1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 28

August 1635

Concrete Plant

Baron Johannes Hass looked at the young women who had come to look at his concrete plant with a mixture of hope and resentment. Baron Hass couldn’t say which was the larger component of the mix. Not that he had any choice, however it came out. He had been told to provide the tour by no less a personage than Maximilian von Liechtenstein. The emperor was not pleased with the time it was taking to get concrete into production, in spite of the fact that he had shown them the designs and reports that Peter Barclay had provided. Baron Hass was building the rotating kiln just as fast as humanly possible. It was simply a very large project. So he took the young ladies around and showed them the sights, explaining as he went.

After the tour, while they were setting down to dinner, the auburn-haired girl, the one whose sister was going to marry Prince Karl, asked him. “Where are the little kilns?”

“What little kilns?”

“Oh. You know.” She waved rather vaguely. “The little ones like they have all up and down the Elbe and Saale rivers. The ones that just make a batch at a time.”

“Little ones are very inefficient. They waste fuel and time.”

“Told you so!” said the short, curly headed one. “It’s long past time to shoot the engineer.”

Istvan Janoszi looked at Millicent, the short one. And for a moment Baron Hass was very glad that he wasn’t Herr Barclay. “Do you think. .”

* * *

“No,” Judy said. “Tempting in this case, but no. Millicent was just talking about an up-time business quote. ‘In every project there comes a time to shoot the engineer and put it into production.’ She’s not literally talking about shooting the engineer. It’s just a comment on the fact that if given their heads, an engineer will end up costing you millions to save a few pennies.” Judy tilted her head and gave a half smile. “They aren’t doing it on purpose. It’s just the nature of the beast. Considering what’s already been invested in that monster-” She waved at the half finished rotary kiln. “-it ought to be finished. But eighty percent or more of any savings it generates in production costs is going to be eaten by transport costs, even if it is located right on the Danube. If you’d gone with beehive kilns, you’d have been in production a year and a half ago, before Pete Barclay and his crowd ever got here, just by modifying kilns you were already using for making quicklime and pottery. Which would have meant that Baron Hass here would have already been making money off his patent and this thing wouldn’t be pushing him into receivership.”

“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.”

“You want to infringe on my patent? Is that it?”

“Not at all,” Judy said. “We want to license it. We have projects of our own, you know, and we’re willing to let you in on them, in exchange for a nonexclusive license to produce concrete. You’ll still be able to produce it once your rotary kiln gets up and running, and you can sell nonexclusive rights to other people. Meanwhile, you’ll be getting in on the ground floor, so to speak, of the Liechtenstein Tower.”

“Liechtenstein Tower?”

“Yes. We’ve already bought the land,” Judy said. “It’s in the old Jewish quarter. The tower is going to be fifteen stories tall, with elevators and electric lights. Plumbing. All the modern conveniences. And we expect it to fill fast, since living space is at such a premium in Vienna.”

“It sounds very interesting,” Baron Hass admitted. “But what I need is money.”

“I understand. But, you know, BarbieCo preferred stock is fully negotiable. The Abrabanels are accepting it at face value.” She opened a bag and pulled out a set of papers exactly the same size as the reich banknotes. Judy doubted that the possibility of the similarity in size being coincidence ever even crossed his mind. Baron Hass was not, after all, an idiot. He looked the bills over and seemed to be impressed. He should be. The printing on the bills was both more subtle and more vibrant than on the reich money. He looked at a judi then looked up at her. Judy smiled at him. He clearly recognized her face on the BarbieCo one thaler note, and the faces of the other girls who were here. Judy continued as he looked over the notes. “That means you can sell it, trade it, you can do whatever you want with it.”

Baron Hass continued to look over the bills. He was concentrating on the susan. The one bill that didn’t have an amount printed on it also had a different format. The cameo of Susan was over on the left side of the bill to leave room to fill in the amount and for the signature, with a list of names who were authorized to sign. That list did include Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein, but it did not include Gundaker or Maximilian. It included Judy Wendell, but not Sarah Wendell, but for different reasons.

