Turner Maxwell Books Free Publishing Free Books Free Literature Free Writers Turner Maxwell Books are an independent co-operative of new writers, committed to publishing inspirational literature. Turner Maxwell Books has over one hundred writers, producing original stories not seen in any other bookshop, Turner Maxwell Books has established itself as a successful and viable publisher. This achievement lies in its innovative and daring approach to establish a shorter supply chain that is simply focused on the requirements of the reader. A CHANGING OF THE GODS. Published by Turner Maxwell Books. First published 2009. Copyright © George Miler 2009 A novel by George Miler.For those who cannot instantly recall aviation’s chronology, Orville and Wilbur Wright did not accomplish the first successful, manned, powered airplane flight until December, 1903, and that maiden voyage was no more than a hop, skip, and a jump. Yet for a ten-month period between November, 1896 and September of 1897, a metallic, cigar-shaped aerial vehicle was sighted by hundreds of sober, respectable citizens. A good many men and women claimed to have spoken with the pilots of the mysterious craft when the object was resting on the ground. The occupants told farmers and retail merchants that they were terrestrial inventors, and said that they would give a full report of their airship to the government as soon as the Spanish-American War was over. Within a year of placing it on public exhibition, the machines were certain to be in general use. The war ended, the year passed, and nothing more was seen or heard or reported. The incidents were recorded in the newspapers, and promptly forgotten, except by those who saw it. And the bewildered members of the inventor’s family. Then, several years later, after an investigation by the Pinkerton Agency turned up nothing except a lot of rumors, the inventor’s son Jack Reid found a clue that led him to Kashgar, China. Something most unusual was occurring there. A gigantic cylindrical craft of some sort, metallic, and about five times as long as its diameter was seen cruising silently over the Kun Lun Mountains. In excess of one thousand feet long and two hundred feet in diameter, the gigantic cigar-shaped structure was obviously under intelligent control of some sort. But whose, and for what purpose? It was highly unlikely that it was a balloon or dirigible. It flew too fast for that, accelerating more rapidly than a rocket. Was it a new mode of travel? Jack wandered far to find out. And to find his father. What he uncovered was a plot against civilization itself. An extract from Chapter One An apparition haunted the skies over the United States in 1897. It was not the kind that threatened supernatural danger or excited the religious imagination. Instead of a fiery chariot swinging low to bear the faithful away to their eternal reward, the thing that lurked in the moonless nights or glimmered furtively in the sunlit cloud tops was made of humbler stuff. Newspapers quoted witnesses who used words like chrome or aluminium, but appearances in broad daylight were rare indeed, and so, too, were credible witnesses. More often the phenomenon came to public notice as a blinding light that stabbed down from the heavens in the dead of night to play over hilltops crowned with cedar and piñon, or to sweep back and forth across the dry prairies. Whenever the cone of brightness was extinguished, blinking eyes were able to make out the red and green glows of navigation lights gliding sedately overhead, accompanied by the rumble of strange machinery. A few stunned onlookers even caught a faint whiff of pungent vapor, as if from a plume of oil or ozone that trailed behind the elusive machine. The object was definitely mechanical. Everyone agreed on that. It was as if American skies had no room for ghostly wraiths or ethereal visions. Even angelic chariots, it seemed, must give a practical account of themselves. As the advancing seasons turned the land russet and brown, the presumed inventor grew bolder, making forays closer to the ground and in broad daylight. He even landed a few times and spoke to amazed citizens, or asked them for water or coils of wire for minor repairs. The accounts of what he looked like and what he called himself didn't always agree. Neither did the reports of what he was supposed to have said, such as his reasons for building the flying machine and his plans for the future. The descriptions of the airship (as it came to be called) varied, too, at least in the details. The consensus opinion held that the contraption was oblong and narrow like a cigar with some sort of carriage slung underneath. The size of the thing, however, grew in the telling until the first frost came, and then it vanished altogether.

