Magestic 2, p.24
Magestic 2, page 24
We’d often stop at the town’s diner for a cooked breakfast in the mornings, some of the day-shift workers having the same idea. I liked the beef stew pie that the diner made, and had some delivered to the house most every day. I paid the deliveryman over the odds, and we had invented the lazy takeaway a few decades early.
That gave me an idea, and some of the worst elements of 21st century life were about to descend on the town. I gave the diner’s owner a little money and he built a new shop, a pizza parlour. It would just make pizza. Hungry workers, the bachelors, flocked to it every night. The outlet also offered takeaways in boxes, so I could pick one up on the way home. When I introduced a subsidised delivery service it was an instant hit, bachelors at the boarding houses ordering pizza on the phone.
On a trip to Vancouver I persuaded a Chinese restaurant owner to open a restaurant in our town, and offered a great lease rate for a new building. We would end up with a Chinese take-away.
During the time I spent with Susan – the early days - I was secretly very happy, although I’d moan at Jimmy from time to time. Helen and I had broken up twenty years before I had gone back to fight The Brotherhood, and those twelve years fighting had been hell – no cold beer, or women. So Susan was a catch, a real catch, and I was happy to be with her, very happy. I’d just never tell Jimmy that. The sex was great, and grew to be fantastic, the good doctor a bit shy to start, experimental later on. Life was good.
Plastic and gold
The aircraft factory had been experimenting with plastics for many years, simple moulds used for a few aircraft parts. The engineers had managed to make the plastic stronger, whilst a little less likely to burn and melt. The scientists had also made a type of Perspex. After demonstrating its benefits – it didn’t shatter like glass – we started to use Perspex for aircraft windows. It was also lighter, and cheap enough to make.
Moving on from that, Jimmy opened a small factory in Vancouver to look at plastic products, including plastic bags, the bane of the 21st century. Our staff soon had plastic bags given to them to try, housewives to be seen carrying things around in them. I gave the Chinese restaurant bags for my take-away, then issued hundreds of them to local stores for free, informing them where the bags could be bought from.
We started making large plastic sheets, selling them at the local hardware store. People put them over cars, barbeque sets, all sorts. We put them over aircraft sat in the snow. The lumber mill boss - the guy who liked to parachute, bought huge sheets of blue plastic to cover sawn timber. Spurred on by that, I sent free samples to every lumberyard, receiving a good response. I then sent them to every hardware store in the province, as well as to any carpenters. Builders soon wanted them to cover part-finished houses.
That led us to open a shop in Seattle that sold plastic products, kitchen bowls snapped up by housewives. When I had plastic three-litre containers delivered to the local milk producer he almost kissed me. The screw tops were just about brilliant in his estimation; it would preserve the milk. We sent samples to every dairy outlet in California. And we bought our oil locally, since shipping it would be costly.
Susan would often ask delicate questions about our interference in the time line, to which I pointed at the Second World War, the Cold War and The Brotherhood – none of which had certain outcomes on this world. And … we didn’t care about sticking to the time line. I told her about some of the future leaders that Jimmy had assassinated and she was shocked. I didn’t tell her about the Americans we had killed, the grandfathers of certain future leaders.
Then, in the spring of 1926, with Susan now quite big, a telegram arrived from Rudd. ‘Mine operating, smelting, first product shipped out.’
It was great news; the first bar of gold had been shipped out of Kenya to Europe. And our buyer was none other than the Bank of England itself. The bank would weigh the gold, check purity, work out a price and take twenty-percent for itself. The balance would be given as credit, the detail of that credit transferred to the national bank of Canada, who would pass on the credit to our local bank.
With that first credit, not much in real terms – but still good for 1926, I was dispatched to Seattle to buy land adjacent to the Boeing field; if they wanted to expand in the future they’d have to talk to us. I flew back in one of our own Dash-7s, picking up a Chinese on the way home from Main Street; it was a Thursday. We sat and stuffed our faces, no TV for another thirty years or so, then read the papers as usual, or listened to some contemporary music – which was growing on us. We even learned the latest dances and laughed like teenagers at each other’s movements.
We’d often drive down to the hotel of an evening, always a party atmosphere there, and would chat to the gang. I bowled with the lads once a week regularly, now part of a team. Susan still worked at the factory, trying to keep busy, and there were always fingers that needed stitches, or flecks in eyes. For entertainment, I borrowed a laptop from a scientist and we hid it in a locked safe at the house. With no one around, curtains closed, we’d huddle up and watch an old movie. Well, a move from the forties, fifties or sixties – from our world, sometimes a nature documentary.
Then, one day, a burst of machinegun fire and screeched tyres woke up the town, bootleggers being chased by the local police. It was a shock, a shock that these arseholes were so close to my home. Everyone was talking about it the next day, our proximity to Seattle being the problem.
Jimmy ordered a war council, members of the Canadian Rifles soon deployed to the border with the approval of the Province’s Governor. We let it be known that a dead bootlegger would earn a soldier a good bonus, not that they needed the encouragement. The task was treated like a live-firing training exercise, squads of Rifles sneaking about at night. Where they found obvious crossing points, recently used, they’d set a trap and wait for days or weeks. Bootlegging dropped off sharply in our region.
