The Flying Warlord

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

Part of my deal with Count Lambert was that I would spend two days a month looking over the projects we had going at Okoitz, so I couldn't go back to Three Walls immediately. I checked the windmills and went down the coal mine. I looked over the progress made on Count Lambert's new castle, which was now more than half built, and spent more time than was necessary in the cloth factory, mostly because all the girls working there wanted to talk to me about something or another. Mostly, they were just trying to get me interested in themselves, and since I was still pretty seriously involved with Cilicia, they were out of luck. None the less, it's fun being pursued by scantily clad young ladies, even when you don't intend being caught, so I ended up spending half of both days there. Cilicia spent her time teaching dancing to the ladies of the town, charging all the traffic could bear.

Then it was back to Three Walls, where I got a half dozen research teams going on the new projects. My usual approach to research was to set up a team of two young men, apprentices, generally, along with one older craftsman. The rule was that they had to try out everybody's ideas, and the older man was not allowed to squelch the dumb ideas that the kids came up with. I reviewed the progress with each team every week or two and threw in my own thoughts, and usually something workable resulted. On really important things, I'd set up two competing teams and let them work independently. The reward for all this, besides their pay, was in the form of cash bonuses if they were successful and the fact that if the new product went into production, the men on the research team were the obvious people to manage the new factory, so promotions were in order.

The railroads and the steamboats were just a matter of design and build, with little real research required at first. Sir Piotr's first survey job was for the railroad track.

Yashoo was sent with a crew to the new lands, which we called East Gate, to build a boat-assembly building and the foundry got busy making cast-iron railroad track. The construction crews were scheduled to go through the Warrior's school in the winter, when there wasn't much else for them to do anyhow.

We didn't have the machinery necessary to roll steel track, and with the comparatively light loads that our track would be handling, malleable cast iron was good enough. Cast iron also had the advantage of being not worth stealing. A blacksmith couldn't make anything out of it. If he tried heating it and beating on it with a hammer, it just crumbled. This fact, coupled with Anna's outstanding ability to sniff out thieves, reduced our theft problem to almost zero.

I was almost tempted to try to build a telegraph again, but not quite. There was no way that I could make copper not worth stealing, and the Mongols would probably be smart enough to cut our lines once the invasion started, so its military advantage would be nil.

Our roiling stock consisted of small flatcars big enough to carry a single container, with a load limit of ten tons. A tenth the size of modem cars, they were huge by the standards of the thirteenth century. They would all be horse or mule drawn, since our line would be only thirty miles long. There wasn't any need for greater speed and the mules already existed. Locomotives were for the future.

Sketching up the boats and the railroad took less than a week, since I had a staff of draftsmen (and draftswomen) now. The aircraft engine was something else.

My first thought had been to make an air-cooled single cylinder two-cycle engine, the sort that is used on lawnmowers, but I got to worrying about balancing it. Static balancing would be no great problem, but dynamic balancing without any sort of test equipment seemed impossible. The thought of vibrations tearing one of our frail wood-and-canvas planes to shreds in midair bothered me.

I went to a two-opposed cylinder design, where both pistons went out at the same time. If every part was identical to its opposite part, it all should balance perfectly. I hoped.

Lubrication? All we had was various animal fats and imported olive oil. I designed a pressurized lube system, knowing that it would be contaminated with the wood alcohol I hoped to use. After that, we would just have to try different mixtures and bum out engines until we found something that worked reasonably well.

Carburetion? All I could do was to sketch up what I think I saw in a textbook fifteen years ago and hope.

Ignition? I put one research team to work on a magneto system and another on the battery-and-coil type and again I hoped.

Then there were the mechanical parts. The engine had to be as light as possible, which meant that I needed the best possible strength-to-weight ratio. Sad to say, our best cast steel was weaker than ordinary cast bronze. Bronze was expensive, since it was made, in part, of tin that had to be imported from England, but hang the expense. I'd get it out of Count Lambert somehow. Everything on that engine was bronze except for the bearings (another research group), the cylinder liners, and the piston rings. These last two were cast iron, just like on many modem engines.

As more and more problems were encountered, more research teams were set up. Did we have a ceramic that had a coefficient of expansion similar to some metal we already had, so we could make a spark plug that didn't shatter when the engine heated up? Get the machinists to make spark plug jackets out of as many metals as they had , and for each type, have the potters mold in all their different types of clays and try to fire them. Could we insulate wires with some sort of varnish? Put a team of alchemists on it!

But many of the problems had to be solved sequentially, rather than in parallel. We couldn't test bearing materials without a working engine, nor could we work on lubricants or carburetion or propellers. The first big snag was ignition, and the problem there was the lack of a decent electrical insulator for the spark coil. The damn things kept shorting out.

While this was going on, there were innumerable problems with the factories, since the entire upper management, everybody above the foreman level, was out playing soldier. And besides Three Walls, I still had to keep tabs on all the other installations, which were also running without their best men and women.

