Grantville Gazette - Volume V (6 page)

Mr. Smith smiled "The
blade
is new. It is a copy of the original blades, made by the man who already owns a quarter of the business. But the handle is over eighty years old. I have been using it myself for several years now. And it belonged to my grandfather before that. He bought it used as a young man, and used it for several years before moving on to a better, more modern design. As you can see, there is only a little wear for how much it has been used. But the blades only last about a week. There is where we make the money. People will have to come to us to get replacement blades. We can make them cheaper than their local blacksmith, because we will have a shop that is doing nothing but turning out these blades as fast as they can. Again, I am not a metal worker. But I do have some knowledge on how some of the original up-time things were made, and I have spent the last year doing research and experimenting. We can gold plate the handles and make them last for many years. As long as they last, the customers will keep coming back for blades. It is just the way people are. They won't want to spend the money to buy a different razor if the one they have still works."

"I will want something legal in writing. If this is as big as you say it will be, I want something that spells out exactly what you have proposed."

Mr. Smith grinned. "So does that mean we have a deal?"

"Yes. We do."

Over the next few weeks, Ernst produced several prototypes for Mr. Smith, whom he now knew was named Zeke Pridmore. They decided on the final design, and production began. Zeke supplied several things to help with production. The rollers to flatten the brass stock to a specific thickness. A press to stamp out and form the sheets of brass to exact shapes. And most interesting of all, a small glass vat, a "car battery," and a pedal-powered charger to keep it working. The electroplating was incredibly simple once it was demonstrated, and though gold was expensive, a single ounce was enough to cover many pieces of brass. Within a few months, Ernst and his two apprentices had made almost a thousand safety razor handles.

When Zeke came to collect the handles, he showed them the final packaging. It included the handle, five blades, each individually wrapped in a colorful waxed paper envelope, a small lather brush, a small glazed earthenware cup and a round cake of pleasant-smelling soap. All of this was nestled in a small wooden box with the company name and logo burned into it. This was to be the initial marketing run. The profits on these sets would be negligible. And less elaborate sets would be available in the next run. But as Zeke had explained, it was important to make the initial "splash" in the market. And the primary market would start in the area immediately around Grantville, where people were already familiar with the idea of safety razors.

By the end of October, Ernst had given up all of his other work. He now employed two journeymen, another apprentice, and was having another room added on to his shop just to handle the extra press and rollers that he had purchased. New batches of razors were sent off as soon as they were completed. In his almost weekly correspondence with Zeke, he received newspaper clippings of advertisements for both the razors and the accompanying supplies. Evidently the advertising campaign was working. Sales were extraordinarily good. A soap factory had been purchased to keep them supplied with the various toiletries that the company was now producing. And a bank draft for his share of the profits arrived monthly.

In November, he received a letter asking him to come and visit the company headquarters in Grantville. After months of working with one of the people from the future, the idea of actually seeing the town was too much to resist. It would take him almost a week to get there, but winter hadn't set in yet and he could now afford the time off. Leaving the shop in the capable hands of his new foreman, he set off for his first trip outside of Franconia in his life.

The first few days of his trip were uneventful. As he got closer to Grantville, he started to see what Zeke had described as "billboards" for their razors. The closer he got to Grantville, the more of them he saw. Outside of Suhl, he saw a small sign by the roadside. It caught his attention because it was in the same colors as the company billboards he had seen in the towns. It was in both German and English, and simply stated:
If you don't know
.

He stopped the wagon, and got down to look at it. It was definitely the same red and yellow color scheme that they were using, but there was no logo, no name, and only that one cryptic line.

"I will have to tell Herr Pridmore that something has happened to one of his precious signs," he murmured to himself.

A few minutes later, he came upon another sign. This one was identical in size and shape to the last one, and it had only the words:
Whose signs these are.
 

Again, Ernst stopped to look for any logos or markings, and found none. He climbed back up and started the wagon forward again. He was puzzled. Zeke had made such a big deal about advertising to draw in customers, and here were signs that looked like theirs, yet made no sense.

A third sign was posted still farther down the road. It was just like the previous two signs, and it stated in neat lettering:
Then you must not
.

He didn't even bother stopping to examine it. But he was actively looking to see if he could spot the next sign as he went on. He was rewarded a few minutes later as he came around a bend in the road to find a fourth sign.

Have traveled very far . . . 

As Ernst went around the next hill, he saw a full sized billboard in the same red and yellow as the signs. Across the top was the unmistakable company logo in bright red.

Burmashave. 

Ernst smiled to himself and rode on. Drawn in, indeed.

To: Grantville Emergency Committee. 
From: John Sterling, Edgar Frost and Francis Kidwell. 
Date: May 30, 1631? fifth day after the disaster. 
Re: Road options around Schwarza Falls. 

Yesterday, May twenty-ninth, the fourth day after the disaster, we went up Buffalo Creek to the power plant to look into how to build a road connection over the border into the lands to what is now the southwest. You asked us to tell you everything, even if we weren't certain it was important, so pardon us if we ramble a bit.

I. The Situation

The report from the power plant is correct. There's a real castle up there looking down on us. Don't imagine a fairy-tale castle. This is a deadly serious looking fortress. There's also a bit of a village there, or at least half of one. The village and the castle are both named Schwarzburg. We need to make friends with whoever runs the place, because they're guarding our southwest flank very nicely. And, if their cannon are even mediocre, I doubt there's much we could do to stop them from wiping out the power plant.

