1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 10

September 1634

Village of Simmering, Austria

“You know anything about oil wells, Sonny?” Ron Sanderlin passed the well-worn book over and took a seat in the sitting room of the large house that they had been situated in. The house was in the village of Simmering, about three miles from the walls of Vienna, and it was where Prince Ferdinand had decided to set up his race track. It was near an imperial hunting lodge established by Maximilian II and there were extensive gardens nearby.

“I know I wish I’d owned one up-time,” Sonny Fortney told him. “But other than that, nada.” One single sentence in the book mentioned that the Matzen oil field was about twelve miles northeast of Vienna and was the largest in Austria. But it didn’t say another thing about it. It was a book on sights to see in and around Vienna and that line was in the vital statistics portion of the book. It didn’t even say whether “largest” referred to land area or barrels of oil.

Ron’s Uncle Bob was shaking his head, indicating he didn’t know either. They had just gotten to Vienna and hadn’t even started Ron’s 240Z. Well, Emperor Ferdinand’s 240Z now. And Janos Drugeth’s uncle, Pal Nadasdy, wanted them to tell him how to get the oil in the Matzen field out of the ground.

“Look, oil drilling is a pretty specialized business,” Sonny said. “And there hasn’t been much along those lines in Grantville since the twenties. Uh. . the nineteen twenties, I mean. There are a couple of older folks that were kids way back then and a few old books tucked away. But I’m pretty sure there is not a single petroleum geologist in Grantville and that means in the world. The wildcatters, ah, the people who are doing the drilling, are mostly up at the oil fields near Wietze.

“Ron here can get the car up and running, and I can build you a track for it. For that matter, with the help of your local smiths and Bob, I can build you a steam boiler and between us we can build you some steam engines and locomotives. I can survey rail lines for you. But none of us know jack about drilling an oil well. And you’re probably going to need to drill a bunch of them. We’ll ask our families if they know anything about it, but I doubt they do. Failing that, we can probably get a geology cheat sheet to at least give you guys a notion of what to look for.”

Count Nadasdy nodded almost as if he had expected the answer. “Please send your letters to get the. . geology cheat sheet, was it? In the meantime, it has been proposed that a wooden rail railroad could be built between here and Teschen. Would that be a good idea?”

“Yep. Prince Karl mentioned something about that before we left. Well, more than mentioned. He sent along a bunch of maps. So he got permission, did he? But I don’t remember anything about Teschen. Where is Teschen?”

“It’s in Silesia on the Oder River. The Poles call it Cieszyn. The notion, as it has been proposed, was to form a rail link between the Danube and the Oder and hence between the Baltic and the Black Sea.”

“Yep. That’s the place. I think he called it Cieszyn. Prague would be closer, though,” Sonny said. Not that he really expected Nadasdy to support a railroad from Emperor Ferdinand’s capital to King Al’s. But just to get the reaction.

Count Nadasdy looked like he had just gotten a good whiff of skunk. “Perhaps at some time in the future. For the moment, however, it would not be feasible.”

Sonny nodded. “But Teschen is?”

“Yes. It turns out that Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein, despite his other faults, is prepared to invest a considerable amount in its construction.”

“Well, he’d have the money for it.”

* * *

The next day, while Ron was getting ready to start the 240Z, Hayley Fortney went with her mother and little brother to the University of Vienna. They were looking for a tutor, mostly for Brandon, but partly for Hayley. It was a warm summer day with white puffy clouds dotting a blue sky and none of it made any impression on Hayley. She still wasn’t happy about ending up in Vienna. She had friends in Grantville and work that interested her. She was the closest thing to a real techie that the Barbies had. She was a steam head and was becoming a tube geek. In Grantville, the new down-time in Grantville, that was perfectly acceptable for a young lady.

In Vienna. . She had a dark suspicion that wouldn’t be true. The fact that the city had the oldest university in the German-speaking world, established in 1365, didn’t impress her at all. There was no engineering school anywhere in Vienna, including at the university. The closest thing to it was the college of natural philosophy at the University of Vienna.

