Grantville Gazette, Volume 69

by Bjorn Hasseler

  "A human-powered radio?" Jason Sr. asked. "From what Vernon had to say, I'm sure there would be an eager market for such a thing. How does it work?"

  "She's feeding the output from a crystal radio through a theremin," Jason said.

  "Using the theremin as an amplifier." His father shook his head ruefully. "I can't imagine why I didn't think of it earlier."

  "Same here," Jason admitted. "It's one of those things that's so obvious once someone else has already thought of it."

  "So how well did it work in situ?"

  "Really well," Jason said. "We could hear it from the other side of the room, even with the usual noise you'd expect from a bar at night."

  "So you spent all night at a bar?" Jennie Lee asked.

  Jason shook his head. "No. We had dinner first…"

  "Why am I not surprised," Diana muttered.

  Jason ignored his sister's sotto voce comment and continued as if she hadn't spoken. "…before going to The Black Ox. We were only there for a few hours, but Frau Mittelhausen was waiting for us when we returned." He grinned. "She wanted to know how well it worked, too. Anyway, Frau Mittelhausen thinks Mags should quit Radio Prague and go into business making them full-time. The demand is going to be astronomical. Every public house that can receive a radio signal will want one."

  "I'm sure Frau Mittelhausen is right, but there's no way we can help Mags start such a business," Jennie Lee said. "Kitt and Cheng Engineering has to be our first concern."

  "That's okay, Mom," Jason said. "Frau Mittelhausen's suggested Mags go into business with Dr. Gribbleflotz' parent company. Mags will be responsible for making the radios and aura detectors while she sees to everything else. She said she wanted eighty percent of the new company for the parent." He turned to his father. "That's a bit much, isn't it?"

  Jason Sr. nodded. "Eighty percent is more in line with what a vulture capitalist rather than a venture capitalist might demand. I wouldn't have thought Frau Mittelhausen would demand that much."

  "I don't think it was a demand," Jason said. "I think it was more an opening gambit in a negotiation. Certainly that's how Mags treated it. She came back with a counter offer of fifty percent, but I don't think Frau Mittelhausen will go that low."

  "Mags shouldn't make any agreement without consulting a lawyer," Jennie Lee said.

  "That's what Dietrich said," Jason said. He turned back to his father. "I told Mags I'd ask what you thought might be a reasonable distribution of ownership of the company."

  "That's a tough one," Jason Sr. said. "Let's see," he said, preparing to count points off on his fingers. "Mags is contributing the intellectual property, while Frau Mittelhausen, for Dr. Gribbleflotz, is offering capital and marketing." He held up three fingers. "There are three parts to the deal, and Frau Mittlehausen is offering two of them. Maybe Mags should be prepared to let them have up to two thirds of the company."

  "But she shouldn't make any commitment without seeing a lawyer," Jennie Lee repeated.

  "No, she shouldn't," Jason Sr. agreed. He turned to Jason. "When can we talk to Mags and Frau Mittlehausen?" he asked.

  "I'm supposed to meet Mags after she finishes work tomorrow to go over the details." He looked at his parents. "Can you come too?"

  "I wouldn't miss it for the world," Diana said.

  "I wasn't talking to you," Jason said.

  "Children!" Jennie Lee said. "We will all be there."

  "Does that include me?" David asked.

  "Sure," Jason said. "You're welcome to tag along."

  Next day, the Mihulka Tower

  Mags was waiting with Frau Mittelhausen and Lips Kastenmayer, a younger brother of Dr. Gribbleflotz' wife, when the Cheng party arrived. Mags made the introductions before leading everyone into a workroom where she had set up a theremin radio.

  "That the radio?" Diana asked.

  Mags smiled at Jason's sister. "I know, it just looks like a theremin, but it works." She looked at Jason. "Would you mind?"

  "No problem," Jason said. He walked over to the theremin and started pumping the treadle.

