The Dreeson Incident(24)

He hummed a couple of lines. That must have been fifty years ago, give or take a couple. Right about the time he and Annie got married. Before he understood in his bones what it was about.



Over by the ATVs a boy, ten years old maybe, blew the horn and let out a whoop of delight.



Henry had been surprised at how much interest there was in his tour. Wackernagel said that if he was doing a good-will tour, he might as well do it right from the start and all the way over. People in the villages, both between Badenburg and Erfurt and on the Imperial Road from Erfurt to Fulda, had all seen up-time vehicles going back and forth before. Lots of times. They had not, very often, seen one of them stopped, where they could take a closer look, with a driver who was willing to explain how things worked. Much less passengers who were willing to vacate the premises and let them climb in and out, let the boys put their hands on the steering wheel and go vroom for a while, or anything else of the sort.



It was sort of restful, as long as people were more interested in the cars than they were in him. He had a feeling that was going to stop once they got over into Buchenland.



Tonight they'd be staying in Erfurt. Probably no curious kids there—Erfurt had a lot of trucks, being the central supply depot for the army—but the city council was giving a dinner for him tonight and then he'd promised to do an interview for the newspaper. Newspapers. There were three, but Cunz had told them that they all had to come to the same interview.



The difference between an interview and a press conference seemed to be that at an interview, everyone sat around a table. At a press conference, he stood up in front and the reporters sat in a row.



Tomorrow morning, Wackernagel wanted them to make a stop at a little village called Bindersleben right outside the city limits. It didn't make much driving sense to stop that soon after they got started, but apparently he knew people there and had promised some kids they could have a good look at the cars.



It was probably a good idea to do it this way, with all the stops. He was glad Wackernagel had come up with the idea. Good PR. Cunz was writing up a kind of trip diary saying what they did at every village and sending it back to the Grantville papers. It listed the names and everything of the kids who came to look at the ATVs. The Times had promised to send copies of the those issues to the villages, so parents could buy copies of the Grantville paper with their children's names in it. Ed Piazza would like that. It would make people who didn't have the time or money to visit the Grantville Fair to see machinery feel more connected to the government. That sort of stuff. It was a lot more personal than watching a truck on the road or looking up and seeing an airplane flying overhead, or even having a crystal set and hearing about it on the radio. Ed believed in personal.



Of course, Ed was thinking about the election.



And his driver was waving. On the road, again.



Someone had told him that Cardinal Richelieu had hemorrhoids. So bad that five or six years ago, when the king of France took down La Rochelle, they'd had to put some kind of a stretcher between the seats in a carriage so he could ride to the siege lying down on his stomach. Made that sort of pained expression on the man's face in all the portraits people had looked up in the encyclopedias a little more understandable, he guessed.



He was going to have the same kind of expression on his own face before he got into a bed tonight. Even with an ATV that had padded seats to ride in. It was a hell of a good thing that he wasn't trying to make this trip sitting on a hard wagon bench.



He grabbed his cane and heaved himself up.





Vacha, on the Reichsstrasse


His driver was slowing down and the car behind, the one with the soldiers riding in it, was pulling around, ahead of them. Henry looked more closely. There were a half-dozen men hanging around the little guardhouse. Those weren't kids interested in looking at cars.



Wackernagel cussed something in German. Must have been a good one, because Henry hadn't ever heard it before.



"It's a divided town," the driver said. "The crossing's always been a bone of contention between the abbots of Fulda—that's the SoTF now—and the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel, so they say. But I know for damn sure that our people cleared this motorcade with their people in advance."



"But Hesse-Kassel is in the USE. Verdammt!" One of the reasons Cunz Kastenmayer said he was glad that he'd gone into law rather than theology, aside from the money he expected to earn, was that he was free to indulge in the occasional profanity. If not in his father's hearing. "And don't think that Wilhelm V isn't making the most of it. Think how much extra acreage he grabbed for himself last spring, all the way over to the Rhine. Under color of doing a good deed for Gustav."