1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 23

July 1635

Liechtenstein House, Vienna

“Her Majesty is on board for the feminine hygiene.” Judy grinned. “She wants a copy of that paper you wrote up, Gabrielle.”

They were in the Liechtenstein townhouse. Sarah watched her sister and the rest of the Barbies plot the overthrow of Austria-Hungary with a sort of bemused enjoyment. Gundaker hadn’t gone out of his way to make her welcome, and even Maximillian was pretty distant. She looked over at her new maid and saw that Anna was trying to follow the girls’ Amideutch.

“Good,” tiny, curly haired Millicent said, making a note. Then she turned back to the conversation that had been going on.

“There are coal and iron deposits, some of them along the Danube, especially in Hungary. Austria-Hungary has resources,” Hayley said.

“So what do they need here aside from a good dose of morals?” Vicky asked. “What will they buy?”

“Living space,” Hayley said. “Susan’s right. Vienna’s crowded, even by down-time standards. There are laws preventing anyone from living in the free-fire zone just outside the walls. That’s part of why the race track is so far out.”

“But there are people living in shacks up against the walls,” Judy said. “I saw them.”

“Sure. Mostly they are soldiers, but a lot are just poor people. They aren’t supposed to be there, but the people in the shacks don’t have anyplace else to live and unless Ferdinand III wants to order his troops to burn out their own wives and children, there isn’t much they can do. Not that some people, including your soon-to-be Uncle Gundaker, aren’t pushing for that,” Hayley explained.

“Anyway, about the only people with the money to buy anything are the very wealthy. Austria is in the midst of a depression. People are hungry and no one can pay them. The cost of bread has gone down in the last two years but there isn’t any money to speak of and what there is, isn’t worth crap. People are still going hungry and we are buying flour on credit and selling bread on credit and I’m not sure how much longer I can keep it up.”

“Yeah. We talked about that already,” Gabrielle said.

“But what do we do about it?” Hayley asked.

“What about meat and wine?” Sarah asked. “The price of bread has been trending down even in the USE. More people can afford to eat, but many of them can afford to eat better, too. More vegetables, even more meat and eggs in their diet, less bread and porridge. That means the net market for bread has decreased, even as the new farming methods are pushing down grain prices. The price of bread goes down as it’s marketed toward people who would have been living on the edge of starvation a couple of years ago. So beef and pork are almost twice as much as they were in 1631, but bread has dropped by an average of fifty cents a one pound loaf. That’s an average over the whole USE and it’s a wild-ass guess, because we just don’t have data for a lot of the USE.”

“It’s not like that here.” Hayley bit her lower lip. “At least I don’t think it’s the same. Since we moved here the prices of bread, wine, peas, and a lot of the other daily needs have gone down a lot. Beef is about the same, pork is a little less, lamb is a bit more. But what’s really gone down are wages. We have people who have lost their place in the farms and villages in the area, and other towns all over Austria-Hungary are facing the same problem.”

“No, the wages are trending up over most of the USE.”

“Meanwhile, it seems all the money in Austria-Hungary is going to buy products from the USE,” Hayley said.

“It’s not just the money Grantville is sucking out of the economy,” Sarah said. “It’s the plows. Didn’t Judy ever tell you my dad’s story of the Fed Fairies?”

“Sarah!” Judy whined, sounding like a twelve-year-old. “Can you imagine Coleman Walker in a tutu with a magic wand? Yuk!”

Which produced general laughter and a lightening of the mood.

“What about the plows?” Hayley asked.

“Not just the plows, but they make a good example,” Sarah continued. “A farmer can plow more fields in the same amount of time. It’s easier to arrange his furrows to minimize run off. The crops come in fuller and the next year he plows fifteen acres rather than ten and adds a bit of fertilizer. Now that farmer is producing twice as much grain as he was two years ago, but the amount of money available to pay for the grain is just the same, or even less, than it was two years ago.

“Since the price of grain has dropped, the farmer down the way who was a bit slow to take up the new ways or just had a bad year can’t make the rent. His family gets thrown off the land and they come into town looking for work. But there is no work. The carpenter has a drill press that he got from the USE and not only isn’t hiring, he’s laid off a couple of journeymen who are also out looking for work. Meanwhile, the money that might have been spent on the price of wheat went to the USE and there is even less available to pay anyone for anything. Causing unemployment and the lower wages you talked about. Unemployment must be even worse than we thought back in Magdeburg.”