“Also, we do like that ball mill you have for turning the clinker into fine powder. Transport is expensive, but it still may be more profitable for us to ship the clinker here for grinding than to set up grinding mills at every beehive kiln up and down the Danube. Assuming, of course, you’re reasonable about the price and are willing to accept BarbieCo stock. I assume you’re using good high-chromium steel balls in your ball mill?” Judy asked, though to the best of Judy’s knowledge there was not a single chromium steel ball in the universe.

“What? It’s taken me almost two years to get the high carbon steel balls.” He looked over at Istvan. “You know I have been trying for years to get some of the steel. You can’t import it from the USE at any sane price. And with the explosion of the Bessemer plant, there have been major delays in getting good steel at anything approaching a reasonable price.”

“What about crucible steel?”

“We have had difficulty finding the right clays and the duke has been most unreasonable about licensing.”

“Mad Max of Bavaria is most unreasonable about most things these days,” Judy said. The duke of Bavaria had bought the patent for crucible steel before his first wife died and he went totally off his rocker. They were even using it in Bavaria at the moment, though his lawyers were suing anyone in Austria-Hungary who tried to use it. And having sold him the patent, the government of Austria-Hungary was stuck with it unless they wanted to give the money back. . and they didn’t have the money.

The rest of the day was spent talking with Baron Hass about how his facilities, half-finished as they were, might be integrated with beehive kilns that could be adapted from other uses or built much more cheaply and quickly to produce concrete in a reasonable time.

Race Track City

Herr Buschen counted out four reichsthaler notes, then a Barbie preferred, then another reichsthaler, nodded sharply to confirm that the payment was right. “Good day, Herr Krause. The same again next week?”

Herr Krause shook his head. “I need more linen next week. Bring more linen.”

“How much more?”

“Half again as much,” Herr Krause said.

“I think I can do that,” Herr Buschen said. Then he stuck out his hand and the deal was done.

Neither one of them paid much attention to the fact that part of the payment was in Barbie preferred rather than the silver-backed reichsthaler. It was all money. When the girls had started trading stock, they had set the stock values to match the local currency, reichsthaler, not American dollars. The price was set at Race Track City. The shops that the SFIC owned a piece of took it at face value. The shops in Race Track City that they didn’t own-any of those shops set up on the part of Race Track City kept by the emperor-were right next door often as not to the SFIC shops, and it really wasn’t any trouble at all to take their BarbieCo stock next door and trade it for reichsthaler. Not that they bothered, unless someone insisted. They just kept it in their cash boxes and used it for change or to buy their next batch of supplies.

* * *

Father Lamormaini bought the small casein crucifix. It was a beautiful piece, painted and detailed, only about three inches tall and quite inexpensive. He bargained a little, but not much. The thing was quite lovely for the price and he had a half reichsthaler note. He offered it to the shopkeeper. The woman took it and placed it on the counter while she opened her cash box and counted out his change. There was quite a lot of it. The standard bills were printed in yellow and black, the royal colors. But here were other bills. Pink bills and purple bills, green and blue bills. “What are those?”

“Oh, those are BarbieCo preferred. They are as good as reichsthaler.” In a half whisper, she added, “Better really. They pay interest every year.”

“I will not take those,” Lamormaini hissed. The words came out without any conscious control, and that wasn’t something that normally happened to him. He had been working in the halls of power for most of his life and had not survived there by letting his tongue run wild.

The shop woman looked up at his tone, then quickly said, “That’s fine, Father. I’ll make sure that your change is all in reich money.”

Father Lamormaini now realized that the mark of the beast had invaded Austria-Hungary in the form of this BarbieCo stock money. The poison of the Ring of Fire that made peasants think they were the same as kings-the same poison that made Lucifer think himself the same as God. The corruption had arrived. The mark of the beast was upon them, and it was more subtle and more deadly than he had ever imagined. Pride, vanity, the arrogance of infinite wealth. . made from nothing. Sarah Wendell, whatever Gundaker said, was Satan’s handmaiden.