Grantville Gazette, Volume 40 (22 page)

"So even if right now . . ." Then Benhard Kunze stopped. "Why not simply make the power here and leave out the batteries? Are they necessary to the process?"

"Not exactly, but if you just use the generator you are going to lose power a lot. Like when the wind isn't blowing or when you change horses or whatever you're using to turn the generator. Batteries take inconstant power and make it more constant. They also let you move it."

Bernhard was nodding. "An imperfect world. Even with your up-time magic, it is still imperfect. I won't answer you today. I will need to ask around, but I am interested and I think we can work a deal."

****

"
Guten Tag
, Fraulein Ritterin."

"Hello, Elzbeth," Bernhard Kunze's wife said. "I wanted to see an up-timer dwelling. It is fairly small, isn't it?"

"Yes, but Herr Bozarth is a widower and he was on what the up-timers call a 'fixed income.' I don't understand how it all worked. I think it means he was on town charity, but for the whole up-time world. Besides, even if it is small, it's very well appointed." She showed Frau Ritterin around while Gordon grumbled about hen parties and asked to be helped out onto the drive.

Elzbeth took Gordon's chair down the three steps to the driveway and Gordon, using the railing, managed the three steps with no difficulty. After they got Gordon onto the drive, Elzbeth and Marlene had a nice talk about the batteries and what Elzbeth had seen when they were disassembled at the high school.

****

"I want three-fifths of the business," Bernhard Kunze said calmly

Gordon choked on his beer. "Three-fifths? Sixty percent! Control? For what? A few introductions and translating? That's worth maybe five percent."

"Where will your factory be, Gordon? Do you have room for it on your lot? Will the bank advance you enough money to buy the land to build your factory? How much is the land going to cost? What about construction? How much will it cost you to have a factory built on the land? Where will you find employees? I understand you need acids, hence the name lead acid batteries. Where will you get it? Do you know some alchemists?"

"And you're going to do all that for me?"

"Some of it," Bernhard agreed. "Most of it. I hold the lease on a village just outside of town."

Gordon shook his head. "We will need power from Grantville. Five miles wouldn't be that long to run power lines up-time but . . ."

"Very well. I can acquire the rights to a village that had half its land cut away by the Ring of Fire. The villagers have no place to farm and the
lehen
holder is quite upset."

"Thomas?" Marlene asked.

"Yes, your brother. He wants to make nice to the up-timers because Junker is being such a problem . . ."

Marlene sniffed. She was of the opinion that "Junker" and "problem" were synonyms. "So you're going to take advantage of Thomas again? I'm never going to hear the end of it from that wife of his." She grinned.

"Thomas wants out. The farmers can't afford the rent with half the land gone to the Ring of Fire and he doesn't want to throw them off the land or be sued for the land they have leased that isn't there anymore. If we buy the
lehen
on Bechstedt, we can move the farmers to Pennewitz, those who want to continue farming. Meanwhile we can convert Bechstedt from a farming village to a battery producing village."

"What is Bechstedt like?" Elzbeth asked.

"It's a village right on the edge of the Ring. There isn't much there. Over half their farmland was in the Ring and it's gone. We can certainly get power there. Those who don't want to move are looking for a new occupation. That will provide us a ready-made labor force, even if unskilled."

"That sounds good but its still not enough for me to give up control."

"Have you considered the cost?" Bernhard said "Will the bank front you the money to rent the village of Bechstedt and build your factory?

"You say you need power and Bechstedt is only yards away from the edge of the Ring of Fire, true, but even so they will have to make connections, will they not? That will cost money. How much money can you afford? How much will the bank advance you?"

"Not much," Gordon admitted. "Look, I have some stuff. I have an old truck. It ain't much and I can't afford to have it converted to natural gas or alcohol like some are doing, but if you could it could give you a good start on a transport company."

It took more negotiating and Gordon ended up giving up his microwave as well as the truck, but he argued Bernhard down to forty percent and got his promise to help in getting the line run out to Bechstedt.

