The Rangers Are Coming (51 page)

When they got to the Restaurant the next morning, Gladstone looked around the room.  He couldn’t believe the changes the great leaders of Europe had undergone in less than a week.  Actually, he couldn’t believe the changes in him.

              Now it didn’t matter with whom you ate, or who you sat next to on the bus.  They had all become some kind of an exclusive club to which nobody else in the world belonged.  The collection of clothing they wore was a hodge-podge of different tastes and adjustments in the name of comfort.  He noticed that many of the women had taken to wearing jeans, or even the shorts they considered so outrageous when first they saw them.  They had picked up a variety of extras, like wide belts that had a holder for a liter of water, or a pack containing sun tan lotion, extra sunglasses, and chewing gum.  Of course everyone wore their baseball caps.  Even Charlene was doing that.  Gladstone chuckled at the boys with t-shirts, shorts and their baseball caps often worn backwards.

              Breakfast was leisurely today.  Cary said President Gallagher was coming to visit with them.  They didn’t have long to wait.  The President arrived just as Gladstone was finishing his second cup of coffee.

              Gallagher jumped on the stage and took the microphone, “Good Morning, my friends.”

              He got a lot of hello’s, some applause, and a few wisecracks.  He beamed, “You folks are acting more like Americans every day.”

              “Wasn’t that the whole idea,” said the King of Belgium?  “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m having more fun than I’ve had in years.”

              That got a roar of consent from almost everyone.

              “I know a lot of you heads of state have been wondering where all this marvelous technology comes from and how we make it.  Well, beginning today we’re going to show you exactly how it’s done.  It all begins with raw power, from electricity and petroleum.  Once you have a way to make the wheels go around and the switches  turn on and off, the rest comes from a lot of smart people finding ways to play with the power in different ways.  Today you are going to see the real secret of America, our schools.  We will leave from here and take you to one of our larger schools.  Larger in that it has classes for very young people, all the way up to the University level and attached is one of our big research and development centers.  The school is located not far from here imbedded in a large residential area where the people live.  So, go back to your rooms and gather your stuff.  Oh by the way, on your tables are the top vote getters for places to see in North America.  If you don’t see your choice it’s because you were the only one who wanted to go there, or the numbers were too small to make up a trip.  You need to pick your top four and give them to your guides when you get on the buses.  See you all in 15 minutes.”

              On the elevator to their room, Henry asked his brother, “Which four did you pick?”

              “I picked the buffalo hunt, Yellowstone and the Tetons, Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde,” said Herbert, “What about you?”

              “I chose Yellowstone and the Tetons and the Grand Canyon, but I picked the big trees and Carlsbad Caverns.”

              “What did you choose, Charlene?” asked William.

              “I picked Niagara Falls, Yellowstone and the Tetons, Banff, and the Grand Canyon.”

              “What about you father?” asked Henry.

              “I asked Cary to book me a ticket on the Transcontinental Train.  I want to see the whole country from sea to sea.”

              “That wasn’t on the list.”

              “Nevertheless, they’re going to accommodate me.”

              When they arrived at the sprawling campus of the school, located several miles outside of Washington, the visitors divided into smaller groups, and toured the classes from the youngest to the oldest in high school.  Then, they looked into several university classes and on to the research center.

              At dinner that night, the leaders from Prussia, France and England were sitting together.  Cary had stayed on to answer any questions they had.

              “It took me all morning to figure out what was different about your schools,” said Moncrieff, “Your schools don’t spend a lot of time in learning the classics. Everyone seems to be about thinking of new things.”

“That’s right,” said Cary, “We’re not interested in learning just what has been taught in the past, the accumulation of knowledge.  Our emphasis is on pushing the boundaries of new ideas, new concepts.  We expect our kids in grades 1 through 6, to learn all the basics, after that the whole idea is to develop along a much different line.  You see we believe the Lord wants us to develop, self-aware, self-reliant, self-actuated people whose minds can soar with an exaltation of intellect, an ennoblement of desire, an enrichment of thought, an invigoration of higher aspirations, a proclamation of discovery and the mighty mobilization of individual souls to reject the human tendency to selfishness, evil and sin.

“What’s more,” said Cary, “Education describes efforts largely self-initiated for the purpose of taking charge of your life wisely and living in a world you understand.  The educated state is a complex tapestry woven out of broad experience, grueling commitments, and substantial risk taking.  To be educated is to understand yourself and others, to know your culture and that of others, your history, and that of others, your religious outlook and that of others.  If you miss out on this, you are always at the mercy of someone else to interpret what the facts of any situation mean.”

“That’s unprecedented,” said Gladstone.

“The results are right in front of your eyes,” said Cary.

“I didn’t understand most of what I saw at the research center,” said the Prussian Monarch.  “I saw people writing complicated mathematical formulas and others seeming to apply the formulas to beams of light.”

“Frankly, I don’t understand it either, other than the general goal to develop a high powered beam of light, called a laser, which will cut metal.”

“What happens to all this information,” asked Gladstone?

“An excellent question, Prime Minister,” said Cary.  “We have another research center that monitors all the other research centers.  It’s no secret to any of you now we are using machines, called computers, to compile, correlate, interpret, and then apply information of all kinds.  The combined work of all the research centers in the country are downloaded to a master computer on a daily basis.  This gives us linkages impossible for humans to interpret.  The master computer is capable of billions of computations a second.  It analyzes the fragments of work being done around the continent, and then combines it into usable avenues of continuing work.  It then sends the new data to the research center that’s working on that particular area of work, and gives the researchers the benefit of everything anyone else has learned that might apply to their projects.  We are coming up with new things all the time.”

