1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 11

September and October 1634

Race Track at Simmering, Austria

“Did you point a gun at Baron Julian von Meklau?” Emperor Ferdinand III asked Ron Sanderlin as he entered the garage. It had taken a while for word to reach the emperor and Ron wondered if the youngsters had talked or just someone that had seen the confrontation.

“Uncle Bob did, Your Majesty. But only because it looked like the boy was going to try and take a horsewhip to me.” Ron looked at the retinue that followed the emperor around everywhere. “Mostly it was to warn the kids off so things didn’t get out of hand.” Ron considered, then added, “Actually, I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more trouble. We’ve had a lot of gawkers, but no one trying to take anything. And aside from von Meklau and his friends, no one trying to throw their weight around.”

“Now that I think about it, Herr Sanderlin, I’m a little surprised myself.” Ferdinand motioned and Ron followed him out of the garage to the muddy field. The gaggle of hangers-on surrounded them both. Ferdinand III continued, “This is to be the road for the 240Z?”

“The track, yes,” Ron told him and went on to explain what he, Bob, and Sonny had worked out. There were several side trips into up-time terminology, what an automobile race track was and how it differed from a horseracing track.

About halfway through the explanation, Ferdinand interrupted. “Take me for a ride.”

“Your Majesty. .” Ron started to object, then seeing the excited expression on the emperor’s face, gave in. It was his car, after all. They got Ferdinand in the passenger seat with the seat belt fastened. Then Ron put the key in the ignition and Ferdinand stopped him.

“What’s that?”

“The key.”

“Like a key to a lock?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. You can’t start the car without it.” Ron chose not to get into the whole issue of hot wiring.

“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.

Docks, Vienna, Austria

“What does it look like, Dad?” Hayley asked. The Pfeifer family had a steam barge that they had built from up-time instruction sheets, which were fairly vague and incomplete. That information was filtered through the knowledge and preconceptions of the local smiths and scholars.

“Well, it’s a steam engine,” Sonny Fortney said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “Two pistons and it does have rods, but there is a gap of almost a sixteenth of an inch between the cylinders and the cylinder heads. And that is a very good thing, because if that sucker ever built up a good head of steam, it would blow up.” The gap was inconsistent-only that wide in a couple of places.

“What about the boiler?”

Sonny shrugged. “It’s a pot boiler, not a tube boiler.”

“Can you fix it?”

“If I had time. But I don’t. I have the grading of the race track and the digging of the basement for the barracks for Erwin von Friesen and his boys. The expansion of the garage. I can advise your people and they can fix it.”

“Can’t Ron and Bob do that?”

“Part of it, but I’m going to have to do the surveying. I don’t trust the wells. We’re too close to the Danube and the water table is too high. So Dana is going to be busy testing the water. Bob is working out what goes where with the brewery.” One of their neighbors was a brewery in Simmering. “And Gayleen is running the kitchen to feed the workers. .”

As it happened, Hayley got the job of delivering the instructions on rebuilding the steam engine on the Pfeifer barge.

Peter Krause’s Smithy, Vienna, near the docks

“No. You see that piece of heavy paper there?” Hayley Fortney pointed at the gasket. It was twenty sheets of thick down-time-made rag paper, glued together, rolled through a wringer to eliminate any air pockets, and then waxed. It had taken Hayley almost a week to get it made. That was all right, though. It was taking just as long to get the cylinders and the pistons remade. And like Dad had said, it was probably a good thing that they had not had proper gaskets, because the boiler was the real issue. It was a steel pot with the lid welded on, and a hole cut into that, with a copper pipe coming out and going to the engine. It took the thing upwards of thirty minutes to build up a head of steam and there was very little in the way of controlling the steam.

Meanwhile, Peter Krause was looking like he would really like to kill her and she almost didn’t blame him. He was forty-five years old, a master smith and it was understandable that he wasn’t thrilled to be told how to do his job by a teenage girl. Unlike most of the people she had dealt with since the Ring of Fire, Peter Krause had never seen the Ring Wall and wasn’t sure he believed in it. Hayley sighed. “Look, no matter how good you are, no two metal pieces fit so perfectly that gas can’t pass between them. You know that. You know that the steam engine you built leaks. You’ve suffered burns from the escaping steam.”

Herr Krause nodded grudgingly.

“Well, it’s not because you aren’t a good smith. It’s because the tolerances are simply too fine for any smith. That’s why the gasket and flange arrangement. The gasket deforms to fit the minor irregularities that are going to be there. The only thing I have ever seen that didn’t have those irregularities was the Ring Wall itself, and that only right after it happened. The only hand that can cut that smooth is the hand of God. So the rest of us have to accept imperfection and figure out ways around it.”

Herr Krause wasn’t smiling, but the left side of his mouth was twitching up just a little. “Well enough,” he said. “The gasket is because no mortal hand is perfect, but it’s paper. How do you expect paper to withstand the pressure that you claim the good steel of my cylinder won’t withstand? It’s paper!”

“Right, it’s paper. But it is compressed by the bolts. There is a rule about the gaskets. The harder they are pressed, the stronger they are. That is why my dad insisted on so many bolts holding the parts together.”

