“I see what you mean, but why not floats and wheels?”
Mallory scratched a scar under his bearded chin. “Well, believe it or not, Skipper, there’s no rubber. I know, it would be all over the place around here back home, but Courtney says even then it wasn’t indigenous. Whether anything like it exists somewhere else, who knows.” He paused and glanced at the blank faces around him. Of course, Lemurian faces were always blank, but none of them spoke up. “Anyway, there’s nothing like it here. Given enough time, we’ll probably come up with a synthetic, but our refining capability just isn’t that far along yet, and frankly, I don’t know how.” He looked at Bradford, who shook his head.
“ ’Fraid not. As Mr. Mallory has suggested, I know there has been some success making a synthetic rubber from petroleum, but I haven’t the faintest idea how it’s done.”
“So in the short term,” Mallory continued, “we’d be better off using rigid wheels and some sort of shock-absorbing arrangement. I still think floats are the way to go, though. At least for now.” He shook his head. “Believe me, Skipper, I wish that wasn’t so. Floatplanes add a lot of problems. They’ll likely be bigger, heavier and slower. Payload will be less and they’ll have greater power-to-weight requirements. More complicated, too. Basically, like I said, NC flying boats… Nancys.”
Matt grimaced. “I was proud when I heard we flew those things across the Atlantic-little before my time-and Walker was even one of the picket ships before she joined the Asiatic Fleet. But if I recall, only one of ’em made it all the way.”
“We’ll make ’em better. We have stronger, lighter materials to work with. Hell, most of a British Hurricane is made of wood, and they’re pretty good fighters. The toughest thing in the air might be those British medium bombers-what are they… or were they? Hell, I can’t remember.”
“Wellingtons,” Bradford supplied, rolling his eyes at the young pilot.
“Right. They may be slow, but they can take punishment. They use the same kind of diagonal bracing the ’Cats use on their big ships. We can do that too. Even the engines shouldn’t be too hard. We off-loaded all the machine tools from Walker and Mahan before the battle and we’ve been building new machines hand over fist. Maybe we can even get the lathes and stuff off Amagi. Then there’s the submarine, with all her tools and steel-if we can salvage it. We’ll make the engines of iron, but flute the cylinders to save weight. Water cooled, if we can cast the crankcases as well as I think we can…”
“Very well,” said Matt, almost laughing. “I see you’ve given this some thought. Have you considered, however, that if the planes have floats and fly off a Navy ship, they can’t possibly be part of the Air Corps? All the crews you train to fly them will have to be naval aviators!”
“Hey! Wait a minute!” Mallory shouted good-naturedly, but he was laughed down. They needed the humor but after a moment, Matt sobered.
“Madam Minister of Medicine?” he asked stiffly. Sandra looked up at him with a small smile for the title, but realized Matt had already begun to retreat into his funk.
“Better,” she said. “We still have a lot of wounded, but I think the vast majority have turned the corner. A lot have already returned to duty”-she glared at Ben and Bernie-“although some shouldn’t have. The Lemurian’s polta paste continues to work miracles.” She referred to an antiseptic, analgesic, viscous paste made from the still somewhat mysteriously prepared by-products of seep fermentation. Seep was a less refined version of the substance made from polta fruit and was a popular spirit and strong intoxicant. The analgesic properties were fairly straightforward, but Sandra still didn’t know why it fought most infections so well. Neither did the Lemurians. They’d had no concept of germ theory when the destroyermen arrived, but they’d had the paste since before recorded history and knew it worked. Before the Squall that transported them here, Sandra had heard of experiments with a type of mold being used to fight infection. She wondered if the same principle was at work here. She didn’t know and couldn’t even begin to guess without a microscope, but the stuff was a lifesaver that beat sulfonamide all hollow.
“How’s Mr. Garrett? And did Silva report to you like I told him?” Matt asked.
