to go much further east and take over what was Russia in my time. He liked this better because he could still fight and test both himself and his men. He took over the work of building the rail line going in that direction. Train loads of equipment, track and partially constructed bridges went east. They came back with whatever was plentiful. Sometimes it was timber, minerals or his men on leave.

The Germanic warriors were in great demand. They were paid well and were shown respect. Clovis had turned them into model soldiers from my time. When they were back in their homeland, their training and esprit de corps continued. Clovis was the father of the Germania soon and this changed Clovis until he had to fit the image. The day of the berserker barbarian from Germania may be coming to an end.

We made a newspaper but it was more like a magazine to protect the paper. Local presses added sheets of paper that were of local interest while important events were transmitted by the radio to go into print everywhere.

Sapor talked to the world at large from a comfortable pillow and his voice was carried all over Europe, the Middle East and a portion of western Wodensland. This was the name Clovis used for this portion of Asia.

Julian broadcast the same way when his turn came. Clovis was so far away that his voice had to be transcribed and a local man would speak his words. He was just too far away for the words to be clear.

Patricia and KhAvar had a radio show each. There were interviews as well as commentary and live music, the only kind we had. Crystal radios were sold at cost and millions of units were made each year. Plays were put on that had some moral aspect. They wanted me to talk of Woden on the radio and I refused. The temples and the sermons had to be enough. Religious radio or television shows still bothered me. I remembered the few hours I had free in my youth. This was usually Sunday morning. All that was available on television was religious programming.

Patricia finally gave me a son but so did KhAvar and I promised myself that this was enough.

My passion now was magic. My strength in magic grew each year but I was not that strong yet. I could find somebody that had the gift of magic much easier. Those influenced by magic were more difficult to find. Security saved me three times from one kind of attack or another. Once it was actually another bomb but a trained dog found it first.

They tried to kill Sapor twice and Julian three times. Both leaders had mages at this time and kept them near. Clovis was at the head of the rail line now just south of the Ural Mountains in what was Kazakhstan. He was warned but he was just too far out in the boondocks to be a suitable target.

Clovis had a very large army and air force now. He did not kill all his enemies but absorbed them like the Chinese did. Who could argue with a man that flew the skies and paid people for their labour. His plans were to push the rail line through Siberia and towards the straight that separated this continent from North America.

He said, "I may not make it but my sons will carry on."

He had lots of them now. I only pointed the way and he was happy to put down track. Astrid was still giving him children though her body would cause her to stop soon.

Trains now ran over a hundred and eighty kilometres an hour. That was because the track was well laid and not only straight but level for the most part.

We had made a lot of bridges and learned a lot from building them. We had an ambitious project in bridging east and west. We were building a suspension bridge that would span the Bosporus. The area had many earthquakes and many were severe. Concrete had to be used but only in sections. The rest had to be made of steel rods and steel cable. These were able to flex.

New roads were constructed near all the tracks. The natural pitch in Palestine was heated and pumped to the coast to go into storage. It was processed to make a good asphalt binder while awaiting pickup. A tanker took this all over the empire. Slaves did not dig the roads but freemen that wanted to feel the power of the machines they controlled.

I put up cities like Toronto in three other locations. They all featured high-rises with elevators. The buildings were all linked with bridges to adjacent buildings. Shopping, recreation and schools were all close. Work was far enough away to keep the noise and dirt to a minimum. Streetcars took the people where they had to go. The pollution control plant sold fertiliser and natural gas but could not do it at a profit.

Hydro to power the cities was usually supplied by nearby rivers. This meant we had to build locks to go with the dams. We built large because electrical consumption would only grow.

We were planning on a working vacation well in advance of actually going. Our ship was the Discovery and it was filled with trading goods. Sapor and my people had made acquittances in India and China. We were now going to make deliveries and get paid in commodities other than gold.

We were not going alone either. The UN loaned me a Destroyer and Sapor told me not to scratch it. He had pretty much stayed close to home and had only taken the ship to the Indian continent a few times. He helped some of the people there with pirates.

Julian loaned me his new carrier for a shakedown cruise. It was an extended version of the Discovery with a much longer flight deck. Guns were in pods outside the hull and an electric launching system and a restraining cable were put in. An elevator brought planes with folded wings from the hold. It was a hundred metres longer than the Discovery and aprons extended both fore and aft to increase the length of the flight deck even more.

In the spring of 24, we were ready to go. The children were happy to go too. School was going to go with them in this case but I knew they would get bored on the long cruise. More of the mages were given freedom but not all of them. I still had to learn and the ones I kept were ones I considered amoral no matter what act they tried to put on.

