The Center Cannot Hold

XV

"Here you are, George," Sylvia Enos said, setting a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her son. When his fishing boat was in port, she liked to stuff him. She was convinced the cook on the Whitecap was trying to starve him. Logic told her that was silly, especially since he'd grown into a strapping man, almost six feet tall and broad as a bull through the shoulders. Logic, sometimes, had nothing to do with anything.

"Thanks, Ma." He slathered on salt and pepper and started to eat. With his mouth full, he went on, "You know what? When I went out to the Banks, I took along a copy of I Sank Roger Kimball. That's a good book-that's a really good book. You and that writer fellow did a… heck of a job." The brief pause there surely meant he was changing what he might have said on the deck of the Whitecap. Sylvia smiled. She'd raised him right. He didn't cuss in front of her-well, not much, anyhow.

"Thank you," she said now. "You ought to thank Ernie, too. He did the real work. And he's a brick, too-if it hadn't been for him, we'd've lost our money when the bank went under. He didn't have to come back and warn me about that, but he did."

She turned away so her son wouldn't see the look on her face. She didn't know what her expression was, exactly, but she did know it wasn't one she wanted George, Jr., seeing. She would have gone to bed with Ernie. She'd wanted to go to bed with him. And a whole fat lot of good that did me, she thought. Just my damned luck, the first time I really want a man since George got killed, to fix on one who couldn't do me any good-or himself, either, poor fellow.

George, Jr., got up and poured himself more coffee-and Sylvia, too, when she pushed her cup toward him. He added cream and sugar, sipped, and said, "There's a lot of stuff in there I never knew before."

"I'm not surprised," Sylvia answered. "That was nine years ago now. You were still a boy then."

"When you put me and Mary Jane on the train to Connecticut, did you really think you'd never see us again?"

"Yes, I thought that. It was the hardest thing about what I did," Sylvia said. "But no one was going to make that man pay for what he did to the Ericsson at the end of the war, and he deserved to."

"But you would have paid, too."

"I didn't even think about what would happen to me. When I found out he was running around loose, I didn't think about much of anything."

"That must have been… very strange," George, Jr., said. "A couple of fellows on the boat were in the Army during the war-they got conscripted before they could join the Navy, or else they weren't sailors yet: I don't know which. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Sometimes they tell stories. They talk about how they were going up against Confederate machine guns and they didn't think they'd come back alive. It must have been like that for you, too."

"Maybe." Sylvia wasn't so sure. If a man charged a machine gun, he had a chance of living-maybe not much of a chance, but a chance. Once she'd shot Roger Kimball, she was in the hands of the law, and she didn't think she had any chance of escape at all. She hadn't counted on having Confederate politics come to her rescue.

Her son said, "You have a book signing this morning?"

"That's right. Every time I sign one, that's fourteen and three-quarter cents in my pocket," Sylvia answered. She couldn't have figured that out herself from the murky language of the book contract she'd signed; Ernie had explained the way things worked.

"Call it fifteen cents." George, Jr.'s, face got a faraway look. He'd always been good in school. Sylvia wished he would have liked it more, would have got his high-school diploma instead of going to work on T Wharf. Years too late to worry about that, though. He went on, "If you sign twenty of them, then, that's three dollars. That's not a bad day's wage."

"I don't know if I'll sign that many of them," Sylvia said, "but they're buying the book-or I hope they are-from here to San Diego. We'll see what it does, that's all. The reviews have been pretty good." That was Ernie's doing, of course; the actual words on paper were his. But the story's mine, Sylvia reminded herself. He couldn't have written it if not for me. My name deserves to be on the cover, too.

"Might be just as well they took a while getting it into print," her son said. "With the Freedom Party coming up again in the CSA, people here are liable to be more interested in what happened to one of its bigwigs back then."

Sylvia blinked. That was true, and she hadn't thought of it herself. George, Jr., had a man's shrewdness. Well, fair enough-he was a man; he'd be old enough to vote in November. Has it really been more than twenty-one years since he was born? Sylvia didn't want to believe that, but couldn't very well help it.

The bookstore, Burke's, wasn't far from Faneuil Hall. No line stretched around the block waiting for her when she arrived. They did have a sign in the window saying she'd be there. That was good. She'd signed at two or three stores that hadn't let anyone know she'd be there. As a result, she hadn't signed much.

She took her place at a table near the door. The table held a dozen copies of I Sank Roger Kimball and a neat hand-lettered sign: MEET THE AUTHOR. A man in a suit that had seen better days came up to her and asked, "Excuse me, ma'am, but where's the bathroom?"

"I'm sorry. I don't work here," Sylvia said. She'd already seen people paid no attention to signs. The man muttered something and went away.

Another man came up. He took a book from the pile for her to sign. "I was in the Navy," he said. "You did everybody on the Ericsson a good turn."

"Thank you," Sylvia said.

A woman picked up a copy of the book. She said, "My brother would like this, and his birthday is coming up. Would you sign it 'To Pete,' please?"

" 'To Pete,' " Sylvia echoed, and wrote the man's name and hers on the title page. That was where Ernie had said the autograph was supposed to go. He knew such things, or Sylvia was willing to believe he did.

A plump woman in a flowered housedress approached. "Where are your cookbooks, dear?" she asked.

"I'm sorry. I don't work here," Sylvia said again. She held up a copy of I Sank Roger Kimball. "Would you like to buy my book? I'll be glad to sign it for you if you do." Of course I will. It makes me money.

The woman shook her head. "Not unless it's got good recipes for beans and cabbage in it." That, Sylvia couldn't claim. The other woman wandered off, in search of cookbooks.

Over the next two hours, four more people asked Sylvia questions whose answers only someone who worked at Burke's could have known. She sent them off to the clerk behind the cash register. She also did get another nine people to buy copies of the book, most by simply sitting there and having them come up, a couple by waving the book as they walked into the store. The first time she'd signed, she hadn't done that-she'd been too shy. But the manager of that bookstore gave her a tip she took to heart: "If you don't toot your own horn, lady, who's gonna do it for you?"

She was getting ready to go home when the bell over Burke's front door jangled again. In walked a lean Irishman with a lot of teeth. He tipped his fedora to her. "Good day to you, Mrs. Enos." Striding up to the table, he took a copy of her book and opened it to the title page. Most people, left to themselves, chose the half-title page or the blank sheet in front of it, but he knew the ropes. "If you'd be so kind…?"

"Of course, Mr. Kennedy." She wrote, For Joseph Kennedy-Best wishes, Sylvia Enos, and gave the book back to him. Another fourteen and three-quarter cents, she thought, but I didn't expect he'd want anything to do with me.

Kennedy took the book over to the clerk, paid for it, and then came back to Sylvia's table. "I hope this means you've come to your senses, politically speaking," he remarked, though the way he looked at her didn't seem political at all.

She said, "I've always been a Democrat." That wasn't strictly true. She'd favored the Socialists till she saw Upton Sinclair do no more than protest to the Confederate States when it came out that Roger Kimball had torpedoed the USS Ericsson after the Confederates were supposed to have stopped fighting. But she'd voted Democratic for as long as she'd had the suffrage.

"You sometimes picked odd ways to show it." No, Kennedy hadn't forgotten seeing her at a Socialist rally on the Boston Common.

