1636:The Kremlin games rof-14

by Eric Flint

  What was a whole lot worse than humbling was the thought that maybe if Bernie had known what he was doing he might have been able to save the kid and who knew how many others. Maybe he wouldn’t have, but he didn’t know enough even to figure out what the disease was. Maybe cholera? He thought he’d read somewhere that cholera had something to do with diarrhea and most everyone who had this had that.

  The street was muddy and there was a bit of a taint to the air. Not just from the house where the boy was. Suddenly Bernie remembered a cartoon he’d seen somewhere with this cowboy apologizing to his horse as he hammered a cork into the horse ass. Something about an EPA regulation. That’s what he was smelling. Not really a barnyard smell. Not quite. An outhouse smell, that was it. The whole city of Moscow smelled faintly of outhouse. The problem was that Bernie didn’t know if it meant anything. He just didn’t know.

  “Okay, asshole,” Bernie muttered to himself. “What do you know? You must know something that will help.”

  There was one thing that he was pretty sure of. Bleeding didn’t actually help any disease he’d ever heard of. Maybe gangrene or something like that, but not an illness. He waved at one of the guards. “Listen, Pavel, I don’t know all that much about medicine but this much I do know. In my time we’ve known for centuries that bleeding people who are sick doesn’t help. I’ll write Prince Vladimir for confirmation, but I’m not waiting for an answer. The next time I see one of these guys bleeding someone with this, I’m going to bleed them. Cut their throat from ear-to-ear and bleed them right out.” Bernie looked Pavel dead in the eye and Pavel went a little pale.

  Then Bernie continued. “I know it’s not their fault. Doctors were still bleeding people in the Revolutionary War and that’s like 1776. But it doesn’t work! And it makes the patient weaker, more likely to die. If I have to take down a few of these guys to make it stop, I’m still saving lives.”

  Well, Bernie was in it now. He’d made his first medical pronouncement and it was a doozie. He knew that he wasn’t going to be able to leave it at that.

  In all the doctor shows back up-time, the doctors wore masks when they were doing surgery and he knew that when there was fear of an epidemic in places like Japan sometimes people wore masks. He knew that that was because some diseases were transmitted by air, by people sneezing on each other or even breathing on each other. Was this disease like that? Bernie didn’t know. He knew that in hospitals and restaurants they were fussy about washing your hands. And he remembered something about childbed fever being carried by doctors who didn’t wash their hands. Besides, all the hospital shows always had doctors and nurses washing their hands and wearing rubber gloves before and after they treated anyone. If the masks didn’t help, washing hands might. Or the other way around. Maybe if he could get people to do both it might help keep this sickness from spreading.

  Bernie started improvising. He sent one of the guards back to the Dacha to get anything they had on diagnosing disease. And while they were there, to pick up Anatoly Fedorov, the apothecary and Vitaly Alexseev, the barber-surgeon, who were staying at the Dacha.

  It turned out that there was almost nothing in the Dacha about diagnosing or treating disease. However, Anatoly and Vitaly had known Bernie for months by now and had talked to him before about up-time medical and sanitary practices. So while they weren’t entirely convinced of the importance of such things, they had at least been exposed to the germ theory of disease. They’d even seen a couple of pictures of cells. Not photographs, but drawings copied from up-time books.

  It was in their interest that the up-time techniques worked. It would give them an advantage over their competitors. This, it seemed, would make a decent test case. So they supported Bernie’s recommendations. For the next weeks Bernie, the guards, and the medical community, such as it was in seventeenth-century Moscow, fought a holding action against an enemy everyone except Bernie knew too well. Bernie worked as hard as anyone and in the process got up close and personal with the grinding poverty and squalor of seventeenth-century Russia.

  Were they successful? Who could say? The annual spring epidemic of typhoid fever was less severe in 1632 than it had been in 1631. Fewer people caught it and fewer of those who caught it died.

