Grantville Gazette-Volume XIV

by Eric Flint

  In any case, Peter, having convinced himself that the so-called Eisenhauer Shoe Company couldn't do it, had decided there was nothing to worry about.

  * * *

  Herr Kacere was polite. "I'd like to help you, ma'am. I really would. But not at the cost of seeing more shoeless kids in winter."

  "Our prices are fair, Herr Kacere! We do not cheat people." It had been hard to believe at first, but Lena was able to get an appointment with the SoTF administrators with only a few days delay. Everyone knew how busy the up-time administrators were.

  "I'm sure they are. For handmade boots and shoes." Herr Kacere sighed and Lena could tell that he had had this conversation before. "Ma'am, you want to know what shocked us most, right after the Ring of Fire? It was how expensive everything was. Everything but labor, anyway. Before the Ring of Fire, some of the older folks used to talk about the horrors of inflation all the time. How, back in the good old days, they used to be able to buy a hamburger for a nickel, without considering the fact that when they could do that, a man got paid around a dollar a day. Just before the Ring of Fire you could buy a hamburger just about like the ones they talked about, but it would cost a dollar. But in that time, even at minimum wage, a man got paid around forty dollars a day before taxes. The nickel hamburgers were actually more expensive than the dollar hamburgers. Twice as expensive."

  Lena wasn't at all sure what John Christopher Kacere was saying, except that it came down to "No, the SoTF would not challenge the mail order catalogs and their prices." And a part of her, a good part, wanted to leave in a huff. But the practical, pragmatic part kept her in her seat as Herr Kacere continued.

  "And food was the least of it. More durable goods like shoes, beds, houses, and tools went down in price even more over the years. Since the Ring of Fire, we—at least those of us who are dealing with the economic impact—have spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what happened. It had a lot to do with assembly lines and production machinery. Mass production in general. I'm not sure of the details of how these boots and shoes listed in the catalog are made, but I can make a fairly decent guess. Somewhere around Grantville or somewhere on the Elbe, there is now a factory. In that factory, there are machines to cut the leather and shape it, to sew it together. And they don't make one pair of shoes at a time. One person at one machine is cutting the leather used in the toe, then passing that piece on to someone else. The next person on the line does subassemblies, sewing the toe to the side, or however it's done."

  Herr Kacere shrugged his ignorance. "Then the piece goes on to final assembly. What matters to us is that if you add up all the time of all the people working on that line to make one pair of boots or shoes, it's a lot less than it would take in your husband's shop. And that's what lets them make shoes for so much less. Plus the fact that since they're buying a lot of leather, they probably get a better price on it than you do.

  "Ma'am, I realize this isn't really fair to you or your husband, but I have to weigh that against what's best for all the people who need shoes. The best thing I can suggest to you is that you try to modernize your shop. Go look at how they do things in Grantville or wherever the shoe factory is. See about getting a loan and buy some sewing machines and leather cutters or whatever they're using."

  * * *

  "Peter, we must."

  Peter shook his head. "No, we must not. Lena, I know you are concerned but a trip like that would be expensive. Wait till these shoes get here. And the buyers find out they are made of paper or gut."

  Lena wanted to go immediately to Grantville to see about buying the machines and setting up the assembly lines needed to compete with the boots and shoes in the Wish Book and the other catalogs. That, however, was not to be. Peter was not convinced. Not yet. He wanted to wait and see.

  "Already we have fewer orders."

  "I know. But they will be back." Peter sniffed. "When they see what they have paid good money for. And after buying from a picture in a book, they will deserve what they get."

  The most irritating thing about it was that little bit of uncertainty. It was just possible that Peter was right. After all, how much could the assembly line and production machines that Herr Kacere spoke of really speed things? They had to be scrimping on materials as well, didn't they?

  * * *

  Over the ensuing weeks, the number of shoes and boots ordered from the shop decreased a bit more. Finally, Lena had what she needed to convince Peter that they must act. The first order of shoes and boots had arrived.

  Karl Strauss flinched a bit when he saw Lena in the market. It didn't take her long to see why, either. Karl was a clerk and scribe and had been a fairly regular customer of Peter's. But now! Lena looked at his feet. "Penny loafers, I see, Karl."

  Karl blushed.

  Lena considered for a moment. Karl was young. She could probably bully him a bit. "Come, Karl. Tell me. Why?"

  "Business has not been good, Frau. They were much cheaper. And by adding the thicker 'socks,' they are more comfortable, as well."

  Lena did her best not to glare. Some of the so-called new styles in clothing for men struck her as ugly. Yet here stood Karl, not only with penny loafers, but with something called "cargo pants." She wasn't sure, but the models in the Wish Book did not have the leg pockets so full that they bulged. She did agree that it was nice not to need to knit stockings quite as long, now that pants were longer. And the thicker yarns that had come into fashion did work up quickly.

  "Up-timers." She shook her head. "Please come to the shop and let Peter look at them. Dara will be glad to see you."