Knowing he hadn't forgotten, she asked him, "What do you want with me?"

The way his eyes flashed told her one thing he wanted. He knew she knew he was married; his wife had watched her children when she spoke at a Democratic function. He didn't care if she knew. He wanted what he wanted. But he made himself remember he wanted something else, too: "I hear you're doing well with your book. I look forward to reading it."

"Thank you," Sylvia Enos said.

Kennedy hefted his copy of I Sank Roger Kimball. "This has put you in the public eye, you know. We have a campaign to run, Mrs. Enos. Would you help Governor Coolidge-help the Democratic Party-take Powel House back from the Socialists? They were lucky at first, but what's happened to the country in President Blackford's term shows their true colors."

That wasn't even close to fair, and Sylvia knew it. But she'd already seen that political campaigns weren't designed to be fair. They were designed to convince, by whatever means possible. She said, "I'd like to help, Mr. Kennedy, but I don't know if I can. Times are hard."

"Don't you worry about that," Joseph Kennedy said. "Don't you worry about that a bit. We'll take care of you." That glint showed again in his eyes. "How does a hundred dollars a month sound, from now till the election? Plus expenses, of course."

For a moment, it sounded too good to be true. But then Sylvia remembered Ernie talking about his dicker with their publisher, and about first offers' being meant to snag people who didn't have the nerve the stand up for what they were really worth. Her spine stiffened. She said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kennedy, but I've got so many things planned, that isn't really enough to pull me away."

Joseph Kennedy eyed her again, this time in a very different way. Plainly, he'd expected her not just to say yes but to swoon with gratitude. After a long moment, he nodded, perhaps seeing her for the first time as a person and not just as a tool or a nicely shaped piece of meat. "More to you than meets the eye, isn't there?" he said, more to himself than to her. He grew brisk. "Well, business is business, and you'll do us some good. How does two hundred a month sound, then?"

Sylvia didn't gasp, but she came close. The way things were, that was a lot of money. "And expenses? And full pay for November, too?" she asked.

Kennedy bared his teeth. "You sure you're not a sheeny, Mrs. Enos?" he said. She didn't answer. She just waited. He gave her a sour nod. "And expenses. And full pay for November, too," he promised, and stuck out his hand. "Bargain?"

She was oddly reluctant to touch him. She didn't see how she could avoid it, though. When they shook on the deal, his hand felt like.. a hand. Somehow, she hadn't expected his flesh to seem so ordinary. "Bargain," she said. The wolf wouldn't come round her door again till the end of the year-longer, if she salted some money away, as she planned to. That made it a fine bargain indeed, as far as she was concerned.

A eroplanes roared off the Remembrance 's flight deck, one after another. Even with a push from the catapult to speed them on their way, they almost dropped into the gray-green water of the northern Pacific till they gained altitude and buzzed away, some to the north, others to the south.

Sam Carsten scratched his nose. His fingertip came away white with zinc-oxide ointment. Even here, off the west coast of Canada, he needed shielding from the summer sun. But, though he might burn in these waters, he wouldn't scorch.

He turned to George Moerlein. Back when they were both petty officers, they'd bunked together. But Moerlein was even newer on the Remembrance than he was now, having rejoined her crew during a fueling stop in Seattle. Carsten said, "Feels good to see us in business again."

"Yeah-uh, yes, sir," Moerlein said. "Sorry, sir."

"Don't worry about it," Sam answered. His old bunkmate had forgotten for a moment he was an officer these days. He went on, "I'm just glad this ship isn't tied up at the Boston Navy Yard any more."

"Me, too, sir." Moerlein got it right this time. "That was what finally made me put in for a transfer-I wondered if she'd ever go to sea again. For a hell of a long time, sure didn't look like it." He pulled out a cigar, then sheepishly put it back in his pocket. The smoking lamp was out on the flight deck during takeoffs and landings, for excellent good reasons. The petty officer shook his head. "I've been away too damn long. I shouldn't even have started to do that."

"Well, you saved me the trouble of barking at you," Sam answered.

Moerlein gave him a wry grin, then said, "What the hell do we do if we catch the Japs with their finger in the cookie jar? They're in international waters, same as we are. What can we do?"

"Damned if I know," Carsten said. "But if they're sending people into Canada to try to get the Canucks to rise up against us, we can't let 'em get away with that, can we?"

"Beats me," Moerlein told him. "But if we do find 'em and we do clobber 'em, don't you figure it's about even money we're doing it on account of President Blackford needs votes and wants to look tough?"

Sam scowled. "I'd hate to think that." He drummed his fingers on his trouser leg. "Of course, just because I'd hate to think it doesn't mean it's wrong."

An hour later, another flight of aeroplanes took off from the Remembrance, while a flight that had gone out before landed on the deck. The carrier kept aeroplanes in the sky all the time. If the Japs really were trying to sneak something past her, they wouldn't have an easy time of it.

As far as Sam could prove, the Remembrance was just going through the motions. Her air patrols had spotted nothing out of the ordinary: fishing boats and merchantmen, none of them flying the Rising Sun. Whether they stumbled upon any actual Jap warships or not, though, the training the whole crew-and especially the pilots-got was priceless, as far as he was concerned. George Moerlein had it dead right: anything was better than sitting in the Navy Yard.

When klaxons started howling a couple of days later, Sam sprinted to his battle station figuring it was just another drill. He certainly hoped so; going to the bowels of the ship on antitorpedo duty wasn't, never had been, and never would be his favorite choice. By now, though, he'd spent more than twenty years in the Navy. He knew how things worked. The Navy did what it wanted, not what he wanted.

Commander van der Waal was down there ahead of him, at the head of a damage-control party. The other officer's face was thoroughly grim. "What's up, sir?" Sam panted. "They tell you anything?"

"Yes," van der Waal said. "Our aeroplanes spotted a high-powered motorboat pulling away from what looked like an ordinary freighter. Ordinary freighters don't carry speedboats, though."

"Son of a bitch," Sam said softly, and then, louder, "They sure don't. What flag is the freighter flying?"

"Argentine," van der Waal answered. "But the aeroplane buzzed her at smokestack height, and the sailors don't look like they're from Argentina. She doesn't respond to wireless signals, either."

The throb of the Remembrance 's engine grew louder and deeper as the great ship picked up speed. " Son of a bitch," Sam said again. "What are we going to do about it?"

"Freighter's only about sixty miles north of us," van der Waal said. "Seems like we're going up for a look-see of our own."

"What about that speedboat?" Carsten asked.

"It won't outrun an aeroplane-probably a swarm of aeroplanes by now," Commander van der Waal said. "But if we find that freighter's full of Japs sailing under cover of a false flag… Well, I don't know what we'll do then."

"Argentine flag's handy for them-Argentina doesn't love us, either," Sam said. During the Great War, Argentina had fought Chile and Paraguay, both of them U.S. allies, because she'd been making money hand over fist sending grain and meat to Britain and France. Sam's old ship had been part of the American-Chilean fleet that sailed round the Horn to try to cut off that trade: not altogether successfully, not till the Empire of Brazil finally entered the war on the side of the USA and Germany, forcing Argentine and British ships out of her territorial waters.

"We may be only a couple of hours from war, Ensign," van der Waal said.

