Willem Krause watched the Las Vegas Belle fly over and the left side of his mouth lifted in his patented half-grin. He was a charming fellow. Which was something he both knew and worked at. Krause worked at everything. Very little had come easy to him. His title was real enough, but mostly meaningless. He made his living as a mercenary soldier. He watched and as he watched, he formed a new goal. The goal of my life, he thought. He would gain an airplane—buy one, or build, or steal one, to take him where he wanted to go and turn him into a whole scout company all by himself. With an airplane, he could sell his services anywhere. Anywhere at all. To Krause it was obvious just from seeing the airplane fly, that aircraft would be of immense value in war even if they could never fire a shot. He watched the plane for another moment, then turned away. He had things to do. And he needed to be in Saxony to get the money to do them with.

****

"It's true, Elector," Willem Krause said. "I saw the airplane fly with my own eyes."

John George of Saxony asked for another beer—as was his custom, by dumping what was left of his present beer on the head of his servant. It was a boring old joke a hundred years before the Ring of Fire. But Willem smiled as though it was the freshest of wit. "They," he said, referring to airplanes, "will be world-changing, Elector. But I don't think the up-timers know it."

"Why not?" John George asked.

"Because of the resources—or rather the lack of resources—they are dedicating to them even now." Willem shook his head in only half-pretended disgust. Telling John George anything bad about the up-timers on his western border was always a good tactic, but in this case Willem was somewhat amazed at how little resources the up-timers were spending on aircraft.

The conversation continued, a mix of complaints about the up-timers and their destabilizing effects, upsetting the natural order of things. And the advantages of air power which, if invested in by farsighted members of the better classes, could stave off—at least for a time—the democratizing effects of the up-timers.

It took two more weeks and quite a bit of groveling, but Willem got the money and headed back to Grantville. During the groveling, they discussed whether it was better to simply buy an airplane or have one built. Krause managed to convince the Elector of Saxony that having one built, and having the Elector's loyal Willem Krause involved in the building, would mean that they were not dependent on the up-timer knowledge nearly as much as they would be if they simply bought whatever some up-timer sold them.

****

Back in Grantville, with a bank account filled with Saxony silver, Willem Krause started looking into the possibilities for airplanes. There were many people building many types of airplanes. The Kellys, an up-timer couple, were building three different aircraft at once. A pair of idiots, one up-timer, one down-timer, were trying to get people interested in building multi-engine bi-wing airplanes.

****

Money, Darius thought. Back up-time, big stars and rich people ran around in faded jeans and torn T-shirts. Not down-time. Down-time, real money was needed to have a wardrobe and having a wardrobe meant having real money. And at first glance this guy looked like he had real money. All those fancy clothes, and this dude was pretty well-padded, too. Not fat, but definitely nowhere close to starvation.

"How can I help you, sir?" Darius asked.

The guy looked at Darius and gave him this sort of conspiratorial grin, as if he had a secret but was willing enough to share it with Darius because he trusted him. "Aircraft. I'm interested in aircraft."

"Yes, sir!" Darius said in Amideutch, half-unconsciously returning the grin, "Aircraft design and history have been two of our most popular research areas ever since the National Library was established. And they've gotten even more popular since the Las Vegas Belle first flew. We have a standard booklet you could buy. It has some basic research from the library and it contains the basic theory and the main formulas involved. It costs twenty-five dollars, but it's just an overview. There is a much more detailed and complete book that was put together by three researchers and examined by Herr Smith. He said it has enough information in it to get you killed."

The guy looked kind of surprised and a bit bemused by that comment. But it was exactly what Hal Smith had said about the book. And Darius told him why. "An airplane that never left the ground was unlikely to kill the pilot, but even the best airplane ever built is a death trap if badly-flown or poorly-maintained. The more expensive book Aeronautics 101 has enough information in it to get you off the ground."

Darius continued with his sales pitch. "If you're actually going to try to build an airplane of your own, you want to read the second book. It's two hundred dollars, but it has a lot of information. After you've read it, you want to consult with Herr Smith and get his thoughts on any design you come up with. That's expensive too, but Herr Smith is a real aeronautical engineer and the only one in the world. There are also the spreadsheets that Herr Smith and Colonel Wood came up with. You can do the calculations with a slide rule, or even on paper if you're good enough at math. But you're safer with the spreadsheets."

***

"That was a good sale," Gemma said behind him. A few minutes later while Willem Krause was leaving with his books. Researchers got a ten percent commission on books sold and twenty-two fifty wasn’t bad for a quarter hour's work.

Darius jumped a bit. "Jeez, Gemma. Where did you learn to sneak up on people like that?"

