“Too many, too long,” Mike growled.
“But they have had a taste of better, now. This economy is in a boom, if I understood the theoreticians I have read correctly. People are learning—forgive my borrowing a rather foolish metaphor, coined so far as I can determine by someone who had never so much as gotten his feet wet—that a rising tide does not lift all the boats. Something which the first author of that metaphor missed, Mike, but that many people here and now do not, is that the rising tide has surges and eddies that smash boats and drown people.”
“Francisco, I know all this, please—”
Nasi gave a slight bow of apology. He knew he had a slight tendency to lecture. “Forgive me. The point I seek to make, Mike, is that it is not those swimming for the wharf or outright drowned that need concern us. Our malcontents are those still in their boats, watching the harbor water come in through sprung planks. They have time enough from bailing to blame you for the light damage to their boat.”
“And I am to blame,” Mike said, “and don’t think I don’t know it. Thing is, I don’t think it’s an inescapable law of nature, like a lot of folks back up-time did. It’s the casualties you take to win a battle. Ask Gustavus Adolphus some time. It’s not pretty, but it beats losing.”
“Nothing, save a battle lost, is half so melancholy as a battle won.” Nasi liked that quote.
“You get that from Eddie Cantrell?” Mike asked. The young naval officer, for the time being in Danish captivity, was fond of quoting Wellington.
“Originally, yes. But I first heard it said in what I suspect was its original spirit by Colonel Wood.”
“Ah.” Mike nodded, suddenly more solemn than angry. Colonel Jesse “Der Adler” Wood had won—helped win; Eddie Cantrell had been maimed and then captured in the same action—the battle of Wismar late in the year before. In that battle, the colonel had lost his star pilot, Hans Richter. Jesse had become a grimmer man, since then.
Nasi let the silence gather a moment. Hans’ death had been a dreadful personal loss to many in and around Grantville. Still keenly felt, for all that his death had been the standard around which the new United States had rallied.
“You know,” Mike said, “all that—” He gestured to take in the last few months, the mass demonstrations and the flood of volunteers to the new brigades. “—is probably scaring the daylights out of our pamphleteer. Out of a lot of them, actually, but especially this Pestis guy.”
Nasi answered that with a grin. “Probably. For it speaks to him of yet more success for the Jewish conspiracy to ruin the honest and spill the blood of Christians.”
Mike chuckled. “So we could believe Pestis guy is a native-born asshole. But you suspect—?” Mike raised an eyebrow.
“Mike, I find myself asking who benefits by incitement and sedition.”
“Free speech,” Mike corrected him.
“Free speech, fine,” Nasi allowed, “but directed at provoking criminal activity. And who has a proven record of working with agents provocateurs . . . ?”
“A French term,” Mike said. “Richelieu? You think he’s funding this?”
“I have no proof. But the telling factor, for me, is how unlikely it is that someone might suffer misfortune enough to provoke this much hatred without becoming bankrupt. Without, even, losing that level of funds required to get several thousand Flugblätter printed and bound. That suggests to me that a better hypothesis is that the disaffected party is getting its funding from somewhere else.”
“Stipulated. It still isn’t a crime, is it?”
“No. But it may be something that criminals are doing. If they will take money from foreign powers—I do not assume, entirely, that it is France—to print leaflets, they might well take it to do other things.”
Mike chewed his lip. “What does Dan think?” Dan Frost had gone from being head of Grantville’s tiny police department to being a consultant to a good many town constabularies throughout the United States. Social advances were not just limited to the making of tools, they covered developments in technique as well, as Dan was proving. Like a lot of small-town cops, he had had little time away from the job for formal training and had substituted a slew of subscriptions to professional journals. He was putting the articles to good use, now, reselling copies of them around the USE and, everyone hoped, raising the usually pitiful level of European law enforcement in this day and age. That library of technique had also proved helpful to Nasi, when he had detection problems that conventional seventeenth-century counterespionage was ill equipped to handle.