  * * *

  Dara bustled around providing refreshments. Probably showing off her "domestic skills," Lena thought a bit darkly. Dara was yet another of the younger people who was enamored of up-time ways, styles of clothing and attitudes. Dara was particularly fond of the clothing styles. She was forever drawing new things she'd like to make for herself, and saving money for the fabric to do so.

  Many of the younger people were adopting those ways wholesale, without thinking. Lena even agreed with some of them. But not all. Most especially not the lack of support for the guilds, the lack of consideration for custom. And she wasn't at all enamored of Dara flashing her eyes at a clerk. Dara's father expected her to marry one of the farmers in their village, once she'd earned her dowry. If anything came of the relationship, one or both of them would be ruined. Dara, if he refused to marry her, and Karl, if he didn't refuse. Yet here she was, flirting with him as though it was perfectly all right.

  With Dara's eager help, she talked Karl out of his shoes so that Peter could look at them closely. And with Dara cooing at him, he didn't balk at letting her inspect the sock, either. Even those could be made with one of the up-time machines.

  After Karl had left—eagerly escorted to the street by Dara—Lena gave her husband a look. "Well?"

  "Very good leather," he admitted. "Very good. And I could not pull the glue loose, not without damaging the shoe."

  "We must go inspect the factory."

  Unfortunately, that statement started the boys, Endres and Benedict, off. And they were still going at it when Dara got back. Everybody wanted to go to Grantville. Then Peter got that mulish look on his face and shouted them down.

  All in all, it wasn't a very pleasant evening.

  * * *

  "Only one order this week, husband. And that for a pair of boots with the buyer's family crest on the side. Something the Wish Book doesn't offer, I should add. At least not yet, thank goodness."

  "So? The boots for the mounted trooper will bring a lot of money."

  "And take a lot of time. And there's only one new order." Lena slumped in her chair. "Peter, you must listen to me. The factory-made boots will ruin our business. They will ruin the business of all who do not modernize. We must do this and we must do it soon, else we will be left behind in this new world."

  Another effect of the arrival of the first of the new shoes was that the shop's business had a prec
ipitous drop. Even several canceled orders. People who had believed Peter about the impossibility of making good shoes for that price were taking a new look.

  Peter sighed and looked depressed. "Very well. Hans can finish those boots. We will go." Then he looked at the eager faces of his sons, as well as the hope in Dara's eyes. Well, she was Lena's cousin. And she'd be a help on the road, keeping the boys occupied.

  "Yes. We will all go."

  * * *

  And on a bright, sunny morning, they set out. North, over the mountains—and they really were mountains, even if they weren't a scratch on the Alps. Unfortunately, all did not stay bright and sunny. It started to rain two days out of Bamberg, and kept right on raining for over a week.

  Then they reached the railhead a bit south of Saalfeld. The railroad south of Grantville was little more than a spur line. They were informed it went to the steel works of Saalfeld and to an iron mine a bit south of that, mostly to make it easier to get the iron to the steel works. Still, a little transshipment town had grown up around the rail head and a warehouse had been set up at the end of line. It was, they were told, a temporary warehouse that would move when the railhead did because the railroads could carry so much more than a mule train, or even one of the new wagon trains, that cargo shipped by rail piled up waiting for more traditional transport.

  And there was "a line planned to go to Bamberg once they could scare up the steel for the rails." So the railroad agent informed them. "For now you folks are standing right at the south end of the Golden Corridor. From the mouth of the Elbe to here, between the rivers and the rails. Shipping is cheap and easy. When they get the railroad down to Bamberg, it will link to the Rhine." It made the last of the trip easier, but at the same time was a warning of things to come. Finally they reached Grantville, and there was no room at the inn. At least not at the sort of inn they could afford.

  Eventually they managed to rent a room in one of the new subdivisions just outside the Ring of Fire. John Christopher Kacere had provided them with letters of introduction.

  * * *

  Lena had to stop herself from drooling at the thought of buying some of the goods she saw on display. By the time these goods actually reached Bamberg, the price was a lot higher. But she was determined that the first thing they had to do was check on the Eisenhauer Shoe Company.

  They took their letters of introduction to the State of Thuringia-Franconia Office of Economic Development. Who in turn directed them to the Eisenhauer Shoe Company. It was then they learned that the factory wasn't in Grantville. "Yes, sir, the marketing headquarters are here in town where we have access to the computer and the telephones. But the factory, we moved that up north of Halle on the Elbe. Oh, must be three . . . no, four months ago. To make shipping easier. We can ship raw materials by barge and ship out the shoes the same way. Got access to the whole navigable Elbe that way."

  The clerk was what they had learned was called an "old Grantville hand," a down-timer who had lived in or near Grantville for several months. It was clear to Lena that before the Ring of Fire he had been a villager. And from the pleased little smile on Dara's face, she could tell the same thing. Apparently the up-timers really didn't care if you were a villager or a townsman. This was going to make it even harder to convince the already rebellious Dara to keep her proper place.

  "How can we get there," Peter asked the clerk.

  "It's no problem. You can take the train part way and a river barge the rest. It's a regular stop for the barges these days. It's not even all that expensive. And Herr Eisenhauer likes visitors. There's even a tour."