“It is,” Hayley said. “We’ve been hiring people just because we couldn’t stand seeing them out of work. In fact, that was the whole basis for SFIC.”

“That won’t work on a large scale.” Sarah shook her head sadly. “We don’t have enough money. Not all of us put together.”

“Then we get the money. Get others to put it up,” Judy said. “We need a project. . something impressive. Then we get investors.”

They tried to talk her out of it. Susan for business reasons, Sarah for economic reasons, Hayley for political reasons, Gabrielle because it looked like a lot of distraction from getting a better understanding of down-time medical science. But Judy had an impulse of iron. It was an impulse to do good, but it wasn’t a real plan.

“How do you form a corporation in Austria-Hungary?” Susan asked.

“They have a lot of laws, but not all that much in the way of corporate law. Moses Abrabanel has been pushing for limited liability laws, but with very little success. I have a lawyer who is familiar with the state of corporate law.”

“Good.” Judy commanded, “Susan, you and I will go talk to Hayley’s lawyer and set up a stock corporation agreement with the best protection we can get for potential investors. Then we need a project, something to excite people, get them interested and involved.”

“Well, like Hayley said, they need living space,” Trudi said. “How about a tram like they have in Grantville to make the land outside the walls more accessible?”

“I’ve been testing the waters about that. There’s not much interest and considerable opposition,” Hayley said.

“Why opposition?” Sarah asked.

“They don’t want to make it easier for the hoi polloi to get to town,” Hayley said. “It’s the whole peasant villager versus citizen thing. And the ferry boat to Race Track City hasn’t helped, either.”

“That’s stupid!”

“Stupid or not, it’s real,” Hayley said. “I don’t see them getting excited about a few miles of track till they see it in operation, and maybe not then. I do see the city council stopping the trams at the city gates and searching the passengers to make sure that they aren’t smuggling in bread or beer to sell in competition with the city bakers. They’ve occasionally done that to the ferry boat.”

“A building then, like the Higgins or some of them going up in Magdeburg,” Trudi said. “Only bigger. A combination hotel and office building. Prince Karl is getting to be a pretty good architect, isn’t he?” She looked at Sarah.

“Oh my God!” Sarah complained. “Don’t get Karl involved in this.”

“Yes!” Judy said. “Karl is crazy for architecture! And he’s actually good at it, too.”

* * *

Two days later, at the meeting with Hayley’s lawyer, Jack Pfiefer, it was pointed out that there was no law against selling stock in a corporation registered in the USE in Austria-Hungary. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the girls owned all or part of several. In fact, they had American Equipment Corporation. . just sitting there. With Prince Karl already owning several million dollars worth of preferred shares.

“We better talk to Ken Doll,” Judy said.

“Ken Doll?” Jack asked.

“Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein,” Judy said in her snootiest voice. “Otherwise known as the Ken Doll of the Barbie Consortium.”

“Oh,” Jack said, sounding confused.

Trudi, who was with them, giggled. “By majority vote of shareholders, AEC can issue as much preferred stock as it chooses to. That’s in the charter, right?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “What about it?”

“Susan, what exactly is the difference between a preferred stock certificate and a dollar bill?”

Susan started to answer, then stopped. She didn’t have a clue what the difference between a dollar bill and a preferred stock certificate was. Neither did anyone else in the room. They were all quite sure there was a difference, but when they actually thought about it, they couldn’t think what it was.

This was a job for Sarah.

* * *

“That’s a good question, Trudi,” Sarah said, pleased. “There are a couple of differences. I guess the first is that money is issued by governments. There have been exceptions to that, company scrip that’s only good in company stores, but the results are usually bad. I’d say universally bad, but I can’t prove it. It ties people into a single supplier, the company that issued the script because who else would take it? Money issued by governments is-or at least can be made-legal tender for all debts public and private, so if you have a debt measured in that money, they have to take it. The second difference is that preferred stock is an investment that is generally expected to pay dividends. Interest of some sort anyway. After all, why would someone loan you money if they weren’t getting interest?”

