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Power Play

Written by Douglas W. Jones

 

I'd gotten a decent night's sleep after the hard ride back from Eisenach. Much of Grantville had stayed up late celebrating their victory over the Croats, but I'd slept through most of it. After breaking my fast, I wandered over to the police station to see how the Grantville police were dealing with the aftermath of the raid two days before.

"Sergeant Leslie," Angela called, smiling. "Am I glad to see you!"

Before I could reply, the phone rang and she picked it up. "Grantville Police," she said, and then paused. I listened to half a conversation while she took notes. Angela Baker is a sweet young woman, but I'd seen her handle some tough situations in the months that I'd served as Mackay's man with the Grantville police.

She picked up her radio microphone as soon as she hung up the phone and transmitted a terse message full of the ten-codes that the American police seem to love. The message was acknowledged by what seemed more a squawk of static than words, but she seemed satisfied.

"Where is everyone," I asked, after she finished with the radio.

"Out," she said. "While everyone else celebrates, we work. That call was about a wounded Croat cavalryman who crawled out of the woods east of town. We've had some cases where they're still armed and dangerous, but some died before we got to them. Add to that the fact that the king is in town with his cavalry, and we're busy. What I was going to say is . . ."

The phone rang again, so again I waited while she took notes. When I first began working with the Grantville police, I thought girls like Angela were menials, but I'd been wrong. Her job wasn't just to answer the phone and relay messages, it was to decide what mattered and what could wait. If something did matter, she had to know who to tell.

"A horse wandered into someone's back yard," she said, shaking her head as she put down the phone. She looked up at me and went on in a more serious tone. "John, we're short handed, and I have a call here that needs attention now. I know you're not officially Grantville police, but could you go out and take a look at this for us?"

"What is it?" I asked.

"The power plant phoned just before you walked in the door. They say they think they might have been attacked."

"They think?" I asked.

"Weird, isn't it. The rest of Grantville is darned sure it was attacked, but out at the power plant, they just think. Could you ride out there and see what's going on? Take notes, collect evidence."

Ten minutes later, I was on my horse on the road up Buffalo Creek. I'd hoped to spend the day helping celebrate Colonel Mackay's wedding, but I knew how much Grantville depended on electric power. In the past few months, Grantville's electric powered machine shops had become the key to supplying the king's new artillery.

It's a three mile ride to the power plant, but even before I got to the fairground on the west side of town, the whole atmosphere changed. Where the center of town was bustling with work cleaning up after the Croats, the west side was calm. I saw no broken windows and no bullet scars on buildings. If any Croats had made it west of town, they'd left scant evidence.

Not long after I crossed the railroad tracks at Murphy's run, the valley turned, giving me a view of the great cliffs south of Schwarzburg that mark the border of Grantville's land. A bit over a year before, Grantville and a round chunk of America from almost 400 years in the future had been plunged through a ring of fire into the center of Germany. The ring of cliffs around Grantville mark the mismatch between the German mountains outside and the American mountains inside. I've been in and around Grantville for most of a year now, and it's still terrifying to think about what God or the Devil did in that instant.

As the valley straightened out, the castle at Schwarzburg and the power plant below it came into view. A year ago, there was just a small cluster of houses by the power plant. Some people called it Spring Branch, after the stream that used to flow into Buffalo Creek there. Now, the Schwarza River flows into Buffalo Creek at Spring Branch, and the village has more than tripled in size. The power plant workers put up some of the new houses, a cluster of what the Americans call mobile homes, but the biggest growth started as a prisoner of war camp just west of the plant. By fall, the camp had become a refugee camp, and now that was fast becoming a permanent village, housing for workers at the power plant and at the new businesses growing up around it.

"Someone here called the police?" I asked, at the power plant's guard house.

"You not police," the guard said, looking at me through the woven steel wires of the fence around the place.

"Nein," I said, switching to German. The old man didn't look like he could guard much of anything, but he controlled the gate in the eight-foot high fence around the plant. "I'm John Leslie, cavalier with the Green Regiment. The police are a bit short handed, so they asked me to come out."

