Ring of Fire III (11 page)

Claudia laughed. “When it absolutely positively has to be there on time. Yes, letters of transfer, bids ten pounds of gold coins because the person they are dealing with doesn’t trust paper.”

“Marijuana seeds so that the crop can be gotten in this year not next year. Dye because the ladies at court have to have the new colors for the party next week,” Magdalena added.

“Fresh Italian oranges for Duchess Maria who is Frau Higgins’ guest for the season and absolutely must have her freshly-squeezed orange juice or she’ll die. Even though she has spent the last twenty years of her life without it.”

And on they went listing some of the things that had been shipped on the Jupiter 1 and the Neptune since the Venice-Grantville route had opened. After they wound down Magdalena continued, “The same thing will be true in a route from Brussels to Paris or London, and almost as true on a route from Grantville to Magdeburg.”

“Almost?”

“They have the train between Magdeburg and Grantville. Those oranges would have been just as fresh after a train ride as after a plane ride.”

“The plane would be full anyway. You know there is a waiting list,” Claudia insisted. “So why not Magdeburg?”

“His Majesty, so I am told, does intend to have scheduled flights to Magdeburg just as soon as we have enough planes for it. It’s on the list right after Paris. But putting it at the front of the list would imply that the USE is more important than France or Spain. The point, as it was made to me, was that economically it’s pretty much a wash whether the fifth plane we get goes from Brussels to London or Grantville to Magdeburg. But politically putting Magdeburg ahead of London makes the king in the Low Countries look like he’s a vassal of the Emperor of the USE or at the very least like he’s siding with Gustavus Adolphus against the League.”

Claudia was nodding by the time Magdalena was finished. “If the Netherlands are to be effective as a buffer state they must, absolutely must, maintain an evenhandedness in their dealings with the nations that surround them. They already have scheduled flights to one city in the USE and Royal Dutch Airlines is owned by the crown.”

* * *

“Please forgive me. Please, please, please?”

Magdalena looked toward the door. The voice had certainly been Georg’s, but what was at the door didn’t look much like him. Well, if you didn’t count the feet. He’d apparently forgotten to put on the clown shoes. Or hadn’t been able to walk in them, knowing Georg.

“Emmett Kelley was a silent clown,” she pointed out.

Georg pulled three long-stemmed roses out of his sleeve. But he’d obviously forgotten to trim off the thorns, since he said “Ouch” rather loudly.

Magdalena couldn’t help it. She began laughing. Georg’s sad face didn’t look so sad now. “What are you doing in that outfit, Georg?”

“Apologizing for being a jerk. Even if I didn’t really know I was,” Georg said. “I’m sorry. I just assumed...well, I’m not a very romantic type, I know. But I do love you. And I do hope you’ll marry me. Even if you do go off to Brussels, I hope you’ll marry me. Eventually. I’ll move to Brussels, too. Anything.”

“Hold off on that, Georg. Farrell needs you here.” Magdalena thought for a moment. “You do realize I’ll be back in Grantville at least twice a week, don’t you?”

Georg looked hopeful. “We could maybe work something out, yes?”

“Yes. I imagine we could.”

* * *

Merton looked at the maintenance checklist and flipped a switch to check the battery power. It was well into the green.
That’s done. It’s time to get some shuteye.
It was Merton’s night in Brussels this week. He had spent one night a week here for the last month and never seen Brussels. Walking tours weren’t his favorite type of entertainment. In fact, he wasn’t looking forward to the walk to the Airport Inn. He turned in his chair and grabbed his walker.

Merton was hobbling back to the door of the Jupiter 3 when the guests arrived. There was Herr Quackenboss, a member of the new board of Directors of RDA and several other people, craftsmen of various sorts by their dress. “What can I do for you, sir?” Merton had met Herr Quackenboss just once. Several of the German board members had sold out and resigned when King Fernando bought the company. They had been replaced by members of Fernando’s court and wealthy merchants from Brussels and Amsterdam. Herr Quackenboss was both a member of the court and a wealthy merchant from Brussels. But that didn’t explain what he was doing bringing a bunch of people here in—well, not quite the middle of the night, but the sun had set.