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain, Darius. Not even half the Lord's name. I don't understand why the good Lord sent a bunch of up-timers back to our time just so they could blaspheme."

"Maybe," Darius suggested, "it's because the good lord doesn't actually care that much about blaspheming. Maybe he cares more about what's in your heart than what comes out of your mouth."

"Maybe," Gemma agreed. "But I'm not going to risk centuries in Purgatory on the chance." Then she smiled at him.

Darius' heart gave a little flutter. Gemma Bonono was pretty. Not pretty in a "oh my god, she's gorgeous" kind of way. Pretty in a "home-town girl" sort of way. If your hometown was in Italy in the seventeenth century, that is. Or at least so Darius imagined. Not that he'd ever been to Italy, not yet.

Gemma also worked in the library. She was more a translator than a researcher, since she spoke Italian, Latin and German. Her English was coming along, too.

"I gotta go, Gemma." Darius sighed. "I need to keep the commission from that sale, so I've gotta do some of the pro bono questions."

"I'll help," Gemma said. "It'll be good practice."

They went back to the reference desk to pick up the next pro bono question. As it happened, that question—like so many others—was one that had been asked and answered before, so they made a note to reference the number for the already researched answer and put it on the out-going stack, then went on to the next question. One of the many clerks would get in touch with the person who had asked the question, find out what kind of report they wanted, and either answer it verbally or, for a fee, have a written report made up and sent out. Some questions already had reports written up and ready to send out, but not all of them.

That part wasn't the researcher's problem. Darius and Gemma would mark down on their timesheets that they'd spent however many minutes answering the question. Enough hours of answering the pro bonos would pay their library fee, which is what they were after.

While they were doing this, Darius explained to Gemma that the sale had been to another aviation nut, and who knows, maybe he'd come back with questions. Most of the people who bought that book never returned. Darius wasn't sure if it was because the book answered all their questions or if it was because the answers in it scared them off.

****

Willem Krause bought both books and read them through, which took him almost two months. Partly because there was a lot of stuff in them, partly because they were in the up-timer type face and he wasn't used to it. Partly because they were in English and he would have done better with either German or Latin. But mostly because they were poorly written. What they were, were articles copied out of various encyclopedias, periodicals, and bits of books, strung together with connecting paragraphs inserted to explain why they had chosen this article or this scene from a given book. There was an article about a plane that had tried to pull out of a dive too fast and had its wings come off. The accompanying paragraph pointed out that while lift increased by the square, stress on the wings increased by the cube, and then failed to explain what that meant.

Willem made a note of another question to ask the next time he went to the library and went back to reading.

This was a few paragraphs from a fiction book, describing how the hero took off from an aircraft carrier. And the connecting paragraph discussed preflight checklists. It was poorly organized minutia of aircraft design and flight, put together by people who, for the most part, had never been in a cockpit or drawn so much as a line of a design of an aircraft. The knowledge was there and some of it was sneaking past the poor authorship to present itself to him. And that was the two hundred dollar book. Willem wanted to throw it across the room. Or, better yet, at the pimple-faced teenager who had sold it to him. At the same time, he realized that it was absolutely the best book available down-time on the subject of powered flight.

****

Willem presented his list of questions to Darius, who examined them carefully then looked at him with considerably more respect. "Some of these are new."

"The questions that aren't new . . . why aren't they answered in the book?

"Because they've come up since it was written. There is a second edition being worked on now, but it won't be out till the end of the year, if then. It should be better organized, though. By the way, if you agree that the answers we find for you can be included in the next edition, there is a discount."

"How much of a discount?"

"Well, they may not want the answers for the book, so it's only twenty percent. Or you can gamble and if they use it and you’re the only one that asked it, they will refund half the research cost."

Willem knew a scam when he heard one. But the whole library worked on a pay-me-again system. Almost every question asked would have an answer that more than one person would want. So the rates they charged took into account the fact that they could probably sell the answer several times. And they always charged extra if the customer wanted their answers kept private. Even if you paid the extra, it didn't keep someone else from asking the same question and getting it answered. It just kept that researcher from selling the answer to the general pool of previously answered questions. By now a lot of questions were answered by typing the question into the list of previously asked questions and getting back a reference number to an already found, correlated and printed answer. So even if Willem didn't take the discount, it was just as likely that someone else would come along and ask the question, so the answer would show up in the next edition of the book anyway.

"I'll take the twenty percent discount." Willem shook his head, partly in admiration for a good scam but mostly in disgust that he was the one who was helping write the next edition of Aeronautics 101—and he was paying for the privilege.

****

"Hey, Gemma," Gemma heard Darius call. "You want to help me with this one? It's that airplane nut again."