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Published by Turner Maxwell Books

First published 2009.
Copyright © George Miler 2009

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Warning: May contain explicit material, which is not intentionally offensive.
Not suitable for children

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental and may be more the work of your own imagination. Why not write a book yourself? Turner Maxwell Books are an alternative co-operative of new writers, working towards publishing inspirational literature.

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FIN DE FRONTIÉRE

a novel by George Miler

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.

-- FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER

Airship Book One.

An extract from Chapter One

    An apparition haunted the skies over the United States in 1897. It was not the kind that threatened supernatural danger or excited the religious imagination. Instead of a fiery chariot swinging low to bear the faithful away to their eternal reward, the thing that lurked in the moonless nights or glimmered furtively in the sunlit cloudtops was made of humbler stuff. Newspapers quoted witnesses who used words like chrome or aluminum, but appearances in broad daylight were rare indeed, and so, too, were credible witnesses. More often the phenomenon came to public notice as a blinding light that stabbed down from the heavens in the dead of night to play over hilltops crowned with cedar and piñon, or to sweep back and forth across the dry prairies. Whenever the cone of brightness was extinguished, blinking eyes were able to make out the red and green glows of navigation lights gliding sedately overhead, accompanied by the rumble of strange machinery. A few stunned onlookers even caught a faint whiff of pungent vapor, as if from a plume of oil or ozone that trailed behind the elusive machine. The object was definitely mechanical. Everyone agreed on that. It was as if American skies had no room for ghostly wraiths or ethereal visions. Even angelic chariots, it seemed, must give a practical account of themselves.
    As the advancing seasons turned the land russet and brown, the presumed inventor grew bolder, making forays closer to the ground and in broad daylight. He even landed a few times and spoke to amazed citizens, or asked them for water or coils of wire for minor repairs. The accounts of what he looked like and what he called himself didn't always agree. Neither did the reports of what he was supposed to have said, such as his reasons for building the flying machine and his plans for the future. The descriptions of the airship (as it came to be called) varied, too, at least in the details. The consensus opinion held that the contraption was oblong and narrow like a cigar with some sort of carriage slung underneath. The size of the thing, however, grew in the telling until the first frost came, and then it vanished altogether.
    The spring rains of the following year brought more than new green thrusting up from the thirsty country. Taller tales began to crowd out the old, too, and weary newspaper editors tried to sear the new growth of rumors under a high sun of scorn and derision. But the reports refused to wither away. Indeed, the sightings mounted to several a day, in widely separated localities, with different colored lamps mounted on the mysterious craft's hull in defiance of consistency and the U.S. Maritime Code. That year a veritable host of impossible aerial vehicles soared, glided, skimmed, drifted, and fluttered over the ridges, plains, and deserts of the continent at incredible speeds. One editor commented that since the airship was multiplying like the splinters of the True Cross that circulated widely in the Middle Ages, the real wonder was that the inventor didn't run into himself.
    The editor would have been stupefied to learn that the unknown aviator was wondering that, as well. Franklin Reid let the newspaper drop to the floor, where it joined the earlier editions that lay at his feet. Then he clenched his empty hands into fists and glowered at the evening-mellowed landscape that unrolled beneath his perch in the observation lounge. As his airship droned on mellophonically at 80 knots, Franklin sat on the edge of the padded aluminum bench (most of the witnesses at least had gotten the composition of the ship's major structural components right) and fumed ineffectively. He had never intended to cause a silly season, especially at the turn of the century when the country was on the verge of an unprecedented era of industrial expansion. He was consumed with an earnest desire to write to the editor and correct the man's condescending attitude, but he didn't dare give in to it. Franklin didn't want to antagonize the newspapers at all, especially now that he was so close to revealing the true nature of his invention to a startled world.