“Like the AEC preferred that the Ken Doll has,” Susan said “He’s made a bundle on that.”

Which was true enough, Sarah had to admit. “That’s participating preferred. If you guys do well, he gets extra dividends, but if you don’t, he just gets more paper. You’ve been lucky so far.”

“Don’t confuse skill with luck, Sarah,” Vicky said. “Sure, we were lucky at first, but we’ve gotten good at it.”

Trudi interrupted before the conversation got totally derailed. “Why do people loan governments money for no interest? That’s what money is, a loan. You’ve said that lots of times.”

“Another good question,” Sarah said. “Because money benefits everyone. . well, everyone who has it. It is a transferable debt on the government, true enough. But the key there is it’s transferable, which lets it act as a medium of exchange. A dollar in your pocket is a dollar in your pocket, whether you got it from the government or from the local bookie.”

“So if we issued preferred stock in AEC, it would work like money.”

“No,” Sarah said. “People wouldn’t accept it. Not if they had any choice in the matter. You wouldn’t know about company scrip, at least not the term. But when a company out in the boonies paid its employees in company scrip, it was because that was the only job available and it locked them into using the company store where prices were jacked up. It was a way of keeping people locked in perpetual debt. It didn’t work in cities where people had other options.”

“It’s not so different from a village shop that gives credit,” Trudi said. “It’s not like you can take your credit to another shop. Shopkeepers often act as local banks, loaning people money that goes on their account and is paid when the harvest comes in.”

“Sort of,” Sarah acknowledged. “But the loan is going the other way. It’s the shopkeeper giving the loan, not the company getting it. It’s always easier to get people to accept a loan than to give one.”

“Not always,” Trudi said. “Often enough the shopkeeper will pay people in credit at the shop. Sometimes my father paid people in credit in local shops. My father wasn’t a cheat, but after Kipper and Wipper, we didn’t have the cash. Almost no one did and the shopkeepers knew we were good for it.”

“Didn’t the banks issue money way back when?” Vicky asked. “Back in colonial days?”

“I knew someone would bring that up,” Sarah muttered, feeling cross. “Yes, and that’s more like what the local shopkeepers Trudi was talking about were doing. Acting as local banks with their own money, just without the cash. Just the accounts on their books. People will always find a way around the lack of money. The trouble is they generally don’t work that well. And usually the problem is that the pseudo money ties people down in some way. Bank money worked fine locally, as long as the bank was solid, but the money lost value as you got farther from the bank.”

“Heck, Sarah,” Judy said, “American dollars lost value once you got out of the area right around the Ring of Fire. At first, anyway. USE dollars lose value outside the USE and in some places inside it.” Judy grinned. “I learned as little as humanly possible from you, Mom and Dad arguing about economics around the dinner table, but no one could avoid learning something.”

“What are you suggesting, Trudi?” Karl asked.

“I think we should use AEC to issue preferred stock, maybe participating preferred stock, then trade that stock for the licenses we need to do a project. Maybe build a big building here in Vienna. Maybe several projects, sort of like your LIC. When it makes a profit, the profit gets shared out among all the people holding the preferred stock, then the people with common stock,” Trudi said, bouncing in her seat.

“Wait a minute!” Susan looked shocked. “A lot of our money is tied up in AEC. I don’t want it diluted to pay a bunch of people bribes just to be able to use stuff we brought back with us in the Ring of Fire.”

“We’re going to have to pay licensing fees,” Trudi said. “I just think it’s better to pay them in stock than in reichsthaler.”

“And that’s just the wrong attitude, Trudi,” Sarah said tartly. “The same attitude that Moses Abrabanel and company were talking about at the party. What if you don’t trust the stock like you trust the reichsthaler? Why should anyone else?”

Trudi flushed. “That’s not what I meant.” Then she paused, clearly trying to figure out how to express what she did mean.

Judy came to the rescue. “Sarah, you said we didn’t have enough money to do much good, not all of us put together. You also said that Austria-Hungary was broke. All Trudi is talking about is the fact that we’ll run out of reichsthaler but not stock, because we can print up as much as we need.”

