Grantville Gazette 46 gg-46

by Paula Goodlett

  "So we wait an hour."

  "Then I better have words with our driver," Wolfgang muttered.

  A few minutes he was back. "Did I miss anything?"

  "He ran into the house for a couple of minutes before returning to the darkroom."

  "Why?"

  "How should I know? Maybe he had to go to the toilet."

  A few minutes later a courier cyclist turned into the drive and knocked on the darkroom door. There was a short discussion, and a large envelope was handed to the courier. "What the heck's he doing?" Tommasina muttered. "You don't need an envelope that big for such a small photograph."

  The courier cyclist pedaled back down the drive and onto the street. Wolfgang and Tommasina hurried to their cab. "Follow that man," Wolfgang ordered their driver as they clambered aboard.

  The driver raised his brows, muttered something unintelligible, and climbed onto his seat and started pedaling.

  They kept the courier in sight until he disappeared into Don Francisco's office. Wolfgang jumped out and went in to check who the package had been delivered to.

  "It seems I owe you a hundred dollars," he said when he returned.

  Monday

  Sebastian had forgotten all about the photograph of Mr. Nasi over the weekend. He'd worried a bit about sales of Gran's book, but sales were going along at a steady pace. In a single month they'd processed orders for over five hundred copies, and received payment for two hundred and sixty-six, with payment pending clearance of the checks on another thirty. At this rate they should break even by the end of July, by which time he'd be in Jena. He sighed at the thought. He'd much rather be taking photographs, but there wasn't a lot of money in that, not yet.

  "Sebastian, there's someone to see you," Mary Ellen called.

  "Who is it?" he called as he hurried out to see who it was. He recognized Tommasina sitting on the sofa immediately. "I sent the photo and negatives to Mr. Nasi like I said I would."

  "Yes, I know. That's why I'm here. Don Francisco was most impressed with the photograph of him riding his bike. In fact, he was so impressed he's had it framed and installed in his office." She looked at Sebastian and shook her head. "You're either very smart, Sebastian, or very lucky." She laid her briefcase on the coffee table and opened it. She extracted several papers. She laid one down on the coffee table. "One order from Don Francisco for twenty copies of A Pictorial History of Grantville to be delivered to his office as soon as possible." She added another paper. "An order from the office of the mayor of Grantville for ten copies of A Pictorial History of Grantville, to be delivered as soon as possible."

  "But why does Mr. Nasi need twenty copies, or the mayor's office ten?" Sebastian asked.

  "Don Francisco often has occasions when he needs to present people with small tokens of appreciation, while a gift of a book about Grantville is a perfect promotional gift for the mayor's office."

  "Small token!" Sebastian muttered. If a seven hundred and fifty dollar book was a small token, he'd really like to see a large token.

  "Don Francisco is a very important man, and he deals with a lot of very important people. He suggests that you might want to produce a similar book about Magdeburg."

  "Do you realize how much Gran's book cost? We can't afford the risk."

  "But Don Francisco can." She laid another sheet of paper on the table. "Also, the Magdeburg Arts Week organizing committee would like to retain you as a photographer. You would be responsible for all the publicity photography and recording events for a book to be published celebrating Arts Week."

  Sebastian licked his suddenly dry lips. It seemed he'd just discovered what a large token looked like.

  Bartley's Man, Episode One

  Gorg Huff,Paula Goodlett

  June 30, 1631

  Johan was hung over again and that was good. For Johan, going into battle with a hangover was almost as good as going into battle a little drunk. It distracted him from what he had to do. He shifted his pike just a little. He was in the second rank of pikes and happy enough to be there. It was respectable, but not as dangerous as the front rank. They were marching forward and he was busy enough just keeping his feet moving and his head from falling off that he didn't have time to worry about putting his pike through someone or having someone put theirs through him. So he barely noticed the difference in the sounds. The Germans, at least the group in front of him, fired one ragged volley and turned and ran. Just as well. He probably wasn't up to much of a fight. Then Johan was bumped. The man beside him had been hit. Karl was a punk kid and arrogant besides, but damn! They were in the second rank, near the middle, and Karl had still been hit in the side, hard enough to knock him into Johan.