"I'll phone," he said, suspiciously, walking back into the guard house.

While I waited, I looked. I'd seen the power plant from the road many times, but I'd never been inside the fence. The place is immense and strange. Tall stacks on the east end of the building give off faint brown trails of smoke. The walls of the plant are iron in some places and brick in other places, and they must be fifty or a hundred feet high. It's not a fortress, but if it weren't for the huge windows, it would be easy to mistake it for one.

"Come in," the guard said, walking out to the gate. He pulled it just wide enough for my horse. "Tie up your horse this side of the railroad track, the grass is good there. Someone will come for you."

A man came around the corner of the plant as I took care of my horse. "Mr. Leslie?" he said, in American style. "I'm Tom McAndrew. You're here instead of the police?"

"I've been the Green Regiment's man with the Grantville police for most of a year now," I said, taking out the pad of paper Angela had made me take and writing down Tom's name. "They're a bit short handed what with the raid and the king's visit and all, so I said I'd help. What happened here?"

"Someone's been shooting at the plant," he said, leading me around the corner.

"It looks like it'd take a cannon to hurt this place," I said, looking up at the thick brick walls. "Of course, those big windows are a weak point."

The west wall of the place wasn't as high as most of the walls facing the road. Perhaps only 30 or 60 feet high, and parts looked newer. The windows began halfway up and ran almost to the top. If they'd had colored glass, they'd have belonged in a cathedral.

"They're not aiming at the windows, they've been shooting at our switchyard."

"Your what?"

Tom paused, and then pointed. "That's the switchyard," he said, pointing to the place where all the different electric wires converged on the plant. A line of tall towers carried six great wires off to the south while wooden poles carried three great wires off to the north. Smaller lines also came together at the place. There was a ring of high wire fence around the yard, and inside, a maze of strange stuff, all made of gray metal except for some parts that must have been green glass or brown glazed fine china. A faint hum seemed to fill the air as we came near.

"I'm afraid I don't get it," I said, dismayed. "I'm just a poor Scot, they should've sent an American."

Tom smiled wryly. "Don't worry, most of the folks in Grantville don't understand this stuff either, but I suppose they do their best to sound like they do around downtimers. The switchyard is where the power from the plant gets switched onto one line or the other. Those boxes with two connections each are circuit breakers to cut off power to the power line if there's a problem."

"Connections?" I asked, puzzled. "You mean those pillars of crockery coming out the top?"

"Right," he said, grinning. "Now, the big boxes with six connections each are the transformers, they change the voltage."

"Voltage?" I asked, feeling lost.

"That's a measure of how strong the electric power is," he said. "Forty volts is enough to kill a careless man, less if his skin is damp. When people turn on an electric light, that's just one hundred and fifteen volts. The bus bars are those three pipes that go across the top of everything. They run at thirty-five kilovolts, that's thirty-five thousand volts, three hundred times stronger than the power for an electric light. The three main circuits going out of the plant are one hundred and thirty five kilovolts. Of course, there's only one that still works, the one that goes over the hill to the mine."

I shook my head, lost in all this detail. "So how do you know someone was shooting at it."

Tom pointed. "Look at the insulators."

"Insulators?"

"You called them towers of crockery. They're glass or porcelain, crockery if you wish. Their job is to support the bus bars and the wires without letting the electricity leak out. Electricity only goes through metal, it can't go through insulators. The bigger insulators are for higher voltages. Anyway, take a look at the insulators holding up the bus bars."

I looked, and indeed, two of the insulators holding up one of the bus bars were shattered. Looking at the gravel below, I could see fragments of broken crockery.

"I see," I said. "Nobody seems to be in a panic, though. Why is this important."

"Because it could have shut down the plant. It should have. I wouldn't have expected the bar to hang in the air like that. The two insulators at the other end of the bus bar must be holding most of its weight, and the rest is being taken by the rigid feeders that drop down to the two newest transformers below. If the bar had sagged down just a bit more, we'd have had an electrical explosion and the power plant would probably have been dead for at least a week while we fixed the damage. As it is, we've got a problem because we only have one spare of that insulator. We've taken it to a potter so she can try to make a duplicate."

