Wing struts proved to be a problem. The most efficient sailplane wings are very long and thin, and we had to support them without the benefit of aircraft aluminum. What we came up with was a sort of synthetic bamboo. I had a huge lathe built that could turn an eight-yard-long spruce log. We bored a conical hole down the middle of it, inserted a long iron cone in the hole and turned the outside of the log so that the thickness of the wall was half that of your little finger. Then the iron cone was removed and wooden discs were glued inside every half yard. This assembly had an astounding strength-to-weight ratio. Two of them fastened together end to end at the fuselage ran down the center of the wings. It held.
Count Lambert was often at Eagle Nest when I was there. He complained that they were making great progress with the aircraft themselves, but that I had once described to him an engine that could power an aircraft, and I was doing nothing about developing one.
The problem was that there were a lot of things higher on my priority list than a glorified lawnmower engine. There was the tooling to mass produce armor, a rapid-fire breach-loading cannon to develop, and we needed to be able to mass produce shells, bullets, gunpowder, sword blades, boots, and all sorts of things. I didn't even have a dependable source of lead and zinc yet, let alone sulfur!
But Count Lambert and the boys teamed up on me and extracted a promise. I would start working on an engine once they could build a two-man glider that could stay up for an hour. Knowing the problems involved, I didn't think that my promise would seriously upset my schedules.
There were two major sour points in early 1236, and they both hit me within the same week. I was being sued, twice. One lawsuit was by Count Lambert's brother Herman. He was no longer pleased with the brass works that I'd sold him. Rather than making him money, it was costing him money, due, I was sure, to his poor management. He felt that it was all my fault, and he was a count whereas I was a mere knight, which proved it to his satisfaction — He wanted his money back.
The other one was from Baron Stefan. He had decided that I was still on the land that Lambert had wrongly given me, land which had been in his family for more than three hundred years, he said. He wanted the land back and for me to pay damages for the trees I'd cut down and the fences I'd put up.
They gave me a few months of needless worry until the duke was passing through one snowy day and threw both cases out of court. Or rather, he dismissed both suits because he was the court.
Count Herman's suit was dismissed because I had delivered the property agreed upon and had never promised that it would be profitable. He gave the count a fatherly lecture about trusting to the workingman rather than to the man's tools and nobody mentioned the fact that the duke himself owned the factory that had run the count's factory out of business.
The duke became angry when he found that Baron Stefan had failed to come at Count Lambert's summons to beat the bounds between our properties. He said that if the baron lost land because of that, he deserved it, and a horse whipping besides for disobeying his liege lord.
It helps to have friends in high places.
Also that winter, Anna and I scouted out the Malapolska Hills, north of Cracow, where I knew there were deposits of zinc, lead, iron, and coal. She said that winter was the best time for smelling out this sort of thing, since there were fewer other smells around '
We found deposits of zinc and lead fairly close together, or at least there were two different ores and Anna said that they both stank like sulfur and I knew that both ores here were sulfides. Lead and iron had been smelted here for thousands of years, and some archeologists believe that it was here that iron was first made.
But zinc was unknown as a separate metal. It was used as an alloying element with copper to make brass, but the ores were mixed before smelting to make brass directly, or zinc ore was mixed with copper before casting and copper was actually used to reduce the zinc!
Late that summer, I found out why.
The fact is I wouldn't have gotten zinc at all if I hadn't added some pollution-control equipment to the blast furnace there. There wasn't even a real need to control pollution, since our facilities were tiny by modem standards and didn't seriously effect the environment. But the problem would grow unless we started off doing things right, so I was adding dust collectors where possible.
When we tried to smelt the zinc ore, after roasting it to convert the sulfide to the oxide, all we got was slag. No metal at all came out. It was only when we cleaned out the dust collector that we found drops of zinc there.
The zinc had left the furnace as a gas! Small wonder the ancients never found it. They weren't worried about pollution at all!
By the next winter, we were producing zinc in quantity, but I get ahead of myself.
Work started on the training base as soon as the ground thawed. I'd chosen the land because of the varied terrain, with both mountains and plains on it, and because it was the least populated area of my lands. I only had to pay seven yeomen to move their families off it.
Eventually, the main barracks would be a square castle a mile to the side and six stories tall, but it was modest enough to start out. It had bunk-bed space for sixteen dozen men and a dining hall that doubled as a church, both made of concrete blocks. There was a big concrete parade around and a twelvemile long obstacle course that was rougher than anything that I'd ever heard of.
On schedule, over a gross of peasants arrived from Count Lambert, or rather one from each of his knights. I had specifically asked for rough, disobedient characters. Peasants who were "too smart for their own good."
They certainly looked the part. If ever there were a bunch of men who looked like they should be hung on general principles, this was the gang. With one exception.
Piotr Kulczynski was with them.
Chapter Nineteen
FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI
I had spent much of the winter in preparation to attend Sir Conrad's warrior school. I had trained one of my subordinates, Jozef Kulisiewicz, to take over my position for a year, taking him twice on my rounds of Sir Conrad's factories and inns, and saw to it that his replacement was well trained.
I had artfully observed all the exercises that Sir Conrad and his knights were doing, and diligently practiced them myself. And I had worked on Count Lambert very carefully, and eventually got him to appoint me to the school. This was not easy, for while my father was one of the count's peasants, I was not, being sworn to Sir Conrad. But I persisted with the count, and came up with many reasons why I should go. At last, I irritated him sufficiently.
"Dog's blood! If you were sworn to me, I'd have you whipped! Piotr, you are too damn smart for your own good!"
"Yes, my lord. But isn't that precisely what Sir Conrad asked for? Men who were too smart?"
"By God it was, and I'm going to send you there just to get you out of my mustache! I know what Sir Conrad has planned at that school, and I think you'll be dead in three days if you go!"
"Thank you, my lord."
"You can thank me after he kills you! Now get out of here and get out of town, too!"
My plan accomplished, I left quickly. For I thought it was absolutely necessary that I attend the warrior school. My position as chief accountant gave me an excellent income, pleasant working conditions, and considerable prestige, but it did not give me what I really wanted. It did not give me Krystyana.