****

Gordon would have gone straight to Bechstedt from Badenburg, but Bernhard Kunze wanted a day or so to talk about the plans with the farmers of Bechstedt. So it was three days later that Gordon and Elzbeth first saw Bechstedt.

"Good day. I am Karl Baum," said a short, solid man when the wagon they were riding arrived at the edge of town. He was around twenty-five or so Gordon guessed.

"Hello, Karl. I'm Gordon Bozarth."

"
Ja
, Herr Kunze talked you would be here."

Gordon let Elzbeth take over the conversation while he looked around. The view was spectacular. It wasn't one of the highest cliffs of the Ring Wall, but it wasn't like the little hump on the way to Rudolstadt either. He couldn't see the granite wall directly in front of him, but where it started to curve around, he could. To his right, looking along the Ring Wall, he could see literally miles of cliff face. Directly in front of him he could see where the little bit of soil that had been icing on the granite cake had spilled into the Ring of Fire, leaving a steep slope to the Ring Wall. And just before it started sloping, there were stakes pounded into the ground and a rope tied between them. As Gordon looked out over the Ring Wall down into the Ring of Fire he could see a power pole not very far away.

Karl apparently saw where Gordon was looking because he said something to Elzbeth and she translated. Her English still wasn't good but it was better than Karl's or, for that matter, Gordon's German. "They had to ah . . . make the sticks cause it was dangerous. A goat valked close and vent over."

Yes, she was definitely getting better at English. Gordon smiled. "Makes sense to me. Ah. It makes sense to me. It seems a reasonable precaution."

The whole conversation was like that. They talked about the plans for the factory and Karl showed Gordon where he thought it should be. Gordon wasn't so sure. He thought it should be farther from the village and farther from the cliff face, but the English and the German weren't good enough to make why he felt that way clear. Why, in Gordon's case, was safety. The safety of the village from the electricity and the acid that would be used to make the batteries. The safety of the factory in case more of the Wall collapsed. So far it had just been topsoil that had gone over, but Gordon wasn't in any hurry to build any closer to the Ring Wall than he had to.

****

"I need a power line run out to Bechstedt."

"Where's that? No, never mind. Not going to happen. Look, we need what we have and can't waste it putting power lines out to run somebody's toaster."

"It's not for a toaster," Gordon said. "It's for a deep-cycle battery factory. To get the lead dioxide, we need power."

"Maybe. But I can't authorize that."

It ended up taking the backing of Frank Jackson and Bernhard Kunze to get the power line run.

****

When they got back to the trailer there was a note taped to the door, asking Gordon to call the guy he rented the lot from. With a feeling of foreboding, Gordon called and was informed that the rent was going to double starting in December.

"That's only three weeks from now."

"I know and I'm sorry but I have people lining up to rent that lot. If you can't come up with the extra money, I'm just gonna have to give it to someone who will. The truth is, Gordon, that if you move out, I'll rent the lot for four hundred bucks a month."

"Four hundred for this little place?" Gordon almost screeched. He had been paying one hundred a month before the Ring of Fire. And the reason he had paid so little was that the lot was just about big enough for his trailer and his truck. It had no yard. It wasn't big enough to put a house on. Heck, it wasn't really big enough for the trailer.

"That's right," came over the phone. "And I have people lining up to pay it. So what's it gonna be, Gordon?"

Gordon took a breath and said, "I'll let you know."

****

"What do you want the extra money for?" Dori Ann asked.

"We need to rent some wheels and a truck to take the Airstream out to the village of Bechstedt. We need to pay to have power lines run out to Bechstedt. Have a septic tank dug and a leach field installed. Altogether, it's going to cost almost four thousand dollars." Gordon handed over an itemized sheet that he had written up by hand. Gordon had never been all that fond of computers and didn't have one. He did have a fairly extensive collection of video tapes, a VHS player, and a small color TV. Which he could sell for the money, but he didn't want to. He told Dori Ann, "But in the long run it will be a savings, because the rent on my lot in the Ring of Fire has gone up. Besides, we will need the power hook-up for the factory. Making batteries requires electricity."

Gordon and Elzbeth had to wait while Dori Ann checked with whoever was really making the decisions, but they got the money.