  The sound of Radio Prague started to emerge from the speaker and everyone stood quietly and listened for a few minutes.

  "That's enough, Jason," Jason Sr. said. He waited for the radio to fall silent before speaking again.

  "So, Mags, we hear you're planning on quitting your job with Radio Prague to start your own business?"

  Mags sighed and looked appealingly at Jason. "I want to, but Frau Mittelhausen can't see any role for Jason."

  "Don't you worry about me, Mags. Mom and dad are planning a major expansion at Kitt and Cheng Engineering, and I'll be part of that."

  "Really?" Mags asked, darting glances to Jason's parents.

  "Really," Jennie Lee said.

  "Yes," Jason Sr. said. "You might think you've invented a radio, but what you've really done is created the basis of a new sound reproduction industry, and Kitt and Cheng Engineering intends being in on the ground floor supplying you with all the components you're going to need."

  "One moment," Ursula Mittelhausen said. "What do you mean by a sound reproduction industry?"

  "Mags' radio just connects a radio signal to an amplifier in the theremin," Jason said. "Well, there are plenty of things that can use that same amplifier. We did a bit of brainstorming earlier, and came up with a few things Mags could add to her production line.

  "In addition to the aura detectors and radios, there are also record players and public announcement systems," Jason Sr. said.

  "Also sound systems for performers," David said. He mimed playing an electric guitar and smiled at Mags. "That was my idea."

  Mags winced at that. She'd heard David playing his electric guitar before, and she didn't think the world was ready for that noise. "Fortunately, you'll have to be your own power source, limiting you to twenty or so watts."

  David clasped his hands to his heart. "You wound me. My music is brilliant, and the louder the better. Which is why your boyfriend and I want to borrow one of your spare theremins so we can experiment with installing a glow plug engine to spin the Alexander Alternator."

  "I don't have any spare theremins." She gestured to the one across the room that she'd used to demonstrate her radio. "That one belongs to a member of the Society of Aural Investigators."

  "That's okay," Jason said. "Dad's happy for David and I helping you build some more."

  "We're going to need to take a couple back to Grantville with us for development work," Jason Sr. said.

  "Is your company going to be competing against Mags' company?" Lips asked.

  "No." It was a resounding declaration from all four of the Chengs and David Kitt. For a moment they smiled at each other before Jason Sr. took charge. "We're happy just helping design peripherals and making components for Mags' company. We're even happier to leave her company to put them together and worry about marketing."

  October, 1636, Prague

  Vernon Fritz was once again conducting an unofficial survey of radio reception and listener satisfaction around Prague. He was walking down the same street he'd been walking down on his first monthly survey thirty days previously when he noticed a crowd gathering around the entrance to one of the many public houses that lined the street. Curious to see what had them gathering around the bar he approached.

  As he got closer he was sure he could hear the current broadcast from Radio Prague emanating from the open door. He checked the portable crystal set he was wearing and confirmed that the sound was from Radio Prague. He increased his pace and quickly arrived at the door, where he forced his way in.

  The room was crowded with men sitting at tables chatting quietly while they drank or ate. In the background was the sound of Radio Prague. He had questions to find answers to and glanced around the barroom, seeking the barkeep.

  The bar owner met Vernon's eyes and hurried towards him. "The man from Radio Prague," he said as he reached out a hand to Vernon. "You have come to admire my new radio. It is one of t
he new Gribbleflotz Ethereal Plenitude Auricular Amplificators." The man smiled at Vernon. "I told you Dr. Gribbleflotz would find a solution."

  ****

  Good German Axes by Tim Roesch

  Wittenförden

  November, 1635

  Kunigunde stood in the quiet dim coolness of her mother’s house near the very center of Wittenförden, a small, secluded village where she knew she was not welcome.

  The house, before, during, and after her mother, had been slowly expanded so that the loft was now more of a shelf, and the central hearth was large enough to heat the interior without the addition of farm animals.