"How can I help?" Gemma asked. "You know that airplanes are . . . how do you say . . . out of my league."

"He wants the answers in German if possible and he'll pay extra for it. So I'll look the stuff up and then we'll go over it together and you can translate it into German."

"I'm still not the best at German."

"Yeah, but you need the work as much as I do."

"No way to get a dowry built up if I don't," Gemma said.

"All you down-time girls are always worried about the dowry business. What ever happened to love?"

"Love is for those who can afford it," Gemma said, primly. "And I can't. Not yet. Not since we spent so much on the doctors for Mama. My sister's marriage took what was left, so Papa and I are starting over."

"You guys can't go back to Padua?"

"Matteo is in charge of the shop. Papa doesn't want to work for his son."

****

Willem spent months in the National Library, looking at plans and reading texts on air flight. And in the process, paid for the pimple-faced boy's junior prom. And more.

Increasingly, he found himself entranced by the delta-wing aircraft. He told himself that it was because they didn't stall out. Which was certainly true. A stall happens when the loss of lift causes the nose-heavy airplanes to go into a dive. A delta has its weight farther back, so it doesn't stall. It just sinks and its controls get mushy. He told himself that a delta-wing would be able to land in narrower spaces because its wingspan would not need to be as wide. Also, true lift is square feet of surface area. The greater the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge of the wing, "the chord," the less the span, or the distance from wing tip to wing tip, needed to be for the same lift. Of course, there are always trade-offs. More chord means more drag. And he was told that by Herr Hal Smith, the up-timer expert on aircraft design.

****

Willem looked at the copy of a picture of the Convair Delta Dart and imagined. He roughed out a sketch based on the Dart, but with a propeller rather than a jet engine. The propeller was in the front, as it was in most airplanes. Just behind the propeller was the engine, even though he wasn't yet sure what sort of engine he could get. Behind the engine was the cockpit and behind that the fuel tank. This was a small plane, one person and some armaments, but small, a short wingspan. He ran some calculations using the new slide rule he had bought, pencil and paper. The wing span would be only thirty feet and the plane would be thirty-five feet long.

Willem was no great artist, but like most people of his station he had been taught the basics. His drawing wasn't good, but it was good enough to give a real artist the idea. He drew a wing section and made marks on his silhouette to indicate where the ribs of the airplane would be placed. Then he took another sip of beer and went back to his calculations.

****

Pierre Trovler was in Grantville for the movies, for the pictures, for the art that came from the future. He wasn't in the encyclopedia, he'd checked. There was no way for him to know why, and if Pierre had known, it's hard to tell if he would have been pleased. For in that other history Pierre had died in 1632 of food poisoning. Without that bad bit of mutton, it's quite likely that Pierre would have made enough of a name for himself to have gained an entry in the encyclopedia. But Pierre didn't know that. No one on Earth, in either timeline, knew it. All he knew was that he had looked and found no entry for Pierre Trovler, born June 9^th, 1604, outside Paris. That lack of such an entry had left him a bit—actually, rather a lot—more modest. He knew he was a good artist, but knowing that he wasn't in the history books and not knowing why had been a cold shower to his ego. It had needed one. He worked harder now. For instance, he worked on the rough sketches that Willem Krause had given him with care and practiced skill, using Herr Krause's notes as well as his sketches and the drafting course from the adult education class at Grantville's high school to make designs and even a perspective view of the aircraft. He worked well into the night using the Coleman lantern, had some of the fried chicken that he had bought that noon, then went to bed.

****

Pierre Trovler handed over the cardboard tube that held the plans. The tube, as it happened, was made down-time, a copy of examples that had come with the Ring of Fire.

Krause took it with a smile that was both very endearing and probably more than half real. "So how is it?" he asked as he removed the cardboard cap from the tube. "Did you manage to turn my scribbling and notes into something worth seeing, or were they too bad to even give you a starting point?"

Pierre grinned in spite of himself. "I persevered, Herr Krause. In fact, they weren’t bad drawings. To be honest, they weren’t professional, but the information was there." He started to add that he thought that Herr Krause would be pleased, but decided not to. He doubted the man would be influenced by such a claim and it might raise expectations.

By now Herr Krause had the papers out and was looking at the drawings and the neat, careful notes. "Marvelous. This actually looks like the design of an airplane."

They talked for some time. They talked about the shape of the wing, and of the three-wheeled undercarriage.

"How do you turn it?" Pierre asked.