She was going to miss her last year at Grantville High and have to make do with correspondence courses and a down-time tutor. It was worse for Brandon. He was doomed to the tutor and correspondence courses for as long as their parents decided to stay here.

Hayley’s mother was interviewing tutors. Her mother, not her, in spite of the fact that Hayley was paying, because Hayley was more than a little tired of being the rich up-timer member of the Barbie Consortium. She was ready to be a teenager again. Sure, the teenage daughter of wealthy parents, but not the wheeler-dealer that she had been seen as in Grantville. At the same time, she was finding authority a hard habit to break. She kept wanting to interrupt her mother.

She was following along, listening to her mom talk about the history and beauty of Vienna when Ron Sanderlin started the 240Z. There were three young men and a gaggle of little boys hanging around the track. And Hayley couldn’t help but overhear what they were saying.

“It’s evil spirits that are making the noise.”

“Nay. It’s the herd of horses is doing it.”

“Horses? It can’t be. You can’t see no horses.”

“They have a whole bunch of them, though. Hidden under a magical hood. Makes them invisible, it does.”

“So it’s evil spirits, after all. But they use them to hide the horses.”

Hayley didn’t know what to say. Vienna was supposed to be civilized, at least by down-time standards. People ought to know better than that. It made her wish she had convinced her parents she should stay in Grantville like Nat. It made her want to correct the boys, explain that horsepower was just a measurement. That there was no magic involved.

Then she heard the giggle. Then all the boys were laughing and Hayley felt like an idiot when she noticed the smaller boys, maybe Brandon’s age. It wasn’t down-timer ignorance but down-timers playing at ignorance in order to entertain little boys. Hayley hadn’t been in Vienna long enough to recognize that the three young men she saw were all wearing the seventeenth-century Vienna equivalent of “college casual.” As it turned out, there were three students from the college of natural philosophy, teasing younger brothers and cousins, while watching the car being put through its paces.

University of Vienna

At the university, Hayley and her mother met with Professor Lorenz, who became very cooperative as soon as he saw the letter from Emperor Ferdinand. Not surprising. He was the king, after all.

Not that Professor Lorenz was particularly uncooperative before that. It was just that before the note he was more interested in picking their brains than helping them find a tutor. The little note from Emperor Ferdinand had given them a good example of their status, both good and bad. Emperor Ferdinand had talked past them the way a German noble would talk past a merchant or a servant. It wasn’t, Hayley thought, intentional cruelty or arrogance. Emperor Ferdinand had simply never learned to talk to people of their rank as people. He asked questions of the air and was interested in the cars and how they worked, and clearly intended that his auto mechanics would have everything they needed to do their jobs well and be happy in their work. But it was almost as though they were extra equipment, accessories to the cars. When Hayley’s father had pointed out that he was going to need a tutor for his daughter and son to continue their education, the king simply had one of the clerks that followed him around make a note of it, as though it were five thousand pounds of gravel for the track or ventilation ducts for the shop. That was the bad, and in all honesty, Hayley wasn’t at all sure how much of that was simply because he was new at the job of king. The good was that by that afternoon they had a note over his seal, instructing the university to see to their needs, i.e. give them whatever they wanted. Emperor Ferdinand wasn’t uncaring, just busy and dealing with the changes since his father’s death.

“Hm,” Dr. Lorenz mused, “Professor Himmler is available but unlikely to be willing to instruct young ladies. Besides he is convinced that Copernicus was a dangerous radical.”

“I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon when I was a child and we’ve all seen the images from probes to the outer planets and, of course, the Hubble space telescope,” Dana Fortney said. “Might he be persuaded by eyewitness accounts?”

“Not even if he was the eyewitness.” Dr. Lorenz smiled. “He’s not stupid, you understand. Just incredibly stubborn. He would find a way to explain it all away. Aristotle said there were crystal spheres, so there are crystal spheres.” Dr. Lorenz looked at Hayley and Brandon. “But if what you’re after is a stern disciplinarian, he might just be prevailed upon.”