“Mr. Garrett’s wounds are healing nicely; he just had so many. It’s a miracle he survived. Same with Silva, but even though Mr. Garrett’s unhappy just sitting around, he does behave. Silva, as you know, is less reasonable. He swooped in for a moment and let Pam Cross patch him up again, but she was going off duty and he took off with her. Frankly, I think she and Risa can make him take it easy better than I ever could.” She sniffed, and while others laughed, she noticed a ghost of a smile reappear on Matt’s face.
Silva’s antics were as legendary as they were infamous. He’d carried on what sometimes appeared a genuine affair with Chack’s own sister, Risa-Sab-At. Risa had been captain of Salissa ’s forewing guard, but now they’d amalgamated all the various guards into fewer unified commands. She was now captain of what would become Salissa ’s entire Marine contingent-after they’d undergone the more rigorous training required of Marines. In many ways, Risa was clearly Silva’s soul mate, just as reckless and fearless and with the same warped sense of humor. The Lemurians hadn’t cared about the rumors surrounding them, rumors Silva and Risa did their best to encourage-only initially-to get Chack’s goat. Now, either they seemed determined to get everyone’s goat-or the rumors weren’t really rumors.
The addition of Nurse Pam Cross from Brooklyn to the menage added a measure of disgust, as well as a grudging respect for the gunner’s mate among the human destroyermen. They’d come to accept that Silva might have taken up with a “local gal,” whether anything physical was involved or not. They just assumed, naturally (or unnaturally), that there was. For him to then snatch one of the only available dames did breed resentment, but it was more of a wistful “how does he do it” sort. Lurid speculation regarding how the threesome might… interact… was probably actually good for morale in a roundabout way, and none of them-Silva, Risa, or Pam-would confirm or deny anything.
Three soul mates, Matt chuckled to himself, two of whom had to come to another world to find each other. Well, there was nothing he could do about it. He’d once ordered Silva to quit carrying on with Risa, thereby breaking one of his own fundamental rules: Never give an order you know won’t be obeyed. But in almost every other way, Silva had really straightened up. “Silva’s been helping you with ordnance development?” Matt asked Bernard Sandison.
Bernie grimaced. “Yes, sir. When it suits him. He’s hurting, I know, so I haven’t pushed him yet, but some of his best work has been on ‘toys’ for himself.”
“Do his ‘toys’ have practical applications?”
“Oh, yeah, but they’re not exactly priority items. The man’s a diabolical genius when it comes to figuring out new and better ways to kill things, and he does love to try them out. It’s just… his priorities are generally more… tactical than strategic.”
Matt allowed a genuine laugh then, at Bernie’s tact. “You mean he concentrates on ‘up close and personal.’ Well, we need that too. Give him his head, but try to run him off for a while. He needs to heal up.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Speaking of that, what have you come up with?”
Sandison shifted on the cushion his wounds made him use. Matt knew the young, dark-haired torpedo officer was highly motivated to please; he still blamed himself for not recognizing the-perfectly good-Mk 10 torpedo among the condemned fish they’d scrounged in Surabaya so long ago. That extra torpedo might have made a lot of difference if they’d known they had it and used it at a different time.
“Right now we’re rebuilding to some degree. One of the shops took a hit from Amagi and it’s a real mess. None of the machinery was badly damaged, thank God, but we’re still getting a roof back over it. That said, we’ve begun to refine some of the projects we were already working on. I think I can give you guncotton, or gun… whatever they use for cotton around here, pretty soon. That’ll give us a high explosive capability for the four-inch guns. We’ve already started making exploding shells with a black powder bursting charge, like the ones they used in the last war. Not as good, but…” He paused when he saw the captain’s grim expression. The only four-inch guns they had were on Walker -underwater. They’d salvage the guns, certainly, and maybe the one on the submarine, but they wouldn’t know if they could salvage the ship until she was dry. “Anyway,” he continued softly, “I wouldn’t recommend using it for a propellant charge until we’ve had a lot more practice with the stuff. Better stick with ordinary gunpowder for now. Same goes for small arms. We just about shot ourselves dry, I’m afraid, and black powder won’t work worth a hoot in the automatic weapons. At least not the BARs, thirties and fifties. They gum up too fast.