Ring of Fire III

Royal Dutch Airlines

There is a King in the Low Countries

“His Majesty, Fernando I, King in the Low Countries wants us to come and visit,” Herr van Bradt said. He hid a snicker as best he could. Really, the clothing women were wearing these days!

“What?” Magdalena van de Passe asked, ignoring the snicker. She knew what it was about, since she’d heard it all before. She was wearing a pair of the new bloomers, long puffy pants that tightened up again at the ankles. Also a leather flight jacket and leather flight helmet with goggles pushed up on her head. It wasn’t a fashion statement. At least not an intentional one. The bloomers were warmer than the more common split skirt; the leather flight jacket was fur-lined and warm and the flight helmet kept her ears warm. None of that would be particularly necessary in one of the Jupiters, but the Neptune was another matter. The Neptune was a minimalist approach to carrying cargo, a two engine monoplane, with a seventy-foot wingspan. Like the Jupiters, they had a low air speed and a very good power-to-weight ratio. But they didn’t carry passengers. The Neptune carried packages; it had no amenities that could be avoided. Anything to save weight and it got darn cold in them, two miles up, in the winter in Germany.

“His Majesty wants us to visit. And he wants us to come in one of the Jupiters.”

“We can’t. The schedule is messed up as it is.”

“I know, but His Majesty insists and Frederik Hendrick added a note as well.” Van Bradt paused. “Magdalena, most of my investments are there. I can’t afford to have the two most powerful men in the Netherlands angry at me. The new engines are going to be ready in a month. Your young man already has the Jupiter Two and two Jupiter Threes sitting there waiting for them. This is politics. The schedule is just going to have to get a bit more out of whack.”

Magdalena argued a bit more, but the decision was out of her hands. The Monster took off from Grantville International Airport at dawn three days later. On board were Magdalena van de Passe, Vrijheer Abros Thys van Bradt and three other major stockholders in TransEuropean Airlines.

Magdalena looked over at the copilot of the week. Most flights had one experienced pilot and one less experienced pilot. The idea was that by the time the new planes were ready they would have pilots for them. “You want to take a sighting, Karl?” They had just reached their cruising altitude so it was practice time.

“Sure.” Karl bent over the periscopelike device and started fiddling with knobs as Magdalena held the plane straight and level. The knobs adjusted a couple of mirrors to align two images collected from almost ten feet apart on the front belly of the plane. When he got the best view, he looked at the dial on the knob and read off a number, which Magdalena wrote down. Some calculations with a slide rule would give them their height above ground. Those calculations would be done in a minute or so, after Karl took some more observations. He flipped a handle and looked in to the eyepiece again. This time he was looking for a landmark out in front of the plane. Anything recognizable would do; a tree, a barn, a really big rock. In this case he found a barn and called out “mark” as he clicked on a stop watch. He flipped another lever so that he was now looking straight down instead down and ahead at a forty-five degree angle, and waited for the landmark to reappear. How long it took for the landmark to show up again and how much it had shifted to the left or right would tell them, with more calculations, their true ground speed and how much drift they were experiencing from crosswinds.

“Mark!” Karl clicked the stopwatch again, then got out the special purpose slide rule. Magdalena looked over his shoulder as he did the calculations.

“First check at 8:04 AM.” Magdalena said. “What do you get for H over G? Remember, if we miss a major check point, you’re the one that’s going to have to get out and ask directions.”

Karl looked at her like she was crazy.

“We land first,” Magdalena reassured him. “But it’s happened more than once. In fact, it’s procedure if probable location permits and you’re more than half an hour past a projected major check point without finding it. So what do you get for H over G.”

After another minute with the slide rule, he gave her the answer.

“Okay. The angle is forty-five degrees so the leg that’s on the ground is the same length assuming that the ground is flat as a pancake which it never is. So, what’s our ground speed and drift?”

Magdalena watched as he set the slide rule, moved the slider, and got the numbers.

“Indicated airspeed is sixty-nine and compass heading is two eight three. So calculate the wind speed and direction, and give me our true heading.” After he’d done that she continued, “Now we know what our speed and direction were a few minutes ago. We can guess that it’s still close to that and make a guess about where we would end up if we continued on this course and the wind didn’t change.” Where they would have ended up was about seventy-five miles south of Kassel in just under ninety minutes. Since they would rather miss Kassel to the north they adjusted their course just a touch, then set about looking not so much for individual landmarks as for the general lay of the land. Patterns that would be recognizable from this altitude. Not a pond but a pond that was just to the right of a village with another village ahead of it. And a mountain peak in the background. They marked features on the map and made notes then made another set of sightings.

