by Eric Flint
Yossie enjoyed the view of the thick forests covering the hills but he wondered why the cleared land in the valley and along the conveyor looked so poorly tended. Much of the land looked like it had been roughly plowed and then abandoned to grow weeds and scrub.
Around midmorning, Ron Koch called a break. "Does anyone have questions?" he asked.
Many of the men were drinking water from strange conical paper cups, but Yossie ignored the offer of a drink. He was suspicious of the water and he was puzzled about the kosher status of the cup. A tin cup would have posed no problem, but paper cups were a novelty and he doubted that the glue holding them together was made from kosher hide.
"What was this thing?" someone asked, pointing to the spidery structure of the conveyor.
"A conveyor belt," Ron Koch said. "It was used to move waste from the coal washing plant to the waste pond. The pond was just outside the Ring of Fire, so we need a new place to put our waste.
"There was a sheet like a wide belt that rode on these rollers. The belt carried the waste. We removed the belt already. We can use it down at the mine when other belts break. We need to get all the iron here, that is your job."
"Do we get to keep these helmets?" someone called out.
"Yes, so long as you work for the mine. If you quit your job, you must return them."
"I thought we were going to mine coal," someone else said.
"We will, "Ron said. "And soon, I hope. First, though, we need to get the mine ready. For that, we need to make some things from the iron we get here."
"But where is this coal?" another man asked. It was Thomas Schmidt, the man Yossie had spoken with on the bus.
"The Pittsburgh coal is about four hundred feet below you," Ron answered. "There are other layers, but that is the big one."
"When we came here this morning, you called this place the mine," another man said. "I'm a miner, and I still see no mine. Where is the hole in the ground?"
"All the buildings down there are part of the mine," Ron said. "See those towers with great wheels on their tops? Those are the headframes, the hoists built over the holes. The west one is for lifting people in and out, the east one is for lifting coal. The big towers are silos for storing coal. The building between them is for washing the coal."
After the break, Bob Eckerlin left them, and Yossie was paired with Thomas Schmidt. "So Joseph," Thomas said, as they worked at opposite ends of a roller. "You said you came from some town near Frankfurt. Was it a Protestant town?"
Yossie knew he was being asked his religion, but he wanted to avoid that question, so he answered literally. "Hanau is just up the river Main from Frankfurt. That land is all borders, with Catholics to the south, Lutherans to the north, and Calvinists to the east. All of them come together in Hanau, and we have a colony of Walloon Calvinists too."
"Before I came to Grantville, I would have thought that was crazy," Thomas said. "Now, I am not so sure."
"Grantvillers are a shock," Yossie said. "I have never met anyone like them."
"Where I come from, we were all Lutherans," Thomas grumbled.
"Where is that?" Yossie asked, before putting his weight into loosening the next bolt.
"North of here, on the edge of the Harz mountains, a town called Thale." Thomas grunted as he started the bolt turning on his end. "It was too close to Magdeburg so we came south when foragers began stripping the countryside all around. I thank God that we left when we did."
He paused, with a pained look on his face. "Just a few weeks ago we had to run again. A band of stragglers came and burned the village outside Jena where we were staying, may they be eternally cursed. We didn't run far enough the first time."
Thomas and Yossie lifted the roller free and set it on the edge of the walkway, and then Thomas spoke again. "Why did you leave Hanau with the war so far away from you?"
"The man I worked for died, may his memory be a blessing," Yossie answered. He didn't want to talk about himself, so he changed the subject as they began work on the next roller. "Thomas, you said that you were a smith. I know a little bit about smithing. How did they make this thing?"
Thomas looked baffled. "I have no idea. There are no hammer marks on the ironwork, and all these bolts and rollers seem perfectly identical."
That topic occupied them for a good part of the day as they worked their way up the conveyor. Yossie wasn't bothered by the identical bolts because of his experience with printing type, but he had to explain to Thomas how type is cast so that all the copies of each letter are perfectly identical.
In turn, Thomas had to explain why the ironwork bothered him so much. "This is all wrought iron, it must be," he said, banging his wrench against one of the bars of the conveyor framework. "Nothing else would ring like that. If it is wrought iron, it was hammered to shape, but there are no hammer marks."
He paused to run his fingers over one of the joints in the structure. "These two bars look like they were joined by melting. I could join lead bars that way, but these are iron. Nothing I know would make enough heat to do that, but most of the joints in this thing are made this way. It is as if welding was easier than riveting."
When they stopped work for the midday meal, the divide between Germans and Grantvillers was apparent in a new way. The Germans had all been told to bring food. They had, in bundles or in baskets. In contrast, all of the Grantvillers seemed to have metal boxes or pails to hold their food. Many of them had metal bottles of some evil smelling black drink that smoked as if it was hot, even after being left all morning.
Yossie's bundle held a hard chunk of the sausage he had helped make less than a month ago in Kissingen, a small loaf of home-baked bread, and a bottle of watered wine. Some of the Germans had less, few had anything more elaborate.
