Grantville Gazette 38 gg-38

by Коллектив Авторов

  June 1633

  When the bells in Saalfeld tolled the quarter hour, Gottfried stopped work to search the road. There, as regular as clockwork, was Veronika, walking up the path with her basket slung over her shoulder. He wasn't the only man on the construction crew watching her approach, although he hoped the main interest of the rest of them was for the contents of her basket rather than the person carrying it.

  He grabbed the boiled-leather hard hat that had been painted pink especially for Veronika after it became obvious she would be a regular visitor and traded it for the basket she was carrying. While she put on her hat he removed the cloth wrapped bundle with his name on it and left the basket for the men to empty in their own time. "It's a pity you only have ten minutes to look around."

  "Why? What is it you want to show me?"

  He reached out a hand and tugged her along. "We're ready to do our first full test."

  Veronika let herself be dragged along. "You're ready to start making paper?"

  "It's just a test run to sort out any problems. We won't be starting production until next week."

  "Have you got many orders yet?"

  Gottfried froze, causing Veronika to bump into him. "Orders?"

  "Yes, orders. You know, contracts from people wanting to buy your paper."

  Gottfried knew very well what orders were, but he'd been so involved with building his mill he hadn't had time to think of anything so mundane as building up an order book. "That shouldn't be a problem," he said airily. "Everybody knows I'm going to make newsprint. The printers will be clamoring for it as soon as I start production." He added a smile to suggest he was sure that such would be the case.

  "Aren't you being just a shade overly hopeful?" Veronika asked.

  So she wasn't buying it. Well, when a man had his back to the wall, he had to come out fighting. "How would you go about getting orders?" Gottfried was happy to see that silenced her. "It's different when you have to come up with a plan, isn't it?" He got a glare for that sally, and he could almost see the wheels turning as she thought about the problem he'd set.

  "An open day! That's what we need. We invite the potential customers to the mill to inspect everything. You can show them some paper being made and answer all their questions, and when they leave, we give them a free sample that they can take home and test."

  "Free sample?" Gottfried had been in full agreement with her idea right up to the point where she used that foul four-letter word. "Do you have any idea how much paper costs to make?"

  "Stop thinking about how much it'll cost, and start thinking about how much business it'll create. If you tried to sell them samples, maybe a few would buy them, but if you give everyone a quire of paper, not only will they all have a sample, but they'll probably all try it out. And they'll talk about it amongst themselves . . ."

  Gottfried reached out and silenced her in the age-old method. He firmly expected to be met by outrage, or at least have his shins kicked, but Veronika surprised him.

  It was the bells of Saalfeld tolling the quarter hour that broke up the kiss. Gottfried's delightful armful was suddenly pushing him away.

  "I have to go," Veronika called as she ran off.

  Gottfried was a bit peeved that she could so easily break off such a mind-blowing kiss, but not so peeved as to miss that she remembered to recover her basket and the money for tomorrow's lunch orders. At the very least, that meant she expected to be back tomorrow.

  ****

  Veronika was breathing heavily as she entered the town square leading to the office. A quick glance up at the clock tower showed she was going to cut it very fine, and in fact, she only just made it to the door as the clock chimed the half-hour. She scampered through the door into the office, to find Nikolaus Rorer standing at the counter, just as the last chime sounded.

  "I really must talk to your supervisor about your time keeping, Fraulein Vorkeuffer. You've been getting later and later returning from your lunch break every day for the last month."

  "But Veronika has never been late," Catrin protested.

  Nikolaus gestured towards Veronika. "She hardly looks ready to start work on time. And for what? A few minutes with a man who isn't going to marry her."

  "Gottfried is too going to marry Veronika," Catrin said.

  "Why would a mill owner marry a girl like her, when he can have his pick of the daughters and granddaughters of the members of the Chamber of Commerce? You should have seen them at the dinner Tuesday night. They were all over your Gottfried." Nikolaus stopped as if an idea had suddenly come to him. "But of course you couldn't have seen that, because you weren't there. Your man didn't invite you, did he?" He threw Veronika a triumphant look.

