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then shaved off everything that wasn't covered. The Cossacks shaved their heads except for a pony tail
hanging on the left side. The Mongols shaved a big square on the top of their heads, leaving a curl in the
middle of their foreheads, in front of their ears, and a thick fringe around the back.
I don't understand the psychology of this brand of nonsense, but obviously, we had to have a funny haircut
too. For a while there, I was toying with going to a Mohawk, but then I decided that the modem military
crew cut was as weird as any of them, and took a lot less maintenance to keep up.
We also spent a lot of time on unarmed combat, for a warrior must stay a warrior even if he's unarmed and
naked.
But after two weeks, I had to leave and go the rounds of the other factories. There were always technical
problems where a few words from me could save hundreds of man-hours, and managerial problems that
only the boss could resolve.
I put Sir Vladimir in charge when I was gone, and I gave him a daily schedule of what was to be done. He
followed it as best he could. For my own part, I tried to stay with the physical training program even when I
was on the road, but it was hard to do.
I especially didn't want to stint the boys at Eagle Nest. Those kids were so earnest that I felt a moral
commitment to give them all the help I could. It didn't faze them in the least that one of their members had
already died in the air. They fully expected to take further casualties and, in typically Polish fashion, were
willing to pay the price. It wasn't the ignorant feeling of 'it can't happen to me.' They knew that it could
happen to them! They just felt that the prize was worth the price, and they went on. This from twelve- and
thirteen-year old boys! If only NASA had such heroes!
What could I do but love them and help them in every way that I could? For now, I got them into
sailplanes, and designed a launching device that would be built on top of the big conical hill near there.
There was plenty of coal tar stockpiled at Coaltown, so we scheduled an asphalt runway on the plain below
the hill. In time, other runways were added so that they could land no matter which way the wind was
blowing, and eventually an entire half square mile was paved over. This not only permitted landing in any
wind, but on sunny days it caused a lovely up-draft that went up for miles!
Wing struts proved to be a problem. The most efficient sailplane wings are very long and thin, and we had
to support them without the benefit of aircraft aluminum. What we came up with was a sort of synthetic
bamboo. I had a huge lathe built that could turn an eight-yard-long spruce log. We bored a conical hole
down the middle of it, inserted a long iron cone in the hole and turned the outside of the log so that the
thickness of the wall was half that of your little finger. Then the iron cone was removed and wooden discs
were glued inside every half yard. This assembly had an astounding strength-to-weight ratio. Two of them
fastened together end to end at the fuselage ran down the center of the wings. It held.
Count Lambert was often at Eagle Nest when I was there. He complained that they were making great
progress with the aircraft themselves, but that I had once described to him an engine that could power an
aircraft, and I was doing nothing about developing one.
The problem was that there were a lot of things higher on my priority list than a glorified lawnmower
engine. There was the tooling to mass produce armor, a rapid-fire breach-loading cannon to develop, and
we needed to be able to mass produce shells, bullets, gunpowder, sword blades, boots, and all sorts of
things. I didn't even have a dependable source of lead and zinc yet, let alone sulfur!
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But Count Lambert and the boys teamed up on me and extracted a promise. I would start working on an
engine once they could build a two-man glider that could stay up for an hour. Knowing the problems
involved, I didn't think that my promise would seriously upset my schedules.
There were two major sour points in early 1236, and they both hit me within the same week. I was being
sued, twice. One lawsuit was by Count Lambert's brother Herman. He was no longer pleased with the brass
works that I'd sold him. Rather than making him money, it was costing him money, due, I was sure, to his
poor management. He felt that it was all my fault, and he was a count whereas I was a mere knight, which
proved it to his satisfaction - He wanted his money back.
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