1636: The Cardinal Virtues by Walter H. Hunt, Eric Flint Page B

people sick—but you know how it is with cafeterias. After a while, if you start with good ingredients, you can make a pretty good meal. I’m a believer, and so is he.

    Recipes was a cipher-replacement for ammunition . The comment about making people sick was a reference she hoped he’d understand, going along with the word believer . Their engineering expert was Johann Glauber, a chemistry wizard who had found a way to replace the mercury fulminate in the percussion caps with something more effective and far safer.
    Glauben , of course, was the German word for “believe.”

    It’s a little harder than working for you, but I guess teaching is teaching. You get the students lined up, you blow the whistle and you watch them run. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but at least I have a few cartons. Well, two cartons at least.

    She was guessing that the average down-timer wouldn’t know that an egg carton held a dozen eggs, so that the key number here was twenty-four—the number of special troopers she was training.
    There wasn’t any easy way to explain to Ed exactly what she was doing by using the cipher since most of the substitution terms weren’t useful in this context. It was probably going to take a few letters back and forth in order to get the hang of it—if someone didn’t figure out that she was sending in code.
    I am not cut out for this , she thought, and nearly tossed the whole thing into the fire. What was the benefit? She could convey a few general things, and would be risking that Turenne, or someone else in the camp, would figure out that she was spying on them. That sort of thing could get you killed . . . after some very nasty things happened to you.

    But I think you’d like these guys, she finally wrote. The boss has kept them busy digging, enough for twelve main drags, but that’s like running laps on the track.

    The main drag , the principal road through Grantville, was Route 250; 12 x 250 was 3,000. Maybe he’d get that reference, maybe not. As for liking these guys , she was trying to tell Ed that they were probably not enemies of the USE.
    If they were going to catch her spying, this letter would surely do it. She decided to close it out before she wrote something even more transparent.

    I’ll look forward to your letter.
    Best regards,
    Sherrilyn Maddox
    Gym Teacher to the Stars

Chapter 10

    March, 1636
    Turin

    Just after Twelfth Night, Monsieur Gaston and his entourage had departed the Castello del Valentino. The duke and duchess were relieved—at least in private—and life returned to normal.
    In the workshop, Baldaccio paid more attention to Terrye Jo than ever, trying to bring her his own peculiar brand of seventeenth-century science. The long winter nights turned his attention to the stars: a new telescope, with hand-ground lenses from a new glass factory in Magdeburg, had arrived during the second week in January, and the Dottore had arranged to have it mounted on the top of one of the corner towers. He would go up late at night wrapped in a ridiculous fur coat and peer through it, taking crabbed notes that he would transcribe onto astrological charts. There was a tussle when he pulled down a portion of the latticework supporting the antenna; whatever his professorial chops, his researches didn’t trump Terrye Jo’s radio. By the next evening it was up again. He had a personal interview with His Grace to clarify the matter and it was never repeated.
    Undeterred, Baldaccio had shown her the horoscope he’d cast for her, explaining that the “imbalance in her humours” (or some other damn thing) resulted from having Venus in Scorpio or Jupiter in retrograde, and that she’d have to stop pining for Monsieur Gaston and find a proper man to bed with if she wanted to get everything back in balance.
    She held back from strangling Baldaccio or dropping a heavy weight on his head. Meanwhile, Artemisio offered to slit his nose and ears.
    “No one will know who