In the Navy
                                     David Weber

      "I'm telling you, Mike, we can dothis!"
      Mike Stearns inhaled deeply, counted to ten—no, better make it twenty—and reminded himself
that the President of the United States couldn't go around throttling overenthusiastic teenagers. He told
himself that rather firmly, then reopened his eyes.
      "Eddie," he asked as patiently as possible, "do you have any idea how many people walk through
this office every week—every day, for that matter—with projects that absolutely, positively just haveto
be done Right This Minute?"
      "But this is different, Mike!" The wiry, red-haired young man on the other side of Mike's desk
waved his hands. "This is important!"
      "That's exactly my point, Eddie. They're all important. But important or not, we only have so many
up-timers with the sorts of skills to make them work. And this—" Mike thumped a solid, muscular palm
on the lovingly executed sketch plan Eddie had laid on his desk between two tall piles of books
"—would require skills I doubt any of us have to begin with. Besides, can you even imagine how
someone like Quentin Underwood would react if I handed whole miles of railroad track over to you for a
'crackpot scheme' like this?"
      "It's not a 'crackpot scheme'!" Eddie said hotly. "This is exactly how the Confederates built their
original ironclads, with rolled railroad rails for armor back during the Civil War."
      "No, it's not," Mike replied patiently. "It's how you think they built them, and that's—"
      "It is how they built them!" Eddie interrupted. "My research is solid, Mike!"
      "If you'll let me finish?" Mike's voice was noticeably cooler, and Eddie blushed with the fiery color
only a natural redhead could produce.
      "Sorry," he muttered, and Mike was hard pressed not to chuckle at his expression. Eddie Cantrell,
especially in the grip of one of his effervescent enthusiasms, was prone to forget that the Mike Stearns
he'd known all his life had become President of the only United States that existed in this Year of Our
Lord Sixteen Hundred and Thirty-Two. Which was fair enough, Mike supposed. There'd been enough
times over the last year or so that he'd thought he was living in a fever dream instead of reality.
      "As I was saying," he continued after a moment, "I don't have any doubt at all that this plan of
yours," he thumped the sketch on his desk again, "represents one hell of a lot of research and hard
thinking. But the truth is that you don't have any better idea than I do of what sorts of hardware it would
take to build the thing. Or, for that matter, who do you think is going to do the stability calculations? Or
figure out its displacement? Or design a steam plant to move a boat this size and weight? Or even have a
single clue how to take command of it when it was built?" He shook his head. "Even if we had the
resources to devote to something like this, we don't have anyone here in Grantville who has any idea how
to build it. And I've got too many other projects that people do have a clue about to justify diverting our
limited—very limited, Eddie—resources to building some kind of Civil War navy."
      Eddie looked away, staring out the office window for several seconds. Then he looked back at
Mike, and his expression was more serious than any Mike recalled ever having seen from him before.
      "All right," the young man said. "I understand what you're saying. And I guess I do get carried away
sometimes. But there was a reason they built these things back home, Mike, and Gustav Adolf is going to
need them a hell of a lot worse than Sherman or Grant ever did."
      Mike started a quick reply, then stopped. Just as Eddie had trouble remembering Mike as anything
more impressive than the leader of the United Mine Workers local, Mike had trouble thinking of Eddie as
anything but one of the local kids. Not quite as geekish as his friend Jeff had been before the Ring of Fire
deposited their hometown in seventeenth-century Germany, but still something of an oddball in rural West
Virginia. A computer nerd and a wargamer who was passionately devoted to both pastimes.
      Yeah, Mike thought. A geek. But a wargaming geek. He may be short on experience in the real
world, but he's spent one hell of a lot more time than I have studying wars and armies and . . . navies.
      "All right, Eddie," he sighed. "I'm sure I'm going to regret this, but why is 'Captain General Gars'
going to need ironclads so badly?"
      "Because he doesn't have railroads," Eddie replied. "That's why rivers and canals are so important
to his logistics, Mike. You know that."
      Mike nodded slowly. Eddie was certainly right about that, although the youngster hadn't been
present for the meetings at which he and Gustavus Adolfus had discussed that very point.
      "Without railroads," Eddie continued, "the only way to move really large quantities of supplies is by
water. That's why successful seventeenth-century military campaigns usually stuck so close to the lines of
navigable rivers. I know we're talking about building steamboats and steam-powered tugs for that very
reason, and that should help a lot. But the bad guys are just as well aware of how important rivers are as
Gustav Adolf is. When they figure out how much more efficiently he's going to be able to use them with
our help, they're going to start trying really hard to stop him. And the best way for them to do that is to
attack his shipping on the water, or else build forts or redoubts armed with artillery to try and close off
the critical rivers." The teenager shrugged. "Either way, seems to me that something like an ironclad
would be the best way to . . . convince them to stay as far away from the river bank as they can get."
      The kid had a point, Mike realized. In fact, he might have an even better one than he realized. The
major cities of most of Gustavus Adolfus' so-called "vassals" and "allies" also happened to lie on
navigable rivers, and altogether too many of those vassals were among the slimiest, most treacherous
batch of so-called noblemen in history. Which meant that in a pinch, an armored vessel, heavily armed
and immune to said cities' defensive artillery might prove a powerful incentive when it came to honoring
their obligations to the Confederated Principalities of Europe and their Emperor.
      None of which changed a single thing where the incredible difficulties of Eddie's proposal were
concerned.
      Eddie started to say something else, then closed his mouth with an almost audible click as he
realized Mike was gazing frowningly down at the sketch.
      The vessel it depicted would never be called graceful. It was an uncompromising, slab-sided, boxy
thing which sat low in the water, and its gun ports and a thick, squat funnel were its only visible external
features.
      "You're right about how important river traffic is going to be," Mike admitted as he ran one blunt
fingertip across the drawing. "But this thing would be an incredible resource hog."
      "I know that," Eddie acknowledged. "That's why I'm only suggesting building three of them. God
knows we could use as many as we could get, but I knew going in that there was no way you were going
to give up enough rails to armor more than that."
      "No way in the world," Mike agreed with a grin which held very little humor. "Quentin would
scream bloody murder if I gave you enough rails for one of these things, much less three! And he
wouldn't be alone, either. It's going to take years and years for us to develop an iron industry that can
produce steel that good. But that part I could handle . . . if I thought we'd be able to build the damned
things in the end."
      "Look," Eddie said, "I admit that a lot of that plan is based on the best guesstimates I could come
up with from my reference books. At the same time, some of those books are pretty darned good, Mike.
I spent a lot of time researching this period when Jeff and Larry decided we just had to do a Civil War
ironclads game." He chuckled. "I always was the navy specialist when it came to game design.
      "But that's not important. What matters is that it's a starting point. If you can find someone else,
someone better qualified to take my notes and my reference books and turn them into something we
canbuild, I'll be delighted to turn them over. You're right. I don't have the least idea how to figure
displacements or allow for stability requirements, and I know the designers screwed up the displacement
calculations big time for a lot of the real ironclads built during the Civil War. There was one class of
monitor that would've sunk outright if they'd ever tried to mount their turrets! So maybe my enthusiasm
did run away with me. But it's more important that this gets done and that it work than that it gets done
my way."
      Mike tipped back in his chair and considered the face across his desk. It was the same face it had
always been, and yet, it wasn't. It hadn't changed as much as Jeff Higgins' face had, perhaps, but like
every face in Grantville, it had thinned down over the course of the last winter and its sometimes short
and always monotonous rations. Eddie had always been wiry; now he'd lost every ounce of excess
weight, yet his frame was well muscled from hard physical labor. More to the point, perhaps, that face
was no longer as young, as . . . innocent as it had been, and Mike felt a pang of deep, intense pain for the
loss of Eddie's last years of childhood.
      But a lot of people had lost a lot of things, he reminded himself, and it looked as if Eddie was doing
a better job of growing into the reality he faced than Mike had realized when he came bursting into the
office. His pride in the concept he'd come up with was obvious, yet it was equally obvious that his offer
to turn it over to someone else who might be better qualified to make it work was genuine. Unfortunately,
there was no one in Grantville who was better qualified. The skills a project like this would call for
weren't the sort that were in much demand in a West Virginia coal mining town. To make it work, they
would have needed someone with some real expertise in mechanical engineering and heavy fabrication,
not to mention running complicated industrial projects. Better yet, someone with some genuine
experience with boats and ships. Best of all, someone with some idea about how a real navy worked.
      Someone like—
      Mike's thoughts broke off in a sudden mental hiccup, and he sat abruptly upright.
      "What?" Eddie asked, and Mike shook his head the way he'd shaken off the effect of a particularly
good left jab during his days in the ring.
      "I'm still not convinced that any of this is doable," he said slowly, contemplating Eddie through
half-slitted eyes. "But if—if, I say—it is, then it's possible that there's someone right here in town who'd
be perfect—" He broke off and grimaced. "Let me rephrase that. It's possible that there's someone right
here in town who could actually make it work."
      "There is?" Eddie looked puzzled. "Who?"
      "The only person who has any experience at all with this kind of building project," Mike replied, and
grinned sourly as Eddie's eyes widened in dawning disbelief.
      "That's right," the President of the United States said in a tone which matched his grin's sourness
perfectly. "I think we need to consult with my sister's esteemed father-in-law."
                                                       ***
      "Let me get this straight." John Chandler Simpson sat on the other side of a slightly battered-looking
table in an Appalachian kitchen and regarded Mike through narrow eyes. "You'reoffering me a job."
      "I guess you could put it that way," Mike replied in a voice he tried to keep entirely free of any
emotion. His years of experience as a union negotiator helped, but it was still difficult. He'd seldom felt as
much antipathy for another human being as Simpson evoked, apparently effortlessly, from him.
      He sat back in his own chair, letting his eyes rest on the framed prints which brightened Jessica
Wendell's friendly kitchen. He could think of very few settings which would have seemed less
appropriate for a meeting with the one-time president and CEO of the Simpson Industrial Group, but at
least Jessica's willingness to surrender her kitchen as an impromptu conference room had let him keep
this meeting out of the public eye.
      Not that the present confidentiality would help much when Mike's cabinet found out what they were
discussing. He shuddered at the thought of how Melissa Mailey, for example, would react when she
discovered that her President had been negotiating anything at all with their arch enemy.
      "I must confess," Simpson said after a moment in a poisonously dry tone, "that I find a certain
degree of irony in this."
       "I doubt you find it any more ironic than I do," Mike told him levelly.
       "Maybe not, but after the way you turned me into some sort of Antichrist in the elections, I have to
admire the sheer gall it must have taken for you to suggest anything of the sort."
       "Gall doesn't come into it," Mike shot back, then shrugged his broad, powerful shoulders. "Look,
Simpson, I don't like you very much. And God knows you've made it plain enough that you like me even
less. But the simple fact is that there's no one else in Grantville who'd even know where to begin with a
project like this one."
       "Well, that's certainly a refreshing admission." Simpson's lips twitched in what, in another man, might
have been called a ghost of a smile, but there was very little humor in his eyes. "I suppose I should be
flattered that you're willing to grant my expertise in any field."
       Mike felt his temper try to flare. He was, by nature, a passionate man, and learning the
self-discipline required to control those passions—and his temper—had not come easily to him. But it
was a lesson he'd mastered long ago, and although Simpson made it more difficult than most, he wasn't
about to forget it now.
       "We can sit here pissing in each other's soup all afternoon, if you like," he said instead, throwing the
crudity deliberately into the midst of the conversation. "Or we can deal with the reason I came over.
Which would you prefer?"
       Something flickered in Simpson's eyes. For a moment, Mike thought it was the other man's temper.
Then he realized it had been something else. A moment of . . . recognition, perhaps. Or possibly simply
an awareness that Mike had no intention of rising to his jibes and giving him the satisfaction of losing his
temper.
       "Tell me exactly what you have in mind," the ex-CEO said after only the briefest pause.
       "It's simple enough." Mike leaned forward in his chair, planting his forearms on the table. "Eddie
Cantrell came to see me with the initial proposal. He brought along a stack of reference books, and it
turns out that he's got an entire stash of other books we never guessed he had. I should've made a point
of going over there and going through the Four Musketeers' library myself. Everybody in town's known
for years that the four of them were absolutely buggy where military history and war games were
concerned."
       He shook his head, eyes momentarily unfocused as he considered the treasure trove he and Frank
Jackson had discovered in Eddie and Larry Wild's bookshelves.
       "Anyway," he continued briskly, "Eddie has decided that we need a U.S. Navy, and he set out
single-handedly to do something about it. Which is how he came up with this."
       Mike took a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and slid it across the table. Simpson's
eyes flicked to it in a casual, almost dismissive glance. Then they snapped back, and he smoothed the
sketch's creases as he frowned down at it.
       "Cantrell did this?"
       "Yeah. He took a course in drafting over at the high school a couple of years ago. Not," Mike
added dryly, "that it really prepared him for a career as a maritime engineer."
       "I'd say that's a bit of an understatement." Simpson's attention was on the figures listed in the data
block in the upper left corner of Eddie's sketch, and he seemed momentarily to have forgotten his
obvious dislike for the man across the table from him. He studied the numbers for several seconds, then
snorted in something very like amusement.
       "This displacement estimate of his has got to be way low," he said. "And even if it weren't, there's
no way he's going to get by with a six-foot draft!" He shook his head. "I'd have to do some volume
calculations to be certain, but even at his estimated tonnage, this thing is going to draw ten or twelve feet,
minimum, and that's too deep for riverine conditions."
