The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  “To talk with you, if you care to talk,” the foreman answered. “Some of this mess is my fault. Maybe I can help fix it. Decent chop-suey joint around the corner and a block and a half down. I’ll buy you lunch, if you’ll let me.”

  Chester considered. The ex-Navy man was a pretty good guy, even if he had sold out to the exploiters. “I’ll eat with you,” Chester said. “I won’t let you buy for me.”

  “Deal,” Mordechai said at once.

  “And no sneaking in more scabs at lunchtime, the way you guys have done before,” Martin said. Mordechai nodded. Chester studied him. If he was a liar, he was a fine one. Chester nodded, too. “All right. We’ll do that.”

  At noon, they walked to the chop-suey place together. It wasn’t bad. Martin had certainly had worse. He ate without saying much. If Mordechai wanted to talk, he could talk. After a while, he did: “How can we settle this? I flew off the handle, and people have paid for it all over town. You can have your job back. No trouble there. Same with most of the people on your side.”

  “If you would’ve said that then, I’d’ve slobbered all over you, I’d’ve been so happy. Now?” Chester shook his head. “If I give in now, I sell out my pals. I can’t do that. The people you work for have got to recognize that the union’s come to Los Angeles. We don’t want the moon, but they’ve got to bargain with us, and they’ve got to do it in good faith.”

  Mordechai frowned. He ate another forkful of strange vegetables and bits of fried meat. “If you think they’ll recognize the union, that’s wanting the moon, and the stars to boot.”

  With a shrug, Chester answered, “I figured you’d say that. So what the hell have we got to talk about? We’ll go on with the class struggle and see how this round comes out.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that Socialist crap,” Mordechai said impatiently.

  “It isn’t crap.” Chester set his jaw. “It works. If it worked in the steel mills in Toledo, it’ll work here, too. How do you like being a scab?”

  Mordechai’s weathered features darkened with anger. “Don’t you call me that.”

  “Well, what else are you?”

  “I’m a foreman. And I’m a damn good one, too, by God.” Pride rang in Mordechai’s voice.

  “I never said you weren’t,” Chester answered. “You’re a damn fine foreman—most of the time. But that doesn’t mean you—or some prick who’s a foreman, too—can act like Jesus Christ on roller skates whenever you want. That’s why we need a union.”

  Despite his mutilated hand, Mordechai ate faster than Chester did. He finished lunch and pushed his chair back from the table. “Afraid you were right,” he said. “This was just a waste of time. You’re not going to win this strike, though, you know. You can’t.”

  “They said that in Toledo, too. They were wrong there. And you’re wrong now. Sooner or later, a construction outfit will decide they’d rather not have all this trouble, and they’ll give us a contract we can live with.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Mordechai advised. He tossed down a quarter. The silver coin rang sweetly. He walked out. Chester set his own quarter beside it and also headed back to the half-built tract. The strike would go on.

  January in the North Atlantic tested a ship’s construction. The endless storms and enormous seas tested a man’s construction, too. The USS Remembrance handsomely passed the test. Sam Carsten wasn’t so sure about his own innards. He had a good stomach, but the endless rolling and pitching started to make him feel as if he were riding a horse that hadn’t been broken. And he had to strap himself to his bed every night to keep from winding up on the deck. He always hated that.

  It needed doing, though. One sailor who slept in a top bunk forgot the strap and broke his arm when he fell out. To add insult to injury—in the most literal sense of the words—the captain busted him to ordinary seaman, too. Sam didn’t suppose he’d lose officer’s rank if he pulled a rock like that, but he didn’t care to find out, either.

  He was up and about when general quarters came. Getting to his station in the bowels of the Remembrance without breaking his neck was an adventure in this kind of weather, but he did it. He cussed most of the way there, though. The skipper had to be in an especially nasty mood to order general quarters in seas like this. It was bound to be just a drill, too. The United States weren’t at war with anybody.

  Besides, at the moment the carrier wasn’t anything more than an oversized light cruiser, anyhow. No way in hell she could launch her airplanes in seas like this. That left her with guns to defend herself, and she didn’t pack a whole lot of firepower—not that kind of firepower.

