American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, yes.” Quinn nodded. “This is not the Army. This is not even the way it is in some of the other Confederate states. I am not going to give you orders. But if you want to teach this fellow a lesson, I can help you.” He pointed to the Tredegars. “The question is, how badly do you want to be free?”

  A few nights later, Rodriguez slid quietly through the darkness, a military rifle in his hands. He hadn’t carried a Tredegar since 1917, but the weight felt familiar. So did the crouch in which he moved.

  A dog barked. Somebody called, “Who’s there?” Silence, except for the barking. A moment later, a yelp punctuated it, along with the sound of a kick. “Stupid dog,” Don Joaquin’s sentry muttered. Rodriguez waited. One of his friends was going forward.

  The brief sound of a scuffle. No shouts—only bodies thrashing. A fresh voice called, “Come on.” The Freedom Party men hurried past a body.

  There stood Don Joaquin’s house. The grandee had only two sons and a daughter, but his dwelling was four or five times the size of Hipolito Rodriguez’s. And the stable and barn not far away were even bigger. How much livestock did he have? How much did any one man need? A guard paced around the barn. He paced, yes, but he wasn’t looking for trouble. It found him all the same. Silent as a serpent, a raider sneaked up behind him and clapped a hand over his mouth. He let out only a brief, horrified gurgle as the knife went home.

  When the raider let the body sag to the ground, another man ran forward with gasoline. He splashed it on the wooden doors and the wall of the barn, then stepped back, lit a cigarette, and flipped it into the pool of gas that had run down from the doors. Yet another Freedom Party man gave the stables the same treatment.

  Flames leaped and roared. Through their growing din, Rodriguez heard horses and mules and cattle and sheep neighing and braying and bellowing in terror. He also heard Don Joaquin’s guards shouting in alarm. Their booted feet pounded on gravel and dirt as they ran to see what they could do.

  He’d been waiting for that, waiting behind a boulder that gave him splendid cover. Almost of itself, the Tredegar leaped to his shoulder. He hadn’t fired one in a long time, but he still knew what to do. The range was ridiculously short, and the flames lit up his targets for him. If only things were so easy during the Great War, he thought, and squeezed the trigger.

  One of the targets fell. He tried to think of them like that, as he had during the war. He wasn’t the only Freedom Party man shooting. Another guard toppled, and another, and another. The guards had fought against the USA, too. They dove for whatever hiding places they could find, and started shooting back. The cracks of their pistols seemed feeble beside the Tredegars’ roars. But, when one of their bullets pinged off the stone behind which Rodriguez crouched, he reminded himself any gun could kill.

  “Away!” Carlos Ruiz called. No shouts of Freedom! here. Don Joaquin might suspect who’d done this, but what could he do, what would he dare do, without proof? He had to know the raiders could as easily have burned his house, with him and his family in it.

  Rodriguez slipped back to another sheltering boulder, and then to one behind that. Then he was far enough from the blazing buildings to stop worrying about the flames giving him away. Before too long, people would be scouring the countryside, looking for him and his friends. He intended to be back in bed by then. Magdalena and his children would say he’d been there all night. And Don Joaquin would know better than to tell people with guns of their own how to vote.

  XVIII

  Spring in Dakota was a riot of burgeoning green and of glorious birdsong. It was one of the most beautiful things Flora Blackford had ever seen. She would have given a great deal not to be seeing it now. If Hosea had won the election . . . But he hadn’t. He’d got trounced. How badly he’d got trounced still ate at Flora.

  The shock of President-elect Coolidge’s death, less than a month before he was to take office, had jolted her no less than the rest of the American political world. After that, though, the pain returned. Her husband had to go down to Washington to hand over the reins of power to a man who hadn’t even beaten him in November—one more humiliation piled on all the rest.

  As soon as Herbert Hoover took the oath of office, the Blackfords had gone on what the papers called an extended holiday. The papers, for once, were polite. Hosea Blackford had gone back to his home state to lick his wounds, and taken his family with him.