       Mike chuckled, and Simpson looked quickly up from the sketch.
       "I said something funny?" he inquired in a voice which had suddenly remembered its frost.
      "No, not really. But you did just demonstrate exactly why I'm sitting here this morning. Do you
really think that anyone else in Grantville—or anywhere else in seventeenth-century Europe, for that
matter!—could rattle off what you just did?"
      "I suppose not," Simpson said after a moment. "Of course, you realize that it's been the better part
of twenty years since I did any hands-on hardware work at all."
      "Maybe so, but at least you did some once upon a time. And didn't your company have a piece of
the Navy's shipbuilding program?"
      "Not really. Oh, our electronics division was one of the second-tier contractors on the Arleigh
Burke-class destroyers' radar systems," Simpson acknowledged. He didn't seem to wonder how it was
that Mike had acquired that particular bit of information, and Mike was just as happy he didn't. The
breach between John Simpson and his son Tom was a deep and apparently permanent one, and Mike
had no intention of admitting that he'd discussed this offer with his brother-in-law at some length before
approaching Tom's father.
      "But that whole division was really outside our core petro-chemical business," the elder Simpson
continued, "and we didn't have anything to do with the hull or the engineering plant. And I damned sure
wasn't handling any of the engineering myself! I don't want there to be any misunderstanding on that.
Translating this—" he tapped the sketch lightly "—into anything remotely resembling a practical warship
would require skills I haven't used since before I ever left the Navy."
      "There's been a lot of that going around lately," Mike replied without cracking a smile, and Simpson
acknowledged the point with a grunt of sour amusement. He looked down at the sketch for several more
moments, lips pursed, then returned his gaze to Mike's face.
      "How much authority and support would I have?" he asked.
      "As much as I can give you." Mike shrugged. "I'm going to have problems with my own people if I
decide to push this one. Quentin Underwood is going to have three kinds of fits the instant he hears about
it, and some of the others aren't going to be far behind. Especially not when they find out how many
railroad rails we're going to be asking for! But that's not really the worst of it. What's really going to stick
in their craws is the impact this kind of diversion of effort will have on all our other projects."
      "They'd better get used to it," Simpson said, and his dark eyes sharpened as if to impale Mike.
"And so had you."
      "What does that mean?" Mike demanded, not quite able to prevent himself from bristling.
      "I may not have the library your young Mr. Cantrell does, 'Mr. President,' but I've been something
of a student of military history in my time, myself." Simpson's smile was cold. "Do you know what
ultimately brought about the downfall of the Swedish Empire?"
      "Gustav Adolf was killed," Mike replied.
      "Yes, he was. But that wasn't what prevented the Swedes from making their empire stand up. His
generals, and especially Torstensson, Baner, and Oxenstierna, had learned their trade well enough to
take over from him. What they didn't have was the economy or the manpower to take on the rest of
Europe head-on. That was what really devastated Germany during the Thirty Years War. The only way
to raise the manpower the Swedes needed, especially when the French turned against them, was to hire
what amounted to mercenaries. And then they had to find a way to pay for them."
      He shook his head.
      "Don't misunderstand me. Gustavus Adolfus and Sweden probably went further than anyone else in
the seventeenth century in rationalizing their manpower resources and creating a standing army out of
their own population. But the problem was that Sweden simply didn't have the population density to
sustain armies of the size it needed. Just as it didn't have the tax base to create the revenues armies that
size—whether raised out of its own population or by hiring mercenaries—demanded."
      He shrugged.
      "So, ultimately, the only real option Sweden saw was to attempt to make war pay for itself by
plundering its enemies and extracting the necessary money in 'contributions' from the populations of the
territory it occupied. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was only so much blood in the turnip . . . and
it wasn't enough. Some historians still argue that the Swedish Empire really collapsed only when Charles
XII finally lost to Peter the Great, but the fact is that it was ultimately unsustainable simply because it
lacked the financial and population bases to support it, especially against the inevitable coalitions of
nations with larger populations and deeper pockets. And whatever else we may have changed by arriving
here, we haven't changed Sweden's demographics."
       "I'm aware of that."
       In the wrong tone, that sentence could have been dismissive, or a challenge, but it didn't come out
that way. In fact, Mike was more than a little surprised by Simpson's analysis. Which, he thought, was
probably because the man had shown absolutely no ability or inclination to analyze the social and political
realities the transplanted Americans faced with the same acuity.
       "In that case," Simpson said levelly, "it's time that you faced the implications. The military
implications."
       Mike started to reply, but Simpson's raised hand stopped him. It wouldn't have, if it had been the
arrogant gesture of Management dismissing Labor from consideration. But to Mike's considerable
astonishment, it wasn't. It wasn't exactly a gesture of warmth, but it wasn't overtly discourteous or
dismissive, either.
       "You've made your policies and political platform abundantly clear," Simpson said. "And you've
also made it abundantly clear that you intend to put the platform you ran on into effect. I won't pretend I
like that, any more that I'll pretend I . . . enjoyed the way you campaigned."
       A core of anger glowed in his eyes, but, to his credit, he kept it out of his voice.
       "I'll grant you the strength of your own convictions and your sincerity. I don't agree with you, and I
hope to hell your social policies don't turn into a complete and total disaster, but that's a fight I've already
lost. And I understand your position on the creation of a general . . . industrial infrastructure, for want of a
better term. It may surprise you to discover that I actually agree with you, to an extent. There's no way
the seventeenth century's ramshackle, top-down excuses for nation states could possibly hope to match
the sorts of technological innovations we could introduce, any more than the Soviet Union was able to
match the U.S.'s tech and industrial base back home. To match us, they'd have to become like us, and
we saw back home what happened to the Soviets when they tried to do that."
       Mike gazed at the other man with carefully concealed surprise. He and his cabinet had never made
any particular secret of their commitment to spreading innovations as widely as possible, but he and his
inner circle had never explicitly made the argument Simpson just had. Partly that was to avoid tipping
their hand to any seventeenth-century opponent too stupid to see the sucker punch coming, but another
reason was that even some of his own cabinet—like Quentin Underwood—would have had conniption
fits if they'd realized just how much of his "secret technological advantages" he was willing to give away to
bring it about. And Mike had never expected John Chandler Simpson, of all people, to recognize what
he had in mind . . . or to acknowledge that his strategy made any sort of sense.
       "Unfortunately," Simpson's chair creaked as he leaned back in it and folded his arms, "what
happened to the Soviets happened during a cold war. Whatever our proxies might have been doing
around the periphery, we weren't locked in a direct, life-or-death battlefield confrontation with them. But
that's precisely the position Gustav is in right now, and if Sweden goes down, so do we."
       "I'm aware of that, too," Mike said. "That's why we organized an army under Frank Jackson in the
first place." He grimaced. "Not that sending up-timers out to get shot at is the most efficient imaginable
use of their knowledge and skills!"
       "Exactly," Simpson said. If possible, the industrialist liked Frank Jackson even less than he liked
Mike Stearns, but once again, that seemed to be beside the point to him, and he leaned forward once
more, stabbing the tabletop with an emphatic finger. "As a matter of fact, it's the worst possible use of
their knowledge and skills. And sending them into the field, even with the advantages we can give them in
terms of modern weapons, is inevitably going to lead to casualties. And every casualty we suffer is going
to cost us irreplaceable 'knowledge capital.' "
      "Are you suggesting that we refuse to risk any of our people and expect Gustav Adolf to foot the
entire bill while we just sit around?" Mike demanded. He couldn't quite believe he was having this
discussion in the first place, or, in the second, that it seemed Simpson had a brain, after all. The other
man certainly hadn't given any sign of it during the constitutional debate or his campaign for the
presidency!
      "Of course we can't do that, either," Simpson replied. "But in the end, it's really going to come down
to how effective an army Gustav can raise and maintain in the field."
      "Wait a minute. Wasn't your entire original argument that he doesn't have the money or the
population to support a big enough army whatever he does?"
      "Yes, it was. But I didn't say anything about army size just now. What I said was that it came down
to the effectiveness of his army. There's a difference between sheer size and combat power. In a way,
you've already acknowledged that by using Jackson and his troops to give Gustav a qualitative edge at
places like the Wartburg and the Alte Veste. But doing it that way wastes our most precious resource.
What we have to do is to make that qualitative edge integral to Gustav's own forces. He's got to get his
manpower requirements down, and the only way for him to do that is for us to take up the slack by
providing him with superior weapons and the training and techniques to use them properly, so that his
men make up in individual effectiveness what they lose in numbers."
      Simpson paused and snorted suddenly with genuine humor, and one of Mike's eyebrows rose
questioningly.
      "I was just thinking about the presumptuousness involved in 'teaching' one of the greatest captains of
history his trade," the industrialist explained. "But that's exactly what it comes down to, in the end. We've
got to give him the tools and show him how to use them in a way which will ease the pressure on his
population. Give him smaller armies, with the sort of waterborne logistical support your young Mr.
Cantrell is advocating, and the superior weapons to let him defeat larger forces, and he'll have a genuine
chance of surviving and holding this empire of his together. But the only way we can do that is to divert
however much of our own resources and capabilities it takes to support those smaller armies. What it
boils down to, is that we'll have to help him downsize—" his eyes glittered with undisguised amusement
as Mike stiffened in automatic resistance to the most hated verb in managerese "—and that will mean an
inevitable slowdown in how quickly we'll be able to build up other aspects of our infrastructure."
      Mike started to reply quickly, then stopped himself. Nothing Simpson had just said came as an
actual surprise to him. God knew he and his innermost circle had spent enough time grappling with the
same problems and the same limiting factors themselves! But no one else, not even—or perhaps,
especially—Frank Jackson, had laid out the points Simpson had just made in such implacably logical
order.
      And he was right, Mike realized. It was a bitter admission, and only the tiniest edge of its bitterness
came from the fact that John Simpson had elicited it. He turned his eyes back to Jessica Wendell's prints,
and his lips tightened as he stared at them sightlessly.
      He didn't want Simpson to be right. He didn't want to divert still more precious resources, and skill,
and knowledge to the military. What Europe needed was medicines, a textile industry, steam or internal
combustion-powered farm equipment. It needed steamships, railroads, oil wells, and telegraphs. It
needed widespread electricity, light bulbs, refrigeration, sanitation, sewage plants, and a food canning
industry. There were so many things it needed—so many whose mere existence would undermine the
aristocracy-dominated excuse for a civilization which was about to turn all of Northern Germany into one
huge abattoir.
      But to introduce those things, the up-timers and their seventeenth-century countrymen somehow
had to survive long enough. And surviving had its own cold, uncaring imperatives. Imperatives, he told
himself with what he knew was an edge of pettiness, perfectly suited to John Simpson Chandler.
      "You're right," he admitted, and heard the reluctance in his own voice as he did so. "We've already
been discussing possible weapon upgrades with Gustav and Oxenstierna—more 'building down' to
something we can produce in quantity instead of trying to use our own weapons as some sort of magic
wand."
      "I'm relieved to hear it," Simpson said. "But it's going to be just as important to show them how to
get the most out of whatever we can provide for them."
      "I'm sure it is. Unfortunately, aside from a few youthful enthusiasts like Eddie and his buddies, we're
awfully short on people who understand how to do that."
      "I'm not surprised." Simpson drummed on the tabletop for a few moments, and Mike surprised an
expression on his face which might almost been one of hesitation. If it was, it vanished quickly, and
Simpson looked directly back at him.
      "For what it's worth," he said, "I really am quite well grounded in military history. It's one of the few
hobby interests Tom and I share." An undisguised flash of raw pain flooded through his eyes at the
mention of his son's name, but his voice never flinched. "What we really need here is one of those
historical reenactors—somebody who spent his vacations marching around in a Union Army uniform with
a Springfield rifle-musket on his shoulder. But I assume we don't have any of those?"
      Mike smiled crookedly. "Sure we do—probably a dozen of them, at least. The first battle of the
Civil War was fought at Philippi, not more than an hour's drive from here."
      Simpson brightened visibly.
      "I should have thought of that, but I suppose I simply assumed that the local population was too
small to support many of them. I hope you're making them available to Gustav and his army? Someone
with hands-on experience like that with nineteenth-century weapons, tactics, and formation drill would be
worth me, Jackson, and Cantrell all rolled into one."
      "I know," Mike agreed, but his tone was considerably less enthusiastic than Simpson's, and he
grimaced irritably when the industrialist cocked his head in question.
      "Our problem is that most of them have skills we need just as badly somewhere else. Down at the
power plant, for example, or over at the mine. Dwight Rogers is a perfect example of the problem. He's
been a reenactor for at least ten or fifteen years, but he's also the only man in town with actual up-time oil
field experience, and that makes him critical to Quentin's oil project."
      "I see." Simpson studied Mike's expression for several seconds, then shrugged. "I see," he
repeated, "and I understand the problem. But I think you're going to have to consider this the first
example of sacrificing infrastructure to survival. We need those men—need not just their actual skills, but
also their ability to sell seventeenth-century professional soldiers on the concept that we can show them
how to do their jobs better than they can now. In fact, you ought to have people like that in Magdeburg
already, working with the Swedes there as military advisers."
      "Um." Mike stared out a window while he chewed that unpalatable argument. It seemed to be
Simpson's day for making him consider things he didn't want to think about, he reflected. And, once
again, Simpson was right.
