1635: The Eastern Front

by Eric Flint

  The adoption of those new techniques was especially rapid in the Germanies and Bohemia. That was partly because the industries involved were further developed there. But another important factor was the stance of the Committees of Correspondence, who were more prominent in those areas than they were elsewhere in Europe. The CoCs were firmly convinced—adamant, it would be better to say—that proper sanitation ran a very close second to godliness, and they matched deed to word. The rapidly spreading network of credit unions that was fostered by the CoCs in lower class communities always extended low-interest loans for any sanitation project. And in cities like Magdeburg where they were powerful, the CoCs maintained patrols that were quite prepared to use forceful means to put a stop to unsanitary practices.

  There were still towns in the Germanies where people emptied their chamber pots in street gutters as a matter of course. Magdeburg was not one of them. Doing so would certainly result in a public harangue; persisting in the practice would just as certainly lead to a beating.

  There were people who denounced the CoCs for that practice, but Rebecca was not one of them. Such people were usually either down-time reactionaries or up-time liberals. The reactionaries were against anything connected to the Ring of Fire. Their objection was not to beatings—they were generally all in favor of that practice, applied to lower class folk—but to the cause involved and the persons engaged in it.

  As for the up-time liberals, Rebecca understood their qualms. But they'd never lived through a major episode of disease, except the few who'd been in the western Germanies during the ongoing plague epidemic this year or had lived through the diphtheria scare in the Oberpfalz the year before. Any epidemic, even when it was more "benign" than smallpox or typhus, was bad enough. It was quite noticeable that those up-timers who'd survived the experience were not given to wincing at the CoC methods of sanitation enforcement. Better some bruised feelings and even bruised flesh to bodies being carted off by the hundreds, or sometimes thousands.

  She then spent some time watching the small horde of children playing with electricity. Within limits, of course. She let them switch the lights on and off in the various rooms, as long as they were reasonably gentle in the process and didn't overdo it. Like most technology patterned on up-time design and theory but constructed using down-time methods and materials, the switches were sturdy things. Still, they could be broken if they were over-stressed, and—again, like almost everything of that nature—they were rather costly. The light bulbs were even more expensive.

  She kept them away from the computer. In fact, she kept the door to that room locked. But she allowed them to plug in and operate Michael's battered old up-time toaster in the kitchen. Every child present—there were no fewer than nine participating in the project—got to make and eat his or her own slices of toast.

  The toast was on the crumbly side. Down-time bread was much tastier than the up-time varieties which were by now long gone, to no one's regret other than some up-timers themselves. But it didn't slice as cleanly or evenly, probably because it lacked what up-timers called "additives" and down-timers called low-grade poisons.

  But the children didn't care. They'd never had toast before, leaving aside some baked flatbreads. They were quite taken by the stuff.

  Their interest faded soon enough, though. There were greater thrills in store. It wasn't long before the children were racing down to the basement to start up the mansion's sure and certain center of attraction. For them, anyway.

  The toy electric train set. Michael had brought it home just two days ago and finished setting it up last night.

  It was one of the very first models produced by the recently launched Fassbinder-Lionel company, from the firm's factory right here in Magdeburg. Completely down-time in construction, albeit obviously based on up-time models. The toy train sets were still fiendishly expensive. As yet, the market was purely a luxury one whose clientele consisted of noblemen and wealthy merchants, manufacturers and bankers.

  The only reason Rebecca's husband had been able to afford it was because he'd gotten it for free. The company could just as easily have been named Fassbinder-Stearns, given that Michael was one of the company's two partners, along with Heinrich Fassbinder. He'd insisted on the name Lionel instead of his own, though. For the sake of tradition, he claimed. Rebecca suspected it was more because Michael saw no reason to stir up charges of conflict of interest any more than was necessary.

  In truth, there wasn't any in this instance. An army general—even a prime minister, as he'd once been—would have precious little occasion to favor the fortunes of a toy train company. But there were other areas in which Michael's financial dealings were grayer in nature.