Aside from the sightings that they did every ten minutes or so, they took a bearing at Kassel. Which was done by looking out the window and finding Kassel, then comparing where it actually was to where they thought it should be. The sightings taken on random landmarks could give them a pretty good estimate of how fast they were going and in what direction, but couldn’t tell them where they were. Not without better maps. They took another bearing at Dortmund, a third at Arnhem and landed near Amsterdam not quite five hours after takeoff. They had been a bit off on their bearings at Dortmund and Arnhem, and had had a bit of a headwind for part of the flight.

“Now this is the way a princess should be rescued!” Maria Anna, the queen in the Low Countries, said with an arch look at her husband.

His Majesty didn’t seem overly concerned with the reproach. “But where would be the excitement in that?” He grinned, looking like a naughty schoolboy. “Besides, there’s altogether too much room. There’s an aisle between the seats.”

Magdalena looked back and forth between the king and his now blushing bride, and decided that this was not a conversation she wanted to get involved in. Luckily, His Majesty had other things on his mind. He turned to Magdalena. “It has a range of over three hundred miles?

“Yes, Your Majesty. More still if it’s lightly loaded and carrying extra fuel.”

“And you’ve contracted for more of them.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. We’ve committed to buying ten more as soon as they are ready. They won’t be exactly the same as these. We’ve been providing feedback on the performance and some problems have come up. We have a Jupiter Two and two Jupiter Threes waiting for engines now. TEA also owns a Neptune, which would be a Jupiter except that we could only get two matching engines. It’s good enough for cargo but not suitable for passengers. Also, it doesn’t have the range of a Jupiter.”

“Excellent!” King Fernando said.

They continued to discuss the ins and outs of the airline business, as well as the technology of the of the Jupiter-class passenger plane for a while. Then the king and queen took their leave. “It seems a very sound enterprise,” King Fernando said in parting. “But I don’t think the name is quite suitable. We’ll call it Royal Dutch Airlines, I think.”

It took Magdalena a few minutes to figure out the true import of the king’s parting comment. Which was probably a good thing because it wouldn’t have been a good idea to go off on King Fernando. Instead, as soon as she could find him, she went off on Herr van Bradt.

“Have you lost your mind?” were the first words out of Magdalena’s mouth when she found Herr van Bradt. “What is this business about renaming TEA Royal Dutch Airlines?”

“His Majesty wants an airline,” Herr van Bradt said. “And the last time I looked my mind was right where it was supposed to be.”

Perhaps going off on her boss and family patron hadn’t been the best idea she ever had either. “But we’re a USE corporation registered in the State of Thuringia-Franconia.” Magdalena was trying to sound reasonable but even she could tell she wasn’t doing a great job of it. “Look, Herr van Bradt. We’ve sweated blood getting TEA going. Now it’s paying off, why should we move it to the Netherlands and change the name?”

“More than that His Majesty wants to buy the airline? He doesn’t insist on owning every share, but he does insist on controlling interest.”

“So why doesn’t he start his own?” Maggie asked. “Why not pick on the Kitts? They’re an airline and an aircraft manufacturer all in one. At least according to Vanessa Holcomb.” She paused. There might be a way out of this. “I think aircraft may be one of the few technologies that the USE is unwilling to share. Would it even be legal for us to sell the airline to the Netherlands? After all, they’re neutral and it wasn’t all that long ago that they were the enemy. Can we sell airplanes to the Netherlands?”

Herr van Bradt grinned at her, but shook his head. “Nice try, Magdalena. But it won’t work for a couple of reasons. First, His Majesty has already talked it over with Prime Minister Stearns and Emperor Gustav. Second, the reason they agreed is that Muscovy already has a dirigible and is working on a bigger one. France is working on aircraft in a little town south of Paris and Austria-Hungary stole one-well, a lot of the parts to one anyway. And your Herr O’Connor went with them and knows how the Monster was built.”

“He was never my Herr O’Connor. I didn’t much like him even when he was working for Georg and Farrell. And after he ran off we found that a bunch of our information on resins and putties, and on composites in general, had gone missing. If Georg or Farrell ever get to Vienna, Neil O’Connor is liable to get his lights punched out.”

