The simplest way to get around the problem would be to demolish part of the square to expand the runway. The easiest way to do that would be to widen the street by removing the buildings alongside it. But you’d need to remove a minimum of a hundred yards of existing buildings—each and every one of which was inhabited by someone and most of which doubled as places of business. Eddie was dubious, to say the least, that any such project could be carried out.
The other possibility would be to create a ramp. That…could be done, especially if you combined the effort with the first option. That would shorten the length of demolition required, too. You could use the rubble from tearing down fifty yards or so or street-frontage buildings as the material for the ramp. With an additional fifty yards that ended in a shallow-incline ramp…
Eddie thought he’d have a good chance of getting the plane into the air safely. Quite a good chance, actually.
But then what? How would he land the bloody thing? Taking off on a ramp was one thing, landing safely on one was something else entirely. Eddie had chewed over the problem for hours, and seen no way to solve the problem.
No way within their means, at least. If they could have built a steam catapult like the sort he’d seen in movies launching planes from the deck of an aircraft carrier…adapt the rear wheel of the plane to serve as a hook catching an arresting cable when he landed…
Blithering nonsense. By the time such devices could be built and tested in Dresden, with the resources available, the siege would be over anyway.
“Let’s face it,” said Minnie Hugelmair. “What we ought to do is turn this hangar”—she gestured at the structure that had been erected in the square to shelter the plane while the repair work on it was done—“into the world’s first aviation museum. Because that’s all this fancy airplane is anymore, a museum exhibit.”
Eddie was pretty sure she was right. At least, until the civil war was over.
It didn’t occur to him that the term “civil war” was a misnomer. Everywhere else in the USE, people might be starting to make wisecracks about the “phony civil war.” But not in Saxony. By now, Banér’s army had savaged much of the province except in the vicinity of Leipzig where von Arnim’s forces ruled the roost. Swedish cavalry patrols never ventured into the countryside any longer except in large numbers. Georg Kresse and his Vogtlanders had organized a large irregular army that operated on the Saxon plain as well as in the mountains. After the atrocities they’d committed, God help any Swedish mercenary who fell into their hands.
Prague, capital of Bohemia
“What an utterly charming idea,” said Francisco Nasi. He spoke softly, barely more than a murmur, because he was talking to himself. There was no one else in his office at the moment.
He left the radio message he’d just gotten on the table and went to a window.
He’d established his headquarters in the Josefov, as Prague’s Jewish district was coming to be known. That was perhaps the single most ridiculous side effect of the Ring of Fire that Francisco had yet encountered. In the history of Prague in the world the Americans had come from, the Jewish district had gotten that name in the course of the nineteenth century. The name was in honor of the Austrian emperor Joseph II, who’d emancipated the empire’s Jews in the Toleration Edict of 1781. Somehow or other—probably through Judith Roth—that anecdote of a world that didn’t exist and if it did was hundred and fifty years in the future had spread through the Jewish district. And now, more and more people were calling the district by that name.
The situation would simply be amusing, except that Francisco—and Morris Roth, he knew—were worried that Wallenstein might find out about it. The man sometimes had a volatile ego, and he might take offense that the Jews weren’t naming the district after him. It was Wallenstein, after all, not some phantasmagorical Emperor Joseph, who had emancipated Bohemia’s Jews in this universe.
Nasi had situated his headquarters in the Jewish district for several reasons. Those ranged from simple prudence—Wallenstein’s edicts notwithstanding, no sensible Jew was yet prepared to assume that pogroms were entirely a thing of the past—to his decision that he needed to find a wife, a project that wouldn’t be helped in the least if he distanced himself from the community in which he hoped to find the blessed woman. That said, he was very wealthy, so he’d obtained a building close to the river that gave him a good view of the Hradcany and the hills behind the Mala Strana. He found looking out over that very pleasant scenery helped concentrate his thoughts.