1636 The Kremlin Games (24 page)

Perhaps Sofia should encourage Natasha to visit the estates in Murom. Take that new steam barge downriver. That should keep her distracted. Sofia could only hope that the distraction wasn’t fatal, considering that the first boiler they made had blown up.

*     *     *

“It must have come from the Dacha!” Sheremetev roared at the patriarch. For most people roaring at Patriarch Filaret was a serious, sometimes fatal, mistake. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev wasn’t most people. He was a cousin of the czar and one of the most powerful nobles in Russia.

“Do not shout at me, Cousin,” Filaret snarled back. “It may have come from the Dacha or it may have come from the bureaus—not even necessarily the Grantville Section. The same sort of thing is coming from Germany and Sweden. The up-timers’ founding fathers are often quoted.”

“Wherever it comes from, the writer, this Flying Squirrel, needs its pelt removed and publicly. We can’t allow this sort of rhetoric and you know it. After what that fool Zeppi did in Moscow last spring, anything attributed to an up-time source is given extra credence almost as though it were holy writ.”

“I know, and that is the very reason we must tread carefully. Aside from offending the Gorchakovs, who have shown themselves both loyal and of considerable financial worth to the czar, a raid or attack on the Dacha would engender quite a bit of ill-feeling among the people. Further, I don’t want to give it that much credence.”

Sheremetev wasn’t satisfied but Filaret wouldn’t budge. The American had become a danger to Russia, Sheremetev thought as he left the meeting. It was time to consider removing that danger. Besides, without the Zeppi fellow, the Sheremetev clan would have a better chance of getting control of the up-timer knowledge away from the Gorchakov clan.

Chapter 37

On the Oka River, between Moscow and Murom

August 1633

“Hey, Stinky. What do you have there?

Pavel Mikhailovich didn’t much like being called Stinky, since he didn’t stink any worse than his brother did. “I got a pamphlet, Shorty. There was this kid handing them out in Moscow.”

“What’d you want a pamphlet for that you can’t read?” Ivan Mikhailovich demanded. He didn’t much like being called Shorty, since his brother was only one inch taller than he was.

“Well, I figured you’d read it to me. Oh, that’s right! You can’t read either.” Pavel Mikhailovich made a rude gesture at his brother, then continued. “The kid stuck it in my hand. I wasn’t going to stop in the middle of a Moscow street and explain to him that I couldn’t read. So I stuck it in my pocket and forgot about it.”

Pockets, not entirely by chance, had become the mark of a well-dressed man—to the extent that someone had suggested a law forbidding them to peasants and
Streltzi.
The notion hadn’t gotten very far, but just the fact that it had been broached was enough to make pockets a fad.

“Fine, then. How’s the engine doing?” In theory, Ivan, being three years older, was the captain and Pavel was the engineer. In fact, they switched off and both turned their hands to whatever needed doing on the Gorchakov Steam Barge One. It was the only steam barge in Russia and it was brand new. The barge was thirty feet long and twelve feet wide. The front twenty feet had boxes and barrels like any barge on the Moskva river might. But the back ten feet were different. They contained a Frankenstein monster of an engine that James Watt wouldn’t have recognized in his worst nightmare. The engine started with a big iron pot, the boiler, which was connected to a big wooden tub by a copper pipe. More copper pipes led to two wooden cylinders, each about six feet long, held together by what a wine merchant would call an excess of barrel hoops.

Though you couldn’t see it from the outside, the inside of each cylinder had a piston a bit over a foot across. From the piston, a piston rod extended out of the cylinder and attached to a connecting rod, which attached to a flywheel, which was connected by way of a belt drive and an assortment of other wheels and belts to a rod on the end of which was a propeller. The power was controlled by a valve that restricted the flow of steam to the cylinders, and the direction of rotation by a lever that added a reversing gear.

“Well enough,” Pavel said. “It’s leaking a bit more than I like out of cylinder two. When we get to Murom, we should pull the cylinder head and check the greasing. But it should get us there.”

Ivan nodded. They had to do that every so often to one of the cylinders or the other. The inside of the cylinders were coated with lard, the steam melted the lard, and the piston shoved it to the ends of the cylinders.

