1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [95]
Eventually, Sergeant Trevor Morton confessed. "I don't exactly know what that is."
With a genial expression on his face, Jozef leaned forward across the table.
"It's not complicated. As you know"—which he certainly didn't—"Poland is the world's greatest exporter of wheat."
That might even be true. Close enough for these purposes.
"The grain is shipped through the Baltic. But the process is slow. Grain is bulky." Best to use short sentences. One syllable words as much as possible. "By the time it reaches the market, prices have often changed. Those who speculate"—no way to avoid that term—"in grain can lose a lot of money."
He paused, enabling the sergeant to absorb this mountain of knowledge.
"Yeah, okay, I get it," said that worthy eventually. His jaws were still moving back and forth. Jozef wondered what he could possibly be chewing? It couldn't be the bizarre material the up-timers called "chewing gum." That had vanished years ago. Jozef had never actually laid eyes on the stuff.
Perhaps Sergeant Morton, having gotten into the habit of chewing gum, had simply continued the process when the gum disappeared. Who could say?
"Well, then," Jozef continued. "Nothing has more effect on the travel time of Polish wheat down the rivers and across the sea than the weather."
That was probably true also, although Jozef was grossly overstating its importance to grain speculators. The real effect of the weather on grain prices was seasonal, not daily or weekly. But that wouldn't do for his purposes here.
"Yeah, okay, I can see that."
Jozef smiled. Mission accomplished?
Alas, no.
"But what's that got to do with me?" asked the American sergeant.
It was all Wojtowicz could do not to throw up his hands. Instead, in as gentle a tone of voice as he could manage, he continued the lesson in remedial bribery.
"The weather in northern Europe generally goes from west to east. As you know. Especially over the open waters of the Baltic. Where you are located, here in Wismar."
The reason the sergeant was located here was because of the USE air force base in Wismar. But the base was no longer used much for active air operations. It had become a sleepy garrison post. Hence the presence of sleep-walking soldiers like Morton. In earlier times, Jozef wouldn't have had to do all this, since the weather forecasts were broadcast openly. Lately, though, once it became clear that Gustav Adolf was going to invade Poland, the USE had decided that a knowledge of the upcoming weather might be a military asset, so they now kept the information as private as such information could be kept—which was not at all, as Jozef was now demonstrating. But then, no knowledgeable man expects a government to be any smarter than a cow.
Jozef had paused for a bit, allowing the man across the tavern table to digest that stew of complex data. Now, finally, the sergeant seemed to have done so.
"Yeah, okay, I get that."
"So. You give me a copy of the weather forecast every evening. We can meet in this tavern or anywhere else you'd prefer."
"Here's fine," said Morton. "I come here every day after work anyway. But what good's the forecast going to do you when you need it in Poland?"
A flicker of intelligence. Amazing. Best to stamp it out quickly, lest it spread.
"I'll have couriers ready, on the fastest horses."
Anyone with a knowledge of geography would have understood immediately that that was absurd. No string of horses could possibly get a weather forecast from Wismar to Poland before the weather itself arrived and made the whole exercise pointless. What Jozef was actually going to do was transmit the information on his own radio. The messages could be easily coded, since they'd be short. Even if a USE radio man should happen to stumble upon the frequency, they wouldn't know what was being transmitted.
But Jozef was certain that Morton wouldn't realize he was being duped. The man obviously had no idea where Poland was in the first place. Nor the name of its capital, the language its people spoke, or . . . anything.