    Franklin would have done so earlier, but something always prevented it. One problem was that the quartz prisms he had planned to use as fog-piercing spectrum filters for his fore-and-aft keel-mounted visio-refracto-periscopes had turned out to be flawed, which had obliged him to land close to a city with a scientific supply house to acquire a superior set. Luckily there was a concealing orchard beside the road into town where the Sky Schooner could set down lightly as a feather and hide under the leaves like a giant myriapod. The following week had been spent trying to resynchronize the negative entropy accumulators after a bolt of lightning had welded two of the relays closed. Two of the atomagnetic deflection coils had had to be rewound as well. Everything had to be perfect for the unveiling, and now that the great day was so near, a wave of hysteria was sweeping through the Union because of the sightings.
    Damned delays, he reflected ruefully. In any event, the great excitement is arousing interest in my achievement. If only it didn't verge on ridicule. The Sky Schooner wasn't just a nine days' wonder.
Franklin rose from his seat to walk to the window set in the bow, unconsciously adopting a rolling gait acquired from his months aboard his airship. Any sailor in the world would have taken him as one of their own. Ironically, Franklin abhorred travel by sea. But the conquest of the air -- that was a dream! And he was living it.
Franklin leaned out over the sill of the outward-slanting window, looking like a figurehead at the prow of the vessel, tall in his black waistcoated suit with its starched collar and knotted tie. The hard planes of his lean, tanned face, handsome in a harsh, high-boned way, the raven black hair with a premature streak of gray threading the temples, and a deep voice with its curt, crisp authority gave him a commanding presence of which he was completely unaware. If anyone mentioned it to him, Franklin would have dismissed it with an irritated shrug which could never dislodge the irksome weight that burdened his shoulders.
    Behind a row of hills astern, the sun dyed the soft spring evening a rich shade of rose. The deck swayed gently as the Sky Schooner lifted herself on electrogravitic impulses to clear a stand of tall spruce growing on the crest of a ridge. Franklin put his hands on the brass rail mounted below the window to lightly brace himself, his heavy gold ring set with a large emerald clinking on the baser metal. From this altitude he was able to see a big thunderhead rearing its dark mass over the southeastern horizon. His green eyes scanned the rumpled blue mantle of topography spread out underneath him for a concealing valley where he could shelter the airship against the storm. He didn't relish the thought of riding out yet another powerful exhibition of Nature's pyrotechnic virtuosity, not when every component of his magnificent machine was functioning perfectly.
A livid flash turned the ramparts of cloud a milky white. Just as suddenly, a wave of unwanted electrochemical energy gripped Franklin's body. It was as if his nervous system was reacting to the titanic spark of electricity via some bizarre form of wireless biological telegraphy. But Franklin knew that this galvanic spasm surged from deep inside his own brain, the insistent prompting of a wanton malady of unknown origin.
    Franklin took the main force of it in his face and arm muscles. He rarely let the members of his crew see him do this. He gripped the rail tightly until his knuckles turned white with the desperate effort of directing the odious faradic current into his extremities and keeping it there until it ebbed away of its own accord. After the attack had subsided, Franklin's pent-up breath escaped from his lungs with an explosive sigh. The episode -- thank God -- was passing without him having to give in to the urge to erupt in a frenzy of spasmodic twitching. Or, worse, spewing forth a torrent of ordinary words that built on their own distorted pronunciations until they turned into gibberish. Privately Franklin referred to the nonsensical utterances as Agarblish" and guarded against its becoming profane, as it sometimes did when the surplus vital force flowing through his body radiated from his subjective brain-mind system. Either that, or the cursing was a result of his own frustration with the damned affliction. It was hard to tell. In spite of his endeavor to be dispassionate and objective, the evil became so strong that he couldn't prevent a personal element from going along with the unseen energy. Often he didn't know where his symptoms ended and his true self began, and Franklin became concerned about his spiritual state, his ability to live a moral life. Whatever the nervous condition was, it had complicated his dealings with men and had nearly precluded any contacts with women -- with one notable exception. Being wed to such an extraordinary and determined lady -- given her attitude of open-mindedness -- Franklin saw no reason why he should not venture upon terrain claimed by normal, healthy persons. The type of experiences described by romantic writers could at least be approximated by Franklin, even if his knowledge of it was laughable by the standards of his contemporaries. Perhaps they could become a husband-and-wife research team and solve the enigma of his bizarre affliction with a rational approach. The slim woman with the unmanageable gypsy-black hair and sea-blue eyes had already rejected the diagnosis that her new husband was Anuts."
