"Mike Stearns is not a prince," Heidi said in a firm, almost belligerent, voice. "He's just a politician. He works for us, not the other way around." Then she relented. "Still Third Division is our division in a way. It's got lots of CoC, even more than the others. And Jeff Higgins and . . . well, it's sort of ours. I'd like to help. But we're already running three shifts and we can't expand production till we get the new machines."
"And we have customers that paid in advance and expect their steam engines on time. I know."
"Look, we have a lot of the booklets on making steam engines out of wood and leather. Granted, they aren't as good as our real steam engines but they're something."
"Yes, they are. But it's as much the boilers as the engines and a pot boiler is orders of magnitude less efficient." Adolph held up his hand. "I know, and we will send him a crate of the booklets. And I'll talk to the staff and see if we can squeeze out a couple of extra boilers for the Third."
"And as much of a CoC shop as this is, they'll try. But we're already squeezing as hard as we can."
Which wasn't true. Adolph's shops ran three overlapping nine-hour shifts a day and his crews worked alternating three- and four-day weeks. Giving them plenty of time for goofing off or, more commonly, agitating for the CoC.
"It's not the people. It's the machines that are the holdup. We just don't have enough of them." And that was true.
Still, they tried and managed to squeeze out a few extra engines. They weren't the only ones.
****
State Senator Karl Schmidt of the State of Thuringia Franconia glanced over the radio message and made a quick note on it, telling his eldest daughter to handle the matter. The senator was a busy man. Busy with the people's business certainly, but, truthfully, more busy with his own. Being state senator was more a position of status than of work. His work was the running of the Higgins Sewing Machine Corporation and its various subsidiaries. Business was good. Like his son, of whom he was increasingly-if still secretly-proud, he was running three shifts. Of course, he'd been doing that almost since he'd bought out the company back in '31.
The radio message was from his stepson David. A request for goods to be sold to the Third Division Exchange Corps. Karl was better positioned and by now had a bit more slack. He could send more sewing machines and more electroplated flatware and, well, generally more. Not that he handled that himself. He turned it over to his eldest daughter, who had taken over for Adolph after the boy had run off to start his own business. Gertrude would handle the matter.
The second radio message was more serious. He wished Uriel Abrabanel still lived here. He would know what to do. Karl didn't. Karl was among the most conservative of the Fourth of July Party and had considerable sympathy for William Wettin's positions. To be honest, Mike Stearns scared him and he had almost followed Quentin Underwood to the Crown Loyalists; would have if it hadn't looked like he would lose his senate seat if he did. Not that any of that mattered. The important point to Karl Schmidt was that his stepson was in the Third Division and in charge of the Third Division Exchange Corps. Which meant that Third Division's financial problems would reflect badly on the family and there were blood ties involved. He didn't have any answers for David, but he sent back that he would help if he could.
****
There were other messages; to the Board of Directors of OPM, to the presidents and owners of companies financed by OPM. Generators, power tools, nuts, bolts, plow blades, knives, ax heads, and more got diverted to the Third Division Exchange Corps warehouses while they were still not sure where they would be shipped. All while David Bartley didn't know where he would get the money to pay for them.
Then there were the requests for help from the finance community. Because, though David didn't have any real idea what the answer might be, he did think it would be in the area of finance and economics.
"So, how do you finance an army when the government isn't going to pay it?" someone asked.
"Well, the obvious answer is to borrow the money. And the government may eventually pay the bills, though I would disallow some of the expenses General Stearns has claimed," said Fredric Brum.
The questioner just looked at him. "You think Mike Stearns is cooking the books?"
"No, of course not. I simply think he is being over-generous with the government's money in compensating the victims of war." Then he sniffed. "Not that it makes any difference. All the government will do is pay the bills with IOUs." Brum believed that gold and silver were money and nothing else was. He was a good mathematician and learning to be a good programmer and socially quite liberal. But he stayed up nights worrying about what was going to happen when people finally realized that the vaunted American dollar was just a piece of paper with I owe you another piece of paperwritten on it in fancier wording. Everyone in the statistics department of the treasury knew that.
"Shh, Herr Brum. Someone might hear you. The problem with borrowing money is that with the way things are right now, a lot of the big lenders would be afraid of how the government would react. They could issue preferred stock, I guess."
****
"Say, Fonzie," David said as he entered the tent.
Frenczil Becker gritted his teeth theatrically and David grinned. Frenczil (the Fonz) Becker sported a black leather jacket, used goop on his hair, and put on tough-guy airs. Not, David would freely admit, without some justification. The Fonz was a lawyer who had joined the Third and become the executive officer of a rifle company. He had distinguished himself in combat and was respected by your average CoC tough. With the formation of the Exchange Corps, he had been seconded to it part-time. That is, in addition to his other duties. He had, in fact, been the one who drew up the actual papers of incorporation that had been signed by General Stearns.
"What do you know," David continued, "about the laws and penalties involved in issuing money or money-like stuff."
"What laws and penalties?"
"Well, someone at the treasury suggested we issue preferred stock and sell it locally but I'm afraid that might be too close to issuing money, so I wanted to find out about the applicable laws."