  Flora turned away from the farm window that showed Great Plains spring to such good advantage. “When do you think we should go back East?” she asked.

  Her husband set down his coffee cup. He managed a crooked smile. “Are the wide open spaces starting to get on your nerves?”

  “Yes!” Flora’s vehemence startled even her. Hosea had put it better than she’d managed to, even in her own mind. “I grew up in New York City, remember, on the Lower East Side. Even Philadelphia seems roomy.”

  “I’m so sorry for you.” Hosea Blackford sighed. “And I’m sorry, but I really don’t feel like going back yet. People here leave me alone. Nobody in Philadelphia or Washington leaves you alone. I think it’s against the law there.”

  “But the country’s in trouble. We need to do something,” Flora said.

  He sighed again. “I spent the last four years doing everything I knew how to do. None of it seemed to help much. I’m willing to let someone else worry about it for a while—especially since the people have shown they aren’t willing to let me worry about it any more.”

  He sounded tired. Worse, he sounded old. Flora had seen how cruelly he’d aged in four hard years in Powel House. He was, she reminded herself, past his seventieth birthday. When they’d married, his being close to twice her age hadn’t bothered her. It still didn’t, not in most ways. But this loss of vigor, of resiliency, troubled her. She was sure that when she’d first come to know him, when she’d first fallen in love with him, he would have bounced back stronger and faster.

  On the other hand, nobody who’d spent three years in the trenches during the Great War came out afterwards the same man he’d been when he went in. Hosea had spent four years in the presidential trenches, and he’d lost the war. She didn’t suppose expecting him to stay unchanged was fair.

  “When we do go back,” she said, “I wonder if I ought to take a flat in the Fourteenth Ward.”

  “Aha!” her husband said, and smiled. “Something makes me think you want to go back to Congress.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Flora said. “I don’t like seeing my old district in the hands of a Democrat. I don’t like seeing a lot of our districts in the hands of Democrats.”

  “Neither do I.” Hosea Blackford’s smile was sour. “I don’t think any of our candidates will ask me to hit the campaign trail for them next year, though. They’d probably want me on the stump for their opponents instead.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Flora insisted.

  “No—odds are it’s worse,” Hosea answered. “I can’t think of anything less welcome in a political party than a president who’s just lost an election. After a while, I’ll get to be an elder statesman, but right now I’m nothing but a nuisance.” With a mournful shake of the head, he added, “By the the time I get to be an elder statesman, I’ll probably be so elder, I’m dead.”

  “God forbid!” Flora exclaimed. No one in her family, no one among the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side, spoke of death straight on like that. Words had power; to speak of something was to help bring it into being. The rational part of her mind knew that was nonsense, but the rational part of her mind went only so deep. Down underneath it, superstition still flourished.

  “It’s true,” her husband said. “We both know it’s true, even if you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t need to take out pencil and paper to know how old I am. I get reminded whenever I look in the mirror. I’d like to stay around long enough to see Joshua grow up, but how likely is that? I’ve already beaten the odds by lasting as long as I have.”

  “That’s nothing but�
��” Flora began.

  “The truth,” Hosea finished for her. “You know it as well as I do, too. And if you don’t, ask the next insurance salesman you happen to run into. He’ll tell you what the actuarial tables say.”

  Flora wanted to tell him that was nonsense. She couldn’t, and she knew it. The best she could do was change the subject: “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Fine.” Now her husband’s grin showed real amusement. “Do you think this new professional football federation’s going to last?”

  That wasn’t what she’d had in mind. “I don’t care,” she said tartly. “What I think is, it’s disgraceful to pay men so much to run around with a football when so many people can’t find work at all. Talk about a waste of money!”

  “It’s an amusement, the same as an orchestra is an amusement,” her husband said. “Nothing wrong with them. We need them. Especially in hard times, we need them.”

