Dave had spent the evening a week ago looking at the kids’ plans. Then, with a strong feeling he was missing something, he had gone to bed. He had slept poorly that night, but the next morning he had it. The reason he hadn’t gotten it at first was that it was not an improvement in the machine, not from the kids’ point of view. What it was, was an adaptation of one of the kids’ machines to do one of the common jobs he used the computer lathe for. It would only do that job, and it wouldn’t do it as fast or as well. But if he built the late-nineteenth century style cam and lever lathe the kids had designed, and used it where he could, it would probably add more than a year to the life of the fancy rig.
He spent the next several days trying to figure out what to do about it. In one sense, it was the kid’s design, but in another sense it wasn’t. None of these designs were really original to the kids. They were adaptations of designs found in books, or even adapted from sections of the sewing machines themselves, just as his was an adaptation of theirs. There weren’t any patent laws, so there wasn’t any legal reason why he shouldn’t just go ahead and build his machine. What if he did the right thing and the kids got greedy? They had reason enough. They had to be desperate for money to get their sewing machine company going. Then he thought about the fact that the kids had gotten together and insisted that Delia Higgins get the lion’s share of the sewing machine company. The kids weren’t thieves and Dave Marcantonio was no thief either. Never mind facing their dad. If he ripped off a bunch of kids, he wouldn’t be able to face himself.
When the kids came in he told them about several minor changes that he had made that would make their production machines a bit easier to build. Then he told them about the adaptation of their machine he was thinking of building. He offered to build the first two machines basically for free, in exchange for the right to use their designs as the basis for production machines to add to his shop. They would still have to provide the metal blanks, but he would machine them for free. They agreed. It would save them a bundle.
Actually they did more than agree. Brent and Trent asked to see the designs for the new machine and offered to help in any way they could. They loved that he liked their designs well enough to use them.
August 10, 1631: Badenburg
Karl Schmidt was a substantial fellow, like his father before him. He was fifty-two and had been recently widowed. He owned a foundry in Badenburg. It was a smallish foundry, with a smithy attached, where they made door hinges, wagon parts, and other things of iron, mostly for local use. He had four surviving children: his son Adolph, a twenty-two year old journeyman blacksmith, and three teenage daughters, Gertrude, Hilda and Marie.
He had known of the Ring of Fire almost from the beginning. At first, it had been a strange and frightening thing, surrounded by dark stories of magic and witchcraft; then miracles, as the stories of who they actually were got around. A whole town full of people from the future, surely God’s handiwork. Yet they didn’t claim to be angels or saints. Why would God go to the trouble of sending a town from the future if it was filled with normal people? There had been several sermons around then, about the angels that visited Lot in Sodom without announcing their angelic status. Some of the priests had pointed out, that if an angel didn’t have to tell you that he was an angel, then certainly a demon or devil didn’t have to tell you he was a devil.
It was an enigma. Karl did not like enigmas. They troubled his sleep. His solution at first, was to keep his distance. Then stories about what Tilly’s men were doing at a farm outside of Rudolstadt, and more significantly, what happened to them, got around. The ease with which the out-of-timers killed was terrifying. Rumor had it that it had only taken a few of them, half a dozen at most, to kill dozens of solders. Yet the same rumor said that they had done it to save the farmer and that they had, in spite of the fact that he had been nailed to a barn door and was the next best thing to dead when they got there. Some stories said he was dead. Karl didn’t believe that, but how much could be believed? Some people visited Grantville, but Karl was not one of them. A few people from Grantville visited Badenburg. Karl didn’t meet them, though he could have.