  This very mansion, for one. They'd only been able to buy the house because of a loan extended to them by some wealthy members of the far-flung Abrabanel family to which Rebecca herself belonged. True, the loan was secured—but the collateral was the royalties that were expected to come in two or three years from the sales of Rebecca's book on current political developments.

  Which she hadn't started writing yet. And whose royalties would depend on enforcement of the copyright legislation passed by the USE's parliament so recently the ink was barely dry on the bill sent up to the new prime minister for his signature.

  Wilhelm Wettin had signed it readily enough. Whatever other disputes his Crown Loyalists had with Michael and Rebecca's party, they'd agreed that establishing up-time style copyright was a good idea. Still, no one really knew yet how well or easily the new laws could be enforced. There might be wholesale piracy, in which case those royalties would be mostly a chimera.

  Not that the Abrabanels who'd extended the loan would care that much. The reason they'd made the loan was political, not economic. Whether or not they ever saw the money paid back, they had a keen interest in seeing to it that the leaders of the July Fourth party stayed alive and well. Their own prosperity, even possibly their very survival, might depend on it.

  To be sure, no one thought the new prime minister was himself an anti-Semite, much less a rabid one. Wettin was an eminently civilized man. But it remained to be seen how well he controlled the political forces he'd help to set in motion. The Abrabanels, like many people, thought his control was shaky—and there were people and groups under the umbrella called "the Crown Loyalist Party" who were quite certainly anti-Semites.

  Rebecca hadn't hesitated at accepting the loan. She understood the political logic quite well. But she also knew—so did Michael—that there would inevitably be charges of conflict of interest. Especially if it became known that the man who'd arranged the loan was none other than Francisco Nasi, himself a member of the Abrabanel clan and Michael's former head of security and espionage.

  Fortunately, Francisco was superbly adept at keeping his doings out of the limelight. And, who was to say? If the copyright laws held up, there might in fact be a large income derived from her book. There would be keen interest in it, certainly. Even if the market was restricted to CoC members and sympathizers, that would be a lot of books sold.

  Rebecca let the children play with the train set for a full hour. Her magnanimity had a cold purpose to it. The toy train sets, Michael had told her, were much like the train sets his father and grandfather had played with. That was to say, not very concerned with the fussbudget latter-day up-time obsession with child safety.

  "There's no way in hell to play with these trains," he'd said, "without getting an electric shock from time to time. No real harm done—and it teaches kids to respect electricity."

  So it proved. Only two of the children got shocked, as it turned out—one of them being her own daughter Sepharad, who promptly wailed as loudly as you could ask for. But within an hour, all of the children were being much more careful than they'd been with the toaster or the light switches.

  The mission was accomplished. And now she had no further reason to procrastinate. It was time to start writing the book.

  * * *

  Fortunately,
she wouldn't have to put up with the troubles and travails of quill pens and ink bottles. Rebecca loved her computer.

  The title came easily and readily:

  An Examination of the Current Political Situation in the Germanies and Europe

  She stared at the title. She had no trouble imagining the caustic remarks her husband would have made, had he seen it.

  "Why don't you just put a damn footnote in the title while you're at it?" he'd jeer. "Just to make sure and certain everyone understands this is an eye-glazing tract of no conceivable interest to anyone except scholars like you."

  After a while, she sighed and suppressed her natural instincts. In this, as in many if not all things, Michael Stearns was correct. So, she deleted the title and, after a few more seconds of consideration, came up with another and more suitable one.

  The Road Forward: A Call to Action

  Chapter 2

  Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia

  Gretchen Richter's eyes were riveted on the sheet of paper in her hands, her brow creased by a truly magnificent frown. Her husband, Jeff Higgins, was leaning over the back of her chair in order to study the figures himself.

  "How much?" Gretchen asked again.

