“I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon when I was a child and we’ve all seen the images from probes to the outer planets and, of course, the Hubble space telescope,” Dana Fortney said. “Might he be persuaded by eyewitness accounts?”
“Not even if he was the eyewitness.” Dr. Lorenz smiled. “He’s not stupid, you understand. Just incredibly stubborn. He would find a way to explain it all away. Aristotle said there were crystal spheres, so there are crystal spheres.” Dr. Lorenz looked at Hayley and Brandon. “But if what you’re after is a stern disciplinarian, he might just be prevailed upon.”
Brandon started to speak, but Hayley stepped on his foot. Let Mom handle it was the clear message.
“Tempting as that thought sometimes is,” Dana said with a grin at her kids, “I think we would all be happier with someone more open to new concepts. After all, Brandon and Hayley will both be working from correspondence courses from Grantville.” Dana Fortney left unsaid the fact that much of what the tutor would be expected to teach was going to be concepts utterly new to the seventeenth century, so he was likely as not going to be struggling along only a day or so ahead of his students.
“In that case, I think your best option would be a recent doctor of natural philosophy. He is quite good with boys and interested in the knowledge brought by the Ring of Fire.” Dr. Lorenz hesitated a moment, looking at Hayley. “He is rather young, only twenty-four. He was going to have to leave Vienna to look for work, which would have been a shame because he is working on several experiments with magnets and coils of copper wire. Continuing those experiments would have been more difficult without the facilities of the university.”
For the first time since they’d been introduced, Hayley spoke up. “Are a lot of people leaving Vienna to look for work?”
“Those who can,” Dr. Lorenz said. “Those who have someplace to go.”
Village of Simmering, Austria
Count Amadeus von Eisenberg, Baron Julian von Meklau and several of their friends rode up to the village two days after the cars had made their procession through Vienna. They found a muddy field and a barn that had been roughly converted into housing for the emperor’s car. There was a canvas tent tied to the side of the converted barn that presumably held the other up-time vehicles, the ones owned by the mechanics.
“Show us the 240,” Julian commanded.
“Can’t do it, boys,” said one of the mechanics.
“What? I am Baron Julian von Meklau.”
“Howdy.” The first word was new to Julian, who had some English, but not a great deal. Then the man continued in badly accented German. “I’m Bob Sanderlin. And the 240Z belongs to Emperor Ferdinand III, so you need his permission to drive it, or fiddle with it or even look at it. Shouldn’t be a problem, though. All you gotta do is go back to Vienna and tell the emperor to let you see it, just the way you told me. I’m sure he’ll be in a right hurry to do what you tell him to, you being a baron and all.”
Julian was suddenly quite uncomfortable. He couldn’t back down in front of his friends. At the same time, if he whipped the dog the way he deserved, Julian would certainly incur the emperor’s displeasure.
“Julian,” said Amadeus von Eisenberg, “leave off.”
Julian looked over at Amadeus, but the count wasn’t looking at him or Ron Sanderlin. Instead he was looking at a small window in the barn and at the gun barrel that protruded from it. It was an interesting gun barrel, very well made and colored a sort of dark blue gray. It was a small bore, which was easy to tell because it was pointed right at him.
Vienna, Austria
“They pointed a gun at Julian, Father,” Amadeus von Eisenberg said.
“I don’t need this, Amadeus,” Peter von Eisenberg said. “Karl Eusebius wants to put a railroad up to Teschen. And Sonny Fortney is a qualified surveyor. You and that drunken rabble you run with getting yourselves shot by the emperor’s pet up-timers is not going to make things easier. I will discuss it with the emperor, but in the meantime you and your friends stay away from the up-timers. I don’t need you in drunken brawls with peasants. Especially useful peasants. Leave them to the local peasants.”
“Yes, Father,” Amadeus said resentfully. He wasn’t happy about it but he would do it.
Village of Simmering, Austria
Hertel Faust, the new tutor, smiled as he looked at the carefully preserved insects in the four glass cases. “These are marvelous. You have examples from up-time America?”
“Uh huh,” Brandon agreed. “That’s this one and that one.” He pointed at two of the cases. “The others are from down-time Germany. Well, around the Ring of Fire anyway. Some of ’em are American insects that I caught after the Ring of Fire but-” he pointed “-that one and that one are maybe crosses between up-time and down-time insects.”
“That would seem unlikely on the face of it,” Dr. Faust said cautiously. “On the other hand, I have never seen ones quite like these.”
Hayley kept her peace. Herr Doctor Hertel Faust was a reasonably handsome young man, well-read and open-minded. If he had the normal male interest in icky, squishy bugs, well, it was unlikely that they were going to find a tutor that didn’t.
After he and Brandon finished ooh-ing and aah-ing over the skeletons of dead bugs, Hayley managed to get Faust back onto something interesting. She showed him an electromagnet and demonstrated the effect of moving a permanent magnet across it.
Dr. Faust looked at the needle on the voltmeter moving and asked, “Please explain to me again why moving a magnet across a coiled wire produces electricity and moving it across a straight wire doesn’t. Does the curve cause the effect?”
“A straight wire does produce electricity when a magnet is moved across it. But it’s just one wire. A coil has lots of strands of wire being affected. You coil them to make the magnetic field produce more electricity.”
“Why not use one big wire? They carry more current, don’t they?”
Hayley wasn’t sure how to explain. “Yes, but the movement of the magnetic field would only produce a little energy no matter how big the wire is. With the coil the magnetic field is acting on lots of separate wires.”
“Then what would happen if you had hundreds of parallel wires, rather than hundreds of coils?”
Hayley started to say something but was stopped by the fact that she didn’t have a clue what would happen. “I don’t know. Maybe you’d get lots of very weak currents of electricity?”
“Perhaps. But assume that all the wires split off from one wire on one side of the magnet’s path and recombined on the other?”
“I don’t know. .?”
“Sounds like a neat experiment, though,” Brandon said.
Dr. Faust was going to fit in just fine, Hayley thought.
* * *
Hertel Faust gave a little half bow to one of the gawkers they passed and Hayley wondered why. She didn’t interrupt, though. She, Brandon, and Dr. Faust continued their walk, identifying tree and birds. Once they were out of earshot of the person Dr. Faust had bowed to she asked, “Who was that you bowed to back there?”
“Herr Weber, you mean? He is of the They of Vienna.”
“What’s that?” Brendan asked. He had clearly heard the emphasis as well as Hayley had.
“The they or the them of Vienna are. .” He paused searching for a word. “Elite. Yes, I think that is the word. The elite of Vienna. Not exactly the nobility, more the patrician class of Vienna. It is important that you know the social rules. The They of Vienna run the city. They hold the important posts and are the most important of the merchants and master craftsmen in the city They are often titled in some way, but not always. Herr Weber, for instance, is simply a very wealthy merchant, but he and members of his family have been involved in the politics of Vienna for the last half century at least. He has influence over which laws and regulations are passed and what exceptions are available.”