Three weeks later, with septic tank dug and power lines installed, Gordon rented a pair of tires, since the trailer had been on blocks for years, and they hired a truck and spent a day moving. He waited till the last day of his paid rent to move.

****

"Good day," Karl Baum said.

"Hello, Karl. Are your parents set up in Pennewitz?" Karl's father, the former headman of the village of Bechstedt, was a farmer and wanted to remain one even if it meant moving and not being headman in the new village. Karl was less enamored of farming and while still quite young, was moderately well respected. All in all, about half the village had moved to Pennewitz, leaving three houses vacant and three lightly occupied.

The pastor was one of the ones who had moved, and Karl Baum was a newly religious man. He had heard the thunder and looked around to see the world changed and now believed. It was hard not to, when there was cliff where there used to be rolling hills.

"It's not a new story I know," he told Gordon. "Everyone around here experienced the same thing. But still, it changes you. Especially since we lost most of our fields."

"I lost most of my world," Gordon agreed. "I think the big difference . . ."

Gordon stopped. It really wasn't all that big a difference. A lot of up-timers were convinced that the Ring of Fire was an act of God, and not in the sense that a hurricane or an earthquake is. "Maybe not so big a difference. I don't know whether God did the Ring of Fire or if it was a natural occurrence of some sort. And I certainly don't know what it meant."

Karl smiled at him a bit lopsidedly. "I was hoping you could tell me what God had in mind when he did that." He pointed toward the Ring of Fire.

Gordon shook his head, then they got down to business. They were going to need a factory far enough away from the houses so that smells and accidents would not harm the village, but close enough for easy walking.

Elzbeth translated but she still wasn't all that good at English.

****

Gordon was sitting in his chair when he saw the wagon carrying Bernhard Kunze and another man.

"Good day, Herr Bozarth," Bernhard called. "I bring help." He jumped off the wagon. "This is Paul Eisenhauer. He has studied alchemy in Lentz and finances in Vienna. He speaks English, French and German. Also Latin, Greek and Hebrew."

"That's a lot of languages," Gordon said. "Can you make sulfuric acid?"

"Oil of vitriol?" Herr Eisenhauer asked. "Yes. Is that the acid in lead acid batteries?"

"Yep," Gordon said. "A thirty-three percent solution. By weight, I think."

"By weight?" Eisenhauer asked.

Gordon grinned. "Yes. By specific gravity. That's one way of measuring the charge of the battery. As the battery discharges, the sulfuric acid becomes more diluted as the sulfur is used to make lead sulfate." Gordon wanted to know how well this Eisenhauer fellow would pick up on what was happening. The theories that went with alchemy weren't the same as those that went with chemistry.

"How does that affect the . . . specific gravity . . . did you call it?"

"Water has a specific gravity. A weight. Coins sink and cork floats. Sulfuric acid has a greater specific gravity than water. We can make glass balls that will float in sulfuric acid and sink in water."

Eisenhauer, a dark, thin man with a Van Dyke beard—who didn't look a thing like the twentieth century general—was nodding his head and stroking his beard. "You know, that's quite a clever technique. And it can probably be applied to any number of liquids."

Gordon smiled until he saw the way Elzbeth was looking at Eisenhauer.

Damn, it it's none of your business you old goat
, he thought. But it still bothered him.

****

There were several encyclopedia entries on the making of lead acid batteries and they had the examples of lead acid batteries from the cars and the one from Gordon's wheel chair. Taken together, it was a good solid start on how to make batteries.

"We could use antimony, Paul," Gordon said while the shop was still under construction.

"What's that?"

Gordon went through his notes. "Stibnite. S T I B . . ." Gordon spelled it out.

Eisenhauer looked though his own notes. "Stibium?" he asked.

"Could be," Gordon said.

"I can find some but I am not sure how much. How much do we need?"

"I'm not sure. We don't actually
need
it. We can make batteries without it; they just won't last as long. The antimony, the pure metal in stibnite, adds strength to the alloy and decreases the sloughing off of the lead sulfide."

"I'll see what I can find and we will experiment."