"And again I ask 'what laws'? There was some talk of making it illegal to issue money, but it would have stepped on too many toes. Rights granted in perpetuity to towns and nobles. It was hard enough to get them to swallow that their taxes had to be paid in USE dollars."
"You mean the Exchange Corps could just issue money?"
"Sure, but who would take it?"
David turned around and left the tent shaking his head. This would require thinking about. He had known that towns and cities were still issuing their own money, that John George and Georg Wilhelm had both issued paper money that had never been worth much, but he had assumed that they had special permission, or been grandfathered in. Mostly he'd ignored the matter, insisting on doing business in American dollars. Which was getting to be a pretty standard clause in contracts in the USE these days.
****
"Run that by me again, Lieutenant." Jeff Higgins shook his head. "I'm having some trouble with the logic involved."
David managed to hide his irritation at Colonel Higgins' forgetting his new rank yet again. He knew Jeff didn't mean anything by it. What was more difficult was trying to explain money matters to someone as ignorant of them as most people were "Well . . ."
He sat up straighter on the stool in a corner of the Hangman Regiment's HQ tent. "Let's try it this way. The key to the whole thing is the new scrip. What I'm calling the divisional scrip."
Higgins shook his head again. "Yeah, I got that. But that's also right where my brain goes blank on account of my jaw hits the floor so hard. If I've got this right, you are seriously proposing to issue currency in the name of the Third Division?"
"Exactly!" David said, without adding that they had been doing essentially the same thing every time they had issued a chit. "We'll probably need to come up with some sort of clever name for it, though. 'Scrip' sounds, well, like scrip."
"Worthless paper, in other words," provided Thorsten Engler. He, like Bartley and Colonel Higgins himself, was also sitting on a stool in the tent. The flying artillery captain was smiling. Unlike Jeff, he found Bartley's unorthodox notions to be quite entertaining.
"Except it won't be-which is why we shouldn't call it 'scrip.'"
"Why won't it be worthless?" asked Major Reinhold Fruehauf.
That question caught David up short because it was so basic and because he didn't have a clue how to explain to the major how money, all money, not just the Division scrip, got its value. The major was leaning casually against a tent pole. He was a good man and reasonably intelligent, but what gave money its value was an imponderable. "Why won't it be worthless? Because . . . Well, because it'll officially be worth something." Which was ridiculous, but explaining that "it would have value because it was perceived to have value, and being perceived to have value, it would buy stuff, which in turn would give it real value" was a bit beyond David's ability to articulate just at the moment.
The regiment's other battalion commander cocked a skeptical eyebrow. "According to who, Captain? You? Or even the regiment itself?" Major Baldwin Eisenhauer had a truly magnificent sneer. "Ha! Try convincing a farmer of that!"
"He's right, I'm afraid," said Thorsten. His face had a sympathetic expression, though, instead of a sneer. Engler intended to become a psychologist after the war; Major Eisenhauer's ambition was to found a brewery. Their personalities reflected the difference.
"I was once one myself," Engler continued. "There is simply no way that a level-headed farmer is going to view your scrip-call it whatever you will-as anything other than the usual 'promissory notes' that foraging troops hand out when they aren't just plundering openly. That is to say, not good for anything except wiping your ass."
David looked at them, totally lost in trying to explain that those level-headed farmers who would never accept scrip had been happily trading their grain for scrip since before Caesar was a pup. Scrip made out of metal not paper, granted. But that only made it scrip that wasn't even good for wiping your ass with. "But-but- " but how to explain to these good men who knew the world was flat and the sun went around it on a crystal sphere that the world was round and went rolling around the sun. "Of course, it'll be worth something. We'll get it listed as one of the currencies traded on the Grantville and Magdeburg money exchanges. If Mike-uh, General Stearns-calls in some favors, he'll even avoid having it discounted too much." He squared his slender shoulders. "I remind all of you that they don't call him the 'Prince of Germany' for no reason. I can pretty much guarantee that even without any special effort, money printed and issued by Mike Stearns will trade at a better value than a lot of European currencies."
Now, it was the turn of the other officers in the tent to look befuddled. As well they should. They knew as well as David did that the Saxon thaler-which until this spring was supposedly backed by silver-was worth bupkis compared to the American dollar that was paper backed by nothing but "I said so."
"Can he even do that?" asked Captain Theobold Auerbach. He was the commander of the artillery battery that had been transferred to Jeff's unit from the Freiheit Regiment.
Bartley scratched his head. "Well . . . It's kind of complicated, Theo. First, there's no law on the books that prevents him from doing it."
Auerbach frowned. "I thought the dollar-"
But David was already shaking his head. "No, that's a common misconception. The dollar is issued by the USE and is recognized as its legal tender, sure enough. But no law has ever been passed that makes it the nation's exclusive currency." The people who had the traditional right to mint money would never have stood for it.
"Ah! I hadn't realized that," said Thorsten. The slight frown on his face vanished. "There's no problem then, from a legal standpoint, unless the prime minister or General Torstensson tells him he can't do it. But I don't see any reason to even mention it to anyone outside the division yet. Right now, we're just dealing with our own logistical needs."