  She knew Nikolaus was trying to hurt her, and he was succeeding, but there was no way she was going to let him see that. Besides, she had the memory of that kiss, and the dazed look in Gottfried's eyes to hang her hopes onto. "Is there something we can help you with, Herr Rorer, or don't you have anything better to do than prop up the counter?"

  "I can see you're putting a brave face on, but he won't marry you. We all know that." Nikolaus gave Veronika a last sneer before pushing off from the counter and disappearing down the corridor to his office.

  "Somebody should do something nasty to that man, like maybe sit a bucket of water over his door, or . . ."

  "No, Catrin. He isn't worth it."

  "But imagine what he'd look like," Catrin said.

  The image of a wet and bedraggled Nikolaus brought a smile to Veronika's face. "He'd raise such a fuss."

  "Sure, but just thinking about it brought back the smile you had before the monster wiped it away. How did your time with Gottfried go today?"

  Veronika knew Catrin was just curious about the progress at the mill, but she couldn't help remembering that kiss, and she blushed accordingly.

  "Oh! Has something happened I need to hear about?"

  "No," Veronika said, trying to brazen it out.

  It didn't work. Catrin was studying her closely. Too closely. "Gottfried kissed you," she said. "What was it like?"

  "Gottfried and I kissed each other, and it was . . . nice."

  "Nice? Is that the best you could do?"

  "That's all I'm saying," Veronika insisted. "And it's about time we got some work done around here."

  "That means it was better than 'nice.' That's good. You don't want to marry someone whose kisses are only 'nice.'"

  July 1633

  Veronika accepted the invitation vouchers from the male half of the last couple and checked the name. Privately, deep inside, where Lyle Kindred couldn't see it, she was jumping up and down like an idiot. Herr Kindred was the publisher of the Grantville Times-the largest newspaper in the area. She picked up the last of the name tags she'd prepared and handed them to his wife. "It is good of you both to come, Herr Kindred, Frau Kindred."

  Lyle was looking around, waving to people he recognized while his wife pinned the name card onto his jacket. "I couldn't afford to stay away. Mary Jo wouldn't let me."

  "I wouldn't let you? Since when have you ever listened to what I've said?" She turned to Veronika. "Lyle insisted on coming just so he could get his hands on the free sample you promised in your invitation."

  Veronika pointed to the stack of one-quire bundles of paper on the table. "The free sample packages will be handed to you when you leave, Herr Kindred. And I'm sure you'll appreciate the quality of the paper. Now, is there anything you would like to see?"

  "Lyle wants to see the paper being made. Is that possible?" Mary Jo asked.

  "Yes. We expected that request and have arranged for the machine to be running during the open house. If you'd like to follow me?"

  "Come along, Lyle, don't keep the young woman waiting."

  "The Spengler mill makes paper by an almost continuous process," Veronika explained as they walked towards the mill hall.

  "How do you get continuous?" Lyle asked. "I've seen a few mills, and they all use paper molds on an endless loop.
There seems to be a problem with the wire mesh breaking."

  "Gottfried solved the problem of the mesh breaking by not allowing the mesh to flex. In place of an endless loop going around rollers, he has a single large roller with the mesh fixed to it."

  "This I've go to see," Lyle said.

  "And see it you shall," Veronika said as she guided the couple into the hall. "There it is."

  The large mesh covered cylinder was about six feet in diameter and two feet wide. It rotated slowly as a constant stream of pulp poured out of the headbox.

  "The paper's pretty fragile on the cylinder, so we have this felt roller here to remove the still wet paper," Veronika said as she pointed out the feature. "The paper then passes through a couple of squeegee rollers before being rolled up at the end."

  "You're making paper in rolls? Can we buy it that way rather than ready cut?"

  Veronika reluctantly shook her head. "You can buy the rolls, but all you'll be getting will be expensive artificial logs. There's still too much water in the paper, and we can't press it out once it's rolled up. So we have to take the rolls and move them to a cutting bench where the paper is unrolled and cut to size. We can then squeeze the rest of the water out of the paper the old-fashioned way."

