He headed for the city gate.
The bicycle proved to be the focus of considerable popular interest. Willard had to admit that people of Fulda showed far more curiosity about it than they did about any message he tried to share with them.
Wesley Jenkins, the N.U.S. civil administrator in Fulda, observed this with profound relief. Derek Utt, the military administrator, as a kind of precaution, tried to make sure that there was at least one uptime soldier in sight whenever Willard was out door-to-dooring.
By the time Willard left at the end of the month, he had distributed a lot of the one-page flyers and two-page brochures. He didn't know whether the families had kept them. No one at all had accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon or invited him for a follow-up visit. He believed that his missionary efforts had probably inspired only the placement of eleven orders at Jennings' bicycle factory in Grantville.
Oh, well.
He dropped his letters for home off at the post office pickup station in the administration building, remembering Howard's announcement that if they were going to be using mature men with families as permanent missionaries, then the rules about limiting contact with their families were out. That had been all right for young men just out of high school who needed to grow up in a hurry, but in this new universe it would be counterproductive.
Wes Jenkins had seemed a little worried about bandits and the bicycle, the whole time Willard was in Fulda. About the middle of May, he had suggested that since he was sending Denver Caldwell down to headquarters to deliver some reports, Willard should leave when the kid did. Willard wasn't finished yet, then. About a week later, Wes had suggested that he should to along with a group of down-time traders. Willard still wasn't finished yet. When he finally decided that he had accomplished as much in Fulda as he probably could, Wes had given him a map the same afternoon.
Shaking the dust of Fulda from his feet, Willard headed off toward the southeast.
June-July, 1633: Würzburg, Franconia
Wes' directions on how to get from Fulda to Würzburg were pretty good. Willard hadn't gotten lost, but there weren't any good-sized towns along the route for him to visit, either. He picked up a packet of letters and newspapers that were waiting for him at the post office, caught up on the news from home, and went back to missionizing.
A month later, Willard felt that Würzburg had gone well. After four weeks of work, covering a city with twelve thousand or so residents nearly door-to-door, he was leaving behind not only another batch of flyers and brochures, but numerous small pamphlets and three copies of the Book of Mormon. That did mean, of course, if you reckoned it another way, that he would still be pushing ninety-seven copies of the Book of Mormon on the bicycle when he left. He leaned the bicycle against a tree and sat down to rest his feet.
He was also leaving behind one young man, an orphaned journeyman baker from Silesia who had been washed up in Franconia by the fortunes of war, who was setting out to make an informative visit to Grantville. Franzi would be carrying letters from Willard to the branch, to his family, and to the Grantville Times.
Of course, there were a lot more people in the territory of Würzburg than just in the town itself—about a hundred and eighty thousand of them, Dave Stannard had estimated. But they were scattered in little villages all over the place, maybe a couple hundred people each, on the average.
Willard had already discovered, much to his dismay, that Grantville's attachment to the installation of signposts and route numbers had not been extended to Franconia. Or maybe the attachment had been extended, but not the actual signposts.
He didn't fool himself about the reason for his plan of visiting first the big towns; then the smaller towns; then do follow-up visits in the big towns. He was afraid that if he left the main roads, he would get lost. Johnnie F. claimed that he wouldn't, but Willard wasn't so sure. Johnnie F. was like a homing pigeon—always had been, even when he was a kid. He was one of those people who just never took a wrong turn. Lesser people appreciated sign posts a lot. Willard hoped that the Franconian economy would pick up enough that the administration could start to install sign posts pretty soon.
August, 1633: Bamberg, Franconia
Willard made it to Bamberg even without signposts, checked in with N.U.S. administration headquarters, said "Hi," to a couple of old friends he knew from his years of working at the Home Center, and found a place to stay that had a shed in which he could lock up his bicycle.
A copyist who was extracting land title registries for Janie Kacere noted that the American Schwarmgeist, the heretical religious enthusiast of whom they had heard so much, was in town. He did nothing unusual until he finished his shift. Then he went and reported to Councilman Färber.