Then there was the problem of the barony that I had just been given. It was previously owned by my enemies, the Jaraslavs. These men had hated everything about me and as a result, they had refused to allow any of my innovations on their lands. Because of this, the barony was the most backward in the duchy. The spring crops were already planted when I got the place, so not much could be done in that direction until next year, but there were a lot of other things that needed doing.

The school system had to be extended into it. That meant more work for Father Thomas, who ran the schools, but not much for me. Along with the schools went our distribution system and the mails. Boris's job. Teaching the farmers about the new crops and machines? I managed to "borrow" two dozen of Count Lambert's more mature peasants, men with grown sons who would just as soon take over the family farm. I made these men my bailiffs and assigned farmland to them scattered over the barony, along with a complete set of the newest farm equipment, with the understanding that they had to teach their new neighbors about the new stuff.

Understand that none of these were trivial jobs. That barony was big! There were four thousand three hundred peasant families living on it. No wonder Baron Stefan had been able to ride around with solid gold trim on his armor!

As to the fifty-odd knights and their squires that were sworn to Baron Stefan, I pointed out to them that their previous liege lord had been killed in a fair fight when he was fully armed and on horseback. And that this deed had been done by scrawny and naked little Piotr, one of my students at the Warrior's school. If they wanted to swear to me, they had to go to the school, too. And there I was a school for their wives as well.

Those who had manors still kept them, but it was many years before they could do more than occasionally visit. They were in the army now!

All told, it was a rough summer and fall.

In the middle of this, my alchemist, a heretical Moslem named Zoltan Varanian, came to me with a vast grin on his face. He wanted to show me something in the valley I had set aside for the use of his people. He took me to a cave in the hills, which had centuries of bat droppings on the floor.

"You see?" he said. "We will no longer have to haul shit up here to make into your gunpowder, my lord! On this very floor is sufficient to make nine hundred tons of gunpowder! I have calculated it!"

This was extremely good news. Getting enough manure to meet the gunpowder quotas was a problem, and the peasants complained that we were taking the only thing they had to fertilize their fields. Furthermore, the manufacturing process for gunpowder was one of our major secrets, as were the ingredients that went into it. Having an internal supply of saltpeter eliminated one possible security leak. On top of that, why couldn't bat droppings be used as fertilizer? There were a lot of bat caves around.

We still had a problem with the sulfur needed, and were importing it from Hungary in the form of cinnabar, mercuric sulfide. We were just storing the mercury, except for a little that was used in thermometers, but it would find a use someday.

The annoying thing was that Poland has vast deposits of sulfur, but they are so far down that we couldn't get to them without some sophisticated drilling equipment that we hadn't had time to develop. Many of the ores we were mining were sulfides, and in roasting them, we were able to recover the sulfur dioxide and convert it to usable sulfuric acid. But taking sulfuric acid back to sulfur is harder than getting toothpaste back into the tube! As Zoltan put it, "Can the child be put back into the mother?" For the foreseeable future, we were stuck with imported sulfur.

I gave Zoltan my hearty congratulations, and two dozen huge bolts of Count Lambert's cloth as a bonus.

By fall, the team working on the zipper was successful, since all they had to do was duplicate the zipper on my sleeping bag, and this mollified Count Lambert somewhat, but the boys at Eagle Nest were disappointed with me. They had done their part and I had failed to do mine. I finally invited the entire senior class to Three Walls so that they could see the problems we were having with the aircraft engine and try their hands at solving some of them.

And the little bastards did!

A fourteen-year-old kid came up with an incredibly simple and efficient ignition system. Our cigarette lighters made a spark, didn't they? They worked on the principle of hitting a quartz crystal, didn't they?

So he made a spark plug with a hefty quartz crystal inside of it, which was struck by a little hammer connected by a linkage to the crankshaft. It didn't need insulation for the wires because there weren't any wires!

So we named the system after him, calling it the Skrzynecki ignition, and threw a party in his honor. What troubled me about it was the fact that I should have thought of that one myself. After all, I was the one who had designed our lighters in the first place. I just had to put it down to a mental blind spot.

It took a few months to beat down the other problems, but by Christmas we had an engine that could run for six hours without an overhaul and that was good enough for starters.

By spring they had six powered aircraft flying. It is astounding what a bunch of motivated kids can come up with!

Of course, the same electrical problems that plagued the engine also troubled the radio. To make a spark-gap transmitter, you have to have a spark. So I used a variation on the Skrzynecki ignition to power the transmitter. To transmit, somebody had to turn the crank so that a dozen little wooden hammers beat on a big quartz crystal, but that was no big problem.

Waxed paper and gold foil (the only really thin metal available) made a usable capacitor, a large, carefully made air core coil of bare wire served for a choke, and a long bare copper wire served as an antenna.

