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Prophecy, Madness, and Holy War in Early Modern
Europe
 OXFORD STUDIES IN WESTERN ESOTERICISM

Series Editor
Henrik Bogdan, University of Gothenburg

Editorial Board
Jean-Pierre Brach, École Pratique des Hautes Études
Carole Cusack, University of Sydney
Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling
Olav Hammer, University of Southern Denmark
Wouter Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam
Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol
Jeffrey Kripal, Rice University
James R. Lewis, University of Tromsø
Michael Stausberg, University of Bergen
Egil Asprem, University of Stockholm
Dylan Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
Gordan Djurdjevic, Simon Fraser University
Peter Forshaw, University of Amsterdam
Jesper Aa. Petersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

IMAGINING THE EAST

The Early Theosophical Society
Tim Rudbog and Erik Sand

MYSTIFYING KABBALAH
Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and
New Age Spirituality
Boaz Huss

SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY
From Jacob Boehme to
Mary Anne Atwood, 1600–1910
Mike A. Zuber

OCCULT IMPERIUM
Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, and the
Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy
Christian Giudice

THE SUBTLE BODY

A Genealogy
 Simon Cox

RETAINING THE OLD EPISCOPAL DIVINITY

John Edwards of Cambridge and Reformed Orthodoxy
in the Later Stuart Church
Jake Griesel

PROPHECY, MADNESS, AND HOLY WAR IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

A Life of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil
Leigh T.I. Penman
Prophecy, Madness, and Holy War in
Early Modern Europe
A Life of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil
LEIGH T.I. PENMAN
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022058612
ISBN 978–0–19–762393–0
eISBN 978–0–19–762395–4
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197623930.001.0001
For Olija
 Contents

Figures
Acknowledgements
A Note on Conventions

1. An Unknown Prophet
2. The Sins of the Fathers
3. Crisis and Rebirth
4. The Sword of God’s Vengeance
5. War and Peace
6. The End of Days
7. Spiritual Sons
Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Figures

2.1 Gravestone of Joachim Gifftheil, Pforzheim (1585)

2.2 Abraham Gifftheil, ‘Crypto Calvinismus Wirtembergicorum’
(1622), title page
2.3 Johann Arndt, portrait (ca. 1625)
3.1 Abraham von Franckenberg, engraved portrait (1725)
3.2 Gifftheil, Stimme durch welche der HErr Zebaoth auß Zion also
brüllet (1629, reprint of ca. 1637)
3.3 Lucas Osiander Jr., oil on wood, Conrad Mehlberger (1619)
4.1 Johann Permeier, engraved portrait by Sebastian Furck (ca.
1640)
4.2 Letter of Gifftheil to Nicolaus Pfaff (20 January 1638)
4.3 Gifftheil, Kriegs=Gebeth (1640), title page
5.1 Christian Hoburg, engraved portrait (undated)
5.2 Gifftheil, Die Fürsten und Richter . . . betreffend (1648), title
page
6.1 Joachim Betke, engraved portrait (undated)
6.2 Friedrich Breckling, fictitious portrait (1692)
7.1 Quirinus Kuhlmann, engraved portrait (1679)
7.2 Johannes Rothé’s standard and army, engraving (1673)
 Acknowledgements

The extraordinary story of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil, the main