  The reason for fewer deaths could have been the washing of the hands. It could have been the masks. And it could have been the boiled water with a touch of salt and sugar that Bernie called Gatorade that they gave to the sick to try to stave off dehydration. It could be those things made a difference. It could also be the placebo effect of Bernie’s masks and his being an up-timer touched by God. Or it might have just been a mild year.

  The little boy died barely a day into the fight. But, though he would never know it, he left a legacy for Russia. By the time Bernie returned to the Dacha he knew that his getting it right made a difference. That difference was the difference between life and death. Not just for little kids who might catch a disease but for thousands of other kids and adults. Kids who would go hungry without better plows, or better crops. Craftsmen who couldn’t get their goods to market without better roads. What had been a job for Bernie Zeppi had become a calling.

  Chapter 18

  May 1632

  Bernie missed the progress meeting where Andrei Korisov announced the AK1. He was still in Moscow. Andrei didn’t let Bernie’s absence slow him down in the least. He didn’t believe that Bernie either needed, or deserved, much of the credit. “There is some loss of force from the gap between the firing chamber and the barrel, but surprisingly little. And a shield to protect the stock from outgassing must be installed. There is some danger from outgassing, but, again, the shield, plus moderate care, should avoid any serious problems?”

  Natasha didn’t scream at the man. Four of the servants in the Dacha had been debilitated by the squirts of gas from the gap between firing chamber and the barrel, and one poor lad had been killed when the firing chamber had broken though the stock and hit him in the head. What she really wanted to do was have Andrei Korisov shot with his own gun, but she couldn’t. He was a deti boyar, and one of Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev’s at that. It was early days yet, but Sheremetev was starting to get interested in the Dacha and what it was producing.

  She wanted Andrei Korisov out of the Dacha, but she couldn’t do it by punishing him for the people his experiments had hurt. Suddenly, she knew what to do. Vladimir had friends in the army and so did Boris. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was arguing that the arming of Russia shouldn’t be left in the Dacha, and he probably already had the full particulars about Andrei Korisov’s cut-up gun. In a few weeks, she would make a trip to Moscow, visit some of Vladimir’s friends in the army and, perhaps, Boris. Meanwhile, she held her face steady while Andrei Korisov gloated over his new toy.

  Then she went on to the next person.

  “I’ve produced electrical sparks, miniature lightnings,” Lazar Smirnov said. “But I can’t tell yet if they are producing the electromagnetic waves the papers talk about. I’ve made a crystal radio set, but I have no way of telling if it works. Certainly, one of them doesn’t, because the sparks aren’t making the crystal set make noise, which, if I’m reading all this right, it should.”

  “What about the heating units?” Natasha asked.

  “I think they’re too big for the batteries, Princess,” Lazar said. “I’ll know more when Bernie gets back and translates these pamphlets for me.”

  The princess looked over at Filip, knowing what he was going to say.

  “We had a boiler blow up,” Filip said. “We had used a copper pot and had a coppersmith weld the lid on. We had a steam pipe going from it to a bellows, the idea being to use the steam to expand the bellows. Using pressure to get work rather than work to get pressure, as it were. But we did something wrong. I’m not entirely sure what, but I think we had a valve in backwards.

  “We put the fire under it, we waited for the bellows to lift but it didn’t. We added more wood, and then the pot split. We had injuries, Princess. The
coppersmith’s apprentice was standing too close when it split. But we had no warning. Nothing at all to indicate what was going to happen. There must be a way to tell that sort of thing, but I don’t know. I won’t even know what to look for until Bernie gets back. I’ve written to your brother, asking for more information. Maybe internal combustion is safer.” Filip shrugged. “We just don’t know enough.”

  “I know and I am sorry, Filip,” Natasha said. “I went by and saw the boy. He is doing well.” She took a deep breath and continued, “Some good news to end the meeting. The plows and scrapers we sent to Murom are in use and our road preparation and plowing are well ahead of schedule. We’ll meet again when Bernie gets back. But know, my friends, that the Dacha is producing good results in the wider world.”