      Damn it to hell.
      "Okay," he sighed finally. "You're probably No, scratch that, you are right. But I've still got to
consider how many birds I can kill with each stone." He pondered some more, rubbing the tip of an index
finger in slow, thoughtful circles on the tabletop, then nodded to himself.
      "All right," he said, focusing on Simpson once more. "I don't know if I can make this permanent
yet—we'll have to look at the competing demands on his time—but Jere Haygood's a reenactor, and a
good one. He was also the senior partner of the one civil engineering firm we had here in Grantville
before the Ring of Fire. Which means, of course, that there are at least seven things we need him to be
doing simultaneously . . . including training other engineers. At the moment, though, he's heading one of
the teams working with Gustav's engineers on improving the Stecknitz canal, which means he's already on
the river. But if we go ahead with this project, you're going to need someone like him to help you lay out
your shipyard, at the very least, right?"
      "It would certainly be an enormous help," Simpson agreed.
      "In that case, I'll send him a radio message and tell him to meet you in Magdeburg. You can discuss
the engineering aspects of this whole idea with him, and there are enough other projects going on in and
around Magdeburg that Pete McDougal probably really needs access to one of our better engineers on
an ongoing basis, anyway. And we can see about having him assigned as our official liaison to Gustav
Adolf's engineering corps. God knows we're going to need someone assigned permanently to that slot in
a teaching role, if nothing else, and that should also get his foot in the door with the Swedish officer corps
in general."
      Simpson pursed his lips, obviously considering the notion carefully, then nodded.
      "That sounds like an excellent idea," he said, and his tone was approving, if not precisely warm.
"And it certainly does kill multiple birds with a single rock. Of course, he's still going to be so busy with
other jobs that they'll undoubtedly interfere badly with his ability to function purely as a military adviser.
On the other hand, once we actually begin providing Gustav's troops with better weapons, we'll just have
to find someone else to assist him. Someone you'll be able to spare from other responsibilities then even if
you can't spare him now.
      "In the meantime, I would certainly be willing to make what I know myself available. And I wasn't
always an engineer during my naval service. Unlike Mr. Underwood, my own early experience was in the
combat arms."
      "That might . . . be very useful," Mike said slowly, with what he hoped was well hidden caution. He
had a sudden vision of Simpson ingratiating himself with the most conservative and inherently dangerous
elements of Gustav Adolf's army. Or, even worse, the CPE's more reluctant German princes.
      Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, he told himself that it was foolish. Conservative—maybe
even reactionary—Simpson undoubtedly was, but the most reactionary twenty-first-century American
imaginable was hopelessly and radically liberal compared to someone like John George of Saxony.
      Which didn't mean that Simpson wouldn't do his absolute level best to build his own little empire if
he had even half a chance. In fact, it would be asinine to expect anything else out of him. Whatever Mike
might think of him on a personal basis, no one was successful at the persistently high level of industrial
performance Simpson had demonstrated without being extremely capable himself. And that capability,
especially in a situation like the one the up-timers faced, would inevitably attract power like a magnet if
Mike allowed him to exercise it.
      If.
      Ultimately, he reflected, that was what it came down to. If Mike allowed his worst political enemy
to demonstrate that there was an area in which he was truly and provably competent, it could have
incalculable consequences for the future. But Mike was still in the position of a man with no choice but to
run even faster to prevent himself from falling.
      Besides, if I let a man like Simpson beat me just because there's one area in which he's competent,
then I'll deserve whatever the hell happens to me!
      "We'll have to think about that," he continued after a moment. "About the best way to make use of
your experience and knowledge, I mean. But in the meantime, what about Eddie's design?"
      "I think it has . . . potential," Simpson replied, accepting the return to the topic which had originally
brought Mike there. "It's going to need a lot of work to make it practical, but assuming that the
Allocations Committee is willing to commit the resources and we can come up with the manpower and
the funding, I think we can probably build them. Of course, once we do, we'll have to come up with
crews for them, as well."
      "I know." Mike gazed at the other man for a few more seconds, then inhaled unobtrusively.
      "If I sign off on it, the Allocations Committee will, too," he said confidently. "I don't say it will be
easy, but I'll bring them around in the end. But if I do, would you be willing to take charge of it?"
      "Not without conditions," Simpson said after a moment.
      "What sort of conditions?" Mike felt himself slipping into the natural stance of a negotiator, and a
small smile flickered around Simpson's mouth, as if he felt the same thing.
       "If I build them, then I command them," he said flatly. "It's not going to be easy, however much
support you can give me. I'd have to build a shipyard before I could start building ships in it, and part of
the job would have to include training the local work force I'd need. The same holds true for building
crews to man them, as well. It's going to take time and careful organization to make any of this work, and
I'm not really in the habit of involving myself in projects that fail. I refuse to oversee the expenditure of so
much of our resources just to let someone else screw up and misuse the final product when I'm done."
       He showed his teeth in a brief, fierce grin.
       "So I suppose that, in the end, it comes down to how much you trust me, 'Mr. President.' Do you
need my expertise badly enough to piss off 'General Jackson' and risk putting me in command of your
navy?"
       Mike met that flash of a grin with an unsmiling, level look of his own, and several seconds of silence
hovered in the Wendell kitchen. Then the President of the United States smiled ever so slightly himself.
       "Actually, I think 'Admiral Simpson' has a certain ring to it," he said.
                                                        ***
       "I can't believe this," Eddie Cantrell muttered under his breath. "Simpson?" He shook his head.
       "Don't even go there, Eddie," Mike growled softly, and Eddie flushed as he realized that he hadn't
spoken quite as much under his breath as he thought he had.
       "I had enough trouble with Frank and Quentin—not to mention Melissa!" Mike continued. "You
wanted your damned ironclads, and you're probably going to get them, so I wouldn't go looking any gift
horses in the teeth, if I were you."
       Eddie grimaced at the reference to "gift horses" and glowered for a moment at the flesh-and-blood
horse whose reins he held. In his considered opinion, horses were a very poor substitute for motorcycles,
and his posterior wasn't looking forward to the journey to Magdeburg.
       "Sorry," he said, after a moment. "And I meant it when I said I'd be willing to turn everything over to
someone else if they knew how to get the job done. But I gotta tell you, Mike—I'm not too crazy about
putting Simpson in command of anything, much less the Navy."
       "If we're going to do this at all, then he's the best man for the job," Mike said, just a bit more
positively than he actually felt. "On the other hand, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'm just as happy he'll
have you along for this little trip."
       Eddie cocked his head at Mike, then nodded slowly.
       "Gotcha," he said. "I'll keep the bastard honest."
       "That wasn't exactly what I meant," Mike said somewhat repressively, already wishing he hadn't
said anything about it at all. "Look, Eddie, you don't like Simpson. Well, I don't like him very much,
either. But don't ever make the mistake of thinking the man is stupid or incompetent in his own area. Or
that we don't need him just as badly as we need Nat Davis or Greg Ferrara. You're going along to help
him find the right spot for his shipyard. You are not going along as some sort of Gestapo agent. Is that
understood?"
       "Understood," Eddie replied contritely, and Mike shrugged.
       "Sorry. Didn't mean to bite your head off. But this is important, and we don't need anyone creating
still more problems to overcome. At the same time, if you happen to notice anything you feel ought to be
called to our attention, I expect you to do it."
       "Understood," Eddie repeated in a somewhat different tone, and Mike nodded. He started to say
something else, then broke off as Simpson came trotting around the corner on his own horse.
       It irritated Mike that Simpson had already known how to ride when they arrived in Thuringia.
Worse, the man rode Western-style, so Mike couldn't even put it down to an effete, socially pretentious
thing like polo.
       The beautifully tailored three-piece business suits which had accompanied Simpson to Grantville for
his son's wedding had long since disappeared. The older man wore boots, denims, a flannel shirt, and a
light nylon windbreaker against the late-spring chill of Northern Germany, and Mike was still a little
surprised by how much the change in clothing changed the man's image. The John Chandler Simpson
trotting briskly along the street looked very little like the supercilious city slicker who'd come to Grantville
so long ago. This man was tall and broad shouldered—as tall as his son, even if he didn't have Tom's
sheer mass of muscle. Then again, no one in the seventeenth-century was as massively built as Tom was.
Which meant that "not as massive" certainly wasn't the same thing as "ninety-eight-pound weakling," and
little though Mike might have cared to admit it, there'd always been far more muscle and far less fat on
Simpson's powerful frame than many another senior up-time executive might have claimed. The recently
past winter had wiped away most of the fat which had been there, too.
       "Gentlemen," Simpson acknowledged them in brusque, no-nonsense tones as he reined in his mount
beside them.
       "Mr. Simpson," Mike replied. Eddie only nodded, but he clambered up into his own saddle. Not,
Mike observed, with any particular grace. Eddie had learned to ride since the Ring of Fire, but only in the
sense that he no longer fell off the horse whenever it stopped. At that, he was doing better than his friend
Jeff, but it was all Mike could do to keep himself from breaking out into laughter at Eddie's expression as
he contemplated the long ride to Magdeburg.
       At least the youngster would be spared the indescribable motion of a coach trip over
seventeenth-century roads, and that was nothing to sneeze at. The main road to Magdeburg was slated
for improvement as an urgent priority, but it was going to be a while before it could be accomplished.
       "Don't forget to check in with the radio shack when you get there," Mike admonished, and Simpson
nodded. Grantville's limited number of radio hams were busy training more operators and planning the
construction of simple crystal sets to eke out and support the handful of modern radios which had
accompanied them back to Thuringia. It was going to be a while before there were enough of them for
more than purely limited use, but installing one of them at the new imperial capital had been a high
priority.
       "I guess that's about it, then," Mike continued. "We'll be waiting to hear from you."
       Simpson gave him another not-quite-curt nod, touched his heels to his horse, and started off without
another word. Eddie looked at Mike one more time, then shrugged and headed off—far less
gracefully—in Simpson's wake.
                                                       ***
       By the time they reached Magdeburg, a few days later, Eddie had developed a new, even stronger,
first-hand appreciation of the advantages of water transport in the seventeenth century. He would vastly
have preferred to make the shorter trip overland to Halle and then travel down the river to Magdeburg,
but there'd been a few unpleasant incidents along the river. Everyone agreed that they thought it was
only isolated bands of brigands—probably mercenaries who were currently unemployed because Gustav
Adolf had destroyed the armies to which they had once been attached—who'd turned to a little freelance
river piracy to survive the winter. That was the official story, anyway. Personally, Eddie was none too
certain that it wasn't a bit more organized than that. There were certainly enough German nobles who
hated and feared the up-timer Americans' impact, starting with John George of Saxony, himself. It
wouldn't surprise Eddie a bit to discover that one or more of them had been turning a blind eye to attacks
on said Americans' barge traffic.
       The situation was improving, in large part because Gustav had begun operating patrols of Finnish
and Lapp cavalry—whose fearsome reputations were well deserved—along the more dangerous
sections of the river. But for the moment, President Stearns and his cabinet had preferred to send their
two-man shipbuilding force to Magdeburg by a more arduous but less adventurous route.
       And "arduous" it had certainly been. Every muscle Eddie had seemed to ache with its own individual
protest, but that background chorus was nothing to the throbbing ache in his thighs and buttocks. The
inns at which they had spent their nights had been an experience of eye-opening unpleasantness in their
own right, and he was uncomfortably certain that he had acquired all too many multi-legged insectoid
boarders.
       But at least they were finally here . . . not that "here" was all that impressive. Magdeburg had been a
largish city by here-and-now standards before Count Tilly's troops had massacred the population and
burned the place to the ground in the worst single atrocity yet of the ongoing Thirty Years War. The
nightmare event had rallied opposition to Tilly and the Imperialists from all over Protestant Germany and
provided Gustav Adolf's army with one of the most chilling war cries of the entire war: "Magdeburg
quarter"—the promise to be just as merciful to Tilly's men as they had been to the citizens of Magdeburg.
       But Magdeburg's history, as well as its central location and its access to the Elbe River, had made it
the inevitable choice as the capital of Gustav's new Confederated Principalities of Europe. The heaps of
charred rubble surrounding the cathedral—the only structure in the entire city which had been spared the
torch—had largely disappeared now, and reconstruction was well underway. The sheer devastation of
the old city had given Gustav's architects the opportunity to design a proper capital, with a coordinated
street plan of long, straight avenues and spacious squares, and the skeleton of the new city to be was
plainly evident. But so was the sprawl of temporary quarters, thrown up in haste and without any
apparent plan or order, for the work force laboring upon the new buildings and streets. And it seemed
evident to Eddie as he gazed out over the site that the area outside the old city walls, where the
foundations of the new factories and warehouses were going in, had not profited from the same degree of
city planning.
       "Quite a mess, isn't it?" Simpson remarked.
       Eddie looked at him. The lengthy, arduous trip had forced him to alter his opinion of
Simpson . . . some. They hadn't exactly whiled away the journey in deep, philosophical discussion. In
fact, they hadn't spoken to one another any more than they had to. But despite himself, Eddie had been
impressed by how little Simpson had complained. Of course, Eddie thought resentfully, Simpson's
posterior probably didn't ache quite as much as his own did. At the same time, however, Simpson was at
least thirty years older than he was, and even though there had to be plenty of room for aches and pains
in those extra decades, Simpson showed absolutely no sign of them.