The expressions on the faces of all the down-timers in the tent mirrored Engler's. But Jeff Higgins was still frowning.
"I don't get it. You mean to tell me the USE allows any currency to be used within its borders?"
He seemed quite aggrieved, David noted with a grin.
"You're like most up-timers," David said, "especially ones who don't know much history. The situation we have now is no different from what it was for the first seventy-five years or so of the United States-our old one, back in America. There was an official United States currency-the dollar, of course-but the main currency used by most Americans was the Spanish real. The name 'dollar' itself comes from the Spanish dollar, a coin that was worth eight reales. It wasn't until the Civil War that the U.S. dollar was made the only legal currency."
"I'll be damned," said Jeff. "I didn't know that."
He wasn't in the least bit discomfited. As was true for most Americans, being charged with historical ignorance was like sprinkling water on a duck.
Colonel Higgins stood and stretched. "What you're saying, in other words, is that there's technically no reason-legal reason, I mean-that the Third Division couldn't issue its own currency."
"That's right." Well it was right as far as it went, which wasn't very far.
A frown was back on Captain Auerbach's face. "I can't think of any army that's ever done so, though."
David didn't say what do you think the chits we've been passing out are? It wouldn't do any good. "So? We're doing lots of new things."
"Let's take it to the general," said Jeff, heading for the tent flap. "We haven't got much time, since he's planning to resume the march tomorrow."
****
General Stearns was charmed by the idea. "Sure, let's do it. D'you need me to leave one of the printing presses behind?"
"Probably a good idea, sir." David said. "I can afford to buy one easily enough. The problem is that I don't know what's available in the area, and we're familiar with the ones the division brought along."
"Done. Anything else you need?"
David and Jeff looked at each other. Then Jeff said: "Well, we need a name for the currency. We don't want to call it scrip, of course."
Mike scowled. "Company scrip" was pretty much a profane term among West Virginia coal miners.
"No, we sure as hell don't," he said forcefully. He scratched his chin for a few seconds, and then smiled.
"Let's call it a 'becky,'" he said. "Third Division beckies."
****
Sergeant Beckmann was seated at a little folding table in their room of the castle. "Not to get all philosophical or anything, sir, but what is money?"
Johan Kipper groaned and David grinned. "Be thankful you didn't ask that of one of the economists at the Fed or Treasury. Best I've been able to tell from their lectures on the subject is that it's just IOUs."
"Of course, if you say that to one of them," Johan said, "they'll spend hours telling you that it's not just IOUs, but takes on the demonic aspect of IOUs, not the angelic aspect or vice versa. And that in its true platonic form, money is a store of wealth . . ."
"Now, now, Johan. Sarah isn't that bad," David said with a lack of confidence that even he could hear in his own voice.
"IOUs?" Sergeant Beckmann asked. "I owe you whats?"
"That's the tricky part," David acknowledged. "Money has quantity but not form, not kind. It's an IOU for a given amount of wealth of no specific nature. The nature of the wealth gets determined when you buy something with it. And not just the nature, but the quantity, too. The IOU has a quantity on it but what that quantity is worth in terms of actual goods gets determined by what you can and what you can't buy with it. Which is determined by what the person you're trading it to thinks they can trade it for and on and on ad infinitum."
"See?" Johan said. "Angels dancing on the head of a pin."
David snorted but nodded.
"So we issue money IOUs and pass them around to tr
ade stuff?"
"Yes."
"Sounds like a great way to make a living." Sergeant Beckmann grinned like the unrepentant conman he was. "What's the catch?"
"Normally, the catch is getting people to accept the money," David said. "In the up-time timeline the transition from gold and silver to paper took centuries and there were still people that had little caches of gold and silver coins when the Ring of Fire happened. In the new timeline, people right around the Ring of Fire accepted our money at first because we were a miracle. Even if people like General Stearns don't much like acknowledging it. But it was also because we had stuff to sell and our money bought it. How much of that first acceptance was God and how much was goods we may never know, but we had both.
"General Stearns has an international reputation and if the Prince of Germany decides to issue money, a lot of people will accept it. Why not? If the count of nowhere important can issue money, why can't the Prince of Germany?"
David looked around the room and saw that Sergeant Beckmann was nodding but Johan Kipper wasn't.
"Some of it was God right enough," Johan said, "but more of it was goods. Yes, the merchants and craftsmen we dealt with in those first days were willing to cut us some slack because you were up-timers and they didn't want to piss off whoever had sent you here. But mostly it was that they knew that the American dollars would spend in the Ring of Fire and having American dollars to spend made great excuse to go into the Ring of Fire and see the television video tapes and other wonders they'd heard about."
David nodded. "So they took them and found that they could spend them at home because their neighbors felt the same way. We have the reputation, the 'Prince of Germany.' More widespread now, if less holy. The problem is, we don't have the stuff to sell. There's sort of a critical mass that money has to reach before it works and I'm not sure the Prince of Germany gets there all by himself."
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