“But surely there’s something that you’ve learned.”
“I think that I know what some of this stuff is supposed to accomplish, Your Grace. Five of these things are radios of various sorts, that operate on various frequencies. This suggests that the shortwave sets that I have managed to keep operating can receive only a small portion of the broadcasting that is actually going on out there.
“There are several televisions, which receive a full-color moving picture, along with the sound that an ordinary radio would reproduce. There are two devices that also reproduce a picture, but do it on paper. This is in addition to a printing device that connects only to a thing called a `computer,’ but which seems to do other things besides computation. This disc, clearly labeled `The Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ fits into a slot in the computer, which suggests all sorts of things.”
“And what might this Britannica thing be?”
“When I was out there, it was a set of large volumes printed on very thin paper that took up seven feet of shelf space. It was a summation of all human knowledge.”
“And now all of that is apparently on this small, shiny disc, along with all the new things that they’ve learned in the last fifty years. Yes, I see your problem. I take it then that you will recommend that our visitors explain it all to you.”
“Yes, Your Grace, and that they get it all working again. This equipment can teach us a great deal about the outside world, things that we will need to know, if we are ever to deal with them on any but disastrous terms.”
“And you think these men can be trusted? When helping us might mean hurting their own world?”
“Sire, you are used to thinking of the outside as being a single entity, as the Western Islands are a single social, political, and economic entity. This is a mistake. The outside world consists of many separate, disorganized governments, with many conflicting interests. This fact is one of the few in our favor.”
“We have other strengths, Tom. Don’t forget that we of the Islands are each the result of seventy-five generations of very careful selective breeding. We are a superior people, and that will tell more than any other factor when we go out to face the world.”
“I hope so, Your Grace, for face them we must, and soon.”
* * *
* * *
Spiffed up and dressed in my best, it was with considerable trepidation that I followed the warlock’s page past two clerks who doubled as armed guards, up a bodaciously long spiral staircase, over a stone bridge that spanned a cleft in the central mountain that had to be over three hundred feet deep, and finally into the great man’s inner sanctum high above the Bay of Avalon.
It wasn’t at all what I had been expecting. The room was huge, as were almost all rooms on the Western Isles, but whereas every other area I’d seen was extremely underfurnished, to the point of looking naked, this place was crowded with tables that were piled high with arcane equipment.
The equipment wasn’t what Hollywood told you a warlock’s workshop should have, either. There was not one eye of newt or ear of toad in the place. No bubbling retorts, no imps and devils staring out from sealed bottles.
On the wall, where one would have expected stuffed owls and mummified bats, there was instead a hand- drawn chart of the Periodic Table of Elements, with the last ten or so at the bottom missing. There was some ceramic chemistry equipment standing long unused in one corner, but mostly the place was filled with books and old electrical junk. In truth, the room looked more like a World War II electronics lab than anything else that came to mind, with lots of ancient tube-type equipment lying around in various states of disrepair.
In addition to all the old stuff, three big tables were covered with all of the new electronic stuff that had been taken from The Brick Royal, while a fourth held much of our library.
“Ah! G’day, mate,” said a voice in English with a strong Australian accent. “Tom Strong here. Welcome aboard and all that.”
I turned to find the warlock sitting at a rolltop desk on a swivel chair. The fellow looked to be in his sixties, with white hair and clear blue eyes. He was wearing a long black robe, and there was a tall pointed black hat on the credenza behind his desk, but his outfit wasn’t embroidered with the astrological symbols that you’d just naturally expect. It was embroidered with tube-type circuit schematics.
“Thanks for the gifts you sent me, though you really sent too much. The gold in particular, well, you might as well take it back. I just wouldn’t have any use for it. Later on, if you still feel generous, maybe I can talk you out of some of your incredible electronic gear.”
“As you wish, sir. You’re Australian?” I said.
“Right. I was on a bomber during the last big war, one of your B-17s, actually, when our navigator and our pilot got each other lost on a dark and stormy night. The twits had us a thousand miles in the wrong direction, the fuel ran out, and the pilot had to make a dead-stick landing on the island. Made a complete hash of it. Been here ever since. Have a chair, won’t you?”
“What happened to the rest of you?” I said, sitting down.
“Well, only three us survived the crash, and one of the gunners was killed a few months later doing something really stupid. That was over fifty years ago, and Johnny died last year. Cancer, I think it was, although they’re not much for autopsies around here. I’m the last one left. It’s one of the reasons that I’m so happy that you bastards have arrived. Someone from the outside world to talk to, you see.”
I reminded myself that “bastard” was a polite term, if you were an Australian.
“Then why have you waited two months before you asked me to visit you?”
“In part because of the quarantine rules, in part to give you time to heal from your wounds, and to give you a bit of time to start learning the language. Also, it took me a few weeks to recover from that mild form of influenza that you chaps gifted us with. Then, too, there’s a bit of politics going on between me and the good archbishop, but you don’t want to hear about that. Anyway, after fifty years, what’s a few more months?”
“So you’ve been here the whole while? You never thought of going home?”
“Oh, at first I did, but there was really no way to do it. I didn’t bring a boat the way you folks did, and the old bird I came in on was total loss and no mistake. Then, after a while, well, this place sort of grows on you. I married, settled in, and prospered. But look here. I’m the one who is supposed to be questioning you, and not the other way around.” He pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Nguyen Hien Treet. That’s Indochinese, isn’t it.”
“Vietnamese, actually.”
“But it says here that you’re a U.S. citizen.”
“I am. I was born and raised in the United States. In fact, this `vacation’ is my first extended trip away from there.”
“And how does a Vietnamese fellow like you get born in the U.S.?”
“It didn’t take much talent, I assure you. After the same war that you fought in, my parents found work as a nanny and a gardener, employed by a British general. He promised them long-term employment and British citizenship if they would go back to England with him. Naturally, they jumped at the chance, and sailed there with him. But after the war, England was forced to go on an extreme austerity program. The general found that he could no longer afford many servants, and was forced to let my parents go. He was an honorable man, however, and even after they were no longer his employees, he used his influence to see to it that they received the promised citizenship papers. Despite this, my parent’s financial prospects in England were not good. Those few jobs that were available always seemed to go to Anglo-Saxons. In time, though, they discovered that as British subjects, it was fairly easy to get a visa to the United States, and their friend the general was able to arrange free military transportation for them to Michigan. They got there in 1948, and eventually, as you say, they prospered. I was born in 1953.”
“I see. I was wondering why you had a Yank accent and not an Indochinese one.”
“I’m sorry to say that growing up, I learned very little Vietnamese. My parents felt that I would be better off learning only English. The problem with that was that they barely spoke the language themselves, so my first language was actually broken English. To make matters worse, they used Vietnamese between themselves when they wanted to discuss something that we children shouldn’t know about. I think that I must have internalized the strange attitude that somehow, other languages were something that I shouldn’t know. Anyway, in school, I really blew it, trying to learn Latin and later Russian.”