"These here . . ." Herr Krause pointed at the trailing edge of the wing and the line that Pierre hadn't known the meaning of. ". . . are actually separate little wings. They move up and down and change the airflow over the wing so that one wing has more lift or so that the lift is more in the front of the wing or more in the back." He pointed at the tail fin. "That has a rudder that pushes from side to side."

"Those parts will need to be clearer and drawings made of the . . ." Pierre paused. He didn't know how or why little wings Herr Krause talked about moved up and down. ". . . of whatever it is that moves those little trailing wings up and down."

"They're called ailerons," his employer told him. "Or, more generally, control surfaces. And they are moved by a system of cables that are run inside the wing and body of the aircraft."

"Just as you say, sir, but they will need to be drawn for the plans and I will need to know what they look like."

"More than that, the book Aerodynamics 101, insists that a scale model should be made and tested in a wind tunnel," Herr Krause said. "I will not skimp on such a step because, as the up-timers say, it's my pale pink body that will be strapped into the thing when it flies." Then he grinned at Pierre again. "Do you happen to know a carpenter of skill that could help us first with making the model and later with making the airplane?"

"I may, sir. Giuseppe Bonono is certainly skilled enough," Pierre said. "He is from Padua and came to Grantville to see what new skills and tools of the carpenter's art might have been developed in the future."

****

It took a few days to arrange a meeting with the carpenter. In part that was because it wasn't, as it turned out, one man. Giuseppe Bonono, a widower and master carpenter from Padua, had on arrival in Grantville discovered Black & Decker power tools. Hand-cutting a hole in a piece of wood so that you might insert a dowel had never been one of Giuseppe's favorite occupations. Electric motors to do the grunt work so that the carpenter could concentrate on the art of carpentry had impressed him greatly. So had the advancements in treating wood. Not that the up-timers knew everything. Giuseppe had his own tricks of the carpenter's trade and thirty years of hands-on experience.

It was, by up-time standards, a small shop in Rottenbach, on the road from Grantville to Badenburg. By the standards of the seventeenth century, especially in terms of output, it was major industry. Still, while their bread and butter was the tables, chairs, and desks they produced, they were also very interested in prestige work.

Willem Krause's delta-wing airplane had the potential to be prestige work. The sort of work that they could advertise and that would bring in sales.

It only took convincing them of that.

Not that they were going to do it for free. Prestige work meant prestige prices, after all.

"Gentlemen and masters, I am on a budget," Willem complained pitifully.

"You do that very well, Herr Krause," Giuseppe complimented him.

"Yes, thank you, Master Bonono," Willem agreed immodestly. "I thought the squeak at the end was especially artful, as though you had just twisted the tongs in which you held my stones. Nonetheless, it is true. If we can't come to an equitable agreement, I will be forced to go elsewhere. I don't want to. Pierre tells me good things about you. But my backer is already concerned over the expense involved and he actually has access to tongs. Red hot tongs, if needed."

No one asked who his backer was. There was no law forbidding the building of aircraft for Louis of France or the Holy Roman Empire. But being able to say honestly "I had no idea who it was for" might prove useful. Besides, it wasn't their business.

Eventually they agreed on a price for the scale model. It was to be a one-twentieth scale model which would make it a bit over a foot wide and a bit under two feet long. It would be much heavier for its volume than the full-size one would be, but the control surfaces would be adjustable so that that the model could be tested in the wind tunnel with ailerons up and ailerons down so that the effect on drag lift and ground effect could be measured.

****

"Gemma," Master Bonono shouted. "Gemma, bring wine!"

"Yes, Papa," a girl's voice said.

The noise of the power tools was muted here and Willem was glad of it. His ears were still ringing a bit from the noise of the table saw.

A pretty young girl brought wine and Willem gave her an appreciative smile for the wine as his eyes took in her form. Nicely curved, firm, yet soft. He let her see that he had noticed then went back to the discussion. "I'm told the model will need attachments where they attach little threads which are in turn attached to weights and scales and dials. One at the center of balance, one at the nose, one at the tail, and one on each wing."

The girl seemed to accept his appreciation as her due but showed more interest in the plans. "A delta wing?" she asked curiously.

"Yes!" Willem was suddenly more interested in the girl. "You know about delta wings?

"Not really. But I was the German translator on your additional questions at the research center, so I had to read up on aircraft design. From what I read, delta wings are not particularly well thought of by Herr Smith."

"There are disadvantages but also advantages. For one, a delta wing doesn't need as much wing span for the same amount of lift. So a delta might be able to use a runway that a straight wing wouldn't."

"You know this man?" Master Bonono asked his daughter suspiciously.

The girl, Gemma, rolled her eyes as her papa went all fatherly on her and Willem hid his smile as the girl answered.

"I've never met him till today, Papa, but I have seen him at the research center, consulting with Darius."