subject of this book, first came to my attention during a research trip
to Wolfenbüttel many years ago. For years, as my work continued on
other projects, I kept an eye out for mentions of this barber surgeon
turned prophet and his strange adventures, but it was not until
2012, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland’s
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, that research for
this book could begin in earnest. Initially I intended to use Gifftheil
and his correspondence to sketch an intellectual geography of
religious dissent in early modern Europe. But as the laborious task of
identifying and collecting sources began, the study transformed into
something very different, particularly as biographical details emerged
which shed a new and personal light on the prophet and his story.
My former colleague at UQ, Mike Zuber, read all or part of this work
in draft on several occasions and offered valuable comments.
Others, including Phil Almond, Peter Cryle, Simon During, Peter
Harrison, Nicholas Heron, Ian Hesketh, Ian Hunter, Gary Ianziti,
Anna Johnston, Simon Kennedy, Henry James Meiring, Tim Mehigan,
Daniel Midena, Charlotte Rose Millar, Knox Peden, Lucia Pozzi, Trish
Ross, and Ryan Walter read and discussed aspects of the work with
me at some point, and offered stimulating feedback.
Many times during this project I benefited from wisdom, advice,
criticism, and information from Jill Bepler, Jürgen Beyer, Henrik
Bogdan, Erik-Jan Bos, Michael Driedger, Peter Forshaw, Carlos Gilly,
Ariel Hessayon, Gizella Hoffmann, Howard Hotson, Tünde Beatrix
Karnitscher, Vera Keller, Hartmut Lehmann, Benjamin Marschke,
Lucinda Martin, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Martin Mulsow, Kathrin
Pfister, Larry Principe, Günter Schmeisky, Douglas Shantz, Jonathan
Strom, Márton Szentpéteri, Vladimír Urbánek, Allen Viehmeyer,
Noémi Viskolcz, and Andrew Weeks. My colleagues at the Monash
Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University in Melbourne,
Lily Yulanti Farid, David Haworth, Lynette Russell, and Leonie
Stevens, gave me the time necessary to complete this study, and
encouraged me to broaden its conclusions to extend to Gifftheil’s
impact on missionary Christianity. Given that this work was
researched and written (mostly) in Australia, it simply would not
exist without the assistance of librarians and archivists in Europe,
the United Kingdom, Israel, North America, and Australasia, who
cheerfully and patiently fielded questions and supplied photos at
every turn. I am grateful to them all, and must give extra special
thanks to Verena Rothenbühler of the Staatsarchiv des Kantons
Zürich, who kindly spent several days tracking down an errant
Gifftheil manuscript that turned out to be of crucial importance.
Research for this project was supported by funding and
opportunities offered by the University of Queensland, the ARC-
funded Science and Secularization Project, Monash University, the
Forschungszentrum Gotha of the Universität Erfurt, the
Franckeschen Stiftungen in Halle, and the Herzog August Bibliothek
in Wolfenbüttel. It has been a special pleasure to complete this
manuscript in Wolfenbüttel, where the idea behind the study was
born, and to be able to write these very words in Amsterdam, where
Gifftheil’s own adventures concluded.
Finally, I thank my family for the support and love they have
offered throughout the course of this project, which has been
completed amidst moves to places far away, the tumultuous
upheavals and lockdowns of a global pandemic, and very trying
circumstances.
L.T.I.P.
July 2022
 A Note on Conventions

Two calendars were used in Europe during Gifftheil’s lifetime, the

‘new style’ Gregorian calendar, dating to 1584, and the ‘old style’
Julian calendar. The adjusted Gregorian calendar was ten days
ahead of the Julian. Because the Gregorian reform was promulgated
by a pope, many Protestant states were reluctant to embrace it. As
such, the Julian calendar continued to be used in Britain,
Scandinavia, in most Protestant territories of the Holy Roman
Empire, and in Switzerland. The Gregorian calendar, by contrast, was
used in the United Provinces, some parts of the Duchy of Cleves,
France, the Kingdom of Bohemia and its crownlands, the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ducal Prussia, Lusatia, and Silesia. Given
that Gifftheil ranged across all of these territories at various points in
his life, I give the dates as marked in the original documents. Where
there is a conflict, or particular need for clarity about dating, both
‘old’ and ‘new’ style dates are given. The years are taken to begin on
1 January.
Transcriptions follow the original documents, including
capitalisation and spelling, except in cases where punctuation has
been changed for clarity. Editorial insertions are indicated by square
brackets. Abbreviations have been silently expanded. All translations
are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
 1
An Unknown Prophet

Vengeance is mine; I will repay.