       Yet what had truly surprised Eddie was the calm, almost matter of fact way Simpson had accepted
the primitive nature of both their transportation and their accommodations along the way. He'd expected
the ex-CEO to demand the very best, and to throw temper tantrums if he didn't get it. But it hadn't
worked out that way.
       Simpson had displayed an amazing talent for hard, shrewd bargaining over the cost of their rooms
every night—almost as if the money were coming out of his own pocket, rather than out of the funds the
U.S. government had provided for the trip. And it had been obvious that he wasn't prepared to be
fobbed off with anything less than the best the inns had been able to provide. Yet that "best" had fallen
dismally short of anything he would have tolerated for a heartbeat "back home," and he hadn't said a
word. In fact, he'd accepted the limitations of their accommodations far more patiently than Eddie had,
and he'd actually tipped the staffs when they left.
       Eddie wasn't quite sure what to make of that, but it had at least cracked the armor of his
preconceptions where Simpson was concerned. Not that he was prepared to surrender his distrust just
yet. Simpson was still the arrogant bastard who'd tried to waltz into Grantville and take over the entire
town. And he was still the slimeball politician who'd thrown in with the bigoted rednecks who'd opposed
extending the vote to anyone who hadn't been born up-time. Which meant, by definition, that he was The
Enemy.
       None of which affected the fact that his observations summed up Eddie's own impression of
Magdeburg quite handily.
       "Calling this a mess is an insult to any other mess," he said, after a moment, and Simpson surprised
him yet again with a dry chuckle.
       "Oh, I've seen worse. Not very often, mind you, but I've seen worse. And given what they had to
start with, I'm actually surprised they've done this well with it so quickly."
       Eddie glanced at him speculatively. He'd been more prepared for Simpson to make some cutting
remark about primitive construction techniques and lousy seventeenth-century architects. Instead, the
older man's tone was merely thoughtful. Indeed, it might actually have been approving, mind-boggling
though that possibility seemed to Eddie.
       "Well," Simpson continued after a moment, "I suppose we should check in with the local authorities
and get off a radio message that we've arrived. This way, I think, Mr. Cantrell."
       He urged his mount into motion, and Eddie found himself—once again—following the rear end of
John Chandler Simpson's horse.
                                                       ***
       The streets of Magdeburg, such as they were, were a hive of activity. In fact, they were so busy that
Eddie quickly decided to swallow his pride, dismount, and lead his horse. The journey from Grantville
had been long enough for even his horsemanship to improve appreciably, but he knew his limits, and the
first time one of the clattering, wooden-wheeled carts came rumbling unexpectedly out of a cross street,
he knew he'd reached them. He managed to survive his horse's rearing protest at the sudden, frightening
intrusion, but it was a very near thing, and he scrambled out of the saddle with far more haste than grace.
       Simpson, on the other hand, simply sat there in the saddle, gazing at him with one quirked
eyebrow. His horse, needless to say, scarcely even tossed its head. Eddie would have loved to put its
calmness down to its innately placid disposition, but he knew it had far more to do with the hand upon
the reins and the rider in the saddle.
       Simpson waited until he was certain Eddie had the reins firmly in hand, then clucked gently to his
mount and led the way through the bustling confusion of workmen, carts, freight wagons, occasional
squads of Swedish soldiers, and street vendors. Eddie followed, glowering at the older man's
ramrod-straight spine and feeling like a total doofus.
       original cobblestones were interspersed with and crossed by muddy tracks—usually more puddle
than mud, actually—and Eddie was grateful that he'd worn boots instead of sneakers. Nikes weren't
exactly the footwear of choice when it came to wading through ankle-deep holes full of water and gooey
mud.
       Eddie hadn't seen so many people in one place, outside Grantville itself, since arriving in the
seventeenth century. And the activity around him very nearly approached the frantic industry with which
Grantville had expanded its housing to face the demands of the winter just past. The smell of smoke, the
clatter of tools, the bellows of foremen, and the incredible smells of too many people crowded into too
little space.
       The smell bothered Eddie even more because it was so different from what he'd become
accustomed to. He'd discovered, to his surprise, that seventeenth-century German notions of public
sanitation were far better than he'd expected from his limited knowledge of history. Melissa Mailey had
explained to him that was because he assumed that British history was synonymous with "history." It was
in fact true that, as a rule, public sanitation in seventeenth-century Britain was just as bad as Eddie
assumed—Edinburgh was especially notorious all over Europe for its filth, with London not too far
behind. But most German towns had a long-established system of cleaning up public refuse, including
human waste, with a class of people employed exclusively for that purpose. It was a system which
Americans despised, since it involved relegating the caste of waste-haulers to pariah social status, almost
like the caste system in Hindu India. Still, it normally served to keep the worst aspects of public refuse to
a reasonable level.
       The problem was that Magdeburg was, for all practical purposes, a brand new city. And one
which, he suspected, had already been sufficiently "infected" with American social and political notions
for the standard system of public sanitation to be functioning haphazardly at best. Not for the first time
since the Ring of Fire, Eddie was discovering that social change, in the betwixt-and-between period,
often had as many drawbacks as it did advantages.
       So, he was more than merely grateful when Simpson finally drew up outside the hastily thrown
together walls of a building two blocks from Magdeburg's temporary town hall.
      Half a dozen Swedish musketeers stood guard outside the American "embassy's" entrance,
accompanied by a single American in deer hunter's cammies and armed with a semi-auto Browning
shotgun. The difference between the sleek, up-time weapon and the clumsy Swedish matchlocks was
almost as marked as the difference between the Swedes' cold-eyed alertness and the American's obvious
casualness.
      Simpson dismounted slowly and handed his reins to the groom who came trotting around a corner
of the hastily assembled structure to take them. The same groom collected Eddie's horse, as well, and
Eddie was delighted to let him have it. Indeed, he hoped he'd never see the sharp-spined nag again.
      But Simpson paid very little attention to the groom. He'd paused long enough to remove his
saddlebags before he let the man take his horse, yet his attitude was very different from one he'd
demonstrated when he and Eddie had stopped at one of the inns along the way. Then, he'd taken
considerable pains to be certain that his mount would be properly cared for; this time his attention was
fully focused on the sentries in front of the building.
      No, Eddie realized. Not on all the sentries—only on Matt Lowry, the American.
      Simpson's frown was not a pleasant thing to see. He looked, Eddie thought, like a man who'd
gotten a sudden whiff of a three-day-dead skunk, and his own resentment rose in automatic reflex.
Obviously, the rich bigshot from Pittsburgh could hardly contain his contempt for the hillbilly in front of
him. Probably because Matt hadn't kowtowed properly in the face of Simpson's innate superiority!
      Eddie waited for Simpson to say something, but the older man only pressed his lips firmly together
and nodded to the trooper who was obviously the senior member of the Swedish guards. Then he slung
his saddlebags over his shoulder and strode into the building.
                                                      ***
      "You're here to do what?" Pete McDougal asked.
      Before the Ring of Fire, Pete had headed up the safety committee for the same local chapter of the
United Mine Workers of which Mike Stearns had been president. Now he was Mike Stearns' personal
representative in Magdeburg, at least until the rebuilding capital was ready for a larger American
presence. Whether he was there as an ambassador to the CPE or to serve the interests of "Captain
General Gars" was an interesting point, but McDougal had the natural diplomacy required to discharge
both functions at once.
      At the moment, however, that diplomacy appeared to be in abeyance.
      "I thought my written authorization was clear enough," Simpson replied coolly.
      "Well, I guess it is," McDougal admitted. He looked at Simpson with obvious dislike, but his tone
was reasonably courteous. "It just sort of took me by surprise. Nobody warned me you were coming."
      "Somehow, I'm not surprised," Simpson said dryly. "Should I assume that that also means that Mr.
Haygood has not yet arrived, either?"
      "No, you shouldn't. As a matter-of-fact, Jere got here yesterday evening, but there was obviously
some kind of screwup. He got the message to head on over, but no one told him exactly why he was
supposed to do it." McDougal shrugged. "One of the problems with radio messages when you don't get
to talk directly to the person who sent them to you."
      "That sort of confusion is something we'd better get over," Simpson observed. "But at least he's
here. And I trust that you'll be able to render us the assistance President Stearns assured me we'd receive
despite the confusion?"
      "I'll try," McDougal said. "But if Mike had warned me you were coming, I would've told him we're
way too shorthanded already. I don't know who I've got available to assign as a local guide. Jere doesn't
know Magdeburg any better than you do."
      "What about Matt Lowry?" Eddie asked. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut, but the
look Simpson had given Lowry had really rubbed him the wrong way. The notion of getting Matt
assigned as Simpson's guide as a way to rub the old-so-superior bastard's nose in his dependence upon
the hillbillies who surrounded him appealed strongly to the teenager.
      "Can't spare him," McDougal replied promptly. "Frank—I mean, General Jackson," he corrected
himself, glancing at Simpson from the corner of his eye "—made it standing orders that we have to have
at least one up-timer on guard here all the time. And Matt's picked up more Swedish than almost anyone
else I've got."
      "That's a wise precaution on General Jackson's part," Simpson said, and Eddie saw the surprise on
McDougal's face. But then Simpson continued in a coldly dispassionate voice. "I can understand why his
ability to pick up the local language would make this Mr. Lowry particularly valuable. It's a pity,
however, that the language appears to be the only thing he's picked up from the Swedes."
      "Meaning what?" McDougal demanded, his expression tightening with anger as Simpson's tone
registered.
      "Meaning that the Swedish troopers outside your front door are at least five times as alert as he is,"
Simpson said flatly. "It's pathetic. He's got twice the firepower of everyone else out there, and if it weren't
for the Swedes looking out for him, anyone who wanted to would walk right past him. Or worse."
      "Now just a minute!" McDougal said hotly. "Matt's been assigned here for over three months, and
nobody's ever come close to getting past him! And unlike certain people," he very carefully did not glare
pointedly at Simpson, "he was with the Army at the Alte Veste and the Wartburg. Did damned well
there, too."
      "He probably did," Simpson conceded, apparently completely oblivious to McDougal's dig at his
own absence from both those battles. "And I don't believe I expressed any doubts about his courage or
his willingness to fight. But there's a difference between guts and willingness and discipline, and discipline
is what keeps a man on something as boring as sentry duty alert, effective . . . and alive. The Swedes
have it; he doesn't."
      He held McDougal' eyes levelly, and to Eddie's astonishment, it was Pete who looked away.
      "Well, anyway, I can't spare him," McDougal muttered. Then he shook himself. "I'll have to see if I
can find you a local. How good is your German?"
      "Passable," Simpson replied, "but Mr. Cantrell's is better than mine." The calmly delivered
compliment—if that was what it was—took Eddie by surprise, but McDougal only nodded.
      "In that case, I think I can probably find someone. It may take a while, though. Do you have
someplace to stay while you're here?"
      "No."
      "I imagine I can find you a room, then. We're still working on the living quarters of our 'embassy'
here. I'm sure we'll get the whole thing finished up . . . eventually. But in the meantime, there's a sort of a
boarding house for up-timers and some of the more senior Swedish and Scottish officers. It's more like a
barracks, really, but it's only a couple of blocks east of here. We can put you up there."
      "That will be fine, given the state of the local construction efforts," Simpson told him. "I suppose Mr.
Cantrell and I should head on over and get ourselves settled in while you find us our guide. Will you go
ahead and radio Grantville to confirm our arrival?"
      "I'll take care of it," McDougal said.
      "Thank you. In that case, I'll be looking forward to meeting Mr. Haygood and our guide." He
nodded to McDougal, then glanced at Eddie.
      "Come along, Mr. Cantrell," he said.
                                                      ***
      As a citizen of the seventeenth-century United States, Eddie had become far more accustomed to
walking than he'd ever been as a twenty-first-century American. Which turned out to be a good thing as
he tagged along behind an obviously indefatigable Simpson, Jere Haygood, and their local guide, Dietrich
Schwanhausser.
      Haygood was a weathered-looking man in his mid-forties, with light brown-colored hair and hazel
eyes. He wore work clothes and high-topped, laced boots which had undoubtedly been comfortably
worn long before the Ring of Fire, and an old Army Single-Action Colt revolver rode in a black ballistic
nylon holster at his belt. He was built on the lean and rangy model, and he moved with a quick, boundless
energy that made Eddie tired just watching him. Simpson, of course, simply took it all in stride.
       Eddie didn't know Haygood well—they'd never actually met before the Ring Fire—but it had been
obvious from the beginning that the engineer wasn't a Simpson admirer. He'd been civil enough, but that
had been about all anyone could have said for his attitude.
       Schwanhausser, on the other hand, had been another matter entirely. He hadn't lived in Magdeburg
before its destruction, but most of his relatives had, and he'd lost them all. Apparently, that was part of
what had drawn him to the reemerging city as it arose like a dusty, smoky, chaotic phoenix from its own
ashes. The fact that he spoke more than passable Swedish and was already acquiring at least a
smattering of English had made him extremely valuable to the new capital's local authorities, but
McDougal had lured him away from them. Exactly how he'd done so remained something of a mystery to
Eddie, but the two computers McDougal had been assigned from Grantville's precious supply of
desktops seemed to have had something to do with it.
