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Several odds and ends to think about. Two new characters are introduced, one of whom can seemingly speak every language known to mankind. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. It sounds impossible but there are a few people like that. I knew one twenty years ago. I was running a mobile home and modular housing sales operation in upstate New York, on the northern flank of the Catskills. Between a quarter and a third of our sales were retirement and vacation homes for folks from New York City and Long Island. Depending on the poll, between a quarter and a third of City residents are non-native English speakers.
At the time, I had a saleswoman with an amazing ability to speak languages. Her father had been a career diplomat in the State Department who spent his life hopping from country to country and dragging his family along with him. Within days of landing in a new country, she was speaking the language. She was utterly fluent in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and God knows what else. She even spoke one of the Turkish languages from one of the ‘Stans. After meeting a new customer in the lobby, she could tell within seconds the native language of the customer and flip seamlessly into the new language, and the customers loved it! Very good salesperson and very high commission rates, she was one of my best salespeople. Interestingly, she had a sister who lived with her, and they were rebuilding an ancient farmhouse. I met the sister several times, and she had no language abilities other than English. Still, that was better than me. My wife says I don’t even speak English, only Southern.
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I’ve been a science fiction fan since I was a young boy, and I remember reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine before I ever saw any of the movies. The one thing that is never shown in any of these stories, though, is disease. Nobody gets sick and they all travel back to their regular time with no ill effects.
That is just wrong. It is entirely possible to carry a new disease from one place to another with horrendous consequences, and a new time is no different than a new place. When Europeans landed in the Americas, they brought with them diseases like smallpox, influenza, and measles, previously unknown in the New World. Native Americans had no antibodies and suffered 80-90% losses from disease. They got us back, though, by giving Europeans syphilis.
Disease transmission via time travel would be no different. While I didn’t discuss it beyond generalizations, if smallpox was brought to Cudlow B by the Vikings, the results would be devastating. We no longer vaccinate for smallpox because we managed to wipe it out, except for some samples in labs around the world. We no longer have herd immunity. If it were to escape the island, it would cause a plague to rival the Black Death of the Middle Ages. If you liked Covid-19, you’re going to love smallpox! The original Covid-19 had a mortality rate somewhere around 2%, though it has mutated to be less deadly but more contagious; smallpox is much more contagious and has a mortality rate of 30%. While we do have the ability to eventually redevelop the smallpox vaccines, the odds are that by the time we could start vaccinating again, well over a billion people could die. Theoretically we could do like Jenner did in 1796 and begin inoculating with cowpox, but that’s only a stopgap, not a perfect cure. If even a single carrier managed to get loose in Western Europe, the results would be catastrophic. Making body bags would become a growth industry.
What could be done if smallpox was found in the Vikings on Cudlow B? A strict quarantine would just be the start. The nicest thing that could be done would be a year-long quarantine, after which the survivors would be allowed to leave after testing. Another good choice would involve several small nuclear weapons, or if that was considered excessive, multiple applications of nerve gas and napalm. It would be much simpler to kill off everything and everybody on the island rather than let smallpox loose on the world.
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I hope everybody is enjoying the story so far. FineStories is having a problem linking stories to the appropriate bookapy listing. Here it is:
https://bookapy.com/s/351/vikings
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When Miami Vice began back in the ‘80s, the ‘elevator pitch’ given to investors was ‘MTV Cops!’ The elevator pitch for this story is ‘Time Traveling Vikings!’ It came about from the History Channel series Vikings. I’m a sucker for period pieces, especially ones involving mayhem and mishap. The series was about the story of Ragnar Lothbrok and his family and was horrendously inaccurate. (He led the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and the Siege of Paris in 845 - 53 years later? His brother, Rollo, becomes the first Duke of Normandy, but that particular Rollo wasn’t born until 870. Etc, etc, etc!)
Still, as I said, I’m a sucker for historical pieces and I put this one on my Record list on the DVR. So, I had to wonder, what would happen if some of Ragnar’s buddies showed up via a time warp or something? Here’s my version. I hope you like it!
One of the most difficult and challenging parts of this story was combining three different languages, Old Norse, English, and American. For Old Norse I was able to find some online translators and dictionaries, and occasionally faked it with some Icelandic. Sorry if you actually read Old Norse and find my mistakes. I don’t plan to rewrite it. As for English versus American, both George Bernard Shaw and Henry Higgins had much to say about the differences in the languages. I had some Englishmen edit that, and they pointed out some errors and I changed them. As for those who find the different languages distracting, just as many have found it interesting and informative. Too late to change now.
For those curious, my standard publishing schedule is Tuesday and Friday.
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