"Yeah. We could get lucky." Harald responded with all the enthusiasm of a man asked to fly off a cliff by flapping his arms. "But what you want to bet we don't?"
XVI. On the X Axis;
1866-1914
The Austrian treasure lay exactly where Fial had predicted it to be. He took a small silver coin from the hoard.
"Fian, I'll flip you for who goes back to that last town."
"What for?" Fiala asked.
"We need pens, ink, and paper. To list the coins. Dates, values, mint marks, wear, like that. It'll be years before we can replace any of them. Memory won't do. And it'll have to be right, else it might change something."
"What about economic changes? Won't putting that money in circulation make changes? You didn't think about that, did you?"
Neither man had. Fian responded, "We have to take the chance. We need the capital. I can't see how a few thousand florins would effect history much anyway."
Fiala pursed her lips. They were compromising their resolve already. They would be able to rationalize their deviations any time convenience demanded it.
It was pretty much what she had expected. Anyone who attained any standing in the State machinery learned the trick early.
Fian lost the toss.
"Well, take a fistful," Fiala said. "I'm starved. And I could use some decent clothes. This thing must've been made out of a potato sack."
"She has a point, Fial. We'll end up in prison if we go flashing a fortune looking like this." He took a handful of small silver, studied the coins.
"Don't spend it all in one place. The more you scatter it, the less attention it'll draw."
"I know. Can you remember these till I get back? To check me?"
"I'll have to, won't I?"
"What's your size, Fiala?"
"Think about that, Fian," said Fial. "This is eighteen sixty-six. You don't buy things off the rack here. You make your own. Unless you can afford a tailor. Just say yea by so. That'll be good enough till we get out of the country and find a tailor."
"I suppose you're right again. I'm beginning to think you burying your nose in books all the time wasn't such a waste of time after all."
Thus, by degrees, they upgraded their apparel and story as they stole westward across Europe.
Neither Fian nor Fiala could get over how little real control governments maintained over their citizens. Contemporary social organization, from their viewpoint, was only slightly more structured than anarchy.
And the amazing thing was that the political movements of the time, even those antecedent to their own, all seemed to espouse more democracy and anarchy.
"That Bakunin is a madman," Fian said of one of the State's minor saints. "He wants to destroy everything. Something must have been lost in the translation."
Fial just chuckled. "Maybe it is a good thing we decided not to look any of them up. But hang on, brother. It'll get worse."
• • •
It was in Paris that they encountered and charmed the Americans. The people were even more naive and generous than their fool descendants.
The Atlantic storms were terrible during a December crossing. Their ship was a day late making New York.
"Damn, I wish they'd hurry," Fian growled from his place at the promenade rail. "I'm supposed to meet Handy today."
"Use the English, father," Fiala admonished remotely. She was captivated by the huge, rude new land rearing behind the piers, so different from the New York she had seen in her own time.
"Too slow, the strange tongue," said Fial. He still fought mal de mere. A nineteenth century steamer was a far cry from a twenty-first century SST.
Fiala regressed to German herself. "Look at them. Swarming like rats." Hundreds of men crowded the piers. Less than half appeared to be stevedores, or otherwise employed.
"Unemployment problem," Fial observed. "The country hasn't successfully changed over to a peacetime economy yet. Plus immigrants. Looks like we'll be able to go ashore in a few minutes."
Fiala rushed to be first.
Minutes later, "Top o' the morning to you, young miss."
Fiala turned.
The redhead, about twenty-five, cut her out of the mob with consummate skill, and established some proprietary right immediately acknowledged by his competitors.
"And won't you be needing someone to manage the plunder?"
She frowned in perplexity.
"Ah, me manners. O'Driscol. Patrick Michael himself… Ah, it's not me manners. Ya sweet thing, ya don't speak the language."
"I do. But do you?"
"Ah, she's got the tongue, don't she, Patrick Michael? Aye, it's the Queen's Own Anglish I'm talking. Her Majesty just hain't the proper use of it yet."
And thus O'Driscol drifted into their lives, initially as a porter helping with their baggage, and later as a guide. And later still, as a bodyguard when, quite unaware of what he had saved, he drove off three would-be robbers while Fian was carrying twenty thousand dollars.
One morning, a year later, they went to see Fial off to his new home in Rochester.
As the train pulled out, Fian asked, "Patrick, what's haunting you?"
The Irishman was forever looking over his shoulder and starting at the passage of unknown people. Hitherto, though, he had been completely uninformative about his past, except to proclaim that he came of the Kerry O'Driscols and not the Kilkenny, which made all the difference.
Patrick glared. Then grinned. "I'm an Irishman, ain't I?"
"That might be explanation enough to another Irishman. Maybe even to an Englishman. But we lesser races…"
"Ah, the Anglish. They'd know, yes, but they'd never understand. A stubborn, thick-headed race."
"So. Maybe you left home after some ill-starred attempt to educate them?"
"You know the Fenians, then?"