"They want little steel balls?"

"That's what it says and these things . . ." Johan said, pointing at the pamphlet.

"What on earth for?" Wilhelm asked, without really looking at the pamphlet.

"I'm not sure. Pamphlet doesn't say. I would guess it's some sort of strange rolling bushing."

"I don't know, Johan. The whole thing sounds fishy to me. Besides, what's wrong with ordinary bushings?"

"It's from Grantville, Wilhelm."

"So? Granted, something weird happened over there a couple of years ago. I even grant that it was probably a miracle. But that doesn't mean everyone in Thuringia is suddenly a saint. It doesn't even mean that all the up-timers are saints. I've heard some pretty nasty stories about them. And did you hear about what they did up at that castle? Burned the Spaniards. That sounds more like devils than saints. Not that the Spaniards didn't probably deserve it. Bunch of Papist pigs."

"Well, no one is threatening to burn us. They are just offering to buy some steel parts from us . . . if we can make them."

"Right. They are offering to buy them, but that broadsheet doesn't guarantee a price. 'Price to be determined.' Steel balls aren't complicated, but they aren't easy to make. They will be expensive to produce and they want thousands of the sets. And they want steel! Why do they need steel? Good Swedish iron we can get up the Elbe at a reasonable price, but they want their silly little balls made out of this crucible steel. Do you realize how much we will spend making the steel? Besides steel being hard to work!"

"So you don't think we can do it? The town, I mean." The town was Zahna, which was a little nothing of a place a few miles northeast of Wittenberg.

Wilhelm sniffed. "Of course we can do it. The question is: should we do it?"

Johan just looked at him. Wilhelm had a tendency to overestimate the capability of Zahna that was almost as great as his automatic distrust of anyone who came from more than a stone's throw away. He hadn't been overly pleased at the miracle of the Ring of Fire happening so far away. To Wilhelm the best proof that Martin Luther had been right was that he had nailed up his points locally, not off in Rome. Johan was more worldly. He had actually been to Jena a few years back. Not to go to college, just to pick up the new pastor who had recently graduated. Of course, that was years before the Ring of Fire. The farthest that Johan had been in the last ten years was taking his wagon over to the Elbe to pick up a load of iron at Mühlanger. Where he had met Maria.

"Wilhelm, we need something. We're losing sales to the villages."

"We make good products."

"Yes, I know we do, and we are well thought of . . . but they can get nails for less than half of what we can make them for. I talked to Hans Gruber the other day and he showed me the price in the catalog. It's not that they resent us. The villagers around here mostly like us and would rather stay with us if they could. But they just can't afford to."

"I know it. But I don't trust this. It's too new, too different. What do they need it for, and why aren't they making the little steel balls themselves?"

"I don—"

"Dinner is ready, you two," Maria, Johan's wife, shouted.

****

"I still don't trust it," Wilhelm said the next day. "And you trust it too much." He glared at Johan. "You always have been too trusting." He transferred his glare to Maria.

Johan repressed a sigh. Wilhelm had never really trusted Maria. He disapproved of Johan's meeting and marrying a woman who wasn't from Zahna. Maria had been in service to a wealthy family in Wittenberg, but she was from Riesigk, which was on the other side of the Elbe. "If I don't go to Grantville to investigate this, then you'll have to do it."

Wilhelm nearly choked.

"Well," Johan said, "you won't believe a thing I say if I go. Besides . . ." He smiled at his wife, heavily pregnant with their first child. ". . . I don't want to be away until the baby is born. So you go."

"Argh," Wilhelm muttered.

"It'll do you good to try something new," Maria said. "Maybe you'll figure out that not everything beyond Zahna is bad."

Wilhelm sniffed and, with a hint of humor, said, "Not necessarily bad. Just not entirely proper."