       Whatever the reason for it, Schwanhausser had become one of McDougal's primary liaisons with
the city government, and his familiarity with the endless construction projects which typified Magdeburg
had proven most useful. The fact that he and Simpson got along like a house on fire (not, Eddie admitted
to himself, perhaps the best chosen metaphor, here in the ashes of Magdeburg) didn't seem to be hurting
things, either.
       Eddie felt more like a half-forgotten appendage than ever as he followed the other three about.
Simpson's German was considerably better than his comments to McDougal had suggested. It wasn't as
colloquial as the German Eddie had been soaking up through his pores ever since he'd arrived here, and
there were times when it sounded more than a little stiff, even odd, to a seventeenth-century ear . . . or to
a twenty-first-century ear which had learned the language in the seventeenth, but it was quite adequate
for his needs.
       So was Haygood's. The engineer had started out following Simpson around with a somewhat
martyred expression. Obviously, his most earnest desire had been to be somewhere else, doing
something useful. But as the tour of possible shipyard sites continued, Haygood had become increasingly
animated. Apparently, the engineer in him was sufficiently fascinated by the task at hand to at least
temporarily overcome his antipathy for Simpson. By the time late morning had turned into midafternoon,
he was waxing positively enthusiastic over the possibilities.
       Eddie was more than a little surprised by that. And, if he was going to be honest, he was also a little
disappointed. Not that he wanted the ironclad project to do anything but succeed, of course. It
just . . . irritated him to see a good Stearns loyalist hobnobbing with John Chandler Simpson so
energetically.
       But if Haygood's reaction irritated Eddie, the way Schwanhausser seemed to respond to the
industrialist bothered him on a much more profound level. It was as if there were some almost organic
relationship between the two of them. One Eddie could sense but not really understand. Something which
had automatically located them in relationship to one another in some sort of hierarchy or continuum
Eddie hadn't even realized existed.
       He decided he didn't like whatever it was. Part of that probably stemmed from his ingrained distrust
of anything Simpson did and, especially, his suspicion of Simpson's empire-building tendencies, which
made him uncomfortable with the easy authority the older man seemed to possess in Schwanhausser's
eyes. But even more than that, he suspected, it was because he'd already seen quite a few
seventeenth-century Germans who seemed to find the role of bootlicker a natural fit.
       That was the one thing Eddie most hated when he encountered it. He supposed it would have been
foolish to expect every German in the seventeenth century to be another Gretchen Richter, or even her
brother Hans. And by and large, the majority of the German citizens of the United States had done a
remarkable job of adapting to the incredibly radical—by seventeenth-century standards—ideology and
political freedoms the up-timers had brought with them. In fact, the way some of them—like
Gretchen—had seized the twenty-first-century concepts and run with them sometimes frightened even
Eddie just a bit.
       But not all of them had adapted. Some of them had good (by their standards) and obvious reasons
for disliking the bottom-to-top changes the up-time Americans had inflicted upon them. Those were the
people who'd held positions of power and authority under the old order and found the notion of being
held accountable by the subjects over whom they had previously ruled but who had now become their
fellow citizens most distasteful. Yet some of those same former subjects seemed almost equally lost and
unhappy. Perhaps it was because they feared the changes were only temporary—that the United States'
enemies would succeed in destroying it after all. If that happened, there would undoubtedly be reprisals
against those who had supported the new order when the old one returned to power. And in some cases,
it was probably as simple as plain old uncertainty. A case of having learned the old rules of the society
which was being remade all about them so well that they felt uncomfortable, even frightened by the
ambiguities with which the new rules confronted them.
       Whatever it was, Eddie didn't like it when he encountered it, and he'd seen a lot more of it since
leaving Grantville. Maybe it was only natural for the people in the small towns and villages who so far had
had little direct, personal contact with the up-timers to be less certain, more hesitant. He hoped that was
all it was—that as the United States continued to expand outward from Grantville, its spreading influence
would erode that hesitation and replace it with the same sort of often fractious independence he'd seen in
Grantville itself.
       But it hadn't yet, and one of the results was that sometimes an up-timer, even someone who still (in
the privacy of his own mind) thought of himself as only a kid, found himself being deferred to and
kowtowed to as if he were a natural born aristocrat. No doubt some of them enjoyed that, but it made
Eddie's skin crawl when it happened to him.
       Of course, he thought sourly, watching Schwanhausser and Haygood listening intently to Simpson,
someone like Simpson probably ate it up with a spoon.
       " . . . need deep water close to the bank," Simpson said as he and the other two stood side-by-side
in ankle-deep mud, staring out over an Elbe River that was still high, wide, and murky with the spring
floods. The up-timer gestured energetically at the water. "When we send them down the launch ways,
they're going to have a tendency to drive downward into the mud if there's not enough depth of water."
       "How many feet deep, Herr Simpson?" Schwanhausser asked. Simpson looked momentarily taken
aback, but Schwanhausser smiled. "I have been learning your system of measurement," he reassured the
American.
       "You have?" Simpson looked down at the shorter German.
       "Oh, of course!" Schwanhausser chuckled. "Many of our 'honest merchants' are screaming to the
very heavens over the thought of adopting a truly universal standard set of measures, but the Emperor has
made it quite clear that the entire Confederated Principalities will adopt your system. And it will be such
a relief to deal in feet and yards which are the same from one end of the land to the other, instead of
dealing with 'paces' which may be one length in Saxony and another in, say, Westphalia!"
       "You can say that again!" Haygood snorted. "And what it's going to mean for engineering projects is
even more important. For one thing, we're going to make damned sure that when we get around to
building our railroads, 'standard gauge' means just that—standard gauge." He grimaced. "None of that
business of every outfit building its own private set of rails to whatever gauge suited it."
       Simpson glanced at the engineer and nodded.
       "I actually hadn't considered that aspect of the rail extension project, Mr. Haygood. Of course, I'm
sure that's only one small instance of ways in which true standardized units of measure are going to
provide immense benefits. Although—" he turned to Schwanhausser "—I suppose I can see why some of
your merchants might not find the prospect particularly delightful, even if that is incredibly shortsighted of
them in the long term. But as far as our problem goes here, I can't really give you a definite answer until I
know more about the design displacements of the ships themselves. Let's say that I'm probably going to
need somewhere around twelve feet minimum depth."
       "Um." Schwanhausser plucked gently at his lower lip in thought. "We should be able to find you that
much water, Herr Simpson. But to get it, you may have to extend your . . . launching ways further out
from the bank."
       "Mr. Haygood?" Simpson asked, cocking an eyebrow at the engineer.
       "That we can do," Haygood assured him.
       "Well, in that case," Schwanhausser said, "I think this area here might meet your requirements. As
far as I know, all of this stretch of the river—from there, at the corner of that factory's lot, clear down to
that small point in the angle of the bend—is still available. That would give you a frontage on the river
of—what? Perhaps two hundred of your yards?"
       "More like two hundred and fifty," Simpson mused.
       "Actually," Haygood said, casting his engineer's eye over the same distance, "it's probably about
two hundred and seventy-five. Closer to three hundred than to two hundred, anyway."
       "I will defer to your judgment," Schwanhausser said, then laughed. "I did say I was learning your
units of measurement, not that I have already mastered them!"
       Simpson chuckled slightly and turned his back to the river while he studied the terrain for several
minutes. They were well outside the old walls of Magdeburg. In fact, they were beyond even the area
already being developed for the new factories.
       "I could really use even more frontage than that, actually," he said.
       "We're only building three ships," Eddie pointed out. He tried very hard to avoid sounding like he
was nitpicking, but from the expressionless glance Simpson gave him he suspected that he hadn't
completely succeeded.
       "No, Mr. Cantrell," the older man said after a moment. "If, in fact, I agree to accept the
responsibility for building your ironclads, they will most assuredly not be the only ships built here. At the
very least, we'll be building additional tugs and barges. More importantly, don't you think it would be a
good idea to provide a little something in the way of support for your battleships? In one sense, after all,
it doesn't matter how powerful and well armored we make them, does it? If there are only three of them,
then they can only be in three places at once, and I can assure you that we'll need to cover more than
three places at a time sooner than you may expect."
       "Well, yeah," Eddie said. "But right now, all we're authorized to build is the ironclads."
       "Actually," Simpson said in a voice whose patient tone surprised Eddie, "we aren't authorized to
build anything at this particular moment. All we have is President Stearn's—" he managed to use Mike's
title without so much as a hint of sarcasm, Eddie noticed, and wondered if that was because of
Haygood's and Schwanhausser's presence "—assurance that if he decides to support the project he'll
succeed in obtaining authorization for it."
       He smiled very slightly at Eddie's expression.
       "Don't get excited, Mr. Cantrell. The President and I may not see eye to eye on a great many
issues, but I don't doubt for moment that if he decides to push the ironclads through, he'll succeed. In
fact, I expect him to. And I also expect him to support my proposal to construct a fleet of timberclads to
back them up."
       "Timberclads?" Eddie could almost feel his ears perk up, and Haygood looked interested, as well.
       "Precisely." Simpson nodded. "Timberclads should be survivable against seventeenth-century
artillery. After all, they stood up reasonably well against nineteenth-century field artillery at the beginning
of the Civil War, didn't they?"
       "Yeah," Eddie admitted. "Of course," he added in a more challenging tone, "they retired the
timberclads as soon as they could, didn't they?"
       "Actually, they continued to use them throughout the war," Simpson disagreed. "Once they'd
developed the capability—and had the time—to build better designed, more heavily armored vessels,
they did build all of them they could. But the existing timberclads continued to serve in supporting roles
until the very end of the war. And our problem, Mr. Cantrell, is that we're going to begin with the ability
to build a very limited number of heavily armored units—by seventeenth-century standards, at least—but
we're not going to be able to develop the infrastructure to build any more of them for quite some time.
'Building down,' I believe the President calls it, and rightly so. Which means that in order to project force
as broadly as we're going to need to project it, we're going to have to accept the units we can actually
build to do it with." He shrugged. "Timberclads should just about fill the bill."
       "He's got a point, Eddie," Haygood put in. "A pretty good one, in fact. Timberclads may not be as
good as 'proper' ironclads, but they'll kick the ass of any seventeenth-century 'warship' they run into. At
least on a one-to-one basis."
       Eddie turned the thought over in his brain, pondering it from several angles. And then, after a
moment, he felt himself beginning to nod.
       "You're right," he said. "I guess maybe I did get a bit too fixated on building the Benton or the
Tennessee," he admitted in a chastened tone. "It's not like we're going to have to run the batteries at
Vicksburg or anything anytime soon, is it?"
       "Probably not," Simpson agreed. "Not, at least, in terms of facing concentrations of true heavy
artillery. But don't look so downhearted, Mr. Cantrell. Timberclads should serve adequately in many
instances, but there will be cases where properly designed, well-armored ships with heavy artillery are
required, as well. In fact, the timberclads' actual function will probably be to carry out routine patrols and
shipping protection. When it comes to an actual standup fight with a properly emplaced battery or fort,
their job will be to back the ironclads up rather than get into the thick of it themselves."
       He sounded almost as if he were genuinely trying to cheer Eddie up, although the teenager found the
possibility unlikely.
       "In the meantime, Dietrich," the older man continued, turning back to their guide, "I believe you're
probably right about the basic suitability of the site. I'd like to get a little more of the river bank, if we can,
and I'm going to need enough area running back away from the river for the yard facilities themselves and
for barracks and a drill field, as well."
       "And eventually, at least, we're going to want someplace to put a decent drydock," Haygood put in,
as enthusiastically if the idea of a naval shipyard had been his own brainchild from the beginning, and
Simpson nodded without looking away from Schwanhausser.
       "That is probably possible, Herr Simpson," the German said thoughtfully. "It may be expensive," he
warned.
       "I suspect that if Gustav Adolf asks them politely, whoever owns it will be willing to be reasonable,"
Simpson said dryly, and Schwanhausser chuckled.
       "I imagine they might," he agreed.
       "Good." Simpson glanced up at the sun, and then down at his watch. It was an expensive electric
job which, unlike most of the battery-powered watches in Grantville, continued to tick smoothly along.
At first, Eddie had wondered if Simpson were buying additional batteries on the black market, but he'd
been forced to give up that cherished suspicion when he realized that it was one of the kinetic-powered
ones which used the wearer's motion to recharge its built in capacitor. Which meant, of course, that John
Chandler Simpson possessed a modern watch which might run for decades yet.
       Not that anyone needed a watch to guess what was on his mind just now, Eddie thought. The sun
was settling steadily lower in the west in a funeral pyre of red and gold cloud.
       "I suppose we should be getting back to our quarters," Simpson remarked, then grimaced. "I don't
imagine the street lights are going to be very bright around here after dark."
       "No," Schwanhausser agreed, and glanced back and forth between the three up-timers. "In fact," he
continued after a moment in a diffident tone, "the truth is that it isn't always safe for Americans to move
about after dark."
       "It isn't?" Simpson asked, and the German shook his head. The up-timer glanced at Haygood, but
from the engineer's expression he didn't know any more about the local situation than Simpson and Eddie
did, and the ex-industrialist looked back at Schwanhausser. "Is that simply because the local criminal
element finds the lack of lighting . . . congenial to its efforts?" he asked. "Or is there some specific reason
why Americans in particular should be on their guard?"
       "It—" Schwanhausser began, then paused.