Deuteronomy 32:35

For by fire and by His sword will the Lord judge all flesh.
Isaiah 66:16

As the bells tolled in the morning fog on Sunday 19 October 1634,

the streets of Tübingen slowly filled with townsfolk making their way
to the church of St. George. The university town’s most recognisable
landmark, St. George’s gothic belfry rose serenely above the
rooftops overlooking the river Neckar, the lifeblood of this region of
southwestern Germany. But the solemn tolling of the bells could not
hide Tübingen’s misery. A month prior, the Thirty Years’ War had
come to the staunchly Lutheran territory when Catholic troops
commanded by the Duke of Lorraine entered the city. The meadows
beyond the Neckar, once farmland, had been devoured by their
encampments. With the troops came violence, plague, and
resentment. The books of the town council, which registered the
grievances of the populace, quickly became filled with complaints
from townsfolk about the hardships occasioned by the soldiers.
Yet there was a glimmer of hope. On this particular Sunday, Lucas
Osiander Jr., the esteemed theologian and chancellor of Tübingen’s
famous university, was to take to the church’s ornate pulpit to deliver
a sermon. While some may have hoped to find solace in Osiander’s
words on that day—during the sermon the preacher speaks God’s
word, and becomes a true prophet—they were instead confronted by
a blasphemous spectacle. Midway through Osiander’s sermon, a man
stirred from the pews and bellowed ‘why do you not preach God’s
word?’ To the horror of onlookers, he drew a sword and stormed the
pulpit, clearly intending to slay the churchman. Yet by God’s
‘miraculous intervention,’ a contemporary newspaper held, the
stocky Osiander somehow deflected the blow even as the
congregation raced to the preacher’s aid. The attacker was
overpowered and brought into custody.
The shocking incident made news across Germany. Given the
situation in Tübingen, these news bulletins all assumed that
Osiander’s assailant was a ‘simple-minded imperial soldier’ from
among Lorraine’s unruly Catholic troops, who had been upset by
Lutheran doctrine.1 But the attacker was neither a Catholic nor a
soldier. He was instead a native of Württemberg, who had been
raised as a Lutheran—in the house of a pastor, no less. He was also
one of the most notorious anti-war activists in the Holy Roman
Empire. His name was Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil.
Rumour held that Gifftheil had been awoken to his divine mission
by the blazing comet of 1618, an apocalyptic portent that coincided
with the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War.2 Gifftheil was strikingly
tall and powerfully built, wearing a long dark beard and long hair;
those who encountered him were impressed by his imposing stature,
his stentorian voice, his mastery of scripture, his fearlessness in the
face of authority, and his striking resemblance to the Old Testament
prophets. One of many lay prophets who emerged to preach God’s
word during the 1620s, by the second half of the seventeenth
century the mere mention of Gifftheil’s name was enough to instil
contemporaries with fear, awe, or anger. For while many lay
prophets urged the populace to repent or do penance in hope of
avoiding war and its consequences, Gifftheil was different. Motivated
by a conviction that ‘false prophets and Sadducees’—by which he
meant Europe’s clerics—had goaded worldly rulers into the hellish
conflict, and, animated by a compassion for the poor and
downtrodden, from 1624 Gifftheil sought and won audiences with
Europe’s kings, princes, dukes and emperors. He implored them to
abjure the advice of their clerical advisors and institute a godly
peace according to biblical precepts, in which the wellbeing of the
poor would be assured. But this compassionate goal was tinged by a
dark fanaticism. Like the biblical Elijah, Gifftheil’s hopes were
dimmed by blood, and he was fully prepared to ‘slaughter the priests
of Baal’ (2 Kings 10)—to kill pastors and theologians—if Europe’s
rulers refused to listen to his prophetic voice.
Lucas Osiander, an esteemed theologian, chancellor of a Lutheran
university, and a leading figure in the state church of the duchy of
Württemberg, might thus seem a natural target for Gifftheil’s
murderous inclinations on that autumn day in 1634. But despite
being widely reported in the press and retold by contemporaries—
and in later centuries even providing the stuff of novels—there was
more to this sensational incident than meets the eye.3 For Gifftheil’s
attack on Osiander was not merely another of his violent
confrontations with religious authority; it was rooted in a bitter
personal history of familial enmity and lost honour reaching back
generations. Furthermore, while the incident marked the end of
Osiander’s public career, for Gifftheil it prompted a dramatic
transformation. After languishing in prison for six long months before
securing an unlikely release in 1635, he emerged from the womb of
his prison cell reborn as God’s Warrior, a second King David, who
had been chosen to wage an apocalyptic Holy War on Europe’s
battlefields and to institute a divine peace by his sword. Following
Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:34, Gifftheil would exact vengeance on
God’s behalf, both for the fall of his family and for the sake of
Christendom as a whole.