  Seated across from her in the large couch in the living room of the Dreeson house, David Bartley shrugged his shoulders. "That depends on a lot of variables. But if you sold all your stocks right now—which I don't recommend, since the market's really antsy with another war looming; well, if you had a lot of military industry stocks, I suppose it might be different—they're doing really well, not surprisingly—but you don't, so—"

  "David," Gretchen said, half-growling. "Keep it simple. If. You. Would. Please."

  "But . . . Look, Gretchen, I'm really not trying to be confusing. It's just that it really isn't all that simple. Like, where would you want to sell it? I wouldn't recommend the Grantville or Magdeburg stock exchanges for most of your stocks. They're the ones affected the worst by the war jitters. You'd probably do better in Amsterdam, or in some cases even Venice."

  "David!" The "half" left the growl.

  Jeff grunted. "Just assume we're morons, David. So, not knowing our asses from our elbows, we go right now to the exchange in downtown Grantville and sell everything—every single stock on this list—for whatever we can get."

  Bartley looked at his watch. "You couldn't get there in time today—"

  "David!" Gretchen's tone left "growl" behind altogether, and began approaching "shriek of fury."

  "Calm down, hon," said Jeff soothingly, his big hand caressing her shoulder. "You can't kill him without producing a political crisis. He's way too popular with the CoCs. All over the country, too, not just here."

  Gretchen said nothing. She just glared at Bartley.

  "Fine," Jeff continued. "So we sell it all tomorrow. How much would we get?"

  David's eyes got that slightly-unfocussed look that Jeff had come to be familiar with this afternoon. The one that signified well-gee-it's-really-complicated-depending-on-this-that-and-the-other.

  "Forget playing with currencies," Jeff added quickly. "Just figure we sell it for USE dollars. Whatever we can get. Soon as the stock exchange opens tomorrow morning."

  Bartley looked down at the list of figures in his own hand, which was identical to the one Gretchen and Jeff were looking at. He pursed his lips, an expression that Jeff thought made him look like a young Ichabod Crane. If Bartley had been standing, the likeness would have been even better. David was tall and thin, his gangly frame still not having caught up to his height. He was nineteen years old, and the best-known if not perhaps the richest of the teenage millionaires produced by the Ring of Fire.

  "Well . . . Figure you'd wind up with about two million dollars. Give or take."

  Gretchen swallowed. "Two . . . ​million?"

  "About. But like I said, if you waited and sold the stocks on the Amsterdam market—and Venetian market, for that matter—and took your time about it—I think you'd wind up getting closer to two and a half million. But the truth is I don't recommend you sell most of these stocks. It's a good portfolio, Gretchen." His slender shoulders became a bit more square. "We did right by you guys, if I say so myself."

  "That seems clear enough," Jeff said dryly. He moved from behind Gretchen's chair and pulled up a chair for himself from a nearby side table. The chair was on the rickety side. Gretchen's grandmother Veronica, Henry Dreeson's widow, used that table for her records and correspondence. She was not a large woman and the chair did fine for her. Under Jeff's weight, it creaked alarmingly. Most of the fat that Higgins had carried as a teenager was gone now. But, if anything, the twenty-three-year-old man who'd replaced that teenager was even bigger—and Jeff had been a big kid to start with.

  He ignored the creaks. Whatever else, they could obviously afford to replace the chair now, even if it did collapse under him. And he needed to sit down. He was feeling a bit light-headed.

  Two million dollars. Two and a half, if you wait.

  The only numbers like that he'd ever dealt with, at least when it came to money, were associated with the role-playing games he and his friends had played in high school. So, trying to get a handle on them and turn the abstract into the concrete, he focused on the chair swaying beneath him.

  Go ahead, sucker. Break. See if I care. You're kindling in the fireplace and I go out and buy something sturdier to replace you. Out of pocket change.

  That thought steadied him some. He glanced at Gretchen, but saw that his wife was in a rare state of paralysis—an almost unheard of state, in her case. She was normally as uncertain as a calving glacier.