    Franklin squirmed uncomfortably and frowned at his preoccupations. He raised his head to gaze again at the twilit meadows that slid past like the perforated scroll of a player piano. At least his condition was improving after he had found a patron for his invention. The episodes were less numerous and less severe. Without the financial burdens pressuring him, his nervous tension had waned, and maybe that explained the alleviation. Ever since his mysterious benefactor had sent him the priceless ring as a token of their partnership, Franklin had experienced sporadic periods of relief from his symptoms. He held his right hand up to glance at the green stone set in the gold band. Surrounding the stone was an inscription in foreign characters, meaningless to its latest owner, and giving the circlet rather a mystic appearance. Frank didn't mind wearing the ring otherwise, because there was more to it than that. The precious stone seemed to blaze.
    He was just daring to relax when the sound of hobnails on the floorboards made him whirl around. He reassembled his countenance when he saw that it was his chief engineer. Milton Honig was a short, husky man who wore the blue one-piece coveralls that made work in the mechanical confines of the ship safer and more comfortable. Milton didn't look comfortable just now. His ruddy face was creased with worry, and his engineer's cap, made of the same sturdy serge de Nimes as his coveralls, was pushed up and back from his forehead to make wiping his sweaty brow easier.
    "Sir, O'Brien reports another distortion in the repeller envelope."
Franklin frowned again and, without saying a word, led the way back through the door into the observation gallery proper, which ran the length of the thirty-foot command gondola's upper level. Glass windows lined the port and starboard sides, slanting up and out like the bow window to conform to the streamlined gondola's oval shape. Adjoining padded benches at every other window offered seating for prospective passengers who might want to enjoy the view. Aft of the gallery, an aluminum ladder ran up through a vertical shaft which connected the two levels of the gondola to the decks up inside the main hull. Unlike Franklin's earlier design, the Sky Schooner's gondola was built into the frame of the main hull, not mounted on struts like the control car of his hydrogen dirigible.
    Franklin climbed up past the level of the crew's quarters to reach the power deck. His small concession to Victorian comfort was nowhere in evidence up here. Buttressing the walls were rows of metal girders holed like Swiss cheese to provide maximum rigidity with minimum weight. The floor of the deck was aluminum in lieu of hardwood, carpeted with a rubber mat. Like every level in the Schooner, the power deck was illuminated by electric bulbs set in the ceiling from bow to stern, casting a harsh light in the girder-framed, cathedral-like chamber. They also added to the stifling heat generated by the hundreds of vacuum tubes in his equipment which the louvered air vents did little to dispel. From this level, just below the engine room, the thunderous dirge of the ether-traction oscillators shook the deck, nearly drowning out everything else. In the spacious interior of the engine room itself, orders had to be shouted, but visits up there were rare. Except for inspections or repairs made on the reserve circuits while in flight, the nine-foot-square bulk of the revolutionary negative-self-inductance motor crouched like an elephant in regal isolation, Franklin thought, like Ganesha on his lotus throne. Its ministrants labored on the deck below where all the gauges and controls were. Even then, conversation was difficult, and telephonic communication was avoided except for the direst of emergencies, which was why Milton had reported to Franklin directly.
