1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [75]
So who could say? Once that steam technology was established as the dominant engine technology, it might retain that status for a long time. There had been a lot of accidental and secondary factors that had produced the dominance of internal combustion engines in that other universe. They might never really come into play in this one.
That sort of uneven and combined development had become quite common. Thorsten's friend had told him that a similar situation existed with computer technology. Many down-timers now understood the basic principles of cybernetics. The friend himself, born in the year 1602, was one of them. But recreating the electronic industry the up-timers had relied on for the purpose was simply impossible in the here and now, and would be for some time to come.
Here, his friend had spent half an hour enlightening Thorsten—and Caroline Platzer, who understood no more than he did—on the subtleties of something called "semiconductors." Apparently, the problem of producing those would be enough in itself to stymie the development of up-time-style cybernetics for a long time to come.
But there was an alternative, one which the up-timers themselves had never developed very far because by the time they began creating computers their electronic capacilities had been quite advanced. The alternative was called "fluidics," and was based on using the flow of liquids instead of electrons—typically water, but it could be air, and apparently the ideal fluid would be mercury or something similar.
That technology was well within existing seventeenth-century techniques. Already, in fact, there was a little boom developing in Venetian glass manufacturing to provide some of the components needed for fluidics-based computers.
What Thorsten's friend had found most fascinating was that there was no telling where these developments would lead in the long run. Any industry, once established and widely spread, creates an automatic inertia in favor of continuing it. That same inertia handicaps its potential rivals. In the world the up-timers came from, that dynamic had entrenched internal combustion engines and electronic computers. But in this one, that might not be true. There were advantages to steam and fluidics, after all, that had never really been exploited in the universe across the Ring of Fire—but might be in this one.
Across the field, Thorsten could see Saxon cavalry coming forward. It looked as if Torstensson's ploy was going to work.
It occurred to him that this was not the best time to ruminate on possible alternative technologies. For the here and now, cavalry was still the principal offensive arm in a battle, as the Saxons were about to try to demonstrate again—and it was Thorsten's job to stop them.
"Here we go," said Lukasz Opalinski. He and his Polish hussars had been ordered to join the Saxon cavalry in their charge against the overextended right wing of the enemy's army. That would be the Third Division, commanded by the USE's former prime minister.
"The Saxons claim he doesn't know what he's doing," said Lubomir Adamczyk. He sounded more doubtful than hopeful. "Stearns, I mean."
But there was no time to talk any further. The charge was starting. Slightly more than four thousand Saxon horsemen would be hammering that enemy right wing within not much more than a minute. Along with two hundred Polish hussars.
Lukacz wasn't all that hopeful himself. It might well be true that the enemy general didn't know what to do. But he didn't really need to know. Stearns just needed to listen to his staff officers, because they would know.
Apparently, he was doing so. To Opalinski, the speed and precision with which the infantry units of the Third Division