“That’s almost worse. You can’t go around printing up money just because you feel like it. Or just because you need it. Mr. Walker is right about that. There has to be something to back it.”

“So we let people starve?” Karl asked.

“No, but. .” Sarah stopped and looked at her betrothed. She didn’t want Karl to see her as cold or cruel, but there were limits on what they could do. “Karl, I understand that you want to help. But if we just start printing money, no one will trust it. Or worse, they will trust it for a little while, then lose faith in it. That’s what happened in France, later in this century in our timeline. It put the introduction of paper money back a hundred years.”

“And we’ll be left with loads of AEC that we have to take at face value. I’m not going to be poor again to rescue what’s left of the Holy Roman Empire,” Susan said.

“Susan, I grew up here,” Karl said. “There are a lot of decent people in Austria-Hungary. And many of them are going to end up in something as close to serfdom as makes no difference if we don’t do something. More than a few will starve in the next few years.”

“That’s right,” Hayley said. “Good people, who just want work. I’ve met a lot of them. And we’ve barely scratched the surface out at Race Track City. There were ten people looking for work for every one that we could find a job for.”

“Fine,” Susan said. “I’m not saying I won’t help, but not with AEC. We all have too much invested in it. And by now it’s turning a really nice profit.”

“Well, AEC still owns Up-time Financial,” Karl offered. “We could use that.”

“It won’t work.” Vicky tossed her head in a gesture reminiscent of Veronica Lake. “People will have to see that we have some skin in the game or they won’t buy in.” It was clear from her posture that Vicky wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but from conversations with Judy, Sarah knew that if the others decided to do it, Vicky would go along.

“Vicky’s right,” Judy said. “The up-timer rep is not nearly as strong here as it is in the USE. And sorry, Karl, but your family’s rep sort of sucks.”

Karl grimaced. “I know. One of the sticks that Ferdinand III is using to try to get money from me is threatening to come down on the other side in the lawsuits. It’s not as big a stick as it would be without King Albrecht holding Bohemia and a lot of our family’s money quietly shifted to the USE, but it’s still a pretty good-sized stick.”

“And it gets bigger with every dime you invest in Austria-Hungary,” Sarah pointed out.

“Which makes it a pretty counterproductive stick,” Susan said. “Because it almost forces your family to move as much of your money out of Austria-Hungary as it can.”

Karl nodded. “That’s one of the reasons that money keeps flowing into the USE. A constitutional monarchy is less likely to, ah, insist on loans. Which, oddly enough, makes it easier for Gustav to get loans.”

“Back to the point,” Sarah said. “Anything Karl invests in Austria-Hungary is potentially subject to seizure. For that matter once, we’re married, anything I invest here is potentially subject to seizure. Unless we are real careful, anyway. If Judy and Vicky both think it won’t work without heavy investment from us, then it won’t work without that investment. So I don’t see a way of doing it.”

“Keep your money in the USE, darling,” Karl said. “We may need it if we end up having to run for our lives.” He grinned. “Besides, I sort of like the idea of being a kept man.”

“That’s right, Sis,” Judy said. “That way if you get bored, you can trade the Ken Doll here in on a more anatomically correct model.”

“Don’t call him that,” Sarah said. “Besides he’s fully anatomically correct.”

“Do tell!” Hayley said, “and I want all the juicy details.”

Sarah felt herself turn bright red.

“Help me, Trudi!” Karl put his hands to his cheeks in an overdone imitation of a melodrama ingenue. “These lascivious up-timer girls are treating me like a piece of meat.”

Trudi snorted. “Up-timers are prudes.”

“The point is, Vienna needs this,” Trudi said, clearly trying to bring the discussion back on the track that Sarah realized the down-time girl had been pushing for since the first question. Trudi, Sarah realized, was a very bright young woman, probably brighter than she was. “Vienna needs it bad. Not Emperor Ferdinand, not the upper-crust of Vienna, whatever they call themselves, although they will benefit too. But Vienna needs it. The small crafters. The people coming in from the farms, the tailors, the bakers. All of those need this. They need work. We can provide work.”