Not content with that, Jimmy deployed the Rifles along a six hundred mile stretch of border, the Canadian Government fine with the move, local liquor manufacturers not so happy about it. A few disappeared. We were determined that our soldiers would not just sit in barracks, they would train hard – and with real bullets. They drove our jeeps across rough terrain, and I supplemented the patrols with two Cessnas that flew along the border with three keen spotters aboard. Seattle went dry.
The summer of 1926 was a good one, Susan and I walking and sailing often, despite her bump. She was concerned about the birth, wishing for a “C” Section, so I informed her that Doc Graham would be here for month seven onwards – Jimmy thinking ahead.
Doc Graham had been practising “C” Sections in Kenya for years, and Susan was reassured. She knew that the child would probably come to term during month seven, her friends had, friends that were also autistic. Gifted. I’d been through it all before and reassured her, but for a doctor she was nervous. But this was about her, and not some nameless patient in a surgery.
We had found a café on the inlet that we liked, and often ate there with a bodyguard nearby, although we felt very safe here in Canada, a little less safe of late with bootleggers around. I popped in to see the developing jet engine often, making comments. One day I said, ‘How about bigger but shorter? It’s the volume of air pushed through that matters more than the speed of it.’
They were intrigued, and I was more interested in commercial jets as opposed to jet fighters. One day, just to be mischievous, I asked them to experiment with injecting fuel into the hot gas just beyond the burn chambers. A few days later they tried it, the engine test-bed breaking its moorings. Re-heat had just been invented.
‘It wastes a massive amount of fuel,’ they said.
‘Yeah, but maybe the pilot in a dog fight wants a quick burst of speed, just a few seconds to get out of trouble.’
They liked the idea, but Jimmy beat me around the head with a rolled up newspaper. It was too soon; I had just jumped ahead a few years. Jimmy then assembled the jet engineers.
‘Guys, how much jet power would be needed to push the prop fighter we made?’
‘A heck of a lot less than this engine produces!’ was the firm answer.
‘OK, make a smaller engine, with power for that fighter, then … rip out the propeller engine, redesign the frame, and stick a jet inside. He made a sketch on a blackboard and asked for opinions, the sketched plane looking a little bit like an early Russian Mig. He assigned extra engineers to it, to the funny plane with no propellers.
Taking a seaplane ride the next day – a seaplane with wheels, several of the gang journeyed out with me to the secret airfield in the interior, and we landed on a long concrete runway, a very long concrete runway; there was no end to it. Peering through the windows with keen interest, we taxied towards a control tower, the edges of the taxiway being moss and peat, not grass. I knew that a platoon of Rifles was now in attendance, keeping strangers away. Well, strangers that could walk this far would be a welcome sight after nothing but moose and bears.
The area around the secret base was suitably flat, and we had passed over a large lake as we approached and descended. Now I stood on the tarmac and peered around, but could see nothing on the horizon apart from moss and heather. A hangar had already been built, another two under construction, one a real monster. Several brick buildings had been constructed behind the control tower, and it was all way ahead of itself.
Jimmy explained, ‘The fighter with a jet engine will come here to be tested, far from prying eyes.’
We inspected the tower - the building sat ready for some action, the offices empty, we even inspected the lonely hangars and cold empty tool sheds. I learnt that some of the base supplies came in by plane instead of train, the Rifles now based here using the airfield as a training ground, live fire ranges nearby. I could see jeeps with 105mm attached. Out here they could blast away to their heart’s content; no one to see, no one to hear. Seeing a sign for a tunnel, I asked about it.
Jimmy explained, ‘There are tunnels connecting all the main facilities; if there’s six feet of snow up top, people can still move around. There are tunnels to the cabins as well. They dug down six feet, put in concrete, put a roof over and covered it with dirt and moss.’
The soldiers showed us their latest mortar tubes, and then tried to hit a distant moose with lobbed shells. It would be cooked later. A single storey barrack room offered windows with two layers - to keep the men warm in the dead of winter; this was the Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre’s home from home, their jeeps painted white, their half-tracks painted white. White snow smocks hung from the walls, the soldiers weapons painted white with black stripes. All they needed was a little snow.
‘Any bootleggers up here?’ I asked their C.O.
‘If there were we’d welcome them in and pat them on the back. It’s a hundred miles to the nearest dirt track, another hundred to the nearest road, and a hell of a way to the nearest whore house!’
‘How long do you spend up here?’
‘Never more than eight weeks. We’re flying in and out now, even in the winter, but we do have fun clearing the damn runway. Still, it keeps the men fit and active. Sometimes they just drop supplies by parachute!’
‘Why’d you have a huge runway way out here?’ they asked.
‘New aeroplanes will be tested here, far from prying eyes,’ Jimmy explained.
I said, ‘We don’t want people to copy them till we’re ready. If they do we make less money, and you guys … are out of a job.’
‘No one up here too see them!’
‘But plenty of people around Vancouver,’ I pointed out.
