1632

The Scotsman's freckled face was twisted by a wry smile. "I trust you'll allow me the occasional lapse?"

Taking Julie's chuckle for an affirmative, the smile became much less wry. "I'm not a boy, Julie, despite my looks. I've seen more ruin and destruction in my life than I care to think about. I think it gives a man-me, at least-a certain perspective."

The smile vanished, replaced by his own excessively severe expression. "For my part, you must understand that I am sworn to the service of the king of Sweden. No matter what you may have heard about mercenaries, I take that oath seriously. So-"

Julie took her right hand out of the pocket and placed fingertips on his lips. " 'Nough. I understand. You don't need a fretting female. You'll be gone a lot, and may never come back."

He took her hand in his own and kissed the fingertips. Then, taking them gently away: "Not willingly. But mine is a risky profession. No way around that."

They set off again, now walking hand in hand. Julie's steps, as always, had a certain bounce to them. More than usual, perhaps.

"You'll allow me the occasional lapse?" she asked.

***

Her first lapse came less than two minutes later.

"Tomorrow?" she exclaimed.

Mackay shook his head. The expression combined regret, apology-and stubbornness.

"I must, Julie. I was in Jena when the king passed through Thuringia, so I was unable to report. I can delay no longer. Gustav Adolf has established a temporary headquarters in Wьrzburg. But I don't know how long he'll be there. He's moving very fast, while the imperialists are still off balance. So I must be off-"

"Tomorrow!" she wailed.

***

If the horde of children who burst around the corner and swarmed past them some time later thought there was anything odd about two people embracing in public, they gave no sign of it.

Probably not. They saw a lot of that, these days.

Chapter 43

November was a whirlwind.

The first storm of winter, when it hit, seemed but a minor distraction. No one in Grantville or the surrounding area was worried about surviving the winter. Not any longer. Even with the influx of new prisoners-turned-immigrants from the battle at Jena, there was more than enough food and shelter.

"Shelter," of course, was often crude. The area surrounding the power plant had become a small town in its own right. The power plant's steam provided a ready source of heat, which was piped through a crazy quilt of hastily erected log cabins so closely packed together that they constituted a seventeenth-century version of a housing project. But, for all its primitive nature, the housing would keep people alive during the winter. And the crowded conditions provided another incentive-not that Germans of the time needed one-to quickly seek work which could provide the wherewithal to move into better quarters.

The problem, actually, was more a shortage of good housing than the wages to pay for it. Grantville had become a classic boom town. The coal mine was running full blast by now, using hordes of pick-and-shovel miners in place of the absent modern equipment. So were all the established industries, especially the machine shops. Even the school's technical training center had become a production facility-and the students, most of whom were now German youngsters, learned their trades all the quicker for it.

New businesses and industries were springing up like mushrooms. Most of them were of a traditional nature. Construction, of course, occupied pride of place. But the Thuringen Gardens soon had competitors, and lots of them, even if it was still the largest tavern in town.

Food, in the end, turned out to be much less of a problem than Mike and his people had feared. In addition to the grain stocked up during the fall, two new sources of provender had turned up.

The first was trade. In the mysterious way that these things happen, coursing through the consciousness of a nation's masses far below the notice of its political and military overlords, word had spread throughout Germany. There was a place…

A market for food, textiles, metal, minerals. Almost anything, it seemed. Paid for with hard currency-gold and silver-if you so desired. Or, if you were smarter, with wondrous new products. Fine metalwork; strange, silky garments; most of all, ingenious toys and dolls and devices made of some substance called "plastic." Luxury goods! Grantville's pharmacies and knicknack stores, oddly enough, proved to be the town's biggest trade asset. In weeks, they unloaded half-useless toys and gadgets which had cluttered the shelves for months.