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Chapter 2


“Don’t you think that was pushing things a bit?” Paolo asked that evening. They had taken a room at the inn—one to themselves, with two cots, since they were respectable businessmen, rather than pallets on the floor of one of the common sleeping rooms used by less affluent travelers.

Frau Mechthilde took payment for a week in advance. In coin, please; not the paper money now more commonly used in the State of Thuringia-Franconia. And weighed the coin on a currency scale that she pulled out from a cubbyhole. Neither of them commented on her conservatism. Many merchants had lost large sums during the Kipper und Wipper inflation a decade ago or more. There was no pressing reason to mention the time they had spent in Grantville. As far as Frau Mechthilde and her harried spouse were concerned, they had arrived from Tyrol. Which lay in the same general direction as Salzburg. More or less.

The evening meal offered sausages and sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut was cabbage.

But, then, they were in Germany. It might be called the United States of Europe now, but it was still Germany when it came to cabbage.

“We shouldn’t be here long enough for them to get skeptical. All we have to do is figure out where the young dukes are, if they are here at all. And I have an idea.”

Paolo raised both eyebrows. Over their long years of friendship, Carlo’s ideas had often fallen into the category that—according to one of the up-timers alongside whom they had worked during their year or so in Grantville—many men preceded with the statement, “Here. Hold my beer a minute and watch this!”

“Why don’t we simply mention to one of those reporters that we’re curious? Let him do the leg work. That way, we get the information for no more money and effort than buying a copy of the paper, and then treating the reporter to a drink and coaxing out of him everything he discovered that didn’t make it into print.”

It took less than three days for them to be sure enough that the young dukes, Maximilian and Sigmund, were safe and sound at the Jesuit Collegium, under the care of their tutor Vervaux, and send a letter to that effect off to Salzburg.

“Shouldn’t we move on?” Paolo asked.

“We have to wait until the rest of the money comes; our advance was only half of what Paris de Lodron’s chancellor agreed to pay us. Maybe the archbishop would like to know something about something else. He may request other services from us in his acknowledgment. Anyway, we paid for a week.”

“Why should the archbishop of Salzburg care about what’s going on in the Upper Palatinate? He sits there all snug, keeping his prince-bishopric out of the war. He only wanted information on this because he worries about Tyrol, I think.”

The next day, Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium, showed up at the inn, wanting to buy a duplicating machine.

Paolo made warning noises intended to remind his associate about the imprudence of taking orders for which there was no product to be delivered. If Carlo insisted on waiting for that bank draft—he, himself, suspected that the chancellor never intended to pay them the promised second portion—they shouldn’t get themselves thrown out of town before it came.

Carlo flipped him a meaningful gesture.

Not a rude one. He’d learned it during their sojourn in Grantville after the Wartburg.

True: Mike Stearns had ordered that the Spanish common soldiers be released, marched ten miles west and then allowed to walk away. From the perspective of seventeenth-century infantrymen, ten miles was a bagatelle. They had walked west; then they had turned around and walked in the other direction—slowly, but fast enough to trace their way along the obvious path that any moving army left behind it, following Frank Jackson and his troops to Grantville.

Carlo shrugged his shoulders, took the order and a letter of credit to cover the cost—he could probably trust the Jesuits to be good for it—and mailed it off to the address in Tyrol that he had for Vignelli. It was printed right there on their business cards. Using The Golden Lion Inn, near the Vils Gate, Amberg, as a return address.

In case inconvenient questions did arise, he chatted amiably with the post office clerk for several minutes about delivery intervals and other such matters, to fix in the woman’s mind that the order had indeed been sent out. Arno Vignelli existed, after all. So did his duplicating machines. Those two facts were what he and Paolo were relying upon to make their current subterfuged identities viable.

They merely didn’t happen to be Vignelli’s employees. Or his subcontractors. Or anyone the man had ever heard of.