  Lieutenant Commander Pottinger arrived at their station at the same time as Sam did. Panting, he asked, “Do you think it’s true, Lieutenant?”

  “Do I think what’s true, sir?” Sam asked in turn. He was panting, too. He’d been in the Navy thirty years now. These mad dashes weren’t so easy as they had been once upon a time.

  “Why the captain called the general quarters,” Pottinger answered.

  “I can’t begin to tell you, sir,” Sam said. “I just heard the hooter and ran like hell. What do you know?”

  “I ran like hell, too,” the head of the damage-control party said. “Some men heading the other way said we’d spotted a Royal Navy ship, or maybe a Royal Navy squadron.”

  “I heard the same thing, sir,” a sailor named Szczerbiakowicz said. “Damned if I know whether it’s true, but I heard it.”

  “Did you, Eyechart?” Carsten used Szczerbiakowicz’s universal nickname; nobody but another Pole could have hoped to pronounce his real one. Sam turned to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. “If that’s so, sir, you think the limeys mean trouble?”

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Pottinger replied. “But I think maybe the skipper thinks they might.”

  “Yes, sir. Does seem that way, doesn’t it?” Sam looked at all the faces in the damage-control party. He realized he was the only one there old enough to have been at sea during the Great War. Even more than the way his heart pounded after the run to general quarters, that told him how many years he was carrying. He said, “The Royal Navy’s a damn good outfit. They were still on their feet in 1917. We never did knock ’em flat; we starved England into quitting when we finally shut down the grain and beef imports from Argentina.”

  The Remembrance rolled steeply. Everybody grabbed for a handhold to steady himself. The ship straightened, then rolled back the other way. Eyechart Szczerbiakowicz said, “I don’t care how good they are, sir. What can they do to us in seas like this?”

  “Damned if I know,” Sam said, talking like the petty officer he had been rather than the officer he was. “I’ll tell you this, though: I sure as hell don’t want to find out the hard way.”

  Nobody disagreed with him. Nobody wanted to see anything happen to the Remembrance. The men might not remember the Great War, but most of them had been through the inconclusive scrap against the Japanese. They knew too well how vulnerable to disaster even the mightiest warship could be. Huddling down here far below the main deck, away from fresh air and natural light, only served as a reminder. No one would do this if he didn’t have to.

  When the all-clear sounded, Sam let out a sigh of relief. Maybe the seas were too high to let the limeys launch torpedoes or to allow for accurate gunnery, but he didn’t want to have to see by experiment.

  As he left his station, he laughed at himself. For one thing, as he’d thought before, the United States were at peace with Britain, even if the two countries were a long way from friendly with each other. For another, he didn’t know for a fact that there were any Royal Navy ships within a hundred miles of the Remembrance. Along with everybody else in the damage-control party, he’d been building castles in the air.

  Sailors coming from other stations were also buzzing about the limeys. If they were wrong, they were all wrong the same way. Carsten shrugged. If he’d had a dollar for every time he’d seen unanimous rumor prove mistaken, he could hav
e quit the Navy and lived ashore in style.

  He headed for the officers’ mess, both to grab a sandwich and some coffee and to find out what was going on from some people who might actually know. When he got there, he discovered that most of the other officers were as much in the dark as he was.

  Before too long, though, Commander Cressy came into the mess. Every head swung toward the executive officer. Sam was far too junior to ask the question about which he was so curious, but that didn’t matter, because a lieutenant commander from engineering did it for him: “Did we really bump into the limeys, sir?”

  The exec paused to time the ship’s roll and put cream in his coffee with the least likelihood of spilling it all over the deck. That done, he nodded. “We sure as hell did. Oh, not literally, but in dirty weather like this we have to worry about that, too: can’t spot anything till it’s right on top of you.”

  “They’re patrolling farther west than they have for a while,” another officer said.

  “I know.” Commander Cressy nodded again, not very happily. “We have no agreement with them that says they can’t, but they haven’t up till now. They still have a long reach, damn them.”

