From the article archive
World A Week: More High Adventure, Part Two
My trip by slow boat to China via way of some of the South Pacific islands gave me plentiful time to study up on my body skills, and to catch up on reading, and to get phenomenally bored.
The Captain keeps a close watch on us because while his crew is composed of good men; they have been known to start a knife fight out of sheer boredom.
The first mate begins to teach me how to handle a kris which is a wavy sword in his eyes, and he tells me of the legends that it can be used to do magic. I test out those theories, and find there is a small amount of magic floating in this world.
A remarkably muscled sailor begins challenging his mates to feats of skill such as races up the cable, and races from one end of the ship to the other on your hands. Soon, I am his chief competition.
In exchange for the remainder of the silver coins held in a magic bag that Lady Winterblest gave me in reward for the slaying of the Frost Dragon(worlds spin in my mind from the time hidden by amnesia, and I remember a remarkably decent and eerily inhuman elven people who lived in comfort in a permanent winter aided by their ancient magics while they rode with spell and sword against the monstrous enemies that rose in the Wildlands. The commander of the paladin patrol that found me had been Lady Winterblest.) he taught me his secrets. Still, by the time I got to my destination, I could only beat him occasionally.
We caught us a giant lizard, and a baby giant eagle(after the mom slew several of our party, and we shot her with several machine guns), and we found a diary.
Copernicus's Lost Diary was deciphered by me and another man because of a lack of trust. All in this world had heard of the vast treasure the King of France had bestowed on the renowned astronomer right before he died. The French King had wanted a new planet named after himself. Nobody found the treasure, or the last of the astronomer's diaries.
We found that a servant of his had fled East with the diary(or so the other writer, this servant claimed in the diary).
In the diary, we saw that if an observation was taken at a certain night through the great man's telescope, well let me repeat the diary ...
Inne the Twenty-second year, and everie onne that followes thus, on the day of the Great King's birthday, as on the day of the Greater King's birthday, if the Eye of Pompeii be placed in my prized Telescope designed for the Searching out of the Hidden Secrets of the Heavens, then will the locatione of the Treasuree be made known to thee, and thee may do with it as seems fit to thee, only now I beg thee give some thought to the wonders of Astronomie. Give a double thought, indeed.
The Great King would seem to be the French King we agreed, and the Greater King's birthday would have to be Jesus of Nazareth or Charlemagne.
The Eye of Pompeii baffled me until the others laughed at my ignorance.
"It is a great ruby dug out of some heathen temple in that lost city over a millenia ago. None knows where it is now."
"I do." A sinister man said from the back of our crowd. We faced him with ernest questions, and he raised his hand to silence us.
"Fu Manchu has it for his headpiece. But none dare cross the dreaded crime lord of the Orient." He sneered at us. Either gold fever, or that sneer, or simply the disdain of the good for the evil ran through our veins that night, and we shouted that we feared no man. The shouts echoed off the cliffs. Our informant grinned.
"Good, I have a score or two to settle with him myself."
We went by boat to Hong Kong, and we paid the Captain and crew well to throw on extra coal, and to stress the boilers because we had little time to cross the world by the King of France's birthday. And such an opportunity would not come again for twenty-one years.
I shall not go into great detail, but our informant, who had a truly fearsome grudge, led us through dangerous streets and winding alleys to a door. Still, we were a tough looking crew. I walked with a kris in my left hand, and a tommy gun in my right, and woven about me and the crew were such spells as I could manage.
We broke in, and commenced to fight. The thugs and assasins that we met in his hallways were not a match for us. They preferred to beat up on helpless merchants. We cut through them like a hurricane through a pirate fleet.
Finally we face the crime lord himself. We took the gem from his head, and tried to take his head as well, but he fell through a rigged trapdoor before we could manage that good deed. Fu Manchu had decided we were too dangerous, so he let us steal what we wanted. And since we had so little time, and were sorely wounded, we could not pursue him as he suspected. We freed his slaves on the way out, and gave them a half share of a gold chest full of coins we found. And we told them to flee the city, and go back to the villages they came from. Several of the more stout, and footloose joined us.