  "Pity," Lyle muttered. "It'd be good to have rolled paper for when we can get a continuous press."

  "Oh, that's not to say Gottfried isn't working on solving the problem. It's really just a matter of getting the right materials to squeeze the water out of the paper before it is rolled up."

  "So how long do you think it'll be before we can get paper by the roll?"

  Veronika shrugged. "Nothing we've tried so far has worked, and we fear we might need rubber."

  Lyle nodded in understanding. "Everything is waiting on rubber. We need it for some of the up-time printing innovations I want to introduce as well. So until you get some rubber you'll be making sheet paper? How much can you make?"

  "How much would you like to buy?"

  "How about thirty reams of Crown a week?"

  Veronika whistled silently. Thirty reams was enough paper for fifteen thousand four-page newspapers. It was hard to imagine the people of Grantville were buying that many newspapers every week, let alone buying that number of copies of just the Grantville Times. "We can do that. The mill has a nominal capacity of thirty reams a day."

  "If the Times were to become a daily, we'd be looking at something like a hundred reams a week. Would that present any problems?"

  Veronika clamped down hard on her immediate desire to agree to anything to secure the order. Instead she stopped to think. "That'd be over half our capacity. I'm not sure how Gottfried would feel about being so committed to a single client. Could I get back to you on that later?"

  "Sure," Lyle agreed. "I just thought I'd ask. We won't be going daily for a while yet anyway."

  ****

  The Kindred's were the last to leave, and Gottfried stood beside Veronika as she handed Herr Kindred his free sample. "I'm sure you'll be impressed with the quality of that paper, Herr Kindred."

  "I'm sure I will, and I'm very impressed with your young lady," Lyle said.

  "Yes, why ever didn't you bring Veronika along to the Chamber of Commerce dinner?" Mary Jo asked.

  "I thought it was a business affair," Gottfried muttered.

  Mary Jo giggled. "Oh dear, you poor thing." She turned to include Veronika in the conversation. "Your man here was absolutely swamped by the young daughters and granddaughters of members of the Chamber of Commerce, all intent on sinking their hooks into the owner of a paper mill."

  Gottfried stood taller and prouder when Veronika failed to say he wasn't her young man. However, he knew he had to say something to assure her that he wanted to be her young man. "I thought I'd never get out of there in one piece."

  "So next time, take this delightful young woman," Mary Jo said. "I'm sure she's capable of protecting you."

  "Next time, I will." He smiled at Veronika. "If you'd like to, that is."

  "I'd like that," she said.

  September 1633

  Gottfried stood at one end of the paper hall looking back at his mill. He still wasn't making roll paper, but his mill was the most efficient paper mill in the Confederated Principalities of Europe. No, make that the world.

  "It's safe to leave it in my hands, you know," Friedrich Stisser said from beside him.

  "That's very easy to say, but she's my baby, and I worry."

  "Yes, but you also want to experiment with new techniques."

  "Yes, I do." Gottfried sighed. He just had to learn to let his baby go; otherwise he'd never have time to experiment with techniques to make chemical pulp. "I'm having trouble with the scale model wood-chipper."

  "There you are then. You go off and play with your wood-chipper and leave the mill in my capable hands."

  Gottfried had wanted someone he trusted to help in his mill and Friedrich had leapt at the opportunity to get away from making bricks. However, he wasn't a trained papermaker, and Gottfried worried.

  Friedrich grabbed him by the arm and marched him to the back door before pushing him toward the separate shed where he was building his chemical pulp mill in miniature. "Go on. You'll never make any progress if you can't trust me."

  Gottfried was torn. The mill was making thirty reams a day, and everything was going well. There wasn't anything that should go wrong, but there was a world of difference between should and could. "If you have any trouble . . ."

  "Call you. Now stop worrying and go."

