Jim was listening intently now, so Jesse plunged on.

"Jim, this here 'Air Farce' needs a ground operations officer. We don't need an aide-de-camp, or a public affairs officer, or an adjutant." Not yet, anyway, but the paperwork is starting to grow, damn it. "What we do need is someone who can take those day workers out there by the fence and turn them into airmen. Someone to keep the field mowed and smooth, to care for the aircraft, and to change that friggin' ramshackle fuel storage and refueling area back there into something that won't explode if someone makes a mistake. We need someone to organize a weather service and eventually teach air traffic control. And finally, we'll need someone who can go out on his own and create the whole thing all over again somewhere else."

Jesse paused. "You're about twenty-four, aren't you? Got some college before the Ring of Fire? ROTC?"

"I'll be twenty-four next month. Yes, sir. Two years at WVU." Jim sat up straighter now.

Jesse nodded. "Thought so. You're a few years older than the other cadets. I know you're more mature and smarter than hell. I think you can handle a man's job. Wanna take a swing at it?"

Jim jumped to his feet and came to attention. "Yes, sir!"

Jesse painfully pulled his sore back out of his chair.

"Okay, then. As of now, you are the ground operations officer for the First Air Squadron. Also base commander. And to make those cadets pay attention to you, you are now a captain. Congratulations, Captain Horton. You will immediately remove your things from the cadet area and move into the spare room in the house with Kathy and me. For the time being, anyway. We'll talk again later."

"Yes, sir!" Jim smiled and snapped a salute.

Predestination was on Rebecca's mind also, that day. In her case, spoken with a curse.

"They will not listen to me," snapped Rebecca, the moment she came through the front door of the house they'd rented in The Hague. "There is no point in trying any longer. Is the radio working?"

She stormed across the room, heading for the staircase leading to the upper floor. Behind her, Jeff gingerly closed the door, as if he were afraid the sound itself would send Rebecca's temper soaring higher still. He and Gretchen exchanged a glance. His wife shrugged and rose from the couch she'd been sitting on.

Gretchen had never entertained any great hopes that Holland's complacent oligarchs would listen to warnings brought to them by a young woman, the wife of the "President of the United States" or not-especially one who was a Jewess to boot, and whose father had even managed to fall afoul of Amsterdam's Jewish community. Three days after they'd arrived in The Hague, Holland's capital city, the normally even-tempered Rebecca was like a cat spitting fury. The treatment she'd received from Holland's powers-that-be had ranged from bureaucratic indifference to paternalistic condescension to-often enough-barely veiled outright hostility.

Gretchen, on the other hand, had the complacence of someone who could at least take comfort in the fact that the bad news was something she had firmly predicted. Fat burghers. Pigs in a trough-and you're trying to warn them the slop is about to run out. They don't want to hear it, simple as that.

As Gretchen headed for the stairs, she could hear Rebecca's voice coming from the landing above.

"Stupid!" That was almost a shout. Gretchen tried to remember if she'd ever heard Rebecca shouting.

No, she couldn't. Not once.

"Stupid!" That was a shout. The words which followed declined some in sheer volume, as Rebecca continued stamping up the stairs, but the tone remained furious.

" 'The French have always been our allies,' " she added in a singsong. " 'It is in their own interests to oppose the Spanish. Why would they change that long-standing policy?' "

When Gretchen reached the landing on the third floor, she saw that Rebecca was talking with Heinrich. More precisely, was using Heinrich as a sounding board for her snarls.

Rebecca, hearing Gretchen's footsteps, glanced back. "It is just as Gretchen said it would be. Fat stupid burghers! Pigs in a trough. Except not even pigs are that stupid."

"Quite intelligent animals, actually," said Heinrich mildly. "But it's true that a pig in a trough usually can't think of anything beyond his slops."

Rebecca was starting to simmer down. From the experience of the past few days, Gretchen knew that the young Sephardic woman would be her normal calm self within a few minutes. Rebecca could not hold a grudge for very long. Unlike Gretchen herself, who could hold one for eternity.

Heinrich's next words helped. "As it happens, Jimmy finally got the radio working tonight. Not more than an hour ago, in fact." He smiled sweetly. "There's a message to you from your husband. He and the baby are fine. He sends you-"

But Rebecca was not listening. She was already through the door leading to the radio room. Heinrich transferred the smile to Gretchen.

"So impatient. It's this 'true love' nonsense the Americans talk about."

Gretchen returned his smile with one that was even sweeter. "Be careful, Heinrich. Annalise reads at least two American romance novels a week. One a day, I bet, now that summer's here and she's out of school. I think she's already gone through half the stock in the libraries."

That wiped the smile from his face. Gretchen couldn't resist the impulse to rub it in. She slid from the "Germanized English" which had become the lingua franca of the United States into the colloquial Oberpfalz-accented German which was the tongue she and Heinrich had both grown up with. "And there won't be any let-up once she does, either. Just before we left, she paid the two dollars to join the romance readers' club."

Heinrich rolled his eyes. " 'Letup,' " he muttered. "Even our good stout Oberpfalz German is getting corrupted by these newfangled terms and notions. Whatever happened to the idea that reading begins and ends with the Bible? Not even the damn Protestants tried to claim you needed more than that. Now-romance readers' clubs!' "

Gretchen grinned at him. "You should see what my husband belongs to. Something called a 'science fiction readers' club.' "

She and Heinrich had been born and raised in nearby towns in that part of the Palatinate known as the Oberpfalz. Although both of them were usually considered "Catholics" by most Americans in Grantville, the reality was far more complex. In the year 1555, in the so-called "Peace of Augsburg," the German princes had established the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio, according to which the religion of a territory was determined by the faith of the prince who ruled it. In some areas of Germany-the Palatinate being one of the most flagrant examples-what followed were decades of constant changes in official religious affiliation. In their short lives, Gretchen and Heinrich had gone from Lutheran to Calvinist to Catholic-and Gretchen's grandmother Veronica had gone through three more such switches before they'd even been born.

By the time they'd actually met, he as a mercenary and she as another mercenary's camp woman in Tilly's army, neither of them had much left in the way of practicing faith. In their day and age, before the Americans arrived and started turning everything upside down, "agnosticism" was a meaningless word. But now, it was an accurate enough description of both of them-Gretchen openly, Heinrich less so.

Still, both of them tended to retain a number of German attitudes on many questions. Neither of them, for instance, had any use for the silly namby-pamby American notions about the "evil of corporal punishment applied to children." One exception, however, was the subject of "romantic love." On that question, Gretchen had been thoroughly converted. Not by books or theory, but by the simple fact of her young American husband's own love for her. Beginning with their wedding night, Jeff's uncomplicated passion had washed her level-headed German practicality aside.