"Yes, sir," Sam answered. "Well, if we are, I hope we kick the Japs around the block, but good."

In fact, he wondered how much damage the USA and Japan could do to each other. An awful lot of ocean separated the two countries. The United States-the American Empire, counting Canada-had more resources. Could they bring them all to bear, though, with a long frontier facing a Confederacy that hated them and might be tempted to throw in with the Japs? Of course, the Japanese had to worry about the Russians sitting over their holdings in Manchuria.

After a while, a sailor brought word from the wireless room: "We've ordered them to stop for inspection, and they say they don't have to, not in international waters. They sure as hell don't talk like Argentines."

Technically, whoever was aboard that freighter was right. Technically, a man who stepped out into the street with a traffic light was also right. If a truck ran the light and killed him, he ended up just as dead as if he'd been wrong. Another half an hour passed. Then one of the five-inch guns Sam knew so well bellowed.

"Shot across her bow," van der Waal said. Carsten nodded.

And then, quite suddenly, the Remembrance 's engines roared with emergency power. The great ship turned hard to port. Van der Waal and Carsten stared at each other. Sam said, "They must've-"

He got no further than that, because a torpedo slammed into the aeroplane carrier and knocked him off his feet. The lights flickered, but stayed on. "Starboard hit, felt like back toward the stern," van der Waal said. He was on his wallet. When he tried to get to his feet, he fell back with a groan and a curse. "I think the burst broke my ankle. I can't move on it. Are you sound, Carsten?"

Sam was already upright again. "Yes, sir."

"You're in charge of damage control, then," the other officer said, biting his lip against the pain. "I know it's not the job you wanted, but you've got to do it. We're taking on water, sure as hell."

"Yes, sir, I can feel it," Carsten agreed. Astonishing how small a list his sense of balance could detect. But this wasn't a time to marvel about such things, not if he wanted to have the chance to marvel later. He nodded to van der Waal. "I'll take care of it, sir, you bet. Come on, boys-let's get moving."

Even as he led the men of the damage-control party back toward the wound in the ship, he wondered if the next torpedo would slam into her amidships and flood the engine room. If she lost power, the lights and the pumps would fail, and then the Remembrance might well go down.

That damn Jap ship must've had a submersible tagging along, in case we found her, he thought unhappily. And we're out here all by our lonesome, without any destroyers along. The Navy Department didn't really believe we'd come up with anything, so they decided to do this on the cheap. Now it's liable to kill us all.

One of the sailors said, "Fuel storage for the aeroplanes is back here. We're lucky the gasoline didn't blow up and send us right to the moon."

"Gurk," Sam said. He hadn't thought of that.

All the watertight doors were closed. That was something. But how many doors, how many watertight compartments, had the blast shattered? That was what they had to find out. Whether the Remembrance lived or died would turn on the answer.

Water in the corridor told them they were nearing the hit. "Do we open that door, sir?" a sailor asked, pointing to the twisted portal, no longer tight, under which the seawater was leaking.

"You bet we do," Sam answered. "Likely men still alive on the other side. Now we fan out, too, cover as much ground as we can, start sealing off what we have to and getting out sailors. Let's go. This is what we've trained for, and it's what we've got to do." I sound just like Commander van der Waal, he thought. Damned if he wasn't right all along, even if I didn't feel like admitting it.

They found sailors closer to the damage who were already doing what they could to stem the tide of water pouring into the Remembrance: stuffing mattresses and whatever else they could find into sprung seams between doors and hatchways and such. Carsten took charge of them, too. He kicked aside a floating severed hand that still trailed blood.

Before long, he was sure the hit the aeroplane carrier had taken wouldn't sink her. Most of her compartments were holding against the flood. Both his sense of balance and a level he had with him insisted that her list had stabilized. Her pumps never faltered. Most important of all, the second torpedo, the one he'd dreaded so much, never came.

In spare moments, when he wasn't too busy sloshing through seawater eventually up past his waist, he wondered why the Japanese submersible hadn't put another fish, or two or three more, into the Remembrance. Word eventually trickled down from above. "Sir, we sank the fucker," a messenger said. "She launched two at us. One missed. The other one nailed us. We had some aeroplanes with bombs underneath 'em in the air by then, to help sink the Jap freighter and the speedboat. One of 'em spotted the submersible as she launched, and he put a bomb right on the bastard's conning tower. That sub sank, and it ain't coming up again."

"Bully!" Every once in a while, especially when he didn't think, Sam still used the slang he'd grown up with. The messenger was a fresh-faced kid who'd surely been pissing in his diapers when the Great War started, and looked at him as if at the Pyramids of Egypt or any other antiquity. He didn't care. If the kid wanted to say swell, that was fine. Most of the time, Sam said swell himself. But bully, even if it did smack of the days before the war, said what he wanted to say, too. The United States had found themselves a new fight. They'd need the Remembrance. And Sam, old-fashioned or not, was glad not to be among its first casualties.

H eadlines in the Rosenfeld Register shrieked of war: VICIOUS JAP ATTACK ON USS REMEMBRANCE! A subhead said, Ship badly damaged but stays afloat! Another headline warned, BEWARE THE YELLOW PERIL!

Mary McGregor had never seen a Japanese in her life. Except for pictures in books, she'd never seen a Negro, either. She imagined Japanese almost as yellow as sunflowers, with slit eyes set in their faces at a forty-five-degree angle. It wasn't a pretty picture. She didn't care. The Japs were fighting the United States. As far as she was concerned, nothing else mattered. If they were fighting the USA, she was all for them.

The Yellow Peril story in the Register warned anyone who spotted a Jap to report him at once to U.S. occupation authorities. She pointed that out to her mother. "Pretty funny, isn't it?" she said. "Can't you just see a Jap walking down the main street in Rosenfeld and stopping in at Gibbon's general store to buy a pickle and some thumbtacks?"

"That story must be going out all over Canada," her mother said. "Maybe there are places where you really might run into Japanese people-Vancouver, somewhere like that. I know they've got Chinamen in Vancouver. Why not Japs, too?"

"Maybe," Mary said. "That would make some sense-as much sense as the Yanks ever make, anyway. But why put that kind of notice in the Register? It's just stupid here, really, really stupid." She held up a hand before her mother could answer. "I know why. Some Yank in a swivel chair probably said, 'Stick this order in every paper in Canada, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. And stick it in every paper in Newfoundland, too, while you're about it.' Who cares whether it makes sense if you're sitting in a swivel chair?"

Maude McGregor smiled. "You're probably right. The Americans do things like that. They like giving big orders, if you know what I mean. It's part of what makes them the kind of people they are."

Had Mary been a man among men and not a young woman talking with her mother, she would have expressed her detailed opinion about what sort of people Americans were. Her eyes must have sparked in a way that got her opinion across without words, for her mother's smile got wider. Then Maude McGregor said, "Next time you go to the cinema with Mort Pomeroy, make sure there aren't any Japs under the front seat in his motorcar."

"I'll do that," Mary said, laughing.

Her mother's smile changed. She said, "Your face just lit up. You think he's special, don't you?"

"Yes." Mary nodded without hesitation. "I've never felt like this about a boy before." She hadn't had much chance to feel anything special about boys up till now. Most of them stayed away from the McGregor house as if she had a dangerous disease. And, in occupied Canada, what disease could be more dangerous than not only descending from someone who'd fought the Yanks to his last breath but also being proud of it?

