The Center Cannot Hold ae-2 Read online

  "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.

  XVI

  Colonel Irving Morrell kissed his wife good-bye and headed in to the U.S. Army base at Kamloops. "Election Day at last," he said. "It can't come any later than this, but it's finally here. November the eighth, 1932-time we throw the rascals out." He checked himself and sighed. "They aren't even rascals. I've met enough of them-I know they aren't. But they aren't what we need, either."

  "I should say not!" Indignation filled Agnes' voice. "After what they let the… Japs do to Los Angeles…" By the pause there, she'd almost added some pungent modifier to the enemy's name.

  "That was a nice piece of work. We haven't been so humiliated since the end of the Second Mexican War, more than fifty years ago now. It was just a pinprick, but what a pinprick!" Morrell reluctantly gave credit to a very sharp operation. "Two aeroplane carriers, a tanker to keep 'em fueled-and one great big embarrassment for the USA. They got away clean as a whistle, too, except for the one aeroplane we shot down and the two that collided with each other over the beach."

  "Disgraceful." Agnes was, if anything, more militant than Morrell himself.

  "Well, if President Blackford's goose wasn't cooked before L.A., Hirohito's boys put it in the oven and turned up the fire," he said.

  "That's true." His wife brightened. "Maybe some good will come of it after all, then. Calvin Coolidge wouldn't let himself get caught napping like that."

  "I hope not," Morrell said, though he didn't know what the governor of Massachusetts could have orde
red done that President Blackford hadn't. He kissed Agnes again. As far as he was concerned, that was always worth doing. "I've got to go. I wish I could do something more useful than guarding a Canadian town that isn't likely to rise up, but that's what they say they need me for, so that's what I'll do."

  "If they ordered you to do something else, you'd do that, too," Agnes said. "And you'd do a bang-up job at it, too, whatever it happened to be."

  "Thanks, sweetie." Morrell would have been happy to stay there and listen to his wife say nice things about him. Instead, he left.

  Snow had fallen the week before, but it was gone now. He couldn't ski to the office. Sentries came to attention and saluted as he went past. He returned the salutes with careful courtesy.

  When he got in, his adjutant said, "Sir, you have a despatch from the War Department in Philadelphia-from the General Staff, no less."

  "You're kidding," Morrell said. Captain Horwitz shook his head. So did Irving Morrell, in bemusement. "What the devil do they want with me? I thought they'd long since forgotten I even existed. I hoped they had, to tell you the truth."

  "I just put it on your desk, sir," Horwitz replied. "It got here about fifteen minutes ago. If you like, you can probably catch up with the courier and ask him questions."

  "Let's see what the order is first," Morrell said. "One way or another, it'll probably tell me everything I need to know."

  He went into his office. As an afterthought, he closed the door behind him. That might miff his adjutant. If it did, too bad. He'd find a way to make amends later. Meanwhile, he wanted privacy. If the General Staff-specifically, if Lieutenant Colonel John Abell-was taking some more vengeance, he wanted to be able to pull himself together before he faced the world.

  There lay the envelope, as Horwitz had said. Morrell approached it like a sapper approaching an unexploded bomb. It wouldn't blow up if he opened it. He had to remind himself of that, though, before he could make himself take the folded paper out of the envelope and read the typewritten order.

  The more he read, the wider his eyes got. He sank down into his seat. The swivel chair creaked under his weight. When he'd neither come out nor said anything for several minutes, Captain Horwitz cautiously called, "Are you all right, sir?"

  "Nine years," Morrell answered.

  Horwitz opened the door. "Sir?"

  "Nine years," Morrell repeated. He looked down at the order again. "Nine miserable, stinking years thrown away. Wasted. Wiped off the map. Gone."

  He could have gone on cranking out synonyms for a long time, but his adjutant broke in: "I don't understand, sir."

  Morrell blinked. It was all perfectly clear in his mind. He realized Horwitz hadn't read the order. Feeling foolish, he said, "They're sending me back to Fort Leavenworth, Captain."

  "Oh?" For a second, that didn't register with Horwitz. But only for a moment-he was sharp as the business end of a bayonet. Then he leaned forward, like a hunting dog taking the scent. "To work on barrels, sir?"

  "That's right. To work on barrels." Morrell didn't even try to hide his bitterness. "The very same project they took me off of-the very same project they closed down-almost nine years ago."

  "Well…" His adjutant put the best face on it he could: "It's a good thing they are starting up again, wouldn't you say?"

  That was true. Morrell couldn't begin to deny it. But he also couldn't help asking, "Where would we be if we hadn't stopped?"

  Nine years before, they'd had a prototype of what a barrel should be. It was a machine much more agile, much less cumbersome, than the lumbering armored behemoths of the Great War. It carried its cannon in a turret that rotated 360 degrees, not in a mount with limited traverse at the front of the vehicle. It had a machine gun in the turret, too, and one at the bow, not half a dozen of them all around the machine. It took a crew of half a dozen, not a dozen and a half. It ran and shot rings around the old models.