  “An orchestra is worthwhile,” Flora said. “A football game?” She shook her head.

  “A lot more people go to watch the Philadelphia Barrels than to the Philadelphia Symphony,” Hosea said.

  Since that was true, Flora could only stick out her chin and say, “Even so.”

  “Amusement is where you find it,” Hosea said. “I’m not going to be elitist and look down my nose at anything.”

  To a good Socialist, elitist was a dirty word. Flora tried to turn it back on her husband: “When the top football players make more than the president of the United States—and some of them do—they’re the elitists.”

  “They asked one of them about that two or three years ago. Did you happen to see what he said?” Hosea Blackford asked. Flora shook her head. She paid as little attention to sports as she could. One of her husband’s eyebrows rose. “What he told the reporter was, ‘I had a better year than he did.’ All things considered, how could anyone tell Mr. Gehrig he was wrong?”

  “A choleriyeh on Mr. Gehrig!” Flora said furiously. “Nothing that happened was your fault.”

  That eyebrow lifted again. “The Party told that to the voters. We told them and told them and told them. And Herbert Hoover is president of the United States today, and here I am in Dakota. If you’re there, it’s your fault.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Flora said.

  Hosea laughed out loud, which only made her angrier. “Joshua might try to use an argument like that, but you shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s the way politics works. ‘What have you done for me lately?’ is the question voters always ask—and maybe it’s the question they should always ask. Teddy Roosevelt won the Great War. They didn’t give him a third term, though, because of all the strikes and unrest that came afterwards. That’s how Upton got to be president—and how I got to be vice president, if you remember.”

  “I’m not likely to forget,” she answered. “I was so proud of you. And I’m still proud of you, and I still think you ought to be president, not that . . . that lump of a Hoover.”

  “As a matter of fact, I agree with you. I think you’re sweet, too,” he added. “Unfortunately, fifty-seven percent of the voters in the United States had a different opinion, and theirs counts for more than ours.” He sighed. “It was even worse in the Electoral College, of course.”

  “Not right,” Flora muttered.

  “What’s not right, Mama?” That was Joshua, still in his flannel pajamas. He was yawning. From somewhere on one side of the family or the other, he’d found a taste for sleeping late. On the Lower East Side—or, for that matter, on a Dakota farm—he would have had to get up early whether he wanted to or not. As the son of a man first vice president and then president, he could usually sleep as late as he wanted to. Privilege is everywhere, Flora thought.

  But she had to answer him: “It’s not right that your father lost the election.”

  “Oh.” Joshua tried to frown, but a yawn ruined it. “Why not? The other guys got more votes, didn’t they?”

  Hosea laughed. “That’s it in a nutshell, Josh. The other guys got more votes.”

  Josh. Flora didn’t like the one-syllable abridgement of a perfectly good name. Joshua Blackford was rolling, majestic. Josh Blackford sounded like someone who wore overalls and a straw hat. And if that’s elitist, too bad, she thought. Hosea didn’t see the problem.

  “The point is, the other guys”—she used her son’s phrase as if it had quotation marks around it—“shouldn’t have got more votes.”

  Joshua muttered something under his breath. Flora thought she heard, “Stinking Japs.” Without a doubt, the Japanese bombing of Los Angeles had been the last straw—or rather, the last nail in the coffin. If Joshua wanted to think his father would have won without that, he could. Flora wanted to think the very same thing. The only problem was, she knew better. Looking at the last nail in the coffin meant ignoring all the others, and there were a lot of them.

  “You’ll win again in four years, though, won’t you, Father?” Joshua had a boy’s boundless confidence in his father. He also had a boy’s strange notions about the way time worked.

  Neither of his parents said anything. Hosea Blackford would be too old to nominate in 1936, even if he’d never lost an election in his life. Since he’d lost the way he had, the Socialists would be trying their best to forget he’d ever existed.

  “Won’t you?” Joshua asked again.