       "Much of it probably is no more than desperation, darkness, and opportunity, Herr Simpson," he
continued after a moment. "Even with all of the construction jobs here in the city, some remain who have
no means of support. Some of those who lack work do, however, have families. We have enough
criminals even without those circumstances, of course, but it has been much worse than usual this past
winter. Armies, battles, and devastation to do not contribute to social tranquility, after all.
       "On the other hand, that situation seems to be improving now that spring is here and the pace of
construction has picked up still further. But I fear that there is another danger, one I have not yet been
able to convince Herr McDougal to take sufficiently seriously."
       "Which is?" Simpson asked.
       "Richelieu," Schwanhausser half-snarled, and his head swiveled as if he were peering about for
assassins. "Do not, whatever you do, underestimate that Frenchman, Herr Simpson! You and the other
Americans are the greatest threat he faces, and he knows it well. Did he not attempt to murder your very
children because he knew it?"
       Simpson nodded slowly, and Eddie felt a chill which owed very little to the approach of night run
down his spine.
       "Well, then," Schwanhausser said, returning Simpson's nod. "Be warned. There are rumors of
assassins and prices on American heads. No doubt such rumors would abound, whatever the truth
behind them, of course. That is Herr McDougal's opinion, at least, and there is probably some reason in
it. Yet I do not think that they are only rumors this time."
                                                      ***
       "That it," Alf Harrison announced, tipping back in his chair in front of the radio.
       "Thank you," Simpson said. He was standing behind Harrison, unable to see his expression, but
Eddie saw the radio operator roll his eyes. None of McDougal's staff liked the industrialist one bit. Of
course, all of them were Stearns loyalists, and most of them had been solid union members before the
Ring of Fire, which created two perfectly good reasons for their attitude right there. Simpson couldn't
have been unaware of it, but he certainly didn't act as if he were, and Eddie wondered whether that was
out of a sense of towering superiority which refused to acknowledge the slings and arrows of his social
inferiors. That was what he'd written it down as at first, but he was beginning to question his initial
assumptions. He didn't much care for that, because he liked things nice and clear, and he preferred for
the people about him to remain if not predictable, at least consistent. The thought that there might be
rather more to John Chandler Simpson than he'd assumed was particularly unpalatable, especially given
the unmitigated jerk Simpson had shown himself to be during the immediate aftermath of their arrival in
Thuringia.
       Eddie wasn't entirely certain why he found the idea so distasteful. Well, he knew part of the
reason—he didn't like Simpson, and he hated the very thought of finding something about the man to
respect. The ingrained suspicion and hostility which were part of Eddie's self-identification as one of
Mike Stearns' men undoubtedly played their parts, as well, he admitted frankly, yet he suspected that
there was more to it even than that.
       Maybe what it really came down to was that he'd never before encountered the combination in a
single person of truly superior abilities with the capacity to make truly enormous mistakes. Intellectually,
Eddie knew it was entirely possible for something like that to happen, but he'd never personally
experienced it, and it was an affront to his teenager's sense of absolute right and absolute wrong. Worse,
it made him wonder if he might be equally capable of screwing the pooch. Not a pleasant possibility at
all, that!
       "Will the commo link be manned all night?" Simpson asked after a moment.
       "Well, yeah," Harrison replied. "'Course there's not much chance Mike—I mean, the President—is
gonna be seeing this before sometime tomorrow morning." His voice was somewhat elaborately patient,
although no one could quite have called it overtly discourteous.
       "I didn't expect that he would," Simpson said calmly. "I was asking for future information, Mr.
Harrison. If this project goes forward, I'll need twenty-four-hour communications capability, and I was
simply wondering if it already existed."
       "Oh." Harrison had the grace to blush slightly, but he didn't go overboard about it. "Yeah," he said
in a much closer to normal tone, "we've got round-the-clock coverage. It's not like being able to pick up
your cell phone, but we can usually get the message through without too much delay."
       "Excellent," Simpson said, and nodded to him. "Come along, Mr. Cantrell," he said then, and
stepped out of the radio room and headed back up the short hall towards McDougal's office.
       He was finally showing at least some signs of fatigue, Eddie noticed, although they were still minor
enough most people wouldn't have noticed at all. Nothing more than a slight limp on the right
side—something even Eddie wouldn't have noted if he hadn't been following Simpson, Haygood, and
Schwanhausser around all day.
       "What do you think about the possibilities?" he asked as he followed the older man down the hall.
He hadn't seen the four-page, handwritten draft of the message Harrison had just transmitted back to
Grantville for Simpson.
       "I think . . . I think it's possible, Mr. Cantrell," Simpson replied after only the briefest pause, then
stopped just outside McDougal's office and turned to face Eddie.
       "I don't say that I think it will be easy, you understand," he continued. "But assuming that the
President is as successful as usual in prying the necessary resources out of the Allocations Committee,
and assuming that Gustav Adolf supports this as enthusiastically as I certainly expect him to and that Mr.
Haygood's services are made available to us, initially at least, then I believe it should be entirely possible
to set up our navy yard here in Magdeburg. Shipping all of the materials we'll need from Grantville will be
a royal pain in the ass, of course, but I don't see how we could realistically expect to be able to build and
launch them very much up-river from here. And the river itself is going to require quite a bit of
improvement before we can move them freely, even operating from here instead of Halle."
       "But you think the idea itself is really practical?" Eddie asked.
       "Yes, Mr. Cantrell, I do," Simpson told him with a slight smile which, for some reason, made Eddie
feel unexpectedly good. "Mind you, I can see quite a few aspects of your initial proposal which are going
to require some . . . refinement, shall we say? But overall, I believe that it's not only a practical idea, but a
good one."
       "Does that mean you're gonna take the job?" Eddie demanded with an edge of lingering suspicion.
       "Let's just say," Simpson said, "that my participation in the project is something of a prerequisite if
it's going to succeed." He smiled again, ever so thinly, as Eddie stiffened. "Of course it is, Mr. Cantrell,"
he chided. "Or were you under the misapprehension that there was anyone else in Grantville who'd have
even a clue as to how to make this work?"
       It was truly remarkable, Eddie reflected as the ex-industrialist resumed his progress towards
McDougal's office, how easily Simpson could go from making him feel obscurely pleased to absolutely
infuriated with only two simple sentences.
       Nor was Simpson finished infuriating people for the evening, either, the teenager discovered a few
moments later.
       McDougal looked up with something less than total enthusiasm as Simpson led Eddie back into his
office.
       "Is there something else I can do for you?" he asked.
       "Actually, there is," Simpson told him, seating himself in one of the chairs facing McDougal's desk.
Eddie started to sit in the other chair, then stopped. Sitting beside Simpson might seem to be ranging
himself with the outsider against McDougal, so he chose to stand, leaning against the wall, instead.
       "Oh?" McDougal sat back in his chair, his expression wary as Simpson's tone registered.
      "I wanted to ask you about something Mr. Schwanhausser mentioned to me earlier this evening,"
Simpson said. "He advised us to be cautious about our movements."
      "Not that again!" McDougal sighed, then shook his head wearily. "Was Dietrich bending your ear
about Richelieu again?" he asked.
      "As a matter of fact, he was."
      "Well, he's just a little bit loony on the topic," McDougal said. He shrugged. "I guess it's not too
surprising, really. He did lose most of his family when Tilly burned Magdeburg. A lot of the locals got
pretty paranoid after that happened. Now they see murderers and assassins hiding in every alley, and of
course the only person who could be sending them is Richelieu."
      "So you don't think there's anything to his fears?"
      "That Richelieu is sending assassins to Magdeburg? No, I don't think there's anything to that. And if
he were sending them here at all, he'd be sending them after Gustav Adolf, not us. Which doesn't mean
that there isn't enough 'street crime' here in Magdeburg to make it smart to stay alert."
      "Have any of our people—up-timers, I mean—been attacked?"
      "Jim Ennis got knifed about a week ago. Hurt pretty bad, in fact, though it looks like he's going to
recover fully," McDougal said. Simpson looked at him sharply, and McDougal shrugged again. "Lucky
for him, one of the Swedish patrols was passing through and heard him scream. He managed to run for it
after the one stab, and the thief gave up and disappeared back down the alley when he saw the patrol.
The bastard got Jim's wallet and his pocket watch first, though. Big windup railroad model, too, not
battery-powered."
      "So you think it was a robbery? A mugging?"
      "What else could it have been? The guy demanded Jim's wallet and his 'jewels,' then stuck a knife in
him. Sounds like a robbery to me." McDougal sounded a bit impatient, and Simpson snorted.
      "Doesn't it seem just a bit odd to you that he stabbed this Ennis after getting what he'd come for?"
McDougal looked blank, and Simpson shook his head. "I assume from what you just said that your Mr.
Ennis gave the 'robber' what he'd demanded instead of trying to resist?"
      "Damn straight he did," McDougal replied. "Jim's about fifty years old, and the first thing he knew
about it was when he stepped around the corner and the bastard showed him the knife! What the hell
would you have done in his position?"
      "Quite possibly exactly the same thing," Simpson said. "But my point is that he did what this 'thief' of
yours told him to. He handed over what the man wanted and didn't resist. And the 'robber' still chose to
stab him. You said the Swedish patrol heard him 'scream,' not 'shout for help,' so I'm assuming that he
hadn't even tried to summon assistance before he was stabbed."
      "This isn't the twenty-first century," McDougal pointed out. "There isn't exactly a cop on every
street corner, and there are some real hardcases and badasses hanging around here. Some of them
would cut your throat for a nickel."
      "I don't doubt it. For that matter, there were plenty of places back home where people would have
cut your throat just as cheerfully for even less. But usually, Mr. McDougal—usually, I say—even around
here thieves don't go around murdering people just for the hell of it. I'm perfectly well aware that there
are exceptions to the rule. But it's still just a bit unusual, I'd think, for someone who's been able to get
everything he demanded with only the threat of violence to go ahead and murder the person who gave it
to him."
      "Like I say, it's a rough neighborhood," McDougal replied. "People get knifed all the time,
sometimes for no reason at all."
      "Actually, people very seldom get knifed 'for no reason at all,' " Simpson disagreed. "There's
always some reason for it."
      "Maybe so, but there must have been dozens of locals who've gotten robbed, beaten up, or
stabbed in the last two or three months, compared to a single up-timer."
      "On the other hand," Simpson pointed out, "there aren't simply dozens of locals for each up-timer in
Magdeburg, Mr. McDougal. There are thousands of them. Statistically, Americans—excuse me,
up-timers—represent an extremely small sample of the total population. So if this was no more than a
random street crime, the odds against the thief picking one of the literal handful of up-timers in
Magdeburg must have been quite high, don't you think?"
      "Look," McDougal said, "why don't you come right out and say whatever it is your driving at,
Simpson. What? You think I'm just been sitting here on my ass ignoring some sort of master plot against
all Americans everywhere? Is that it? You're accusing me of not doing my job?"
      "I didn't say that," Simpson replied. "In fact, all I intended to do was to suggest to you that Dieter
might have a point. Of course it's possible that Mr. Ennis was simply the victim of an armed robber with a
particularly vicious temper. But it's also possible that the entire object was to make an assassination look
like a robbery. That was all I came in here to suggest. On the other hand, now that you ask, and after
hearing your reaction to my questions and my suggestion that you might want to be just a little
open-minded on the question, I have to say that, yes, it does sound to me like you've been sitting on your
ass—or maybe your brain—where this particular possibility is concerned."
      "Listen, you—" McDougal began furiously, but Simpson only shook his head and stood.
      "I didn't come in here to argue with you, McDougal. I came in here to try to get you to think.
Obviously, whatever your other virtues—and I'm sure they're legion—may be, thinking isn't one of them.
You do remember, as Dieter himself reminded me just this afternoon, that it was Richelieu who ordered
the attack on the high school? The high school in which your children were students? Why do you think
he didthat? Richelieu is capable of total ruthlessness, but the man isn't a complete psychotic, you know.
He attacked the school because of what it represents, and what it represents is knowledge. The
information Gustav Adolf needs and that Richelieu fears even more than he does the Spanish Habsburgs.
Well, he didn't get the high school, and he didn't manage to kill all of your teachers and all of your
children in one fell swoop, but that's not the only place knowledge is locked up, is it? It's also walking
around inside the brain of every single up-timer. And do you seriously think that Richelieu isn't perfectly
capable of and willing to attempt to eliminate as many of those brains as he can?"
      McDougal stared at him, jaw clenched, and Simpson snorted.
      "Apparently you do. Well, I hope the people responsible for keeping your President alive are a bit
more willing to think the unthinkable than you appear to be. I may not be one of his greatest admirers, but
if I were Richelieu, the only person I'd want dead right now even more badly than I wanted Gustav Adolf
that way would be Mike Stearns. You might want to pass that assessment along to him."
      Simpson's voice was desert-dry, and McDougal's jaw unlocked enough to drop ever so slightly.
Simpson observed the phenomenon and produced another snort, then glanced at Eddie.
      "Come along, Mr. Cantrell. I'd like to find some supper before we turn in for the evening."
                                                      ***
      Dinner was quite probably the best meal Eddie had eaten since leaving Grantville. In fact, it was in
the running for the best meal he'd had since the Ring of Fire, period. The "restaurant" was little more than
a very large tent—or, at least, a tarp stretched across two-and-a-fraction walls of what would someday
be a proper restaurant but which was currently still under construction. At least the kitchens seemed to
be complete, and The Crown and Eagle Bar and Grill was obviously the establishment of choice for both
the Americans—Haygood was already there when they arrived—and many of the Swedish officers
stationed in Magdeburg.
