Ellen Under The Stairs (19 page)

"What I want is a container that won't
leak water out or air in."

"I have seen pots with lids made to
fit," Golden answered.

"I have seen pots like these, also.
Cooking pots and the like. What I want is lids that can be fastened
down in such a way that no amount of pressure," -- there was that
word again -- "could force what is inside the pot to come out, or
to force anything -- even air -- to leak inside the sealed
pot."

"I do not know, Lord," Golden said,
his meaning also that he knew no one who had the answer to that,
strange question.

After hearing everything Golden could
find out, John-Lyon had Golden bring a great number of Xanthin
craftsman to the Mage Room, John-Lyon talking with each seriously
about how to make "air tight" vessels. Potters.
Blacksmiths.

It was when the Mage learned about
what the metal workers called "solder" that the Mage seemed
pleased.

The Mage had gone on to ask about
"welding??" -- a stronger kind of soldering, was Golden's
understanding. But no one had the answer to that
question.

* * * * *

It would work!, John said to himself
after dismissing the last metal worker, then telling Golden to take
a rest, Golden a little green around the gills from following
John's commands. (If John had known what to ask, he wouldn't have
had to keep sending Golden out for more information. But he
hadn't.)

What John had found was an alternate
method (to gunpowder) for producing an explosion. All that was
needed was an airtight canister of pottery or metal. Put a measured
amount of water inside, also an exact weight of fire stone, seal up
the container, and you had a steam powered bomb. With water and a
piece of fire stone inside a crucible, all someone on the outside
had to do was think the fire stone inside to boil the water, rising
steam pressure eventually blowing the vessel apart, putting the
hurt on anyone or anything near it. Some experimentation was all
that was needed to find out how much water and how big a fire stone
you needed to put inside.

After that, you just catapulted a
steam activated bomb onto a Malachite ship, and boom! (As for
timing the explosion, it would be something like pulling the pin on
a hand grenade, counting to five, before tossing it. Bang! Before
the enemy had time to throw it back.)

Not that John was under the illusion
that his steam powered bombs would break the blockade. All the
Malachite ships had to do, after all, was stay out of range of
Stil-de-grain's land locked catapults. He could get more distance
with a steam driven cannon, like the one Leonardo DaVinci had
sketched ......

No. On second thought, John realized
that the Malachite ships could back out of range of either catapult
or cannon, and still stop all merchant ships with supplies bound
for Xanthin. The steam bombs were more a matter of Stil-de-grain
morale than anything else. (Like the wildly inaccurate
anti-aircraft fire gave courage to Britains during World War
II.)

The bomb soon to be in the testing
stage, John now had to find a way to slip out of the harbor without
those super-fast Malachite cruisers running him down.

Once before, when the Mage/King Auro
had caused a wind to blow in this windless world, John had made a
sail boat, to be specific, a catamaran. Using the wind, he'd first
outmaneuvered, then outrun enemy warships. But with the defeat of
Auro, the wind had stopped. Forget sail boats in a dead
calm.

Thinking of traveling by water, one of
the oddities of this world was vast moving currents in the sea,
each like a giant, but gentle, whirlpool, one going clockwise, its
rim touching the next one, the next swirl rotating
counterclockwise. No one seemed to know what caused the sea to
revolve in this way; only that that's the way it was. (John doubted
that many people in his own world understood elementary forces like
why the wind blew, what factor made summer and winter, or the facts
behind sun "rise" and sun "set" -- the most basic of knowledge. So
he couldn't fault this world's folks for their lack of knowledge
about the way their world worked.)

Back to those whirlpools in the sea.
What sailors in this world did to go in a given direction was to
catch the rim of one of the circles of water, each gyration maybe
two miles in diameter. Drifting around the edge of the slow
whirlpool, sailors would row/steer to change over to the rim of the
next, counter rotating circle, drifting around the edge of that,
until "jumping" to the rim of the next swirl. This was much like
tacking against the wind in a sailboat, "zigging" left for awhile,
then "zagging" right -- but always making way in a given direction
in the middle. Or it was like these rotating sea-circles were gears
in a gear train, a bug jumping from one gear to the next at the
appropriate time, to circle this way and that toward his objective
straight head.

John had once thought about creating
underwater "sails," moving them like rudders to "tack" across the
circles of water, instead of drifting around their rims.

It was just that he hadn't devised a
way of doing that.

Rowing to one circle rim, drifting
around it until rowing to the next rim was still the best way of
getting anywhere -- short of sailing, something you couldn't do
without wind.

If the sea was shallow everywhere, he
could save time by using steam power to blast an anchor on a rope
in the direction he wanted to go. The anchor holding at the bottom
of a shallow sea, its rope stretched back to the ship, sailors
might winch the ship in a straight line, dredging up the anchor
when reaching it, to blast it ahead again. This would be like a kid
on roller skates, throwing a weight on the end of a rope, the
weight wrapping round a tree ahead, the kid pulling himself on the
rope until he reached the tree, unwinding the rope, and hurling it
ahead to fasten around another tree.

Impossible, since the sea was shallow
only near the shore.

John knew of an ancient Roman drawing
of oxen walking round and round the bottom of a boat, pulling a
merry-go-round device geared to paddle wheels fitted over the sides
of the boat -- much like boats that plied the rivers of the U.S.
around the time of the Civil War. Just an idea, the Romans never
building an ox powered ship. Why? Because it wouldn't
work.

Meanwhile, the Malachites were
improving their naval cruisers by adding a second bank of oars,
doubling their sailor's pulling power, such a ship in the 600's
B.C. called a bireme. In the 500's, warship were improved further
by adding a third set of oars, becoming triremes. Finally to reach
the quinqureme class -- five banks of oars to the side seeming to
be the limit of oar power.