****

Unlike his flighty younger brother Johan, Wilhelm didn't travel. He didn't approve of the world outside his home town. It brought things like the plague that had killed his parents and the war that was trying to destroy them all. He didn't like traveling down the Elbe and he didn't like traveling up the Saale and he didn't like staying at inns and he didn't like drinking different beer and he didn't like the way some people spiced the sausage. His litany of complaints went on and on, although after a few irritated looks from fellow travelers he decided to keep them to himself. And he didn't like having to keep his opinions of inferior beer and sausage to himself.

But because of his attitude, he was prepared to dislike Grantville most intensely.

And he did.

The asphalt stuff on the roads stank. The cars went too fast and left a stink behind them. The people dressed funny. And everyone he saw just looked too . . . happy. He couldn't avoid seeing the grandeur of the Ring Wall and the power and utility of the up-time devices, but he didn't have to like it. And he didn't.

****

So this is the place they talk about on the radio, Wilhelm thought. The Thuringen Gardens. He stepped through the door and found that the place was almost too crowded to move through. One of the waitresses waved toward the tables and said, "Just find a place to sit. Doesn't matter where. One of us will be over to take your order in a moment."

Easier said than done, Wilhelm thought. The place was packed with people moving and talking and laughing. He couldn't hear himself think, and almost turned around and left. But the Thuringen Gardens was famous. Even in Zahna they had crystal radios and listened to the VOA. They heard about the Gardens on several of the programs. They had heard concerts that were broadcast from the Gardens. Going to Grantville and not visiting the Gardens would be . . . Well, he wouldn't dare face his sister-in-law if he were to come home and admit that he had gotten to the Gardens and then turned around and left.

So he persevered and finally found an open spot on a bench. Unfortunately, it was right next to a young woman. What made it worse was that she was a very pretty young woman and he didn't know how to talk with pretty young women. He never had, not even when he was a younger man.

"May I sit here?" he asked hesitantly after standing there long enough to almost seem creepy.

"Sure, go ahead. I rarely bite."

Once he was seated, the young woman continued. "I was wondering if you were going to get up the nerve to sit down or run away. Are you new to Grantville?"

"Yes, just got here today. I am staying at the big inn they built just outside the Ring Wall."

"Right, the tourist inn, we call it. It's cheap enough and it does have running water, but it's not like the Higgins is going to be or even like the Willard. So what brings you to Grantville? Want to see if you're in the encyclopedia?"

"What?"

"You know, coming to find out if you are remembered by history?"

"No." Wilhelm shook his head, still confused. "I am a blacksmith. Who would remember me?"

"Well, at least you're not one of the egotists," the young woman said. "My name is Barbara Fischerin, by the way. I'm an old Grantville hand, been here since early last year. I go to school nights at the high school and when I get my GED I'm going to get a job as a clerk or a bookkeeper, or even a secretary. I'm not going to be a housemaid forever. You can get ahead in Grantville."

All of which would have, no doubt, been highly informative if Wilhelm had understood half of it. What was a GED? He stopped. A GED was something they had heard about on the radio. It was a high school equivalency certificate. That might be of value. It would probably be more education than he had, come to that. He had eight years of school, the last four part-time as part of his apprenticeship. He found himself impressed by the young woman. Perhaps she would get such a job. "That sounds quite impressive."

She shrugged, which did interesting things to her blouse. "Not for here. You should meet my cousin. He is a licensed researcher at the State Library and Research Center. Anyway, if you're not here to find out if you're famous, why are you here? Just to see the place?"

"No. I am coming about a business opportunity."

"What sort?"

Wilhelm pulled out the well-creased broadsheet. "This and several others arrived in our village a couple of months ago, brought by a merchant. Between them they listed many products that would be bought if they could be produced to the standard required. I am here to find out if it's a real offer."

She took the sheet and started reading. A few moments later, she pointed to a place on the sheet and said, "The offer is legitimate, I'd say. It's Universal Machine Supply Corporation, which is owned by OPM, and they are legitimate. I even have some OPM shares. Frau Wasserman says it's for my dowry, but I'm not sure I want to get married. Still, it's nice that she does it."