We raced the boat so hard that it had to stop in Port Said for repairs. From there we caught the attention of a bored Englishman who was gambling away his fortune for lack of anything better to do. We convinced him to gamble his life and his car by racing across the dessert coast roads, and up Europe at insane speeds dodging sandstorms, bandits, and landslides. He loved it.
We made it just in time, and we slipped inside the museum observatory by passing the guard an Abraham Lincoln to get him to emancipate the door for us. We put the ruby into the telescope after gingerly removing the eye piece.
Through the red filter we could see an asteroid that you could not see with a clear glass. We charted what longitude it indicated.
Here I revealed my secret for I had not entirely trusted my fellows.
"It's suggested, " I told their baffled and resentful faces "That the Star of Bethleham only told, say, the latitude, because the longitude was already known."
"But then what's the latitude here."
"I think it has to be the observatory." I said.
We computed using my theory, and the destination was this circular museum. We laughed that the wily astronomer might have hidden his treasure in his own house, and tricked everybody else into going on a wild goose chase.
Still where in this house was it? We thought of that last phrase, "Give a double thought." First we went to the center of the house, and found nothing. The guard came to bother us, and we reassured him with a Franklin.(It was an alternate world; they went off the gold standard earlier than we did.)
There was nothing, and then we considered that we should not be thinking of the center, but astronomically. We used the house as if it was the Earth, and followed the latitude and longitude a second time. It led us to a statue of stone of the astronomer with a large metal telescope in hand.
I unwound the eyepiece, and gems and rings spilled onto the floor in profuse abundance. There were too many to fit in the 'scope. Part of the statue was hollow as well.
Some of the others were in favor of breaking up the statue, but we were all very well compensated, and I felt we owed the man some courtesy. We left with our pockets bulging and went out separate ways into the night rejoicing.
Myself, I financed a chair of astronomy at a local university, and headed back to America. I never made it. One of Fu Manchu's assasins shoved me over the side of the boat.
Tadeusz
The Captain keeps a close watch on us because while his crew is composed of good men; they have been known to start a knife fight out of sheer boredom.
The first mate begins to teach me how to handle a kris which is a wavy sword in his eyes, and he tells me of the legends that it can be used to do magic. I test out those theories, and find there is a small amount of magic floating in this world.
A remarkably muscled sailor begins challenging his mates to feats of skill such as races up the cable, and races from one end of the ship to the other on your hands. Soon, I am his chief competition.
In exchange for the remainder of the silver coins held in a magic bag that Lady Winterblest gave me in reward for the slaying of the Frost Dragon(worlds spin in my mind from the time hidden by amnesia, and I remember a remarkably decent and eerily inhuman elven people who lived in comfort in a permanent winter aided by their ancient magics while they rode with spell and sword against the monstrous enemies that rose in the Wildlands. The commander of the paladin patrol that found me had been Lady Winterblest.) he taught me his secrets. Still, by the time I got to my destination, I could only beat him occasionally.
We caught us a giant lizard, and a baby giant eagle(after the mom slew several of our party, and we shot her with several machine guns), and we found a diary.
Copernicus's Lost Diary was deciphered by me and another man because of a lack of trust. All in this world had heard of the vast treasure the King of France had bestowed on the renowned astronomer right before he died. The French King had wanted a new planet named after himself. Nobody found the treasure, or the last of the astronomer's diaries.
We found that a servant of his had fled East with the diary(or so the other writer, this servant claimed in the diary).
In the diary, we saw that if an observation was taken at a certain night through the great man's telescope, well let me repeat the diary ...
Inne the Twenty-second year, and everie onne that followes thus, on the day of the Great King's birthday, as on the day of the Greater King's birthday, if the Eye of Pompeii be placed in my prized Telescope designed for the Searching out of the Hidden Secrets of the Heavens, then will the locatione of the Treasuree be made known to thee, and thee may do with it as seems fit to thee, only now I beg thee give some thought to the wonders of Astronomie. Give a double thought, indeed.