Then he turned and went forward again.

*     *     *

Struck with an idea how he might twit his younger brother, when Ivan got to the middle of the barge he asked loudly, “Say, can anyone read? My brother can’t and he got given a pamphlet in Moscow.” The front half of the barge was stacked with boxes and barrels of goods from Moscow and the Gorchakov Dacha, on which sat half-a-dozen passengers, all of it, and them probably, headed for the Gorchakov family estate at Murom.

There was a general shaking of heads. The passengers were mostly
Streltzi
on this run, which varied a lot. But there were generally better odds of finding a literate person on the barge than most places. The barge made a local, then an express, run in both directions. This was the express run from Moscow to Murom, a bit under four hundred miles by river. They would next hit land in four days or so. For safety’s sake, they threw out an anchor and stayed in the middle of the river at night.

One woman asked, “What have you got?”

“Just a pamphlet some kid gave my brother in Moscow,” Ivan answered.

“Sorry I can’t help.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re sure to find someone in Murom who can read it to us. Why are you going to Murom?”

“I’ve got a cousin there. Maybe I can get work, what with all the new business Princess Natalia is promoting.”

*     *     *

The other passengers had similar stories. Looking for work, looking for opportunity. Bright people, hopeful people, but not literate people. So they wouldn’t find out what the Flying Squirrel had to say till they got to Murom.

Meanwhile, they cooked their meals over the boiler fire and had a generally good four-day vacation, talking about the goings on in the wider world.

“What’s the Dacha like?” the woman who had a cousin, second cousin actually, in Murom, asked the first night.

“Confusing.” Pavel laughed. “I don’t have any idea what they are talking about most of the time.”

“So how did you get the job?” asked a big man who was going to Murom in hopes of work as a blacksmith or maybe a foundry man. Not belligerently, just with the assurance that comes with being the biggest man around most of the time.

“Because we are very good boatmen,” Ivan said, with a touch of belligerence in his tone. This was their barge, after all.

The big man waved off any offense. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t doubt your skill, but I heard that those folks at the Dacha are dead set on reading and writing and figuring. I heard even the servants are learning to read at that Dacha place.”

“That’s true enough,” Pavel agreed after swallowing his mouthful. “But the princess said they’d never find enough river men to handle steam barges if they insisted that they all be able to read.”

“So they plan to make more of these?”

“They’re already making them at Murom,” Ivan confirmed. “We got the first one because we’re the best boatmen out of Murom and even the princess had heard about us.”

“We’re part of a test,” Pavel explained. “Us and the steam engine. We were shown how to operate the steam engine and sent out with it to see how it worked. Every time we go by the Dacha they ask us about what has gone wrong and how we fixed it. At first it was really bad, but we got to know the engine pretty quick and we have fewer breakdowns every trip.”

*     *     *

Not no breakdowns as it turned out. That trip, on the second day, they had a pipe come loose from the number two cylinder and they had to repair it as best they could with rags and pig fat and continue on. It was during the pig fat repairs that Pavel explained that what they had was a low-pressure steam engine. “See,” he explained amiably, “the piston is so big so that the pressure on any little bit of it can be less and you still get the same total power.”

Chapter 38

Grantville

September 1633

“So what else is on the list of impossible demands this week?” Brandy asked.

“Bernie, or rather ‘one of the brain cases,’ wants a computer. The patriarch wants proof of the dangers of lead poisoning and an alternative makeup, because certain women in Moscow are having fits. Also, tons of antibiotics. Apparently they are having trouble with the instructions already sent.”

“That’s not surprising. Cloramphenicol is doable, but not easy.” Brandy said.

Vladimir nodded. “I have one here from the Polish Section demanding a generator ‘if such things really exist.’ We sent one to Bernie a while back; that must be where they heard about it.”

“According to Natasha, they have a group at the Dacha who are hand-making generators and batteries. Why doesn’t the Polish Section get one from them?”