Brandon started to speak, but Hayley stepped on his foot. Let Mom handle it was the clear message.

“Tempting as that thought sometimes is,” Dana said with a grin at her kids, “I think we would all be happier with someone more open to new concepts. After all, Brandon and Hayley will both be working from correspondence courses from Grantville.” Dana Fortney left unsaid the fact that much of what the tutor would be expected to teach was going to be concepts utterly new to the seventeenth century, so he was likely as not going to be struggling along only a day or so ahead of his students.

“In that case, I think your best option would be a recent doctor of natural philosophy. He is quite good with boys and interested in the knowledge brought by the Ring of Fire.” Dr. Lorenz hesitated a moment, looking at Hayley. “He is rather young, only twenty-four. He was going to have to leave Vienna to look for work, which would have been a shame because he is working on several experiments with magnets and coils of copper wire. Continuing those experiments would have been more difficult without the facilities of the university.”

For the first time since they’d been introduced, Hayley spoke up. “Are a lot of people leaving Vienna to look for work?”

“Those who can,” Dr. Lorenz said. “Those who have someplace to go.”

Village of Simmering, Austria

Count Amadeus von Eisenberg, Baron Julian von Meklau and several of their friends rode up to the village two days after the cars had made their procession through Vienna. They found a muddy field and a barn that had been roughly converted into housing for the emperor’s car. There was a canvas tent tied to the side of the converted barn that presumably held the other up-time vehicles, the ones owned by the mechanics.

“Show us the 240,” Julian commanded.

“Can’t do it, boys,” said one of the mechanics.

“What? I am Baron Julian von Meklau.”

“Howdy.” The first word was new to Julian, who had some English, but not a great deal. Then the man continued in badly accented German. “I’m Bob Sanderlin. And the 240Z belongs to Emperor Ferdinand III, so you need his permission to drive it, or fiddle with it or even look at it. Shouldn’t be a problem, though. All you gotta do is go back to Vienna and tell the emperor to let you see it, just the way you told me. I’m sure he’ll be in a right hurry to do what you tell him to, you being a baron and all.”

Julian was suddenly quite uncomfortable. He couldn’t back down in front of his friends. At the same time, if he whipped the dog the way he deserved, Julian would certainly incur the emperor’s displeasure.

“Julian,” said Amadeus von Eisenberg, “leave off.”

Julian looked over at Amadeus, but the count wasn’t looking at him or Ron Sanderlin. Instead he was looking at a small window in the barn and at the gun barrel that protruded from it. It was an interesting gun barrel, very well made and colored a sort of dark blue gray. It was a small bore, which was easy to tell because it was pointed right at him.

Vienna, Austria

“They pointed a gun at Julian, Father,” Amadeus von Eisenberg said.

“I don’t need this, Amadeus,” Peter von Eisenberg said. “Karl Eusebius wants to put a railroad up to Teschen. And Sonny Fortney is a qualified surveyor. You and that drunken rabble you run with getting yourselves shot by the emperor’s pet up-timers is not going to make things easier. I will discuss it with the emperor, but in the meantime you and your friends stay away from the up-timers. I don’t need you in drunken brawls with peasants. Especially useful peasants. Leave them to the local peasants.”

“Yes, Father,” Amadeus said resentfully. He wasn’t happy about it but he would do it.

Village of Simmering, Austria

Hertel Faust, the new tutor, smiled as he looked at the carefully preserved insects in the four glass cases. “These are marvelous. You have examples from up-time America?”

“Uh huh,” Brandon agreed. “That’s this one and that one.” He pointed at two of the cases. “The others are from down-time Germany. Well, around the Ring of Fire anyway. Some of ’em are American insects that I caught after the Ring of Fire but-” he pointed “-that one and that one are maybe crosses between up-time and down-time insects.”

“That would seem unlikely on the face of it,” Dr. Faust said cautiously. “On the other hand, I have never seen ones quite like these.”

