but even the best airplane ever built is a death trap if badly-flown or poorly-maintained. The more expensive book
Darius continued with his sales pitch. 'If you're actually going to try to build an airplane of your own, you want to read the second book. It's two hundred dollars, but it has a lot of information. After you've read it, you want to consult with Herr Smith and get his thoughts on any design you come up with. That's expensive too, but Herr Smith is a real aeronautical engineer and the only one in the world. There are also the spreadsheets that Herr Smith and Colonel Wood came up with. You can do the calculations with a slide rule, or even on paper if you're good enough at math. But you're safer with the spreadsheets.'
***
'That was a good sale,' Gemma said behind him. A few minutes later while Willem Krause was leaving with his books. Researchers got a ten percent commission on books sold and twenty-two fifty wasn’t bad for a quarter hour's work.
Darius jumped a bit. 'Jeez, Gemma. Where did you learn to sneak up on people like that?'
'Don't take the Lord's name in vain, Darius. Not even half the Lord's name. I don't understand why the good Lord sent a bunch of up-timers back to our time just so they could blaspheme.'
'Maybe,' Darius suggested, 'it's because the good lord doesn't actually care that much about blaspheming. Maybe he cares more about what's in your heart than what comes out of your mouth.'
'Maybe,' Gemma agreed. 'But I'm not going to risk centuries in Purgatory on the chance.' Then she smiled at him.
Darius' heart gave a little flutter. Gemma Bonono was pretty. Not pretty in a 'oh my god, she's gorgeous' kind of way. Pretty in a 'home-town girl' sort of way. If your hometown was in Italy in the seventeenth century, that is. Or at least so Darius imagined. Not that he'd ever been to Italy, not yet.
Gemma also worked in the library. She was more a translator than a researcher, since she spoke Italian, Latin and German. Her English was coming along, too.
'I gotta go, Gemma.' Darius sighed. 'I need to keep the commission from that sale, so I've gotta do some of the pro bono questions.'
'I'll help,' Gemma said. 'It'll be good practice.'
They went back to the reference desk to pick up the next pro bono question. As it happened, that question- like so many others-was one that had been asked and answered before, so they made a note to reference the number for the already researched answer and put it on the out-going stack, then went on to the next question. One of the many clerks would get in touch with the person who had asked the question, find out what kind of report they wanted, and either answer it verbally or, for a fee, have a written report made up and sent out. Some questions already had reports written up and ready to send out, but not all of them.
That part wasn't the researcher's problem. Darius and Gemma would mark down on their timesheets that they'd spent however many minutes answering the question. Enough hours of answering the pro bonos would pay their library fee, which is what they were after.
While they were doing this, Darius explained to Gemma that the sale had been to another aviation nut, and who knows, maybe he'd come back with questions. Most of the people who bought that book never returned. Darius wasn't sure if it was because the book answered all their questions or if it was because the answers in it scared them off.
****
Willem Krause bought both books and read them through, which took him almost two months. Partly because there was a lot of stuff in them, partly because they were in the up-timer type face and he wasn't used to it. Partly because they were in English and he would have done better with either German or Latin. But mostly because they were poorly written. What they were, were articles copied out of various encyclopedias, periodicals, and bits of books, strung together with connecting paragraphs inserted to explain why they had chosen this article or this scene from a given book. There was an article about a plane that had tried to pull out of a dive too fast and had its wings come off. The accompanying paragraph pointed out that while lift increased by the square, stress on the wings increased by the cube, and then failed to explain what that meant.
Willem made a note of another question to ask the next time he went to the library and went back to reading.
This was a few paragraphs from a fiction book, describing how the hero took off from an aircraft carrier. And the connecting paragraph discussed preflight checklists. It was poorly organized minutia of aircraft design and flight, put together by people who, for the most part, had never been in a cockpit or drawn so much as a line of a design of an aircraft. The knowledge was there and some of it was sneaking past the poor authorship to present itself to him. And
****
Willem presented his list of questions to Darius, who examined them carefully then looked at him with considerably more respect. 'Some of these are new.'
'The questions that aren't new . . . why aren't they answered in the book?
'Because they've come up since it was written. There is a second edition being worked on now, but it won't be out till the end of the year, if then. It should be better organized, though. By the way, if you agree that the answers we find for you can be included in the next edition, there is a discount.'
'How much of a discount?'
'Well, they may not want the answers for the book, so it's only twenty percent. Or you can gamble and if they use it and you’re the only one that asked it, they will refund half the research cost.'
Willem knew a scam when he heard one. But the whole library worked on a pay-me-again system. Almost every question asked would have an answer that more than one person would want. So the rates they charged took into account the fact that they could probably sell the answer several times. And they always charged extra if the customer wanted their answers kept private. Even if you paid the extra, it didn't keep someone else from asking the same question and getting it answered. It just kept that researcher from selling the answer to the general pool of previously answered questions. By now a lot of questions were answered by typing the question into the list of previously asked questions and getting back a reference number to an already found, correlated and printed answer. So even if Willem didn't take the discount, it was just as likely that someone else would come along and ask the question, so the answer would show up in the next edition of the book anyway.
'I'll take the twenty percent discount.' Willem shook his head, partly in admiration for a good scam but mostly in disgust that he was the one who was helping write the next edition of Aeronautics 101-and he was paying for the privilege.
****
'Hey, Gemma,' Gemma heard Darius call. 'You want to help me with this one? It's that airplane nut again.'
'How can I help?' Gemma asked. 'You know that airplanes are . . . how do you say . . . out of my league.'
'He wants the answers in German if possible and he'll pay extra for it. So I'll look the stuff up and then we'll go over it together and you can translate it into German.'
'I'm still not the best at German.'
'Yeah, but you need the work as much as I do.'
'No way to get a dowry built up if I don't,' Gemma said.
'All you down-time girls are always worried about the dowry business. What ever happened to love?'
'Love is for those who can afford it,' Gemma said, primly. 'And I can't. Not yet. Not since we spent so much on the doctors for Mama. My sister's marriage took what was left, so Papa and I are starting over.'
'You guys can't go back to Padua?'
'Matteo is in charge of the shop. Papa doesn't want to work for his son.'
****
Willem spent months in the National Library, looking at plans and reading texts on air flight. And in the process, paid for the pimple-faced boy's junior prom. And more.
Increasingly, he found himself entranced by the delta-wing aircraft. He told himself that it was because they