“Astonishing, “said Gladstone.

“As the President said, it’s the greatest secret we have.  We’ve been working in this way for almost a hundred years.  The results in new products are sent all over the world in our trading network, and each of your countries have benefitted from the solutions.”

The conversation had drawn a lot of people to listen in to what was being said, and the look on their faces showed a dawning understanding of what a motivated and interconnected group of people could accomplish.

                                                                      ***

              The next morning the buses were loaded and the convoy left Washington, driving on a smooth sheet of wide asphalt to the west.  Gladstone was amazed at how fast the buses could move when they were put to maximum output.

              They drove across the colorful and beautiful country of the Appalachian Mountains and down into Pennsylvania.  Their first stop was at a huge industrial complex.

              “This is one of our oil production centers,” explained the President as the buses were parked on a hill overlooking a big valley.  “We have hundreds of wells for oil drilled down there.  They can produce about half a million barrels of oil a day.  We have an equal number of wells that are extracting natural gas.  The entire output goes into that very large refinery you see located in the center of the producing fields where diesel fuel is refined from the crude oil.  The heavier waste is processed into tars which are combined with sand and rocks to make the surface of the roads on which we have been driving.”

              “There are pipelines leaving the refineries to deliver diesel to stations scattered all over the Eastern Coast.  Other pipelines spread out to the cities where they deliver the natural gas to disbursement centers and smaller and smaller pipes until they reach homes and buildings.  The heating and air-conditioning of your resort comes from here.

              Further down the valley were to two big buildings with a light smoke coming from stacks.  The buses unloaded and the groups were taken inside.

              “These are power plants,” said Gallagher.  “They are run on natural gas, and produce electricity.  The heat from burning the gas run those turbines and generates electricity.  These two plants produce about a million giga-watts of energy per day.  The electrical lines are all buried and the wires are encased in steel pipes.  That way they are not subject to being knocked out with high winds or snowstorms.  These two plants power Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.”

              “We currently have about 500 of these plants running across the continent.”

              “Where do all the people who work at these facilities live,” asked someone?

              “Good question,” said Gallagher.  We have two high-speed trains that run out of this industrial valley, over the hill and down into another valley.  We have a complete city there.  It’s quite pretty and quiet.  The workers come back and forth on staggered schedules, which make the commute from home to work, just 20 minutes.”

              “Our next stop is Three Rivers, a city that got its name from the three rivers that converge.”

              It was another hour to the city of Three Rivers.  At the confluence of the rivers was the city itself.  It was a lovely designed community that spread out from the commercial and recreational center, lined with parks.

              “You would never know from looking at Three Rivers, that an enormous industrial plant is located beyond the line of forest.  Again we run high-speed trains to let the workers commute.”

              They skirted the city on a smooth road and approached a really gigantic complex of buildings.  The largest of which was in the center.  Other long buildings fanned out from the central building.  A network of smaller trains moved all over the area, carrying people and products.  The buses were able to inch their way along between the buildings and stop at the entrance of the huge, very noisy building.

              “If you expect to hear anything I say, you will have to wear these headsets,” said Gallagher, “Also, for safety reasons, we ask you all to put on a yellow hard hat.”

              The group filed by a distribution point and donned headsets and hard hats.  They could hear Gallagher talking, and the headsets drowned out the roar of the building itself.

              They walked along a catwalk over-looking several huge containers, which were full of hot molten metal.

              “This is our largest steel mill in the country,” said Gallagher.  “In the beginning we used what you have recently developed, the Bessemer method of producing steel.  Later, we switched to the Open Hearth Method, which is more efficient and produces a better quality steel with fewer impurities.”

              One of the open hearth containers was dumping it’s load just then, and Gallagher paused to let people see the process.  The molten steel went shooting off into at least a dozen troughs that went in all directions, out of the building.  “The open hearths run 24 hours a day, six days a week,” said Gallagher, “We produce a million pounds of steel every day.”

              “Now let me show you the genius of our early designers,” said Gallagher.  “We kept the assembly plants for products right next to the source.  It means we don’t have to reheat the steel to make things.  Follow me and I will show you one of the assembly plants.

              They walked several hundred yards and entered a building.  The steel became enclosed in a long, square box on the way to the assembly plant and was now cool enough to be solid.

              As it entered the assembly plant, the steel was divided into various sized long squares and these were cut into different sizes and fed into big stamping machines.  Gallagher led them down the line and the people could see that shovels, rakes, hoes, pickaxes, sledgehammers, and the frames for wheelbarrows were coming out the other side and down into water that steamed as the metal cooled.  Men were waiting to attach the handles, and attachments to the tools.  A machine took away the completed tools, men neatly stacked them in wooden boxes, stamped, “Rome” and trucks hauled the boxes away headed for a port and a ship being loaded for Italy.

              Gallagher picked up a hammer from the finished pile.  “We just made this high quality, last forever, hammer in five minutes.  It cost us about 50 cents to produce the steel and a quarter for the materials and labor to make it a complete hammer.  It will cost about a quarter to deliver this hammer to a port and put it on a ship, and another quarter to ship it to Rome.  We can make and deliver it for $1.25.  You think you are getting a wonderful bargain for buying it wholesale for $6.  You sell at retail for $12, and it’s the best hammer in your store, for the least amount of money.”

              “We can receive an order, refit our machines for whatever you need built and turn it all out in less than a week.  There is a complex of 12 assembly plants, surrounding the steel mill where each man does a particular job in an assembly line.  We have 10 such complexes sprinkled around the country making everything we export, plus a hundred specialized mass production facilities building things for us and for you.  The only thing people complain about is not being able to get enough of our products.”