“I’m surprised the Committees aren’t hoovering the things up,” Mike said.
“When they find them, they are. Usually when the tavern owners bring it to their attention—and quickly, lest suspicion fall on them. Heh. The Committees of Correspondence—especially here in Magdeburg—are, ah, territorial about propaganda.”
Mike chuckled. He, too, knew many of the firebrands involved with the Committees. They had no such troubles as the anonymous pamphleteer in getting their message across. They didn’t even have to threaten anyone to get vendors to distribute their propaganda in the open. Well, not in Magdeburg, at least, or in Thuringia. It was hard to know what practices they might be following in the smaller towns in such provinces as Pomerania or Mecklenburg.
“What they did not notice,” Nasi went on, “is that the author is the same as the author of Pestis. I, however, am certain of it. The style, the word-choices. As good as a fingerprint. Dan Frost’s suggestion of examining the letters in their small details allows me to say the two pamphlets come from the same press. We have, though, yet to find that press.”
“You’re assuming it’s in Germany?”
“Yes, I am assuming that. I have to. Loose as our borders are, from the point of view of smugglers printed matter is bulky and hard to transport unseen. Did a foreigner wish to circulate this material among us, he would do better to buy a press within our borders and produce it here.”
“Figures,” Mike agreed.
“We are trying to trace the type, and the paper. Dan’s experience of the police techniques of the future gives us methods that the perpetrators do not, I think, know of. The problem is that there are thousands of presses and hundreds of papermakers in the Germanies. Until we stumble upon something from that particular press which we can trace, we are stymied. The paper is even worse. No two batches are alike, whereas in the twentieth century there was quality control and everything was milled to the same grade. Now? The papermaker probably isn’t using the same mix of rags any more. Although we do know something about the shape of his roller.”
Mike sat silent for a while. “You think this guy’s a threat,” he said finally.
Nasi decided he had to approach this carefully. “Mike, no. This fellow, by himself, whoever he is, is not a threat. His pamphlets appear too infrequently and too widely scattered for me to think there is a big organization with him. It’s just . . .”
Stearns was ahead of him. “You want to know who’s funding this stuff. It’s the money that bothers you.”
Nasi nodded.
“You’re sure it’s not just internal, then?” Mike was talking slowly and carefully. Nasi understood his concern. However ebullient Mike had been with Dan Frost over the Congden business, he had himself had misgivings about it. Sometimes, he’d said privately, what looks like a crime is in fact the exercise of a right.
“No, Mike.” It was as well to lay the whole thing before him. Nasi had seen Mike’s response to faits accompli and it was not pretty. Not that Herr Prime Minister Stearns wasn’t above doing it himself, but he regarded it as a tactic for use on opponents, not on one’s own side. “I’m sure of nothing at the moment. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to find that there is a group—a small group, I would guess, or they would be more overt—who have done badly, but not too badly, out of the last three years.”
“Why not too badly?” Mike asked, and then: “No, forget that. Printers have to be paid. Papermakers, too.”
“Just so. Such a group would be smart enough to evade ruin, but not so smart as to see what is taking shape, in these United States of Europe.”
Mike flashed a grin, leaned back and stretched. “A mess, Francisco. An unholy, godawful, don’t-know-my-ass-from-my-elbow mess.”
“Quite.” Nasi stepped away from the window to pace a little. “The problem is that such a mess is a novelty to much of our population. The spoliation of armies and the ravages of plague, these things they could take for granted. They have been facts of life for so many for so long.”