      The name was a nice touch, Eddie thought, and he rather suspected that The Crown and Eagle was
a franchise of the owners of the Thuringen Gardens back in Grantville.It wouldn't be surprising, since
everyone knew Gustav Adolf was planning to make Magdeburg his new imperial capital in Germany. The
city was already a "boom town," and the boom was just getting underway.There was certainly something
very up-time about the choice of names, and he recognized two of the bouncers from the Gardens. The
food was just as good, too, and he tucked into the steak Simpson had decided to treat both of them to.
      There were times when Eddie missed the twenty-first century with excruciating poignancy, and
memories of food had a tendency to bring them on. No pre-Ring of Fire American had been even
remotely prepared for the change in diet imposed by their transition to the seventeenth century. It wasn't
just the esoteric or "modern" foods they missed, either. It was the fact that the entire food distribution
system, and the food production system, as well, was so damned limited compared to the one they'd
grown up with. Steak, for example. It was generally available, but it cost an arm and a leg. Or
corn-on-the-cob. They were lucky as hell that they'd had seed corn available when they were kicked
back in time, but there hadn't been enough of it. Almost every kernel they'd been able to produce in the
shortened growing season they'd enjoyed after arriving in Thuringia had gone right back into seeds, rather
than onto people's tables. And tomatoes. Or avocados. God, Eddie had never imagined that he would
have been willing to contemplate homicide for a couple of scoops of guacamole!
      But at least The Crown and Eagle's cooks knew how to do justice to one of their extraordinarily
expensive T-bones . . . unlike the cooks in the inns in which he and Simpson had stayed or dined on their
journey to Magdeburg. Most of them had figured that the only way to cook beef was to boil it into a
consistency which would have made decent cavalry boots. This steak, on the other hand, was done to
medium-rare perfection (over an open-fire grill, of course!) and served up with nicely sauteed
mushrooms, and a salad of very early bibb lettuce (courtesy of the up-timers) with a vinaigrette dressing.
      There was even, wonder of wonders, a baked potato. Potatoes had already been introduced in
large parts of Germany before the Ring of Fire—to Eddie's surprise, since he knew that Frederick the
Great had had to force them onto Prussia in the next century—but they were still something of a rarity.
Of course, once he reflected upon the matter, it made sense that The Crown and Eagle would serve
them, given that so much of the establishment's popularity stemmed from its "American cuisine."
      Eddie luxuriated in all of them with shameless hedonism. In fact, it was quite some time before he
was able to tear himself sufficiently away from gastronomic considerations to pay much attention to
whatever else was going on about him.
      " . . . so the point, you see," Simpson was saying to a pock-faced Scotsman who was obviously
one of Gustav Adolf's officers, "is to eventually completely eliminate the pike from the battlefield."
      "Och, mon, you're daft!" the Scotsman declared. "There's never a day musketeers could stop a
hard charge of well-trained pikes without pikes of their own." He shook his head and thumped his beer
tankard on the rough-planked table. "The King's already increased his proportion of shot to pikes to
two-to-one, and that's higher than any of these stinking Imperialists. But any more than that, and we've
nothing to stop t'other side's pikes with, and there's an end to it. It might be that if all our 'new weapons'
could fire as fast as yours can there might be something in it, but they're not going to be able to, are they
now?"
      "I'm not sure exactly what sort of firearms are being considered, actually," Simpson admitted, and
looked down the table at Haygood. "Mr. Haygood? Do you?"
      "No, not really," the engineer replied after washing down a mouthful with a healthy swig of beer. "I
understand that they're still debating the advantages of flintlocks and caplocks. I know which one I'd
prefer, but the manufacturing end isn't my kind of engineering, and I've been kind of busy with other
projects, I'm afraid. So far, I don't think anyone's even suggested the possibility of a breechloader."
      "Given the difficulties in manufacturing proper cartridges—and, for that matter, fulminating powder
and primer caps—I'd assume that you're going to be looking at muzzle-loaders of some sort, at best,"
Simpson agreed, and turned back to the Scotsman.
      "I'm guessing that they'll probably be flintlocks, but the designs should include cylindrical iron
ramrods and conical touchholes. In that case, your rate of fire is going to be considerably higher than it is
right now, but you're right that it's never going to match that of up-time weapons. I'm sure that plans are
already afoot to provide you with rifles, which will let you open fire effectively at greater ranges, so you'll
generally have longer to shoot at an attacking enemy, but that certainly isn't enough by itself to guarantee
that you can stop a determined charge.
      "But you're missing at least part of the point, Captain. If you eliminate the pikes, then you can take
the pikemen and issue all of them rifles—muskets, if you prefer—as well. And if your entire army is
equipped with rifles and bayonets . . ." He paused. "Ah, they did mention bayonets to you, didn't they?"
he asked.
       "You mean that wee silly knife they're talking about hanging on the end of a musket?" The Scotsman
shrugged. "Och, and won't that be useful against some bastard with a twelve-foot pike!"
       "That 'wee silly knife' will be a lot more useful than you think, especially if your troops are trained
with them," Haygood interjected. The Scotsman looked skeptical, and Haygood showed his teeth in a
thin smile. "What happens when somebody gets inside your reach with a shorter, handier weapon?" he
challenged. "Say, someone with a knife who blocks your sword to one side while he rams it into your
belly?"
       The Scotsman blinked, and it was Haygood's turn to shrug.
       "Trust me, properly used, a bayoneted rifle is very effective in close combat. As it happens, I'm one
of the very few up-timers who's had actual experience with the kind of weapons and tactics Mr.
Simpson's talking about." He did not, Eddie noticed, explain that his "actual experience" was that of a
hobbyist, and the Scotsman frowned.
       "Mr. Haygood is correct," Simpson said. "For all practical purposes, bayonets will turn every single
man in your entire army into a pikeman, if he's needed. And in the meantime, if all of your infantry are
musket-armed and trained and disciplined to employ those muskets in mass fire that's properly timed, not
very many pike formations are going to be able to close with them."
       The Scotsman looked more thoughtful, but it was clear that acceptance still ran a distant
second—or third—to skepticism, and Simpson cocked his head.
       "Suppose that I gave your musketeers weapons that could open aimed fire at a range of, say, three
hundred paces and expect to hit man-sized targets at that distance. And that I got their rate of fire up to
four shots a minute, at the same time," he suggested after a moment. "And suppose that your army had
nine thousand men in it, and that I organized them into three firing lines, each three thousand men long.
And then suppose that I organized your musketeers into ninety-six-man companies, each composed of
three thirty-two-man 'platoons,' and trained them to fire by half-platoons."
       The Scotsman was staring at Simpson, his eyes almost crossed as he tried to follow what the
American was saying.
       "All right, now," Simpson continued. "If you've got three thousand men in each line, then that means
that each line consists of thirty-one companies, or ninety-three platoons, or a total between all three lines
of sixty-three companies and . . . two-hundred and seventy-nine platoons, right?"
       The sandbagged-looking Scotsman nodded, obviously prepared to let the up-timer do the
mathematical heavy lifting, and Simpson shrugged.
       "Well, the math is actually pretty simple. If your musketeers can fire four times every minute, then
the total reload cycle for each man in your formation is approximately fifteen seconds. So if half of each
platoon in your first line fires, and then two and a half seconds later the second half of each platoon in the
first line fires, and then two and a half seconds after that half of each platoon in your second line fires,
and so on, your nine thousand men are going to the sending the next best thing to fifteen hundred rounds
down-range every two and a half seconds. That's almost thirty-six thousand rounds per minute."
       The Scotsman's eyes weren't crossed now—indeed, they were almost bulging, and Simpson
shrugged again.
       "But the total numbers don't begin to tell the entire tale, do they?" he inquired mildly. "Remember,
fifteen hundred of them are going to be arriving every two and a half seconds. Effectively, there will be a
continuous, unbroken wall of bullets pouring into any pike block foolish enough to try to close with your
formation, which I should think would have at least a tiny bit of an effect on its morale. Obviously you've
seen a battlefield or two of your own. How well do you think a formation of pikes would do when it
came to holding its ranks and carrying through with an effective charge under those circumstances?"
       "Carrying through?" The Scotsman shook his head as if he'd just been punched. "Mother of God,
mon! If you're telling the truth about the range of these 'rifles' of yours, then it would take a good three
minutes—at least!—under fire for the pikes to close, and that would mean—"
      "That would mean that they were trying to charge through over one hundred thousand rounds of
continuous fire," Simpson said, once again doing the math for him obligingly. "So if there were nine
thousand pikemen, and if one third of the shots your men fired actually hit, you'd kill each of them about
four times."
      The American smiled thinly, and raised one hand, palm uppermost.
      "Of course, that's under perfect conditions. It assumes that the terrain lets you see the target and
begin engaging it at extended range, and that your rate of fire isn't affected by something like rain, barrel
fouling, or something like that. And once the firing begins, smoke alone is going to cause individual
accuracy to drop off pretty severely. But I think you see my point?"
      "Aye, you might be saying that," the Scotsman said, and looked at Haygood, as if seeking additional
confirmation of Simpson's claims.
      "Mr. Simpson's description isn't exactly the one I would have used," the engineer said. "It sounds
more like what the Brits did to the French during the Napoleonic wars than the sort of tactics I'm trained
in. Of course, most of the differences are because the ones he's talking about would make the kind of
tactics you're accustomed to downright suicidal. Which is why we developed better ones which were
even more effective. Mr. Simpson's example was hypothetical, but in the up-time American Civil War, a
battle was fought—would have been fought—with weapons very similar to the ones he's describing,
about a hundred and thirty years from now at a place called Chickamauga, and in just two days, the two
sides suffered over thirty-seven thousand casualties. And at the Battle of Antietam, in the same war, the
two sides suffered twenty-two thousand casualties in a single day."
      It was obvious to Eddie that no one had ever explained it to the Scotsman the way Simpson and
Haygood just had—certainly not with the numbers the two of them had produced—and the officer
stared at the Americans for two or three more seconds before he drained his tankard. Then he waved it
at one of the barmaids for a refill and turned back to Simpson.
      "And what other evil little surprises would you be suggesting?" he asked, leaning his forearms on the
table and gazing at the American intently.
                                                      ***
      It was well past midnight before Simpson, Haygood and Eddie left The Crown and Eagle. Many of
the Swedish officers who'd helped fill the restaurant had been thoroughly standoffish when they first
arrived—no doubt because Simpson's reputation as an anti-German and anti-Swedish bigot had
preceded him. Despite that, however, most of them had been listening when he began his discussion with
the pock-faced Scotsman. And whatever his other faults might have been, it seemed that John Simpson
had a definite gift for getting at the heart—or, at least, the nuts and bolts—of an explanation.
      Even Eddie, with his wargamer's fascination with military history, wouldn't have thought of breaking
down the numbers the way Simpson had. He would have just waved his hands and insisted that the
weight of fire would have been sufficient to break the enemy's charge. Which would have overlooked the
fact that the members of his audience, whatever theoretical faith they might have in Americans' technical
ingenuity, were basing their understanding of what he was saying on their actual experience with
matchlocks. No wonder they'd had such serious reservations about the possibilities!
      But once Simpson had gotten the actual numbers across to them—and once the notion that
Haygood really knew what he was talking about had percolated through their brains—virtually every
officer in the restaurant had started easing closer and closer to the table the three Americans shared. And
as they'd closed in, they'd begun to ask other questions, as well. Lots of other questions.
      Simpson had done his best to answer those questions, and somehow Eddie hadn't been as
surprised as he once would have been when Simpson frankly admitted, from time to time, that he didn't
know an answer. When that happened, Haygood usually did, although there were times when even he
had to admit he was stumped. Two or three times, Simpson actually turned to Eddie, drawing the
younger man into the conversation when he rightly suspected that the question was the sort a war game
enthusiast might know how to answer. But there was a difference between the explanations Eddie gave
and those Simpson provided. Indeed, there was a difference between the answers that came from
Simpson and those which came from Haygood, as well, and as Eddie listened to the older man, he knew
what that difference was . . . and why it convinced Gustav Adolf's officers to listen so intently to the
ex-Navy officer.
       Experience. John Simpson had never served in the howling chaos of a seventeenth-century
battlefield, yet there was something about his voice and manner, an assurance that he knew what he was
talking about from personal, first-hand experience when he explained things to the hard-bitten officers of
the Swedish Army. Not, perhaps, the same experience as their own, but experience nonetheless.
       They kept him talking for hours before they let him go. And when they finally did let him take his
leave, it was with nods of mutual respect unlike anything Simpson had ever seen in Grantville itself,
before or after the Ring of Fire.
       It would have taken a superman not to have been pleased and flattered by such a reception, and
whatever else he might have been, John Simpson Chandler was not a superman. The after-supper
discussion had to have been the most enjoyable single evening he'd spent since arriving as a less than
eager guest for his son's wedding, and it showed. He was never going to be an expressive man, Eddie
realized, yet there was a new liveliness in his voice and eyes as the two of them finally gathered up a
Haygood who'd apparently had a beer or two too many and headed towards their quarters in the
boardinghouse where McDougal had rented rooms for them.
       It was blacker than the pits of Hell outside the restaurant. Eddie remembered how Mr. Ferrara had
once complained, before the Ring of Fire, about light pollution and how it interfered with observations on
their astronomy field trips even in rural West Virginia, but he hadn't really understood at the time. Not the
way he did now.