"You think it was done with a gun?" I asked, looking around. The closest the outer fence came to the switchyard was about ten rods, either from the south across the creek or from the edge of the refugee camp to the west. "It can't have been done with a common matchlock, it's too far. Whether it was German or American, it was a long rifle. If we could find a bullet, that would help."

"I have the key," Tom said, "but it's dangerous in there. Keep down, don't get tempted to climb up on anything."

"I heard you talking about thousands of volts, when what, forty are enough to kill a man."

"Right," he said, as he unlocked the gate in the switchyard fence.

I wasn't happy in that switchyard with the humming of the electricity all around me, but I did my best to ignore it. It was the broken insulator on the ground that I wanted, not anything up high. I didn't move anything, but just looked at the pieces where they'd fallen. "Do you see," I said, pointing to the shattered pieces of one insulator, and then pointing up at where they'd come from.

"What," he said.

"The pieces are scattered, but they're mostly east o' where they came from. I'd bet the shooter was over there somewhere," I said, waving at the refugee camp to the west.

The pieces of the other insulator were scattered in the same way. I wanted a bullet, so my eyes were on the gravel. Lead doesn't bounce very well. If a bullet hit an insulator head on, it would likely drop to the ground right under it.

"Look there," Tom said, pointing at the wall of the power plant.

"What?" I asked, straightening up to look where he pointed. There were fresh bullet scars on the brick wall of the power plant. It was obvious that a shooter trying to hit an insulator at 50 yards was bound to miss a few times.

"That's good," I said. "But help me find a bullet before we leave here."

We looked for another few minutes before I found a smashed bullet. "Take a look," I said, holding it in my hand.

"It was a round ball, wasn't it."

"Right," I said. Not with a flat bottom, like your rifles shoot, but it was shot from a rifle, you can see the grooves. We're looking for a downtime marksman, I think, perhaps a Jäger."

"Yayger?" he asked, while I pocketed the ball and a few pieces of shattered insulator.

"Professional hunter," I said. "They usually use good rifled guns."

The area under the scars on the side of the powerplant was weedy, there was no hope of finding a bullet there, but standing under the scars on the side of the building and sighting back through the switchyard toward the refugee camp, it was obvious where the shots had come from.

"Want me to go with you?" Tom asked, as we stared at the building the shooter must have used.

"That would be nice. Back through the main gate?"

"Faster through the west gate," he said. "The railroad used to go out that way, before they pulled the track last summer. I have the key here."

When I'd first seen it, the refugee camp had been nothing but a few parallel rows of light sheds. Just about every time I'd visited, there'd been changes. What had been sheds had been closed in by winter, and with the coming of spring, the pace of construction had increased. The shooter's building had a new second story, and as we came up to it, a roofing crew was at work adding a good slate roof on top.

"Hey, who you," a German carpenter asked, as we stepped inside.

"I'm from the power plant," Tom said. "John is with the Grantville police. Who are you?"

"Johann Schneider."

While I tried to figure out what question to ask, I wrote down his name. "What happened here during the Croat raid?" was the best I could do.

"Well," the carpenter said, answering in German, "the news of the Croats came before we got to work. We decided to lock the old prison camp gates and move the women and children into the inner houses. I think we could have held off a cavalry attack for a long time."

I nodded, looking around. "You're probably right. Horses are no match for a woven wire fence with barbed wire on top. You had guns?"

"A few," he said. "Mostly matchlocks, but enough to keep an attacker from trying to cut his way through the fence, and three of us had American pistols."

"No rifles?"

"No," Schneider said. "Everyone who had a gun had it out. I didn't see any rifles."

"So what happened afterwards. When did you get back to work here?"

"When news came of the victory, we had a bit of a celebration. It was time for the noon meal, so it was afternoon when we got to work."

"Did you see anything in this house when you got back to work?"