"Does what? I don't understand."

"Frau Wasserman is my employer. She provides room and board, plus a small salary and some mutual fund shares every month. OPM is one of the funds. It's all part of the benefits package."

By this time, Wilhelm's head was spinning. For one thing, Barbara, while apparently hard-working and certainly quite a pretty girl, was a chatterbox. She hadn't stopped talking since he'd sat down. For another thing, he was quite hungry and the waitress still hadn't made it to their spot so that he could order some food.

As he was thinking this, Barbara did get quiet. So did many of the others in their part of the Gardens, for a group of people were climbing onto the stage.

A voice boomed into the room. "And now, back by popular demand, we present Miss Els Engel, appearing with the Old Folks!"

"Good evening, friends," the warm, furry voice of Els Engel said, sounding much better than it had over the radio, richer and fuller. "Tonight we are going to do a medley of country and western music, with a bit of the big band music thrown in. Some of it will seem a little strange to many of you, but it has a beautiful soul once you get used to the new style."

By the end of the evening Wilhelm and Barbara had agreed to meet the next day when Barbara promised to introduce him to her cousin, the researcher.

***

Cousin Franz the researcher spoke and read German and English, not all that unusual in war-torn Germany. He was moderately well-educated, having gotten a year at the university before the war had ruined his prospects. When he, with his family, had washed up in Grantville he had, with the family's help, gotten together the money to take the library course. Since then he had been working as an independent researcher and gradually paying them back.

Frankly, Wilhelm didn't find him all that impressive, though Wilhelm did manage to keep that thought to himself. After all, there wasn't that much to this bit of research. Barbara took Wilhelm to the Library and Research Center and introduced them. Wilhelm showed him the leaflet. Franz took one look and went and fetched a couple of booklets.

"These are free." Franz pointed to one. "This one is provided by Universal Machine Supply Corporation, which is owned by OPM." He pointed at the other. "This is the quarterly report on OPM. Between them they should answer most of your questions. Since UMSC put out that pamphlet, we've had dozens of such requests. I could do the research independently, but it would be a waste of my time and your money." He pointed again at the leaflet provided by Universal Machine Supply Corporation. "That one is actually produced by the National, ah, State Library and Research Center. It's just that UMSC asked the questions about how ball bearings were made and even they weren't the first. But when the staff had put together the booklet, UMSC paid to have it translated into German and have a thousand copies made up."

"Why?" Wilhelm asked as he looked at the first booklet.

"Because they want people to start making ball bearings and figure that you're more likely to do it if you know how it's done."

"And this one?"

"Oh, OPM gives those out to anyone. They're advertising. Whether you're thinking about buying shares or need money to start a business, this will tell you what OPM has to offer. There are dozens of others just like that from other mutual funds. Funds that invest in everything from ships to roses. There are even two from funds in France."

****

In spite of the fact that Franz struck Wilhelm as a self-important jerk, the booklet on bearings was interesting. It turned out that there were several types of bearings. Wilhelm was familiar with bushings. He made them regularly for wagon wheels and a score of other uses. At the most basic level, a bushing was just two surfaces with a bit of grease between them. Not that the up-timers didn't have a number of tricks that they applied. There were also magnetic bearings and liquid bearings and other weird stuff. All this was mentioned in a couple of pages at the start of the booklet. Then it got into rolling bearings, and ball bearings in particular.

A ball bearing is any bearing that uses balls. Most of the fairly standard bearing sets that Universal Machine Supply Corporation wanted used a set of balls rolling in two races, little circular pieces that had tracks for the balls to race around in. They also had cages to keep the balls from rubbing against each other as they rolled around. It was all designed to let something spin with as little friction as possible.

Wilhelm actually went to visit the offices of Universal Machine Supply Corporation.

****

"Can I help you, sir?" asked the young lady at the desk in the front room.