"I'm glad he makes you happy," her mother said. "I hope he keeps making you happy for years and years, if that's what you both end up wanting."

"I think maybe it is," Mary said slowly, a certain wonder in her voice. "He hasn't asked me or anything, but I think I'll say yes if he does. The only thing I don't know about yet is how he

feels about the USA."

"Would you let that stand between the two of you if you really love each other?" her mother asked.

"I don't think I could really love anybody who sucks up to the Americans," Mary answered. "I just couldn't stand it. So I'll have to find out about that. Then I'll make up my mind."

Maude McGregor sighed. "All right, dear. I'm not going to try to tell you any different. You're old enough to know your own mind. But I am going to tell you this: I'm afraid you won't have too many chances, so you'd be smart to think twice before you waste any of them."

"I never expected to have any," Mary said. "We'll see what happens, that's all. I'm going out to the barn now. I want to give the cow a bottle of that drench we got from the vet."

"I don't know how much good it will do," her mother said.

"Neither do I." Mary shrugged. "But it won't do any good if the cow doesn't drink it, so I'd better try."

The trick in getting medicine into a cow, she knew, was making sure she thrust the bottle almost down its throat. Otherwise, the drench would slop out the other side of the beast's mouth. It probably tasted nasty-it stank of ammonia, and she wouldn't have wanted to drink it herself. She poured it down the cow, though, and had the satisfaction of pulling the empty bottle from the beast's mouth and seeing only a few drops on the dirt and straw in the stall.

However satisfied Mary was, the cow was anything but. It drank from the trough, no doubt to get rid of the taste of the drench. Mary left the stall. She paused and sat down by the old wagon wheel. She hadn't given up. She didn't intend to give up. She still burned to pay back the Yanks-and the Canadians who collaborated with them.

"I'll take care of it, Father," she whispered. "Don't you worry about a thing. I'll take care of it."

And what would Mort Pomeroy think of that? He hadn't run away from her when he found out she was Arthur McGregor's daughter. That surely meant he had some interest in her-and that he liked the Yanks none too well. What else could it possibly mean?

Cold as Manitoba winter, she answered her silent rhetorical question. It could mean he's head over heels for you and doesn't care about politics one way or the other-or, if he does care, he'll forget about that for the time being because he's head over heels for you.

Or — colder yet- it could mean he's really a collaborator himself, but he's pretending not to be so he can trap you. Mary shook her head. It wasn't so much that she believed Mort incapable of such an outrage, though she did. It was much more that she didn't think the Yanks could be interested in her. Her father, after all, was almost nine years dead. She'd been a girl when he blew himself up. Since then, she hadn't done anything overt against the Americans. Oh, they were bound to know she didn't love them. But if they got rid of every Canadian who didn't love them, this would be a wide and ever so empty land.

She took her weekly bath earlier than usual that Saturday, and dressed in her best calico. Her mother smiled. "What time is Mort coming for you?" she asked.

"Between six and six-thirty," Mary answered. "Do I look all right?" She anxiously patted at her hair.

"You look wonderful," her mother answered. "I'm sure you'll have a good time. Talking pictures! Who would have thought of such a thing?"

Mary sniffed. "They've had them in the USA and the CSA for a couple of years now. We're only the poor relations. We have to wait our turn."

"That may be part of it, but Rosenfeld's not the big city, either," Maude McGregor said. "I'll bet they've had them in places like Winnipeg and Toronto for a while now."

With another sniff, Mary said, "Maybe." She didn't want to give the Americans the benefit of any doubt.

Mort Pomeroy pulled up in his Oldsmobile at six on the dot. Mary didn't, couldn't, hold his driving an American auto against him. After the U.S. conquest, the Canadian automobile industry no longer existed. "Hello, Mary," Mort said when she came to the door. "You look very pretty tonight. Hello, Mrs. McGregor," he added to her mother, who stood behind her.

"Hello, Mort," Maude McGregor answered gravely.

"Shall we go?" Mary didn't sound grave-she was eager.

"Have a nice time," her mother said. She didn't tack on, Don't stay out too late, as she had on Mort's first few visits to the farmhouse.

Riding in a motorcar was something Mary hadn't done very often before she got to know Mort Pomeroy, though she tried not to let on. It was ever so much faster and smoother than traveling by wagon. Almost before she knew it, they were back in Rosenfeld.

Mort laid down two quarters at the cinema as if he'd never had to worry about money in his life. That Mary doubted; his father might make a living from his diner, but nobody got rich running a business in Rosenfeld.

Inside the theater, he bought them a tub of popcorn and some sweet, fizzy stuff called Yankee Cola. The bubbles tickled as they went up Mary's nose. She laughed in spite of the fizzy water's name. Music blared from the screen as the newsreel started. Then there were pictures of a damaged warship that, with its flat deck and asymmetrical smokestack and superstructure, was as funny-looking as anything Mary had every imagined. "Jap treachery almost sank the USS Remembrance," the announcer boomed, "but quick work by her damage-control team saved her."

On the screen, a very fair officer looked out at the audience. "We got her back to port," he said. "She'll be in action again before long, and then the enemy's going to pay."

Mary leaned toward Mort Pomeroy. "Too bad the Japs didn't sink her," she whispered, and waited to see how he'd respond.

He nodded. He didn't make a fuss about it or get excited, but he nodded. Mary didn't think she could have stood it if he'd said he would rather see the USA win than Japan. As things were, she smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder in the dark theater and enjoyed the film. Sound did add to the story: more than it did to the newsreel, where most of it had been martial music and an announcer reading what would have been shown before in print on the screen. Hearing characters talk and sing made her feel as if she lived in New York City with them-and made her feel as if she wanted to, which was even more startling.

Afterwards, Mort drove her back toward the farmhouse. Voice elaborately casual, he said, "We could stop for a little while."

There were only the two of them, and the motorcar, and the vast Canadian prairie. Who would know if they did stop for a little while? No one at all. "Yes," Mary said, also casually, "we could."

He parked on the soft shoulder and turned off the engine and the headlights. It was very quiet and very dark. They slid towards each other on the front seat. His arms went around her. They kissed for a long time. He squeezed her breasts through the thin cotton fabric of her dress. The heat that filled her had nothing to do with the warm summer evening. But when he set a hand high on her thigh and tried to slide it higher yet, she twisted away. "I'm not that kind of girl, Mort," she said, and hoped her breathless voice didn't give away her lie.

Evidently not. He just nodded and said, "Kiss me again, then, sweetheart, and I'll take you home." She did, happily. He fired up the Oldsmobile's engine and put the auto in gear. Off toward the farm it went. Mary didn't know when she'd been so happy. Looking at Mort Pomeroy there beside her, she was almost sorry she wasn't that kind of girl.

"O ccupation duty!" Colonel Abner Dowling made the words into a curse. "My country's at war, and what do I get? Occupation duty. There's no justice in the world, none at all."

"As General Custer's adjutant, sir, you were right at the heart of things during the Great War," Captain Toricelli said.

"I wanted to be at the front, not at First Army headquarters," Dowling said. That was nothing but the truth. It wasn't the whole truth, of course. The whole truth was, he would have sold his soul for seventeen cents to escape the company of General Custer, provided the Devil or anyone else had offered him the spare change for it.

