Of course, in Thuringia, Frank, Gerry and Ron could be said to sound foreign anyway.
“Yes, Magda, it’s me. Frank. I’m calling to check if it’s okay if I—and Gerry and Ron if I can find them—go for a dinner and a few beers at the Gardens? Aidan is celebrating finishing summer school.”
“Aidan?” Magda was an artist in the kitchen and Dad had high praise for her as a business manager—her own father had taught her to keep books—but she sometimes had trouble matching faces to names before the sixth or seventh meeting.
“Sergeant Southworth.” Frank braced himself.
“Ah.” There was a freight of meaning in that syllable.
Frank held his breath. The general attitude toward soldiers among the Germans was not good. The professionalization of the U.S. Army—even Frank Jackson’s loose attitudes were practically Prussian by local standards—was helping, but few people had shaken off the attitudes of a life during wartime and Magda was no exception. Frank could also see her trying to place Aidan’s face among the small army of lifters and shifters that the Lothlorien commune had employed. A lot of summer-school students had supplemented their money by doing a few hours a week casual work at the new dye plant.
“Your father should speak of this,” she said at last, “but he is out. With the President, and Doctor Nichols.”
Frank could practically smell the snobbery coming out of the telephone, and saw his chance. Magda was still smitten with Dad—and rightly so—but she visibly wanted him to act more like the captain of industry he was well on the way to becoming. Hobnobbing with the President was about the speed she wanted him at. “Well,” said Frank, “if Dad’s with the President, we don’t want to distract him because Gerry and Ron and me are going for a beer at the Gardens with Aidan. Can you tell him when he gets home?”
Silence at the other end of the phone. Then: “Just so. Don’t be late, and be respectable, yes?”
“Sure, Magda. And thanks.” He put the phone down after saying goodbye with the definite feeling she was no more fooled than anyone had been the last time a couple of Dan Frost’s boys had brought all three of them home from where they had “just been tired” on a bench halfway between the Gardens and home. On the other hand, Magda hadn’t minded so much. They hadn’t been fighting, and as far as she was concerned overdoing it and having to be helped home was something boys did from time to time.
“A’reet?” Aidan was waiting.
“Sure. C’mon, we’ll see if we can find Gerry and Ron before we head back to town. I figure we earned them beers.”
Aidan grinned. “I’ve scrip and reason to spend it,” he said, and held up a wad of the new funny-looking dollar bills. Frank found them a bit embarrassing, frankly, what with the hand his dad had had in the design.
It was another of those oddities—weirdities, Frank thought of them—that the Ring of Fire had produced in the world, in the Year of Our Lord 1633 in Universe Whichever. With the influx of American technology and the political stability provided by the army of the new U.S., Thuringia had quickly become the strongest economic province in war-ravaged Germany. That meant the U.S. dollar was also the strongest currency in Gustav Adolf’s ramshackle Confederated Principalities of Europe.
On the other hand, given that “George Washington” and “Abe Lincoln” meant nothing at all to ninety-nine percent of the population of the CPE, Mike Stearns had decreed that new designs were needed for the various dollar bills. And, since Frank’s father Tom was the only manufacturer of a waterproof green ink in the world, he’d more or less been able to finagle his designs onto an unsuspecting universe.
Frank could live with an eight-point buck as the central symbol on the one-dollar bill, hands kneading dough for a five-dollar bill and a loaf of bread for a ten-dollar bill, even if he thought the puns were pretty outrageous. But, even for his dad, putting Johnny Cash on the twenty-dollar bill was going over the edge.
* * *