by Eric Flint
"Did you see anything in this house when you got back to work?"
"Like what?" he asked, and I was stumped. I didn't want to ask for evidence of someone shooting at the power plant. I'd learned from the Grantville police that it was bad to ask leading questions. "Well, any sign that something odd had happened here."
"Now that you mention it, there was something," he said, frowning. "That window was broken out, and there was a sort of sulfur stink in the air."
The window he pointed to had only a few fragments of greased paper around the edges. It faced the power plant, and someone had torn out the paper. When I walked over to the window, I could see powder burns on the sill. Someone had fired a black-powder rifle out the window from close by. "Tom? Take a look."
Fortune didn't smile on us when we asked around, nobody remembered hearing the shots fired. People told us that the power plant makes odd noises on occasion, and it seemed likely that the shooter had managed to muffle the noise of his gun by shooting from inside the house.
Around noon, Tom suggested we break for lunch and recommended a tavern out by the main road. The place had decent food, and they'd set up tables in the shade of a big tree. Halfway through our meal, when the serving maid came to ask if we wanted more beer, I thought to ask the same questions I'd been asking in the camp.
"Around the time of the Croat raid, did you happen to see anyone around here with a long rifle?"
She frowned. "There was a man here the night before who had a big flintlock rifle. He said he was visiting a friend in the camp."
"Can you describe him?"
"Weatherbeaten, thin, he had a brown horse with a white cross on its nose. By his accent, he was Franconian."
"Have you seen him before then, or since?" I asked.
She hadn't. I paused, puzzled, and then looked across the table at Tom. "A jager, it would seem, and from Franconia. How in creation would such a man know to shoot at your, what do you call them, insulators."
"It's an obvious way to attack a power plant," he said.
"Obvious to you," I said, "But you had to spend half the morning explaining things to me enough that I could understand what he'd done. Someone here, someone working in your plant, must have taken the time to explain the same things to that man, or more likely, to whoever hired him."
"You think we have a spy in the power plant?"
I nodded.
***
When I got back to the Grantville police station, Angela Baker asked what I'd found. When I told her, she immediately dialed the telephone and asked for Chief Frost. "Yes," I heard her say "I know he's at the wedding banquet, but he should hear this himself." There was a pause. "Yes, I suppose it's poor form to walk out on the king, but if I can't get Chief Frost, then I need to speak with Mackay immediately."
She looked up at me with a grin. "I still can't believe we have a king here in…" Someone on the other end of the telephone must have spoken, because she stopped suddenly and then handed me the phone.
"John Leslie here," I said, using my best telephone manners. It was Chief Frost.
I went on to tell what I'd seen at the power plant, leading up to my guess that there was a spy in the plant to teach a German huntsman what exactly he needed to shoot at.
"Good Job," the Chief Frost said. "And thanks for helping cover for us when we're stretched thin. I'll mention your work to Colonel Mackay, and please, write up a proper report, or have Angela help you write it up. I'll forward a copy to Rebecca."
I didn't expect Chief Frost to say he'd forward a copy to Rebecca Abrabanel. To hear Grantville's policemen talk, you'd think nobody ever reads their reports. Now, my report was going to be read, not by some clerk, but by one of the most important people in Grantville.
Angela was a big help with the report, but we took frequent breaks when the telephone rang or a garbled burst of static on the radio needed action.
On one of the telephone calls, Angela put her hand over the telephone mouthpiece. "Power plant again," she said to me, and then uncovered the mouthpiece. "I think you should speak to Sergeant Leslie, he's the one who figured it out this morning."
When I took the receiver, the man on the other end introduced himself as Scott Hilton. "I'm the steam engine project shift supervisor for the power plant. Tell me why you think there's a spy in the plant," he said.
When I finished answering his question, he sighed. "I hate to say it, but I don't think this is our first attack. When I heard there might be a spy here, I didn't want to believe it, but at the same time
…" He stopped, and there was an uncomfortable pause. "Well, I wanted to hear it from you before I go off half cocked."