  But the prototype was powered by one truck engine. It could be, because it was made of thin mild steel, not armor plate. No one had wanted to spend the money to go any further with it. Manufacturing real barrels would undoubtedly reveal a host of flaws the prototype hadn't. For that matter, Morrell didn't even know if the prototype still existed. The way things were during the 1920s, it might have been cut up and sold for scrap metal. He wouldn't have been surprised.

  Had the USA gone on building and developing barrels instead of letting them languish, it would have had the best machines in the world nowadays. As things were, the Confederates' Mexican stooges had built barrels at least as good as the prototype during the long civil war between Maximilian III and the U.S.-backed republican rebels. They hadn't only made prototypes, either. They'd had real fighting machines.

  What they'd had, the CSA either had already or could have in short order. Morrell knew the same thing wasn't true-wasn't even close to true-in his own country. "Well," he said, "I've got a lot of work to do, don't I?"

  "Yes, sir," Captain Horwitz said. "Congratulations, sir."

  "Thanks, Ike." Morrell laughed, though it wasn't really funny. "I bet I know what finally got the Socialists off the dime."

  "What's that, sir?" his adjutant asked.

  "The Japs bombing Los Angeles-what else? And the sad part is, no matter what I do with barrels, even if I get it all done day after tomorrow, it won't matter much. How could it? Where are we going to use barrels fighting the Japanese?"

  "Beats me, sir."

  "Beats me, too." Morrell tapped the order with his fingernail. "I've got to let the base commandant know I've been transferred. And I've got to let my wife know."

  "What will she think?" Horwitz asked.

  "I hope she'll be pleased," Morrell answered. "We met in Leavenworth, Agnes and I. She was living in town, and I was stationed at the fort. I wonder how much it's changed since we left."

  Captain Horwitz looked sly. "One thing, sir-you can leave your skis behind. No mountains in Kansas."

  "Well, no," Irving Morrell agreed. "But I think I'll take 'em-they do get enough snow for cross-country skiing." He got to his feet, tucking the order into the breast pocket of his tunic. "And now I'd better tell Brigadier General Peterson he's going to have to live without me."

  Brigadier General Lemuel Peterson was a lean, lantern-jawed New Englander. He said, "Congratulations, Colonel. I was wondering if you'd end up in command here when they sent me somewhere else. But you're the one who gets to go away instead, and you're actually going to do something useful."

  "I hope so, anyhow," Morrell said. "If they give me twenty-nine cents for a budget and expect me to put barrels together out of railroad iron and paper clips, though…"

  "You never can tell with those cheapskates in the War Department," Peterson said. If Morrell reported that to the powers that be, he might blight his superior's career. He intended no such thing-he agreed with Brigadier General Peterson. The commandant at Kamloops went on, "Maybe we'll see a little sense from now on, because it looks like the Democrats are going to win this election."

  "Yes, sir." Colonel Morrell nodded. "Here's hoping, sir."

  Lemuel Peterson could have used that against him-except few officers would have quarreled with the sentiments he expressed. "Why don't you go on home for the rest of the day?" Peterson said. "You're ordered out of here within a week-you'll be as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with hives. You should let your family know. What will your wife have to say?" As he had with his adjutant, Morrell explained how he'd met Agnes in Kansas. Peterson nodded. "That's a point for you. Go on, then. Do you have a wireless set?"

  "Yes, sir," Morrell answered. "One more thing to pack."

  "True, but that's not what I was thinking of," Brigadier General Peterson said. "You can listen to election returns tonight."

  "Oh." Morrell nodded. "Yes, sir. We will do that, I expect."

  Agnes exclaimed in surprise when he showed up at the front door. She exclaimed in delight when he told her about the order. "I don't care about Kansas one way or the other
," she said, "but this is wonderful. You'll be doing something important again, not just makework."

  "I know." He kissed her. "That's what I'm really looking forward to." He kissed her again. "And I knew you'd understand."

  "I've got a couple of steaks in the icebox, and some good Canadian beer, too." Agnes raised an eyebrow. "After that, who knows what might happen?"

  "The wench grows bold." He patted her on the bottom. "Good. I like it."

  What happened after dinner was that he played with Mildred on the living-room floor while the wireless blared out endless streams of numbers. Every so often, his little girl would complain because his mind wasn't fully on their game. "You're listening to that silly stuff," she said.

  "You're right," he said. "I'm sorry." He was sorry to disrupt the game. He wasn't sorry, not in the least, about what he was hearing. What everyone had thought would happen was happening: Calvin Coolidge was trouncing Hosea Blackford. Even as he listened, Coolidge's lead in Ohio went up to a quarter of a million votes.

  "And Coolidge is also ahead in Indiana, which last went Democratic in the election of 1908," the announcer said. Morrell clapped his hands in not quite childish glee. Mildred gave him a severe look a schoolmarm would have envied. He apologized again.

  His daughter eventually went to bed. Morrell and Agnes stayed up a while longer, to let her fall asleep and to hear some more returns. Coolidge kept capturing state after state. By the time they went to bed, too, they had a lot to celebrate-and they did.

  C incinnatus Driver knew a certain amount of local pride. "The new vice president, he was borned in Iowa," he said. "How 'bout that?"

  His son sent him a jaundiced glance. "And he moved away as fast as he could go, too," Achilles retorted. "He moved as far as he could go, too-all the way out to California. What does that say about this place?"