Ring of Fire III

by Eric Flint

  “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 muc
h. 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.

  Farrell nodded and looked back at the letter. With the success of the Monster, orders had poured in to M&S Aviation. Unfortunately, planes had not poured out. The issue for M&S was the same as the issue for all the other aircraft manufacturers: engines or at least affordable engines. The tiny little wedge in the door that leads to the industrial revolution was producing goods, but not enough to go around. There weren’t enough factory-made engines, not for airplanes and not for anything else either.

  The Gustavs under government contract had first priority, especially in terms of up-time engines. The new down-time-built radial engines were just beginning to appear and were pretty darned expensive being partly handmade themselves. M&S was second in line, after the government, for those because of its involvement in their development. But that didn’t mean that they got all the engines that the government didn’t want. Radials were, in theory, being built by two companies in the USE, which were in turn getting several of their parts from other companies. Swartz Aviation was where M&S was getting their radials. The company had produced just eight engines so far. Four of the eight had gone to the air force; the other four had put the J3 into the air. Farrell didn’t really trust them. They were prone to breakdowns, which was not a good thing in an aircraft engine. The J4 had had its design tweaked to suit the new radials after M&S’s experience with the J3. So, once they got another set of four engines, they had the airframe ready for them.

  “What’s DKL saying?” Merton asked.

  “More delays.” DKL Power Systems had followed closely in Swartz Aviation’s footsteps and had just finished its test engine. They insisted that they had most of the parts for the next half-dozen. But there were delays as people constantly underestimated the stresses that internal combustion put on engines. DKL had gone with a heavier nine-cylinder design that was supposed to deliver a bit over two hundred horsepower. Not that it mattered to M&S, because when Farrell had approached them he was informed that it would be six months at least before DKL Power Systems could start on new orders. Farrell didn’t know which companies were ordering the new engines, but aside from the Kitts, the Kellys and the USE Air Force, there were three other aircraft manufacturers still trading on the Grantville exchange: one in Essen, one outside of Magdeburg and one in Brandenburg of all places. And that didn’t count the privately-held companies or the government-backed programs in nations all over Europe. There had been a lot more right after the Belle flew, but most of them had folded since, finding the making of airplanes beyond their capability and all too often finding it out the hard way.

  “What about Lufen?” Merton asked.

  “No, absolutely not. I am not putting a jet engine near a composite wing. Even if they ever do get it to work without burning up.” Lufen Jet Works was trying to build a jet engine using ceramics to handle the heat. They were using a small, low-horsepower four-cylinder engine to run fan compressors and force air into a combustion chamber. The jets would—if it ever worked—deliver thrust only, but—again, if it worked—it would let a twenty-five-horsepower engine produce thrust equivalent to around two hundred horsepower, because all the twenty-five-horsepower engine would actually be doing was providing air to the jet. From what Farrell had heard, it would be an amazing fuel hog, but would be able to use just about any liquid fuel in the main combustion chamber. There were quite a few groups like that, trying different things to see what would work. The combination of the information in the State Library and lots of bright people doing lots of different experiments was producing some weird results and an incredible number of expensive and sometimes fatal failures.

  In any case, with the amount of work they had to do and the number of mostly finished aircraft components that were sitting waiting for engines and final assembly meant that M&S had simply run out of room. They had needed a new shop for months and since it looked like RDA was planning to go its own way, M&S was in final negotiations for a piece of land near Magdeburg. Georg was up there now looking over the shop. He was going to run the Magdeburg plant so that Farrell could stay in Grantville. Now this. The king in the Low Countries was offering to buy controlling interest in M&S Aviation for a fairly tidy sum—with the agreement that they move their main manufacturing facility to Brussels.

  “So after stealing our designs didn’t work, they want to buy us out?”

  Merton just shrugged again.

  Farrell wasn’t surprised, really. Anyone that had something that might fly had three copycats by the end of the week and M&S had the Mercury, only a couple of which had been built and one had suffered a fatal crash. And the Saturn, one of which had been built and was flying. And finally the Jupiter, three in actual operation and another when they got the engines from Swartz Aviation. Of course, they had copycats. Hell, they probably had copycats in every major country in Europe, almost all of which were waiting on engines and most of which would crash within minutes of their first takeoff if they ever got them. “Well, what do you think? You own twenty-five thousand shares of the company.”

  “Get real, Dad. M and S Aviation is your deal. The shares you gave us when you and Georg started it...it was nice and all, but it’s your baby.”

  * * *

  Georg stared at the ribbons and seal. “King Fernando wants to buy us now, yes?”

  “So I’m told,” Magdalena said. “And this whole thing of landing in Grantville, then taking the train to Magdeburg is just silly. I’m going to mention that when I get back. Again.” Once you were a flyer, trains were just plain slow.

  “I only just got this operation up and moving, Maggie.”

  “You’d like Brussels,” Magdalena coaxed. The more she thought about marrying Georg, the more she wanted to. Besides, the apartment in Brussels was just plain lonesome.

  “Farrell doesn’t want to leave Grantville.”

  “Have you asked?”

  * * *

  Nearly every up-time face in Cora’s new outdoor eating area turned away from Mary. Which just really ticked her off.

  “Well, the king is offering top dollar,” she said loudly. “But that’s not the reason we’re considering it. We’re mostly considering it because this place is a backwoods dive where everybody knows your business and isn’t afraid to start bossing you around. For your own good, of course.”

  After weeks and weeks of remarks, Mary was at the end of her patience. She and Farrell had decided to vote against the sale. Right up to the moment she’d read an article in the Grantville Times that out-and-out a
ccused Farrell and Georg of treason.

  Flo Richards chuckled. “You go, girl.”

  “Easy for you to say, Flo. They’re not accusing you of treason—which it isn’t!”

  The loudness of the last three words made Flo flinch. “I know that. And you never know. J. D. and I may go somewhere. You can’t really raise that many sheep in these dratted hills. And I had a lot of fun on the trip to Amsterdam, you know.”

  “I’m stifled,” Mary said. “This town is stifling. And it’s getting worse, with all this publicity.”

  “It’ll blow over. Nobody was fool enough to take up that bill and try to get it passed. Besides, you wouldn’t have had to sell the company, anyway, if it did pass. Just dissolve it, then move as a private person.” Flo snorted. “I can’t believe some of those idiot politicians.”

  Cora bustled up with their coffee, including one for herself. “You know, Mary, I think you’re right. There are too many people who are only too willing to tell a person what they ought to do these days.” She raised her voice. “I’m thinking about selling out and moving to Bamberg myself. Get away from all these old fogies.”

  Then she winked at Mary and Flo. “See how they like that one.”

  * * *

  “What’s the matter, Mary?” Farrell had been wondering that for weeks. Mary had gotten quieter and quieter since her mother’s death from flu in January.

  “Grantville’s just not the same anymore.” Mary sighed. “Mom’s gone. So many people have moved away. Judy and John are talking about moving down to Bamberg now that the capitol is there. Merton’s moved to Brussels and we only see him twice a month or so. I guess I’m just...I don’t know...stale. Just tired and stale and I’d like a change.”

  Farrell kind of felt that there had been plenty of change in the last five years, but in another way he did understand. It was sort of like empty nest syndrome, only different. He and Mary weren’t exactly retirement age—and God knew there wasn’t any kind of retirement system—but they’d often talked about what they’d do once they did retire. Most of that talk had been about getting out of Grantville, going someplace warm in the winter and cooler in the summer. Traveling in Europe, Canada and Mexico.