And yet Custer unquestionably was a hero, a hero many times over. How did that square with the other? Dowling cast a suspicious eye in the direction of Captain Toricelli. What did Toricelli think of him? Some things, perhaps, were better left unknown.

"If you must do occupation duty, sir," his adjutant persisted, "there are worse places than Salt Lake City. If the Mormons rise up again with all their might, they don't just tie down men we might use fighting the Japs-"

"Not likely they could," Dowling said. "Damned few battleships and cruisers and submersibles in the Great Salt Lake."

"Er-yes, sir," Captain Toricelli said. "But the railroads still run through Utah. An uprising could keep manufactured goods from getting to the West Coast and oil from getting to the East. That would make everything much harder."

"I should say it would," Dowling agreed. "And fighting Japan will be hard enough as is. The little yellow men have been getting ready for this ever since the Great War. And what have we been doing the past twelve years? Not enough, Captain. I'm very much afraid we haven't done enough."

"Do you know what worries me more than anything else, sir?" Toricelli said.

"Tell me, Captain," Dowling urged. "I can always use something new to worry about. I may not be able to find enough things on my own."

"Er-yes," Toricelli said again; Abner Dowling in a sportive mood disconcerted him. Gathering himself, he went on, "I'm afraid President Blackford will pick up a lot of votes because we're at war."

"Oh." Dowling scowled. That made entirely too much sense for him to like it. "I do hope you're wrong. With luck, people will see a Democrat in Powel House is the best hope we have of winning this war. We've been in two with Republicans, and we lost both of those. And we're not off to a good start with a Socialist running one. I'll trade you-do you want to know what worries me more than anything else?"

"Tell me, sir," Angelo Toricelli replied. He didn't actually say he wanted to know, but he came close enough. He was an adjutant, after all; part of his job was listening to his superior.

Dowling knew more about that side of being an adjutant than he cared to. But the shoe was on the other foot now. He didn't have to listen to General Custer's maunderings any more. And he didn't intend to maunder here. He said, "I'm afraid the Japs will take the Sandwich Islands away from us, the way we took them away from England in 1914. That would be very bad. Without the Sandwich Islands, we'd be fighting this war out of San Diego and San Francisco and Seattle. The logistics couldn't get much worse than that."

"Well, no, sir," Captain Toricelli said. "But we caught the British by surprise when the Great War broke out. I can't imagine the Japanese pulling off a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor."

"I hope not, by God," Dowling said. "Still, who would have thought they could have pulled off a sneak attack on the Remembrance? That was a pretty slick piece of work."

"It cost them, too," his adjutant said. "They lost their freighter and their speedboat and their submersible."

"A good thing they did," Dowling said. "If that sub could have launched a second spread of torpedoes, we'd have lost our aeroplane carrier. By everything people say, we almost lost her anyhow." He shook his head. His jowls wobbled. "As far as you can in a situation like that, we got lucky."

Toricelli nodded. "And Canada's quiet-for the time being, anyhow. And President Mitchel's keeping the CSA quiet, too. He can't possibly strike at us-the Confederates are no more ready for a big war than we are: less, if anything. And the Action Francaise is busy puffing out its chest and making faces at the Kaiser. So it's just us and the Japs."

"And thousands of miles of water," Dowling added.

"Yes, sir-and several thousand miles of water," Captain Toricelli agreed.

Those thousands of miles of water, of course, were the main reason Abner Dowling would almost surely stay in Utah for as long as the war lasted. The United States had needed an enormous Army to take on the Confederate States along the land frontier the two American republics shared-had needed it, got it, and won with it. But what good was an enormous Army out in the Pacific, where most of the islands were small and where the only way to get to them was by ship? None Dowling could see.

He surged to his feet, saying, "I'm going to take a bit of a constitutional." Every doctor he'd ever seen told him he'd be better off if he lost weight. Trouble was, he had no great interest in losing it. He'd always been heavy. He felt good. And he liked nothing in the whole wide world better than eating.

By the time he got to the entrance to Army headquarters in Salt Lake City, a squad of armed guards waited to escort him on his stroll: his adjutant must have telephoned ahead. Dowling fumed a little; he didn't want to go for a walk surrounded by soldiers. But he could hardly claim he didn't need guards, not after he'd been in General Pershing's office when that still uncaught assassin gunned down the military governor of Utah.

If anybody in a third-story window had a rifle, or maybe just a grenade, all the guards wouldn't do him a hell of a lot of good. He knew that-knew it and refused to dwell on it. "Let's go, boys," he said.

"Yes, sir," they chorused. The privates among them were young men, conscripts. The sergeant who led the squad was in his thirties, a Great War veteran with ribbons for the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star among the fruit salad on his chest.

The wind blew out of the west. It tasted of alkali. Dowling thought tumbleweeds should have been blowing down dusty streets with a wind like that. The streets in Salt Lake City weren't dusty, though. They were well paved. Everything in the city-with the inevitable exception of the ruins of the Temple and Tabernacle-was shiny and new. Everything from before the Great War had been knocked flat during the Mormon uprising.

Sea gulls spiraled overhead. Seeing them always bemused Dowling. Staying within the borders of the United States, you couldn't get much farther from the sea than Salt Lake City. The gulls didn't care. They ate bugs and garbage and anything else they could scrounge. Farmers liked them. Dowling pulled down his hat, hoping the gulls wouldn't make any untoward bombing runs.

He strolled past the sandbagged perimeter around the headquarters. Soldiers in machine-gun nests saluted as he went by. He returned the salutes. Leaving headquarters wasn't so hard. To return, he knew he'd have to show his identification. The Mormons hadn't tried anything lately. That didn't mean they wouldn't.

People on the street looked like… people. Women tugged at their skirts to keep them from flipping up in the breeze. Boys in short pants ran and shouted. A long line of men waited patiently in front of a soup kitchen. Dowling could have seen the like in any medium-sized city in the USA. And yet…

Nobody said anything to him. He hadn't expected anyone would, not with soldiers tramping along beside him with bayonets glittering on their Springfields. No one even gave him a dirty look. But he still had the feeling of being in the middle of a deep freeze. The locals hated him, and they'd go right on hating him, too.

After a bit, he noticed one difference between Salt Lake City and other medium-sized towns in the USA. No election posters shouted from walls and fences. No billboards praised Hosea Blackford and Calvin Coolidge. Being under martial law, Utah didn't enjoy the franchise. Lawsuits to let the locals vote had gone all the way to the Supreme Court-and had been rejected every time. Ever since the War of Secession, the Supreme Court had taken a much friendlier line toward the federal government's authority than toward any competing principle.

And it's paid off, by God, Dowling thought. We finally licked the damned Confederates. We're the strongest country in America. We're one of the two or three strongest countries in the world. We did what we had to do.

He turned a corner… turned it and frowned. Half a dozen posters were plastered on a wall there: simple, wordless things showing a gold-and-black bee on a white background. The bee, symbol of industry, was also the symbol of Deseret, the name the Mormons had given to the would-be state the U.S. Army crushed.

Dowling turned to the sergeant who headed the bodyguards. "Note this address," he said. "If those posters aren't down tomorrow, we'll have to fine the property owner."

