Johnnie F. sauntered off. He wished the commissioners well, but he had his own agenda. That, for today, involved vermin control in stored grain and the seventy-eight rerun of his elementary school program. He was also arranging to import alfalfa seed from southern Italy. He'd have done that already if it hadn't taken him six months just to find out that in this day and age the English word for it, or some close relative of it, was "lucerne." Once he figured that out, finding the German and Italian words for it had been a snap, so to speak.
When Johnnie F. looked back on his military service since the Ring of Fire, he admitted to himself that he'd made a pretty poor soldier. Not that he hadn't tried. He still did, but he just couldn't seem to get focused on destroying large chunks of men and materiel. He made a pretty good agricultural extension agent, though, now that he had the chance. Weird that he'd had to end up in the army to get it. He'd always wanted to be one, but by the time he graduated, the state office was downsizing. His pre-Ring of Fire job in the Clarksburg office of a big timber firm had just been a way to use his degree in agriculture to earn a living not too far from home.
He speeded up a bit once he was around the corner, trotting off to collect his helpers. He didn't have time to fret about Reece Ellis.
June, 1633: Würzburg, Franconia
The Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda certainly had accumulated a lot of paper. Paul Calagna looked around the storeroom with a certain amount of wonder.
"Are we expected to cart all this home with us when we finish up?" he asked Phil Longhi.
"I think so. The Federal Archivist's Full Employment Act of 1633. That's us."
"We've not even bought this much paper. I should know; I authorize the payment vouchers."
"What do we spend our days doing?" Phil asked. "Either going out and meeting with local authorities or calling local authorities in to meet with us here. What happens, either way? They give us a stack of paper, that's what. Or, more precisely, they give Jon Villareal a stack of paper. Which he files. Here. Say, by the time we're done, a ream of paper every work day for four or five months . . . That's in addition to what we use ourselves."
"I guess I'd better plan to hire a wagon and team, then. One more item for our poor overstressed budget."
July, 1633: Bamberg, Franconia
By July, the commissioners in Würzburg were to the point that they could check up on what was happening in the other parts of Franconia. Phil and Jon held the fort; Paul went up to Fulda; Lowry, Jim, and Hugh went off with three of Scott Blackwell's men to the little enclave of a pugnacious imperial knight. The knight's enclave was entirely surrounded by Würzburg, but for all of a half-mile was itself located on both sides of one of the main roads from here to there. They hoped he would see reason on the topic of transit tolls.
Reece Ellis, meanwhile, went to Bamberg. Where, belligerent as usual, he decided that the local commissioners just weren't up to snuff. Instead of making the commission work their first priority, Walt and Matt had continued to do their regular assignments first. They'd disseminated information on the Establishment of Religious Freedom only as an afterthought and during those small portions of the day when they weren't thinking about their main jobs with the military. Vince Marcantonio, the N.U.S. administrator, and the rest of the civilian staff hadn't paid much attention to the project either. They'd somehow gotten the impression, when two army men were assigned to do it, that this was a military initiative. They had continued to think about tax revenues, public sanitation, and the like.
Reece had to admit that Bennett Norris had picked up the voter registration part of it and was carrying that through, but that was only a postscript to the Special Commission's real job, as far as he was concerned.
If Reece had only expressed his opinion to Walt and Matt, or to Cliff Priest, who was the military administrator and their boss, or even to Vince and to his deputy Wade Jackson, he wouldn't have done that much damage. It would have been, after all, only among the uptimers. But Reece expressed it in public. He expressed it during a formal speech to the Bamberg city council. He expressed his strong conviction that Bamberg's delegation from the Special Commission didn't really give a damn about the establishment of religious freedom to anyone else who might be listening. He made his view very plain—that, in fact, the special commissioners were bootlickers for Vince Marcantonio, who would let the Bamberg Catholics get away with anything they tried.