“As you’ve just pointed out, the cat, as they say, is already mostly out of the bag. There was, in fact, very little for the United States of Europe to gain by trying to tie a knot in the poor kitty’s tail. On the other hand, there was a fair amount for them to gain in terms of trust and good relations by letting King Fernando have an airline. Especially in letting him have one before his brother got one on his own. The king of Spain and his advisors aren’t happy with the king in the Low Countries and they are going to be even less happy with him when he one ups them by having a working airline before Spain has its first flight.” Herr van Bradt shrugged. “His Majesty is aware of that, of course, but he really wants an air force. And this is the Netherlands. Our navy is merchant ships for the most part. It makes sense that the Netherlands Air Force should be an airline first. He wants to put off the final break with Spain as long as he can. But he is not willing to weaken the Netherlands to do it.”

“You mean we’re not just going to be a Netherlands airline but His Majesty’s air force? These aren’t combat planes. I’d rather do aerobatics in a 747 than in a Jupiter and I’ve never flown a 747 outside one of those computer simulations.” The whole idea of trying to do a loop-the-loop in a Monster gave her the willies.

“The Netherlands aren’t at war, Magdalena. Even if they were, His Majesty knows that the Monster isn’t designed for combat. But neither was the DC3 and it was considered one of the most valuable planes in World War II.”

“You’ve been talking to Georg, haven’t you?” Magdalena sighed. She knew chapter and verse on the magical, mystical DC3. The way Georg talked about it, she sometimes imagined it in a miniskirt and high heels with really big engines falling half out of its blouse. Of course, other times, when she imagined flying it…Well, that was a different story.

“Yes, I have. And confirmed it with Hal Smith. I’d order a dozen of them if I could. The point is: even in war, there are other things a plane can do than bombing or strafing runs on enemy positions. And in peace, which we all hope for, the airline becomes both a money-maker and a status symbol for the Netherlands. That’s what His Majesty wants and he is willing to pay for it.”

Magdalena thought a minute. “Georg isn’t going to like this. Not at all.”

“Fat lot of good it’s going to do him,” Georg Markgraf muttered. “The aircraft are built here.”

“Here is all of three hundred miles from Amsterdam, Georg,” Magdalena said. “Granted, that trip used to take weeks. But you know we can do it in five or six hours.”

“I didn’t want a long-distance marriage.”

Magdalena was stunned. While Georg had been, well, hanging around her a lot, he’d never mentioned marriage. Then she began to be a bit angry. Mostly at his assumption that she would agree to marriage. Which she wasn’t at all sure about. She liked the life of a pilot, being free to go where she willed-or rather, where the schedule allowed.

“Oh?” Magdalena sniffed. “I wasn’t aware that you’d engaged yourself, Georg? Who is it? One of the investors’ daughters?”

“No! I thought you and I…” His voice trailed off.

“Nice of you to mention it to me.” Magdalena threw him a look, then flounced away.

Farrell Smith sighed. “Georg, I’ve never met anybody who had such a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease. Not to mention that was just romantic as all get out…not.”

Mary, his wife, shook her head. “Panic, dear, panic. I’ve got the strangest memory of somebody at this table”-she gave him a significant look-“getting rather tongue-tied, back in the day.”

“Georg would be better off if he did get tongue-tied,” Farrell pointed out. “Instead, he just blurts stuff out, usually stuff that’s going to get him in hot water.”

“I don’t want Magdalena to move back to Amsterdam,” Georg said. “I’ve just been waiting for the right moment to ask her to marry me. This wasn’t the right moment.”

“I’ll say,” Farrell said.

“You’re being awful hard on him, Dad,” Merton said. “Getting a girl is pretty hard when you’re a nerd.” Then he laughed. “Don’t worry about it, Georg. Maggie’s a nerd, too. She’ll come around.”

Farrell held his peace. Barely. He positively hated it when Merton said nerd. Merton had dropped out of high school, not exactly the best endorsement of a teacher. Farrell hadn’t handled it well and Merton had moved out. Then he had that accident after the Ring of Fire and lost both legs above the knee. Merton had always been more of a physical kid than a mental one. The loss of his legs had been especially hard on him, and the Ring of Fire had had made it harder still, because it had turned back the clock in the field of prosthetics. It had never occurred to Farrell before Merton’s accident that the switch from “disabled” to “physically-challenged” had been anything but political correctness. The difference between a peg leg and an up-time prosthetic limb was the difference between a disability and a challenge. At least in Merton’s case. It was, for all practical purposes, impossible to walk on a couple of peg legs that started above the knee. That was not true with up-time prosthetics.

