The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Betty the decorative secretary led him into Dalby's office. Just seeing Dalby made him let out a sigh of relief. He let out another one when Dalby handed him a thick sheaf of brown banknotes. What he let out after counting the money was more on the order of a grunt of pain. "This is all?" he demanded.

  "That's all, Mr. Potter. I tried to warn you: you don't get top dollar in a bear market," Ulysses Dalby said. "Here are the transaction records. I'm not cheating you."

  "Well, maybe you don't," Potter said after carefully checking the records. He did his best to sound philosophical. "But I would have got a lot less if I'd waited till tomorrow or the day after or next week, wouldn't I?"

  Dalby nodded. "I have to say you would have. I'm also going to ask you one thing more: in what bank do you intend to put your money now that you've got it?"

  "Why, the First Secession Bank and Trust," Potter answered. "I've been doing business with them since I came down here after the war. You must know that. How come?"

  "Mm… It may be nothing. You're a good judge of banks-I think the First Secession is a pretty solid outfit. It may come through all this just fine."

  Clarence Potter stared at him. "It may, you say?" Dalby nodded again. Potter whistled softly. "You think it's going to be as bad as that? Banks going under, the way they did in '88 and '04?"

  "Yes, it may be that bad," the broker answered after a little thought. "On the other hand, it may be a good deal worse." Potter started to laugh, thinking Dalby had made a grim sort of joke. But Dalby's face was serious, even somber. "I'm not kidding, Mr. Potter," he said. "I'm not kidding at all. In the last couple of panics, our markets took a beating, and so did Wall Street up in the USA, but the rest of the world went on about its business. It's not like that this time, sir. I wish to heaven it were. This time… It won't do much to Africa, I suppose, and maybe not to China, either-the heathen Chinese are already about as bad off as they can be. But I don't believe anyplace else will get off untouched."

  Potter whistled again, an even lower, even more mournful note. He might have been tolling the passing of an era. Maybe I am, he thought. "My God," he said aloud. "And I thought I was a pessimist."

  "I watched the ticker tape all day, Mr. Potter. I watched it get further and further behind the sales it was supposed to be listing," Dalby said. "When I saw you this morning, I still had some hope. I'd say it died about an hour and a half ago. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I hope so. But I don't think so, not any more."

  He looked shellshocked. That was exactly how he looked, Potter realized. He'd been through too much, like men in the Army of Northern Virginia during the war. They'd got that stunned, beaten look on their faces, too. Half the time after that, they didn't care if they lived or died. Dalby didn't seem to, not right now.

  Stowing your money in your mattress was a joke that went at least as far back as money and mattresses. Potter wondered which of those had come first. Joke or not, he did just that with the banknotes he'd got from Ulysses Dalby. The next morning, he closed out his account at the First Secession Bank and Trust. The lines at the bank weren't too bad. "I assure you, sir," said the young clerk who gave him his money, "we are perfectly sound."

  "I believe you, son," Potter answered. "That's why I'm doing this now. Who knows how the devil you're going to be in a couple of weeks, though?"

  The clerk didn't try to tell him everything would be fine. He found himself wishing the fellow would have.

  He went to the Whig Party meeting the following Tuesday more out of morbid curiosity than for any other reason. The stock exchanges hadn't got any better. They'd kept right on sinking, Richmond faster than New York. Lines outside the banks were starting to get longer-and more anxious.

  The meeting went very much as Potter expected-very much as he'd feared-it would. It put him in mind of a lot of maiden ladies talking-or rather, trying not to talk-about sex. The lawyers and businessmen circled the building crash like a man circling a rattlesnake in a small room. They couldn't ignore it, but they didn't want to deal with it, either. They kept making noises about "changing conditions" and "uncertainty" and "a seeming slump in the business cycle."

  Clarence Potter stuck up his hand. He needed a while to be recognized. He wasn't surprised; he'd expected they wouldn't want to notice him. He'd proved himself a gadfly, and they didn't like that. But he was, or could be, a patient gadfly. At last, the chairman had no choice but to turn his way and ask, "Yes, Mr. Potter?"

  "Boys," Potter said, "the jig is up."

  Bang! The chairman rapped loudly for order. "Have you anything more germane to say, Mr. Potter, or may we move on to the next order of business?"