  Good, strong German trees had been felled by good German axes, some of which her papa had made from good German ore, to hold up the well-made roof. What had been an exterior meeting area with an awning rather than a roof was now an interior room with a long, heavy table that had seen much, carried much, and been scarred, burned, and gouged by much.

  Those who experienced it called it a section of castle wall laid upon its side.

  The door was a good, strong German door held together by strong German hinges with a lock that held the door tight to the frame. For all its inherent value and strength and thickness it could not prevent the silence from coming inside.

  “Papa?” she asked quietly. She did not expect her father to hear her. Not yet.

  If there was anything in the house that was her mother it was the hearth Kunigunde had her back firmly turned to; more of an oven and a stove than a mere fireplace. In the winter it could heat a house three times the size of this one and make meals for ten times the number of people who commonly ate at the table that was also behind her.

  The hearth was a clever combination of brick and cast iron with a clever collection of tools; each one made to the sort of exacting specifications her papa was well-known for from Schwerin to as close to Berlin as anything from her papa dare come.

  Even Danzig knew of her papa’s specifications.

  Once a year, sometimes twice, a wagon came and took away tools and pieces of carefully crafted metal to places in Poland that might not know her papa’s name but knew her papa’s work well.

  Wittenförden might not be well-known or easily locatable but it was well-thought of.

  Like her mother…

  “Papa?”

  In the end it was the silence that made her open the door, forced her out into the very late morning, almost midday. There should be loud, raucous noise, and there was not.

  “Papa?” She was louder this time.

  From sunrise to sunset her papa’s forge, his smithy, was never silent, and he was the loudest thing or person there. Wittenförden rang with his blows upon red, hot metal. Not now.

  A wagon had come and there had been voices and the rumble of unloading. There had been horse sounds and wood sounds and the sounds of footsteps but no sound of the forge. No sound of her papa.

  When her papa awoke and found the apprentices gone for the holiday in Schwerin he had not bellowed, so she had hunkered down in her mother’s kitchen awaiting the inevitable, which never came. She struggled through the baking of bread and simmering of broth and the cutting of vegetables but, all morning, there had been silence.

  “Papa?”

  The wagon had gone with the normal sounds such things make, diminishing in the slow distance along a road, a path really, back to Schwerin.

  Kunigunde had finally taken off her mother’s apron, the one she wore while working inside the house, and put on the leather apron, the one the women of Wittenförden looked at with disapproval. She left the house and strode across the yard and stopped at the boundary between house and smithy.

  She would have dared the women of Wittenförden and even those of Schwerin to say any single thing about her leather apron, the one she wore in the smithy when she worked beside her papa, whether he or the women of Wittenförden approved or not.

  In the distance she could just hear the wagon, its sound diminishing, respectful of the silence of the smithy.

  “Papa?” she inquired of the silence that haunted the smithy, a silence so unnatural in a usually loud and busy place. The crackle of flames or the sizzle of the quenching trough would have been loud in this silence.

  The heat was there and the smoke and the smells of metal, hot and cold. There was nothing obviously amiss. Everything from brooms and baskets, hammers and wood and coal and charcoal were all where they belonged. Work waited to be finished and finished work waited to be paid for and taken to market.

  Such were the tides of the smithy of Wittenförden.

  “Papa?”

  Her papa was a big man. Normally he dominated the smithy and the vast sound of him filled the countryside. He was called ‘the Smith,’ rarely by his more common name, Ernst.

  Few from Wittenförden, fewer from Schwerin called him Ernst. No one in her memory used his family name, his surname. Formally, which was rare, he was called Herr Ernst.

  To her, he was simply Papa. The surname didn’t matter to her, not here, certainly not now.

  “Papa?”

  Wittenförden produced two things: axes of all sorts and the trees those axes felled.

  Her papa made the finest axes in the north of Germany, possibly Poland and the south of Germany as well and his skills at fixing wagons and harness, at least as far as the metal that bound the wood and shackled the leather, were well-thought of.