Hayley kept her peace. Herr Doctor Hertel Faust was a reasonably handsome young man, well-read and open-minded. If he had the normal male interest in icky, squishy bugs, well, it was unlikely that they were going to find a tutor that didn’t.

After he and Brandon finished ooh-ing and aah-ing over the skeletons of dead bugs, Hayley managed to get Faust back onto something interesting. She showed him an electromagnet and demonstrated the effect of moving a permanent magnet across it.

Dr. Faust looked at the needle on the voltmeter moving and asked, “Please explain to me again why moving a magnet across a coiled wire produces electricity and moving it across a straight wire doesn’t. Does the curve cause the effect?”

“A straight wire does produce electricity when a magnet is moved across it. But it’s just one wire. A coil has lots of strands of wire being affected. You coil them to make the magnetic field produce more electricity.”

“Why not use one big wire? They carry more current, don’t they?”

Hayley wasn’t sure how to explain. “Yes, but the movement of the magnetic field would only produce a little energy no matter how big the wire is. With the coil the magnetic field is acting on lots of separate wires.”

“Then what would happen if you had hundreds of parallel wires, rather than hundreds of coils?”

Hayley started to say something but was stopped by the fact that she didn’t have a clue what would happen. “I don’t know. Maybe you’d get lots of very weak currents of electricity?”

“Perhaps. But assume that all the wires split off from one wire on one side of the magnet’s path and recombined on the other?”

“I don’t know. .?”

“Sounds like a neat experiment, though,” Brandon said.

Dr. Faust was going to fit in just fine, Hayley thought.

* * *

Hertel Faust gave a little half bow to one of the gawkers they passed and Hayley wondered why. She didn’t interrupt, though. She, Brandon, and Dr. Faust continued their walk, identifying tree and birds. Once they were out of earshot of the person Dr. Faust had bowed to she asked, “Who was that you bowed to back there?”

“Herr Weber, you mean? He is of the They of Vienna.”

“What’s that?” Brendan asked. He had clearly heard the emphasis as well as Hayley had.

“The they or the them of Vienna are. .” He paused searching for a word. “Elite. Yes, I think that is the word. The elite of Vienna. Not exactly the nobility, more the patrician class of Vienna. It is important that you know the social rules. The They of Vienna run the city. They hold the important posts and are the most important of the merchants and master craftsmen in the city They are often titled in some way, but not always. Herr Weber, for instance, is simply a very wealthy merchant, but he and members of his family have been involved in the politics of Vienna for the last half century at least. He has influence over which laws and regulations are passed and what exceptions are available.”

“So why the bow?” Hayley asked.

“A lack of respect might cause you trouble.”

“They better not try,” Brandon said belligerently. And Hayley felt tempted to agree with him. But Dr. Faust was shaking his head. “It could cause your parents trouble to show them a lack of respect. It’s better to give them the bow and avoid the trouble.”

* * *

Bernhard Moser was one of the better qualified applicants to the race track work force. He was a journeyman blacksmith who had been let go when his master had gotten a steam hammer. The master had three journeymen working for him, including his two sons. So Bernhard was the one who got cut when the steam hammer had arranged for them to need one less worker. He was a friendly sort and had the solid muscles expected of a blacksmith. Better yet, he was at least a little familiar with steam hammers. Ron Sanderlin hired him on the spot to work in the shop. Bernhard started out on Fresno scrapers.

Vienna, Austria

“So far, sir,” Bernhard told his contact, “it’s just what you would expect. They are making Fresno scrapers, picks, shovels, all the sorts of things that you would expect to build a road. The up-timers themselves seem friendly and down-to-earth, but they have a truly horrible accent.” Bernhard shook his head. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.

“This is not about the up-timers themselves, but one thing. The housekeeper that the Fortneys hired is Annemarie Eberle, and I am fairly sure she works for Janos Drugeth.”

“Did she recognize you?”