Hayley hid a sigh. This was taking a long time.

Sanderlin Home, Simmering, Austria

“No, Mrs. Sanderlin, nothing too big or grand. I’d like to hire hundreds of people, too. But it would make too much noise.”

“But we can order a hundred sewing machines from Grantville and you know you could get them.”

“No. If I order a hundred I’ll get ten and a polite note from Karl Schmidt telling me that he will get us the rest as soon as he catches up with his back orders. Which ought to be sometime around the year 1700.”

“Well, then, why don’t we start our own sewing machine factory? You can get the machines, can’t you?”

“Maybe. But it would be a major investment and, for all I know, we would be burned out by irate tailors. Look, we’ll hire your friend Maria Bauer’s husband and set up a tailor shop out by the race track the emperor is building. But we can’t hire everyone.”

Gayleen Sanderlin went away disappointed, and truthfully Hayley was disappointed herself.

Fortney House, Simmering, Austria

“It’s called casein and it’s made from milk and vinegar,” Dana Fortney said to the delegation of widows and orphans that she had gathered for the casein case venture. They were in the outdoor kitchen just behind the house and the women were standing around a long trestle table. It was a sunny fall afternoon, and the smell of vinegar was having to fight against the scent of flowers and mown hay on the breeze. “We use stamps and hot milk and vinegar. We stamp it into shapes and let the shapes sit for a few days. Then we varnish it. Now, I have never done this myself, but I have instructions on how to do it. We will be providing the raw materials and working with you on making stuff. Let me walk you through a sample batch.”

Carefully following the instructions from the cheat sheet, Dana made a small batch of casein. Once it was rinsed in cool water, she put the blob in the mold they had had made and pressed it in. It came out in pieces. Well, it was her first try.

Within a few days, the ladies of the casein factories were producing casein items. They had been moved to a empty room in the brewery. It took a few hundred dollars of wasted milk for them to get the hang of it, but after that they could make casein buttons and clasps, knitting needles and crochet hooks, boxes and bottles and lids.

Simmering, becoming Race Track City

There were buildings going up around the race track and new shops in each building. The casein shop had shelves full of items made out of casein plastics, but that wasn’t the only place that casein was used. There were casein buckles on the boots made by the boot maker, and casein buttons on the pants and shirts. Also casein eyeglasses frames were made by a craftsman from the University of Vienna. The man had been making eyeglasses since long before the Ring of Fire. The little industries in the area around Ferdinand III’s race track were starting to feed off each other.

Better yet, the steam barge was finally up and running. And they were selling tickets to more than just the workers on the track. More people were walking out to see the track than were taking the shuttle barge, but enough were taking the barge so that they were making an extra trip every day for tourists.

* * *

Ron Sanderlin watched with considerable amusement as the 240Z made its way around the track. He didn’t know Janos Drugeth, but he had seen the man’s uncle. Pal Nadasdy had been the next best thing to incoherent after his ride a few days before. The 240Z slid a bit going around the far curve but the emperor got it back under control well enough. Ron was wondering how the cavalry officer and spy master was going to manage. Ron glanced at his uncle. “Think he’ll barf like the banker did?” The elder Abrabanel had gotten a ride, and thrown up in the car seat. Which they had had to clean.

“Could be.” Bob Sanderlin gave a twitch of his shoulders that was not quite a shrug.

“Doubt it,” said Sonny as they moved out from the garage as the car came in. “He’s a cavalry officer.”

“So?” asked Bob.

“He’s got stuff to prove.”

Bob’s shoulders gave that half-twitch again, and he and Ron headed out to open the doors.

“Nice recovery on that last turn, Your Majesty,” Ron offered as he opened the door for the emperor. Bob didn’t say anything as he opened the door for Drugeth. Bob now had dentures, but for most of his life he had had bad teeth and he had a tendency to keep his mouth closed out of old embarrassment. Especially around people he didn’t know well.

“It worked splendidly! Just as you said!” The emperor was grinning like a kid.

A moment later Drugeth lurched out of the car and stood stiff-legged beside it.

The emperor put his hands on his hips and looked around the race track. At this point it was just dirt, shaped by Fresno scrapers. But the emperor seemed pleased. “You were right, Ron,” he announced. “We need to build up the banks of the track on the curves.”

“Yup. Even at only sixty miles an hour, which is nothing for a 240Z, you almost spun out. Of course, it’ll help a lot once we can replace that packed dirt with a solid surface. Tarmac, at least, although concrete would be better.”

Ferdinand nodded. “We can manage that, I think, given a bit of time. We’ll need to build spectator stands also.”

He turned to Janos, smiling widely. “We’ll call it the Vienna 500, I’m thinking. You watch! One of these days, it’ll draw enough tourists to flood the city’s coffers.”

The expression on Janos Drugeth’s face was a study. Clearly, he had no idea what the emperor was talking about. But Ron knew. It was Ron who had suggested the idea.

The Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria

“Well, Your Majesty,” Ron Sanderlin said, “if there were a canal to the race track there would be a lot more people coming out to watch you going round the track.”