"I am Wilhelm Wagner. I was wondering about the ball bearings you want made?"

"Yes? What would you like to know?"

"Why do you want them?"

She reached in a desk and pulled out another booklet. Then she started showing him all the items that could be made better with ball bearings. Wheels and machine tools and engines and . . . on and on and on.

The opportunity was for real. By now Wilhelm was convinced that the only question was: could Zahna do it? Wilhelm was very much afraid that they couldn't. The reason was that making balls for the ball bearings was machine-intensive. There was a reason that blacksmiths in the seventeenth century used bushings rather than ball bearings. Bushings were easier to make. Incredibly easier to make if made by hand. Making the balls by hand could certainly be done but it would take a long time for each bearing. In practice, Wilhelm, his brother, and all their journeymen and apprentices working full-time making balls couldn't make enough ball bearings to feed themselves at the prices UMSC was willing to pay. But there was an answer for that and it was shown in the booklet: a set of machines that would let them make bearings by the thousands and let them make them cheaply and well. Trouble was, they couldn't afford the machines.

He packed up his kit, said goodbye to Barbara, and headed back to Zahna.

****

"So, is it for real?" Johan asked him

"Yes, it's for real. I saw drawings, and even working machines. They have human-powered two-wheel vehicles called bicycles that can be made without ball bearings, but work much better with them. And a whole host of other devices, many of which can get by with bushings, but become much more efficient with ball bearings. So there is a demand for ball bearings. It would be a product that would sell."

"Then we are going to do it?"

"I wish we could, but I don't see how." Wilhelm brought out the booklets and the information he had collected and started going over it with his brother. Over the next week, he would go over the same information with every member of the town council.

"We would like to help you. Your family is one of the best in town and your shop is well run, but the expense!" The mayor shook his head, speaking for the town council. It was precisely what Wilhelm had expected to hear, since he was on the council himself. And everyone on the council realized what a town-owned company would mean for the town . . . if they could get it going.

Almost everyone wanted a factory for Zahna, but even with the resources of the entire town, they couldn't support a ball bearing factory. There were just too many production machines involved. Producing the balls would take three machines: the heading machine, basically a stamp press that stamped a roughly ball-shaped piece on the end of a wire, then those almost-balls would go through rill plates, which were a lot like a grinding wheel for flour. The hard steel rill plates had grooves cut in them so when the balls were rolled around under pressure they got really round and compressed. And then the balls were sent to a furnace for tempering, and finally were subjected to more rolling around in a ball mill.

That was all just for making the balls. If everyone—or even almost everyone—in town invested in the project, Zahna could do it, if there was a matching loan from OPM or one of the other mutual funds.

But that wasn't all that was needed for a ball bearing factory. It took a different stamp press to make the cages and other grinding machines to make the races, which had inner and outer surfaces, each of which needed their own grinding and shaping machines. Those machines wouldn't come cheap. As well, the machines would need something to power them.

It was just too much for one town, even with the matching loans.

****

"The trip wasn't a total waste," Wilhelm said. "I bought some tools. A metal-working lathe that can be run with pedals. And a few other pieces that ought to let us work more efficiently."

Johan looked over Wilhelm's purchases, and they spent a few days getting back to work using the new tools. The tools were helpful and increased the shop's production. Johan and Wilhelm also started making a few of the up-time tools. Over that winter things went fairly well with the new machines.

When not involved in caring for her newborn, Maria noticed that Wilhelm seemed less satisfied with the town than before his visit to Grantville. It was like pulling teeth, but she finally got him to admit that he had met a girl in Grantville.

"What's her name?" Maria asked.

"Barbara." Wilhelm sighed. "Very nice girl, Barbara. But she's too young for me, I fear."

"Oh?"

"Only twenty-five. She wouldn't be interested in me. I'm fifteen years older, and a settled sort, and far away from Grantville."

"Oh?"

"Grantville is very exciting, you know," Wilhelm said. "It smells funny from the asphalt and the gasoline, but it's still very exciting."