"Like what?" he asked, and I was stumped. I didn't want to ask for evidence of someone shooting at the power plant. I'd learned from the Grantville police that it was bad to ask leading questions. "Well, any sign that something odd had happened here."

"Now that you mention it, there was something," he said, frowning. "That window was broken out, and there was a sort of sulfur stink in the air."

The window he pointed to had only a few fragments of greased paper around the edges. It faced the power plant, and someone had torn out the paper. When I walked over to the window, I could see powder burns on the sill. Someone had fired a black-powder rifle out the window from close by. "Tom? Take a look."

Fortune didn't smile on us when we asked around, nobody remembered hearing the shots fired. People told us that the power plant makes odd noises on occasion, and it seemed likely that the shooter had managed to muffle the noise of his gun by shooting from inside the house.

Around noon, Tom suggested we break for lunch and recommended a tavern out by the main road. The place had decent food, and they'd set up tables in the shade of a big tree. Halfway through our meal, when the serving maid came to ask if we wanted more beer, I thought to ask the same questions I'd been asking in the camp.

"Around the time of the Croat raid, did you happen to see anyone around here with a long rifle?"

She frowned. "There was a man here the night before who had a big flintlock rifle. He said he was visiting a friend in the camp."

"Can you describe him?"

"Weatherbeaten, thin, he had a brown horse with a white cross on its nose. By his accent, he was Franconian."

"Have you seen him before then, or since?" I asked.

She hadn't. I paused, puzzled, and then looked across the table at Tom. "A Jäger, it would seem, and from Franconia. How in creation would such a man know to shoot at your, what do you call them, insulators."

"It's an obvious way to attack a power plant," he said.

"Obvious to you," I said, "But you had to spend half the morning explaining things to me enough that I could understand what he'd done. Someone here, someone working in your plant, must have taken the time to explain the same things to that man, or more likely, to whoever hired him."

"You think we have a spy in the power plant?"

I nodded.

 

****

 

When I got back to the Grantville police station, Angela Baker asked what I'd found. When I told her, she immediately dialed the telephone and asked for Chief Frost. "Yes," I heard her say "I know he's at the wedding banquet, but he should hear this himself." There was a pause. "Yes, I suppose it's poor form to walk out on the king, but if I can't get Chief Frost, then I need to speak with Mackay immediately."

She looked up at me with a grin. "I still can't believe we have a king here in . . ." Someone on the other end of the telephone must have spoken, because she stopped suddenly and then handed me the phone.

"John Leslie here," I said, using my best telephone manners. It was Chief Frost.

I went on to tell what I'd seen at the power plant, leading up to my guess that there was a spy in the plant to teach a German huntsman what exactly he needed to shoot at.

"Good Job," the Chief Frost said. "And thanks for helping cover for us when we're stretched thin. I'll mention your work to Colonel Mackay, and please, write up a proper report, or have Angela help you write it up. I'll forward a copy to Rebecca."

I didn't expect Chief Frost to say he'd forward a copy to Rebecca Abrabanel. To hear Grantville's policemen talk, you'd think nobody ever reads their reports. Now, my report was going to be read, not by some clerk, but by one of the most important people in Grantville.

Angela was a big help with the report, but we took frequent breaks when the telephone rang or a garbled burst of static on the radio needed action.

On one of the telephone calls, Angela put her hand over the telephone mouthpiece. "Power plant again," she said to me, and then uncovered the mouthpiece. "I think you should speak to Sergeant Leslie, he's the one who figured it out this morning."

When I took the receiver, the man on the other end introduced himself as Scott Hilton. "I'm the steam engine project shift supervisor for the power plant. Tell me why you think there's a spy in the plant," he said.

When I finished answering his question, he sighed. "I hate to say it, but I don't think this is our first attack. When I heard there might be a spy here, I didn't want to believe it, but at the same time . . ." He stopped, and there was an uncomfortable pause. "Well, I wanted to hear it from you before I go off half cocked."

I had to grin at the American expression comparing a man to a half-cocked pistol. "So are you fully cocked now?" I asked.