  Things went downhill from there. An army, even part of Tilly's army, could only take so much, and this one was being cut to pieces from so far away that they couldn't fight back. It took a while, but it started to crumble. Then it broke. All of a sudden, everyone was running and Johan was running with them. But not very far. He was too hungover and, well, just too damned old to run as far as he would have needed to go.

  After a few minutes, and on the other side of the baggage train, he stopped. Huffing and puffing, Johan waited for the cavalry to catch him. His hands were already up when they got there.

  July 7, 1631

  Johan Kipper looked at the Singer sewing machine in total confusion. It wasn't that Johan was stupid, or even ignorant. It was simply that his world wasn't filled with devices of this complexity. There were a few, but not many, and Johan had never seen one. What made the sewing machine worse than the telephones or the lights was that it looked like he should be able to understand it.

  Unfortunately, he wasn't allowed to remain in his state of confusion. Instead, Brent Partow, one of young Master David's friends, saw his look and-as boys were wont to do-began to explain. Which would have been a great deal more helpful if the lad had spoken a comprehensible tongue. His English had the weirdest accent that Johan had ever heard. Just like the rest of the up-timers, and it just got worse as the lad got into the details of the inner workings of the sewing machine. It wasn't the twang that bothered Johan. He had heard variations like that often enough. It was the technical words.

  "It would seem a very complex piece of equipment," Johan offered. "It would probably take a long time to make. Perhaps something simpler?"

  "We could, I guess. But it would be more likely to be copied," young Master David said, but Johan was an old soldier and an old bargainer, and he heard the lack of full confidence in David's voice. "Besides," David continued in a firmer voice, "the sewing machine is what we agreed on."

  So it wasn't the best choice, just the one they could agree on. That was more than interesting. "Well, it looks very complicated to me."

  "Looks are deceiving," Brent said. "It's not lots of different parts, so much as lots of the same few parts."

  His twin brother, Trent, snorted at that. And Frau Higgins said, "Never mind. What we're going to need you to do is help us talk to the local merchants and craftsmen so that we can have the parts made without telling them how to make the whole thing."

  Johan walked his rounds about the storage lots and thought about the up-timers and the children and their project. He liked them, liked them a lot. They were kind to an old soldier who didn't deserve it and they made him feel at home. Johan had grown almost to manhood in Amsterdam, watching the best merchants and craftsmen on earth go about their business. He knew that while the up-timers had great wealth, that wealth would be used up soon or late, unless they used it to build more. He understood that. He looked over at the chain link fence and shook his head. Like building a castle wall out of gold: you have to worry as much about someone stealing the fence as you do about them getting what's inside of it.

  Over the past several weeks he had been acting as interpreter for the kids as they went about their business and he had managed to keep the local merchants from robbing them blind.

  And he, Johan Kipper, would keep protecting them. A
lways. Johan wasn't quite sure why he felt that way. He finally had a home, a place, and hope. Things he had given up on years ago. He wouldn't give that up, not for anything. His place was with young Master Bartley, who would listen to him and learn from him the way the world worked. And with young Master Donny, who needed his protection. He looked around his home again. Chain link fences and steel containers full of goods, but only a limited supply, no matter how large it might seem.

  "All right, Herr Kipper," Doctor Sims said. "Let's have a look. Open wide."

  Johan opened his mouth and the doctor looked around in there for a few minutes, then had him sit up.

  "Here's the situation. You have a couple of cavities in the teeth you have left, but I don't have any partial plates that would fit your remaining teeth. What I can do is pull those last few and set you up with a full set. I have a couple of full sets that can be adjusted to fit you. I don't like pulling healthy teeth and if I had access to the equipment and supplies needed to make partial plates, that's what I would recommend. But I don't."

  Johan didn't have to think about it long. He hated to lose the last of his teeth, but he knew they would be going anyway. He agreed.