⋆⋆⋆
Although today Gifftheil has fallen into obscurity, an account of the
prophet’s life and exploits has long been a desideratum. His
contemporaries, fascinated by the divisive and tempestuous prophet,
desired such an account as a proof—or refutation—of his godly bona
fides. In the 1640s, one of Gifftheil’s long-time collaborators declared
that ‘a whole Volume could bee written of his strange Life.’4 In the
first decade of the eighteenth century, some forty years after the
prophet’s death, just such a manuscript vita circulated among
Europe’s religious dissenters, which even interested those who were
nominally opposed to his martial doctrines.5 Naturally, modern
historians have seen a different utility in such an account. Since the
nineteenth century, scholars have believed that a biographical
portrait of Gifftheil could furnish ‘deep insight into the religious
undercurrents’ of early modernity.6 In 1934, Ernst Benz, the doyen
of German church historians, declared that a monograph on the
prophet was ‘required urgently,’ both to inform scholarly debates on
the origins of German Pietism and to address the seventeenth-
century legacies of the Radical Reformation.7
This book offers the first full-length account of Gifftheil’s life,
thought, and exploits. From humble beginnings as the offspring of a
pastor’s family in the mountain ranges of the Swabian Jura, Gifftheil
earned his living as a barber surgeon before a succession of tragic
incidents—among them his father’s expulsion from successive
pastorates and his brother’s suicide—pushed him toward the fringes
of society. From December 1624 until his death in Amsterdam in
1661, Gifftheil wandered Europe as a prophet, one who uttered
divine speech. During this time he secured audiences with the great
and the good, certainly. But he also attempted to murder at least
two Lutheran pastors, demanded troops and gold bullion from
diverse authorities to pay for an army of Holy Warriors, escaped
from three prisons, and published at least 130 tracts and pamphlets
in several European languages. After his death, Gifftheil’s writings
were sent to leading Pietists such as Philip Jakob Spener and August
Hermann Francke, and were perused by Protestant missionaries
before they embarked on journeys to the Americas, India, the East
Indies, and Greenland. In the 1730s, Schwenckfelders fleeing
persecution in Europe carried with them to Pennsylvania manuscript
accounts of his adventures. Born from a family tragedy in rural
southwestern Germany, fired by a strange religious and political zeal,
Gifftheil’s ideas ultimately reached people across the world and
played a role, albeit a minor one, in the rise of Lutheran missions
and the story of global Christianity.
 ⋆⋆⋆
Biography and other contingent narratives are a fraught genre in
historiography, especially since the emergence of the ‘biographical
turn’ around 1980. According to critics, the narrative form of a
biographical study lacks partiality; a subject can easily be divorced
from their surroundings, and available evidence and knowledge of
‘what came next’ can be over-determinative. Questions have also
been raised about how representative the lives of extraordinary
individuals—like Gifftheil—can be.8 But the past is made up of a
diversity of voices, all of whose stories are valuable in illuminating
the conflicts and possibilities of the past.9 As a lay prophet, Gifftheil
offers an exceptionally unusual point of departure, for his story casts
new light on the murky underworld of seventeenth-century prophecy
and religious dissent.
Recent studies on prophecy in Lutheran Europe have overturned
prior scholarly opinion about the exceptionality of lay prophets in
early modern confessional culture. Once considered anomalous and
rare manifestations of ‘popular’ religious enthusiasm among the
lower classes, Jürgen Beyer’s indispensable work, in particular, has
demonstrated the seeming ubiquity of lay prophets and the diverse
backgrounds from which they stemmed. They could be found in
almost every territory, came from rural and urban areas, came from
all walks of life, could be young or old, married or unmarried, men or
women. Most were literate, some were educated, and many shared
modes of speech and comportment, often developed by imitating
local pastors.10 Despite their backgrounds, however, the vast
majority of these lay prophets preached messages of repentance
and penance, intended to increase piety within the territorial church.
Most, furthermore, were inspired by visions of angelic intelligences
to share their messages. Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil, however, was
very different. He too was raised in the apocalyptic foment of
Lutheran confessional culture, but ultimately rejected its tenets in
favour of a heterodox spiritualist religiosity.11 He was one of a select
group described by theological opponents as a ‘new prophet,’ a
person who, in the guise of legitimate prophecy, sought to
challenge, not strengthen, the territorial churches.
The crucible of Gifftheil’s dissenting political and religious thought
lay in what Antoine Faivre has called the ‘theosophical current,’ a
central pillar of the esoteric tradition in Europe.12 As Carlos Gilly has
shown, the term theosophia emerged in dissenting religious circles
around 1570 to designate an unmediated godly knowledge, instead
of a knowledge won through study or observation. It was first used
to describe the teachings of the infamous Swiss physician
Paracelsus, whose suppressed theological doctrines encouraged
experimental wisdom and prophetic knowledge informed by the
‘lights of grace and nature.’ In 1580, Johann Arndt, who later
became a Lutheran pastor and an influence on Gifftheil, described
theosophia as the ‘true age-old philosophy,’ a ‘divine and natural
wisdom of the ancients’ which trumped all ‘paper erudition.’13 In the
seventeenth century the term was adopted by Protestant dissenters,
Christian kabbalists, and lay prophets like Heinrich Khunrath, Jacob
Böhme, Paul Nagel, Johann Valentin Andreae, and Abraham von
Franckenberg, to represent a prophetic alternative, sometimes
stridently anticlerical, to institutionalised religious, educational, and
political authority.14
Faivre has identified three characteristics common to most early
modern theosophical works. The first is speculation about the
complex interrelations between God, humanity, and nature. The
second is the primacy of the mythic and mytheme—like the story of
the Fall—as foundations for this speculation; and the third is the
belief that humanity, through creative imagination, can access higher
supernatural worlds.15 Although the canon of theosophical literature
has typically been limited to the works of a handful of well-known
figures—Faivre himself names but eight German representatives—
the reality is that the number of theosophers in early modern
Germany was large, and the diversity of their teachings remarkable.
Unmentioned by Faivre, Gifftheil was both a student and exponent of
this tradition. His earliest tracts were influenced by Paracelsian and
Arndtian thought, and featured sweeping speculations about the Fall,
about spiritual rebirth, and about the interconnectedness of the
created world. Even as Gifftheil’s writings in later years inclined to
more simplistic anti-war rebukes and apocalyptic tirades, his
worldview remained theosophical. Theosophy provides a key to
unlocking his approach to the world, how he understood its failings,
and how he conceived of his own prophetic calling as a remedy to
them.
Gifftheil’s place in this tradition is confirmed by his supporters,
who, to a man, were supporters or exponents of theosophia. They
included followers of Jacob Böhme, Arndtians, and Schwenckfelders.
After his death, Gifftheil’s mission was taken up by figures like
Friedrich Breckling, Johann Georg Gichtel, and Quirinus Kuhlmann,
all of whom were deeply indebted to theosophical doctrines. As
such, Gifftheil’s story sheds considerable light on German
theosophical currents in the crucial period between Jacob Böhme’s
death in 1624 and the rise of Pietism in the 1670s. It casts this
current in a new and sometimes disturbing light. For while in modern
scholarship theosophy is chiefly associated with a gentle
introspective pacifism, Gifftheil’s story shows that several adherents
flirted closely with militarism, and that the theosophical movement
as a whole was forced to navigate a potential martial turn in the
early 1640s.16

