Grantville Gazette 38

her form. Nicely curved, firm, yet soft. He let her see that he had noticed then went back to the discussion. 'I'm told the model will need attachments where they attach little threads which are in turn attached to weights and scales and dials. One at the center of balance, one at the nose, one at the tail, and one on each wing.'

The girl seemed to accept his appreciation as her due but showed more interest in the plans. 'A delta wing?' she asked curiously.

'Yes!' Willem was suddenly more interested in the girl. 'You know about delta wings?

'Not really. But I was the German translator on your additional questions at the research center, so I had to read up on aircraft design. From what I read, delta wings are not particularly well thought of by Herr Smith.'

'There are disadvantages but also advantages. For one, a delta wing doesn't need as much wing span for the same amount of lift. So a delta might be able to use a runway that a straight wing wouldn't.'

'You know this man?' Master Bonono asked his daughter suspiciously.

The girl, Gemma, rolled her eyes as her papa went all fatherly on her and Willem hid his smile as the girl answered.

'I've never met him till today, Papa, but I have seen him at the research center, consulting with Darius.'

'You watch out for that boy. He doesn't have two dollars to rub together, even if he is an up-timer.'

'He's just a friend, Papa!' Gemma said with clearly strained patience and a face growing a bit pink.

When Willem first learned that the girl knew of his interest, he had had a moment of concern. But it was clear, after all, that all that had happened was a coincidence and perhaps a useful one. 'So you have some familiarity with aircraft design?' he asked. 'From your work in translating the questions?'

'A little,' Gemma admitted, doubt clear in her posture. 'I have a good idea what the words mean, anyway.'

'So here,' Willem said to Master Bonono while gesturing at the girl, 'you have a consultant on the interpretation of the design in your own house. How convenient.'

Making such a model is not the work of an hour or a day, but for a master like Giuseppe Bonono it wasn't the work of a lifetime, either. In a couple of months, there would be a twentieth-scale model, of the arrowhead plane, as Giuseppe called it. Ready for the wind tunnel test over at Smith Aeronautics.

Leaving the Bononos, father and daughter, to their work Willem went looking for flying lessons.

****

'And this is realistic?' Willem didn't even try to hide his doubts.

The man shrugged. 'It was my son's, and he mostly used it for gun-fighting games. But it has the flight simulator on it. The ads say it's realistic, but I don't really know. It's fifty dollars an hour if you want to use it. If you don't, there's others who do.'

Willem tried it and didn't know if it was realistic or not. It did let him get used to the idea of banking into a turn and a little bit familiar with the gradualness of flight. And, perhaps more importantly, the misleading nature of that gradualness. Planes do things slowly and smoothly . . . till they don't. The don't part is when they get close to the ground. Then things get fast. A crash at two hundred miles per hour is pretty sudden.

****

The second simulator was a thing of wood and canvas, controlled by men with ropes and poles. They rocked and tilted the mini-plane in three dimensions in response to Willem's manipulation of the controls. Again, it was far from perfect but it taught him something about flying. Well, reinforced something the flight game had shown him. If you bank the plane to the right then bring the stick back to neutral, you're still banked to the right. To get back to level flight, you have to move the stick not just back to neutral but beyond it, till you have reversed what you did to bank in the first place. And all the time you were banking to the left and un-banking, you were turning left. So, to turn left, you pushed the stick left, then back to center, held the stick as you made most of the turn, then pushed the stick right till you were out of the bank, then brought it back to center. And with each move it was easy to go too far or hold it too long, and it took practice to get it right.

That was what the low-tech simulators that had sprung up since the Belle had first flown were about, letting you practice before climbing into one of the still few planes that had been completed since the Belle's first flight. Flight time in those was very expensive. The Belles were unavailable, strictly for the military. Kelly Aviation usually had one plane running, well, sometimes. In general, Mr. Kelly would finish it, then a few days later take it apart for parts for the next one. But during those times when one of his planes was in fact flight ready, you could take flights in it and even get flying lessons. For the paltry sum of two hundred fifty dollars an hour.

The Kitts had an airplane and mostly kept it running. It was a two-seater, front and back, and lessons were three hundred dollars an hour. Over the two months that Giuseppe and Gemma were occupied in building the model, Krause racked up over a hundred hours in various simulators, forty hours of ground school, reading maps from the air and such, and a grand total of seven and one quarter hours in the air. He thought he knew how to fly, not well perhaps, but well enough. Besides, he was spending a lot of money on flying lessons.

****

It was in the days before the model was ready for the wind tunnel that the secrecy, which had been more a matter of habit and general caution, became a matter of vital necessity. Hans Richter flew into history and John George into insanity within days. In response to the change from the CPE to the USE, John George and and the Elector of Brandenburg had withdrawn from the Swede's alliance. John George had never been the most popular neighbor to the up-timers, but now he was considered a traitor by the king of Sweden and at least a potential threat by the Americans. Building an airplane nominally for John George would be seen as an act as hostile as building the plane for Cardinal Richelieu. Possibly more hostile. After all, John George was closer. It made no real difference in Willem Krause's plans. He had always been careful about such things. Because if no one knew who was paying the bills, it would be harder for them to come in at the last minute and take away his airplane. Now, keeping them in ignorance would be essential to keeping the project going.

'I lost another commission today,' Pierre Trovler told Willem dejectedly 'Because I'm French. I'm not a cardinal or a politician. I'm an artist.'

'You have my sympathy, my friend,' Willem told him. 'As long as you don't expect me to express it too loudly. People are excited by boys at Wismar and incensed by the League. I suggest you don an appropriately patriotic mien. Perhaps a painting of the heroic outlaw driving into the enemy ship. Or, you could join the CoC. I'm just grateful no one is asking where I was born, since my family's estates are in the electorate of Brandenburg.'

'I'm already a member of the CoC,' Pierre told him. 'I was before this happened.'

'Really? I wouldn't have thought you were the sort. Didn't you just say you weren't political just after you disclaimed being a cardinal? Do you paint in red robes?'

'You don't have to be a cardinal to be Catholic and you don't have to be a politician to believe in liberty. I know you're of the nobility, but you're a regular guy, not like John George.'

Willem gave no sign by word or action that anything had changed but something had. For while he was in no way John George and cordially despised the man, neither was he a regular guy. He was of the nobility and that made him different from peasants of any situation, no matter how grand their circumstance or how mean his. He was of the nobility. His genial manner was just that-a manner. He stepped down from his natural station to put people like Pierre at ease and get the best labor out of them, not because he thought them his equal. But here they thought they were-even normally sane people like Pierre. He would have to be more careful now.

****

Willem watched as the technician attached the thin steel wires to his model airplane. One from the top of the model, set at the center of gravity, went through the top of the wind tunnel, over and around a pulley, off to another pulley, then down the side to a weight and gauges for reading. The bottom center of gravity wire went down through the bottom of the wind tunnel to an adjustable spring.

There were similar sets of wires at the nose, center, tail, and wing tips. Together the wires and gauges would measure the lift and drag of the airfoil at varying wind speeds and at various flap and aileron settings.

Then they started the fan and the model Arrow was pushed back by the wind. The technician took measurements: lift at nose, lift at tail, drag-each measurement taken several times, once for each air speed. The process was repeated with smoke and more notes were taken, when the smoke started swirling and