"And you don't think Barbara might like a quieter, possibly more secure, life?"

"Oh, she's very modern. Going to school, getting her GED."

Honestly, Maria was in agreement that her husband's older brother was an old curmudgeon. But he had been one when he was twenty, according to Johan. Even so, Wilhelm was a decent man, if grumpy and not at all to her tastes. He needed a wife. Even if he didn't think so.

"You might write her," Maria suggested. "Perhaps she needs a friend."

****

Over the winter things in the shop went well. The new tools and the new designs that Wilhelm had brought back made the shop both more efficient and more profitable.

By spring the writing was on the wall . . . but it was still faint and in very fine print.

Factory-made items were starting to become available. Not enough of them, and they were expensive because of their scarcity and the transport costs. But Wilhelm had been to Grantville and when he put what he had seen in Grantville together with what he was seeing now in the Wish Book and other advertisements that came to Zahna, he was becoming concerned.

"It's how fast they can make them, Johan. Barbara took me to see a factory just outside the Ring of Fire. They had these big stamp presses and they were stamping out parts in seconds. Parts that would take us hours to make."

"But it's just one factory!"

"For now. But they're making more. If we don't . . ." Wilhelm stopped, looking for a word. "Modernize. Copy the way the up-timers do things. If we don't do this, we are going to be left behind. And by the time we are forced to modernize, we won't have the resources to do it."

"It's not that I disagree, Wilhelm, and it's not that the council disagrees," Johan said. "Peter Krup is terrified of the shoes in the Wish Book." Peter Krup was the town's largest shoemaker. "And he's not the only one. But we just can't do ball bearings. For that matter, I'm not sure what we can do."

"We could make the balls if everyone got behind it!"

"Probably. But what good will that do if there isn't anyone making the races and cages?"

"I don't know." Wilhelm sighed. "Would you pass the beets, Maria?"

"What about arranging with another town to make the races and a third to make the cages? We can't be the only ones who see the problem."

"Why don't I write home about it?" Maria said. "My brother wrote me recently and he shares your concerns about finding ourselves left behind with all the new technology out of Grantville. Perhaps Riesigk could get involved with the ball bearings . . ."

"It's too far away," Wilhelm said. "We'd have to ship the balls across the river, then put them on mules or something to get them to Riesigk. Then we'd have to ship them back across the river to wherever they do final assembly. No, it's better if we go to the local towns and villages and find our partners closer to hand. It will save incredibly on transport costs."

Maria was sure that he was overstating things, but she had no answer ready. So she just nodded and waited for the men to go back to work. Then she sat down and wrote her brother a letter.

****

"Do you two really think that this is a good idea?" The mayor of Zahna was a relative and a friend of Wilhelm's and, though not as distrusting of strangers as Wilhelm, he found the whole Ring of Fire situation intensely disturbing. He was a devout Lutheran and the idea of God sending a bunch of people from the future didn't fit with his notions of how the world was supposed to work or the things that God did.

"It's a better idea than letting the new world pass us by and leave us poor and unable to support ourselves."

The mayor nodded sadly. He didn't like it, but perhaps his favorite of all the Bible verses had to do with moving your mule out of the ditch on the Sabbath. You did what you had to do to get by in this world, and God understood that.

He sent letters to the surrounding towns and villages. Mostly wrote them himself and had them hand-carried.

****

"What is wrong with those people?" Wilhelm complained. "You can't outlaw the Ring of Fire or the things it brings. You might as well outlaw clouds and the rains they bring. The rain is still going to come."

"It's not my fault," the mayor said. "I wrote them and they don't agree. They insist that they can prevent people in their towns from buying from the Wish Books. Mayor Kastner said that loyal citizens wouldn't betray their town by buying from the up-timers."

Wilhelm went home in a poor mood.

****

"Don't gloat, dear," Johan told his wife, without meaning a word of it. "It's unbecoming."