  “Think they could link up with the Confederates, sir?” Sam asked.

  “Now isn’t that an interesting question?” Cressy said. “You have a way of asking interesting questions, Carsten.” Almost shyly, Sam dipped his head at the praise—if that was what it was. The exec went on, “The short answer is, I don’t know. For that matter, the long answer is I don’t know, too. We haven’t spotted the Confederates doing a whole lot to build up their surface fleet—some destroyers and cruisers, but no new battleships, no carriers. They would have a devil of a time building those without our noticing. Submersibles . . . Submersibles are a different story, I’m afraid.”

  The officer who’d first asked about the Royal Navy was a flame-haired Irishman named George Toohey. He said, “They started building those fuckers—pardon my French, sir—years before that Featherston bastard grabbed the reins. You can bet they haven’t stopped since.”

  “We should have made ’em say uncle the second we caught ’em at it,” another lieutenant commander said. “It would have saved us a lot of grief. Their boats gave us fits in the last war. They’re liable to do worse than that if we ever have to tangle with them again.”

  Nobody said he was wrong. Nobody in the Navy—nobody Sam Carsten had ever heard, anyhow—would have said he was wrong. But Commander Cressy only shrugged. “No use crying over spilt milk,” he said crisply. “We’re stuck with the world we’ve got, not the one that might have been. For better or worse, the political will to clamp down tight wasn’t there. If we ever do have another war, God forbid, I think we’ll see Royal Navy subs—and French ones, too—refitting in Confederate harbors, and C.S. boats doing the same thing on the other side of the Atlantic.” His smile bared sharp white teeth. “Makes our job a little more interesting, doesn’t it, gentlemen?”

  “They won’t be using Bermuda or the Bahamas or Canada as bases against us, anyway,” Lieutenant Commander Toohey said. “Not this time around, they won’t.”

  “Or Newfoundland, either.” Commander Cressy was relentlessly precise.

  “If the Confederate States have a lot of submarines, holding on to the Bahamas could get expensive,” Sam remarked. “Long haul down from Philadelphia and New York City, and every mile of it right past their coast.”

  A very young ensign said, “Baltimore’s closer.”

  Cressy withered him with a glance. “A look at the map would remind you that Baltimore also lies within Chesapeake Bay. One assumes the mouth of the bay will be thoroughly mined. One also assumes the Confederates in Norfolk will not sleep through the commencement of hostilities.” The ensign turned pink. He left the mess in a hurry. The exec was imperturbable. “Shall we go on discussing reasonable possibilities?”

  “Even if the Confederates don’t have carriers, how many land-based bombers have they got?” a lieutenant asked.

  That struck Sam as a possibility altogether too reasonable. He said, “I was aboard the Dakota in 1917, when British bombers attacked her from the Argentine mainland. That wasn’t much fun—and the airplanes now are a lot better than they used to be.”

  Commander Cressy nodded. “One reason we have carriers is to keep land-based aircraft off our fleets. Even so, though, the days of operating battleships in coastal waters may be gone for good.”

  The lieutenant who’d asked about land-based bombers said, “In that case, sir, why do we keep building them?”

  “I am not the right person to whom to direct that particular question, Mr. Hutton,” the exec replied. “I suggest you ask your Congressman, your Senators, and the Secretary of the Navy. You may be sure, I have done so.” His smile was cynical. “You may also be sure, my letters have done just as much good as you would expect.”

  Carsten had been in the Navy his entire adult life. He understood how the top brass thought. “We got some use out of battleships in the last war,” he said, “so of course we’ll need them in the next one.”

  “Yes. Of course.” But that wasn’t agreement from the executive officer. It was raw sarcasm. “By that way of thinking, it’s a miracle we have any carriers at all these days.” Another of those frightening smiles. “But of course we know everything is exactly the way it should be in this best of all possible worlds. Don’t we, gentlemen?”

  No one in the officers’ mess quite knew how to answer that. Sam hoped somebody in the Navy Department did.