The receiver had a similar antenna connected with an identical coil and capacitor. This in turn went to a coherer, which was little more than a glass tube with iron filings in it. If a signal was picked up, the iron filings slightly welded themselves together and the resistance through them went way down. This let a low voltage current go through a relay which went "click" and tapped the coherer, shaking loose the iron filings to wait for another signal. It was a year and a half getting a pair of transceivers working that could send and receive over two dozen miles, and they weren't very dependable, requiring constant fiddling on the part of the operators, but they were good enough. We went into production with them.

About then, I somehow found time to polish up the books I had been writing. Over the years, I had tried to write down everything I could remember about science and modem technology, and over time these scattered notes had turned themselves into about two dozen books. Or perhaps I should say pamphlets, since none of them was more than three dozen pages long, and in fact the longest of them was the poetry I had remembered.

One was called Concerning Optics. Everything I knew in twenty-nine pages. Another was Power Transmission, eighteen pages. It was frustrating! Here was everything I remembered from seventeen years of formal education, and a lot of reading besides, all in one short stack of papers! Even then, some of them wouldn't be useful here for many years, and books like Computer Design, Programming and Semiconductors were filed for future publication. But Bridges, and Canals, Locks, and Dams could aid contemporary builders, and there was no reason to withhold the information. I got the stack over to Father Ignacy and ordered six thousand copies of each, with woodcut illustrations. He was awestruck, but said he'd start having it done.

Around Christmas, Sir Piotr brought me copies of his first maps, the first accurate maps ever done of my own lands. He was an amazingly good mathematician, and after some years of tutoring on my part, he was starting to pull ahead of me. Certainly, his books on arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry were better than mine, and we published his instead of what I'd done. He himself, with the help of the accountants that used to work with him, had written a book of trig tables, and had worked out the techniques necessary for accurate mapmaking. Those got into print as well, and we paid decent royalties.

There was a compass rose on the map, so naturally I turned it so that the arrow pointed up and I could read the words. I stared at the representation of the land that I had been riding over for years and I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"Sir Piotr,- there's something very wrong here. This isn't my land."

"But of course it is, my lord. I could hardly make a mistake like surveying the wrong property."

"But ... you've got Sir Miesko's manor south of Three Walls. It's north of us!"

"Right, my lord. It's north of us."

"Then why do you have it at the bottom of the map?"

"Because I put south at the top of the map, my lord."

"You put south at the top of a map?"

"Yes, my lord. I worried a bit about that, since of course it's traditional to put east at the top--"

"East, for God's sake?"

"Of course, my lord. But I knew you'd want things done in a sensible and rational manner, so naturally south goes at the top."

"Naturally. Would you please go over your reasons for that conclusion?" I'm not sure whether it was caused by graduating from the Warrior's-School, being knighted, or marrying Krystyana, but Piotr just didn't get intimidated anymore.

"Happy to, my lord. Your prime referent has always been your clock. All of our angles are measured as though they were the time of day it is when the fat hand is at that angle. At least that was the system you taught me. The fat hand corresponds to the position of the sun when the clock is south of the viewer, and all of your clocks are always mounted on a south wall for that reason. Therefore, all of the angles shown on the map correspond to the normal clock if the map is placed up next to the clock. Since the map corresponds to the land, and the land, looking south, has the more southerly portions appearing to be higher, this just naturally puts south at the top of the map. In addition, everybody knows that the mountains are to the south of us, and the plains and the sea are to the north. The mountains are higher, so naturally they go at the top."

I had to stare at it for a while and think about it, but in the end I had to admit that his way was more consistent.

It was more consistent to read our angles clockwise rather than counterclockwise, as it is done in the modern world, so we did it that way.

In the modern world, electricity flows from negative to positive. It happened that way because Ben Franklin knew that something was flowing, but he guessed wrong about the direction. Since I was starting out fresh, I corrected Ben's error. Our electrons were positive.

The controls on the aircraft worked the opposite of those on twentieth-century planes, because the boys started out flying hang gliders. With the usual control stick, if you want to go down, you push the lever away from you, but on a hang glider, which steers by the shift in body weight, to go down you must pull on the stick to pull your body forward. So when they started making gliders with control surfaces, it was natural for them to make it so that you pulled the stick to go down. Exactly the same thing happened with turning left and right. Sensible, but the opposite of what I was used to.

And on the riverboats, the same damn thing happened. I'd installed a conventional ship's wheel, but Tadaos had insisted on reworking the steering apparatus so it would be more "natural" for him. He was used to steering with a tiller bar, where to go to the fight, you push the bar to the left. "Natural" for him was to move the top of the wheel to the left to make the boat go to the right. I had to do it his way or fire him, and just then I didn't have a replacement.

Yes, I know we were all Polish, but is that any reason why everything has to come out backward?