-and so he never saw Aidan pounding in from his left to slide in for the ball in a spray of turf and distinctly seventeenth-century English.

Frank's cry of alarm was part scream, part roar, part a word that would have gotten him a real old-fashioned look from Magda. His new German stepmom had learned about some parts of modern English with surprising speed.

He kept his feet, just barely. The ball went out of play in a low, curving loop, just as the whistle blew for full time. "Damn," said Frank. And, with more feeling, "Damn!"

Away on the other side of the eighteen-yard box, Heinrich jogged to a halt. His expression said it all. Had Frank managed to cross the ball, Klaus' sloppy goalkeeping had left the net wide open for the winner to go in: as it was, the game had finished three-all. Freda, back at the other end of the pitch, wasn't much better than Klaus-she got focused on the main attack and a good cross or diagonal through ball could easily leave her off her line and the net wide open for a sneaky striker to score.

Part of the problem, Frank decided, as he heaved air back into his lungs, was that most of the sports-minded Germans seemed to have taken up baseball. That just plain wasn't fair. True, the up-timers had fixed on baseball as a strong reminder of home. On the other hand, they had been dropped back in time into the nation that had produced Beckenbauer and Klinsman and . . .

Frank decided wishing soccer was more popular wasn't going to get him to the showers any quicker. He staggered over to where Aidan was flat on his back in the penalty box, and leaned down to help him up.

Aidan was just about everything Frank wasn't. Frank was an up-time American, raised on a hippie commune dedicated to peace, egalitarianism and really, really good weed. Aidan Southworth was a seventeenth-century Catholic English mercenary, formerly of the Spanish army in Flanders. He'd been taken prisoner at the Wartburg the year before, when the Spanish troops had surrendered after the fortress was bombarded with napalm. Thereafter, he'd elected to stay in Grantville and was now back at school to "get his letters." Aidan had decided to try to make a military career in the armed forces of the CPE, in the Grantville regiments of which literacy was a requirement to advance beyond the rank of private soldier.

Aidan had said he knew no other trade and wanted to learn none for the time being. Soldiering was what he knew and he'd stick with it until he had a little put by. Privately, Frank wondered if Aidan knew what he was letting himself in for. From Aidan's accounts of drinking, fornicating and fighting his way across Europe since going to war alongside his father as a twelve-year-old drummer boy, he was likely to find life in the CPE's increasingly professional armed forces a mite boring.

"Th'art quick, Frank," said Aidan, as he got to his feet, "but not quick enough, eh?"

Aidan's English had been all but incomprehensible when he'd first arrived at school. He'd been from Lancashire, where apparently the English were mostly still Catholic, and had never bothered to learn the more comprehensible speech of the south of England, and simply got by in Spanish and Dutch instead. He'd picked up American English fairly quickly, though.

"Aidan, I'm quick enough not to get cropped by a dirty fouling English bastard like you."

Aidan laughed. "That'd be dirty, fouling, literate English bastard, thank ye kindly."

"Cool!" Frank grinned. "You passed, then?"

Aidan grinned back. "That I did. I learned on't this day, and shall have my ticket for it directly."

"Great!" Frank realized his own feelings were a bit mixed on the subject. On the one hand, he'd rather looked forward to a spell in the army-he'd been just that bit too young for the fighting the year before. On the other hand, reforms had just been announced to the effect that the army was going all-volunteer and more professional. Frank Jackson's take on military punctilio-which was largely that it was horse manure that he couldn't be bothered with-was going out of the window. There were already uniforms and drill starting to appear around town, and the U.S. Marine Horse were looking decidedly smart lately.

Frank wasn't sure he wanted any part of that kind of thing. Even if he'd be allowed to join the military at all, for that matter. Frank served as his father's chief assistant and bottlewasher in the pharmaceutical end of his business-with his brothers, Ron and Gerry, being respectively the second and third assistants-and Frank knew that the powers-that-be considered him far more useful in that capacity than as another spear-carrier. He fell into the category of "critical industrial worker." The one time he'd raised the matter with Frank Jackson, the head of the army had quietly told him he'd be a lot happier if Frank kept working to save ten sick or wounded U.S. servicemen than signing up to maybe kill one French or Spanish soldier.

"Wouldst have a beer with me?" Aidan asked. "In celebration?"

"Oh, sure. We'll get Gerry as well, and Ron if he's not busy." That was something neither Frank nor his two younger brothers had any trouble with. Up-time and down-time attitudes to drinking had met somewhere in the middle, though probably a bit nearer the seventeenth-century side of the issue. The down-timers in Grantville had gotten used to water that was relatively safe to drink, and the up-timers had gotten used to beer that was worth drinking for its flavor.

"Uh, I'd better check in with home first, though." Frank and his brothers Gerry and Ron had come home the best part of paralytic one night, and their father had gotten the nearest he ever did to angry. The sons all thought Tom Stone's attitude was decidedly irrational. Not to mention unfair. He'd spent a lot of his twenties in alternative states of mind, after all. But now he regarded getting anything more than a little buzzed as a serious personal failing. Tom had pulled his usual sneaky parental trick of relying on his sons' senses of personal honor and responsibility, and Frank felt he had to check in now when he was going for a beer.

"Okay," said Aidan, "Telephone after we get out of the shower, yes?"

The telephone rang and rang. "Come on, Dad," Frank muttered.

"No answer?" Frank heard the English accent behind him, and turned around. Aidan was out of the shower, and dressed up for the evening. Frank was briefly thankful that his dad's dyeing business brought a lot of samples and spare swatches of cloth, so lately the whole family was very well dressed-except his dad, whose fashion sense had run aground somewhere around 1973.

