“So you had the advice of Helene Gundelfinger, the Secretary of the Treasury for the USE, and a renowned scholar of economics who works for the USE Federal Reserve Bank? No wonder you got rich.”
“Not to mention Karl Schmidt, David Bartley, Franz Kunze, and half a dozen other members of what has become the financial elite of the State of Thuringia-Franconia and the USE,” Hayley admitted with a grin. “The real question is: with all that good advice why aren’t we richer?”
Mrs. Sanderlin looked at Hayley for a minute, then shook her head. “No, it’s not, Hayley. The real question is: how did a small West Virginia coal-mining town have Mike Stearns and Ed Piazza. How did it have Fletcher Wendell and Tony Adducci, not to mention David Bartley, the Stone family, Dr. Nichols and all the rest? One or two, sure. But dozens, even hundreds?”
“I’ve asked myself that question every day for the last year and a half or more.” Sonny Fortney interrupted their conversation.
“Any answers, Dad?” Hayley asked.
“The best I can come up with is ‘people rise to the occasion.’ Or, put another way, ‘talent is a lot more common and opportunity to express it a lot less common than we tend to think.’”
“I’m not sure it’s just opportunity,” Hayley said. “I think it’s need, too.”
“Maybe, darlin’, but you and your young friends argue for it just being opportunity. You didn’t need to become investors. You could have just sold your dolls and bought dresses. A lot of kids did. Which, I guess, argues against my point.”
“It doesn’t matter, Sonny.” Mrs. Sanderlin bit her lip in concentration. “Even if only ten percent took advantage of the opportunity when it happened, that’s still a lot more talent than we expect. Or at least than we expected, up-time. How many inventors, statesmen, businessmen and entrepreneurs were washing dishes and sweeping floors up-time? Because there wasn’t an opportunity for them to shine.”
“Down-time was no different. Even worse, probably,” Hayley said. “Look at Karl Schmidt. Without the Ring of Fire he would never have been anything but the owner of a minor foundry in a small town. Anna Baum would still be spinning thread at starvation wages if she hadn’t actually starved by now. Or Mrs. Gundelfinger. Well, she might have owned her shop, but never much more than that, I think.”
“So how did the Ring of Fire change things?” Mrs Sanderlin asked. When Hayley and Sonny Fortney looked at her in confusion, she tried to explain. “Look, up-time America and Europe had all this stuff and Africa and South America didn’t. So it can’t be just the know-how, otherwise Peru would be building super jets and Zambia or wherever would be building rocket ships and computers. I mean, they could even order the parts that they couldn’t make themselves.”
“I think that may be the key,” Sonny said after a little thought, looking out over the Danube as the sun slowly set. “They could buy it. They didn’t need to build it.”
“But they couldn’t buy it,” Mrs. Sanderlin said. “They didn’t have the money.”
“But they could buy shirts easier than they could buy shirt factories. They could buy cars easier than they could buy car factories.”
Hayley’s memories of up-time were starting to get more than a little vague. Three and a half years is a much higher percentage of a teenager’s life than the life of her parents. But here, experience in down-time business was fresh. “Competition?” she asked doubtfully. “Competition isn’t that much of a problem, Dad. There is always more market than product to fill it.”
“Selling up-time products down-time, sure,” Sonny told her. “But up-time the competition of established industries was a real problem for start-ups.”
They continued to talk about the meaning of opportunity and the effect of the Ring of Fire.
* * *
“Here you go, Mrs. Simpson,” Brandon Fortney said as he poured some grain into the bird’s food dish. Mrs. Simpson was his favorite Rhode Island Red and was normally a good layer, but she was upset by the move. Brandon had four dozen fertilized eggs in a rosin foam incubator, a Rhode Island Red rooster, Captain Jack, and another hen, Eliza, also a Rhodie. He hoped that would be enough to establish a good up-time laying flock in Vienna. Meanwhile, the hens weren’t laying, and though he knew it was probably just the trip, it still worried him.
Well, that, and the whole business of heating water for the hot water bottles that had to be in the incubator. That was really a hassle on the road, but he had managed.