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said crisply.

Martial law meant no antigovernment propaganda. The Mormons and the government hadn't liked or trusted each other since the 1850s. They'd despised each other since the 1880s, and hated each other since 1915. That didn't look like changing any time soon. The government-and the Army-held the whip hand. If the posters didn't come down, the man on whose property they were displayed would be reckoned disloyal, and would have to pay for that disloyalty.

Of course he's disloyal, Dowling thought. The only people in Utah who aren't disloyal are the ones who aren't Mormons-and we can't trust all of them, either. The Army didn't stop to ask a whole lot of questions about who was who back in 1915. We landed on everybody with both feet. So some of the gentiles haven't got any use for us, either. Well, too bad for them.

As he walked down the block, he saw more bee posters. He nodded to the sergeant, who took down more addresses. One man was already out in front of his house with a bucket of hot water and a scraper, taking down the posters on his front fence. Dowling nodded to the noncom again, this time in a different way. That address didn't get taken.

But when Dowling asked the man scraping away at the posters if he knew who'd put them up, the fellow just shook his head. "Didn't see a thing," he answered.

He likely would have said the same thing if he'd given cups of coffee to the subversives who'd put the posters on his fence-not that pious Mormons would have either offered or accepted coffee. Even the locals who outwardly cooperated with U.S. authority weren't reliable, or anything close to it.

With a sigh, Abner Dowling went on his way. He wasn't in the front lines against the Japanese. He probably never would be. But whenever he went out into Salt Lake City, he got reminded he was at war.

"N o, Mister-uh-Martin. Sorry, sir." The clerk in the hiring office shook her head. "We aren't looking for anyone right now. Good luck somewhere else."

"Thanks," Chester Martin said savagely. The clerk blushed and ran a sheet of paper into her typewriter so she wouldn't have to look at him.

Jamming the brim of his cloth cap down almost to his eyes, Martin stalked out of the office. He didn't even slam the door behind him. He might come back to this steel mill again, and he didn't want them remembering him the wrong way.

He wanted work. He wanted it so bad, he could taste it. But wanting and having weren't the same. Somewhere around one man in four in Toledo was out of a job. It was the same all over the country.

He hadn't really expected to find work here, but he had to keep going through the motions. He'd been to every steel mill in town at least four times, with never the trace of a nibble. He'd been other places, too. He'd been to every kind of outfit that might need a strong back and a set of muscles. He'd had just as much luck at the plate-glass and cut-glass works, at the docks, at the grain mills, and even at the clover-seed market as he had in his proper line of work. Zero equaled zero. He didn't remember much of what he'd learned in school, but that was pretty obvious.

A man in a colorless cloth cap shabbier than his own came up to him and held out a hand. Voice a sour whine, the man said, "Got a dime you can spare, pal?"

Chester shook his head. "I don't have a job, either."

The other man eyed him-here, plainly, was another fellow who'd lost his job early in the collapse. "You haven't been out of work all that long," he said. "You still think you'll get one pretty soon." The day was hot and muggy, but his laugh might have come from the middle of winter.

"I have to," Martin said simply.

"That's what I said," the other unemployed man replied. "That's just what I said. After a while, though, you find a Blackfordburgh isn't such a bad place. You just wait, buddy. You'll see." He tipped his shabby cap and walked on.

With a shudder as if a goose had walked over his grave, Martin went on his way, too. He and Rita were still hanging on to their apartment, thanks to money borrowed from his folks. But he didn't know how long his father and mother would be able to go on helping them. If his father lost his job… Chester didn't even want to think about that. How could he help it, though, with so many men pounding the pavement looking for work? Guys just like me, he thought as his own feet slapped up and down, up and down, on the sidewalk.

He had a long walk home. He didn't care. A long walk beat paying a nickel trolley fare. One of these days soon, though, he'd have to shell out some money to let the little old Armenian cobbler down the street repair his shoes. Walking wore on the soles as much as being out of work wore on the soul.

Somebody on a soapbox-actually, on what looked like a beer barrel-was making a speech under the statue of Remembrance across from city hall. A couple of dozen men and a handful of women listened impassively as the fellow bawled, "We've got to hang all the damn Reds! They aren't real Americans-they never have been! And the Democrats are just as bad. No, worse, by thunder! They pretend they want us strong, but all they really aim to do is keep us weak! Half of 'em are in the Japs' pockets right this minute, so help me God they are!"

He paused for applause. He didn't get much. Chester Martin kept walking. He supposed it was inevitable that hard times would spawn reaction, but this fellow seemed no threat to imitate what the Freedom Party was doing in the CSA. Just a noisy nut, Chester thought. It's not like we haven't got enough of those.

VOTE SOCIALIST! posters a little farther on proclaimed. TOGETHER, WE HAVE POWER! they showed a brawny factory worker swinging a hammer under a bare electric bulb. Nowhere did they mention Hosea Blackford's name. It was as if they wanted to forget he was there while hoping he got reelected anyhow.

COOLIDGE! The Democrats' posters weren't shy about naming their man. HE'LL FIX THINGS! they promised, and showed the governor of Massachusetts as a confident-looking physician at the bedside of a wan U.S. eagle. That wasn't fair, but it was liable to be effective. And the Democrats seemed not only willing but proud to tell the world who their presidential candidate was. They even had his running mate, a native Iowan with slicked-down hair, at his side handing him a stethoscope.

Martin muttered under his breath. The depths to which the United States had fallen in the past three years and more truly made him wonder whether he'd done the right thing in turning Socialist after the Great War. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. He laughed, though it wasn't funny. For how many mistakes was that an excuse? About half the ones in the world, if he was any judge.

But it had. With the big capitalists clamping down tight on labor in the rough days right after the war, voting Socialist had seemed the only way to hold his own. And it had worked. For ten years and more, the country stayed prosperous. But when prosperity died, it died painfully.

Would the Democrats have let things get this bad? Chester pondered that as he tramped toward his apartment. He still had the letter Teddy Roosevelt had sent him after he was wounded. He'd met Roosevelt in the trenches during the war-had, in fact, jumped on the president and knocked him flat when the Confederates started shelling his position on the Roanoke front. Roosevelt hadn't forgotten him. TR's concern hadn't been based on class, as the Socialists' was. It had been personal. The Socialists sneered at such ties, saying they were like those of an old-time baron and his feudal retainers.

Maybe the Socialists were right. Chester had no reason to believe they were wrong. Right or wrong, though, they'd done none too well themselves. Maybe personal ties really did count for more than those of class.

"Damned if I know," Martin muttered. "Damned if I know anything any more, except that things are fouled up all to hell and gone."

A woman coming the other way gave him an odd look. She didn't say anything. She just kept walking. The way things were nowadays, plenty of people went around talking to themselves.

Martin opened the door to his apartment without having found any answers. He doubted anybody in the whole country had any answers. If anybody did have them, he would have been using them by now. Wouldn't he?

Rita's voice floated out of the kitchen: "Hello, honey. How did it go?"

"N. G.," Chester answered. The two slangy initials summed up the way things were in the USA these days. The United States were no good, no good at all. He went on, "They aren't hiring. Big surprise, huh?"

