Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette. Volume XX

She knelt down and took a grip. It looked like a lot of iron, but

… "Oh. This isn't as heavy as it looks. If you're quick with the sticks, I can pick it up all at once."

"All right." He put the blocks in place against the side. "Ready."

A second later it was propped up with its ends clear of the floor. He handed her a wrench and gestured with his hand. "You turn the nuts this way to take them off. I'll hold this down. Once that's done, you can slide off the end bells and we'll pull the rotor out."

She looked at the wrench in her hand. It shone like a mirror, and there wasn't a hammer mark on it anywhere-except… "Herr Bosboom, what's this here?"

"That? That's a kudzu leaf. It's the maker's hallmark."

"They must be great craftsmen. This is a beautiful piece of work."

He glanced up at her. "You appreciate fine tools?"

"Naturally. I grew up in this mill."

She turned to the generator, and set the wrench in place on the first nut. She gave it an experimental tug to get the feel, then braced her knee against the side and gave a solid pull. Two minutes later the insides were exposed to view, and she was lifting the pieces one at a time to a cloth spread out on a bench.

Ilsabe watched curiously while Herr Bosboom blew the dust away and started playing his lamp over the parts. She pointed to the wires wound around a stack of thin iron plates. "This looks very carefully made. What do all these pieces do?"

"Well…"

Winkler and Dranitz came back to the mill with a handful of thick pamphlets. Gerd came over to the bench to see, with Ilsabe beside him. Bosboom spread out the papers for the generator and the switchboard, and looked up in surprise. "Herr Winkler, these are in Italian! Do you read Italian? Do you, Herr Dranitz?"

"No, but there are plenty of pictures. We just went by those, and the tables."

" Whooh. So, you didn't get any of the cautions and the explanations. That explains a lot. The instruction sheets in German weren't packed with this equipment, obviously. I don't know how that happened, but I'll leave you my copies. But why didn't you just send for the right ones, before doing all this work?"

Winkler flung up his arms. "That would have taken a week or more for the post to go back and forth. I needed to get on with this, so my men could start mining."

"I see. Well, you would have saved a great deal of time, and a lot of money besides, if you'd sent for instruction sheets you and your men could read. Haste makes waste-it certainly has here. While you were gone, I inspected and tested the generator with Fraulein Hartmann's kind help." He nodded to her. "Except for that and a few bits and pieces, there isn't much here that can be saved."

"What! I wrote to the company to send somebody who could get this working, not to be told there is nothing to be done."

Bosboom straightened up and faced Winkler, his hand resting on the open leaflet. His voice went flat. "Herr Winkler, this trip up here is costing my company a day and a half of my time, and if you're being charged for it, I haven't heard about it. My job is to tell you the truth, not wave my hands in the air and magically turn it into something else. So I suggest you start taking detailed notes of this discussion, if you want to accomplish anything.

"Now, then. There's a great deal that can be done. In fact, this can be made to work. The basic idea is right, an electric pump is by far the most practical solution, with so little left of the old pumping machinery, especially everything there was above ground. But the system has to be engineered correctly. The pump company has people who can do that for you, and their consulting rates are reasonable.

"But the worst problem I see from the electrical side is that knob-and-tube wiring you have in the mine. That only belongs inside a dry building. It's dangerous anywhere in a damp tunnel, but you have it running right above open drain channels. Let a discharge line burst, and it's a death trap. Besides that, you have outdoor pole lines, and those don't look like they're up to standard either.

"There are just too many pitfalls here for inexperienced workmen. You need the services of a licensed electrician to direct the rebuilding, otherwise somebody's sure to be killed."

"An electrician? There isn't one within forty miles of here! It would take days to get one, and they charge a fortune! If you're such an expert…"

Bosboom clenched one hand on the edge of the bench.

"Herr Winkler. My employers make a point of maintaining a professional demeanor and sticking to technical matters when speaking with a customer."

"Well, of course!"

He looked unblinking at Winkler for a good two seconds, then growled, "I could make an exception in your case."

" What? What do you mean?"

"You asked for help. I've been patiently explaining what it will take to get the results you want, and make this pumping system safe for you and your men to be around. You stand here brushing aside what I'm telling you, as if a loud voice will change the facts to suit your convenience. It won't. We all had to begin from the beginning, but what seriously disturbs me is your unwillingness to learn when you have the chance. Do you expect to make this work without taking the trouble to get the right equipment and install it properly? For that matter, don't you care at all about the lives of your miners? Or your own life?"

"You expect me to throw money around like water? And take who-knows-how-long to do all this?"

"You don't like the cost of safe wiring? Would you rather pay to restore the old pumping system from before the war, with all the push rods and bell cranks? Would you like to pay to rebuild the dam so you could get power to drive it? No? I didn't think so. I can see the answer on your face."

Winkler was turning red. "Who are you, you young puppy, to talk to the head of an enterprise like this?"

Bosboom fixed Winkler with an icy glare and slammed his open hand down on the Italian installation manual. "Who am I, Herr Winkler? The examiners at Leiden consider me a civil engineer. Mr. Reardon is satisfied that I know enough about electricity to give sound advice to his customers. I'm the man who can tell you how to keep from walking into a worse disaster than the one you've already suffered. The Lord protect your men! What you have here would never have been built in any of the mines around Grantville. If the state inspectors didn't stop it, the UMWA would."

"Now what are you saying? Are you threatening me with the UMWA?"

"Oh, be serious! The UMWA isn't so foolish as to rely on companies or their representatives to tell them about dangerous mines. Now if you're through trying to bully us into rebuilding this whole thing without charging for it, you can start taking notes, and we'll discuss practical action to get your mine pumped out without killing anyone."

Winkler went growling and sputtering back to his office with his papers and notes.

Gerd watched the engineer for a minute as he started packing up his tools, still working one-handed. Finally he said, "Herr Bosboom, I don't think I've ever heard a speech like that one. Certainly not to old Winkler."

"I hope I did right. I hope I got through to him."

"What was it that made you so upset?"

"Herr Hartmann, I've seen the consequences of refusing to face facts." He shuddered.

"When I was nine years old, I wanted to see what my uncle Hannes did. One day he let me come with him to a job site, where'd just been engaged as the supervising engineer. You can imagine what a treat that was for me. A canal lock was to be repaired and enlarged, so bigger barges could go through. When we arrived that morning, it had been all pumped out, and the masons were ready to go in and examine the wall.