"Yes, dear," Maria said, with a bowed head and a grin that utterly ruined the effect.

"Oh, shut up," Wilhelm groused. When he had told them about the other towns' reactions, Maria had pulled out a letter from her brother, Carsten. Riesigk was showing great interest in the project.

"All right. When can we get away to go visit Riesigk?"

****

"Carsten!" Maria waved.

Carsten Bauer looked up. He was in the field, following a pair of oxen. It was what he was normally doing this time of year and he enjoyed it. It gave him time to think. "Maria? Is that you?"

"It's me, Carsten, and you know Johan and Wilhelm. This is little Johan, who you haven't met yet."

"Go on up to the house and say hello to Anna. I'll finish this row and come join you."

****

"So you want to make ball bearings?" Konrad asked. Konrad was Maria's cousin and the mayor of Riesigk. Which didn't amount to all that much, he would freely admit, because there were only fourteen full farmers in the village and six half-farmers. Mayor of less than two hundred people didn't make you the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

"Yes." Wilhelm Wagner looked like he was eating especially sour sauerkraut.

"And the towns with actual charters don't want anything to do with it because they are too busy outlawing everything up-timer?" Konrad caught himself. He was enjoying this altogether too much. The town citizens of the Germanies looked down on the villagers of Germany with great disdain and they always had. Wilhelm was from a town, even though it wasn't much bigger than a village might be. It wasn't even an imperial city. Zahna got its charter from the Wittenberg government. Konrad had always resented that looking-down and the abuse that went with it. The towns controlled the trade. They said who could buy and who could sell and when within their borders. Now, with the up-timers who didn't care about such things, villages like Riesigk could get the things they needed from catalogs without having to buy from the towns. The towns hated that.

"They are being very short-sighted," Wilhelm complained.

"I couldn't agree more," Konrad told him, and meant it. From all he had heard about the Wagner brothers, they were pretty decent types for townies. But they were still townies. "What do you want from us?"

"We can make the balls, we think, if we can buy the ball mill from the up-timers or even some of the parts of it. We think we can make the heading machine ourselves. It's a new kind of forge, but we are fairly sure we can put together something that will work. The annealing, well, that's just a firing and tempering. We've been doing that all our lives. And we can use what I learned in Grantville to make the crucible steel out of the iron we buy."

"But we can't do it all," Johan interrupted his brother's bragging. "The ball bearings aren't just the balls. They also need something called races and cages." He pulled out a set of ball bearings that he had made by hand, first from the pamphlet that they had gotten, then from the added information that Wilhelm had brought back. He disassembled the parts so that how it worked could be seen. "Look here. The little curved channels that the balls are in keep everything lined up and the cages keep the balls from rubbing against each other."

"They still rub against the cages, don't they?" Konrad asked.

"Yes, but not very much, and not very hard. With a bit of grease, this thing will spin for a long time. We tried it on a wagon wheel and spun it by hand and it kept spinning for almost a full minute."

"That's impressive, I'll grant. And we are looking for anything we can find to bring in American dollars. But . . ."

The conversation went on for some time. And later some of the village children were sent to Gohrau and Rehsen, villages within a mile of Riesigk and each other, to fetch the village mayors. After they arrived, there was more talking and more showing of the ball bearings that Johan had made.

Johan and Wilhelm explained that while they could make ball bearings, they couldn't do it at a reasonable price. Not without lots of equipment. And their smithy, even the whole town of Zahna, couldn't afford all the equipment they would need.

"So what are you after? Investors?" Tobias Schubert, the mayor of Gohrau, asked. "We don't have all that much money, and we are more concerned with finding work than finding places to put money we don't have anyway."

"We will need to employ a lot of people to make the ball bearings in the numbers that are going to be needed," Wilhelm said.

"So you want us to invest our money then move to Zahna?"

"No!" Wilhelm said.

