****
Willem presented his list of questions to Darius, who examined them carefully then looked at him with considerably more respect. "Some of these are new."
"The questions that aren't new . . . why aren't they answered in the book?
"Because they've come up since it was written. There is a second edition being worked on now, but it won't be out till the end of the year, if then. It should be better organized, though. By the way, if you agree that the answers we find for you can be included in the next edition, there is a discount."
"How much of a discount?"
"Well, they may not want the answers for the book, so it's only twenty percent. Or you can gamble and if they use it and you’re the only one that asked it, they will refund half the research cost."
Willem knew a scam when he heard one. But the whole library worked on a pay-me-again system. Almost every question asked would have an answer that more than one person would want. So the rates they charged took into account the fact that they could probably sell the answer several times. And they always charged extra if the customer wanted their answers kept private. Even if you paid the extra, it didn't keep someone else from asking the same question and getting it answered. It just kept that researcher from selling the answer to the general pool of previously answered questions. By now a lot of questions were answered by typing the question into the list of previously asked questions and getting back a reference number to an already found, correlated and printed answer. So even if Willem didn't take the discount, it was just as likely that someone else would come along and ask the question, so the answer would show up in the next edition of the book anyway.
"I'll take the twenty percent discount." Willem shook his head, partly in admiration for a good scam but mostly in disgust that he was the one who was helping write the next edition of Aeronautics 101-and he was paying for the privilege.
****
"Hey, Gemma," Gemma heard Darius call. "You want to help me with this one? It's that airplane nut again."
"How can I help?" Gemma asked. "You know that airplanes are . . . how do you say . . . out of my league."
"He wants the answers in German if possible and he'll pay extra for it. So I'll look the stuff up and then we'll go over it together and you can translate it into German."
"I'm still not the best at German."
"Yeah, but you need the work as much as I do."
"No way to get a dowry built up if I don't," Gemma said.
"All you down-time girls are always worried about the dowry business. What ever happened to love?"
"Love is for those who can afford it," Gemma said, primly. "And I can't. Not yet. Not since we spent so much on the doctors for Mama. My sister's marriage took what was left, so Papa and I are starting over."
"You guys can't go back to Padua?"
"Matteo is in charge of the shop. Papa doesn't want to work for his son."
****
Willem spent months in the National Library, looking at plans and reading texts on air flight. And in the process, paid for the pimple-faced boy's junior prom. And more.
Increasingly, he found himself entranced by the delta-wing aircraft. He told himself that it was because they didn't stall out. Which was certainly true. A stall happens when the loss of lift causes the nose-heavy airplanes to go into a dive. A delta has its weight farther back, so it doesn't stall. It just sinks and its controls get mushy. He told himself that a delta-wing would be able to land in narrower spaces because its wingspan would not need to be as wide. Also, true lift is square feet of surface area. The greater the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge of the wing, "the chord," the less the span, or the distance from wing tip to wing tip, needed to be for the same lift. Of course, there are always trade-offs. More chord means more drag. And he was told that by Herr Hal Smith, the up-timer expert on aircraft design.
Willem looked at the copy of a picture of the Convair Delta Dart and imagined. He roughed out a sketch based on the Dart, but with a propeller rather than a jet engine. The propeller was in the front, as it was in most airplanes. Just behind the propeller was the engine, even though he wasn't yet sure what sort of engine he could get. Behind the engine was the cockpit and behind that the fuel tank. This was a small plane, one person and some armaments, but small, a short wingspan. He ran some calculations using the new slide rule he had bought, pencil and paper. The wing span would be only thirty feet and the plane would be thirty-five feet long.
Willem was no great artist, but like most people of his station he had been taught the basics. His drawing wasn't good, but it was good enough to give a real artist the idea. He drew a wing section and made marks on his silhouette to indicate where the ribs of the airplane would be placed. Then he took another sip of beer and went back to his calculations.
****
Pierre Trovler was in Grantville for the movies, for the pictures, for the art that came from the future. He wasn't in the encyclopedia, he'd checked. There was no way for him to know why, and if Pierre had known, it's hard to tell if he would have been pleased. For in that other history Pierre had died in 1632 of food poisoning. Without that bad bit of mutton, it's quite likely that Pierre would have made enough of a name for himself to have gained an entry in the encyclopedia. But Pierre didn't know that. No one on Earth, in either timeline, knew it. All he knew was that he had looked and found no entry for Pierre Trovler, born June 9th, 1604, outside Paris. That lack of such an entry had left him a bit-actually, rather a lot-more modest. He knew he was a good artist, but knowing that he wasn't in the history books and not knowing why had been a cold shower to his ego. It had needed one. He worked harder now. For instance, he worked on the rough sketches that Willem Krause had given him with care and practiced skill, using Herr Krause's notes as well as his sketches and the drafting course from the adult education class at Grantville's high school to make designs and even a perspective view of the aircraft. He worked well into the night using the Coleman lantern, had some of the fried chicken that he had bought that noon, then went to bed.
****
Pierre Trovler handed over the cardboard tube that held the plans. The tube, as it happened, was made down-time, a copy of examples that had come with the Ring of Fire.
Krause took it with a smile that was both very endearing and probably more than half real. "So how is it?" he asked as he removed the cardboard cap from the tube. "Did you manage to turn my scribbling and notes into something worth seeing, or were they too bad to even give you a starting point?"
Pierre grinned in spite of himself. "I persevered, Herr Krause. In fact, they weren’t bad drawings. To be honest, they weren’t professional, but the information was there." He started to add that he thought that Herr Krause would be pleased, but decided not to. He doubted the man would be influenced by such a claim and it might raise expectations.
By now Herr Krause had the papers out and was looking at the drawings and the neat, careful notes. "Marvelous. This actually looks like the design of an airplane."
They talked for some time. They talked about the shape of the wing, and of the three-wheeled undercarriage.
"How do you turn it?" Pierre asked.
"These here . . ." Herr Krause pointed at the trailing edge of the wing and the line that Pierre hadn't known the meaning of. ". . . are actually separate little wings. They move up and down and change the airflow over the wing so that one wing has more lift or so that the lift is more in the front of the wing or more in the back." He pointed at the tail fin. "That has a rudder that pushes from side to side."