⋆⋆⋆
Traditionally, historians have struggled to make sense of Gifftheil.
This is unsurprising for, even in the digital age, evidence concerning
his life and work is difficult to identify and to access. Printed editions
of his many writings, distributed in limited numbers in ephemeral
formats, were and are rare. Given that virtually all were printed
anonymously or pseudonymously, they are all but unidentifiable in
library catalogues whether traditional or modern.17 Similarly, though
manuscript material concerning Gifftheil’s life and writings can be
found in numerous libraries and archives throughout Europe, they
are often incompletely catalogued, or only identifiable by dogged
research and good fortune.
 The struggle for historians to find contexts for Gifftheil has
resulted in two distinct historiographical traditions concerning the
prophet. The first of these represents Gifftheil as a preternaturally
well-travelled and influential religious adventurer, typically described
as a pacifist, whose writings and agitations in England and
elsewhere were an inspiration for English Fifth Monarchism and
Quakerism.18 These remarkable claims, however, have their origins
not in statements made by any of the key figures, but are instead
repetitions and variations of the alarmist heresiographical ‘lumping’
undertaken by some of Gifftheil’s polemical detractors.19 Repeated
by multiple authorities, the prophet’s links to these movements have
assumed a patina of historical verity merely by dint of their
repetition. The result of the cross-pollination of Gifftheil’s obscurity
with associations inherited from early modern religious polemic is
nowhere better demonstrated than in the bizarre tale of Gifftheil’s
supposed audience with a sultan of the Ottoman Empire as a Quaker
missionary. As far as I can determine, this first appeared in a Dutch
scholarly work of 1902, which informed us that:

Gifftheil was so confident in his prophetic mission that he visited the Sultan.
The Sultan willingly listened to him, albeit with bemusement and good
humour, and, thanking him for his words, assured him in the manner of
Alexander’s testimony to Diogenes that he would be delighted to become a
Quaker, if he were not already a Muslim.20

Needless to say, this incident never occurred. While the prophet sent
at least one letter to ‘the Turks’ during his lifetime, the only other
indication that Gifftheil or his exhortations ever reached the Sublime
Porte comes, fittingly, in the pages of a 1691 novel.21 The story is
almost certainly the result of a confusion of Gifftheil with the Quaker
missionary Mary Fisher, who visited Sultan Mehmed IV at Adrianople
in 1658.22 Whether the interpolation of the German prophet into the
tale was the historian’s error, or appeared in an as-yet unidentified
anti-Quaker polemic of early modernity, is less important than the
circumstance that, although not corroborated by a skerrick of
primary evidence, it has been repeated several times, and its echoes
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And there he saw a sight that terrified him. Through his mind passed
the recollection of all the thousands that had seen a similar sight,
though the markings were different. Instead of the chromium and
black pirate craft, there rode a quiet Guardship, big and potent.
Morgan was outgunned, for three solid turrets of three rifles each
covered his smaller ship in an inevadable bracket of heavy fire.
Resistance was impossible; he could not even fight like a cornered
rat. He was forced, if anything, to suicide. Ignominious suicide, for
there would not even be the chance to go out fighting.
The space door opened to admit a single man, clad in the uniform of
the Solar Guard.
Morgan gulped and swore. "Jeffries!"
"Right," snapped the Guardsman.
Morgan grabbed for his guns and the cabin of the small craft was
filled with the crack-crack of swift gun fire. Morgan fired once; Jeffries
twice. Black Morgan missed, but Jeffries' first shot shattered the
pirate's right wrist. The other gun dropped out of his hand from shock,
and Jeffries strode up and covered the beaten pirate.
Jeffries did not return to his ship, but he took over the pirate's small
craft and drove it to Terra. He handed the pirate over to Captain
Edwards with a smile.
"This is he," he grunted. "And now what?"
"You've won," smiled Edwards. His pleasure was honest. "If he's
Black Morgan, you've won, and we can easily hush up any trouble.
But can you prove it?"
"Sure," grinned Jeffries. "Cell him, and then come up to training
school on the roof. This takes demonstration."
"O.K.," smiled Edwards. "It's your show."