  Slowly, Johan Kipper was getting used to the up-timers, and at the same time he was coming to realize that he didn't agree with them about how the world worked. He liked what they thought, but to him David would always be young Master David. Mrs. Higgins, whatever she insisted on being called, was always going to be the mistress of the clan, as noble in his eyes as any queen in Christendom. It was very nice that the up-timers thought down-timers their equals, but it wasn't true, not really.

  For the next couple of years, Johan Kipper adjusted to life among the up-timers. He learned about post traumatic stress disorder and realized that probably over half the people in Tilly's army had had it to one degree or another. It was, in fact, so common that it wasn't thought of as a disease at all. It was just the way soldiers were. After all these years, treating it was going to take a long time, but even the treatment he got helped a lot. He still had the nightmares and sometimes the flashbacks, but they were controllable. He was much less of a danger to himself and others. At the same time, the effect of the talk therapy and the group had made him probably more effectively dangerous than he had been in years. He could still fight, but now it was when he decided to, not just whenever something set him off.

  Financially, he was much better off. The Higgins-Bartley clan were overly generous. So generous that it made him uncomfortable. And it turned out that young Master David had a real knack for the world of business. That knack had been honed by merchants and crafts masters from two centuries, and by Johan himself trying to teach the boy about how to bargain. Johan swore the best up-time bargainer was a novice compared to anyone down-time. But it didn't matter. Up-timers could produce so much, so very much, that they could lose their shirt on every deal and still end up the winner. It had taken the down-timers who didn't live in Grantville a long time to realize just how productive the combination of man and machine really was. In fact, most of the world-even most of the Germanies-still didn't realize. So Johan bargained to keep David and Frau Higgins from being too taken advantage of. He was fairly successful at that, except when it came to himself. They simply would not hear when he carefully explained that they didn't need to give him stock or bonuses.

  August 5, 1633

  Johan Kipper sat in the cafeteria in the high school, going over reports from OPM. He was on the board of the mutual fund and there was quite a lot of paperwork involved. Still, in many ways it wasn't all that different from when he had first come to work for Mrs. Higgins. He was still haggler-in-chief for Master David's business projects. Johan grinned at the thought, showing a very nice smile. Dentures, of course, paid for by Mrs. Higgins not long after he had gone to work for the family. He would have been able to pay for his own now, if you could still buy the up-time artificial resin-based dentures at all.

  There was gray in his hair but there was still more brown than white and he wasn't going bald. He was clean-shaven, clean in general, and well-dressed. He was still no prize by up-timer standards, but was a well-enough-formed man of the short and stocky sort. He still had the pock marks that were fairly common in the seventeenth century, but had virtually disappeared from the twentieth.

  "Who are you and what are you doing here?" said a voice in up-timer English.

  Johan looked up to see a woman in a hair net and apron, holding a great pot of knockwurst and sauerkraut, apparently today's lunch main course. All of which lead him to believe that she was a down-timer lunchroom servant, but the language shouted up-timer. So did the clear, rosy complexion. Even after two years, the discontinuity made Johan a little uncomfortable, though he knew perfectly well that it shouldn't. She put the big tray in the steam table and gave Johan a look of increasing suspicion.

  "I am doing paperwork," Johan said.

  "I could see that. Why are you doing it in the high school lunchroom?"

  "I'm waiting for Master David," Johan said, fully aware that he was making a hash of the whole mess.

  Darlene Myers wished she had asked one of the other cafeteria workers about the man before she approached him, but he had just been sitting there, in mostly down-timer style clothing-rich down-timer clothing, if she was any judge. And she had thought about all the stories from up-time about predators frequenting schools, and assumed down-time had had the same sort. And he looked sort of creepy, or at least he had at first glance. Now she was more than a little lost. Who was this Master David? Was there some down-time noble going to the high school? She realized that there must be. She hadn't thought about it, but she had just gotten this job a few days ago. Through a friend who thought she was crazy to take it.

  "Who is this Master David?" she asked. "Is he a student here?"

