He looked at Rebecca. "You won by ninety-eight percent, in your district."
"Well, yes. I ran unopposed." She frowned at the cards in her hand. "And now bridge is getting boring also."
"Start losing, for a change," suggested her husband. "That might perk up your interest."
"Do not be ridiculous, Michael," said Rebecca.
"Fat chance," jeered her partner Melissa.
Grantville, late February 1635
"Well, I've got to say," Joe Stull said, "that it's suddenly become a real high priority on everybody's list to push the railroad through Kronach and all the way down to Bamberg. I guess that's the main thing I'll be dealing with personally and it'll keep me more than busy. The rest of the cabinet will have to handle everything else."
"No question that you and Aura Lee are moving with us?"
"Nope. Billy Lee's going to stay here with Chad and Debbie, to finish high school, but we'll take Juliann. There'll be some school there to suit her. I already talked to Constantin Ableidinger when he was up here last week. Or correspondence courses. Or something. We'll deal with it."
George Chehab frowned. "The decision's going to be easier for some than others. A whole bunch of families who work for the SoTF government are starting to agonize about 'do we go or do we stay?' Especially if half the couple's a state employee and the other half isn't."
Ed Piazza spread both of his hands out on the table. "We're not going to be cutting them any slack."
"How so?"
"Every office moves, just as fast as we can find office space in Bamberg. And we're not going to dawdle on that. Ideally, I'd like to get the whole move done in six months. We're already negotiating for leases. New construction, where we can get it. Temporary buildings, if that's all we can get. Vox populi, and all that. The voters said that we go, so we go. Make it clear to the personnel office. So they can make it clear to everyone who comes in and whines."
Tony Adducci leaned back. "Yeesh—that's hard-nosed. We're going, of course. But where's everybody going to find housing?"
"The CoC people are helping with that—locating rental properties and such. Encouraging landlords to rent. Not that a lot of families won't be crowded into a lot less space than they're used to, next winter," Chehab said. "I'll be pushing electrification and telephones. Not the way they're available here in Grantville, but at some sort of minimal level. Not that we can't live without them, if we have to. Vince Marcantonio's staff have been, all along."
"Vince and the others who've been in the regional administration there since the fall of '32 are coming up to give orientation sessions on finding housing and schools. Janie Kacere's going to talk to the career people. Stacey O'Brien, Tom's wife, going to talk to the wives and mothers." Ed laughed. "Do you think that this is the first redistricting I've overseen in my career? This is nothing compared to the grief an administrator gets every time the system redraws the school attendance boundaries."
"What's going to be left?" Vera Hudson asked. "After the government people go? Could someone pass the potatoes this way, please."
"It's not as bad as the doomsayers make it sound," Chad Jenkins answered. "Do you want gravy?
"The town's keeping the state library. It just doesn't make sense to split it off from the other libraries at the schools, or from the research center. So all the foreign visitors who use those will keep coming."
Missy passed the gravy boat, grinning as she thought of Thanksgiving dinner last year.
Chad kept talking. "And we're getting a sort of consolation prize. The Tech Center's being promoted into the SoTF Technical College, with a lot more faculty and an expanded curriculum. It's going to absorb the teacher training program that's been at the middle school. And the first two, maybe three, years of the Jena/Leahy medical training curriculum. Basic science and nursing through the RN, pre-med. That will be drawing a lot more students into town."
"A lot more rowdiness, it sounds to me like. Solid citizens leaving and flibbertigibbets coming in."
"Mother," Debbie said.
"The music people will stay here, too," Missy said. "A lot of them at least. For a long time. Because of the sound equipment."
"I don't actually see many of the businesses moving out, Mrs. Hudson," Ron said. "Not for years, at least. Especially not the ones heavily dependent on technology. Or electricity and telephones. Just think—the USE left the Federal Reserve here, even when it went national and not just part of the NUS/SoTF government. The Voice of America will stay here. Nobody can move the mine, either."