  XIV

  If it had been up to Armstrong Grimes, he would have dropped out of high school as soon as he could and gone to work. He wanted everything work could give him: money, money, and, well, money. He didn’t think his mother would have minded. She and Aunt Clara were keeping Granny’s coffeehouse going to bring in extra cash.

  Armstrong snickered and cursed at the same time. He’d never liked his aunt, and it was mutual. They were only a couple of years apart, but these days the gap seemed wide as the Grand Canyon. Clara had escaped from school, while Armstrong was still stuck in it.

  Not matter what he thought, his old man was bound and determined that he get his high-school diploma. Armstrong quarreled with his father, but he’d never had the nerve to take things too far. Merle Grimes walked with a permanent limp, yes, but that was no sign of weakness. It as much as said, Don’t mess with me, punk. The Confederates shot me and I kept going, so why the devil should I be afraid of you?

  And so Armstrong had to endure another six months of Theodore Roosevelt High School before he could escape into the real world. He said as much one night, resentfully, over supper.

  His father laughed. “Once you do graduate, you’ll probably be conscripted. Two years in the Army will show you what’s real, all right.”

  “They don’t conscript everybody in a whole year-class, the way they did in your day,” Armstrong said. “I’ve got a pretty good chance of just being able to get on with my life.”

  “Your country is part of your life,” Merle Grimes said. “If you don’t help it, why should it help you?”

  “I would if we go to war or something,” Armstrong said. “But now . . . ?” He spread his hands, as if that would tell his father what he wanted instead of a green-gray uniform. Heading the list were his own apartment, his own auto, and a good-looking girlfriend the first two items would impress.

  “The peacetime Army is a steady place,” his father said. “The way things are these days, that counts for a lot. Who knows what’ll be out there? If your grades were better . . .” He gave his son a dirty look.

  “So I’m no greasy grind,” Armstrong said, returning it with interest. “I do good enough to get by.”

  “Good enough to get by isn’t good enough,” his father insisted. As far as Armstrong was concerned, he might have been speaking Chinese.

  On the way to school the next morning, Armstrong lit his first cigarette of the day. He didn’t smoke all that much, beca
use his father didn’t like him doing it around the house. The first drag he took made him a little sick and gave him a little buzz, both at the same time.

  He didn’t pay much attention in class. He would get by, and he knew it. The teachers couldn’t do anything to make him study harder, not when he would escape their clutches for good in a few months. A lot of the seniors, especially the boys, acted the same way.

  More because he was a senior than for anything in particular he’d done—his football career had been decent, but no more than decent—he found himself a big man on campus. The younger kids all looked up to him. He’d had that happen before, when he’d worked his way up from first grade all the way to eighth in elementary school. As an eighth-grader, he’d been a big shot. Then, all of a sudden, he’d been nothing but a freshman at Roosevelt, and freshmen were nobodies. He’d spent the rest of his time here getting back on top.

  He was on his way from math to U.S. government when he stopped so suddenly, the kid behind him bumped into him. He hardly even noticed. He’d just had a very nasty thought. Once he got out of high school, he’d fall right down to the bottom of the totem pole again. He wouldn’t be a big man on campus. He’d be a kid, fighting for a break against men twice his age. How long before he got back on top again? Twenty years? Ever?

  Armstrong tried to imagine twenty years. He couldn’t—it was longer than he’d been alive. In twenty years, he’d be close to forty, and if forty wasn’t old, what was? He’d intended to sneak another smoke in the boys’ room on the way to government, but he didn’t. Worrying about falling to the bottom of the totem pole had slowed him down, and he didn’t want to be tardy. They still handed out swats to kids who came in late, even to seniors.

  Mr. Wiedemann, the government teacher, walked with a limp almost identical to that of Armstrong’s father. He wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his lapel, so he’d been hurt during the war, too. “We don’t look at secession the way we did before 1863,” he said. “Can anyone tell me why we don’t?” Several hands shot into the air. Armstrong’s wasn’t one of them, but Wiedemann pointed at him anyway. “Grimes!”