Yet as he followed Felicia into the dining room, he had to own to being impressed by the ease with which she’d taken in the problem, then unerringly put her finger on the source. He’d worked alongside inventors long enough to appreciate that seeing through all the layers of obfuscation created by complicated mechanical systems to the heart of a problem required a certain clarity of mind.
In his experience, it took a special type of brain and mind to be able to “see” at that level.
Felicia said nothing about her success as she resumed her seat beside Flora, who had already finished her meal.
Rand smiled and made his and William John’s excuses, then claimed the chair opposite Felicia.
As usual, William John sat at the head of the table, opposite Flora. Transparently released from all worries, glib and gay, he rattled on to Flora, heaping accolades on his sister’s head for her invaluable assistance.
Felicia, Rand noticed, looked pleased, but also faintly disturbed.
To fascinating and occasionally enigmatic, he could now add intriguing.
From where he sat, there was definitely more to Felicia Throgmorton than he’d had any reason to suppose.
* * *
The next day was Sunday. Rand and William John went down to the workshop immediately on returning from church.
The previous afternoon and evening, they’d worked together—Rand acting as William John’s assistant—to make the modifications Felicia had suggested. They’d had to leave the connections to harden overnight before testing the new valves.
They could barely wait to fire up the boiler.
Then they watched the gauges. Watched and waited as the pressure built.
The valve released precisely as it should. “Yes!” William John raised his fists to the ceiling.
Rand grinned, but kept watching. Only when the new valve continued to release, maintaining the pressure in the boiler at the maximum safe level, did he finally relax.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of their difficulties. William John reattached the drive shaft—he’d dismantled it while they’d concentrated on working on the boiler—only to discover that now, although the issue with the pressure was resolved, even with a steady pressure applied, he couldn’t get the pistons to remain in strict tandem. After five minutes of running, they were sufficiently out of rhythm to have the drive shaft groaning.
After an hour of poking at the pistons and their connections, clearing all the tubing, and then studying the diagrams, William John had once again resorted to tugging his hair. “I don’t understand it,” he wailed. “We’ve increased the pressure, but it’s now under control and steady. The timing shouldn’t have changed.”
It occurred to Rand that, as with the earlier problem, this one was almost certainly more about design than the actual mechanism. “Why don’t we carry on with those changes you wanted to make to the drive shaft itself and wait until your sister comes to pry us away for lunch, then see if she can suggest a way forward?”
William John had looked ready to throw a spanner at the board. Rand’s words gave him pause, then he shrugged. “Yes—why not? We’re getting nowhere here—let’s move on to something we can do.”
When, after Johnson had struck the gong twice with no result, Felicia again made her way down the curving stairs to the workshop, it was to find William John and Rand waiting for her with welcoming smiles on their faces.
Frowning, she paused on the last stair. “What is it?”
William John leapt to tell her—in detail.
And, once again, she found herself, however reluctantly, inexorably drawn into considering, studying, and evaluating the problem.
When William John finally fell silent, and both men waited, patently expecting her to offer them a solution, she frowned at them. “Yesterday...that was very likely just luck. A fluke. A moment that won’t be repeated.”
William John looked at her beseechingly. “Please.” He
gestured to the diagrams.
“We’re stuck.” Rand’s tone was less cajoling and more definite. “You’re here, you understand the problem—just look and see if anything strikes you.”
She humphed, but consented to fix her attention once more on the diagrams. The more she traced the connections, the more she felt as if her mind was sinking into the structure of the engine, making sense of the complexity in a way that was almost beyond her conscious grasp. As if some deeply buried part of her recognized the challenge and rose to meet it.
This difficulty was...trickier. There were more possibilities, more points at which things might be going awry.
She lost all sense of time as, with her eyes, she traced, tracked, and backtracked.