"I suppose so," he said, with a chuckle. "As I said, I think there were other attacks on the plant."

"Why?"

"We've had accidents," he said. "We expected some accidents, but there've been some odd ones. We're trying to build machines none of us are really prepared to build, you know."

I didn't know, but I didn't interrupt him.

"When you've got enough plain ordinary accidents, it's easy to think that everything that goes wrong is an accident. Now that we know someone's trying to attack us, I'm pretty sure that some of those accidents weren't so accidental. I just talked it over with Landon, my boss, and he agrees. There are two that we're pretty sure of, a main bearing failure and a cylinder head that burst."

"I'm afraid I don't understand. What's a main bearing, and what's a cylinder head."

He paused for a few seconds. "Tell you what. My wife and I will feed you dinner tonight, and then I'll give you a quick lesson on steam engines. That way, when you do come out to the plant, things'll make a little sense."

He gave me directions to his house before he hung up. All the while, Angela was watching me. "It sounds like you're not done with the power plant," she said.

"It seems that there might have been other attacks."

"Let's finish today's report first, before you start on tomorrow's work," she said. "Tomorrow, take better notes so this job won't be so hard!"

 

****

 

Scott Hilton lived up the slope on the northeast side of town, far enough from the main roads that the Croats hadn't gotten into his immediate neighborhood. The Hilton house was what the Americans call a foursquare, two stories, with bedrooms above and living area below. As I started up the steps to the large front porch, the silence was shattered by a boy's bellow.

"Ma, he's here!"

Two boys disappeared into the front doorway as I stepped onto the porch. As it developed, there were five Hilton children. Lisa, the oldest, tried to help control the younger ones. Hans and Jacob were the two who'd announced me, and there was a toddler underfoot as well as a baby. There was also a middle-aged German woman, Maria.

Dinner was noisy. Sylvia, Scott's wife, seemed to thrive on the disorder. Between interruptions, she managed to give a short history of the family. "Hans and the two babies, they were the Zimmermann family, from a little village north of here. Maria took care of them after their place was burned out. We took them in after they showed up at church."

"Mister Hilton, how long have you worked at the power plant," I asked, as the children's full stomachs began to quiet them down.

"About a year, Sergeant. Before the Ring of Fire, I worked in Fairmont, that was a town off beyond where Rudolstadt is now. When they asked if anyone knew anything about steam engines, I said yes. I've been at the power plant ever since."

Sylvia interrupted. "The one thing Scott didn't tell me when we got married was his fixation on steam. Just about every weekend, it seems, we would go traipsing off to the darndest places to take photos of greasy old pieces of junk."

He chuckled. "Right, only now, that photo collection is a gold mine and I'm working full time, and then some, trying to recreate some of that junk."

"You're not going to show him your photo collection!" she said.

"No," he said, pushing himself away from the table. "Come down to the cellar, I want to show you a little steam engine."

There was a half-cellar under the downhill side of the house, and half of that was a small workshop. After Scott turned on the light, he pulled a tray of machinery off of a shelf.

"This here's a toy steam engine," he said. "My father brought it back from Germany when I was a kid. This half is the boiler," he said, pointing to a shining round barrel a bit bigger than my fist. "It was supposed to burn a special fuel, but I ran out of that years ago, so I stuffed the burner with rags and if you soak it with alcohol, you can make it work. Let me fire it up for you."

Five minutes later, with the boiler half full of water and the burner rag saturated with gin, blue flames engulfed the boiler and a puddle of blue crept out from the copper shell around the boiler.

"Don't worry about the fire," he said. "So long as it stays on the metal base, we won't burn down the house. While we wait for the water to come to a boil, take a look at the engine itself."

There was a wheel, he called it a flywheel, and when he spun the wheel with his fingers, it cranked a pair of plungers in and out of a metal post off to the side of the flywheel. The plungers were piston rods, and the metal post held the cylinders.

"Why is this piston rod bigger than that one," I asked, only to find out that there was more to learn. There was only one cylinder and one piston rod. The smaller rod was called the valve rod.

