“That’s clever. But what if the key is lost?”
“We have three sets, Your Majesty. I had one and Gayleen had one before the Ring of Fire and we had a metal smith make up another one when we sold you the car.” More time was spent while Ron showed the emperor the key and that it was a perfectly ordinary piece of metal, nothing particularly high tech.
Finally Ron got to start the car, describing what he was doing as he did it. He pulled the car out of the converted barn and drove it around the muddy field. It had rained last night, sleeted actually, and then thawed this morning, soaking the ground. Ron was careful and the field was still covered in grass, so they managed a loop, with only a little sliding. It was a slow loop. Ron didn’t think they had topped fifteen miles an hour.
“I want to drive!” the emperor said. Ron tried, without much hope, to talk him out of it, then traded seats.
By this time, Sonny and Bob were watching, as well as a couple of crowds of down-timers. There were the villagers and the courtiers—not mixing—and the workers that Ron and Sonny had hired—not really mixing with either group, but closer to the villagers.
Ferdinand III did fairly well. He had the standard gas-brakes-gas issues of new drivers, but not bad. And he had good control for the first loop. He started speeding up on the second loop. When he hit the back end of the second loop, he pushed it and they were doing thirty-five into the next turn. Two previous trips over the same ground had ripped up the grass that was holding the mud together. When they started to turn, the rear wheels decided that Newton’s first law of motion should guide their actions, since friction was on a vacation. The emperor slammed down on both the gas and the brake pedal, and the 240Z did a 540 degree turn. They stopped, facing the way they’d come, rear wheels buried in mud up to their axles and the front wheels not much better off. The combination of brakes and gas had killed the engine and—Ron sincerely hoped—flooded it.
Ferdinand III sat still for several seconds, his white-knuckled hands gripping the plastic steering wheel hard enough that Ron was afraid he might break it. Then he took several deep breaths and smiled. “My, that was exciting.”
Ron took a couple of deep breaths of his own. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
Ferdinand III reached for the keys again.
“You may have flooded the engine, Your Majesty.”
“Flooded it?”
Ron explained. The emperor listened. Then, with his foot carefully off the gas pedal and the car in park, turned the key. It started right up. The emperor grinned and Ron suppressed a groan.
The emperor put it in drive, and hit the gas. The wheels spun and mud flew.
All this had taken a few minutes and about the time the emperor hit the gas, there were half a dozen people of high estate in range of the flying mud. They retreated faster than they’d come, but the car didn’t move more than an inch. And as soon as Ferdinand let of the gas, the car settled back into the mud.
“We’re stuck, Your Majesty. You might as well turn it off and save the gas. We’ll have to pull it out.”
Ferdinand looked rebellious, but after a moment he turned off the car and unbuckled his seat belt. He opened the driver side door, and swung his legs out of the car. The imperial boots sank half way up the calves, in peasant mud. It was a good thing he had hands to help him or the emperor of Austria-Hungary would have landed face first in the mud.
Ron was expecting royal distaste, at least. He didn’t get it. Ferdinand had ridden horses all his life, and even if there was usually a groom to handle the beast when he was done, Ferdinand was familiar with the effects of hooves on muddy ground and was unsurprised to find out that spinning wheels had a similar effect.
* * *
It was a few minutes later, back in the barn-cum-garage, that the emperor expressed his will. “Yes, I want a race track and a good one. In the meantime, just to avoid any trouble, I’m going to assign a small troop of soldiers to you out here.”
“Where are these troops going to sleep?” Dana Fortney asked.
“That’s a good question,” Ron Sanderlin agreed. “Your Majesty, we’re already pretty crowded.”
It worked out that they were authorized to use the workers they were hiring to build the track to construct housing for the troops and to expand the garage and houses they had, but the Sanderlins and Fortneys would have to pay for the materials out of their own pocket. Over the next weeks, they bought bricks, stone, and wood, shipped in on the Danube. Using those materials along with the goods they had brought with them and locally done metal work, they expanded their homes and added housing for the squad of soldiers assigned to them. Fifteen men with their wives and children. Also their horses, because it was a cavalry troop commanded by Erwin von Friesen, an imperial knight. The garage gained room for the Sanderlin’s truck and the Fortney’s Range Rover. All of the construction had to be overseen by someone.