Jeffries faced the group of experts, scientists, and police officials. At

one side of him was the mock-up of the celestial globe used in
training rookie spacemen. On the table beside him was a pile of
equipment.
"This," he said, holding up the equipment, "is familiar. It is a small
detector-pulse receiver. It is coupled with an attenuator and a variable
delay line, and a minute re-transmitter. The celestial globe will show a
target approaching the ship at a velocity exceeding the speed of light,
and will match the ship's acceleration, velocity, and course in
microseconds."
He started his equipment, and across the celestial globe in three
distant flashes came a flitting target, to stop short of the ship's spotter
in the center of the globe. From the other detecting equipment came
indications and presentations as to type of drive, size of ship, and
wave bands of the other ship's radiation.
Jeffries laughed, turning off his equipment. "When equipment is very
sensitive, in order to collect information from great distances, a rather
minute transmitter can produce a heavy target," he said. "Now, above
the dome of the building—watch!"
He turned a square box at the sky and set it going. Black Morgan's
ship came swooping down, to stand above the observation dome of
the building, its rifles trained on the men inside. Jeffries turned dials
and the turret turned slowly. He manipulated another dial and the big
ship turned to face away. Then it receded and was gone in a twinkling
of an eye.
"Three-dimensional projector," he growled. "Just what they were
using for moving pictures for a hundred years. And there's your
answer!"
Captain Edwards stood up and nodded. "But look," he said. "How did
the contact come?"
"Contact?" gritted Jeffries angrily. "The louse! He took off in a suit as
the ship lifted from the port, and clung to it with his magnetics like a
flea on a dog until he had a chance to do his job at high velocity.
Then he would drop off and radio-control his own ship which was
running free a few million miles behind, and destined to come within a
few million miles of his position. It was set to about match his speed,
and then at that velocity, to circle and spiral until it was within his
range. There was no one aboard it, and so he could cram on gravities
until it creaked. I swear it had on sixty gravities."
"But you—?"
"Remember, my hobby is photography. Photography itself is a matter
of fantastic illusion. Your eyes, fallible as any sense, view a collection
of light rays in a certain pattern and your brain says it is Uncle Julius.
Iconography, when enlarged to life-size, can produce a solid image
that from a distance can be mistaken. Iconocinematography does not
produce a solid image but establishes a radiating point for
heterodyned light, producing an apparent image that the real thing
can go up and shake hands with—providing his timing is good, for the
image is unreal.
"So there's Black Morgan. Since he could not exist in fact, he did
exist in the interpretation of incomplete data. Any man can fudge a
detector by supplying false echoes from a delayed transponder.
Anybody can project a super image of a spacecraft by
iconocinematography. And a spacesuit is capable of considerable
motion of its own, plus the ability to cling like a leech to the hull of a
ship under acceleration.
"At first I was a bit concerned about the effect of attacking an armed
ship with an icono image—but I discovered that Black Morgan's real
ship was as unarmed as any commerce vessel. He was the real
fantasy!"
Captain Edwards smiled. "A good man, Jeffries," he said to his
superiors. "And a good big man can still take a good little man's tricks
and turn them against him!"
And Lieutenant Jeffries took a deep breath. "Now, sir," he said.
"About that vacation—?"
THE END.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
IMPOSSIBLE PIRATE ***

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