unhappy.'
Walenty Tarnowski was the young nobleman who was bound and determined to establish what he called 'advanced mechanics' in the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. Unusually for a scholar, he was quite willing to get his hands dirty, too. Koniecpolski had given him the assignment of studying the captured war machine to see if he could duplicate it-or, since that wasn't likely, see if he could design a simpler and more primitive version of the device.
Mark Ellis was the American soldier they'd captured when they seized the APC. Under questioning, he'd claimed that he knew very little about the machine, being a civil as opposed to mechanical engineer. He'd also claimed he would refuse to talk under torture.
The latter claim was dubious, to say the least. The number of men in the world who would refuse to talk under torture was minute. The problem was rather that their talk was usually babble, and Koniecpolski saw no reason to think the up-timer would be any different. Besides, he had no desire to stir up American animosity toward Poland by mistreating one of their people. Sooner or later, after all, Poland would need to negotiate a peace treaty.
So, Tarnowski toiled on, day after day, with no help from Ellis. But he really was quite adept at this 'advanced mechanics' of his. So who could say? The time might come-and much sooner than people thought-when Polish hussars would ride into battle on iron horses instead of fleshy ones. .Gloomily, Mark Ellis listened to Walenty Tarnowski's depiction of today's results. This morning's results, rather. The nobleman had all afternoon to ferret out still more knowledge.
They'd gotten in the habit of eating lunch together. Perhaps oddly, given the way they'd started, the two men had gotten to be on very cordial terms. You could even say they'd become friends, in a way.
Mark still insisted he would say nothing, nothing, nothing-subject him to what agony they would! To which Walenty replied that he was a student of advanced mechanics, not a torturer. And besides, Mark had nothing to say anyway, being a mere civil engineer. The ritual insults exchanged and mutual honor upheld, they'd then proceed to have the sort of pleasant chats that young men will have when they're in relaxed and convivial company. Walenty, being a Polish nobleman, called it 'intelligent conversation.' Mark, who fancied himself a West Virginia hillbilly, called it 'shooting the shit.'
In truth, Mark Ellis was very far from being a hillbilly, unless you chose to slap the label on any and all West Virginians-which would certainly be objected to by at least three-fourths of the state's population. He had three years of college, just for starters, where any self-respecting hillbilly would only grudgingly admit to having graduated from high school. The one and only characteristic he shared with hillbillies was, ironically, the one he insisted to his Polish captors not to possess-he was, in fact, a very good auto mechanic.
So he knew, better than most people would, just how much progress Walenty was making. It was pretty astonishing, actually. Mark still thought there wasn't much chance the Poles could produce a functioning armored fighting vehicle of their own, not for a number of years to come. There were just too many technological obstacles to overcome-many of them ones which not even the USE could handle yet.
But that would be the only reason they couldn't, not lack of knowledge. Walenty Tarnowski already knew why an automobile or truck worked, front to back, and he'd soon be able to teach anyone with mechanical aptitude all of the basic principles involved in creating a damn tank.
Luckily for the USE, which had started this stupid war thanks to that idiot Gustav Adolf's medieval dynastic fetishes, the Poles simply didn't have the industrial base to make a tank, regardless of how much knowledge they had.
But how long would that remained true?
'So much for dumb Polacks,' he muttered, after Walenty left to go back to work on the APC.
Mark got up and went to the window that gave him a view to the west. 'Come on, guys. Quit screwing around and sign a damn peace treaty, will you?'
Chapter 24
USE army's siege lines, just outside of Poznan 'Some wine, Doctor?' asked George, the duke of Brunswick- Luneburg, holding up the bottle from which he'd just poured himself a glass.
James Nichols shook his head. One of the things about the seventeenth century that he'd never gotten accustomed to was the astonishing alcohol consumption. Abstractly, he knew that the practice of drinking alcohol from the morning on was common in pre-industrial societies. Melissa had told him that Americans in the early nineteenth century consumed an average of six times as much in the way of alcoholic beverages as Americans did in the late twentieth century-and they were mostly drinking whiskey, too, not beer or wine.
From a medical standpoint, it even made a certain amount of sense, in an insane sort of way. You couldn't assume the local water was potable-it very likely wasn't, in fact-and alcoholic beverages were much safer to drink in that respect.
Never mind that they also had a lot of unhealthy side effects. The thing that really drove James Nichols crazy was that one of the standard practices for drinking in the daytime was to cut the wine with water-as Duke George was doing this very moment. He'd only poured himself half a glass of wine. The rest, he was filling up from a carafe of water.
Drink wine in order to avoid microbes from infected water. Then cut it with water full of microbes. Go figure.
Something of his thoughts must have showed in his expression, because the duke smiled widely. 'I assure you, doctor!' He waved the bottle at General Torstensson, who was sitting in a comfortable chair just a few feet away-with a glass of wine cut with water in his own hand. 'Lennart always insists that his orderlies have to boil the water we use for our beverages.'
Torstensson chuckled and said: 'And now the good doctor is wondering why we simply don't drink the water.' He shrugged. 'It has no taste, I'm afraid. Or tastes bad, often enough.'
He used the glass to gesture at a chair positioned not far away in the chamber of his headquarters he was using for informal meetings. It was one of the rooms on the second floor of a tavern he'd seized in one of the villages not far from Poznan.
'I can have some tea made, if you'd like. I'm afraid I have no coffee.'
The duke plopped his portly figure into another chair. 'Tea! But it's still at least two hours short of noon!'
'That's it, make fun of the abstemious up-timer,' grumbled Nichols, as he took his chair. 'Thank you, General, I would appreciate a cup of tea.'
He didn't ask for cream or sugar. Cream, because he wasn't willing to drink un-pasteurized dairy products; sugar, because it was rarely available and he didn't much care for honey. So, he'd just learned to drink tea plain. By now, he'd even developed a taste for it.
At that, he was enjoying a luxury. Tea was even more expensive than coffee, and coffee was extremely expensive. The standard hot beverage for people at the time if they weren't drinking alcohol was a thin broth of some sort.
Torstensson wiggled a finger at the orderlies standing by the doorway and one of them left to get the tea. The other two remained in place.
And that was another seventeenth century custom Nichols had never really gotten used to-the ubiquity of servants. By now, most Americans had adapted because they'd found they could afford servants themselves. But Melissa strongly disapproved of the practice-she was not entirely rational on the subject, in James' opinion, but it wasn't something worth arguing about-so they had no servants in their own household. Instead, they had a seemingly endless procession of cleaning ladies and cooks who didn't live on the premises and were thus not technically 'servants' but who did exactly the same thing and cost about twice as much.
Go figure. It wasn't as if everything about the twentieth century had been logically coherent either.
Duke George seemed to be something of a telepath today. 'And how is your estimable wife these days?'
The third general in the room was Dodo Freiherr zu Innhausen und Knyphausen. He shook his head