“Ah, Herr Schmidt,” Herr Quackenboss said, with what appeared to Merton to be false good cheer. Merton was sensitized to false good cheer as people saw his legs. But Herr Quackenboss had already seen them and had been mostly curious about how they were made. “Why are you still aboard?”

“Aircraft checkout.” Merton tapped one of his fiberglass legs. “It takes me a little longer to get it done. Speaking of which, what brings you...” Merton looked at the, yep, craftsmen, who had followed Herr Quackenboss onboard. “...and your friends out at this time of the evening?”

Quackenboss hedged a bit and blustered a bit, but eventually came clean. They were there to examine the airplane. In detail. Take measurements. Make drawings. Learn as much as they could about how to build it.

“Sir, you and your guests are free to take your measurements. You’re on the board, after all. But I am going to have to be here. It’s a safety matter. I have no desire whatsoever to fall out of the sky because something vital got broken.” He motioned Quackenboss over, then whispered, “You know I’ll have to report this, sir.”

“I have His Majesty’s approval.” That was said rather huffily, so Merton figured he probably did. Otherwise he would probably have offered Merton a bribe. As it was, Merton figured that these guys were to be the guiding lights of the Royal Dutch Air Force, or whatever they ended up calling it. Not everyone in the Netherlands was thrilled with the idea of King Fernando spending so much money on airplanes and they were especially upset about his spending that money in the USE, not with good Dutch merchants and craftsmen. His Majesty ought to be spending his money on stuff they could make, like ships. Or at the very least give them a chance to make airplanes.

Georg wasn’t going to be happy about this development. Neither was Maggy.

* * *

“Well, what the hell did you expect me to do?” Merton tilted his head up to look Georg in the eye. That was one of the most irritating things about his lack of legs. It made it really hard to stare someone down. “It’s their plane, bought and paid for.”

“But it’s my, our, design. Royal Dutch Airlines didn’t buy that.”

“I’m not altogether sure of that, Georg,” Farrell said.

“What? Show me in the contract where it said they could copy our design.”

“No, Georg. I’m pretty sure that they are going to point to the contract and ask us to produce the clause that says they can’t. Even worse, a clause that says that they can’t let someone else look at it and copy it. After all, it probably won’t be Royal Dutch Airlines that is making the Dutch knockoff Jupiters; it will be some other Dutch company that is also in large part owned by the crown.” Farrell shook his head. “I don’t know if the USE and the Netherlands have any agreement on the protection of patents and even if they do most of the Monst—Jupiters aren’t patentable. The wing shape is right out of Dad’s aeronautics text; the ACLG is from an article in
Time
...even if we did have to figure out how to make it work. Don’t get me wrong, there is some really brilliant engineering that we probably could patent. At least, we could have up-time. But none of it is stuff they couldn’t work around.”

“Well, I guess that means the king in the Low Countries won’t be offering us tons of money to set up shop in the Netherlands,” Farrell’s wife Mary said. “What about that Magdeburg site?”

“Magdeburg!” Georg protested. “RDA doesn’t even have Magdeburg on its flight schedule. They say there is no reason to compete with the rail line. I’ll never see Maggie in Magdeburg!”

* * *

Captain Fredric van Moris had been with His Majesty when he was still a cardinal. He had a hundred hours in the Jupiters. He had taken off five times and landed three. He had flown left seat with Magdalena van de Passe and Merton Smith. He was the most qualified pilot in the Dutch Air Force. Based on what Fredric considered to be not very good advice, His Majesty had decided that the pilots that had come over to RDA from TEA were not to be involved in the flight of the first aircraft built in the Netherlands.

The Sea Bird looked like the Jupiter 3. In fact, from a distance you would think it was a Jupiter 3 rigged for two engines instead of four. When you got closer you could see other differences. After some difficulties with the composites, they had switched doped canvas and wood. That made the body and wings lighter than a Jupiter’s, but also weaker. It had two straight six engines—made in the Netherlands at great expense—which together produced a bit over six hundred horsepower, but weighed over fifteen hundred pounds. To compensate for the weight of the engines, they had made the body of the plane as light as they thought they could get away with. However, the Sea Bird was still heavy compared to a Jupiter.