Farrell didn’t peek under the table to see the fiberglass and resin prosthetics that his son now wore. But the knowledge that they were there and Georg had been instrumental in putting them there made it really hard for him to hold his tongue.

Georg snorted at Merton. “What would you recommend, O Great He-man?”

“Flowers, oh Nerdly Genius.” Merton said, “Flowers and chocolates with a note telling her you’re a jerk. The great truth of the universe is all men are jerks. The problem with nerds is they don’t realize it.”

“And the problem with jocks,” his mother told Merton, “is you revel in it.”

“And it’s about time for me to get to my reveling,” Merton agreed, pulling his walker to the kitchen table. He used the walker to lever himself up out of the chair, then reached down and adjusted the tension on the knee springs of his artificial legs, using the walker for balance. They weren’t truly up-time artificial legs, but they were a great deal closer to what they had up-time than Europe had had before the Ring of Fire. With them and the walker, Merton wasn’t limited to a wheelchair.

Wooden legs have the problem that they are heavy. And when you lose most of your legs, you lose that muscle mass as well. Aside from the limited ability to flex at the heel and knee, the fiberglass prosthetics were lighter than wood would have been. Merton still needed buns of steel to make them work, but physical labor had never been his trouble.

“Come on, Maggie. You knew he was going to ask you as soon as he got up the nerve,” Merton said a couple of hours later. Merton was a pilot for TEA-RDA, he guessed it would be soon. It took some extra gear and the truth was that he probably wouldn’t have been allowed to fly professionally up-time. The rudder controls were foot pedals after all. But while not a pilot before the Ring of Fire, Merton did have flight time. He had gone up with friends of his grandfather and even considered it as a career. But he hadn’t liked school.

“I know that. It was his blithe assumption that I’d say yes.”

“From what I’ve seen, you’ve been going out of your way to give him that impression.” Merton gave her a look. “Were you just leading him on?”

“Okay. I would have said yes but…”

“But he failed to suffer enough?”

“No. It’s not that. But, why didn’t he ask me?”

“Dowry.”

“What?” Maggie looked up. “He wasn’t satisfied with my dowry?”

“No. The other one, the one that the guy gives.”

“He owns a big chunk of M and S Aviation!”

“Yep and you own a big chunk of TEA or at least you did. How’s that going to work out, by the way? Is His Nibs buying you out?”

“Not entirely. He wants me to have an interest to make sure I don’t jump ship. Actually, that was one of the things that a lot of the negotiations were about. TEA has two planes and a contract for eight more. But even more than the planes, TEA is the people. By switching off pilots we’ve been able to train more. We have eight pilots and twice that many maintenance people. We’ll have more by the time we have planes for them to fly. All our pilots have experience on four-engine aircraft and most of them are cross-trained as maintenance people.”

Merton nodded. He was one of those pilots; he got maybe three flights a month. And several hours stick time on each flight. And on every flight he was either training someone or being trained. While his legs limited what he could do in the way of aircraft maintenance, he spent time supervising that, too. Like most of the others, he was waiting impatiently for more planes to come off the line at M amp;S Aviation so that he could get more time in the air.

Maggie was still talking. “Herr van Bradt spent a certain amount of time explaining that to His Majesty. If the employees didn’t like the deal, Royal Dutch Airlines would end up owning two cargo planes, two mail planes and having nobody to fly them, load them, or maintain them. He’d also probably have a new airline starting up here in competition with him. When you get right down to it, an airline is mostly its people.”

“So what’s he offering?”

“A ten percent raise across the board. Plus a bonus if you’re willing to join the Dutch Royal Air Force Reserve. And he’s going to want us to train Dutch pilots.”

Merton nodded. It made sense if you looked at it from King Fernando’s point of view, but he would have to think about it. Not that they were going to let him into the USE Air Force.

Moving the airline to Amsterdam wasn’t that difficult. It was only some three hundred miles. But scheduling the move wasn’t a picnic. TEA, now renamed Royal Dutch Airlines, had schedules to meet. One of which was with Claudia de Medici in Bolzano.

Claudia lifted an eyebrow when she saw the new logo on the side of the Neptune. “Royal Dutch?”

Magdalena shrugged. “A person has to do what a person has to do.”

“And you have to move to Amsterdam. And delay what part of my cargo, pray tell?”