“All right. Trudi’s right,” Karl said. “And if it requires me to put skin in the game, as you girls call it, I’ll put skin in the game.”

Sarah saw that Trudi had won the point. “All right. If you’re going to do this, you’re at least going to do it right. Susan, I’m going to need your computer and I’m going to need price points. .”

Sarah went through what she was going to need to determine how much stock they could issue, money they could create, based on what they were going to have to sell. In a number of ways it was like figuring out how much you could afford to borrow for a capital investment like a house or a tractor. But it also had to involve how much of an influx of money the local economy could absorb. Over the next days and weeks, that second assessment would increase by an order of magnitude. It wasn’t the Viennese economy that was a constraining factor. Vienna was on the Danube and a major north/south trade route. New cash introduced in Vienna would be absorbed by the greater economy, just as had happened around the Ring of Fire in 1632 and 1633. . but faster. All that would come later, though.

“Wait a minute,” Judy said. “All that’s fine, Sarah, but in the meantime we need to make sure that people will take it. The American dollar went over so well partly because people looked at it as a piece of artwork, an engraving. They didn’t know Abe Lincoln from Abe Vigoda or George Washington from Curious George, but they could see the quality of the engraving. They could see the detail. You guys have seen the gold backs.” She was referring to the paper money printed by the Holy Roman Empire, now the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The printing sucked. They were printed in yellow and black ink on beige paper, and the yellow ink was barely visible. That applied to all of the notes, the reichsthaler, the goschen and the pfennig. It even applied to the new “mark” note that was to be the worth of a Cologne mark of silver. “We can’t have that. We need something that will be really hard to counterfeit, and we need it to be visually impressive.”

“So what do you want to do?” Susan asked.

“I want to let Heather Mason back in Grantville know what we want and have her come up with designs. You know she’s tied into the whole art community. Then we’ll have plates made up of the hardest steel they can make and have them cut at one of the up-time machine shops.”

“That’s going to take time,” Hayley said. “I’m not all that sure how long Moses Abrabanel is going to continue to take our IOUs.”

“I’ll talk to Moses,” Karl said.

“I’ll write Heather,” Judy said, and the rest took their assignments.

* * *

Over the next weeks, the girls of the Barbie Consortium did what they did best. They shopped. They bought cloth, they bought jewels, they bought bread and cake and buttons and bows. They bought flour by the ton and coal and bronze. Every purchase was recorded and went into Sarah’s database, and a picture of what the Austro-Hungarian reichsthaler was worth began to emerge. People like to think that one currency translates into another in terms of a simple exchange rate, but it’s not really true, any more than one language translates perfectly into another. An exchange rate is an average and that average will be accurate enough for some products, but way off the mark for others. Like the German word Weltanschauung can be translated as “world view,” but that translation is not completely accurate. In terms of money, it depends on where you are and what you want to buy. What Sarah developed wasn’t so much an exchange rate for the reichsthaler versus the American dollar, but a picture of what the reichsthaler was good for.

It wasn’t a pretty picture.

Abrabanel Offices outside Vienna

“Hello, Moses.” Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein smiled as he was ushered into Moses Abrabanel’s tiny office. Then the smile died as he saw the yellow circle on Moses’ doublet. Jews in Grantville were not required to wear special signs on their clothing, and with Morris Roth as a major noble of Bohemia, they weren’t required to wear them in Bohemia either, though many still did. But here in Austria-Hungary, it was still a legal requirement. Quite to his own surprise, Karl suddenly realized that he was offended by it. The news out of the USE was full of the CoC and Operation Krystalnacht. Much as he knew and understood the political motivation, he remembered Henry Dreeson’s body, and was for the most part in sympathy with the CoC and Mike Stearns on this.

At the moment, he could see concern blooming on Moses’ face and wondered what his looked like. “I’m sorry, Moses. I have been living in Grantville these last years, and, well, sometimes I forget that the rest of the world has not changed as much as we would hope. It was the yellow circle. No one wears such things in Grantville unless they choose to. And not every one that wears one is Jewish. They are all the rage among a certain faction of the CoCs recently.”

Moses didn’t look especially reassured by Karl’s comments. “I’ve been concerned that there might be a reaction to the CoC operations here.”