"You watch out for that boy. He doesn't have two dollars to rub together, even if he is an up-timer."

"He's just a friend, Papa!" Gemma said with clearly strained patience and a face growing a bit pink.

When Willem first learned that the girl knew of his interest, he had had a moment of concern. But it was clear, after all, that all that had happened was a coincidence and perhaps a useful one. "So you have some familiarity with aircraft design?" he asked. "From your work in translating the questions?"

"A little," Gemma admitted, doubt clear in her posture. "I have a good idea what the words mean, anyway."

"So here," Willem said to Master Bonono while gesturing at the girl, "you have a consultant on the interpretation of the design in your own house. How convenient."

Making such a model is not the work of an hour or a day, but for a master like Giuseppe Bonono it wasn't the work of a lifetime, either. In a couple of months, there would be a twentieth-scale model, of the arrowhead plane, as Giuseppe called it. Ready for the wind tunnel test over at Smith Aeronautics.

Leaving the Bononos, father and daughter, to their work Willem went looking for flying lessons.

****

"And this is realistic?" Willem didn't even try to hide his doubts.

The man shrugged. "It was my son's, and he mostly used it for gun-fighting games. But it has the flight simulator on it. The ads say it's realistic, but I don't really know. It's fifty dollars an hour if you want to use it. If you don't, there's others who do."

Willem tried it and didn't know if it was realistic or not. It did let him get used to the idea of banking into a turn and a little bit familiar with the gradualness of flight. And, perhaps more importantly, the misleading nature of that gradualness. Planes do things slowly and smoothly . . . till they don't. The don't part is when they get close to the ground. Then things get fast. A crash at two hundred miles per hour is pretty sudden.

****

The second simulator was a thing of wood and canvas, controlled by men with ropes and poles. They rocked and tilted the mini-plane in three dimensions in response to Willem's manipulation of the controls. Again, it was far from perfect but it taught him something about flying. Well, reinforced something the flight game had shown him. If you bank the plane to the right then bring the stick back to neutral, you're still banked to the right. To get back to level flight, you have to move the stick not just back to neutral but beyond it, till you have reversed what you did to bank in the first place. And all the time you were banking to the left and un-banking, you were turning left. So, to turn left, you pushed the stick left, then back to center, held the stick as you made most of the turn, then pushed the stick right till you were out of the bank, then brought it back to center. And with each move it was easy to go too far or hold it too long, and it took practice to get it right.

That was what the low-tech simulators that had sprung up since the Belle had first flown were about, letting you practice before climbing into one of the still few planes that had been completed since the Belle's first flight. Flight time in those was very expensive. The Belles were unavailable, strictly for the military. Kelly Aviation usually had one plane running, well, sometimes. In general, Mr. Kelly would finish it, then a few days later take it apart for parts for the next one. But during those times when one of his planes was in fact flight ready, you could take flights in it and even get flying lessons. For the paltry sum of two hundred fifty dollars an hour.

The Kitts had an airplane and mostly kept it running. It was a two-seater, front and back, and lessons were three hundred dollars an hour. Over the two months that Giuseppe and Gemma were occupied in building the model, Krause racked up over a hundred hours in various simulators, forty hours of ground school, reading maps from the air and such, and a grand total of seven and one quarter hours in the air. He thought he knew how to fly, not well perhaps, but well enough. Besides, he was spending a lot of money on flying lessons.

****

It was in the days before the model was ready for the wind tunnel that the secrecy, which had been more a matter of habit and general caution, became a matter of vital necessity. Hans Richter flew into history and John George into insanity within days. In response to the change from the CPE to the USE, John George and and the Elector of Brandenburg had withdrawn from the Swede's alliance. John George had never been the most popular neighbor to the up-timers, but now he was considered a traitor by the king of Sweden and at least a potential threat by the Americans. Building an airplane nominally for John George would be seen as an act as hostile as building the plane for Cardinal Richelieu. Possibly more hostile. After all, John George was closer. It made no real difference in Willem Krause's plans. He had always been careful about such things. Because if no one knew who was paying the bills, it would be harder for them to come in at the last minute and take away his airplane. Now, keeping them in ignorance would be essential to keeping the project going.

"I lost another commission today," Pierre Trovler told Willem dejectedly "Because I'm French. I'm not a cardinal or a politician. I'm an artist."

"You have my sympathy, my friend," Willem told him. "As long as you don't expect me to express it too loudly. People are excited by boys at Wismar and incensed by the League. I suggest you don an appropriately patriotic mien. Perhaps a painting of the heroic outlaw driving into the enemy ship. Or, you could join the ...