The Dreeson Incident(39)
"Thanks for the compliment. But, what I mean is—Jacques-Pierre isn't. Interested in me, I mean. Except for teaching me to Meditate. Which must have been Meant. By the Stars, you know. It's sort of too bad. He's in great condition."
Veda Mae cocked her head to the side. "Spending every day trotting alongside a wagon and heaving the contents of garbage cans into it will do that for the old biceps and triceps and abs, I suppose. Several of the orderlies at the assisted living center—why don't they tell the plain truth and call it an old folks home or a nursing home, the way people used to?—are in really good shape, too."
Velma raised her eyebrows. "Window shopping?"
"I'm a widow," Veda Mae said righteously. "It's perfectly proper, as long as all I do is look."
Chapter 15
Frankfurt am Main
"Solch eine Schlamperei!" Johann Wilhelm Dilich was screaming at the top of his lungs.
Nathan Prickett wasn't quite certain that there was one word that could translate all the nuances into English. It was carelessness combined with messiness combined with filthiness. Filthiness like dirt, not filthiness like porn. Maybe even a little recklessness, combined with quite a bit of fecklessness.
The militia captain was looking horrified.
The people who prepared bodies for burial had already come and gone.
The demo was supposed to have been a showpiece. Showing off all the nice new gun-shaped toys the militia had been practicing with.
It had been quite a bang. Amideutsch had coined a word. Boomenstoff. Stuff that went boom. Or bang. Or bam-bam-bam. Or blam. Most of the words that used to come with exclamation points after them in comic books.
They'd been storing a lot of Boomenstoff in the bunker.
That was a really big hole in the redoubt now.
The bright spot was that they were south of the river, in Sachsenhausen. At least it hadn't happened right downtown.
Who in hell had taken a candle down into the bunker where the guys were loading? They weren't even supposed to go down there wearing any iron, for fear of striking a spark. Dusty air was dangerous, even if the dust wasn't gunpowder. Once, once when he was a kid, he'd managed a pretty good boom just by throwing a canister of his mom's flour up into the air. Everybody knew about grain elevators. Well, the down-timers didn't have grain elevators.
But it was all spelled out in the manual. Line by line, word for word.
Fat lot of good that had done.
Seven men dead. For a couple of them, they wouldn't find enough to bury. That included the guy with the candle, whoever he'd been. They could probably identify him by a process of elimination. Figure out who everyone else was, alive and dead. He'd be the one they couldn't account for. Forty-three injured, including two officers from patrician families.
The muttering in taverns throughout Frankfurt had started the evening after the catastrophe at the Sachsenhausen redoubt.
There was always some level of resentment of the ghetto in the city, because of its size. Except for possibly Nürnburg, Frankfurt had the largest Jewish population of any city in the Germanies. The last time it really boiled over had been twenty years before, during the so-called Fettmilch revolt.
The Jews. It must have been the Jews.
It didn't make any sense. Nathan ran his hand through his hair. There had not been a single Jew involved.
They must have contaminated the powder.
How in hell could they have done that? It was kept in the magazine in Sachsenhausen.
They changed the instructions in the manual on how to handle it somehow. Left out a step. Or added one, maybe, so the next one didn't work right. Just enough that our sons and brothers would have to suffer.
The manual was perfectly good. What's more, the militia captain had promised to have all the men read it. That he would drill them in the procedures.
And he had kept his promise.
It had been plain, ordinary, contrary, human stupidity. Pilot error, as people said.
The up-timer. He is called Nathan. His name is Jewish.
Nathan had a suspicion that they wouldn't be a bit more pleased when they found out that he was Methodist. He picked up his pen.
Dear Don Francisco.
You wouldn't believe what is going on here. Or, maybe you would.
This was going to be a long letter.
On the Reichsstrasse between Fulda and Steinau
The two drivers and three mechanics were patching a tire on the rear ATV. Again. This time, it had taken a sharp rock.
About fifty or sixty men from the Fulda Barracks Regiment were watching with great interest. It was taking a while. The patch kit had been sitting on a shelf in someone's garage ever since inner tubes went out of style, up-time. The patches weren't for this kind of tire. The goop wasn't what it had once been.