"We want to go into partnership with your villages to produce ball bearings," Johan jumped in before his big brother stuck his foot in his mouth. "We will make the balls in Zahna, and the races and cages will be made here. Then they will all be assembled in Zahna."

"So you want us to make the races and ship them to Zahna for assembly. Why not ship the balls here for assembly? The assembly doesn't look too hard." Tobias picked up the example ball bearing set that Johan had brought, took it apart and put it back together. "It doesn't seem to need a blacksmith to do it. Probably children could do it. It would keep them out of trouble, avoid idle hands and all that."

"After school," said Maria's mother with some heat. "Not instead of school."

Maria smiled. Her mama was very intent that all the children should learn as much as they could. She had wanted Carsten to go to the Latin school, but Carsten always had trouble reading and didn't receive a scholarship.

Wilhelm opened his mouth and Maria knew exactly what he was going to say. He was going to complain about moving the assembly jobs to the villages. Those jobs could be done by Zahna children as well as village children. She kicked him under the table, and when he looked at her she looked back just as hard as she could, willing him to keep his big mouth shut.

He did.

****

Eventually—actually very quickly, it just seemed to take forever—they came to a basic agreement not just to manufacture ball bearings, but to try to manufacture ball bearings as a group. That the town of Zahna and the villages of Riesigk, Gohrau and Rehsen would form a company between them to manufacture ball bearings, or failing that to manufacture between them some other mutually agreed-on product. That last was because they, especially the villages, weren't entirely sure that they would be able to make ball bearings.

****

"We need to go to Grantville," Maria told them. She, Johan, Wilhelm and the baby were having a picnic by the stream that ran next to Riesigk. "And we need to take Cousin Konrad with us." Cousin Konrad, at forty-five, was the most respected man in Riesigk, and mostly if he said it would be, it was. This worked because he never commanded anything that everyone wasn't basically agreed on already. "Tobias Schubert from Gohrau should go too."

"And why are we going to Grantville anyway?" Johan complained. "Why not Magdeburg? It's the new capital and it's closer, after all."

"Because if we are going to consult with anyone that even approaches an expert it's going to have to be done in Grantville anyway. And besides, the Grantville National Bank and the Grantville Branch of the Abrabanel banks are in Grantville. So Grantville will be the best place to get financing if we need it," Wilhelm said

"And it's where most of the machines and parts will have to be ordered from. Konrad and Tobias are involved, so they must come along," Maria added.

"They live on the wrong side of the river," Wilhelm muttered, with a hidden grin. "But why do you think you should go?"

"To apologize for Zahna after you have offended everyone."

Poor Johan just put his head between his hands and moaned. Not that he was all that bothered. Johan was an easy-going sort. If either his wife or his brother had ever had occasion to watch Bonanza and once saw Hoss Cartwright, they would recognize him on the instant as another Johan. Big, strong, incredibly gentle, and the only thing that angered him was seeing someone weak abused by someone strong.

"What about the baby?"

"The baby goes, too. I may have him looked at by the doctors there."

"Why?" Johan's head came up in sudden concern.

"He's fine, darling. But the up-timers have something . . . I heard it on the radio . . . inoculations. To keep children from getting sick. I want to look into that. Also I want to meet this foreigner that Wilhelm's so interested in. Barbara, isn't it?"

It was Wilhelm's turn to put his head between his hands and moan.

Johan laughed and Maria grinned.

****

Konrad Bauer was looking at the Ring Wall and he crossed himself. Konrad was neither Catholic nor particularly observant as a Lutheran, but he—for that moment—reverted to the habits of his youth. "I didn't believe it," he said quietly. "Not really. I thought I did. I had accepted that the Ring of Fire was real, and even that it was an act of God that had brought the people from the future to our time. But that was . . . different. A thing of the mind, not of the gut. Looking now . . ." He shook his head. "How can we hope to deal with such people?"

"We probably won't," Wilhelm said, not unkindly. He had experienced the same thing the first time ...