The emperor of Austria Hungary, who had renounced the title of Holy Roman Emperor, raised an eyebrow at Ron Sanderlin. “It’s only three miles. Hardly too far to walk. A canal, even a short canal, is very expensive. Why don’t you have your friends the Pfeifers simply build a dock on the Danube at that point? It would only be a mile walk.”

It was a good question and Ron didn’t have a particularly good answer. He fell back on honesty. “Because people need work, Your Majesty. When we got here and the race track project got started, we were deluged with people who were desperate for work. And we’ve done what we can but it’s not nearly enough. A project like the canal would employ hundreds of people, and at the same time it would make for an easy, quick transport from Vienna proper to Race Track City. .”

People had started calling the area around the race track Race Track City a month or so ago, but just after he said it Ron realized that he didn’t know if the emperor had heard the term. It also occurred to him that he didn’t know what legalities were involved in being a city. He knew only vaguely that there were imperial cities that had imperial charters, and that Race Track City didn’t have much of anything along those lines.

Fortunately, the emperor didn’t seem to notice his gaffe. He just nodded and excused himself for a moment. When he came back, he had Reichsgraf Maximillian von Trautmannsdorf with him. After that, the emperor of Austria-Hungary sat back and watched as his chief negotiator skinned Ron Sanderlin and tanned his pelt for hanging on the wall.

“I sympathize with your intentions, Herr Sanderlin, but the royal purse isn’t bottomless,” Reichsgraf Maximillian von Trautmannsdorf said.

“Yes, Your Grace.” Ron Sanderlin wished he had gotten a bit more advice from the Fortney girl about how to set up a partnership with the emperor. Except she had never done that either. “Well, we were thinking maybe a partnership of some sort, if we can come up with the money or rather part of the money to build the canal. .?” He let the question trail off, not wanting to ask, “What do we get out of it?”

“How much of the funding would you be putting up?” Trautmannsdorf asked.

“That depends, sir.” Well, there was no getting around it. Ron plunged in. “What are we going to get out of it? I mean if we put up, say, half the money to dig the canal, what do we get?”

“What do you want?”

“Clear title to some of the land around the race track and a farm for the seeds and stuff we brought.”

“How much land?”

Ron pulled out a map. The area had been surveyed by Sonny Fortney and he had clearly delineated the area between the race track and the Danube. Up to now that area had belonged to the emperor. The Sanderlins and Fortneys had simply had the use of it as part of their employment agreement. They had stretched that pretty far in setting up businesses, but they had gotten permission for each business. Now Ron showed Ferdinand III and Reichgraf Trautmannsdorf a map of a good-sized town, almost half a mile across in either direction, but that included the race track and canal, centered just northeast of the race track. It was small compared to Vienna and tiny compared to an up-time city, but it was clearly a town. It included the race track and room for up to fifty separate businesses. There was already an agreement between Brandon and the chief gardener at the emperor’s hunting lodge to have Brandon and some of the gardeners plant the up-time plants come spring. But the plan expanded that into a village between the hunting lodge and Race Track City.

Again, it was stuff that they had sort of started on already, but on a semi-official basis.

Ron pointed at the map. “The parts that are crosshatched would be ours and the rest would be the crown’s to do with as you like, but you might want to put some businesses in from here to here. That will be prime real estate as the town grows up.” At least that was what Hayley had said, and it made sense.

Trautmannsdorf was not one to take the first offer though. “For that you ought to pay for the whole canal.” But he was smiling when he said it.

They spent half an hour bargaining back and forth, and by the end of it Ron Sanderlin knew he had been skinned good and proper. A fact Hayley Fortney confirmed with loud lamentation as soon as she heard the results.

Fortney House, Race Track City

“We’re going to be overrun with Hofbefreiten and we get to pay most of the cost of building the canal for the privilege,” Hayley pointed out.

“What are holfbitten?” Dana wanted to know.

“People. People who have a special status. Hofbefreiten means court-freed or court-exempted. The way it works is that they pay the court for the privilege of providing stuff to the court. Anything from socks to carriages to coffeecake, and they get to sell stuff to the general public without paying the local taxes, the onera. Which can be quite onerous.”

Gayleen groaned and Dana made to whack her daughter.

Hayley ducked and continued. “He must have figured it out before you even finished talking about the effect of the canal.”

“Figured what out?” Bob Sanderlin asked, moved to rare speech by his confusion.

“That the steam ferry and the canal make Race Track City effectively part of Vienna, but not legally part of Vienna. Which gives all of Race Track City effective Hofbefreiten status without him having to officially do it, so the burghers who do have to pay onera won’t start screaming till it’s too late. Remember, they pay for the privilege of being Hofbefreiten and that’s money in Ferdinand’s pocket. I figured he’d insist on us paying for more of the canal and give us more of the property to dispose of, but he saw the potential. He can move Hofbefreiten out here to Race Track City and it will seem like a big concession to the burghers. And he can sell Hofbefreiten status to new craftsmen too. Make his tenants out here official Hofbefreiten. He’ll recover his whole share of the cost of the canal in the first year’s rents.”

“Well then, you should have done it yourself,” Ron groused. “I never claimed to be David Bartley.”