  * * *

  "Here you see . . ." The guide pointed. ". . . our cutting press. There are six processed hides and this press is cutting boot soles. We get twenty left and twenty right soles from each processed hide."

  Just then the press dropped and in the blink of an eye two hundred and forty boot soles were cut. Lena looked at Peter who was staring openmouthed. Two hundred and forty. Peter was skilled and hard working; he could cut a single boot sole in less than a minute. But two hundred and forty. Even if you included the time it took to stack the hides on the cutter . . .

  Their guide was still talking. "These pieces are sorted by size and then moved by cart to the sewing line . . ."

  Lena walked along, following the young guide, taking note of each step. There were some places where delays happened. Sometimes the cutters were ahead of the sewing, sometimes one or more of the other operations were a bit delayed while someone finished a different operation. But the speed! Such speed.

  "The up-timers tell us, and you can see pictures on the wall there, that back in their time, hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes came off of a rolling belt, were packed in boxes, then transported by their trucks to 'retail' locations and warehouses."

  Lena couldn't quite imagine hundreds of thousands of shoes. Nor could she quite imagine the rolling belt, until she took a good look at the picture the guide pointed to. It was all quite a shock. Peter's face was as pale as she'd ever seen it.

  * * *

  Peter was drunk for the first time in ten years. And for the first time ever, it wasn't a happy drunk. He wondered if it was because he wasn't drunk enough, then looked down at the little glass that had held the very potent drink that the bar tender called "Shine." The bartender, a most helpful fellow, had informed him that it was called a shot glass because if you emptied it in one gulp you felt like you had been shot.

  By that standard Peter had now been shot several times. It hadn't helped. Because the killing blow had been delivered before he ever got to the bar. That had been done in the shoe factory, where they had killed his pride in what he did, his hope for the future, his dreams for his children.

  Lena was upstairs in a surprisingly nice room, especially considering that she would be a homeless beggar soon. Dara and the boys were in Grantville, where they were no doubt spending the rest of the family's savings. Which might be just as well. At least they would have a few days of fun before the end, which was more than most of the shoemakers in Bamberg would have—or their families, either.

  After due consideration, Peter decided that if however many shots he had taken had not put him out of his misery, one more probably wouldn't do the job. He kept seeing that press coming down like a headsman's ax. Cutting off his future as it cut out soles. In a way, the worst part of it all was that now having seen it, he understood exactly how it worked. It was so simple. Straight forward. In a way, it wasn't even that new. He used tools in his shop. He often separated out the work between the apprentices. Sometimes everyone in the shop had a hand in making a single pair of shoes. He could follow each step along the assembly line in the shoe factory, see what it did and why. He could even think of improvements. Not that that did any good. It must have cost a fortune to put the factory together.

  Peter knew that Lena thought of him as a stubborn old fool. He figured she was probably right in a lot of ways. He'd never been all that good with numbers or accounts or keeping records. But he had a craftsman's eye and a craftsman's sense. He knew how things fit together . . . for all the good that did now.

  * * *

  Lena paced. Then paced some more. At one point, she seriously considered pulling Peter out of the bar before he got completely drunk. Then she considered joining him and getting drunk herself. Then she paced.

  Right up to the tour of the factory, Helena Kellerin had had a plan. They could raise the money for improvements to the shop. It wouldn't exactly be easy but the up-timers were actively loaning money for modernization. To raise the money, they would need to present a prospectus to the bankers. A plan with decent detail describing how they were going to turn that money into an improved, more productive shop. Lena had been convinced that it wouldn't be that difficult. She would draw up a prospectus and present it to the bankers. They would buy a couple of the sewing machines that Herr Kacere had mentioned, maybe some improved leather shears. They would modernize the shop and start producing more shoe
s for less money. That had been the plan right up till the tour of the factory.

  But they hadn't seen an improved shop. They had seen a factory.

  She hadn't told Peter of her plan. It had been hard enough just getting him to come here to look at the factory. Now she was glad she hadn't. It would have been embarrassing. With all the changes in the world in the last few years, she'd studied everything she'd been able to find about how money worked. Especially the new up-timer economics. She had known about money of accounts. In fact, much of the shop's income came from people who didn't have silver to pay. The price would go into an account book and the shop would get paid when the crop came in. And the shop did the same thing with other merchants. It had taken a while but what she had finally realized was that all money—even pure silver coins—was just another form of money of accounts. If you understood money, you understood everything.

  Except you didn't. Lena had, she was still convinced, gotten a good handle on up-timer money and economic system. But when she saw that factory, she realized that though she understood the process of mass production from the money side, she didn't even have the start of a handle on it from the . . . uh . . . making stuff side. She could grasp easily enough what each device did. It was the way it all fit together that had her stumped and, from his expression, had Peter stumped as well. Peter was set in his ways. He'd been making shoes for over twenty years, ever since his own apprentice days. There was no way that Peter knew how to make these new-fangled methods work. Just no way. He was too determined to keep on with the old ways.