In the course of his verbose and voluminous apologies for not having a sample to demonstrate, accompanied by eloquent lamentations in regard to the imaginary axle of the imaginary freight wagon onto which it had been loaded in Bolzano, Carlo happened to mention after mass the next Sunday, as he stood on the front steps of St. Georg’s, that he had heard somewhere that the archbishop of Salzburg had some interest in events in the Oberpfalz and he wondered why, because he didn’t see a connection.

Owing to a series of unfortunate events, the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg was rather short on students these days and its staff were doing double duty as parish priests. Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the institution, was, by both training and inclination, a teacher. He was more than happy to explain that the recent placement of Regensburg into the new USE province of the Upper Palatinate by Gustav Adolf at the recently concluded Congress of Copenhagen meant…

“What it boils down to,” Carlo said that evening, “is that the diocese of Regensburg, which is a lot bigger than the imperial city of Regensburg, not to mention Catholic rather than Lutheran, is in the Salzburg archdiocese. Most of the Catholic parishes in the Upper Palatinate fall into the jurisdiction of the diocese of Regensburg. Therefore…”

“Oh, sure,” Stentzel Grube was happy to answer Paolo’s follow-up question. “A few of the Catholic parishes, to the west and southwest of here, fall under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Eichstätt—those are over around Neumarkt. A few more are under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Bamberg, which will likely cause Franz von Hatzfeld to stick his nose into the Upper Palatinate’s affairs, even from his comfortable perch in Cologne, if that is where he still is.

“Most of the Catholic parishes, though—an even higher proportion now than between 1621 and the Council of Copenhagen, given that Regensburg itself has been incorporated into the USE Province—fall into the Regensburg diocese. Now that the secular force of Duke Maximilian’s Bavarian officials is not available to carry out the program of recatholicization in the Upper Palatinate, it becomes the obligation of the church itself. That will be rewarding, if it prospers; something like the ecclesiastical equivalent of the up-timers’ ‘hearts and minds’ program that they were running over in Franconia before the Ram Rebellion. Hell and his Jesuits are supposed to be doing the heavy labor of keeping the theoretical converts made during Maximilian’s tenure as actual converts. Or, at least, as many of them as they can. If it does not prosper, that becomes, ultimately, Lodron’s problem. So, ja, it’s only natural that he would be interested.”

They extended their stay by a second week. Carlo still believed in a bank draft from Salzburg. Paolo found his simple faith touching. During their first Christmas season in Grantville, they had learned about Santa Claus.

Before they received Lodron’s (possible) payment of the second installment for services rendered, they received a crate.

The cooperation of the Thurn und Taxis postal system (now no longer imperial) with the hybrid Swedish/USE postal system (now newly imperial) was becoming remarkably efficient.

A duplicating machine for delivery to Caspar Hell, S.J.

A frazzled clerk in the Bolzano factory, having received the order, couldn’t find any record of these two sales representatives, concluded that his incompetent predecessor had mis-filed the information, completed a set of substitute records, filled out the requisite dispatch slip, and messengered that over to the warehouse, which sent the order out.

With…

Paolo looked at the second layer packaged in the crate with deep suspicion.

Unpacking produced a demo model of the new and improved version of the Vignelli duplicator and samples of several other products. There was also a pamphlet containing a model spiel for sales representatives to use explaining how, owing to the location of the factory, it was far wiser for Germans in the south to purchase from Vignelli rather than from IBM in far-away Magdeburg, where the owners were mainly looking for contracts in the north, such as the one they recently signed with the USE navy, which would distract them from showing proper concern for the needs of private customers, of smaller customers, of—really, of any customer who might be somehow persuaded to buy office supplies from Vignelli instead.

Along with a reminder that they were not factors. That term was not modern. That term was not progressive. That term was stodgy and failed in presenting the image of go-getters (that was printed in English, in Latin letters rather than Fraktur). They were sales representatives (also in Latin letters; please use that rather than salesmen, as some of Vignelli’s representatives were women; this should be mentioned when demonstrating products to wealthy ladies and the change was pleasing to the regent of Tyrol).

