Ron’s Uncle Bob was shaking his head, indicating he didn’t know either. They had just gotten to Vienna and hadn’t even started Ron’s 240Z. Well, Emperor Ferdinand’s 240Z now. And Janos Drugeth’s uncle, Pal Nadasdy, wanted them to tell him how to get the oil in the Matzen field out of the ground.
“Look, oil drilling is a pretty specialized business,” Sonny said. “And there hasn’t been much along those lines in Grantville since the twenties. Uh. . the nineteen twenties, I mean. There are a couple of older folks that were kids way back then and a few old books tucked away. But I’m pretty sure there is not a single petroleum geologist in Grantville and that means in the world. The wildcatters, ah, the people who are doing the drilling, are mostly up at the oil fields near Wietze.
“Ron here can get the car up and running, and I can build you a track for it. For that matter, with the help of your local smiths and Bob, I can build you a steam boiler and between us we can build you some steam engines and locomotives. I can survey rail lines for you. But none of us know jack about drilling an oil well. And you’re probably going to need to drill a bunch of them. We’ll ask our families if they know anything about it, but I doubt they do. Failing that, we can probably get a geology cheat sheet to at least give you guys a notion of what to look for.”
Count Nadasdy nodded almost as if he had expected the answer. “Please send your letters to get the. . geology cheat sheet, was it? In the meantime, it has been proposed that a wooden rail railroad could be built between here and Teschen. Would that be a good idea?”
“Yep. Prince Karl mentioned something about that before we left. Well, more than mentioned. He sent along a bunch of maps. So he got permission, did he? But I don’t remember anything about Teschen. Where is Teschen?”
“It’s in Silesia on the Oder River. The Poles call it Cieszyn. The notion, as it has been proposed, was to form a rail link between the Danube and the Oder and hence between the Baltic and the Black Sea.”
“Yep. That’s the place. I think he called it Cieszyn. Prague would be closer, though,” Sonny said. Not that he really expected Nadasdy to support a railroad from Emperor Ferdinand’s capital to King Al’s. But just to get the reaction.
Count Nadasdy looked like he had just gotten a good whiff of skunk. “Perhaps at some time in the future. For the moment, however, it would not be feasible.”
Sonny nodded. “But Teschen is?”
“Yes. It turns out that Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein, despite his other faults, is prepared to invest a considerable amount in its construction.”
“Well, he’d have the money for it.”
* * *
The next day, while Ron was getting ready to start the 240Z, Hayley Fortney went with her mother and little brother to the University of Vienna. They were looking for a tutor, mostly for Brandon, but partly for Hayley. It was a warm summer day with white puffy clouds dotting a blue sky and none of it made any impression on Hayley. She still wasn’t happy about ending up in Vienna. She had friends in Grantville and work that interested her. She was the closest thing to a real techie that the Barbies had. She was a steam head and was becoming a tube geek. In Grantville, the new down-time in Grantville, that was perfectly acceptable for a young lady.
In Vienna. . She had a dark suspicion that wouldn’t be true. The fact that the city had the oldest university in the German-speaking world, established in 1365, didn’t impress her at all. There was no engineering school anywhere in Vienna, including at the university. The closest thing to it was the college of natural philosophy at the University of Vienna.
She was going to miss her last year at Grantville High and have to make do with correspondence courses and a down-time tutor. It was worse for Brandon. He was doomed to the tutor and correspondence courses for as long as their parents decided to stay here.
Hayley’s mother was interviewing tutors. Her mother, not her, in spite of the fact that Hayley was paying, because Hayley was more than a little tired of being the rich up-timer member of the Barbie Consortium. She was ready to be a teenager again. Sure, the teenage daughter of wealthy parents, but not the wheeler-dealer that she had been seen as in Grantville. At the same time, she was finding authority a hard habit to break. She kept wanting to interrupt her mother.
She was following along, listening to her mom talk about the history and beauty of Vienna when Ron Sanderlin started the 240Z. There were three young men and a gaggle of little boys hanging around the track. And Hayley couldn’t help but overhear what they were saying.
“It’s evil spirits that are making the noise.”
“Nay. It’s the herd of horses is doing it.”
“Horses? It can’t be. You can’t see no horses.”
“They have a whole bunch of them, though. Hidden under a magical hood. Makes them invisible, it does.”
“So it’s evil spirits, after all. But they use them to hide the horses.”
Hayley didn’t know what to say. Vienna was supposed to be civilized, at least by down-time standards. People ought to know better than that. It made her wish she had convinced her parents she should stay in Grantville like Nat. It made her want to correct the boys, explain that horsepower was just a measurement. That there was no magic involved.
Then she heard the giggle. Then all the boys were laughing and Hayley felt like an idiot when she noticed the smaller boys, maybe Brandon’s age. It wasn’t down-timer ignorance but down-timers playing at ignorance in order to entertain little boys. Hayley hadn’t been in Vienna long enough to recognize that the three young men she saw were all wearing the seventeenth-century Vienna equivalent of “college casual.” As it turned out, there were three students from the college of natural philosophy, teasing younger brothers and cousins, while watching the car being put through its paces.
University of Vienna
At the university, Hayley and her mother met with Professor Lorenz, who became very cooperative as soon as he saw the letter from Emperor Ferdinand. Not surprising. He was the king, after all.
Not that Professor Lorenz was particularly uncooperative before that. It was just that before the note he was more interested in picking their brains than helping them find a tutor. The little note from Emperor Ferdinand had given them a good example of their status, both good and bad. Emperor Ferdinand had talked past them the way a German noble would talk past a merchant or a servant. It wasn’t, Hayley thought, intentional cruelty or arrogance. Emperor Ferdinand had simply never learned to talk to people of their rank as people. He asked questions of the air and was interested in the cars and how they worked, and clearly intended that his auto mechanics would have everything they needed to do their jobs well and be happy in their work. But it was almost as though they were extra equipment, accessories to the cars. When Hayley’s father had pointed out that he was going to need a tutor for his daughter and son to continue their education, the king simply had one of the clerks that followed him around make a note of it, as though it were five thousand pounds of gravel for the track or ventilation ducts for the shop. That was the bad, and in all honesty, Hayley wasn’t at all sure how much of that was simply because he was new at the job of king. The good was that by that afternoon they had a note over his seal, instructing the university to see to their needs, i.e. give them whatever they wanted. Emperor Ferdinand wasn’t uncaring, just busy and dealing with the changes since his father’s death.
“Hm,” Dr. Lorenz mused, “Professor Himmler is available but unlikely to be willing to instruct young ladies. Besides he is convinced that Copernicus was a dangerous radical.”