“I know that, but we need that engine as an example. The steam engine project is hitting snags all over the place. And I’m pretty sure it’s the tolerances.”
“Tolerances?”
“How tightly the piston sits in the cylinder,” Bernie explained, which wasn’t a particularly good explanation, as far as Anya was concerned.
“Oh, man.” Bernie sounded worried. “Why him?”
Natasha looked up from her latest letter from Brandy Bates and watched Bernie for a moment. His beard had grown in rather nicely, she thought. His clothing, though, was a disaster, and worse, he was influencing the staff at the Dacha and even people in Moscow.
“Why who?”
“Cass Lowry.” Bernie waved the letter at her. “He used to be a friend of mine when we played football together. I thought he was so cool-and he is clever. He was always coming up with stunts to pull. The thing is…” Bernie paused and looked at Natasha, then went on. “He always had… I guess you’d call it a sense of entitlement. His stunts usually had a nasty edge to them, getting back at someone who had dissed him. Ah… shown a lack of respect for him. He was going to go to college on a football scholarship. Studying was a waste of time.
“I was the same way, I guess. Everything that happened to us was someone else’s fault. I was right with him all through high school. Then, after his football scholarship fell through, Cass blamed me for keeping him from studying.” Bernie looked over at Natasha and gave a shrug. “There may have been some truth to it but other guys on the team did study and went on to college. Somewhere in there, I got over myself and started to grow up. But from the letter, it doesn’t sound like Cass ever did. Now he’s blaming everything on the down-timers and Mike Stearns.” Bernie waved the letter. “That’s what this letter comes down to. I hope no one ever reads this, Natasha. Because it’s pretty rude.”
Natasha knew that quite well. It took some effort to control her expression. Cass Lowry’s comments about “krauts,” “russkies” and “I guess you’re living in the armpit of the universe” had not gone unnoticed. Not in the least. “Brandy says it is because he was the only person who knew cars well enough who was willing to make the trip. Vladimir wanted, very much, to have someone who knew cars travel with your ‘Precious.’”
“My what?”
Natasha looked at Brandy’s letter again. “Brandy says ‘tell Bernie that Cass is traveling with Precious because Cass is the only guy we could find who wasn’t doing something else.’”
Bernie’s face was a study. Part outrage, part pout. “The car is not named Precious. Are you sure she didn’t say ‘your precious car’ or something?”
Natasha shook her head. “No. It even has the capital P. I assumed it was the name for it. At any rate, your Cass will be arriving in a month or so. We should probably arrange for you to meet him. He, according to Brandy, wants to visit us for a while. And you never know, he might help.”
Bernie slumped into a chair. “I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong. Cass is smart, smarter than me, I always thought. It’s just… I don’t know… he has a knack for screwing things up. You’re probably not going to care for him one little bit. Neither will Boris or Filip.” Bernie shook his head in disgust. “Why did Brandy have to send him?”
Brandy had not sent him, Vladimir had. He had been fully aware of Cass’ drawbacks and had stressed the need to put up with them while he was milked for information, especially on weapons and tactics used by the up-timers. “Mr. Lowry,” Vladimir had written, “is not a person we would want in our home. But he does have knowledge that could be useful to Russia. Try to keep anyone from killing him for the insults he will surely give.” Natasha had wondered if Bernie’s view would agree with Vladimir’s. While there were subtle differences, for the most part it did.
Chapter 40
On the road to the Swedish Border
November 1633
Bernie shivered. Theatrically, Natasha thought. She exchanged an amused glance with Anya. Anya rolled her eyes and Natasha had to struggle not to giggle.
Oblivious to the byplay, Bernie went on, “Well, at least it’s not a horse. It may be colder than a witch’s… ah, never mind. It may be really cold, but at least we aren’t riding horses.”
“Indeed, we aren’t.” Natasha smiled. “And you must admit that it’s a very nice sleigh, Bernie, very nice.”
And it was, in fact, a very nice sleigh. It had special springs for the skis. Outside it was bitterly cold and the snow was still pretty deep, but the streamlined sleigh had double-walled construction and a lacquer polish job that acted as sealant, as well as making the whole thing shiny. It was relatively warm inside, even if it did look a bit peculiar. The sleigh needed high road clearance because even the improved roads weren’t exactly highways in the up-timer sense of the word. They were reasonably well-graded dirt roads with a bit of crushed rock spread over them. Plus, at the moment, a layer of snow.
Only a relatively small part of the design for the coach was from up-timer information. More of it came from a Russian coach maker who had joined the team after the czar had seen some up-time car magazines. Czar Mikhail had liked the idea of cars and smooth rides. He’d decided that if he couldn’t have an engine, he at least wanted a streamlined design and shock absorbers.
The coach maker, Ivan Egorovich Shirshov, had taken note of that desire. The czar had seen to that. Ivan Egorovich had arrived at the Dacha with a medium-sized chip on his shoulder over the whole mess. Then he talked to Bernie and found that Bernie agreed with him. But it was no more up to Bernie than it was to him. They had gone over Bernie’s car magazines, then over sleigh designs and coach designs, trying to figure out what they could do. Ivan Egorovich now had a permanent dent in his forehead from pounding it against the wall in frustration. And Czar Mikhail had a new coach. So did Bernie.
Bernie grabbed the edge of the seat. “Hang on. We’re about to hit another rutted bit. And I still can’t figure out why you wanted to come on this trip, ladies. You’re probably going to get frostbite on your noses.”
“The ‘advance team,’ as you call it, has made arrangements, Bernie. We will be comfortable. And I like traveling. Vladimir and I did quite a bit of it, you know, back when our father was alive.”
Aunt Sofia grinned widely. “The weather, it is not so bad.”
Bernie shuddered. If it hadn’t been for the long johns, he’d have had frozen b… ah… parts by now.
The trip to the Swedish border had several purposes. One was to investigate the road work. Road work had been continuing apace since a few months or so after Bernie’s arrival. Since he had worked on the road gangs around Grantville and had a mechanical turn of mind, he had a good knowledge of the horse-drawn grader and other horse-drawn road improvement equipment. The equipment he had helped design for Russia had been used extensively for more than a year now and was showing real effect. The czar’s highways mostly went south and east, roughly toward China. One, however, went north and west toward the coast of the Baltic Sea.
That was the highway they were traveling. It was a fairly slow trip. They stopped occasionally to examine the road work. Most important to Bernie, though, was that the trip’s second purpose was to pick up his car. It had been shipped from Grantville by way of the Baltic Sea to the Swedish-owned coast.
Russia had lost this particular bit of land to Sweden a couple of decades before. Thankfully, relations between the two nations had greatly improved in the ensuing years. This was mostly because both Sweden and Russia disliked Poland more than they disliked each other. But, also, Czar Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov was honestly impressed with the charismatic Swedish monarch.