Yossie considered the bread he was eating to be something of a miracle. The house they were living in had a very strange kitchen, with an even stranger oven. They had not even understood that it was an oven until the old lady who owned the house showed them how it worked, and then Yitzach ben Zvi had filled the whole house with smoke when he lit a fire in it to make it kosher.
After he'd eaten, Yossie left the group to say the grace after meals. He walked well away before he pulled his bentscher out of his pocket. He didn't want anyone to see the Hebrew text of the slim little prayerbook or to hear him chanting the long prayer in that tongue. Grantville was supposed to be indifferent to the fact that he was a Jew, but Yossie wasn't ready to test that indifference, much less the tolerance of his German coworkers.
That afternoon, there seemed to be no end to the job of removing rollers. Yossie and Thomas were getting better at it, but the number of rollers to be removed was immense. Guessing the total number was an interesting challenge. The conveyor had a set of three rollers every few feet, and if it ran all of the way to the cliffs of the Ring of Fire without a change of direction, they agreed that there must be well over a thousand rollers to remove.
As the afternoon passed, Yossie told stories of the trip east. He said something of the group he'd traveled with, but he carefully avoided all mention of religion. What seemed to interest Thomas most were stories of the smithies and glassworks he'd seen in the Spessart and in the Thüringerwald.
In turn, Thomas told of the Harz mountains south of his home in Thale. He said nothing of his encounters with the war, his departure from Thale or his more recent flight. He'd hinted that he had a family, but he never mentioned them. Instead, he focused on his old smithy and the peaceful years before the war had come to his home.
By the end of the afternoon they were working in silence, and they remained silent on the bus ride home. It had been a long hard day doing very strange work. Yossie was content to sit quietly on the bus and passively watch as it followed the road into Grantville.
When he said goodbye to Thomas, Yossie was startled to realize that, for the first time in his life, he was not an alien Jew among Germans. Despite the gulf that separated them, he and Thomas were as similar as brothers
when compared to the Grantvillers. They were two strangers in a very strange land.
When Moses had named his son Gershem, which means "a stranger there," he was describing his experience in the land of Midian. Yossie wondered if Midian could possibly have been as strange to Moses as Grantville was to him.
Sixteenth of Sivan, 5391 (June 16, 1631)
By Tuesday of the next week, they had stripped almost everything from the upper end of the conveyor. Where it had once gone somewhere beyond the wall of cliffs that bordered the Ring of Fire, it now ended above a small hollow. From there to the cliffs, it had been reduced to bare ironwork, and parts of that had already been cut up.
Yossie spent the morning assigned to work with an American woman named Gayle. He had heard rumors that one of the American miners was a woman, but that didn't prepare him for the fact. From a distance, he might not have known that she was a woman until he heard her voice. She was dressed like a man, in blue twill trousers just like the men of Grantville wore, and her helmet was no different from a man's.
Gayle was an electrician, which meant that she worked with the mysteries of electricity. Yossie already knew that the Americans burned electricity in their lights. Apparently, the conveyors had also burned electricity. For the entire morning, Yossie helped Gayle disassemble the electric wires for a device Gayle called a conveyor drive motor.
Every day, Yossie had been assigned to one of the Americans for at least an hour, and sometimes much longer. Ron had explained that he wanted the Americans and Germans to work together so that they would learn from each other, and he wanted to let the Germans try their hands at many different jobs.
Yossie could see the wisdom in the American plan. At the same time, he felt awkward being paired with a woman. In the world he knew, it was improper for a man to touch a woman who was not his close relative, and even taking something from her hand or handing something to her was improper.
The right way for a man to give something to a woman was to set it down somewhere within her easy reach. He expected her to do the same when passing tools to him. Again and again, Yossie was frustrated. Either there was no place to set what he was trying to give Gayle, or she would try to pass things directly to him.
Gayle seemed mildly amused by his awkwardness. Several times, she asked him what was wrong, making it clear that she knew that he was embarrassed. Unfortunately, Yossie's rudimentary English and Gayle's rudimentary German didn't allow for any useful explanation.
* * *
After their lunch break, Thomas Schmidt called Yossie over. "You said you'd done some smith work? Do you want to be my helper?"
"What help do you need?"
"Herr Koch wants a smithy. They have some marvelous tools here. They even have saws that can cut iron and torches that can melt it. Those will wear out, though, and they say that they can't be replaced. If I can make tools to cut iron, I can replace them."
Yossie followed Thomas past the towering iron structure that stood over the entrance to the mine. The Grantvillers called it the pit head. A low building next to it housed some kind of machine that made a constant low rumble.
The building beyond the pit head had doors along one wall that were wide enough to drive a wagon through. Thomas walked around the end of the building to a newly built shed where a mixed group men were at work.
"Here is our new forge," Thomas said, gesturing expansively. "It isn't much yet, but we will see what we can do."
The smithy was roofed with the rippled metal that was used for so many buildings at the mine. A half-built chimney stood over a hearth that filled half of the open side of the shed. On the opposite side, there was a door into the larger building.
"None of that is ready yet." Thomas said. "Come in here. This is the mine workshop. They have a bench and wonderful tools we can try using to make the tools we want."
