Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat Read Free

she’d never win this argument, so she changed the subject to something that had been bothering her lately: “Is this real Dutch?”
    Henry’s bright blue eyes, which were already big, grew even larger as they opened wide with shock. “Of course it’s real Dutch! Straight from Bavaria.”
    “Bavaria?”
    “Ach, that’s not it. Indeed no. I meant, um – hmm. Well, strip my gears! I’m blanking.”
    “Holland.”
    “Ya, that thing. Good old Holland.”
    “Anyway, I was talking to Brie-”
    He arched an eyebrow. “You speak with cheese?”
    “Huh? It’s a name.”
    “Ya, for a moldy French dairy product.”
    “She’s a girl .”
    “Do her parents realize what they’ve done?”
    Angelica sighed. “Maybe not. I was trying to say that she showed me the Internet-”
    “The what?”
    “The Internet, and please don’t ask me if it’s for catching fish! It’s a computer thing.”
    He blinked, not understanding. “Is it electricity-powered, leef?” Dear .
    She nodded.
    “I wouldn’t trust it, then,” he stated firmly. “Electricity is treacherous. Extremely dangerous.”
    He absentmindedly scratched his arm, where a healed scar showed long and white. It had been caught in some spinning gears and badly cut a few years earlier. At the time, he’d said he was lucky it hadn’t been severed.
    “Dad, listen,” Angelica said, wondering how he could be so confused, “she showed me stuff in Dutch on her computer, and it wasn’t the same!”
    “Ect neet!” Henry said. No way! “Not the same?”
    “I understood some. It talked about tulips and canals. But if that’s Dutch, how could what we’re learning be Dutch, and they’re so different?”
    “Ah, now I see.”
    Deep in thought, Henry rubbed his face, unknowingly smearing the grease mark all over his cheek.
    “Please don’t make up a story,” she chided. “You’re the one who says to always tell the truth.”
    He smiled. “Of course. What we’re learning must be an older version of Dutch, one that our ancestors preserved over many years. It may seem strange, but one day, when we go home, it will all make sense. Trust me.”
     
    ***
     
    Returning from the kitchen with a plate, Will offered them slices of homemade bread and fresh cheese they’d made from their goats’ milk.
    “Still too cold for math,” he said, shivering.
    “I know,” Angelica suggested brightly, “let’s go outside and practice fencing or shooting the heavy crossbow!”
    “Tomorrow,” her father said. “Let’s solve the mystery of our wonderful cooling system. How is it that our red hot boiler, on the hottest day of the year, instead of cooking us into little roasts, makes it delightfully cool?”
    “Freezing, you mean.”
    Angelica sat by an open window that let warm outdoor air in. Even so, she wore a pretty red sweater that her mother had knitted for her.
    “Well, it is working a bit too well,” Henry admitted. “I’ll fix it if you tell me how we get cold from heat.”
    “We use the heat,” she said, wrinkling her nose as she urged her brain to remember, “to squish something.”
    “To compress a fluid, good,” said Henry, motioning with his hands like he was pressing something together.
    “Right, the fluid is … I forgot.”
    “Will?”
    “The compressed fluid is cooled and then released,” Will said monotonously, “and the molecules are suddenly free to move around. They need energy for this, so they take heat from the area, creating cold.”
    “Perfect, except the last word,” Henry said. “There’s no such thing as cold!”
    Angelica sat up, puzzled. “Huh?”
    “Cold’s an illusion. We make it up in our heads.”
    “I’m shivering for what reason, then?”
    “Because of less heat. Always remember, there is only heat. More heat or less heat. Cold cannot move into or out of a system. Only heat.”
    “Dad, you say ‘cold’ all the time!” Will protested.
    Henry started to argue but couldn’t help chuckling, instead. “Flink