“You think that likely?” Karl asked. “It’s not Jews stringing up the anti-Semites in the USE.”

“That’s a distinction not commonly made in the midst of a pogrom.” Then the Jewish banker shook his head. “Never mind, Your Serene Highness. What can I do for you?”

“You have been loaning the Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company money for the past several months, I understand?”

“Your Serene Highness, with all respect, our dealings with the SFIC are a private matter and it would be inappropriate for me to discuss them with you. You wouldn’t want us bandying about any dealings we might have with your family, would you?”

“No, and that’s fine. I got the information, including the numbers, from Hayley Fortney. I’m here with her knowledge and consent to buy the debt.”

“Why?” Moses blurted, then blushed all the way to his receding hairline.

“Because Hayley is approaching her credit limit, and her fellow Barbies are coming to the rescue. I’m the Ken Doll, I’ll have you know. And the Ken Doll is supposed to stand around looking good and giving the Barbies money. Judy says it’s a rule.”

Moses Abrabanel blinked and his mouth fell open. Karl found himself laughing out loud. “The Barbies are backing the SFIC, and the Liechtenstein family is backing the Barbies. SFIC’s credit may now be considered as good as any in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and better than most.”

Now Moses was giving Karl a very sharp look. “Why?” he said again. This time it wasn’t shock, but calculation.

“Because it’s a good investment,” Karl explained. “Yes, they are carrying people, but most of those people are hard-working and if some of them will fail to pay the SFIC back in full, most will. The SFIC can afford the loss of the occasional default or forgiven loan better than the loss of business.”

Moses nodded, slowly at first, but then with more vigor. “I see, and if I could I would extend them more credit. But with the loss of Bohemia and the rest, the empire has been leaning on its other sources of income with more force than might be entirely wise. To put it bluntly, Your Serene Highness, the Abrabanel family in Austria-Hungary is teetering on the edge.”

Karl pulled out a check book. It was printed down-time, but in the up-time style and it was on the First National Bank of Grantville. He then took a gold inlaid fountain pen, also down-time made to an up-time design, and used it to fill out a check with several zeros in the amount line. It somewhat more than cleared the debt owed to the Abrabanel Banking house by the SFIC.

“And the rest?” Moses asked.

“A drawing account.”

“I’ll implement it today, Your Serene Highness.” It would take about two weeks for the check to reach Grantville and clear, but apparently Moses didn’t doubt that it would be good.

Liechtenstein House, Vienna

“You did what?” Gundaker’s face was as red as Moses’ had been, but it wasn’t from embarrassment. It was from anger.

“I bought twenty percent of the Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company,” Karl repeated.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“I find myself wondering the same thing,” Maximillian said, rather more cautiously.

“No, Uncles. My mind is right where it ought to be. However, there is a real difference between a loan to one individual and the same amount loaned to many people. It is less the level of risk than the measurability of risk. Some of the debts will not be paid, some will be, with interest. This will average out to either a slight gain, or at worst a slight loss on the loans. If it turns out to be a loss, the interest in the many businesses will cover the loss over time. It’s actually much safer than say investing in armies. After all, armies sometimes lose the war.”

Grantville, July, 1635

“Judy has gone nuts,” Heather Mason told Els Engel.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Heather. To go nuts you have to start somewhere else,” Els told her. They were at the studio, recording a new record. “All you Barbies live in crazy.”

Heather stuck her tongue out at Els, then looked at the tray of foods in the green room and decided that she had better pass. She was having trouble keeping her weight down, especially since she could afford chocolate these days. “Fine. The still-crazy Judy the Younger Wendell wants me to get printing plates designed to print preferred stock certificates for a company called BarbieCo. In denominations of one pfennig, six pfennig, one groschen, twelve groschen, one reichsthaler and one mark denominations, no less. And one more, on which the amount is filled in when it’s issued. I’m supposed to decide what goes on which denomination. There’s a rough drawing of a building that’s supposed to go on the back, and some legalese.”

“So which Barbie goes where?” Els asked. “You ought to keep the really big one for yourself.”

“I was thinking about the puns. You know. . the buck and the dough and the picture of Johnny Cash.”