As you come around the bend in Buffalo Creek, about a mile out from Grantville, what you see is a wall of black rock, streaked with red, green and brown. This castle sits on a hill dead center on top of it, right above the power plant. The cliff has a mirror polish on it that reflects the sky when you get close enough. We guess that from the bottom of the Buffalo Creek valley up to the floor of the valley above, it must be three hundred feet. Our ridge tops are about four hundred feet above the valley floor, but the hills of the land we've been plunked into are much higher. We guess about twice as high, which means eight hundred feet up from the valley floor. The German hills aren't as chopped up as ours. They seem a bit rounder, but the valley walls are steep enough.

There's a stream in the valley we cut into. They call it the Schwarza, and where it flows over the cut edge, there's quite a waterfall. We'll call it Schwarza Falls. It's hard to guess how high it is, because it's pounding down on what was a steep slope and washing quite a bit of that slope downhill. We figure it's a clear fall of at least fifteen feet, but then it tumbles down at least two hundred feet before it flows into what used to be Spring Branch.

If it hadn't been for the fact that the Schwarza valley is offset a bit from Buffalo Creek valley, there'd be no hope of getting a road up that cliff. As things stand, though, the Schwarza had a loop to the northeast that got lopped off by the disaster. (We're starting to call it the "Ring of Fire," by the way, since that seems a pretty good description of the disaster—"RoF" for short.) The ridge to the north of Buffalo Creek just manages to come up to that part of the Schwarza's stream bed. Also, just southwest of Schwarza Falls, there's a little knob on our side that just goes up to the level of the rooftops of some houses nearby. It's all that's left of the ridge that divided Spring Branch from Buffalo Creek.

One thing is real clear. That little village at the top of the falls is in big trouble. Half the place is gone. Calling it a village may be too generous; it was a cluster of houses and barns built beside a bridge across the Schwarza. In a few places, the ground collapsed as far back as thirty feet from the edge, taking houses and barns if they happened to be there. There's quite a mound of muck and rubble along the face of the cliff below those places. There's one barn, though, that's standing right on the edge and hasn't moved an inch.

The cut-off chunk of the Schwarza northeast of the castle must have dumped its entire contents and a good part of its riverbed over the cliff in one great gush. There's a flow of debris from there down along what used to be Spring Branch Creek. It looks like what was left of Spring Branch Road inside the ring of fire was pretty well buried or washed out within a few minutes on Sunday. The culvert over Spring Branch Creek on the main road looks like it survived that first gush, but it was never intended to take the flow of the Schwarza river, so the road is acting like a dam. The water was over the road when we got there. It's a few inches deep and running fast, but the road is pretty flat so the overflow is spread over quite a distance. It's eating at the road, and we think it'll wash it out unless we dig up the culvert and put in a proper bridge.

We waded across and took a hike up what's left of the ridge that divided Buffalo Creek from Spring Branch. It's the steep but direct route into what's left of the lower Schwarzburg village. They were watching us the whole time, and there's no doubt that they were as nervous about us as we were about them. By the time we got up the hill, a guy named Franz was there to meet us, with two others who stayed back a bit and whose names we didn't get. Franz seemed to be an officer in the guard of the castle. As near as we could make out, his boss is the graf of Schwarzburg and a town named Rudolstadt.

Franz turned out to be a decent fellow and pretty quick witted, but he had some big pistols in his belt and a sword. We were careful not to put our hands anywhere near our holsters those first few minutes. We'd better send someone official to Schwarzburg quickly, someone who knows German!

We read Franz the message you wrote for us in German about wanting to open the road connections across the border of the "ring." After we gave him the letters you gave us, we tried to have a conversation. I wish we knew more German, but the stuff you gave us helped a lot. With lots of mistakes, hand gestures and an occasional picture on a notepad, we managed to get by.

He told us that the Ring of Fire destroyed the road from Schwarzburg to Rudolstadt where, as near as we could make out, his boss lives most of the time. It also destroyed the road to the town of Saalfeld. As a result, it seems that we're in agreement about trying to open up a road connection.

The bridge across the Schwarza at Schwarzburg is right at the lip of the falls. It's in serious danger of collapse because of all the dirt that's been washed away from the foundations. If the bridge goes, the farmhouses that are left on the southeast side of the Schwarza will be cut off, so they're already working on a temporary wooden bridge upstream from the old one. Timber is one thing they have plenty of. The roads here are mostly grass and packed dirt, with cobblestones only where erosion is likely to be a problem.

Northeast from the falls about two hundred yards, the road is almost cut off with half of it slumped away. It looks like it was right on the riverbank there, at the southeast end of the loop of river that the Ring of Fire sliced off. Beyond that, to the northwest, the road is in good shape, with stone retaining walls in places as it takes a long switchback up the slope to the castle gate.

We didn't go into the castle, but we did go up to the square by the gate where there's a bit of an upper village. The castle sits along the crest of a knife-edge ridge with the Schwarza river wrapped around the west, south and east sides. You couldn't ask for a better defensive position, but it's not all that big. The castle must be a quarter mile long but the ridge isn't very wide anywhere.

II. Road Proposals

Franz, the officer, must have been thinking about the problem of getting a road down from Schwarzburg, because he took us to the jumping off point where a new road could connect. He pointed out the route he thought would work before we left to walk down that way. We agree with him, so we'll describe that route and forget the others.

Be aware, we're not engineers, just three guys who've had plenty of experience building and maintaining roads. We're confident that we can do this job, and do it well, but under the laws of West Virginia, we aren't really qualified. It would be nice if there was a civil engineer to help with this project.

The road would turn north just east of the old Spring Branch road and traverse up the east side of the Spring Branch valley. This would almost follow the power company right of way once the power line gets on the same side of the creek. Then, the road would turn broadly around the head of the valley to meet the northwest end of the abandoned riverbed of the Schwarza. The climb up out of the riverbed would be short, and we'd meet the road up from the lower village about a quarter mile northwest of the waterfall.