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The Viennese Waltz(33)

By:Paula Goodlett


Village of Simmering, Austria

Count Amadeus von Eisenberg, Baron Julian von Meklau and several of their friends rode up to the village two days after the cars had made their procession through Vienna. They found a muddy field and a barn that had been roughly converted into housing for the emperor’s car. There was a canvas tent tied to the side of the converted barn that presumably held the other up-time vehicles, the ones owned by the mechanics.

“Show us the 240,” Julian commanded.

“Can’t do it, boys,” said one of the mechanics.

“What? I am Baron Julian von Meklau.”

“Howdy.” The first word was new to Julian, who had some English, but not a great deal. Then the man continued in badly accented German. “I’m Bob Sanderlin. And the 240Z belongs to Emperor Ferdinand III, so you need his permission to drive it, or fiddle with it or even look at it. Shouldn’t be a problem, though. All you gotta do is go back to Vienna and tell the emperor to let you see it, just the way you told me. I’m sure he’ll be in a right hurry to do what you tell him to, you being a baron and all.”

Julian was suddenly quite uncomfortable. He couldn’t back down in front of his friends. At the same time, if he whipped the dog the way he deserved, Julian would certainly incur the emperor’s displeasure.

“Julian,” said Amadeus von Eisenberg, “leave off.”

Julian looked over at Amadeus, but the count wasn’t looking at him or Ron Sanderlin. Instead he was looking at a small window in the barn and at the gun barrel that protruded from it. It was an interesting gun barrel, very well made and colored a sort of dark blue gray. It was a small bore, which was easy to tell because it was pointed right at him.

Vienna, Austria

“They pointed a gun at Julian, Father,” Amadeus von Eisenberg said.

“I don’t need this, Amadeus,” Peter von Eisenberg said. “Karl Eusebius wants to put a railroad up to Teschen. And Sonny Fortney is a qualified surveyor. You and that drunken rabble you run with getting yourselves shot by the emperor’s pet up-timers is not going to make things easier. I will discuss it with the emperor, but in the meantime you and your friends stay away from the up-timers. I don’t need you in drunken brawls with peasants. Especially useful peasants. Leave them to the local peasants.”

“Yes, Father,” Amadeus said resentfully. He wasn’t happy about it but he would do it.

Village of Simmering, Austria

Hertel Faust, the new tutor, smiled as he looked at the carefully preserved insects in the four glass cases. “These are marvelous. You have examples from up-time America?”

“Uh huh,” Brandon agreed. “That’s this one and that one.” He pointed at two of the cases. “The others are from down-time Germany. Well, around the Ring of Fire anyway. Some of ’em are American insects that I caught after the Ring of Fire but—” he pointed “—that one and that one are maybe crosses between up-time and down-time insects.”

“That would seem unlikely on the face of it,” Dr. Faust said cautiously. “On the other hand, I have never seen ones quite like these.”

Hayley kept her peace. Herr Doctor Hertel Faust was a reasonably handsome young man, well-read and open-minded. If he had the normal male interest in icky, squishy bugs, well, it was unlikely that they were going to find a tutor who didn’t.

After he and Brandon finished ooh-ing and aah-ing over the skeletons of dead bugs, Hayley managed to get Faust back onto something interesting. She showed him an electromagnet and demonstrated the effect of moving a permanent magnet across it.

Dr. Faust looked at the needle on the voltmeter moving and asked, “Please explain to me again why moving a magnet across a coiled wire produces electricity and moving it across a straight wire doesn’t. Does the curve cause the effect?”

“A straight wire does produce electricity when a magnet is moved across it. But it’s just one wire. A coil has lots of strands of wire being affected. You coil them to make the magnetic field produce more electricity.”

“Why not use one big wire? They carry more current, don’t they?”

Hayley wasn’t sure how to explain. “Yes, but the movement of the magnetic field would only produce a little energy no matter how big the wire is. With the coil the magnetic field is acting on lots of separate wires.”

“Then what would happen if you had hundreds of parallel wires, rather than hundreds of coils?”

Hayley started to say something but was stopped by the fact that she didn’t have a clue what would happen. “I don’t know. Maybe you’d get lots of very weak currents of electricity?”