About then, the boiler began to whistle. "That's the safety valve," Scott said. "When the boiler is up to pressure, it lets off the extra steam into a whistle. That tells us it's time to run the engine, and letting off the extra steam keeps the boiler from exploding."

As he spoke, he turned a little wheel with his fingertips. "This is the throttle valve," he said, as steam began to hiss out from around the piston rod and the valve rod. "Give the flywheel a bit of a spin with your finger."

I did, and to my surprise, the flywheel began to turn faster and faster, until the machine was humming and the spokes and other moving parts were nothing but a blur.

"Too fast," he said, turning the throttle wheel slowly back. The engine slowed, until it was chugging along at the tempo of a fast march.

"What makes it go?"

"There's a piston in the cylinder, and the steam can push it from one side or from the other. The piston pushes the piston rod, and that turns the crank. Each time the piston reaches one end or the other of the cylinder, the crank slides the valve the other way. That reverses the direction the steam is pushing the piston."

"So what use is it?" I asked, fascinated but puzzled.

"This one is no use at all," Scott said, grinning, "except as a toy for overage boys like me. What we're trying to do out at the power plant is build fourteen machines like this, except a whole lot bigger. Those machines will be able to generate all the electric power Grantville needs."

"But you already have a power plant," I said.

"Yup, but the machines in that plant need supplies we can't get from anywhere in the world, not since the Ring of Fire. We might be able to run the old machines for another year, if we're really lucky. Machines like this toy, though, we can make all the parts ourselves and we don't even need special oil. Beef tallow should work just fine to oil it, and if we can get enough whale oil or even olive oil, that'll be even better."

"Should we add more fuel to the fire?" I asked, as I noticed that the blue flames around the boiler were almost completely out.

"No, this fuel was meant to be drunk, not burned," he said, picking up the toy steam engine and blowing out the last remaining flames. "Come upstairs and we'll share a drink while I tell you something about the problems we've been having."

He put the toy steam engine back on its shelf and picked up the bottle of gin before leading me back up the stairs. "Have you ever had a Martini?" he asked, on the way up.

"A what?"

"Here, sit, I'll make you one," he said, waving me into his parlor. "I've had a bit of trouble getting Vermouth, but I think I've finally got my hands on something that works."

He disappeared into the kitchen with the bottle of gin, and in a minute, came out and handed me a glass of cold clear liquid with ice cubes and a pickled olive floating in it.

"To the king," he said, raising his glass before he took a sip.

"And to Grantville," I said, returning the toast. I'd heard enough of the American attitude toward nobility in general to understand that his toast was unusual. I imitated him, taking just a sip of my drink after the toasts.

Scott launched into the history of the power plant over his drink. "Unit Five, that's the big turbogenerator out at the power plant. It isn't likely to outlast the year. Right now, it's generating almost all our electric power, and we've got to build replacements. We knew that much as soon as we came through the Ring of Fire. The oil filter system and oil are our big problem. We've even got two guys trying to re-refine the oil, but even if they're successful, something else will probably go wrong."

I was totally lost, but one thing puzzled me more than all the rest. "Unit Five? Does that mean there's also a Unit Four?"

"I asked that too, after I started at the plant. Each new generator at the plant gets a number, in order. When they built the plant back in the 1920's, over seventy years before the Ring of Fire, it was a much smaller place, with two units, numbers one and two. They were only a few megawatts each. Then they enlarged the place in the 1930's and 1940's and put in two new units, three and four. Those two might have added up to fifty or a hundred megawatts, and once they were working, they scrapped one and two. Now, the hall that used to hold one and two is the plant machine shop. After World War II, fifty years before the Ring of Fire, they replaced Units Three and Four with Unit Five. That's about two hundred megawatts. The space where Units Three and Four used to be is where we're building our new units."

"What's a megawatt?" I asked, befuddled. "Are they like the kilovolts I heard talk of this morning?"