  Saalfeld

  Veronika and Catrin were working their way through yet another pile of tax invoices when Andreas Rottenberger burst in. "The Spanish have invaded the United Provinces."

  "What? Invaded? Where did you hear that?" Veronika asked.

  "The radio net," Andreas said.

  Veronika glanced at the cheap radio by the counter that was tuned into the Voice of America broadcasts. "There's been nothing on the radio."

  "Not that radio, the radio net. There's a bunch of us amateurs with our own transceivers, and the net's full of news about the invasion. Apparently the Spanish destroyed the Dutch navy."

  "You should take your story to the papers. I'm sure they'd be interested," Catrin said.

  Veronika shot Catrin a glance. She was looking at Andreas with her dreamy "isn't he cute" look. Then what Catrin had suggested hit home. Newspapers. And newspapers needed paper. Gottfried had to be told about this. She shot to her feet and ran for the coat hangars. "Catrin, you look after the office."

  "What? Where are you going?"

  "To see Gottfried. The newspapers are going to be printing special editions, and he needs all the forewarning he can get to ramp up production for the extra demand."

  "But what about your job here? Nikolaus is sure to complain."

  Veronika barely paused as she put on her jacket and grabbed her hat and gloves. "Let him do his worst. This could be important for Gottfried."

  ****

  Gottfried was happily watching the two-foot length of one-inch diameter wood disappear down the chute into his hand-operated chipper as he wound the handle when he thought he heard someone bellowing his name. He stopped winding, and there it was again. A familiar feminine voice was calling out for him. He hurried over to the shed door and opened it, to see Veronika running towards him. "Veronika, shouldn't you be at work?"

  "This is more important. Andreas says the Spanish have invaded the United Provinces. The papers are going to want to print special editions as soon as possible, and we have to make sure they have enough paper."

  Gottfried was struggling to understand what had Veronika so excited. "Who is Andreas?"

  "Andreas Rottenberger."

  Gottfried shook his head to indicate he was still none the wiser.

  "Andreas has a transceiver, and he's in contact with other amateur transceiver operators. He says the net is full of the story. We have to act fast."

  "Net?" Gottfried was still lost. "And
why do we have to react fast? Actually, who is 'we'?"

  "The mill has to act fast. The papers are going to want extra paper on top of their regular order to print the extra editions."

  "How do you know the papers are going to print extra editions?"

  "Do you want to be able to read the full story about the disaster in the United Provinces?"

  Gottfried nodded.

  "Right, and so will everyone else. Show me the store room. I want an idea of what we have in stock."

  Gottfried was swept along to the storeroom where he stood and watched while Veronika checked out the piles of paper all ready for collection.

  "Schmucker and Schwentzel? Since when have they been buying our newsprint?"

  "That's their first order. They're planning a line of cheap fiction."

  "Right, well, they can probably afford to wait a couple of days for their order. So that's another twenty reams we have uncommitted."

  "Uncommitted!" Gottfried protested. "They have a contract for that paper, to be collected tomorrow."

  "Yes, but what time tomorrow?"

  "Noon." Suddenly it dawned on Gottfried what Veronika was proposing. "We can't sell Schmucker and Schwentzel's order to someone else and make it up tomorrow. There is not enough slack in the system to produce an extra twenty reams by noon tomorrow."

  "You're wrong, there's a whole fourteen hours a day of unused capacity."

  She had a point. The mill was only working a standard ten hour day, but Gottfried could see plenty of problems. "The workers will never stand for it."

  "So pay them extra. Just make sure we have enough paper to meet the demand, otherwise they might move to another supplier."

  Gottfried had been the first papermaker in the area to use coppice wood, but others had followed his lead, and his was no longer the only mill making paper from wood pulp. It was just the best located one. "We won't have enough wood ready to be ground."

  "Stop thinking of obstacles and just get to work. If you need more wood, go and get it. Meanwhile I've got some letters to write. Do you have someone who can run the letters to the printers in Rudolstadt and Grantville?"

  "Caspar's son can run your letters, but why do you want to send any out?"