Fredric van Moris knew that the Dutch designers’ knowledge of aircraft design was imperfect but he didn’t know how significant the deficiencies were. One of the things that none of the Dutch designers realized was just how strong a shaped composite could be. It was also designed without benefit of a clear understanding of the laws of aerodynamics. Especially the cubed square law. The difficulty came from the fact that in an airplane some things scale up along a line and other things scale up along curves. Reynolds Number calculations derived from a one-twelfth scale model will work just fine for the full-scale model. Lift calculations work on the square which is nice. But weight and wing stress calculations work on the cube and that’s not nice. Not nice at all!

Captain van Moris looked at the plane with a little trepidation but mostly with pride and excitement. It looked good to him. Of course, he wasn’t an aircraft designer. He was, truth be told, barely a pilot. The Jupiters were a fairly forgiving type of aircraft. And a hundred hours was little more than twice the minimum to get a private pilot’s license up-time. He went through his preflight checks with extra care, climbed aboard and spent a few minutes checking each of his controls. Finally, he started the engines, then inflated the bag and he was off. He sped along the lake as he neared takeoff velocity. Something felt different...the wings were flexing more than they should and the aircraft felt more like it was taking off overloaded. By now, the Jupiter would be telling him that it was ready to fly. But not this bird. It was still married to the lake. When the airspeed indicator reached the indicated speed, he pulled back on the stick and it tried. He could feel it reaching for the sky and not quite grasping it. He gave it more throttle and at sixty mph indicated airspeed, the Sea Bird crawled into the sky. Captain van Moris managed to get the aircraft almost thirty feet into the air, constantly just on the edge of a stall...and that’s when the wings came off. The plane fell thirty feet onto the air cushion landing gear which compressed, taking some of the impact, then popped like a balloon.

Captain van Moris got out of the plane—barely. And swam to shore. He was very lucky. If the wings hadn’t come off when they did, he would have hit the trees on the edge of the lake.

* * *

Farrell Smith looked at the fancy embossed letter with the royal seal. Then looked at his son.

Merton nodded. “They had a blow-up, Dad. Luckily Freddy van Moris wasn’t killed. But His Majesty wasn’t happy.”

“What happened?”

“The wings came off at maybe thirty feet H over G. That’s what Freddy van Moris said. Apparently they were flapping when he left the water. I didn’t see it; the first I heard about it was when they called us in for the after-crash report. Anyway, it was a darn good thing Freddy’s a good swimmer or there’d be another name on the tower out at Grantville Airport.”

There were now forty-six names on the tower wall, each one for a person who had died in the pursuit of aviation since the Belle had flown in 1633. Thirty-seven of them had little silver wings painted beside to signify people who had died in crashes. People who had built planes that they thought would fly then tried to fly them. Apparently Freddy van Moris had come close to being number forty-seven. “Why?” Farrell asked. “Why did the wings come off?”

“Do I look like Georg or Grandpa? It was wood and canvas. I know that much. And Freddy said it looked very much like the J3. Before it came apart anyway.”

That was enough to tell Farrell Smith what had probably happened. “Wood and canvas isn’t the same as a composite. In a composite the load is spread pretty evenly. It stresses differently and needs fewer supports. Damn it, Merton, they could have asked us. We would have told them.”

Merton nodded again with a half shrug. “It’s the books. They tell you enough, enough so that you get high enough to kill you. No one is stacking eight wings on a bicycle and looking silly in a movie, like they did in our timeline. Instead they’re building delta wings powered by black powder rockets and auguring in at two hundred MPH. Stuff that makes sense and seems like it’ll work if you’ve read the books and only read the books.”

“Where did they get the engines?” Farrell asked, trying to bring the discussion back to the Dutch accident.

“They built them themselves,” Merton told him. “Big mothers. Bronze and crucible steel. I never saw them bright and shiny, just the one that they managed to fish out of the lake. That plane had to cost a fortune to build. The engines were, in essence, handmade by master craftsmen. Probably ten thousand man hours in each engine.” Merton was shaking his head over it and Farrell understood why. To hand-make an engine was more than anyone could afford to do very often. Even kings could only do it occasionally as a proof of concept or proof of wealth, but it could be done and it didn’t require the tiny industrial base that existed so far. What it did require was pot loads of money.