  “I like to think I would win against Mr. Hoover,” Hosea said slowly. “He doesn’t seem to me as if he’s moving things in the right direction. But I don’t know if I would want to run again, and I don’t know if the Socialist Party would nominate me if I did. We would have to see how things look in 1936 before we could know.”

  Flora added, “The next election for president is almost four years from now. That’s a long time.”

  “Especially in politics,” her husband added.

  Joshua nodded. He’d just turned seven; to him, four years were a very long time indeed. He said, “I think you still ought to be president.”

  “Thank you, son,” Hosea Blackford said.

  “I think the very same thing,” Flora said, and ruffled Joshua’s hair. He was dark like her, but otherwise looked more like his father, with a long face, prominent cheekbones, and a straight, pointed nose. He also had more of his father’s temperament: he was steadier than Flora, and not given to sudden enthusiasms that took control of him for days or weeks at a time.

  “Who do the Socialists have that could be any better than you, Dad?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine anyone better. Flora ruffled his hair again. Neither could she. But she knew the practical politicians in the Socialist Party would have a different opinion—and Hosea really would be too old to run again in 1936. He probably would have been too old to run in 1932 if he hadn’t been the incumbent.

  “One way or another, everything will work out fine,” she said. Joshua believed her. He was still only a little boy.

  The Remembrance steamed west across the Pacific, accompanied by three destroyers, a light cruiser, a heavy cruiser, and two battleships. Sam Carsten wished one of the battlewagons would have been the Dakota, but no such luck. His old ship was off doing something else; he had no idea what.

  Repairs in Seattle had been as quick as the Navy yard there could make them. He did his best not to worry about that. Back during the Great War, the Dakota had been hastily repaired after battle damage—and her steering had never been reliable again. Her steering probably still wasn’t reliable. So far as Sam knew, the Japanese torpedo hadn’t damaged the Remembrance’s steering—but what had it damaged that hasty repairs might not discover? He hoped he—and the ship—wouldn’t find out the hard way.

  Commander van der Waal wasn’t aboard. Broken ankles healed at their own pace; you couldn’t hurry them. A new damage-control officer, a lieutenant commander named Hiram Pottinger, was nominally in charge of antitorpedo work. But Pottinger’s previous service had been in cruisers. Sam knew the Remembrance backwards and forwards and inside out—literally inside out, after
the torpedo hit off the Canadian coast. Most of the burden fell on his shoulders.

  He’d led the sailors in the damage-control parties when things looked black. That had earned him respect he could have got no other way. It had also earned him thin new gold stripes on his cuffs; he’d been promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, for what he’d done. Glad as he was of the promotion, he could have done without some of the respect. He feared he would end up trapped in an assignment he’d never wanted.

  Martin van der Waal had always insisted it was an important assignment. Even had Sam been inclined to argue, the experience of getting torpedoed would have changed his mind. But he agreed with his injured superior. Important, antitorpedo work definitely was. That still didn’t mean he cared to make a career of it.

  He spent as much time as he could on deck. That meant more tinfoil tubes of zinc-oxide ointment, but he did it anyhow. Watching aeroplanes take off and land never failed to fascinate him. He got plenty of chances to watch, for the Remembrance flew a continuous air patrol. The Japanese Navy had ships out here, too, and who found whom first would have a lot to do with how any fight turned out. The way the arrester hook caught the cables stretched across the deck and brought a landing aeroplane to an abrupt halt still fascinated him.

  One perfect morning, he was taking the air on the flight deck after breakfast when alarms began to sound. Klaxons hooting in his ears, he ran for his battle station, wishing it weren’t deep in the bowels of the aeroplane carrier. He wanted to be able to see what was going on. As usual, the Navy cared not at all for what he wanted.

  “What’s the word, sir?” he panted as he came up to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.

  “Nothing good,” his superior answered. “One of our machines spotted a whole flight of aeroplanes with meatballs on their wings heading this way.”