       Not even the endless months of the winter just past could have prepared him for the darkness which
enveloped the one vast construction site which was Magdeburg. Dark as those winter nights had seemed
at the time, Grantville at least still had electricity. Light bulbs were one of the items which had fallen under
strict rationing controls as yet one more utterly irreplaceable twenty-first-century resource which had
been taken completely for granted before the Ring of Fire. Because of that rationing, Grantville's homes
and businesses and public places had seemed woefully dimly lit to up-timer eyes.
       Compared to Magdeburg at midnight, however, Grantville at its dimmest had been lit up like
downtown Las Vegas on a Saturday night. The inky blackness of the muddy streets and alleys between
the half-completed walls of the buildings was broken only by occasional—very occasional—torches or
lanterns. In many ways, the widely scattered pinpricks of light only made the darkness even denser by
comparison, and Eddie buttoned his denim jacket against a chill night breeze as he followed Simpson out
of the restaurant. Simpson, on the other hand, actually unzipped his light windbreaker, as if he welcomed
the briskness.
       It would have been easy to become hopelessly lost amid all of the heaps of brick, timbers, and
other building materials, but they didn't have all that far to go. Besides, dark and confusing as most of the
city might be, Pete McDougal had insisted that the United States' official headquarters had to be
well-lighted—by Magdeburg standards, at least—at all times. That provided a visual beacon they could
orient themselves upon, and they moved out briskly (or, at least, as briskly as
Haygood's . . . cheerfulness allowed) through the muddy darkness.
       Haygood was kind enough to provide them with an enthusiastic, if not particularly tuneful serenade,
but Simpson wasn't in a very talkative mood. No doubt he'd used up a month or two of conversation
after supper, Eddie reflected just a bit sourly. Eddie didn't feel much more like talking himself, though. He
was too busy with his own ruminations, still trying to figure out how he felt about the surprising,
apparently contradictory layers of Simpson's personality. And so the two of them trudged along silently
through the deserted streets and alleys.
       Except that they weren't quite "deserted" after all.
       Eddie was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn't notice when Simpson abruptly halted. His
first inkling that anything out of the ordinary was happening came when he literally ran into the older man's
back. It was a much more substantial back than Eddie would have anticipated, and the wiry teenager
bounced backward a step and a half from the impact.
       "What the hell—?" he began angrily, but before he could complete the question, several things
happened at once.
       He and Simpson had just entered the faint spill of light from a lantern burning outside an alley mouth.
It was the most feeble of illuminations, but clearly it was enough for the three men who'd been waiting in
the alley to identify them. Eddie knew it was, although it took him two or three precious seconds to
realize the fact.
       "There!" someone hissed in German. "That's them—get them!"
       Eddie was still gaping, trying to get a handle on what was happening, when he saw the gleam of
naked steel and three burly figures coming straight for him. Confusion barely had time to begin giving way
to fear and the beginning of panic as he realized Dieter Schwanhausser had been right to warn them.
Whether or not the men in the alley worked directly for Richelieu didn't really matter. What mattered was
that all three of them were obviously intent upon shoving a foot or so of knife blade through one Eddie
Cantrell.
       He opened his mouth to shout for help, even as he stumbled backward another step. But that was
as far as he got before a hammer blow of sound smashed his ears like a baseball bat.
       The muzzle flash lit up the night like a lightning bolt. Eddie had never before seen a handgun fired in
near darkness at very close range, and the brilliant eruption of light stabbed at his eyeballs like a knife.
But if it came as a surprise to Eddie, it was far more of a surprise to their assailants.
       Eddie heard the beginning of a scream of agony, then cringed as the baseball bat whacked him
across the ears again and another stroboscopic blast of light assaulted his optic nerves. But that same
flash of light seemed to carve John Simpson out of the darkness, and Eddie saw the nine-millimeter
automatic which had materialized magically from somewhere under his unzipped windbreaker.
       The city slicker from Pittsburgh had dropped into a half-crouched shooter's stance, with the
handgun held two-handed, and the abortive scream of pain was chopped abruptly off as Simpson's
second shot hit the lead attacker dead center, just above the collarbone.
       One of the other assailants shouted an incredulous curse and lunged desperately forward, but
Simpson didn't even shift position. Haygood was just beginning to claw at the revolver holstered at his hip
when Simpson fired again—twice, in a quick one-two sequence that punched a pair of bullets into the
triangle formed by the would-be killer's forehead and the base of his throat.
       That one went down without even a scream, his throat and the back of his neck exploding in a grisly
spray, Eddie noticed almost numbly, and the third man hesitated. It was only the briefest of pauses, and
Eddie always wondered afterward exactly what the man had thought he was doing. He might even have
entertained some notion of throwing down his knife and surrendering, but if that was what he had in mind,
he didn't get around to it in time to do him any good.
       Simpson's point of aim shifted, and Eddie had a fraction of a second to wonder how the man could
possibly see what he was doing after the blinding brilliance of the muzzle flashes. Maybe he was actually
closing his eyes—or one of them, at least—as he fired. Eddie didn't have a clue about that, but it didn't
really matter, either. The nine-millimeter pistol barked twice more in that same, deadly rhythm. One shot
hit the third attacker perhaps an inch above the heart; the second took him squarely above the right eye
and slammed him back to slither bonelessly down the alley wall behind him just as Haygood's revolver
finally cleared its holster.
       Eddie Cantrell stood there, frozen in stunned disbelief. The entire attack couldn't have consumed
more than five seconds. Probably less. But in those few heartbeats of time, three men had tried to kill
him . . . and the stuffed shirt from Pittsburgh had killed all three of them, instead.
                                                       ***
      "Good morning, Mr. Cantrell."
      "Uh, good morning," Eddie half-mumbled as Simpson greeted him the following day. The older man
sat at the small, rickety table in the tiny "sitting room" of their shared quarters, carefully cleaning a
Browning High-Power automatic.
      It was the first really good look Eddie had gotten at it, and from the way the bluing was worn away,
it was obvious to him that the handgun had seen a lot of use. It was equally obvious that it had been
lovingly maintained during its lengthy lifespan, and Eddie wondered how Simpson had managed to
conceal it so effectively that Eddie had never even suspected he had it.
      "Are you ready for breakfast?" Simpson asked.
      "Breakfast?" Eddie repeated, then swallowed heavily, remembering.
      "Well, lunch, actually, I suppose," Simpson said thoughtfully, his face expressionless, although there
might have been the faintest flicker of amusement in his eyes. If so, Eddie scarcely noticed as his mind
replayed the previous night's events.
      The sound of the shots, especially so close to the United States' "embassy," had brought two
different Swedish patrols at a dead run. Not only that, but the sentries outside the embassy itself had
responded almost as quickly, and, unlike the Swedes, they'd brought powerful up-time hand-portable
lights with them.
      Eddie rather wished they hadn't. He'd seen carnage and bloodshed enough for someone two or
three times his age since arriving in Thuringia. He'd been there when Frank Jackson smashed his first
Imperial army of mercenaries outside Badenburg and he and Jeff Higgins, Larry Wild, and Jimmy
Andersen had faced down a second army of rapists and murderers who'd been their so-called "allies"
with nothing but twelve-gauge shotguns and outrage. He'd been there at the Wartburg, too—and at the
Alte Veste. Despite his brash, often bubbling exterior, there were nights when nightmares spawned by the
memories of those sights and sounds kept him awake, tossing and turning.
      But whatever he'd seen, he was scarcely hardened against it, and the sight of what Simpson's shots
had done to their targets on the way through had almost cost him his excellent supper.
      McDougal himself had appeared on the scene in less than ten minutes, still buttoning his shirt while
he stared down at the three twisted, blood-leaking bodies and the wicked looking knives lying beside
them in the mud.
      "So, Mr. McDougal," Simpson had grated, the harsh anger in his voice the only indication he
seemed prepared to allow of his own adrenaline and fear, "do you still think Mr. Schwanhausser is
overreacting to the possible threat from Richelieu?"
      McDougal had flinched visibly from the bitter, biting irony of the question, but he'd only stared
down at the bodies for a few more seconds, then shaken his head.
      "No," he'd said then, not that he'd had much choice about it. "No, Mr. Simpson. I don't suppose he
is."
      There'd been quite a bit more after that, of course, before anyone got to bed, and it had been still
longer before Eddie managed to drop off to sleep. Which was why he was so late rolling out.
      "Uh, yeah," he said, shaking himself out of his thoughts. "I guess I am sorta hungry, at that."
      He sounded a bit surprised, even to himself, and Simpson snorted. There was amusement in that
snort, but not the harsh, dismissive sort of humor Eddie might once have expected. Indeed, in its own
way, it was almost gentle.
      "Well, give me a few minutes to finish up here, and I'll treat you to lunch at The Crown and Eagle,"
the older man said while his hands briskly broke down his cleaning rod and packed it and the other
cleaning supplies away, then reassembled the Browning quickly and expertly. Eddie watched him, noting
the smoothness of the practiced movements, and dismissed any lingering suspicion that Simpson had
borrowed the handgun from someone for the trip.
      "You had that all along, didn't you?" he asked after a moment.
      "Yes, I did," Simpson agreed, not looking up as he finished reassembling the pistol and slid a freshly
loaded magazine into the grip. "The Browning is an excellent weapon," he observed, "although the
nine-millimeter round is a little short on stopping power, compared to something like the .45. On the
other hand, with a hundred and forty-seven-grain hollowpoint and about four-point-six grains of HS-6, it
will do the job quite adequately."
      "I . . . see." Eddie cleared his throat. "How long have you been carrying it?" he asked.
      "For considerably longer than you've been alive," Simpson replied, and looked up at last with a
slight smile. "There are times, Mr. Cantrell, when one should be a little cautious about leaping to
conclusions, don't you think?"
      "Yeah," Eddie said slowly, "there are." He paused, meeting Simpson's eyes levelly, then added, "I
guess everybody should bear that in mind, shouldn't they?"
      "I imagine they should," Simpson agreed after a moment, and something passed between them as
the older man met the youngster's gaze equally levelly. Eddie wasn't certain what that "something" was,
but he knew both of them had felt it.
      Then the moment passed, and Simpson stood. He tucked the Browning away into the worn holster
at the small of his back which Eddie had never noticed before, then nodded towards the door.
      Eddie nodded back, and the two of them headed off towards The Crown and Eagle. Quite a few
people looked at them—and especially Simpson—oddly as they passed, but the older man paid the
curious no attention.
      "By the way, Mr. Cantrell," he said casually as they approached the restaurant, "while you were
sleeping in this morning, I went over to check with Mr. Harrison to see if President Stearns had
responded to my message from yesterday."
      "Oh?" Eddie glanced at him. Something about Simpson's tone sounded warning signals. "Had he?"
      "Yes, he had," Simpson replied. "In fact, he informed me that he's accepted my recommendations
and that he and his cabinet have authorized me to call upon Mr. McDougal for assistance in formally
acquiring title to the land for our navy yard."
      "Our navy yard?" Eddie repeated, and Simpson nodded.
      "Yes. We're going to have to return to Grantville, of course. I'll need to spend some time with you
and your original plan if we're going to work out a practical design for the ironclads. And we need to
discuss with the President how many timberclads we'll need to add to the mix. And, for that matter,
exactly what sort of priorities for resources—other than the railroad rails, of course—and manpower the
Navy is going to require. And how we're going to organize that manpower and set up training programs."
      "Why do you keep saying 'we'?" Eddie asked. Simpson cocked an eyebrow at him, and the
youngster shrugged irritably. "I know you're going to tear my design completely apart and put it together
all over again," he said. "I accepted that when I first proposed it to Mike—I mean, the President. So,
okay, it wasn't a perfect design. I never claimed it was."
      "No, it wasn't," Simpson agreed in a coolly judicious tone. "On the other hand, I'm sure we'll have
time to work the bugs out of it. After all, it's going to take weeks—probably at least a couple of
months—of organizational work before we can get back to Magdeburg and really start setting things up
here."
      "Dammit, there you go again with that 'we' stuff! Just because Mike sent me along on this first trip
doesn't mean I want to spend my time sitting around in this mudhole while they build the city around us!"
      "That's unfortunate," Simpson observed. "On the other hand, I'm sure there are a great many people
who find themselves compelled to do things they didn't want to."
      Eddie stopped dead in the street and turned to face the older man squarely.
      "Just go ahead and tell me what you're so pleased about!" he snapped irritably.
      "That's 'Tell me what you're so pleased about, sir,' " Simpson told him, and Eddie's eyes began to
widen in sudden, dreadful surmise.
      "I'm afraid so, Lieutenant Cantrell," Simpson informed him. "Still, I suppose it's only appropriate
that the individual responsible for inspiring his country to build a navy in the first place should find himself
drafted for duty as its very first commissioned officer. Well, second, actually, I suppose," he amended
judiciously.
      "B-b-but I—I mean, I never— You can't be serious!" Eddie blurted out.
      "Oh, but I can, Lieutenant," Simpson said coolly, and showed his teeth in the edge of a smile. "Don't
worry," he advised, taking Eddie by the elbow and getting him moving once more, "you'll adjust quickly
enough, Lieutenant. Oh, and by the way, I imagine you'll adjust even more quickly if you remember to
call me 'Admiral' or 'sir' from now on."