Love and Chemistry by Jack Carroll & Edith Wild

Author:Jack Carroll & Edith Wild [Carroll, Jack & Wild, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press
Published: 2017-02-23T06:00:00+00:00

Gräfenstuhl

A few days later

When Matthias came back just before sunset from buying a little fresh bread for dinner, the mail was already there, and Jupp had started cooking. He took the letters to a bench, to stay out of Jupp's way.

One of them was from Aunt Grete. The other was from the hospital. There wouldn't be any tales from home in that one. Matthias opened it, dreading what it was likely to say. He called up the stairs, "Raimund, would you come down here? We have another problem." He opened Aunt Grete's letter while he was waiting.

When Raimund came down, looking a question, Matthias handed him the hospital's letter. "See for yourself. We're behind in payments, and they want to know when we expect to send them some more. Can you think of anything we can do about that, until we can get some of our copper to market?"

Raimund chewed on a knuckle for a few seconds, thinking. "Huh. This could really hurt us, if word gets around that we're not paying our bills. Let me talk to my cousin in the morning and see if he has any answers. I think he's run into this kind of thing a couple of times."

Matthias leaned against the bench. "Tomorrow? Do you need me to stand in for you at the bridge construction site?"

"No, tomorrow isn't our turn. Is there anything left to do around here in the meantime?"

"Catch up on housekeeping. Write a few personal letters I should have gotten to before now and answer this one from Aunt Grete. She wants a report. And after that, see if I can purify common salt by crystallization."

Jupp called from the kitchen, "Salt? What for?"

"Remember the notes we brought back from the college library? So we can react it with a little of the sulfuric acid we have left over after we extract the zinc, to make some reasonably pure hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid, so we can add it to the nitric acid we had to learn how to make on the way to silver nitrate. Then we'll have aqua regia. With aqua regia we can turn some of the secondary sludge left over from the silver cells into chloroauric acid, and then separate that. And if I haven't gotten any of that wrong, and if there aren't practical problems or dangerous reactions and byproducts I'm overlooking, we'll see if we can extract gold. Aunt Grete is asking about that again, too. Right now we have some time to try it. There isn't much else I can do in the shop, until we get some more raw copper."

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