But to build a trireme in the three
months before Xanthin's food supply ran out? Impossible.

What about small, paddleboats? The
kind tourists played with in warm water resorts? Too little
power.

Another way to "drive" a boat (if you
didn't mind adding countless miles to your journey by following
every inlet and bay of the shore), was to harness a pony-team to
the boat, the ponies on the bank pulling the boat along. In the
early days of the industrial revolution when iron ore was needed in
great quantities at some distant point, horses were used to drag
boats along a canal, the Erie Canal only one example.

What had replaced canal traffic, were
trains, trains a fast way to haul heavy cargo.

Steam trains!

And he was back to steam again. But
could he have this island's craftsmen produce the kind of boiler,
plus piston and cylinder engine necessary to make a Fulton powered
boat, Fulton building a steam engine putting out enough energy to
buck the current of the Hudson river?

No. Not even if he had all the time in
the world to attempt such a feat.

Thinking of simple steam engines, the
Greeks at Alexandria had built a rotary steam engine around 200
B.C., steam made to jet out of a metal ball, the ball spinning
backward from the direction the steam hissed out -- much like a
lawn sprinkler whirls in reverse of the water forced out of it. The
Greeks hadn't used this steam engine for anything practical,
though. Would have had major headaches finding a way to gear up a
spinning metal ball. So this remained just a toy. Fire up the
water. See the escaping steam make the ball rotate. Fun, fun,
fun!

A toy ..............

When John was a boy, a friend of his
had an antique toy boat. To make it go, you placed a lighted candle
inside the boat and the boat would chug ahead by what looked like
magic. A putt-putt boat was what it was called.

As an adult, John had realized that
what was making the boat move in the water, was an early, and
simplistic version of a steam engine. Inside the boat was a boiler
-- nothing but a couple of strips of copper soldered so close
together that only a thin film of water could get between them,
copper pipes trailed back from either end of the enclosed boiler to
emerge under water at the stern of the boat. Place the candle flame
under the boiler, and the film of water within was instantly boiled
into steam, the steam putting pressure on the water in the twin
pipes, forcing a little water out the back of the pipes, the pulse
of water driving the boat forward. Meanwhile, the little boiler,
now empty (a partial vacuum created inside by the expulsion of
steam), water was sucked back into the boiler, this water to be
instantly turned to steam, another pulse of steam driving water out
of the back of the pipes. The boat made a "putting" sound as pulse
after pulse of steam-pushed water jetted out the back, the boat
driven by this most simple of steam engines -- surely simple enough
for this world's craftsmen to built.

The question was, how much "push"
could you get with this primitive device?

On the other hand -- John's mind
scrambling to think of the possibilities -- if he could make a
steam engine powerful enough to buck the gentle currents of this
world's whirlpools, he could cut across the swirls, the shortest
distance from one point to another, a straight line. If this
worked, he would be going in a straight line; pursuit ships forced
to drift much further around the whirlpools' rims.

It would take some planning. First, to
make a model boat to see if he could duplicate the steam powered
toy of his childhood. Then to build a boat large enough to carry
people.

Time to have a serious talk with
Admiral Coluth!

* * * * *

Coluth had never seen the Mage work
like he was working now. Even in the last war when creating the
sailing ship, the wind-ship that Coluth and his sailors had to
handle in a new way.

This time, with Coluth often in
attendance, the Mage had three, secret projects under way, the
first, making objects for catapults to hurl.

A second weapon was much like the
"cannon" the Mage had created for the last war, this one to shoot
water?? (No matter how hard the Mage tried to explain how this
weapon worked, Coluth failed to understand what was in the Mage's
mind.)

Of greater interest was the Mage's
talk of a different sort of ship, one not rowed like most ships, or
even to be pushed by the wind, the evil wind coming to an end with
the defeat of Auro of Azare. But a ship that would go forward by
what the Mage called "steam."

"It makes sense to build a model,
first," said John-Lyon. "I think I know how this will work, but I
need to try out the principal."

"Yes, Lord," Coluth said, in his
rough, seaman's voice -- Coluth never sounding right to himself
when indoors.

So the work on the little craft began,
metal workers once more involved, the Mage telling them what to do,
the workers hammering and soldering on what John-Lyon called a
"simple steam engine," the "engine" looking to Coluth like nothing
more than a thin, coin sized bottle of flattened copper, two small
metal pipes coming out from either end, the "engine" fastened in
the middle of the model boat, the pipes trailed down the center to
the stern, ending under the water a short way back of the
boat.

The Mage then put a pebble of fire
stone under the flattened copper pot -- this pot called the
"boiler." Heat, said the Mage, would make the boat go, Coluth
interested to see how that might be.

After the small boat was finished, the
Mage had a tank of water brought to the invention room, John-Lyon
filling the boat-pipes and the "boiler" with water before setting
the small boat down to float on top of the tank-water.

But a problem arose. The small piece
of fire stone created too little heat to boil the water in the
"boiler" -- even though John-Lyon and Coluth together thought the
fire stone into heat. What the Mage wished, he said, was for the
water to get so hot that heat-bubbles swirled up from the bottom of
the boiler-water, these bubbles bursting into mist, the Mage
calling this mist -- "steam." It was the pressure of the "steam"
that would make the boat go forward in the water. At least that was
what Coluth thought was the Mage's meaning, Coluth -- and others --
sometimes failing to understand the Mage's explanations.

"Tell me, Coluth," said John-Lyon,
frustrated that the water he had put through the pipes and into the
"engine" refused to boil. "When using light magic to make fire
stones hot, does it matter who is doing that?"