  "Master David Bartley," the man said, with what sounded to Darlene like considerable pride in his voice. Now that sounded like an up-timer, not a down-timer. Though. .No. She remembered the Higgins Sewing Machine Company and OPM. David Bartley was one of the up-timer kids who had started getting rich after the Ring of Fire. Apparently, David had gone native in a big way, servants and the whole deal. What Darlene wanted to do was send this servant off with a bee in his ear about the rights of man and give this David Bartley a good talking to on the same subject. The problem was, she didn't actually know anything about the situation. So she gave the man a warning look and a humpf and retreated back to the kitchen to gather more intelligence.

  "Who is that guy in the serving room?" Darlene asked. "He says he is waiting for Master David Bartley, no less."

  Gretel Hoffmann looked over at the calendar. "I bet it's the HSMC board meeting. Johan Kipper is on the board, you know. Even after the Schmidt takeover, he stayed on the board along, with Delia Higgins and Mr. Marcantonio."

  Which didn't answer Darlene's question at all.

  "What?"

  Gretel, an old Grantville hand and a great gossip, gave Darlene a condescending look. About half the kitchen staff here was convinced she was an idiot, otherwise what was she doing serving meals to teenagers when her up-timer knowledge was so valuable. Gretel, after questioning her, just figured she was crazy.

  "Well, it's like this. David Bartley is the real head of OPM and is one of the biggest stockholders in HSMC. Johan Kipper is his man. He represents David Bartley in board meetings and the like, because David Bartley is too young to sit on the board of a corporation by your up-timer law."

  It really wasn't the sort of discussion that Darlene had expected from the kitchen staff of a high school lunchroom, but she hadn't thought about what the changes the down-time world had brought to Grantville would mean.

  "How many of our students are millionaires?" Darlene wondered aloud.

  "Oh, lots," Gretel said and started going through the names.

  "Never mind," Darlene interrupted the list. "Why does Herr Kipper-at least, I assume it's Herr Kipper out there-call David Bartley 'Master Da
vid'? Hasn't anyone mentioned to him that we don't have slavery in Grantville?"

  For a minute Gretel just looked at her like she was strange. Then she said, "He is just a little old-fashioned. Johan Kipper came to them as a former soldier, a beggar, hoping for work, and now he is rich." Gretel clucked her tongue at such undeserved good fortune. "Some people are just born lucky."

  All this left Darlene confused, but very intrigued. She picked up another tray for the steam table and headed out to check out the guy. He wasn't a great looking specimen, short and stocky and with the leftovers from the worst case of acne she had ever imagined. No, she realized. Johan Kipper had survived smallpox. He was as tough as he looked, apparently. "Is the board meeting of Higgins Sewing Machine Company coming up?" she asked, mostly because it was all she could think of to open the conversation with.

  He looked up. "Yes. How did you. ."

  "Gretel. She knows everything about everyone. At least she claims to. Why does that mean you need to be here?"

  "Because Young Master David needs to know what will be decided at the board meeting. Herr Schmidt is arguing again to increase the sales price."

  "Why? Have costs gone up?"

  "No. They have gone down. But we sell a sewing machine and, often as not, the buyer turns around and resells it the next day for a considerable profit."

  "And Herr Schmidt figures you might as well make the extra profit."

  "Yes."

  "So, why not?" Darlene asked. "I mean, I can understand why you guys might want to be generous, but if the generosity isn't getting to the people who are the end-users, why not make the extra profit?"

  Johan looked at her in confusion for a moment. "End-user? Oh, I get it! Very clever. Sometimes it takes me a minute to understand up-timer expressions. Young Master David is concerned that if we price the units too high, we are likely to force someone else to go into competition. Herr Schmidt insists that they will anyway, as soon as they can figure out how. He wants to guard our proprietary information more strongly." Johan grinned, an open, friendly expression, with just a touch of impishness. "A couple of weeks ago, he was threatening to lock the Partow twins out of the factory if they kept giving away secrets."