“You have wood in your hair.” Natasha grinned. Bernie needed some management and she found she liked that. She peered at his hair. “Quite a bit of wood. What have you been doing out there in that shop of yours?”
Much to Natasha’s surprise, Bernie went outside to shake off the wood shavings. “Sorry about that,” he said when he came back to finish his lunch. “I didn’t realize. I brushed myself off, but didn’t know I had it in my hair. We were working on the pattern lathe. Finally got the setup for that connecting piece Ivan the Tolerable wanted.” Bernie had gotten into the habit of giving various people at the Dacha nicknames. “Now I need to talk to the guys about this vent stack thing. Maybe we can get the bathroom back in operation.” Bernie gulped down the last of his sandwich and beer and rose from the table again. “Excuse me. I really want to get the plumbing working. We can’t persuade anyone else to install it till we get it working and winter is coming on pretty quick. I really don’t want another spring typhoid outbreak.
“Oh, Brandy said to tell you hi. And I’m going to be up late studying, again.”
Natasha barely repressed the snort. Studying, he said. Studying that little blonde, more likely.
She shouldn’t mind it, Natasha knew. It was common with men. But this was Bernie, and for some reason it bothered her.
“Could you light a couple more candles?” Bernie smiled at Anya. “I can’t tell you how much I miss good lighting, I really can’t.”
Bernie liked Anya. She was smart, willing and practical. Bernie was perfectly aware that she was using him. He was using her, too, but it was friendly and fun. Anya went off to get more candles.
Bernie sat down with the book, a hand-typed and drawn copy of freshman algebra. Algebra had been one of his “did well” courses. One of the ones that he had found fun. But it had been a few years and the nerds were desperate to get through algebra so that they could get on with calculus. Not one of Bernie’s good courses.
“Bernie, could you teach me math?” Anya asked. Her English was still far from good but it was getting better every day.
“Sure. Algebra?”
“No. Math of accounts.”
“Accounting?” Bernie stopped and considered. Actually it made quite a lot of sense. Russia was trying desperately to move from a primarily barter economy to a moneyed economy. That would require bookkeeping and accounting. A growth industry, they would have said up-time. “Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure I have all the stuff we’ll need. In fact, I’m darn sure that I don’t. But we can make a start. I don’t know all that much about double-entry bookkeeping, but I’m pretty sure it involves something like this.”
Bernie pulled over a sheet of paper and drew a grid. “The item bought or sold. The amount it’s bought for here or sold for here that way you have a record as it comes in and goes out so…”
They got a start on it, then Bernie got back to refreshing his memory about algebra.
All the things he didn’t know meant Bernie had to study. It was a lot more intense than school had been and he had come to think of it as much more important. Importance didn’t make it easier or more fun. But, as with anything, practice did. All the stuff that he had been sure that he would never need once he graduated high school, he needed now. He had to interpret words he’d never heard and in contexts he’d never dreamed of. What the hell was calcareous grassland? Calcareous turned out to be to do with chalk or calcium; at least that’s what the dictionary said. But calcareous grassland? How could chalk grow grass? He had to go to the dictionary all the time to find the weird stuff that the Russian nerds wanted.
Then there was Bernoulli’s Law. Petr Nickovich had found a description of how wings worked in one of the books. The explanation described a wing’s dependence on Bernoulli’s Law. Then they had compared that with Newton’s three laws and the effects hadn’t matched up. The nerds had come to the conclusion that it couldn’t work that way. Newtonian physics, Bernie was assured, would require a small plane to be traveling at over three hundred miles an hour to fly. They believed Bernie that powered flight was possible. They even believed him and the books about the size of the wings and the speed of the aircraft. They knew and understood that they were missing something, but they didn’t know what. Bernie didn’t know what either. He built paper airplanes and wooden airplanes that flew, based on the rubber-band-powered airplanes he had played with as a kid, but he couldn’t explain how they worked.
What Bernie didn’t know, and for that matter most people in the Ring of Fire didn’t know, was that Bernoulli’s equations were a way of describing the actions of large groups of air molecules that were in turn following Newton’s laws of motion. And when they had tried to integrate the two different ways of describing the same event they had, in effect, added everything up twice. The mathematicians and natural philosophers who surrounded Bernie now might have understood the complex explanation. They were still somewhat trapped by Aristotle’s assumptions but they were some really bright guys. It didn’t matter. Bernie didn’t have the science to explain it. He had seen the drawings of air flow over a wing and assumed that they were accurate. They weren’t. This didn’t mean the shape of the wing was wrong. They weren’t really inaccurate, either. Just simplified. Using the drawing out of those books for the cross-section of the wing would produce a wing that would fly quite well. Assuming, of course, that you added the ailerons and the rest of the plane.
Every day Bernie had people asking him questions that he didn’t have the answers to. They weren’t meaningless questions that didn’t really matter, like how many planets there are in the solar system. Well, most of them weren’t. The astrologers were nuts to know the locations of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto. Mostly, though, the questions were about how things worked and how to treat injuries and diseases. And that’s what kept him up late studying.
Chapter 27
Andrei had it. He was sure now that after months of experimentation, he had the right chamber shape. The outside of the chamber was shaped like a long barn with a peaked roof. The inside, of course, was a round hole of the same size as the barrel. After the chamber was loaded, it simply inserted into the rifle, roof down and muzzle forward, which put the touch hole on the right side, aligned with the pan. He had tested it on the firing bench, fired dozens of rounds through it with no real problems. He reported to Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev that they were ready to go into production. Granted, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev wasn’t the official person he was supposed to report to, but he was Andrei’s patron, so he was who Andrei told first.
Sheremetev told him to make two dozen of the rifles and to have them sent to the Sheremetev estates. Andrei did so. It was a disaster.
In the field the chambers had a bad habit of slipping out of the guns. Even worse, sometimes they didn’t slip out of the rifle, not all the way. Instead they got shifted just a little so that the touch hole was still aligned enough to fire the charge, but the muzzle of the chamber wasn’t properly aligned. At which point the gun had a tendency to blow up. Any bit of dirt that got into the chamber lock misaligned the chamber and caused it to misfire or sometimes escape from the chamber lock when fired. One of the Sheremetev deti boyars had died when an escaping chamber had hit him in the head.
Boyar Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was not amused. Worse, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was embarrassed, because the first guns shouldn’t officially have gone to him but to the army. Sheremetev excused the slip by saying that he was having the sample tested to help out his deti boyar and wasn’t it a good thing that he had. For if he hadn’t, the army might have got stuck with rifles that weren’t ready yet. The explanation was accepted but not believed and Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev resented Andrei. But even more he resented the Dacha and Natasha for the fact that he had to ask them for help.