True, also, many—no, most; perhaps all—of the Americans they were seeking to recruit were not what any sane man would consider upright and moral persons. At best, their guiding motives were nakedly mercenary. For some of them, such as Simmons, you could add a desire to escape apprehension by the SoTF's authorities for criminal activity. For others, like the O'Connors and their employee Timothy Kennedy, their extravagant and careless spending habits had led them to drive a seemingly prosperous business into a state of near-bankruptcy.
As for the "craziness" of the Suzi Barclay girl, a subject on which both Gage and Gardiner could expound at length, what was to be expected from the offspring of such parents?
He rubbed his face again. In the end, all the problems were simply inherent to the business itself. If a man insists on sticking his hand into a marsh looking for gold, he can hardly be surprised if he retrieves filth and leeches as well as the gold he was looking for.
And . . .
There was gold there, sure enough. Being fair to the two. Whatever the moral and mental characteristics of the up-timers whom Gage and Gardiner had recruited to move to Vienna and provide the Austrian empire with technological skills and advice, there was no question that they'd assembled an impressive group. Amongst them, there was extensive knowledge of American machining techniques, mechanical design, and steam engine design, not to mention the seemingly ubiquitous knowledge that American males had with regard to automobile engines. There was even a fair knowledge of aircraft principles, something which was in scant supply even among Americans.
Still, it was a mess. The original plan had been modified after the end of the war between the USE and the League of Ostend brought a period of peace. That, combined with the outcome of the Congress of Copenhagen and the decision of the SoTF to relocate its capital from Grantville to Bamberg, was producing a massive wave of emigration of Americans out of Grantville to other parts—and not all of them to somewhere else in the USE. It seemed as if every nation in Europe had launched a recruitment program here, even the French.
Most of those who chose to leave the USE, of course, went to either Prague or Copenhagen or the Netherlands. Bohemia and Denmark were allied to the USE; and, while the new kingdom in the Low Countries was not, it enjoyed quite friendly relations these days. Nowhere in Europe had the now-romantic figure of the Netherlands' new queen Maria Anna assumed such legendary proportions as it had in Grantville. "The Wheelbarrow Queen," they called her, often enough. Even the rambunctious and surly commoners of Magdeburg seemed inclined to favor the Netherlands, monarchy or not.
Janos had hopes that, eventually, that same romanticism might help relations between the USE and his own nation. Maria Anna was, after all, a daughter of the Habsburgs and one of the new emperor's two sisters. At one time—not more than a few months ago—an archduchess of Austria itself.
It was too early for that, of course. Everyone in the USE was expecting a new war to begin the coming spring, with Saxony and Brandenburg, and everyone was assuming—accurately, alas, unless Janos could persuade the emperor otherwise—that Austria would weigh in on the side of the USE's enemies. Still, Janos had hoped to keep tensions between Austria and the USE, especially its Americans, to a minimum. Sooner or later, he was sure Austria would have to seek peace with the USE, and he didn't want any more in the way of festering anger than was inevitable in the course of a war.
So, clearly and unequivocally, he'd told Istvan Janoszi to instruct his agents to keep any transfer of personnel and equipment from Grantville within the limits of the law, as the Americans saw it.
That hadn't seemed too difficult a project, at the time. The up-timers had sweeping notions on the subject of personal liberties, which included the right to emigrate and included the right to maintain personal property in the process. The key figures, the O'Connors and the Barclays, were in a position to do that. Simply move themselves and their businesses to Vienna. Impossible, of course, to move the actual physical plants, but they could certainly take with them all of their technical designs—"blueprints," those seemed to be called—and even much of the moveable equipment. Over time, if not immediately.
Unfortunately, what Janos hadn't foreseen was the inevitability of what followed. Like anything dragged out of a swamp, be it gold-colored or not, the Barlows and the O'Connors were sticky. They had relatives and friends, the relatives and friends had their own such—and among them, what a surprise, were some individuals whom no one in their right mind would want to encourage to move into his own country.