“Do you think God cares more for Germany than for Russia?” Natasha asked quietly. Natasha had never struck Bernie as all that religious but the notion that God didn’t think you were worth worrying about had to hurt.
“No,” Bernie said with more conviction than he really felt. “What I think is that if the Ring of Fire had showed up anywhere where there was just one established religion, that religion would have landed on it with both feet. If the Ring of Fire had landed Grantville, say, here in the Time of Troubles, then we would have been hit by Russian troops with Russian Orthodox priests urging them on before they knew anything except that something strange and scary had happened. And by the time anyone really figured out what had happened, it would have been really hard for them to backtrack. The Russian Orthodox Church would have been stuck with a policy of kill the daemons.”
Natasha slowly nodded, thinking it through. Russian civilization had come apart in the Time of Troubles, but the church wasn’t seriously challenged. If something like the Ring of Fire had happened, people would have looked to the church for answers and there was a very real chance that the church would have seen the town with Catholics, Protestants, and even atheists-but no one from the Orthodox Church-as a threat.
“Yep. Would have scared the hell out of just about anyone. The difference between here and there is just that there, there was nothing strong enough to hit us before they got to know us at least a little. And they had Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics, some killing each other, some running each other out of town, and a few sort of getting along. We were easier for them to get used to.”
“So not virtue or vice, but circumstance?”
“That’s the way I figure it, but I ain’t God. Not even a priest. But, as to that bit about ‘gift to all the world’? Come see the balloon tomorrow.”
Natasha watched the balloon as it lifted into the air. Petr Nickovich was doing “a preliminary experiment into the lifting power of hot air.” In other words, he was playing. It was his third balloon so far, each larger than the last. This one was as tall as a man and as wide as it was tall. And it trailed a series of lead weights. Lifting first one, then the next into the air below it. It lifted five of them, then stopped rising, proving that hot air is lighter than cold air. Which any five-year-old in any peasant village in Russia could have told him. Natasha knew there was more to it than that. The weights told Petr how much lift he was getting from that volume of heated air. There was also a thermometer in the balloon that told him how hot the air was. A thermometer by the wall told him how hot the outside air was so he would have the difference.
Petr Nickovich was holding his experiment in a corner behind the main building of the Dacha where it would be out of the wind. Which also meant out of the sun. It might have been prettier if his balloon was in the sunlight. It would certainly have been warmer.
What had really brought her out into the cold to see it was the idea that, some day, a much bigger thing like this might let people fly. Petr Nickovich wasn’t looking at the balloon; he was writing out calculations. Then he looked over at Filip Pavlovich. “I was right. The heated air lifts a little more than a quarter of an ounce per cubic foot.”
Filip Pavlovich just nodded.
“I must have the hydrogen you promised me,” Petr Nickovich insisted.
“Yes. Fine. We’ll talk about it, but inside.” Filip Pavlovich was visibly cold even in his heavy clothing. “Where it’s warm.”
Natasha smiled, though she didn’t let it show. Petr Nickovich was not one to take being laughed at well and keeping the peace was part of Natasha’s job.
As they blew out the candles that were heating the air for the balloon, Natasha thought about what was going on at the Dacha. It wasn’t just Bernie, the person that this was all about. There was Lazar Smirnov, a member of a cadet branch of a great house, who was sitting in one of the buildings, winding wires in a coil. Slowly, carefully, making what he said would be a generator of electric. He carefully painted the wire with lacquer and laid one circuit around the coil, then waited for it to dry before he did the next. He was a volunteer, here because he wanted to be. Sure, he and Bernie had talked about insulation and electromagnetic fields but he was the one doing the work. And Lazar could have hired a small army to do any work he wanted done. But he wanted to understand electric power, so was doing the work himself.
It was a strange attitude in Lazar and it had come from Bernie. “You want to learn how a machine works, build it yourself. Set someone else to doing it and they’ll learn it instead of you.” Bernie had said that more than once and clearly it was having an effect. Servants here were treated better, talked to, not at. You might need the expertise they had gained on your next project. Natasha was not sure where it would all lead.
Part Three
Chapter 29
January 1633
It worked. Andrei Korisov had tested it, even firing it several times himself. The results were good. Not perfect by any means, but the third major version of the Andrei Korisov Rifle was a workable weapon, even a good one. It seemed to Andrei that it had taken both more and less time than it had. More because of all the frustrations of the last two years and less because it was a genuine revolution in the design of fire arms.
He sent a message to Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev telling him so. Sheremetev sent back, “Send some to the Dacha. Let’s see what they say,” by which Andrei was allowed to know that he was not forgiven yet for the failures of the AK2.
Bernie knelt on the blanket laid out at the Dacha firing range and fired the new gun from the gun shop. It was the third day of testing and it had passed the bench tests pretty well. The lip had helped a lot with the outgassing. It no longer cut you if you had your hand in the wrong place, it just hurt like the blazes.
Bernie wanted to make sure that the outgassing had been licked enough so that it wasn’t a danger to the user. He was also making a point. Andrei wouldn’t get it, but by now Filip would. So would Natasha. Leaders lead. They don’t assign some poor peasant to take the risks.
Bernie opened the chamber lock by the lever-action and pulled the spent chamber. The lever-action allowed the back of the chamber lock to be pushed forward, forcing the lip of the chamber into the barrel. It also allowed for the quick removal and replacement of the firing chamber. Bernie knew that Andrei hated the added complexity of the lever-action. But by now the fact that Andrei didn’t like it made Bernie at least open to the idea. Andrei was probably right that simpler was better both for production and for ease of maintenance. But the lever-action of the chamber lock was simple. Four moving parts, all of them interconnected. Levers moved the back block of the chamber lock back when opened and forward when closed. The back block of the chamber lock was shaped like an upside down barn with a peaked roof, and fit into the back block in only one position. That meant that to line up the chamber only the back and front of the chamber had to be precisely finished, precisely fitted.
He was about to stick another in when he had a thought. He half cocked the lock, flipped up the frizzen, tapped the touch hole on the chamber over the pan. Sure enough, a few grains of powder fell into the pan. Bernie closed the frizzen, inserted the chamber, closed the lever action cocked and fired again.
He looked over at Nick. “How am I doing? Hitting anything?”
“You’re hitting a bit low, Bernie,” Nick told him.
“It’s the black powder drop,” Bernie complained. “After a life time of shooting smokeless, I can’t get used to it. What about adjustable sights, Andrei? I know we talked about them.”
“They are an added expense and no one will know how to use them.”
“Cheap asshole,” Bernie muttered under his breath. But in a way he knew that Andrei was right. Russia wasn’t like Germany, where you published a cheat sheet and suddenly everyone knew how it worked. Likely as not,
