Free Live Free, corrections and notes

I said before that Dr. Makee made it sound like he'd known Free for decades. Nope, only a few years according to my hc (207). Let's say that Free moves into the house in 1980. One of the details that might point to the city being Chicago is the tunnels under downtown (286). OTOH, there are cities with a 38th Street going North/South: Kansas City, Kansas (nice Oz tie in: any major city in Kansas!); Omaha, Nebraska (maybe); St. Joseph, Missouri; Philadelphia (but one chapter is "I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia," implying it ain't in Philly, and the Philly street is named North 38th). Another intersection mentioned is 44th and Dennis (280). I was thinking that the building might have to be standing in 1819, because of how Wolfe's timeline compresses timeframes. A building like that in 1819 rules out a lot of the midwest, except for maybe St. Louis and Indianapolis. But maybe the 1819 building is not right. The building was definitely built in the 19th century. Anyway, if the building timeframe has always been, say, 1980-1982, and Free visited periodically from 1807-1818, adjusting it so that he never overwrote himself (11 years of frontier life interspersed with up to 36 months of 1980s life), then that starts to make some sense until the whole "1819" thing crops up (that point where he leaves the frontier and puts the gizmo in the wall). Maybe it would be fixed if it were written: "Free leaves 1819 for 1979, where he puts the gizmo in the wall." Because then it would be there for him to use from 1980-1982. But if he is keeping himself in realtime after installing the gizmo in the wall in 1979 then he would implode everytime his frontier-visiting self came in . . . no, wait, the visitor would implode, because the realtime Free is older . . . hmmmm. In any event, another detail: Free supposedly has not been time-travelling (all this talk of not knowing where the ticket is; too old to use it; etc.), yet Whitten did implode after being on the ground for a while, which implies that Free had been elsewhen from Nov 1982 to Jan 1983 until the moment of Whitten's implosion on Jan 14. OTOH, if the house isn't standing there in 1819, then, because it is a time machine and not a teleporter, the gizmo would deposit a person out in a field. (Which is another reason for suspecting it to be in a midwest location, since Free is on the expedition, etc. Then again, he hid the gizmo in a Kentucky cave for at least a while.) =mantis=

I'm going to try to work out a personal chronology for Whitten/Free from the time he set up camp at the Magic Carpet until his death. I think we're roughly in agreement on the basic facts. But I think you're looking in the wrong place for the city. It's not in the Midwest, if it exists at all; it's on the East Coast. I have only the Tor paperback, so I don't know the HC page number, but on the second page of chapter 59 Free looks out the window of the cockpit and sees the "tossing waters of the Atlantic". The High Country doesn't stray from protected US airspace--that's why it was built. It seems to circle, more or less; at least it doesn't seem to ever be out of a short-range flight of the shuttle B-17, and the B-17 takes off and lands from the old military base near the modern airport. And the Flying Carpet is near the airport. The flask and the matches point to New York City. I don't think that is the city, but the city is probably close to NYC. The television commentator said it was a major US city. It's definitely not Philadelphia. It's far enough north to get cold and have snow. If the shuttle used in 1942 operated under the same conditions as in 1982-3 (never too far from High Country), then that plane landed at Langley Field, Virginia. The high and mighty aboard the High Country probably wanted to stay close to the center of government power in Washington DC. The city, if it exists, should be between there and NYC, as I see it. -Roy