His wife came out of the kitchen, an apron around her waist. She gave him a hug and a kiss. "You've got to keep trying," she said. "We've both got to keep trying. Something's bound to turn up sooner or later."

"Yeah." Martin hoped his voice didn't sound too hollow. He remembered the fellow who'd tried to panhandle from him, the one who'd said he was living in the local Blackfordburgh. With a shiver, Martin made himself shove that thought down out of sight. He tried to sound bright and cheerful as he asked, "What smells good?" He meant that; something sure did. They hadn't had any meat for a few days, but the aroma said they would this evening.

"It's a beef heart." Rita did her best to sound bright and cheerful, too. "Mr. Gabrieli had 'em on special for practically nothing. I know they're tough, but if you stew 'em long enough they do get tender-well, more tender, anyhow. And I could afford it."

"All right," Chester said. "It does smell good." Since he'd lost his job, he'd found out about tripe and giblets and head cheese and other things he hadn't eaten before. Some of them turned out to be pretty good-giblets, for instance. He wouldn't get a taste for tripe if he lived to be a hundred. He ate it, because sometimes it was that or no meat at all. Sometimes-a lot of the time-it was no meat at all. Maybe the beef heart would prove tasty.

It proved… not too bad. No matter how long Rita cooked it, it remained chewy, with a faintly bitter taste. But it satisfied in ways cabbage and potatoes and noodles couldn't. "Here's hoping Mr. Gabrieli has it on special again before too long," Chester said. Rita nodded. Unspoken was the painful truth that, if even a cheap cut like beef heart wasn't on sale, they couldn't afford it.

When morning came, Martin went out looking for work again. He actually found some: hauling bricks from trucks to a construction site. It was harder work than any on a foundry floor, and didn't pay nearly so well. For a full day of it, he made two and a half dollars. But coming home with any money at all in his pocket felt wonderful-good enough to let him forget how weary he was.

And, when he set the coins and bills in front of his wife, she was delighted, too. "Will there be more tomorrow?" she asked hopefully.

"I don't know," he answered. "But you can bet I'm going to go back and find out."

He made sure he got to the construction site early. He didn't get there early enough, though. By the time he came up, a couple of hundred men already clamored for work. Toledo cops did their best to keep order. Chester had played football against one of the policemen. "How about a break, pal?" he said. "Let me slide up toward the front? I could really use the job."

The cop shook his head. "Can't do it," he said. "Everybody else here is hungry, too. Playing favorites'd be worth my neck."

He was probably right. That made Martin no less bitter. Knowing he had no chance for work there, he went off to look for it somewhere else. He had no luck, not even when he offered to help a truck driver bring crates of vegetables into a store for a quarter.

"No, thanks. I'll do it myself," the driver said. "If I give you a quarter, I lose money on the haulage." He stacked more crates-all of them with fancy labels glued to one side-on a dolly and wheeled them into the grocery. When he came out again, he said, "You that hungry?"

"Hell, yes," Martin said without hesitation. "I'd do damn near anything for a real job again."

"You ought to go to California, then," the driver said. "That's where this stuff comes from, and they grow so goddamn much out there, they're always looking for pickers and such. Weather's a damn sight better than it is here, too."

"Probably doesn't pay anything," Chester said. "If it sounds so good, why aren't you on your way yourself?"

"Believe me, buddy, I'm thinking about it," the truck driver said. "There are times when I don't want to see another snowflake as long as I live, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah," Martin admitted. "I do. But California? It's a hell of a long way, and who knows what things are really like out there?"

"Only one way to find out." The driver set more crates on the dolly. The spicy odors of oranges and lemons filled the air. They were, in their own way, better arguments than anything he could have said.

"California," Chester muttered as he went off to see what else he could scrounge in Toledo. Pickings were slim. Pickings, in fact, couldn't have been any slimmer. Would they be any better on the far side of the country? He shrugged. Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe the right question was, how could they be worse?

Up till now, Flora Blackford had never been to the West Coast. When she got off the train in Los Angeles, she was surprised to find it was ninety degrees in the second week of October. She was even more surprised to discover that ninety-degree weather could be pleasant, not the humid hell it would have been in New York City or Philadelphia or Washington-or Dakota, for that matter.

She joined her husband on the platform at the station. President Blackford was smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers. "Four more years!" people chanted. Patriotic red-white-and-blue bunting was draped everywhere Socialist red bunting wasn't.

Vice President Hiram Johnson said, "Welcome to the Golden State, Mr. President. We're doing everything we can to make sure we deliver the goods three weeks from now."

"Thanks very much, Hiram," Hosea Blackford replied with a gracious smile. The two Socialist stalwarts stood side by side as photographers snapped pictures. Flora wondered what the captions to those pictures would say; the Los Angeles Times didn't love the Socialist Party.

"Your limousine is waiting, Mr. President-Mrs. Blackford." Johnson suddenly seemed to remember that Flora existed.

Escorted by police cars with wailing sirens, the limousine made its slow way from Remembrance Station to the Custer Hotel. The bright sunshine, the clear blue sky, and the palm trees made everything seem wonderful at first glance. The grinding despair of the business downturn might have been on the other side of the world, or at least on the other side of the United States.

It might have been, but it wasn't. Even in the couple of miles from the station to the hotel, Flora saw a soup kitchen, a bread line, and a lot of men in worn clothes aimlessly wandering the streets. Thanks to the mild weather, getting by without a roof over their heads was far easier in Los Angeles than in, say, Chicago.

Recognizing the president in the open motorcar, one of those men who looked to have nowhere to go shouted, "Coolidge!"

"Ignore him," Vice President Johnson said quickly.

"It's a free country," Blackford said with a smile. "He can speak up for whichever candidate he pleases. Certainly is a pretty day. I can see why so many people are coming here. We don't have Octobers like this in Dakota, believe you me we don't."

Another man, this one wearing a tweed jacket out at the elbows, pointed at the limousine and yelled, "Shame!"

This time, Hiram Johnson tried to pass off the heckling with an uneasy chuckle. Hosea Blackford said, "I have nothing to feel ashamed about. I've done everything I could from the moment this crisis began to try to repair it. I defy any citizen of either major party-or any Republican, either, for that matter-to show me anything I might have done and have not."

Flora reached out and set her hand on top of her husband's. She knew he was telling the truth. She also knew the toll the business collapse had taken on him. He'd aged cruelly in the three and a half years since taking the oath of office. She sometimes wished Coolidge had won the election in 1928. Then all of this would have come down on his head, and Hosea would have been spared the torment of fighting a disaster plainly too big for any one man to overcome.

At the Custer Hotel, a woman reporter called, "Why aren't we doing more in the war against the Japanese?"

"We're doing everything we can, Miss Clemens, I assure you," Blackford answered. "This is a war of maneuver, you must understand. It isn't a matter of huge masses slamming together, as the Great War was."

"Why weren't we ready to fight a war like that?" Ophelia Clemens persisted.

"We'll win it," he said. "That's what counts."

He and Flora managed to get to their suite without too many more questions. She tipped the swarthy porter-he spoke with a Spanish accent, and might have been born in the Empire of Mexico. As soon as the fellow left, Hosea Blackford collapsed on the bed. "For the love of God, fix me a drink," he said.