I had to grin at the American expression comparing a man to a half-cocked pistol. "So are you fully cocked now?" I asked.
"I suppose so," he said, with a chuckle. "As I said, I think there were other attacks on the plant."
"Why?"
"We've had accidents," he said. "We expected some accidents, but there've been some odd ones. We're trying to build machines none of us are really prepared to build, you know."
I didn't know, but I didn't interrupt him.
"When you've got enough plain ordinary accidents, it's easy to think that everything that goes wrong is an accident. Now that we know someone's trying to attack us, I'm pretty sure that some of those accidents weren't so accidental. I just talked it over with Landon, my boss, and he agrees. There are two that we're pretty sure of, a main bearing failure and a cylinder head that burst."
"I'm afraid I don't understand. What's a main bearing, and what's a cylinder head."
He paused for a few seconds. "Tell you what. My wife and I will feed you dinner tonight, and then I'll give you a quick lesson on steam engines. That way, when you do come out to the plant, things'll make a little sense."
He gave me directions to his house before he hung up. All the while, Angela was watching me. "It sounds like you're not done with the power plant," she said.
"It seems that there might have been other attacks."
"Let's finish today's report first, before you start on tomorrow's work," she said. "Tomorrow, take better notes so this job won't be so hard!"
***
Scott Hilton lived up the slope on the northeast side of town, far enough from the main roads that the Croats hadn't gotten into his immediate neighborhood. The Hilton house was what the Americans call a foursquare, two stories, with bedrooms above and living area below. As I started up the steps to the large front porch, the silence was shattered by a boy's bellow.
"Ma, he's here!"
Two boys disappeared into the front doorway as I stepped onto the porch. As it developed, there were five Hilton children. Lisa, the oldest, tried to help control the younger ones. Hans and Jacob were the two who'd announced me, and there was a toddler underfoot as well as a baby. There was also a middle-aged German woman, Maria.
Dinner was noisy. Sylvia, Scott's wife, seemed to thrive on the disorder. Between interruptions, she managed to give a short history of the family. "Hans and the two babies, they were the Zimmermann family, from a little village north of here. Maria took care of them after their place was burned out. We took them in after they showed up at church."
"Mister Hilton, how long have you worked at the power plant," I asked, as the children's full stomachs began to quiet them down.
"About a year, Sergeant. Before the Ring of Fire, I worked in Fairmont, that was a town off beyond where Rudolstadt is now. When they asked if anyone knew anything about steam engines, I said yes. I've been at the power plant ever since."
Sylvia interrupted. "The one thing Scott didn't tell me when we got married was his fixation on steam. Just about every weekend, it seems, we would go traipsing off to the darndest places to take photos of greasy old pieces of junk."
He chuckled. "Right, only now, that photo collection is a gold mine and I'm working full time, and then some, trying to recreate some of that junk."
"You're not going to show him you
r photo collection!" she said.
"No," he said, pushing himself away from the table. "Come down to the cellar, I want to show you a little steam engine."
There was a half-cellar under the downhill side of the house, and half of that was a small workshop. After Scott turned on the light, he pulled a tray of machinery off of a shelf.
"This here's a toy steam engine," he said. "My father brought it back from Germany when I was a kid. This half is the boiler," he said, pointing to a shining round barrel a bit bigger than my fist. "It was supposed to burn a special fuel, but I ran out of that years ago, so I stuffed the burner with rags and if you soak it with alcohol, you can make it work. Let me fire it up for you."
Five minutes later, with the boiler half full of water and the burner rag saturated with gin, blue flames engulfed the boiler and a puddle of blue crept out from the copper shell around the boiler.
"Don't worry about the fire," he said. "So long as it stays on the metal base, we won't burn down the house. While we wait for the water to come to a boil, take a look at the engine itself."