"Yes and no," he said, launching into a confusing description of the difference between force and power. I must have looked baffled, because he gave up halfway through, took a sip of his drink, and started over. "Think about a mill," he finally said. "You can measure the power it takes to turn the millstone in watts, or you can measure it by how many horses it takes to turn the wheel. One horsepower is about 750 watts. Anyway, two mills might need the exact same amount of power, but one could get that power from a high wheel with just a trickle of water, while the other gets it from a low wheel in a broad stream. You can think of volts as the height of the fall."

He paused to pick the olive out of his glass and pop it into his mouth. "Ah, these Italian olives are pretty good."

All I had left in my glass were two cubes of ice and an olive, so I imitated him. I don't eat olives very often, but it did seem better after soaking in my gin martini.

"Earlier, you said you'd had lots of trouble with accidents," I said, after spitting the olive pit into my glass. "And then you said you expected lots of accidents. Why?"

He sighed. "We're in way over our heads, that's why. Nobody in Grantville has ever built a steam engine bigger than a few horsepower, and now we need to build an engine with a thousand horsepower. Andy Frystack has built little engines, and he's a good machinist. The people at the power plant know steam, but not piston engines.

"Then, think about the size we need. The engines I've tracked down that put out a thousand horsepower all run over a hundred tons of iron, and we want 14 of the things. That's a lot of iron. Even if we can get the iron, who around here can cast pieces that big?

"Accidents? We've had castings break. Bad foundry work is the obvious explanation. We've had steel bolts snap. We might have made a mistake guessing the force they could handle. We've had bearings fail for lack of oil. We're used to automatic oiling systems, we probably didn't oil them enough. We've been lucky, so far. Not too many pipes have burst, and nobody's been killed, but we've come very close to catastrophe.

"Before you go inside that plant, I want to make sure you understand that it's a dangerous place."

"I got a lecture on the danger of electricity when I visited this morning." I said.

"It's more than that," Scott said. "We're working with chunks of iron that weigh a ton or more. Chunks of stone, too, for the engine foundations. Be careful what you walk under. Steam pipes are hot. We work with superheated steam at four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. That's a high enough pressure that it is like working with gunpowder. Steam pipes can explode like bombs, and the cylinder of a steam engine can shoot a piston just as well as a cannon can shoot a cannonball."

 

****

 

Scott Hilton met me at the power plant the next morning and led me into the building. "This is the hall they made for Units Three and Four," he said, as I gawked at the scene. "Now, we've built Unit Six at the far end, and we're building Units Seven, Eight and Nine."

The room was huge, filling perhaps a quarter of the whole power plant. Huge windows along the south and west walls spread a soft light through the room. The place reminded me of a cathedral, except for huge machinery and construction toward the east end and a work crew digging a pit toward the middle.

Scott led me to the construction area. A crew of masons were at work there, filling a newly dug pit with stonework. Scott's explanation mostly went over my head. "This is the foundation for Unit Eight," he said. "Parts of it stand up high to hold the cylinders, but we need access to the steam and condensate pipes, and of course, there's the pit for the generator and flywheel."

While we watched the masons, a huge door at the west end opened to admit a four-horse team hauling a heavy freight wagon.

"Ah," Scott said. "They're delivering a stone for Unit Eight. Watch."

At first I didn't notice, but there was great bridge spanning the width of the room and it was moving toward the freight wagon. As a huge hook lowered from the bridge, I realized that it was a crane. When it reached the wagon, the teamsters hung their load from it, a single large stone.

"How much does the stone weigh?" I asked.

"About two tons, solid quartzite," Scott said. "It's quarried from the ring wall north of Schwarzburg, less than a mile from here, all downhill for the heavy stones. The little stones go to that new warehouse they're building in town, we keep the big ones."

As he spoke, the crane silently carried the stone toward the awaiting masons and lowered it onto a bed of fresh mortar.

"What's all that stuff," I asked, pointing to piles of ironwork stacked along the wall beyond the masons.

"Parts. We're getting parts from foundries and forges scattered all over. Some workshops are better at little castings, other can do big ones. Some forges do wrought iron, some can give us the little steel parts we need. When the parts come in, we line them up over there until we're ready to use them. Let's look at Unit Seven. There, we're starting to put things together."