  Any farmer or shepherd who needed a knife fixed or a pot mended could depend on her papa’s strong arm and firm, well-placed hammer blows. With those same hands and same hammers he made needles and pins far too fine to come from a place so obviously a smithy created to make axes and horse shoes and loud, large things of metal.

  When he made needles and pins Kunigunde thought, for a moment, he was remembering her mother, his wife.

  “Papa?”

  “Stay away!” His voice finally burst out of the smithy like a flock of geese thrown up and off the nearby lake. “Go back in the house where you belong! Go!”

  Kunigunde did not stay away. She did not go. It was not in her nature to do so. Besides, the memory of her mother was in that house. Better she should be here, being bellowed at by her papa, than inside remembering the mother she never knew.

  Kunigunde strode forward into papa’s command as if it were a stiff wind, cold and forbidding, full of ice and snow, but between her and where she needed to be.

  In the end, it was not her papa’s command that stopped her, but his silence.

  “Papa?” Kunigunde began. “What is wrong? You are not working? The forge is almost cold. Look…”

  “You are like your damned brother. He doesn’t listen either. Off being chased about…swinging that damned sword like he knew what he was doing! Instead of coming to show himself, show that he was well, he sends me this damned…trash. Both of you don’t listen.”

  “I am not like my brother! I am here. He is not. You should thrash those lazy apprentices!”

  The silence was oppressive, stifling. She expected a response, a noise, a shout. Anything?

  She had to walk around the large, brutish hulk that was her papa to see what had silenced him.

  It was a pile of metal on the smashed and pounded dirt floor of the smithy.

  Armor.

  “Is that blood, Papa?”

  “This is no place for a woman. I told you to stay away! Why can’t you follow directions? Why?”

  She stood beside her papa and looked at the pile of metal on the ground, before her.

  “I should marry you off…” he muttered. “But who would have you?”

  His hands clenched. She could hear muscles creak.

  “What will you do with it all, Papa?”

  The silence was hot and lasted a lifetime, or so it seemed.

  “It is good metal…the best…” her papa whispered. “Some fine man had it made to protect his precious son and see what good it did? What a waste…”

  That frightened her. The whisper frightened her.
In her fifteen years she had never heard her papa whisper. He was too big to whisper. Even his soft good night could wake the dead then frighten those very same dead back into their graves!

  There was no fear in that whisper, no reverence or the quiet of men waiting for just the right moment to set loose an arrow at a rabbit tempted close and careless. His was a whisper of remembrance, when louder words might scare a memory away.

  He was remembering her mother, and events even more tragic, and because he did she must.

  In that silence her sigh was loud.

  Kunigunde took a deep breath, adjusted her leather apron and began.

  She let her loudness speak for both of them. Her actions were obvious, designed to confront her papa’s silence, to challenge his whisper. She clattered and banged and stomped. She slammed and clashed and grunted. Smithies were excellent places for noise and clamor!

  This was the part she liked; early in the morning, scaring the night away with the awaking of the forge; the eager clanging of the smithy ready to do work.

  But this was midday. Kunigunde sighed and forged forward, anyway.

  She made up for the time of day with loud rattling and shaking of the metal armor as if to wake the dead; even if that dead was the one who had worn this armor.

  She cut off the leather straps, carefully, putting the knife down as loudly as she dared when finished. You did not live in a small town like Wittenförden and not understand the concept of “waste naught, want naught.” Everything, even silences and memories and forgetfulness, had a use.

  Even the distaste and frowns of the women of Wittenförden made when she appeared had a use.

  Once the cloth and leather was taken away, the metal need only be heated and pounded and used to make other things, useful things. There were a myriad of things to do; bring the forge to the right temperature, collect the appropriate tools, check the metal for anything that might interfere with the work.

  She could see where a few ‘garnishments’ had been gouged out of the metal. The enameling had been light and she left it alone. The blood was more like a thin, powdery mud now; easy to ignore.