There was a wheel, he called it a flywheel, and when he spun the wheel with his fingers, it cranked a pair of plungers in and out of a metal post off to the side of the flywheel. The plungers were piston rods, and the metal post held the cylinders.
"Why is this piston rod bigger than that one," I asked, only to find out that there was more to learn. There was only one cylinder and one piston rod. The smaller rod was called the valve rod.
About then, the boiler began to whistle. "That's the safety valve," Scott said. "When the boiler is up to pressure, it lets off the extra steam into a whistle. That tells us it's time to run the engine, and letting off the extra steam keeps the boiler from exploding."
As he spoke, he turned a little wheel with his fingertips. "This is the throttle valve," he said, as steam began to hiss out from around the piston rod and the valve rod. "Give the flywheel a bit of a spin with your finger."
I did, and to my surprise, the flywheel began to turn faster and faster, until the machine was humming and the spokes and other moving parts were nothing but a blur.
"Too fast," he said, turning the throttle wheel slowly back. The engine slowed, until it was chugging along at the tempo of a fast march.
"What makes it go?"
"There's a piston in the cylinder, and the steam can push it from one side or from the other. The piston pushes the piston rod, and that turns the crank. Each time the piston reaches one end or the other of the cylinder, the crank slides the valve the other way. That reverses the direction the steam is pushing the piston."
"So what use is it?" I asked, fascinated but puzzled.
"This one is no use at all," Scott said, grinning, "except as a toy for overage boys like me. What we're trying to do out at the power plant is build fourteen machines like this, except a whole lot bigger. Those machines will be able to generate all the electric power Grantville needs."
"But you already have a power plant," I said.
"Yup, but the machines in that plant need supplies we can't get from anywhere in the world, not since the Ring of Fire. We might be able to run the old machines for another year, if we're really lucky. Machines like this toy, though, we can make all the parts ourselves and we don't even need special oil. Beef tallow should work just fine to oil it, and if we can get enough whale oil or even olive oil, that'll be even better."
"Should we add more fuel to the fire?" I asked, as I noticed that the blue flames around the boiler were almost completely out.
"No, this fuel was meant to be drunk, not burned," he said, picking up the toy steam engine and blowing out the last remaining flames. "Come upstairs and we'll share a drink while I tell you something about the problems we've been having."
He put the toy steam engine back on its shelf and picked up the bottle of gin before leading me back up the stairs. "Have you ever had a Martini?" he asked, on the way up.
"A what?"
"Here, sit, I'll make you one," he said, waving me into his parlor. "I've had a bit of trouble getting Vermouth, but I think I've finally got my hands on something that works."
He disappeared into the kitchen with the bottle of gin, and in a minute, came out and handed me a glass of cold clear liquid with ice cubes and a pickled olive floating in it.
"To the king," he said, raising his glass before he took a sip.
"And to Grantville," I said, returning the toast. I'd heard enough of the American attitude toward nobility in general to understand that his toast was unusual. I imitated him, taking just a sip of my drink after the toasts.
Scott launched into the history of the power plant over his drink. "Unit Five, that's the big turbogenerator out at the power plant. It isn't likely to outlast the year. Right now, it's generating almost all our electric power, and we've got to build replacements. We knew that much as soon as we came through the Ring of Fire. The oil filter system and oil are our big problem. We've even got two guys trying to re-refine the oil, but even if they're successful, something else will probably go wrong."
I was totally lost, but one thing puzzled me more than all the rest. "Unit Five? Does that mean there's also a Unit Four?"
"I asked that too, after I started at the plant. Each new generator at the plant gets a number, in order. When they built the plant back in the 1920's, over seventy years before the Ring of Fire, it was a much smaller place, with two units, numbers one and two. They were only a few megawatts each. Then they enlarged the place in the 1930's and 1940's and put in two new units, three and four. Those two might have added up to fifty or a hundred megawatts, and once they were working, they scrapped one and two. Now, the hall that used to hold one and two is the plant machine shop. After World War II, fifty years before the Ring of Fire, they replaced Units Three and Four with Unit Five. That's about two hundred megawatts. The space where Units Three and Four used to be is where we're building our new units."
