“So it’s too late to use the beehive kilns?”
“Not at all. Sure, this thing will produce twenty or thirty times the concrete that a beehive would, but the rotary kiln and a hundred beehive kilns together won’t produce enough to meet demand. Concrete was everywhere up-time because it was so cheap and flexible. The stuff you’ll be able to make in the beehive kilns won’t be nearly as cheap or quite as flexible, but it’s still going to be one of the cheapest, most flexible materials available. Baron Hass here will even make a reasonable profit. As long as he’s not too greedy!” Judy the Younger looked over at Baron Hass. “If you try for too much profit by holding down production and jacking up prices, you’ll lose your market, or most of it, to other materials. Stone, brick, wood, plastics when they get into production, composites like resin-impregnated fabrics, iron and steel. You have the exclusive right to produce one building material, but it’s not the only one. The reason it was so common up-time was that it’s cheap to produce and easy to use.”
“But that means I should be building a dozen of the big ones,” Baron Hass protested. “Just like my spies and Herr Barclay told me.”
“If the only factor involved was engineering,” said the little one, while opening a spiral notebook. “If all you had to worry about was turning rawmix into clinker. But it’s not. You have to make the rawmix, you have to powder the clinker, you have to ship in the fuel, the limestone, the shale or clay, package and ship out the Portland cement. You need to provide instructions on the mixing of the Portland with water and aggregate, on the pouring and how long your customers will have to make the pour after mixing. So you’re probably going to have to train concrete consultants to send out to major customers, if you don’t want to be sued because the customer did something wrong and is blaming your cement instead of their error for the problem. You’ll probably win those lawsuits but they will still cost you money. A lot more money than consultants to keep the problem from happening in the first place would.”
“The transport will be more expensive than the consultants anyway,” said the tall one, looking over the short one’s shoulder. “Cement works out to be less expensive to transport than quarried stone or brick, when you figure in the weight of the concrete against the weight of the stone wall, because you can usually get the water and aggregate closer to the job site. But you’re still shipping lots of tonnage. Meanwhile, if you had beehive kilns in operation you would be working out your other issues, and making money, while the big rotary kiln is being built. And once it is built, it’s still not going to satisfy all the demand. So the beehives will still be in operation. Still making you money, if not quite as much as the rotary kiln will.”
Baron Hass looked between the girls and Istvan Janoszi. The girls were consulting their notes in light of what they had seen here and the agent was giving Baron Hass a crooked smile. For the past several months Baron Hass had been putting off Ferdinand III and his advisers with the reports from Herr Barclay. That option had just disappeared. Besides, the girls were right. Baron Hass was not by any means ignorant of business, though it was true this was by far the largest undertaking he had ever attempted.
“How many tons of clinker will the rotary kiln produce in a day?” Millicent asked. When given a figure she started calculating, giving figures for the amount of coal used each day, the amount of limestone, the amount of shale or clay. Each week, each month. There was quite a bit of limestone clay and coal already on the site. But after a couple of minutes, she pointed out that there was only enough on site to run the kiln for a month or so. Baron Hass knew it had taken three months to get the supplies there. So it was starting to look like he was only going to have enough fuel and raw materials to keep the rotary kiln running about a third of the time.
“But I can’t! I don’t have the money for small kilns. It’s all invested in the rotary!”
* * *
Got him right where we want him, Judy thought. “We might be able to help you out there.”
“How?”
“Well, you still have the patent you bought from the emperor. And that’s worth something. If you can get into production soon enough that he doesn’t get disgusted and revoke it—”
“Soon enough would be right now,” Janos said, somewhat sternly. “The emperor’s patience is not . . . unlimited.”
“It so happens we have access to several beehive kilns,” Judy said. “And if we can come to an agreement, we can both get into concrete production.”