The Kremlin Games(49)

And that was the issue Andrei Korisov brought up in regard to getting the AK3 into full-scale production. There were armories in Russia. Some of them were quite good, so far as quality was concerned. But even Andrei’s Gun Shop was incredibly slow by German standards, much less up-time standards. And it wasn’t just guns. It was everything. Oh, Russians knew how to do things—but that was half the problem. Russians knew how to make a gun. You made it the way your grandfather did. They knew how to make a plow and how to use that plow to plow a field . . . which was precisely the way their grandfather did it, and at the same phase of the moon.

Not that there weren’t creative people and original thinkers in Russia. It was just that they all seemed to live at the Dacha. Well, perhaps a few at the Gun Shop.

The specific issue now was getting the gunsmiths in Russia to make the new guns, much less use the new techniques. There was nothing about the chamber-loading flintlock rifle that they couldn’t make, but Andrei was insisting that they were too stupid to learn. And Filip was insisting that if Andrei could learn, a donkey could learn. Bernie was insisting that there was no reason for the gunsmiths of Russia to object to the AK3 and plenty of reason for them to embrace it.

But Bernie didn’t understand. Andrei was unpopular and well-known enough that the mere fact that he had invented the rifle—and named it after himself—was plenty of reason for most Russian smiths to hate it, sight unseen. Add to that the general illiteracy, and what Bernie called “the not invented here syndrome,” and they were facing an uphill battle.

Meanwhile Natasha was getting a headache.

* * *

“What was it like to live in the future?” Anya asked.

“Easier, freer, but less important.” Bernie shrugged. “I never thought much about the future when I was living in it. What I did didn’t matter much to anyone, not even me. I was in no hurry to grow up. There was no real need. I had a pretty good job. Enough money for most of what I wanted. Never found the right girl, but had a lot of fun looking.” Bernie grinned at Anya. He wasn’t her right guy and she wasn’t his right girl, but they had fun anyway.

“Right after the Ring of Fire, and especially right after the Battle of the Crapper, I was just caught up in what I had lost. I couldn’t get over the way my mother died and I kept seeing those guys falling down like tenpins at the Crapper. It didn’t help that like a damn fool I made the mistake of going out there after the battle and looking at the corpses. There was one kid—I’m sure I was the one who shot him, because he was wearing this odd-looking hat—”

He broke off for a moment, then shook his head. “So I didn’t give much thought to what it meant for anyone else.” Bernie looked into Anya’s pale blue eyes made darker by the candlelight. She was trying, but she didn’t get it. He hadn’t expected her to. It made little enough sense from the inside; it had to seem totally nuts from the outside.

“Like everyone else, I was in shock at first. But I just couldn’t come out of it. People started doing things, things that mattered. President Stearns, Jeff Higgins . . . everyone was making it work and I couldn’t get past the Crapper and Mom’s death. I was sitting around doing what I was told. The same old Bernie. No direction, no drive.

“I couldn’t think of anything useful to do. Truthfully, I wasn’t even trying. Then Vladimir offered me this job. I had no idea if I could do it, but I couldn’t take much more of Grantville. It wasn’t home anymore, but it was too much like home.

“I think the trip out here was the first time I had been sober for three days running since the Crapper. Now, I’m too busy to worry about it that much.” Bernie grinned again. “Too much to do. The Nerd Patrol is always hitting me with new questions and I spend so much time reading and helping out that there isn’t that much time to mope anymore. That’s the secret to a happy life, kid. Have something to do. It’s even better if it’s something that matters. But have something, whether it matters to anyone else or not.”

* * *

Lazar Smirnov worried out the words in the pamphlets. Flipping back and forth between them, trying to divine meaning from two directions. Along with the copies of English books and parts of books that Vladimir sent them were the occasional German translations. Lazar had a bit of German, almost twice as much German, in fact, as he had English. He didn’t have all that much of either. He spoke Russian, read Latin and Greek, but that was about it. His reading of Russian was problematic and his writing was quite idiosyncratic. So trying to read the pamphlets on electronics and radio was an uphill task at the best of times. But he had been doing it for over a year now and he was gaining, he hoped, an understanding of how it all worked. He had a spark gap transmitter and it now seemed to work. That is, the crystal set clicked when it should if it was close enough. What was the difference between a Leiden jar and a capacitor? He was beginning to think there wasn’t one. He went back to the little pamphlet on the capacitor and noticed the word mica, looked up mica and noticed that the best was muscovite mica.