“No.” Els shook her head. “Don’t try to make it look like a copy of American money, or people will think it’s a fake.”

“Hmm. Maybe,” Heather said as she continued to read through the documents. “Hey, wait a minute. BarbieCo is American Equipment Company. They renamed it by stockholder vote. This really is crazy.” She continued to read. They were going to issue lots of preferred stock. Sarah and Susan were still working out how much, but at least several million dollars worth, possibly a lot more. Heather was to contact their other investors, warn them, and offer to buy them out. AEC was pretty closely held. Aside from the Barbies and Karl, there were maybe twenty people who had stuck with the company.

And Judy admitted it was a really risky venture.

Heather looked up from the bundle. “Els, you don’t really need me for the rest of this record, do you?”

Els eyebrows shot up. “But you love. .” She gave Heather a look, then said, “No. It’s okay, Heather. This is serious, isn’t it?”

The latest take of Els’ down-time Amideutch version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was playing over the speakers to get the levels right. It was for Robin of the CoC and they were doing it with Els as Marian, starting as a lone voice singing quietly as they marched along, then Rod Friedman who played their unit commander joining in, then more and more people, till they had an army of voices. Which took laying down tracks of the same singers several times. It was all about the CoC’s attack on the anti-Semites. And Heather felt a chill go down her spine that was only partly the music. “It could be, Els. It could be very, very serious.”

* * *

All the way to the Higgins Hotel, Heather Mason considered. By the summer of 1635 there was a large and growing contingent of top-flight artists in Grantville. They came to visit, and stayed for the suite of artistic tools that didn’t exist anywhere else on Earth. . and wasn’t going to for the next twenty years at least. Digital cameras, computers with graphics software, computer-controlled cutting and shaping tools. And Heather knew a great many of them. It went with being Trommler Records, because it wasn’t just the records themselves. She was also in charge of the sleeves and album covers.

So she knew who to talk to and, most importantly, she knew who would keep the job secret.

* * *

The artists of the seventeenth century would have been right at home at Disney Studios in the thirties and forties. They understood schedules and working to them, and there was darn little of the later nonsense about “prostituting their art.” They painted what the client wanted and they did it as quickly and efficiently as they could manage. When they were privileged to work for Heather Mason, they also had access to digital photographs and computer-aided design. The photographs they used were the high school dance photos and, for Hayley Fortney, a year book photo for the last year she was in Grantville High.

They knew what they needed to do and they-for altogether too much of the time-had Heather Mason looking over their shoulders and encouraging them to hurry up.

Two weeks after she got the notice, Heather delivered into the hands of Dave Marcantonio a floppy disk containing twenty-eight image files. Then, for a truly exorbitant fee and as a personal favor, Dave used those image files to cut twenty-eight high carbon steel printing plates.

“Interesting thing here, Heather,” Dave Marcantonio said, grinning as he examined the image files. “I see Susan, Hayley, Judy, Vicky, Gabriel, Millicent and even Trudi, but I don’t see a picture of Heather Mason.”

Heather put on a look of great dignity. “I made an executive decision. It’s time and past time that people started realizing the Barbie Consortium is not just an up-timer club, so I put Trudi in.”

Heather sniffed. “We only needed the seven denominations.” Then she laughed out loud. “Judy figured I’d be using bucks and fins and stuff. But Els was right. We don’t want these to look too much like the American dollars. Besides, the reichs money uses a picture of Ferdinand II, Ferdinand III on the new ones. So if they have people’s pictures, they will look more like money to the Austrians. I considered using the Ken Doll, looking all regal like he can, but I figured that might cause problems with Ferdinand III. Heck, putting just one face on the money would have caused problems. This was the best choice.”

“And you think your co-conspirators aren’t going to notice that you are the only one not on a bill?”

“Oh, they’ll notice all right.” Heather Mason smiled like a naughty five-year-old who just got the very last piece of cake at the birthday party. “Think of it, Mr. Marcantonio. I got the bunch of them.”

Dave Marcantonio laughed and went back to work. Two days later, those plates were on a plane to the Danube. Three days after that, they arrived in Vienna. But all that would take into August. In the meantime, the Barbies were still learning about Vienna.