There were a lot of photographs of our departure and they would find their way into our magazine and the local news magazine too. It was uneventful but nice sailing around Hispania, we bypassed the Pillars of Hercules and then viewed the African coast.

I had been this way before. Clovis had heard of the Azores and the Canary islands. He was in the fishing stage at the time and claimed the islands so they could be used to process the fish in the area. I told him about the military bases and airports that would come in handy in later years. The UN was given the right for a naval and an air base when they chose to exercise the options.

We made stops along the way but always we had to do so with a small ship going in first. Coming close with even the small destroyer was too frightening even if they did not understand what a cannon was. We traded as we went. Local spices and fresh food was all we could expect. There was local gold and that usually went toward my iron goods. Swords and armour were not for sale at any price. Europe in my time sold weapons to the Africans and the Africans were so busy killing each other that the Europeans had no problem taking any land they wanted from them.

We transmitted information about our trip every day. KhAvar and Patricia could continue with their radio shows but the reception was not as good as they wanted. Protegees now carried my wives words to the world.

In the area near what had been South Africa, I pointed out where I wanted to expand myself. The area was rich enough to support trading and this way I could start another academy and school system.

After rounding the southern tip of Africa we went northeast. Madagascar had not been found by Europeans yet. I had told Sapor about the large island but it was not rich so he was not interested. We took our time and explored the coast. There were some extensive deposits of guano. I analysed them and found them very high in phosphorus.

We stayed long enough to let the locals get up the nerve to come and trade with us. Minerals were always welcome as a trade commodity. One of them was high in chrome. We went to check out the area where it was found but it was too rough to get the drilling equipment into this remote location. Chrome was also found in Kazakhstan and the deposit was quite large.

A few weeks later we visited the Arabian Peninsula. This was my property now but ruled over by Sapor. I had been given it to help him but as yet I had only visited the northern portion. Sapor had a base at the southern end and we stopped there to get refuelled and a chance to use the much taller antenna in our broadcasts.

Julian and Sapor came to see us. It was a short trip for both of them. The trip down the Red sea was done in the other aircraft carrier. The children attacked their grandfather or granduncle when they came aboard. We had some new fruit for them to taste and the girls showed them the pictures we had taken.

Sapor said after he was released by his captureres, "Samudragupta's son Ramagupta was just killed by the Scythians. Those people are called the Saka over there but they are still the Scythians."

"Who do you think will be the next ruler?"

"Probably Samudragupta's other son Chandragupta. He is named after his grandfather."

This put a big damper on my plans. I wanted to start some friendly relations with India and this was the aim of our trip. We needed a ruler that controlled some of the sub continent. I knew some information about India from my previous life but it was not much. India had some wonderful ideas about getting along with each other but also had a very rigid caste system and more foolish beliefs in religion. Buddhism had started there a long time ago and so was an early form of Hinduism. Some times the two religions clashed but mostly they coexisted fairly peacefully.

I asked, "Tell me what you know about him?"

Sapor brought out a map of India and pointed to the area on the North of the country and on its west coast. I knew that at one time this was called Bombay by the English but I had no idea what it was called now. "Ramagupta was killed here. A new ruler would have to deal with those that killed his brother. I'm sure you'll find him near or preparing to get revenge.

"Chandragupta, from my reports is like his grandfather. He's a good leader and likes to push his neighbours."

I said, "Like a Persian I know?"

I was given that look and he continued, "Yes. They had part of this coast until recently. I sent an ultimatum then destroyed the walls of one city. The Indians capitulated. I wanted the spices and I did not want to antagonise Samudragupta so I let the Indians stay but under my rule."

"What did Samudragupta do?"

"I went to India and gave him a demonstration of the guns on some old buildings then some pirates. Since then we were not friends but we were not enemies. He wanted me to sell him the guns so he could take on the Scythians. I thought this might come under the idea of your UN. He wanted to push the Scythians back. Your father is dealing with the Scythians now and I worry if he can do this all alone.

"The Scythians look like they have a lot of Germanic blood. From what I hear, they are as bad as the Huns."

"They are. You said that in a hundred or more years, the Huns will push all these people out of the way, invade India and take over the northern section. I sent word to Samudragupta about this but I heard that he thinks me a fool to even think that. He figures his army can beat anybody that attacks him on his home ground."

I said, "We may have changed those events by what we have already done. I am sure that there are a lot more nomads in Wodensland ready to take whatever they can get."