The Great King would seem to be the French King we agreed, and the Greater King's birthday would have to be Jesus of Nazareth or Charlemagne.
The Eye of Pompeii baffled me until the others laughed at my ignorance.
"It is a great ruby dug out of some heathen temple in that lost city over a millenia ago. None knows where it is now."
"I do." A sinister man said from the back of our crowd. We faced him with ernest questions, and he raised his hand to silence us.
"Fu Manchu has it for his headpiece. But none dare cross the dreaded crime lord of the Orient." He sneered at us. Either gold fever, or that sneer, or simply the disdain of the good for the evil ran through our veins that night, and we shouted that we feared no man. The shouts echoed off the cliffs. Our informant grinned.
"Good, I have a score or two to settle with him myself."
We went by boat to Hong Kong, and we paid the Captain and crew well to throw on extra coal, and to stress the boilers because we had little time to cross the world by the King of France's birthday. And such an opportunity would not come again for twenty-one years.
I shall not go into great detail, but our informant, who had a truly fearsome grudge, led us through dangerous streets and winding alleys to a door. Still, we were a tough looking crew. I walked with a kris in my left hand, and a tommy gun in my right, and woven about me and the crew were such spells as I could manage.
We broke in, and commenced to fight. The thugs and assasins that we met in his hallways were not a match for us. They preferred to beat up on helpless merchants. We cut through them like a hurricane through a pirate fleet.
Finally we face the crime lord himself. We took the gem from his head, and tried to take his head as well, but he fell through a rigged trapdoor before we could manage that good deed. Fu Manchu had decided we were too dangerous, so he let us steal what we wanted. And since we had so little time, and were sorely wounded, we could not pursue him as he suspected. We freed his slaves on the way out, and gave them a half share of a gold chest full of coins we found. And we told them to flee the city, and go back to the villages they came from. Several of the more stout, and footloose joined us.
We raced the boat so hard that it had to stop in Port Said for repairs. From there we caught the attention of a bored Englishman who was gambling away his fortune for lack of anything better to do. We convinced him to gamble his life and his car by racing across the dessert coast roads, and up Europe at insane speeds dodging sandstorms, bandits, and landslides. He loved it.
We made it just in time, and we slipped inside the museum observatory by passing the guard an Abraham Lincoln to get him to emancipate the door for us. We put the ruby into the telescope after gingerly removing the eye piece.
Through the red filter we could see an asteroid that you could not see with a clear glass. We charted what longitude it indicated.
Here I revealed my secret for I had not entirely trusted my fellows.
"It's suggested, " I told their baffled and resentful faces "That the Star of Bethleham only told, say, the latitude, because the longitude was already known."
"But then what's the latitude here."
"I think it has to be the observatory." I said.
We computed using my theory, and the destination was this circular museum. We laughed that the wily astronomer might have hidden his treasure in his own house, and tricked everybody else into going on a wild goose chase.
Still where in this house was it? We thought of that last phrase, "Give a double thought." First we went to the center of the house, and found nothing. The guard came to bother us, and we reassured him with a Franklin.(It was an alternate world; they went off the gold standard earlier than we did.)
There was nothing, and then we considered that we should not be thinking of the center, but astronomically. We used the house as if it was the Earth, and followed the latitude and longitude a second time. It led us to a statue of stone of the astronomer with a large metal telescope in hand.
I unwound the eyepiece, and gems and rings spilled onto the floor in profuse abundance. There were too many to fit in the 'scope. Part of the statue was hollow as well.
Some of the others were in favor of breaking up the statue, but we were all very well compensated, and I felt we owed the man some courtesy. We left with our pockets bulging and went out separate ways into the night rejoicing.
Myself, I financed a chair of astronomy at a local university, and headed back to America. I never made it. One of Fu Manchu's assasins shoved me over the side of the boat.
Tadeusz
Recovered from the Gaming Outpost database backup. Original wording is preserved; damaged punctuation and presentation markup have been repaired. Historical links without a local match point to the Internet Archive.