"As soon as I find where they're hiding the liquor, I will," she said. "And I'm going to make myself one, too." She held up the whiskey bottle in triumph when she pulled it out of a cabinet. Her husband clapped his hands. The ice bucket was right out in plain sight. So were glasses. Whiskey over ice didn't take long.

"Thank you, dear." Hosea sat up and downed half his drink at a gulp. He let out a long, weary sigh, then spoke two words: "We're screwed."

"What?" Flora choked on her whiskey. She hoped she'd heard wrong. She hoped so, but she didn't think so. "What did you say?" she asked, on the off chance she really had been wrong.

"I said, we're screwed," the president of the United States replied. "Calvin Coolidge is going to mop the floor with me. Calvin goddamn Coolidge." He spoke in sour, disgusted wonder. "Half the time, no one's even sure if he has a pulse, and he's going to clean my clock. Isn't this a swell old world?" He finished the drink and held out the glass. "Make me another one, will you?"

"You've got a speech in a couple of hours, you know," Flora warned.

"Yes, and I'll be all right," her husband said. "Not that it would make a dime's worth of difference if I strode in there drunk as a lord. How could things be any worse than they are already?"

He'd never shown despair till that moment. He hadn't had much hope, but he'd always put the best face he could on it. No more. As Flora poured whiskey into the glass, she said, "You can still turn things around."

"Fat chance," he said. "I couldn't win this one if they caught Coolidge in flagrante delicto with a chorus girl. Probably not even if they caught him in flagrante with a chorus boy, for heaven's sake. Blackfordburghs." He spat the name out in disgust. "How can I win when my name's gone into the dictionary as the definition for everything that's wrong with the whole country?"

"It's not fair," Flora insisted. "It's not right." She sipped her own drink. The whiskey burned on the way down, but not nearly so much as her husband's acceptance of defeat.

When she was a little girl, she'd watched her grandmother die. Everyone had known the old woman was going to go, but nobody'd said a word. Up till now, the Socialists' presidential campaign had been like that. In public, she supposed it still would be. But she could see her husband had told the truth, no matter how little she liked it.

Hosea Blackford said, "We knew it was going to happen if I couldn't turn things around. I did everything I knew how to do-everything Congress would let me do-and none of it worked. Now they're going to give the Democrats a chance." He took a big swig from the new drink. "Hell, if I'd lost my job and my house, I wouldn't vote Socialist, either."

"It'll only be worse under the Democrats," Flora said.

"But people don't know that. They don't believe it. They don't see how it could be worse. They only see that it's bad now, and that there was a Socialist administration while it got this way. I'm the scapegoat."

"You did everything you could do. You did everything anybody could do," Flora said. "If they don't see that, they're fools."

"It wasn't enough," her husband answered. "They don't have any trouble seeing that. And so-" He finished the drink at a gulp. "And so, sweetheart, I'm going to be a one-term president." He laughed. "In a way, it's liberating, you know what I mean? For the rest of the campaign I can say whatever I please. It won't make any difference anyhow."

Before very long, an aide knocked on the door and said, "We're ready to take you to your speaking engagement, Mr. President, ma'am."

"We're ready," Blackford declared. Flora anxiously studied him, but he looked and sounded fine as he went to the door. More than a little relieved, she followed him out to the limousine.

He spoke at the University of Southern California, just north of Agricultural Park. The USA had touted the park and the football stadium there as a venue for the 1928 Olympic Games, but had lost out to Kaiser Wilhelm's Berlin. People were talking about another bid in 1936, but the Confederates were also trumpeting the possibility of holding the Games in Richmond that year. The international decision would come in 1933.

President Blackford got a warm welcome on the university campus. The Socialist Party still attracted plenty of students, though Flora wondered how many of them were twenty-one. A handful of signs saying COOLIDGE! waved as the limousine went by. "Reactionaries," Flora muttered.

Friendly applause greeted the president when he strode into the lecture hall where he would speak. A young man did shout Coolidge's name, but guards hustled him from the hall. The Democrats didn't try in any organized way to disrupt Blackford's address. They probably don't think they need to bother, Flora thought bitterly. They're probably right, too. My own husband doesn't think they need to bother, either.

Behind the podium, Hosea Blackford waited for the applause to die away. "We've done a lot for the country the past twelve years," he said. "The Democrats will say we've done a lot to the country the past twelve years, but that's because they're part of the problem, not part of the solution. If they hadn't played obstructionist games in Congress, we've have an old-age pension in place today. We'd have stronger minimum-wage laws. We'd have stronger legal support for the proletariat against their fat-cat capitalist oppressors. We would, but we don't. The Democrats are glad we don't. We Socialists wish we did. That's the difference between the two parties, right there. It's as plain as the nose on your face. If you want the proletariat to advance, vote Socialist. If you don't, vote for Calvin Coolidge. It's really just as simple as that, friends."

He got another round of applause. Sitting in the front row, Flora clapped till her palms were sore. Not all the Coolidge backers had left the hall, though. Two or three of them raised a chant: "Bread lines! Blackfordburghs! Bread lines! Blackfordburghs!"

Hosea Blackford met that head on. "Yes, times are hard," he said. "You know it, I know it, the whole country knows it. But answer me this: if my opponent had been elected in 1928, wouldn't we be talking about Coolidgevilles today? The Democrats would not have made things better. In my considered opinion, they would have made things worse."

"That's right!" Flora shouted. People in the hall gave her husband a warm hand. The only trouble was, making political speeches to an already friendly crowd was like preaching to the choir. These people (except for that handful of noisy Democrats) hadn't turned out to disagree with the president. And his words weren't likely to sway anybody who'd already decided to vote against him. Nothing was. Flora knew as much, even if she hated the knowledge.

Her husband pounded away at the Democrats, at Coolidge, at Coolidge's engineer of a running mate. He got round after round of applause. By the noise in the hall, he would have been swept back into office.

But then, just as Flora's spirits rose and even Hosea Blackford, buoyed by the reception, looked as if he too felt he wasn't just going through the motions, distant explosions made people sit up and look around and ask one another what the noise was. Then, suddenly, some of the explosions weren't so distant. They rattled the windows in the hall. Through them, Flora thought she heard aeroplane engines overhead.

She frowned. That was crazy, to say nothing of impossible… wasn't it? She looked up at her husband. No-she looked up at the president of the United States. "I don't know what's going on, my friends," he told the crowd, "but I think we ought to sit tight here till we find out."

He got his answer sooner than he expected. A man bleeding from a scalp wound burst into the hall and shouted, "The Japs! The goddamn Japs are bombing Los Angeles!" As if to underscore his words, a cannon somewhere in the distance began shooting at the aeroplanes. Flora wondered if it had any chance at all of bringing them down. She had her doubts.

The crowd, the crowd that had been so warm, so full of support, cried out in horror and dismay. A guard tapped Flora on the shoulder. "Come with me, ma'am," he said. "We're going to get the president and you out of here. If the roof comes down…"

Helplessly, she went with him. He and his comrades hustled the Blackfords into the limousine and drove off as fast as they could go. As they zoomed away from the University of Southern California, Flora saw fires flickering in front of the huts and tents of a huge Blackfordburgh in Agricultural Park. And she saw other fires burning farther away, fires Japanese bombs must have set. She put her face in her hands and began to cry. Now, for certain, there was no hope at all.