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The Dreeson Incident(129)







Grantville


"The man will pay me to do it," Friedrich Klick told his brother-in-law Jacob. "For just one day. Of course, I'll have to practice with him and the others. He insists that it is to be a 'controlled, orderly demonstration.' We will arrive together. We will carry placards made of stiffened paper attached to sticks, which we will wave in the air. We will shout slogans. He is very insistent, though, that we must not act like plebians. No looting. No . . ."



"Where's this happening?"



"In Grantville."



"That's a big city now—must be twenty thousand people there. How many of you are there, making this 'demonstration'?"



"He would like to have between seventy-five and a hundred men."



"Not enough to make much of an impression."



"We will all be concentrated in one place only. On a plaza they call a 'parking lot' in front of the hospital. The Leahy Medical Center. It is right on their famous tarred highway, Route 250, so we won't get lost in some maze of crooked streets, trying to find it."



Jacob Menzer raised his head. "Why is he demonstrating against the hospital?"



"Vaccinations." Klick pulled a handful of pamphlets out of his doublet. "See. Even many of the up-timers thought they were dangerous, but they are trying to force them on us and our children."





"Vaccinations?" Andres Scherf scoffed a couple of days later. "Why are they worrying about these 'vaccinations,' Jacob? Don't you know that they perform autopsies there? They desecrate the bodies of the dead, just as Dean Rolfinck does at the medical school in Jena. But Rolfinck, at least, limits himself to corpses of executed criminals that have been turned over to him by order of the city council." He laughed harshly. "Which, they say, does wonders for keeping down the crime rate in Jena. In Grantville, though—and I have heard this myself from a man who talked to the sister of the employer of the man who died—the doctors use the bodies of respectable citizens who die at that Leahy Medical Center for autopsies. Or want to. True, in that case they asked permission and gave the body to the family, undamaged, when the wife refused. Or so the man said. But who can tell how many times they have desecrated the bodies of people who came to them hoping for a cure?"



Jacob Menzer, grave and solemn, worried now, nodded his head.





"They call them 'anatomy lessons.' Yes, I know this. It is not a rumor. Hans Hessburger told me himself. He learned it from his cousin, who knows a man from Kamsdorf whose cousin Franz is studying to be a 'nurse' there. They expect Franz to stand around a table and watch while a surgeon cuts an arm or a leg into layers and pulls out the veins and muscles. 'Dissection' is what they call it. And then . . ."



Gabriel Kratsch paused for effect.



"Yes?" Thomas Klau leaned forward, anxiously.



"Then they will expect Franz to do it, himself. He went to work at that hospital as a respectable baker, providing food for their 'cafeteria' that feeds the staff and patients. But then one of the up-timers tempted him into becoming one of them. A respectable Lutheran boy from Thuringia, cutting up the dead. Sending them into the resurrection with mutilated bodies."



"Who did you say this is?"



"The boy? Franz Brohm, from Rottenbach. The man in Kamsdorf is named Heinz Bickel. You can talk to him yourself. He will tell you the truth."





"We will have to do something about it," Kratsch said. "Can you talk to Friedrich again, Jacob? Find out from him what day this 'demonstration' is going to happen. What time of day. All that information. Orderly protest—bah! We will let them know what we truly think of their blasphemy."



* * *



Trent Dorrman, at Grantville-Saalfeld Foundries and Metalworks, bundled up the last batch of material they had found in the files that seemed like it might have anything, no matter how tenuous, to do with Jay Barlow, Caryn Barlow, Billie Jean Mase, and the other defectors to Austria. It had taken a while and involved a lot of overtime.



He put on a cover note to Preston Richards.



At the end, he added a postscript saying that the company had picked up several new temporary laborers lately. That was normal enough in this season, when a lot of casual laborers were having trouble finding work in their home towns, but he'd overheard several of them talking. It seemed like they'd been working heavy labor on the hoses and pump wagons in several towns nearby, and that Bryant Holloway had sent them down to Grantville to find work.



He couldn't help but think that it was sort of peculiar that Holloway, who was paid by the fire department, would send men away from the towns where they lived after he'd gone to all the trouble of training them for the fire watches there.