He led me to the narrow space between Units Six and Seven. Six was a huge version of the machine I'd seen in Scott's basement, churning away at double-time and making a quiet pop-pop noise as it worked. About half of the big iron pieces of Seven were in place, with a group of men hard at work on one of the big pieces.

"They're turning the low-pressure cylinder right now," Scott said.

"Turning?" I asked. "Looks like it's not moving at all."

"Boring, I should say," Scott said. "See, they've run a boring bar down the middle of the cylinder, between those cast iron centers attached across each ends. There's an electric motor turning the boring bar, and there's a tool on the bar that goes round and round scraping the inside of the cylinder to be exactly thirteen and a half inches radius, as close as we can make it. It's not that different from boring a cannon, but a whole lot bigger around."

Turning to look at Unit Six, I could see similarities to the engine I'd seen the night before, but there were differences. "On your little engine, the valve and the cylinder were right together on the same side of the big wheel, but here, they're on opposite sides."

Scott looked baffled, and then chuckled. "No, my little engine at home has just one cylinder. Here, we have two cylinders, and each has its own valve system. The thirteen inch one on the far side is the high pressure cylinder, the twenty-seven inch one on the near side is the low pressure cylinder."

He must have seen the baffled look on my face. "It's a compound engine. That means we use the steam twice. The high pressure steam is four hundred pounds per square inch. We get half the work out of the steam dropping the pressure to seventy-five PSI, that's pounds per square inch. The low pressure cylinder gets the other half of the work, dropping the pressure to near zero."

I surveyed the immense thing, wondering how I could possibly be of any use. "You said you thought there'd been attacks? What kind of attacks?"

He led me over to the great crank on the high pressure cylinder side. It was whirling around and around, almost too fast to follow with my eyes. "See that thing on top of the main crankshaft bearing?" he asked, pointing to the trunnion bearing behind the crank.

On top of the heavy ironwork was a polished copper fitting a bit bigger than my fist. "That's an oil cup," he said. "It's full of oil, and the oil in it slowly drips down into the bearing. Without oil, the bearing would burn up and wreck the engine."

"Burn up?"

Scott paused before he answered. "Ever see how hot a wagon axle gets if there's no grease on the hub? This wheel is turning so fast that the metal itself will melt if it runs dry."

"So what happened here?" I asked.

"Every half hour, the engine master comes through and tops up the oil in each of the oil cups. A month and a half ago, right after we got this engine working, the bearing caught fire. Afterward, we found that the oil cup was missing, broken off. The engine master swore that the cup was there not twenty minutes before."

I looked at the cup. "But the engine wasn't wrecked?"

"It came close. The engine master was nearby, and when he saw the smoke, he killed the engine. We had to re-turn the axle and replace the brasses before we put the engine back in service."

"So we're looking for someone who knows the engine needs oil," I said. "This engine master you mentioned, I should talk to him."

"Probably," Scott said, "but Franz was badly hurt in the next accident. Come here."

He led me into the space between the two cylinders. There was a confusion of moving parts there, with the great wheel spinning madly not far in front of us. A cast-iron case as big as the great wheel gave off a hum that sounded like the electric switchyard outside.

"What's all this," I asked, and got more than I wanted. The great wheel was the flywheel, the humming case beside it was the alternator, with another wheel inside it called the forty-eight pole rotor. I'd been right about the sound. The alternator was the part of the engine that actually made electricity. The spinning shaft along the side of each cylinder was a camshaft that worked the valves, and the whirligig on the end of each camshaft was the governor that controlled the engine speed.

"My little engine at home has piston valves, but that kind of valve doesn't work very well at high speed. When we started working on this engine design, some of us wanted to use Corliss valves, but the Masaniellos convinced us to do it with balanced poppet valves. They're faster and the parts are easier to machine. The camshaft here works the poppets."

I was totally baffled, except that I could clearly see his finger pointing at the spinning shaft he called the camshaft. "What was ...