“I don’t think so. It wasn’t that we had ever worked together, but someone pointed her out to me once when she was acting as an under maid in the palace.”

The contact nodded. “Come and see me once a week for now

If anything urgent comes up, you know the signals.”

“Yes, sir.”

Race Track at Simmering, Austria

The unemployment situation in Vienna became increasingly clear over the next few day, demonstrated not by numbers reported on TV, since they didn’t get any TV in Austria, but by the numbers of people showing up looking for work on the new race track. Ron Sanderlin couldn’t hire them all; he couldn’t even hire an appreciable fraction of them. At the same time, he hated turning away hungry people.

“Sonny, can you hire some of these guys to do something, anything?” Ron asked their third day in Simmering.

“What? Why me?”

“Well, you know.” Ron shrugged. He didn’t want to come right out and say can you get your teenage daughter to hire a bunch of these people? The up-timers had only been dealing with newly rich relatives since the Ring of Fire and asking those newly rich relatives for money was handled in different ways by different people. Everything from the assumption that what they had was yours to I’ll starve before I drag them down with me. It became especially difficult if those newly rich relatives were sons and daughters, because of the embarrassment factor. “Why am I still a working stiff when little Billy-or, in this case, little Hayley-has managed to turn herself into a millionaire?”

The elder Fortneys took a notfanatical hands-off approach. They didn’t ask Hayley for money or stock tips but if she volunteered they would mostly let her help if it wasn’t going to endanger her future prospects. Ron knew, for instance, that Hayley had offered to pay for the tutor. Which Sonny and Dana had agreed to, but the maid was paid by Dana.

“I know how you feel, Ron, but. .”

Just then another person showed up. He wasn’t a prepossessing fellow. He was balding, with bad teeth and a wart over his right eye. But it was also clear that he was desperate for work.

Ron looked at Sonny then back at the man. “Check back in a couple of days. I can’t promise anything, but maybe we’ll have something.”

After the guy had left, Ron just looked at Sonny.

“I’ll talk to Dana. That’s the best I can do,” Sonny said.

Fortney House, Simmering, Austria

Sonny talked to Dana and Dana talked to Hayley.

“The thing is, Mom, I’m not really all that good at business.” Hayley looked around the sitting room in their new home as though she could find the explanation in the whitewashed walls. “That’s mostly Susan, Millicent and Vicky. I’m the tech geek. In most of the businesses we’ve taken over, it wasn’t that the tech didn’t work. It was that the business didn’t work.”

“I understand, Hayley, and neither your father nor I want you to endanger your future over this. It’s just really hard to say no to hungry people looking for work.”

“I’m not saying no. At least not yet. Let me think about it. Okay?” Hayley looked around the sitting room again. There were windows with glass in the standard down-time diamond pattern, a big fireplace with no fire at the moment. A polished wood floor with a rug. It was a nice room in a nice country house, that was easily three times the size of their place back in Grantville. No indoor plumbing. Instead they had people lining up to empty their chamber pots. No microwave, electric toaster or natural gas oven. In this day and age, cooks worked from before dawn to after nightfall to make bread and stew. It was, to Hayley, as if the Ring of Fire had just happened.

* * *

“Dr. Faust?” Hayley knocked on the third door of the third floor room.

“Just a moment.”

Hayley waited as Dr. Faust got himself together. Then he opened the door to a room that was a bit bigger than a closet but not much. There was a bed about the size of a camp cot, but probably not as comfortable and a stack of books on the floor.

“What can I do for you, Miss Hayley?”

“Do you know anything about business law as it is practiced in Austria?”

“No, I’m sorry. I studied natural philosophy and for a while medicine, but the law never held any interest for me. Why?”

“Well, do you know anyone who does?” Hayley asked.

Dr. Faust looked at her a moment. “Jakusch Pfeifer was studying law to work with his family in shipping, but they lost several craft, ah, upriver. They had to stop going that far and he’s short of tuition money. But again, why?”

“Just a plan Mom and Dad are thinking about.”