We made our inspection of the airfield, Jimmy happy with it, and soon flew off southwest, back towards home. And it now felt like home; I had no wish to be anywhere else. The seaplane landed on the inlet, undercarriage up, and let us off next to the hotel, a boat coming out for us. Susan met us, a big hug for me. Well, as much of a hug as we could manage in her condition.
Jimmy dispatched extra builders to the remote airfield, wanting it completed this summer and ready for next spring. Aircraft engineers were sent out to the remote airfield to create stores ready, and to check the facilities. The airfield would not be used to manufacture aircraft, but the aircraft would be assembled and tested there, so lathes and welding sets were dispatched, aluminium glue and av-gas. The real work would begin in earnest next spring.
Radios
We had been working on radios for many years, each of our aircraft now fitted with one. They were getting smaller, sound quality was improving, and they broke less often. Now we ventured into making simple radios for housewives to tune into the local radio station. At the moment there were two stations in Vancouver, and that was about it. We started our own station in the town, each worker given a free radio set. The radios appeared in the town’s diner, in shops, and soon everyone had a radio on in the background.
We played contemporary music, but interrupted with a five-minute news programme every four hours. Radios started to sell to those who didn’t work for us, the radios looking like large mantelpiece clocks with wooden surrounds. Inside, they were more advanced than the other sets available in the period.
Radio retailers were opened in Vancouver and Seattle, and trade was good, the sets soon shipped all around Canada. Our pilots were told to take a few on each trip, and to just give them out free; word of mouth advertising would do the rest. We had gone viral.
Four hundred sets were shipped out to Kenya, two hundred to Hong Kong, and a thousand were batched up for the UK - where they liked to sit in of a cold winter’s night and listen. With Jimmy asking for ten thousand sets this year alone, additional staff were hired at a facility in Vancouver, hundreds of them. In total, we now employed directly some eleven thousand people, making us the largest employer in the province.
Our fridges were doing well, and now benefited from glued-aluminium casing and plastic insides. I figured that people trying to copy us would have a hard time of it. The fridges were sent south by train to Los Angeles or Florida, where our sales staff would place them in hotels, sale or return, for a month. No one wanted to give them back at the end of the month. Lease terms were agreed, our sales staff enjoying a hundred percent success. That company, Columbia Frozen Fridges, now made a good profit. For the time period, it was a fantastic profit.
‘How about … cars?’ I asked Jimmy one day as we sat in the hotel diner.
‘We’d put US workers out of jobs.’
‘This is all on a small scale at the moment,’ I countered. ‘So ... maybe top-end cars, glued-aluminium and plastic.’
‘If you want to set up a small factory, then by all means. We could do with some decent cars for the gang.’
I went and asked a question of the engineers. ‘Could an aircraft engine run a car?’
‘It could … if you was figuring on driving at a hundred miles an hour!’
‘Funny you should say that…’
I left some very amused engineers thinking about racing cars, and bought a piece of land towards Vancouver, an old mill. I sent in the builders to do it up, and to erect a few large sheds. A fence was thrown up, guards hired, a team of twenty engineers allocated to me. They ordered the equipment they would need, hiring people from the city with the relevant skills – and there were not too many of those left.
They started with a basic jeep, taking it apart, and then considered a stronger chassis. The bodywork would be bonded aluminium honeycomb - great for safety if you hit something, and the windows would be Perspex.
A few of the scientists seemed a little jealous, and dropped hints. I allowed their input, many people interested in tinkering with the new car design on the weekends.
Babies
August saw two arrivals; Doc Graham, and a baby girl a week later. Everyone had a look, gifts bought, silly noises made. Susan recovered in a day or so, and now glowed with the baby in her arms. Jimmy may have been right; a kid can change your perspective.
We employed the maid full time, and she would work 8am to 6pm every day, another lady coming in at weekends. Both of the ladies were married to engineers, so security was less of a risk. Ted’s wife popped in often and would baby-sit for us, Ted’s eight year old daughter great with baby Mary, a name that Susan liked. I had used up quite a few girls names, and didn’t argue.
Young Mary was a good sleeper, but Susan insisted that all the children of “gifted” parents had the blood. I spent hours just sat holding her, or just sat watching her sleep. Life was good.
But then one day a drive-by shooting occurred, a car of gangsters opening-up on our hotel in Vancouver. We could not decide if they were after someone inside, or after us. The bootleggers had been knocked back, and we figured that they knew we funded the Rifles, everyone around here did. A war council was convened. Since we could not be sure who it was, we had a word with the Seattle police and put together a list of likely suspects, as well as where they lived or hung out.
Big Paul put a team together: Rifles SAS, armed with AK47s, the men offered good bonuses. A few days later they flew across the border in our own planes, landing on a road at night and soon creeping through a forest to an estate owned by a gangster. They left no one alive, and blew the house to pieces with a timed charge, soon on the plane home.
Next they dressed in suits and flew in, pistols hidden as they snuck around the back of a gin joint after hours. Grenades went in first, followed by the soldiers, everyone inside shot dead, timed explosives left behind. The building collapsed in on the bodies, our ghosts soon back across the border.
