Frank wasn’t sure he wanted any part of that kind of thing. Even if he’d be allowed to join the military at all, for that matter. Frank served as his father’s chief assistant and bottlewasher in the pharmaceutical end of his business—with his brothers, Ron and Gerry, being respectively the second and third assistants—and Frank knew that the powers-that-be considered him far more useful in that capacity than as another spear-carrier. He fell into the category of “critical industrial worker.” The one time he’d raised the matter with Frank Jackson, the head of the army had quietly told him he’d be a lot happier if Frank kept working to save ten sick or wounded U.S. servicemen than signing up to maybe kill one French or Spanish soldier.
“Wouldst have a beer with me?” Aidan asked. “In celebration?”
“Oh, sure. We’ll get Gerry as well, and Ron if he’s not busy.” That was something neither Frank nor his two younger brothers had any trouble with. Up-time and down-time attitudes to drinking had met somewhere in the middle, though probably a bit nearer the seventeenth-century side of the issue. The down-timers in Grantville had gotten used to water that was relatively safe to drink, and the up-timers had gotten used to beer that was worth drinking for its flavor.
“Uh, I’d better check in with home first, though.” Frank and his brothers Gerry and Ron had come home the best part of paralytic one night, and their father had gotten the nearest he ever did to angry. The sons all thought Tom Stone’s attitude was decidedly irrational. Not to mention unfair. He’d spent a lot of his twenties in alternative states of mind, after all. But now he regarded getting anything more than a little buzzed as a serious personal failing. Tom had pulled his usual sneaky parental trick of relying on his sons’ senses of personal honor and responsibility, and Frank felt he had to check in now when he was going for a beer.
“Okay,” said Aidan, “Telephone after we get out of the shower, yes?”
* * *
The telephone rang and rang. “Come on, Dad,” Frank muttered.
“No answer?” Frank heard the English accent behind him, and turned around. Aidan was out of the shower, and dressed up for the evening. Frank was briefly thankful that his dad’s dyeing business brought a lot of samples and spare swatches of cloth, so lately the whole family was very well dressed—except his dad, whose fashion sense had run aground somewhere around 1973.
“No, not yet—” he said, but then his stepmother’s voice came on the other end of the line.
“Lothlorien Farbenwerke,” she said.
Frank still found his stepmom’s telephone manner funny. Magda might have been married to Dad for well over a year and part of an up-time equipped household for a little longer, but for some reason she still retained a slight awe of the telephone. Television she had no trouble with, and the washing machine and vacuum cleaner she regarded as God’s fitting apology to womankind for inflicting untidy males on the world, but telephones still left her slightly nervous.
“Magda?” Frank found it best to give her something simple to settle into the conversation with. He knew she would have hesitated while the phone rang, looking to see if someone was around to answer it instead.
“Ja, hier,” she said. “Is that you, Faramir?”
Frank winced. Cringed, in fact. The big, big downside to a hippie upbringing, the thing that completely made up for the freedom other kids didn’t get, was the wanton cruelty with which the flower-children had named their own kids. He was, by his paperwork, Faramir Stone. And his brothers—the relationship wasn’t quite that clear-cut but his brothers they were—had the names Gwaihir and Elrond to live down. Any one of them would sooner have been called Sue. Every record bar their birth certificates—Dad had had this much decency—recorded them as Frank, Gerry and Ron. Magda, German right the way down, insisted on using the names with which their birth certificates had been gestempelt.
On the plus side, there were a lot of folks in Grantville these days with more exotic names, and apart from the few who’d bothered to look Tolkien up they were just three more foreign-sounding names out of hundreds.