* * *

As it happened, Dana Fortney was the keeper of the family accounts, as was Gayleen Sanderlin for the Sanderlin family. Between them they had a pretty complete listing of what the families had brought to Vienna. It was quite a lot. It included a Higgins Sewing Machine, a typewriter-also down-time made-an adding machine, but not, unfortunately, a computer. The Sanderlins had had a computer, but they sold it to the Higgins Hotel when they moved to Vienna. They had Brandon’s rabbits, his roosters and hens and thirty-eight chicks that were starting to turn into cockerels and pullets, and a RosinFoam incubator ready for the next batch. There was a lot more stuff on the list.

“I can’t run the business on my own, Mom,” Hayley said. “If you and Dad want me to hire people, you and Mrs. Sanderlin get to keep the books. And keeping those books is liable to end up as a full-time job for the both of you. We’re going to need extra household servants, because between the lack of things like vacuum cleaners. .”

“We knew we were going to need servants when we came, Hayley,” Dana said. “We already have two maids and a cook. Not to mention Dr. Faust and-”

“But not how many, Mom,” Hayley said. “We’re not going to have a couple of maids to help out; we’re going to have staff. A cook and probably two undercooks, four or five maids and an overmaid to run them. Also a couple of groundskeepers. And the Sanderlins are going to need the same because you and Mrs. Sanderlin won’t have time for housework, not even for much in the way of supervising. Neither I or Brandon is going to have time for chores, because Brandon-the little creep-is going to be managing the groundskeepers. Teaching them about those silly rabbits and chickens of his and modern corn, tomatoes, watermelons and stuff. And I’m going to be looking for stuff to build using what we have. Not to mention instructing master craftsmen in the crafts they have spent the last forty years learning. Between that and our school work, we won’t have time to turn around.”

“Do we really need all that?” Gayleen Sanderlin asked.

“No, of course not, Mrs. Sanderlin. But the people out there waiting around hoping to be hired. . they need it. If we are going to do more than set up a soup kitchen for the poor of Vienna, we need to get things organized so that the business pays for itself after the initial investment. Even if we were just setting up a soup kitchen, we would need staff to run it and it would take up a fair amount of time.”

“Why not hire people to manage the business instead of to do the cooking?” Hayley’s mom asked. “I’d rather cook than do accounts.”

“Because we don’t know them, Mom. Sure, I figure most people are basically honest, but if they start looking at us as rich idiots with more money than sense, at least some of them are going to decide that it’s not really wrong to rip us off.”

At that point both women nodded. A lot of up-timers, including the Sanderlins, had gotten suckered in the first few months after the Ring of Fire. Often by people who wouldn’t even think of such a thing when dealing with a fellow down-timer. Up-timers were often seen as rich sheep to be sheared, who had arrived with too much wealth and too little sense, easy marks that deserved to be taken, because of their naivety, wealth and arrogance.

Hayley continued, “We have to be seen to know what we’re doing.”

“So you’ll be in charge of the business?” Mrs. Sanderlin asked.

“No. I’ll put up the money, or most of it, and I’ll advise about which products are buildable. If you guys want to do this, it’s going to have to be you, Dad and Mr. Sanderlin, maybe both Mr. Sanderlins. . but with them busy working on the emperor’s projects, you two will be the ones actually running the business. I shouldn’t be in charge for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s going to be really hard for them to take me seriously as the boss. The other is. . well, you’ve had people coming to you for two weeks looking for work. I’ve had it for two years. Since Karl and Ramona’s wedding. ‘Invest in this give me a loan for that.’ It was bad enough just being part of the Barbies. I don’t want it to be all on me.