    Low railings divided the power deck into sections for each command team. Franklin angled off to the left to peer over the Sequencing Electrician's shoulder at the rows of lights set in the oak panel in front of him. Franklin felt the need to reassure himself that the etheric pulsations propelling the Sky Schooner were precisely timed, even though he could tell that just by listening to the organ-like tones of electrons pulsing through the multigridded resonant cavities of the parallel fifty-foot-long traction conduits on either side of the motor's cold and smooth housing. No, not like an elephant, Franklin amended. A recumbent lion, the conduits making its fore and hind legs. Or better, a sphinx, every bit as enigmatic as the source of its miraculous power. His researches had revealed that the ether was a medium with properties utterly unlike any he or any other nineteenth-century physicist could have imagined. In a window below the marching lights, steel fingers inked a diagram of engine performance on a moving scroll of paper. The inventor saw the reflection of his long-jawed, saturnine face in the instrument's glass, a face that did not seem to be designed for smiling.
    Suddenly aware of betraying his nervousness, Franklin straightened and wiped his hands on his waistcoat. Nevertheless, what was happening to the force field surrounding the airship and buoying it aloft shouldn't have been happening. He hastened on past the other stations, with their brass-rimmed gauges and dancing needles, to the Phosphoroscope Station, with Milton still trailing behind him.
    Standing on a dais and ringed by its own waist-high railing, the station that monitored the configuration of the field consisted of a large Crookes tube mounted vertically inside a pedestal. When the operator sat in the standard aluminum-and-canvas chair, the face of the upright tube was level with his solar plexus. That was assuming that the operator was of average height. Jesse O'Brien was tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, so he had to sit hunched over the delicate instrument. He wore an expression of barely concealed consternation as he stared at the pattern made by the fine cathode stream. The rays excited a beautiful emerald green fluorescence when they impinged on the German soda glass. Before Franklin had evacuated the tube and sealed it, he had inserted a disk perforated with two slits between the cathode and offset anode. Instead of casting a ray-shadow shaped like the perforated disk on the tube's wide face, the rays created rings of light and dark interference bands.
    The effect still baffled Franklin because only waves were supposed to reinforce and extinguish each other when taking two different paths. Evidently an undulatory disturbance in the flow of electrons was manifesting itself in the oversized vacuum tube. Franklin ascribed it to some as-yet-unknown parameter governing the Poynting vector, but whatever it was, it registered changes in his airship's electrogravitic field with amazing precision. He knew that the intermittent flickers stippling the pattern were due to the approaching thunderstorm's lightning bolts. That was not what alarmed him.
    The rings of green light should have been centered exactly on the tube's axis, given its location directly under the motor at the center of the Schooner. The rings weren't supposed to be circular, not as long as the propelling force imposed a forward bias upon the airship's electromagnetic momentum, but they were supposed be symmetrical, concentric ellipses. The only effect that was supposed to mar the geometrical simplicity of the interference pattern was a steady ripple mark moving fore-to-aft in time with the self-action oscillators that advanced the airship through the ether.
    Instead the image presented by the display was an ugly bilobate mutation that lacked any saving mathematical grace. The larger lobe was recognizably the Sky Schooner's primary field, with its focal point at the center, but the rings of light were crowded against the forward edge of the Phosphoroscope's glass face, while they were spaced apart more widely astern, as if they were being drawn out through a knothole and getting pinched off to form a secondary lobe. Seeing it made Franklin wince with sympathetic pain.
    Jesse was bending lower to peer at the reticle of frosted lines etched like a spider web in the glass. He straightened when he felt the inventor's presence. "Sir, a magnetic storm on the sun might be the cause of this."
    Franklin shook his head. He had to raise his voice to reply: "The disturbance is due west of us, behind us. A sunspot storm would tend to affect the repeller field in a north-south direction."
    "Maybe it's more of that magnetite, like the outcropping we overpassed two weeks ago," Milton chimed in.
Franklin pulled his nose doubtfully as he stared down at the pattern.     "If so, it's the purest I've ever seen."
    Jesse grinned. "Maybe we can stake a claim!"
Franklin smiled back. "We can certainly use the money." Siphoning water out of lakes and ponds was one thing, keeping the galley supplied with grub was another, requiring outlays from an onboard cash reserve that was dwindling. "Let's see what happens when we change course."