Chapter 18

Author’s note: [ and ] delineate mind-to-mind dialog.

I mixed what looked to me to be reasonable proportions of the three ingredients for my first try at napalm. I could tell that Hippolyte was puzzled when I used a long taper to light my experiment. She knew that I was working on something to turn fire into a weapon, but she could not make the connection between the mixture I had made and an offensive weapon.

The pile of goo took a moment to catch, and then it flared up into a very respectable flash of flame. It burned for about 15 seconds before it went out. The mix did everything I wanted, except for burning long enough. Examination of the mass of crud lying in the saucer after the fire went out seemed to indicate that I needed more fat and less soap. Okay, that was easy enough to do.

My second mix was not much better than my first, so I kept at it. Mixture number 13 seemed to be what I was looking for, so I settled on that until I could make some firebombs from it. I returned control of our body to Hippolyte, and she seemed relieved. She was all in favor of firebombs to be used against somebody else, but she did not like being that close to one when I was experimenting with the formulation. Unfortunately, that was what she had to put up with, but she was none too happy about it.

That series of tests had taken all morning, and we took a lunch break. I was now ready to experiment with a full bomb. I had several small pots of the type normally used for perfume or medicine. The body of the container was about two inches in diameter, and it had a short neck leading to an opening about half an inch in diameter. I had a stopper to close the opening after I had rigged a fuse.

At this point, I was fashioning my fuse from a section of swamp weed that that a tubular stem about a quarter-inch in diameter. At this point in the testing I had become very cautious. I certainly did not want any of the burning material to fall on me! My first test with the fuse was to lay a small blob of the mix on a saucer and stick the end of a short section of fuse into the blob. There was nothing to hold the fuse upright, so I let it drape over the edge of the saucer.

I used my taper to light the exposed end of the fuse and stepped back. Oh, damn! That fuse mixture took too long to burn down to the blob. I was almost completely out of patience when the fire finally reached the blob. There was some sputtering and the blasted fire went out without ever setting fire to the blob. That was adding insult to injury!

Okay, something else was required. I decided to try to get some idea of how much flame was necessary to ignite the blob, so I made a trail of more of the mix leading up to the blob. I lit the opposite end of the trail of mix and watched it as it burned down to the blob. This time the blob caught fire the way it was supposed to, but that was certainly not an acceptable fuse.

Obviously, making a suitable fuse was going to be more of a job than I had expected. What I wanted was a stable fire that would ignite the main part of the bomb when the outer shell broke upon impact. My next experiment was something entirely different—I took a narrow strip of cloth and saturated it with the fuel mix. When I lit one end, it burned vigorously its entire length and continued to burn for almost a minute.

Ah-ha! This looked like what I needed for a fuse. I made up another fuse and pushed one end into the neck of the bottle that I had previously filled with the fuel mix. I pushed the fuse into the bottle until I could feel it come into contact with the fuel already in the bottle. I laid the whole infernal machine on the ground and lit the fuse. Let me tell you, I got the hell away from that concoction as quickly as I could.

I had to wait something like half a minute for the fuse to do its work, but there was a sudden “crack” noise like a tiny firecracker going off, and the bottle broke into a number of pieces. Flaming material jumped out of the broken bottle and spattered around in about an 18-inch radius. Hippolyte was as excited as I was when the flames spattered around, and the whole mass burned for about 7 or 8 minutes.

This was what I wanted, and all I had to do now was to work out the details. How many chemists have said that to the boss and wound up spending six months or more working out those damned details? I made up another bomb like that first one and tied a string to the neck. I laid the bottle on the ground and lit the fuse. I picked up the string and spun around so that the bottle flew in a circle around me.

I spun twice and released the string. What I was trying to simulate was the kind of treatment the bottle would get from a trebuchet. When I released the bottle, the whole mass flew against a stone wall, and that shattered the bottle. Flaming goop spattered everywhere, and it continued to burn for several minutes. Now Hippolyte was really excited.

The bottle did not strike the wall where I had expected it to, mostly because I had not practiced this part of the experiment. There were some dried leaves near where the bottle had hit, and these leaves were set on fire. That was living proof of concept, and they used to say up-time. Hippolyte and I were ecstatic. If this worked with a full-scale machine, we had our answer to a siege!

The next step was to see what different size bottles did to my firebomb idea when they broke. Luckily, there was a potter in town who could make the kind of firebomb containers that I needed. I drew a picture of what I wanted and took it to see him. Of course, he thought that I was crazy to want bottles like I had drawn. No sane person could possibly have a use for such a bottle. On the other hand, I was willing to pay his price, so he agreed to make five each of several different bottle sizes. This was an order for 20 bottles, and that was going to take two weeks to make and fire in his kiln, but I was adamant that I knew what I wanted.

Two weeks later, the bottles were delivered. In the meantime, I had one of the ballistas modified to use as a test machine for launching the bottles. This was done with one of the ballistas on the rear of the fort. Hopefully, that would cut down on the number of accidents. I had a stone target constructed as a disk about six feet in diameter 100 yards from the ballista. I was afraid that I was pushing the range and accuracy of the ballista, but I was determined not to be the cause of a major fire.

I explained to everybody involved in the tests exactly what I was trying to do, so that was another way to reduce accidents. They were all intensely interested in the tests—who would not be interested in the evolution of a new weapon to kill enemies? We made a number of practice shots with wooden balls of various sizes and weights so that the ballista crew would have some experience in firing something beside huge arrows.

Everything was ready for when the jars were delivered. To make sure that I would know what was involved in filling the jars and installing the fuses, I did the whole thing myself. Hippolyte was very supportive at this stage and never complained of how boring it was to stand idly by while I was doing such important and deadly work. It took three days for me to be satisfied with my work, so the test firing was scheduled for the fourth day.

The potter, Harmore, was invited to watch the tests of what was being done with his jars. Yes, if the test turned out to be as successful as we hoped, Hippolyte and I wanted the word to spread far and wide so that opponents would be intimidated before they were ever shot at. All of the politicians were also invited to watch. We knew that the test was really to determine what size firebomb would be the most appropriate and how accurate the shots would be.

Each bomb was weighed to make sure that they were all the same within a size, and wooden practice balls of the same size and weight were test fired before the bombs were trusted to the firing range. Very few of the audience had been this close to a ballista when it was fired, so they were impressed with the skill it took to shoot the weapon, much less to hit what your were aiming at. Multiple shots with the wooden balls were made to insure accuracy and repeatability.