"What's a megawatt?" I asked, befuddled. "Are they like the kilovolts I heard talk of this morning?"
"Yes and no," he said, launching into a confusing description of the difference between force and power. I must have looked baffled, because he gave up halfway through, took a sip of his drink, and started over. "Think about a mill," he finally said. "You can measure the power it takes to turn the millstone in watts, or you can measure it by how many horses it takes to turn the wheel. One horsepower is about 750 watts. Anyway, two mills might need the exact same amount of power, but one could get that power from a high wheel with just a trickle of water, while the other gets it from a low wheel in a broad stream. You can think of volts as the height of the fall."
He paused to pick the olive out of his glass and pop it into his mouth. "Ah, these Italian olives are pretty good."
All I had left in my glass were two cubes of ice and an olive, so I imitated him. I don't eat olives very often, but it did seem better after soaking in my gin martini.
"Earlier, you said you'd had lots of trouble with accidents," I said, after spitting the olive pit into my glass. "And then you said you expected lots of accidents. Why?"
He sighed. "We're in way over our heads, that's why. Nobody in Grantville has ever built a steam engine bigger than a few horsepower, and now we need to build an engine with a thousand horsepower. Andy Frystack has built little engines, and he's a good machinist. The people at the power plant know steam, but not piston engines.
"Then, think about the size we need. The engines I've tracked down that put out a thousand horsepower all run over a hundred tons of iron, and we want 14 of the things. That's a lot of iron. Even if we can get the iron, who around here can cast pieces that big?
"Accidents? We've had castings break. Bad foundry work is the obvious explanation. We've had steel bolts snap. We might have made a mistake guessing the force they could handle. We've had bearings fail for lack of oil. We're used to automatic oiling systems, we probably didn't oil them enough. We've been lucky, so far. Not too many pipes have bu
rst, and nobody's been killed, but we've come very close to catastrophe.
"Before you go inside that plant, I want to make sure you understand that it's a dangerous place."
"I got a lecture on the danger of electricity when I visited this morning." I said.
"It's more than that," Scott said. "We're working with chunks of iron that weigh a ton or more. Chunks of stone, too, for the engine foundations. Be careful what you walk under. Steam pipes are hot. We work with superheated steam at four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. That's a high enough pressure that it is like working with gunpowder. Steam pipes can explode like bombs, and the cylinder of a steam engine can shoot a piston just as well as a cannon can shoot a cannonball."
***
Scott Hilton met me at the power plant the next morning and led me into the building. "This is the hall they made for Units Three and Four," he said, as I gawked at the scene. "Now, we've built Unit Six at the far end, and we're building Units Seven, Eight and Nine."
The room was huge, filling perhaps a quarter of the whole power plant. Huge windows along the south and west walls spread a soft light through the room. The place reminded me of a cathedral, except for huge machinery and construction toward the east end and a work crew digging a pit toward the middle.
Scott led me to the construction area. A crew of masons were at work there, filling a newly dug pit with stonework. Scott's explanation mostly went over my head. "This is the foundation for Unit Eight," he said. "Parts of it stand up high to hold the cylinders, but we need access to the steam and condensate pipes, and of course, there's the pit for the generator and flywheel."
While we watched the masons, a huge door at the west end opened to admit a four-horse team hauling a heavy freight wagon.
"Ah," Scott said. "They're delivering a stone for Unit Eight. Watch."
At first I didn't notice, but there was great bridge spanning the width of the room and it was moving toward the freight wagon. As a huge hook lowered from the bridge, I realized that it was a crane. When it reached the wagon, the teamsters hung their load from it, a single large stone.