"What are we trying to make," Yossie asked. Rows of shelves filled one side of the room, and several strange iron machines stood on the floor.
Thomas went to a bench along the back wall of the workshop. "Here is the problem," he said, picking up a brightly polished piece of silver. It was bent into a broad U shape, with a dull metal ribbon stretched across the opening and a black handle on one side. "This is one of their metal cutting saws. See how fine the teeth are? It is like a file cut into a slice the thickness of a ribbon."
Thomas began to saw a rusty iron bar, and then paused after only a few strokes. "The trouble is," he said, "these saw blades are not made to be sharpened. They have hundreds of them, but when they are gone, they will have no way to do this kind of cutting. Here, finish this for me. Be careful with this beautiful saw."
Yossie took the saw and set gingerly to work. The iron bar was as big around as his thumb and rusty, with an odd pattern of lumps along it. The saw teeth cut into the metal bar quickly once Yossie learned to bear down properly.
"What are we making?" Yossie asked, after he'd cut halfway through.
"Chisels," Thomas said. "They have some simple chisels, but to cut up the conveyor segments, we need bull-nosed cutting chisels. I think the Americans doubt I can cut wrought iron pieces that big. While we wait for the forge to be ready, we can do some work using these American tools."
After Yossie had cut a foot-long chunk from the bar, Thomas showed him how to reposition the bar in the bench vise so Yossie could start a second cut. While Yossie sawed, Thomas set to work grinding the first piece to shape.
"Stop," Thomas said, after Yossie had cut most of the way through a second piece. "Save the saw. You can break the bar now, just bend it back and forth." Then he smiled. "Did I tell you, my wife and I have moved into a house? We have said goodbye to the grounds of the Grantville fair."
"What kind of house?" Yossie asked, after he'd broken the bar. Thomas had said "we" when speaking of his flight, but he'd never said a thing about his family.
"It is not a whole house, just a room. The couple that live there had three children, but two were left behind by the Ring of Fire, so now we have the room those children lived in."
The conversation ended while Thomas went back to grinding, but continued when Yossie finished cutting off the next piece. "How well do you communicate with your new landlord?" he asked.
"Not well. They have a little phrase book, but most of the phrases are very strange." Thomas chuckled. "It's as if the book was printed for use by the ignorant sons of wealthy noblemen."
"What do you mean?"
"There are so many phrases for dealing with servants. It is all very polite and the servants are doing jobs I do not fully understand. How to tell your coach driver to stop, how to ask your servant for more food, how to tell a porter where to put your baggage. Still, the little book is useful. Here, let me show you how to use this grindstone."
Yossie was fascinated by the grindstone. A touch of a little silver toggle on the machine would start or stop it. The stone was tiny compared to every grindstone he had ever seen. When it was running, it spun incredibly fast, and when he touched his work-piece to the turning stone, the stream of sparks was as intense as a flame. He immediately began to think about how such a machine might be applied to type cutting.
Thomas set to work with the saw while he let Yossie try to duplicate the chisels he'd ground. The most time consuming part of the job involved grinding the front third of each chisel to taper down to half of its original diameter. With that done, the final job was to grind a blunt triangular tip.
"How is this?" Yossie asked, handing Thomas the result.
"Not bad for a first effort, but the tip should be off center. The short edge sits in the groove you are cutting."
It took two more tries before Thomas approved the result. "Good. After we case harden it and temper it, it should cut well. This iron the Americans call rebar seems to be very good stuff, but we will learn the truth when we put it to the fire."
Yossie understood case hardening and tempering. He'd helped harden and temper many type punches in the print shop in Hanau. Th
ose punches had been tiny compared to the chisels he and Thomas were making, but like the chisels, they were made to cut metal.
"Why are we making so many chisels?"
"You only need one chisel if you have a grindstone to sharpen it every time it gets dull, but when you are up in the hills trying to cut one of those conveyors, will you take this grindstone with you? A bundle of spare chisels is what you want." Thomas paused. "How are you getting on with your landlord?"
"It is easier now that two of my group have left." Yossie said.
"They found another house?"
"No, the two merchants I came with decided to buy a load of stuff these Americans don't value. Now, they're on a trip selling it so they can buy livestock to bring back."
"Where will they find any buyers? These Americans have wonders, but who today has money to buy? And where will they find livestock? The foragers have stripped the Saale valley."
"Things are better to the west," Yossie said. "They went over the hills to Hildburghausen, we met a merchant there on our trip east. If there is no stock to be had there, they may have to travel as far as Neustadt. There is a big cattle market there."
"I wish them luck in their venture," Thomas said. "This town has too many unused pastures. The open land around this mine could probably support a good herd."
"That was our thought exactly," Yossie said. "There's idle land above Deborah, too. They say it's an old mine pit that was filled in, but it has a good fence around it."
Shortly after they went back to work, they were interrupted by one of the Americans stepping into the shop.
"Tom, come," he said, and then gestured to Yossie. "You too."
"What's going on?" Thomas asked.
"Who knows?" someone said. "They didn't say."
After they'd stood in the crowd for a minute, Thomas picked up the thread of their interrupted conversation. "So how are you getting on with your landlord?"