“Ah, that explains it.” Vladimir grinned. “The Polish Section wants a generator all right, but they don’t want to go through the Grantville Section or the Dacha to get it. Russian politics. I’ll direct them to the Dacha. Here’s one . . . they want the precise location of all gold mines in Russia. I already told them that the best we’ve found is general areas. So, make unreasonable demands of me, Brandy. I’m getting used to it.”

“Hmmm.” Brandy considered. “Hmmm. No one has ever suggested that to me before, I don’t think. I’ll hold the unreasonable demand for now and use it when it’s really inconvenient. For now, how about a reasonable demand? Let’s take off early? I want you to tell me about Moscow.”

Vladimir shrugged. “Why not? The demands will still be here tomorrow.”

*     *     *

It was three nights after the car had left for Russia that Vladimir made up his mind. He would ask for permission to marry the girl from the future. He pulled out a pen and began the two letters. One to Natasha informing her that he would be seeking Brandy’s hand and asking for her help in persuading the czar. One to the czar asking his permission to marry a foreigner. He would wait to ask Brandy until he had permission because he didn’t know what he would do if the permission was not forthcoming.

Having written those letters, Vladimir began to write this week’s report to the embassy bureau, attention Grantville Section. First he wrote about Hans Richter and the political implications that were already bouncing around central Germany. That was an event that would change the politics of Europe. He included some of the newspaper coverage and turned to the next item.

The steam engines are on order. The younger Herr Schmidt may prove even more suited to the new future that sits before us all than his father. I include fairly extensive notes on the tour of his plant. Herr Adolf Schmidt charged two thousand American dollars for that tour. He said he understands that he can’t prevent others from profiting from his work, but he can at least get them to pay for the privilege if he doesn’t charge too much. It would have cost more to steal the information, so I guess in this case he didn’t charge too much. I think we got our money’s worth, anyway.

In spite of your efforts in Murom, I don’t think the infrastructure is in place to support a steam engine factory in Russia like the one in Magdeburg. Herr Schmidt’s factory doesn’t exist on its own, but is a part of an industrial community. Herr Schmidt gets parts from three different foundries and is looking for more. The machines he uses to finish those parts were produced by other suppliers, mostly from near Grantville. But he is looking into having a tube bender made in Magdeburg. I mention this to emphasize again that what we need more than a steam engine shop or a gun shop—or any other shop—is that community of industry. A place where the parts for machines may be bought and new machines built, not out of raw iron ore but out of parts that are already on a shelf in another shop.

We do need steam engines, yes. Besides the tour and the order for two twelve- and four twenty-horsepower steam engines and the accompanying boilers and condensers, I have included the booklet that Schmidt Steam sells with instructions on how to make the less efficient, but easier to produce, low-pressure steam engines, which it seems every other blacksmith or carpenter in Germany is building. When combined with my notes on the tour it should give our craftsmen a better steam engine.

Rudlinus Nussbaum, who took me through the factory, explained it this way. There are two extreme forms of steam engine. The ones like they make in the factory are high-pressure steam engines that use what he calls super-heated steam to produce pressures of hundreds of pounds per square inch. That’s still lower than the pressures and heat in an internal combustion engine, but it’s very hot and very high pressure. Rudy, as he asked that I call him, said that a piston escaping from a high-pressure steam engine would go right through me and the door behind me. He then assured me that I was perfectly safe. Grinning like an idiot the whole time.

In any case, high-pressure steam engines require good quality steel and fairly tight tolerances. We have craftsmen that could handle the tolerances, but it would take a long time to build each cylinder.

However, there are also the low-pressure steam engines I sent you the booklet about. In general, a low-pressure steam engine uses steam that is not that much above boiling and works at pressures as low as a few pounds per square inch. Rudy said, “To get useful work out of that weak a head of steam, they use large cylinders and large pistons. A piston head with a diameter of one foot has a surface of 113 square inches. At a steam pressure of ten pounds per square inch, that comes to a stroke force of 1130 pounds or half a ton. Say half of that is lost to friction and other factors . . . that’s still 565 pounds of work. Just over a horsepower, assuming a foot-long cylinder and a cycle time of a couple of seconds. Actually, with a one-foot diameter, four-foot cylinder and a decent flywheel, at ten psi you should get about two and half horse power once it gets going.”