It was a slow news day in Amberg. All the newspapers, even the Forge, carried three or four lines about the arrival of the demo model, which, really, did wonders for adding verisimilitude to their assumed identities. The arrival of the crate almost made the mythical freight wagon and its broken axle real. Nobody, not even the reporters or Frau Mechthilde, stopped to analyze why the promised demo equipment had arrived in the same crate as Father Hell’s order.

The Patriot had a half-column on the wisdom of the Jesuit Collegium in becoming the first institution in Amberg to take this progressive step. Father Jacob Balde, S.J., tried the experiment of using it to produce a parish bulletin for St. Georg’s the next week.

It was surprising how many people wanted to see the machine.

The innkeeper, whose name had proved to be Dionys Prohorsky (a Bohemian Protestant from across the border, who had married into the Golden Lion, which was Frau Mechthilde Donhauserin’s inheritance, which explained a lot, Carlo thought; she hadn’t been the old host’s pretty daughter-in-law, but rather his daughter), was not thrilled about having one of the tables in the dining room frequently occupied by a duplicator. His redoubtable wife, she who had embraced the up-time use of the honorific for ordinary commoner women with enthusiasm, pointed out that most of the potential customers for the duplicating machine came in during the slow hours in the dining room and bought a beer while observing its operation.

It didn’t hurt, from Prohorsky’s perspective, that one of the visitors was Keith Pilcher, one of the up-timers who had come to Amberg the previous spring to assist with revival of the iron industry, who gave an impromptu talk in Amideutsch, to an equally impromptu gathering of a half-dozen or so men who had money to spend and a dozen more who did not, on the general subject of copy machines I have known, from hectographs and mimeographs through dot matrix printers and many more. His cheerful, encouraging, final pronouncement was that this one looked to be less prone to going out of service at inconvenient times than most of them.

“I’d order one now,” he said, “but I’ll be heading down to Regensburg in a few days. I’ll check in with you when I get back.”

A couple of the spectators placed orders. Carlo mailed them off to Bolzano, with due attention to the post office clerk.

One fine day, the bank draft for the second half of the payment that the archbishop of Salzburg had promised them did arrive, to Paolo’s considerable surprise. There was also a modest retainer in case of future useful data that might come their way.

The same day, it turned out that Keith Pilcher had passed the story of his encounter with the duplicating machine to another up-timer, a Herr Brick Bozarth, who served as the up-timers’ “trade representative” in Regensburg. Pilcher had been serious when he complimented the machine’s simplicity of operation. This resulted in, not a command, but a strongly phrased request, that one of the sales representatives should proceed to Regensburg for the purpose of discussing duplicating machines and other office supplies.

Regensburg was at least four times the size of Amberg.

“We really can’t do this,” Paolo protested. “We’ve got our money. We ought to be getting out of here. Besides, they’ll want you to take the demo model to Regensburg. As long as it’s right here, at the address where Vignelli sent it, and he knows where it is, it should be obvious to any magistrate, if the matter should come up, that we haven’t stolen it. If you take it out of town, though…”

To the government clerk who had passed on the directive that they were to go cooperate with the up-timer in Regensburg, he demurred at taking the machine away from Amberg on the grounds that many people were still coming to see it.

Fortunately (according to Carlo), or unfortunately (according to Paolo), Father Balde volunteered that the Jesuits would be happy to have potential customers come visit the machine at the Collegium while the other one was out of town. “Hearts and minds” and all that. The up-timers in Franconia hadn’t been the first humans to think up public relations.

Carlo put the demo model in a smaller crate, hired a day laborer to carry the crate out the Vils Gate to a commercial barge landing, climbed on the barge, once more carrying his well-worn backpack, and floated down the Vils to the Naab to the Danube to confront whatever destiny that fate might have in store for him this time.



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