“And that’s another thing. . we want to keep the business under the radar as much as we can. Because if you think people looking for work is bad, wait till you get hit by people looking for investors. You don’t want to turn them down because it’s their dream you’re killing. But suppose it’s a really crappy idea? Or it’s a good idea, but they aren’t the people to run it? Another reason to keep quiet is because even if it’s not a zero sum game, there are winners and losers. Just the fact that some people get jobs from us is going to pis. . ah, upset people, the people who wanted to hire them for starvation wages. And if the business gets too big, they will try to shut us down. We don’t have Mike Stearns and the army to protect us this time. All we’ve got is Emperor Ferdinand’s interest in cars. If we get to be too much trouble, he’ll stick the cars in the garage and send us packing or lock us in a dungeon somewhere.”

“I’m starting to think maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Dana said.

“It’s not, Mom. But you and Dad are right about one thing. Creating jobs for people is the right thing to do, even if it’s not the smart thing. If we’re careful, we can help a lot of people before they shut the business down. If we’re careful enough, they might not shut it down.”

Fortney House, Simmering, Austria

Annemarie Eberle showed Herr Pfeifer into the sitting room and then went out to fetch coffee.

Jakusch Pfeifer smiled at the three women. Two were older than he was and the third was younger. He wondered why she was here but didn’t let it show on his face.

“Have a seat, Herr Pfeifer,” said one of the older women. “I’m Gayleen Sanderlin. This is Dana Fortney and her daughter, Hayley.”

Once Jakusch was seated, it was Dana Fortney who got down to business. “What can you tell us about business law and the management of trade in Vienna?”

“Not as much as I would like, if you’re talking about the guild restrictions on manufacturing in Vienna itself. On the other hand, you aren’t in Vienna. You are three miles outside it, and I am familiar with the laws governing trade into and out of the city. Vienna’s rules don’t apply here.”

“Yes. .” Hayley paused a moment. “I guess it’s a pretty long walk from Vienna to the race track.”

“It’s not so bad,” Herr Pfeifer said. “Only four miles and I caught a ride with Cousin Paul. The race track is only a mile or so from the Danube. Though, it is a bit muddy right at the shore.”

The maid laid down the coffee service and Mrs. Sanderlin thanked her.

Dana Fortney smiled. “You know all those stories grandparents tell, Hayley? The ones about walking two miles in the snow to get to school.”

“Yes,” Hayley muttered, not really paying attention, “uphill in both directions.”

“I’m starting to think that at some point, maybe in my grandparent’s day, there was some truth to them.”

“Um.” Hayley still wasn’t paying that much attention, Herr Pfeifer noticed. He looked at Frau Fortney, then at Hayley. Frau Fortney grinned a bit and touched a finger to her lips. Hayley was oblivious to it all.

“The workers, to come from Vienna to the track each day and go back each night, have to walk four miles, sometimes more. It’s shorter from the banks of the Danube and if we were to use the Fresno scrapers to dig a canal and put in a dock next to the track, it would change a two-hour walk each way to a comfortable half-hour boat ride. That would be worth paying for.”

“It would also make it easy for people to come see the cars race around the track,” Dana agreed. “Maybe it’s something that Ron ought to talk to Emperor Ferdinand about.”

“Yes,” Hayley said. “As soon as he can get an appointment.”

“It’s too expensive,” Herr Pfeifer said. “How many people working on the track can afford even a pfennig a day for just a ride to work, much less two?”

“More than you might think, but we’ll give them a bargain anyway,” Hayley said. “Sell boat passes that are good for a month for twenty-five pfennig each, or even twenty.”

“Or you could do it like some of the bus companies did up-time,” Frau Fortney said. “Sell tickets and give your boatman a paper punch. The ticket has however many circles or boxes printed on it. Each time they ride, the captain or someone punches out a circle or box on the pass. When they’re all used up, they have to buy a new ticket.”

Herr Pfeifer wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but decided to let it ride for now. “However they pay, it costs money to run a barge on the river.”