"No, not yet-" he said, but then his stepmother's voice came on the other end of the line.

"Lothlorien Farbenwerke," she said.

Frank still found his stepmom's telephone manner funny. Magda might have been married to Dad for well over a year and part of an up-time equipped household for a little longer, but for some reason she still retained a slight awe of the telephone. Television she had no trouble with, and the washing machine and vacuum cleaner she regarded as God's fitting apology to womankind for inflicting untidy males on the world, but telephones still left her slightly nervous.

"Magda?" Frank found it best to give her something simple to settle into the conversation with. He knew she would have hesitated while the phone rang, looking to see if someone was around to answer it instead.

"Ja, hier," she said. "Is that you, Faramir?"

Frank winced. Cringed, in fact. The big, big downside to a hippie upbringing, the thing that completely made up for the freedom other kids didn't get, was the wanton cruelty with which the flower-children had named their own kids. He was, by his paperwork, Faramir Stone. And his brothers-the relationship wasn't quite that clear-cut but his brothers they were-had the names Gwaihir and Elrond to live down. Any one of them would sooner have been called Sue. Every record bar their birth certificates-Dad had had this much decency-recorded them as Frank, Gerry and Ron. Magda, German right the way down, insisted on using the names with which their birth certificates had been gestempelt.

On the plus side, there were a lot of folks in Grantville these days with more exotic names, and apart from the few who'd bothered to look Tolkien up they were just three more foreign-sounding names out of hundreds.

Of course, in Thuringia, Frank, Gerry and Ron could be said to sound foreign anyway.

"Yes, Magda, it's me. Frank. I'm calling to check if it's okay if I-and Gerry and Ron if I can find them-go for a dinner and a few beers at the Gardens? Aidan is celebrating finishing summer school."

"Aidan?" Magda was an artist in the kitchen and Dad had high praise for her as a business manager-her own father had taught her to keep books-but she sometimes had trouble matching faces to names before the sixth or seventh meeting.

"Sergeant Southworth." Frank braced himself.

"Ah." There was a freight of meaning in that syllable.

Frank held his breath. The general attitude toward soldiers among the Germans was not good. The professionalization of the U.S. Army-even Frank Jackson's loose attitudes were practically Prussian by local standards-was helping, but few people had shaken off the attitudes of a life during wartime and Magda was no exception. Frank could also see her trying to place Aidan's face among the small army of lifters and shifters that the Lothlorien commune had employed. A lot of summer-school students had supplemented their money by doing a few hours a week casual work at the new dye plant.

"Your father should speak of this," she said at last, "but he is out. With the President, and Doctor Nichols."

Frank could practically smell the snobbery coming out of the telephone, and saw his chance. Magda was still smitten with Dad-and rightly so-but she visibly wanted him to act more like the captain of industry he was well on the way to becoming. Hobnobbing with the President was about the speed she wanted him at. "Well," said Frank, "if Dad's with the President, we don't want to distract him because Gerry and Ron and me are going for a beer at the Gardens with Aidan. Can you tell him when he gets home?"

Silence at the other end of the phone. Then: "Just so. Don't be late, and be respectable, yes?"

"Sure, Magda. And thanks." He put the phone down after saying goodbye with the definite feeling she was no more fooled than anyone had been the last time a couple of Dan Frost's boys had brought all three of them home from where they had "just been tired" on a bench halfway between the Gardens and home. On the other hand, Magda hadn't minded so much. They hadn't been fighting, and as far as she was concerned overdoing it and having to be helped home was something boys did from time to time.

"A'reet?" Aidan was waiting.

"Sure. C'mon, we'll see if we can find Gerry and Ron before we head back to town. I figure we earned them beers."

Aidan grinned. "I've scrip and reason to spend it," he said, and held up a wad of the new funny-looking dollar bills. Frank found them a bit embarrassing, frankly, what with the hand his dad had had in the design.

It was another of those oddities-weirdities, Frank thought of them-that the Ring of Fire had produced in the world, in the Year of Our Lord 1633 in Universe Whichever. With the influx of American technology and the political stability provided by the army of the new U.S., Thuringia had quickly become the strongest economic province in war-ravaged Germany. That meant the U.S. dollar was also the strongest currency in Gustav Adolf's ramshackle Confederated Principalities of Europe.

On the other hand, given that "George Washington" and "Abe Lincoln" meant nothing at all to ninety-nine percent of the population of the CPE, Mike Stearns had decreed that new designs were needed for the various dollar bills. And, since Frank's father Tom was the only manufacturer of a waterproof green ink in the world, he'd more or less been able to finagle his designs onto an unsuspecting universe.

Frank could live with an eight-point buck as the central symbol on the one-dollar bill, hands kneading dough for a five-dollar bill and a loaf of bread for a ten-dollar bill, even if he thought the puns were pretty outrageous. But, even for his dad, putting Johnny Cash on the twenty-dollar bill was going over the edge.

Some people joked that the Thuringen Gardens ought to have been the location of the new Grantville mint. Since the place seemed to have a license to print money, they said, they might as well actually do it there and save on freight.

It was not that there was any shortage of places in Grantville for the hungry-and thirsty-to seek refreshment and unwind. There were places with fancier food, finer drink, and all manner of other selling points.

The Gardens, though, had been there first with the mix of up- and down-time comforts and customs, and had become something of an Official Institution in Grantville. In fact, from what anyone could tell it had become famous all over Germany. Now that central Germany had been politically stabilized-by seventeenth-century standards, anyway-and the armies that had ravaged it driven off, Grantville was not only a boom town but the central tourist attraction for anyone in Europe with the money and leisure time to afford to come there. And each and every one of those visitors sooner or later made a beeline for the Gardens.