  "Whether it's a smart move or not, we will need some cash pretty soon, David. I think you call it liquidity or something like that." Jeff nodded toward his sister-in-law, who was sitting next to David on the couch. The eighteen-year-old girl was studying the figures Bartley held in his hand as intently as a cat watching a mousehole. "Annalise needs to start college in the fall, and that scholarship she got won't be enough to cover the cost."

  He lifted his hand and spun the forefinger in a little circle. "Not to mention this gaggle of kids we've got to support. Except for Baldy, anyway. He likes his apprenticeship at KSI, and he's even making enough to support himself."

  "That's not a problem. What I recommend is that you sell your shares of Kelly Aviation. They're selling like hotcakes right now on account of the war coming, but I don't personally think that's going to last, so you may as well get out while the getting's good."

  Feeling under some sort of vague compulsion to demonstrate his masculine mastery of financial matters in front of the womenfolk, Jeff took off his glasses and started cleaning them with a handkerchief. "You sure? I heard those are pretty good planes they make."

  "Technically, yes. Bob Kelly knows his stuff when it comes to designing aircraft. In that respect, he's probably just as good as Hal Smith. The problem's on the other end. He's got the business sense of a jackrabbit and while Kay makes up for it some, she's also, well . . ." He looked uncomfortable. For all his financial acumen, David Bartley wasn't a cutthroat by temperament. He was quite a nice guy, actually, and not given to bad-mouthing others.

  "Well," he repeated.

  Jeff was less reticent. He'd run into Bob Kelly's wife on several occasions. "Yeah. If pissing people off was an Olympic event, she'd take the gold every time."

  David nodded. "I figure you could get three hundred thousand dollars from those stocks. You could set aside twenty-five percent of that as a fund for Annalise, which ought to be plenty even as expensive as Quedlinburg's gotten to be."

  Annalise spoke up, her tone a mix of defensiveness and belligerence. "It's the only really good college for women yet. In the USE, anyway. I wouldn't mind going to Prague but Gramma'd pitch a fit."

  Jeff put his glasses back on. "That'd leave us with about two hundred and twenty-five thousand. Gretchen wants to move to Magdeburg as soon as possible, now that Ronnie's leaving town, and we'd need to
get a house big enough for all the kids. We'd figured on renting, but . . ." He started doing the needed calculations.

  Not surprisingly, David did the figuring faster than he did. "You could buy the kind of house you need for . . . ​I figure about seventy-five thousand dollars. But then you'd own it free and clear and still have a hundred and fifty thousand to live on. Even with all your kids, that's way more than enough."

  Gretchen frowned. "Seventy-five thousand? That seems much too high. We're not going to be looking for a home in the rich districts, you know."

  "Yeah, sure. You pretty much have to stay in one of the working class areas where the CoCs are strong and can provide you with some protection. You've got a lot of enemies. But for the same reason, you'll need a really solid place. My own advice would be to buy a whole apartment building. Plenty of room for the kids—Ronnie, too, if she wants to move in with you—"

  Jeff chuckled. "Not likely. She says she's had enough of babysitting our kids and we can damn well do it on our own from now on. I think she's planning to move in with the Simpsons. She and Mary get along real well, and with the admiral likely to be gone most of the time, Mary'd probably like the company."

  Gretchen looked like she was on the verge of choking. "An apartment building? We don't have that many kids. Baldy will be staying here and so will Martha, who wants to finish school. That leaves us with only half a dozen who'll be coming to Magdeburg. And I can assure you that I have no intention of becoming a landlady!"

  David made a face. Again, the youngster's nature made it hard for him to state the truth bluntly.

  Jeff, on the other hand, had no such compunctions left. Being married to Gretchen for four years had pretty well rubbed off whatever delicate sensibilities he'd ever possessed. "Hon, we've got a lot of enemies. Well, you do, anyway. Most of them don't have much against me except they've got to get past me to put you in the ground."