  Chapter 19

  June 1632

  Boris got back to Russia while the fight against the typhoid fever outbreak was still going on but after Bernie had gone back to the Dacha. The Grantville Section was, so far, not doing all that well. Boris was having organizational problems. Pavel Borisovich, his eldest son, shook his head at him. “They won’t authorize his transfer, Father.”

  “Why not?” Boris felt he was asking the question with considerable restraint.

  His son shrugged. “The official reason or the real reason?”

  “The official one; I know the real one.” The real reason was resentment. The patriarch had gotten Boris the Grantville Section and a reasonable budget. That only fueled the resentment. There were other people who were in line for the promotion; people with better family connections. That would normally mean that if a new section was established, those people might reasonably expect to be selected to head it up. Assistant section chiefs-in and out of the embassy bureau-were angry that Boris had been jumped a rank.

  “Priorities.” Pavel squinted and hunched over as though he expected a strong wind.

  “I was given to understand that we had a rather high priority?” Boris tried to keep his voice calm. Perhaps too calm.

  “I’m just passing on what I was told.” Pavel waved the report, then began to read. “‘Because of the requirements of the grain shipments to Sweden, Yuri Petrovich Gorbochov is desperately needed to expedite the harvest in the Gdansk region.’”

  “They picked one that has a higher priority than we do.” Boris had to give that section chief credit. It was cleverly done anyway. There might even be some truth to it.

  “Father, I’m not sure you do know the real reason. At least not all of them. I was talking to Petr Somovich. He said that a lot of people are starting to be afraid that this is a job that leads nowhere. Bernie is popular enough, though some of the healers are pretty upset with him. Not that much has come out of the Dacha yet. The scrapers, if they turn out to be useful, and a few other things. We have some books that mostly don’t make sense, not even to people who do speak English. Who cares that someone named Audubon painted birds? Russia has real issues to deal with.”

  “I know, Son.” Boris had to concede that some of the objections to working with the Dacha crew seemed to be valid. Among the other things that Boris had brought back was a down-time copy of the first book of the Encyclopedia International, 1963 edition, that had been in someone’s garage. They had refused the outright sale of the books but had rented them to Vladimir and his friends for an outrageous sum. “But you never know what might combine with something else to solve a problem. We saw it again and again in Grantville. There would be an article on something that they needed but it would be missing some vital piece of information. Then that needed piece of information would show up in the biography about the man who discovered it. Something like where he was when he found the first deposit of some rare earth.”

  “So you decided to send a copy of everything. I know, Father. I even agree.” Pavel’s face was serious, his dark eyes intent. “That doesn’t change the fact that spending the next ten years of their lives translating minutia about people who will never even be born seems a pointless, career-ending job to most people.”

  Boris sighed. “I had hoped it would be more popular. It is a secure position, doing important work, if not the most exciting. A safe place in the bureaus.”

  “That’s the problem, Father.” Pavel shrugged. “It’s not secure unless the Grantville Section becomes secure.”

  Boris was left with an office and a budget and not nearly enough people who read and wrote English and Russian. The budget… for the moment he had plenty of money. Well, lands. The government of Russia ran on a formalized barter system because there was not nearly enough money to support the economy they had. That would be changing soon. The Assembly of the Land and the Boyar Duma were almost agreed on the form the Czar’s Bank would take.

  The delay in the formation of the Czar’s Bank wasn’t caused just by the haggling over who got what. There was plenty of that, to be sure, but the politicians were also waiting for more excerpts from up-time economics books. They all wanted the money to work, even the fair number of boyars and other officials who didn’t believe that paper money would ever be worth anything.

  Two days after Boris got back he had a visit from Princess Natalia. She came to his home, had tea with his wife, and talked to him about getting Andrei Korisov out of her Dacha.