“None of it,” Magdalena said. “We’ve been flying the wings off both planes to get caught up. Jupiter number three is ready for test flights. Once we’ve got it on the schedule, we’ll open up a new route. The Brussels-Amsterdam-Grantville route will be a triangle, which will mean that you will be able to fly from Venice to Grantville, spend the night there, then catch a plane to Brussels, refuel there, then fly on to Amsterdam the same day. Just a day after you left Venice. Jupiter Four, when we get the engines for it, we’re going to try and keep in reserve for when one of the other three is on its semiannual tear down and for the occasional charter. But it won’t always be the Jupiter Four that is the reserve; they will rotate. The Brussels-Amsterdam-Grantville plane will reach Grantville, then fly the Grantville-Venice route while the Grantville-Venice plane is flying to Brussels. Then the reserve plane will get the Grantville-Venice route as the Brussels-Amsterdam-Grantville plane goes into reserve. All subject to change as one or another blows a cylinder or throws a rod. Which is happening a lot more than we’d like with the new engines in the testing phase. As we add more planes, we’ll add more routes and more and more of those routes will be centered on Brussels.”

“Why Brussels?”

“Mostly politics. Brussels is the capital, after all. But also, from Brussels, London, Paris and Luxemburg are all short hops. Mostly short enough that the Jupiter Threes will be able to get there and back without refueling. Not that we plan on doing that. His Majesty is on relatively good terms with everyone just at the moment, so he’s going to try to arrange for airports with fueling stations. Anyway, from Luxemburg it’s a hop to Zurich then another here to Bolzano without a stop in the USE. We considered Basel, but with the city council’s propensity for taking hostages…well, some of our passengers are fairly high profile.”

Besides, Queen Maria Anna was still a bit annoyed with Basel and moving some of the highest-value trade to a competing city was just one of the ways she was demonstrating her displeasure. Maggie completely agreed with Her Majesty. Actually, almost all their passengers were pretty high profile, not all of them politically. Some were just rich. Some were princes of the church. The cardinal protector of the USE had flown on the Monster more than once, as had a couple of the great artists and scientists of the seventeenth century. Most of their passengers would make pretty good hostages for someone. And Maggy, like the queen in the Low Countries, felt that taking hostages was the sort of hobby that should be discouraged.

“What about Magdeburg?” Claudia de Medici asked.

“Not soon.”

“Why not?”

“Again it’s mostly politics and just a little bit of economics. You know as well as I that the planes rarely fly much under their max load. We have more passengers and cargo than we can carry and would on just about any route between major cities. There are hundreds of rich people in every major city in Europe. And thousands of tons of cargo that someone can make a fortune on, if only they can get it to their partner in days instead of weeks.”

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.

Farrell nodded and looked back at the letter. With the success of the Monster, orders had poured in to M amp;S Aviation. Unfortunately, planes had not poured out. The issue for M amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 accused 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.

“Well, I think the ‘buy an RV’ idea has pretty much bitten the dust,” Farrell said. “But we could try Magdeburg. Or Bamberg, if you want to be near Judy.”

“I want something for us, babe,” Mary said. “We always talked about what we’d do for us, once all the responsibilities were taken care of. About what we’d do when we weren’t stifled anymore.”

“Well, we did get that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe we talked about.”

Mary grinned. “Indeed we did. Why don’t we do something with it? We haven’t seen London yet. We always wanted to go there. And Athens. Rome. Naples. And, well, everywhere.”

“Ah…”

“Yes, dear. I know. We hadn’t planned on it being the year 1636. But we do have planes now. It’s just a matter of getting enough of them. Before you know it, there will be tourist traps all along the Med, just like back up-time.”

Her husband gave her the “you’re being silly” look. Mary knew perfectly well that “before you know it” in this case meant fifteen or twenty years.

“Well, maybe not tourist traps like we had up-time. On the other hand if you’re one of the owners of Boeing… Which we are-” That look again. “-close enough. Magdeburg is a start, at any rate. We ought to be able to take a hop to Brussels and visit Merton. We’re stockholders, after all. I can’t see how RDA won’t add a route to Magdeburg from Brussels, sooner or later. It’s Gustav’s headquarters. The pilots have to come pick up the planes, and dropping them off in Grantville to take the train is, well, silly, seems to me. And I bet they’ll put Bamberg on a route, sometime. All those government functions, you know.”

“We can get tickets if we want them,” Farrell conceded. “Even do a charter if they don’t open a route soon enough to suit us.”

“Georg is going to run the Brussels plant. King Fernando made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

“Then it’s doubly important for you to visit Brussels often. You know how Georg is. He’ll be trying to handle the paperwork while covered in fiberglass.”