“Sure, but not that much,” said the young girl. “Put in seats and maybe an awning to keep people dry when it rains. There are around a hundred people who come out here every day, working on the track. Fifty people per trip and four trips a day-two here, two back. That’s two hundred tickets at a half pfennig per head. . a hundred pfennig a day, every day. A bit over a reichsthaler every three days, gross. Your boatman will get a couple of groschen a day and there will be docking fees. . but even with the cost of the boat and steam engine amortized in, you should make a decent regular profit. Not a great big profit, but a steady one.” Two groschen a day was fair pay for a worker. It was what the day laborers at the race track were getting. But the surprising thing for Hayley-all of the girls, for that matter-was what a groschen would buy. There were twelve pfennig to a groschen. In Grantville or Magdeburg a pfennig was about equal to a quarter, but you could buy a small loaf of bread, about half a pound, for a pfennig in Vienna. Gayleen Sanderlin had said several times that it was like the prices in Mexico, back up-time.

* * *

By the end of their conversation, several things had happened. One was that Jakusch Pfeifer got his name shortened to Jack. He also figured out that Hayley Fortney was actually running things, not Frau Fortney acting for her husband. Perhaps more importantly, he was smart enough to guess some of the reasons for the subterfuge and to keep the secret. Jack became the lawyer for the Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company and Jack’s family got in on the ground floor of the Vienna ferry business.

* * *

Annemarie reported two days later, when she had her contact, that the Sanderlins were going to try to build a canal to the race track. She didn’t report that it was the women arranging it. She just assumed that they were acting on instructions from their husbands.

It took Bernhard Moser an extra couple of days to report the development. Not because of any incompetence on his part, but simply because he was working out at the shop and it had taken a couple of days for the news to come up in conversation.

Vienna, Austria

“They seem harmless enough,” Bernhard told his contact. “Even the canal they want to build seems to mostly be about giving people work.”

“And who’s going to pay for the work?” his contact asked. “That money’s got to come from somewhere and I don’t see where.”

“Neither do I,” Bernhard acknowledged. “Then again, I’m not an up-timer.”

It wasn’t a really satisfying meeting. Not because Bernhard had been unable to get the information. About the only thing he had missed was that Hayley Fortney was the one in charge. He’d even figured out that it was the women running things. Mostly that was by the process of elimination, because he couldn’t see Ron Sanderlin-or either of the other two men-running a business. But Hayley Fortney was just a teenaged girl. The idea that such a person could be able, much less trusted, to manage large sums of money and major projects was so ridiculous that it never even occurred to him. As well to think it was all being run by Brandon’s chickens.

Magdeburg, United States of Europe

Francisco Nasi brought up the next report. He’d already read it, of course, so all he needed to do was give the contents a quick scan to refresh his memory.

“This is from our correspondent in Austria.”

Mike Stearns got a crooked little smile on his face. “‘Correspondent.’ Sounds so much nicer than ‘spy.’ I assume we’re talking about Sonny Fortney, right? Or is that ‘need to know’ and I don’t?”

Nasi pursed his lips. “Interesting protocol issue, actually. Since you’re the head of government, I suppose you technically need to know everything. In any event, you’re my employer, so if you tell me you need to know I’ll take your word for it.”

Mike shook his head. “I’m not sure how that worked back up-time. At a guess, judging from the screw-ups, the CIA and the other spook outfits didn’t tell the U.S. president more than half of what they should have. In our case. .”

He pondered the problem, for a moment. “I’ll take your word for it, whether I need to know something or not. Just make sure you let me know there’s something I might or might not need to know in the first place. If the grammar of that sentence doesn’t have you writhing in agony.”

Nasi smiled. “In this case, as it happens, Sonny really is more in the way of a correspondent than a spy. He does report to me-as I’m sure the Austrians have already figured out-but I don’t have him creeping around listening at keyholes or peeping into windows.”

“For that, I assume you have other people. Call them ‘real spies.’”

“I don’t believe you need to know that, Prime Minister.”

“Spoilsport. So what’s happening in Austria?”

“To summarize. . The Austrians are adjusting to the American presence. More slowly and with greater difficulty than they should, of course, but they’re doing better than I expected.”

He set down the report. “But it’s very early days-and now we have a new emperor. Ferdinand III will be one mainly setting the tone and the pace.”