  “I don’t care that much that he is no doubt spying for Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev or one of that clan. Anyway, they have other spies, I don’t doubt. It’s what he’s doing with the servants of the Dacha. They are terrified to go near his little shop for fear of being drafted to pull a trigger on the latest of his experiments.”

  “Is he getting results?”

  Natasha sighed. “Yes, I think so, and so does Bernie. Not that Bernie is any more pleased about his methods than I am. Bernie and Filip worked up a string and pulley system for pulling the trigger and a paper cage to measure the outgassing.

  “Andrei Korisov thanked them for the paper cage because it gives a more accurate read on the direction of force than a screaming, running peasant does. He just grunted about the string and pulley system for bench-firing the rifle. Apparently, saving peasants from maiming or death is not an issue of concern. Bernie, just back from Moscow and the slow plague, wanted to kill him and I wanted to let him. Even Filip was upset, and you know how conservative he is.”

  Which Boris actually didn’t, but he nodded anyway. It was what you did when a princess told you that you knew something you hadn’t known. “So, Princess, clearly you have something in mind?” he asked when she had run down a little.

  “Yes. I want to give him to the army or to the Grantville desk. Anywhere. I don’t really care. I just want him out of the Dacha. Bernie will still consult on weapons development and maybe the army can find him some criminals to pull his triggers for him. As long as they aren’t my people, I don’t really care.”

  This was a very natural thing for a member of the nobility to say, though Boris knew most up-timers wouldn’t think so. There was a certain coldness that came with the territory. Let the monster go kill other people if it was inconvenient to stop him, just so long as they weren’t her people.

  “If you try to give him to me, the bureaus will scream,” Boris said with some regret. There were contracts to be had, not just with the main army but with the Streltzi of all the towns and cities in Russia. “I would suggest you give him to the Streltzi bureau, and through them to the army. They will be thrilled.”

  Which was what they ended up doing. The Gun Shop, as it came to be known, was placed at another small town about thirty miles south of Moscow and about twenty miles away from the Dacha. If there was need, they could get in touch with the Gun Shop or it could get in touch with them. And in the meantime, Andrei Korisov was out of Natasha’s hair and no danger to her servants.

  Chapter 20

  July 1632

  “Order Kameroff to take his battalion to the west.” Bernie grinned as the barely bearded Russian wearing two stars on his collar moved his finger along the map, over a set of hills then north
west along a river. “He is to take dispatch riders and notify us at the first sign of the enemy.”

  This was not the war games Bernie had played as a kid. There was no fog of war in Afrika Corps, or the other war games Bernie played. There, everyone could see what the other side was doing. Not in this game, which had been designed by army officers instead of geeks.

  “Yes, sir,” said the veteran with the graying beard halfway down his chest and a single bar on his collar. There was probably a bit of amusement in his voice. But if the “general” felt any offense at that amusement, he kept it to himself.

  The “lieutenant” left to deliver the orders. The “general’s” sigh was barely audible. This was his first time in the war room and he was clearly trying hard to keep up a good front.

  It was Bernie’s first time in the war room, too. Bernie had told some of the guardsmen at the Dacha about war games and football last winter. He’d drawn plays on a slate, and a small hex grid map on another. The guards had been less interested in the football plays than in the grid map. Perhaps because the grid map war game was a game that involved dice. And in Russia, in winter, playing dice was something to do. Anyway, Bernie had spent many evenings with the guards and the serving maids building a simple war game for the guards to play and insisting that the maids should be allowed to play if they wanted to.

  The guards gave in pretty easily. The girls were pretty, after all. The game was based on some battle that Ivan the Terrible had fought. The guards told Bernie the situation, how many troops of what kind Ivan had, how many the enemy had, the terrain, the supply situation, stuff like that, sometimes consulting with Father Kiril, a priest and historian, to get the details right. As they gave Bernie details, he would fold them into the game. The supply situation became supply units that had to travel back and forth to the front. Terrain was added to the map and restricted movements, till they had something approaching a working game.