  "What is the next order of business in the middle of a crash?" Potter demanded. "Sending out for more strings so we can fiddle while the market burns?" Bang! went the gavel again. Potter ignored it. "Next Congressional elections are only a few months away," he said harshly. "If this is as bad as it looks, how do we intend to send one single solitary Whig incumbent back to Richmond for the new Congress? We'd better be thinking about that, eh, before we worry about anything else. And we'd better try to keep the country on its feet so it'll be in some sort of shape to want to vote for us. How are we supposed to go about that?"

  Bang! Bang! Bang! "Mr. Potter, you are as thoroughly out of order as it is possible for one man to be," the chairman all but shouted.

  "You're right," Potter agreed. "But the country is a lot further out of order than I can be, and so are the Whigs. I have one last question, gentlemen, and then I'm done: if this turns out to be as bad as it looks right now, how the hell do you propose to keep those Freedom Party yokels from trying to pick up the pieces?"

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! The gavel descended again and again, a veritable fusillade of banging. That succeeded in silencing Clarence Potter. But, he noticed, no one tried to answer his question. He'd expected nothing different, nothing better. He'd hoped for something better, but he knew too well the difference between hope and expectation. He walked out of the meeting gloomy, but he'd figured he would.

  A couple of days later, after watching stocks tumble lower yet, after listening on the wireless to a speech by President Mitchel that was as full of misplaced optimism as any he'd ever heard, he decided to telephone Anne Colleton. He wasn't even sure she would remember him; a brief acquaintance in a political squabble a couple of years before didn't necessarily constitute an introduction.

  But she said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Potter. I do appreciate the help you gave me against that fool of a Braxton Donovan. What's on your mind today?"

  "I don't know, frankly," he answered. "The main reason I called was to see how you were doing. If anyone could land on her feet in this mess, you're the one."

  "I'm not too bad," she said. "As soon as I saw which way the wind was blowing, I sold out as fast as I could. I got hurt. I didn't get wiped out. If I'd stayed in the market a little longer, I would have. How about you, Mr. Potter?"

  "About the same," he told her. "I could have done better if I'd left a couple of days sooner, but I'm getting by for the time being. An awful lot of people aren't, though, and it may get worse before it gets better."

  "I'm afraid you're right," Anne Colleton said. "Not many people can see that. In a way, it's good to know someone can."

  "Belshazzar needed Daniel to read the writing on the wall," Potter said. "I hope someone can do the job for us."

  "I wish there were no job to do," Anne answered.

  "Well, so do I," he answered. "But I'm very much afraid this is only the beginning, and not just for the Confederate States. In a way, misery loves company. In another way, if everyone's in trouble, nobody can help anybody else get out of it."

  Anne Colleton didn't say anything for perhaps half a minute. At last, she told him, "That makes good sense to me." Another pause. "You seem to make very good sense, Mr. Potter. Maybe we should talk some more if we get the chance."

  And what am I letting myself in for if I say yes to that? Potter wondered. But th
e answer seemed obvious. Trouble. Only question is, how much trouble? He too paused, but not for long. "Maybe we should, Miss Colleton. Maybe we should."

  W hen Chester Martin got off his shift at the Toledo steel mill, he went straight to the Socialist Party hall not far from the factory. He could have had himself a beer there, but opened a bottle of Nesbit's instead. He wanted to keep his wits about him.

  Spotting Albert Bauer, he called, "What do you think of this management notion?"

  "Cutting shifts from eight hours to six, you mean?" Bauer answered.

  "Yeah, that's what I mean, all right, unless there's another brand-new management notion I haven't heard about yet," Chester said.

  Bauer didn't look happy. "Way I see it, we've got two choices," he said. "We can say yes, and let 'em cut our pay by a quarter. Or we can so no, and have 'em fire one out of four of us." He was drinking a beer. He drained it, then added, "This is what you call being between the Devil and the deep blue sea."

  "I don't trust those management bastards," Martin said. "Like as not, it's a trick to pump up their profits and hurt us at the same time. Instead of hiring goons and scabs, they play these games nowadays."

  "I know." But Bauer looked mighty unhappy. "Hate to tell you, Chester, but I don't think so, not this time. I've seen the orders going through the pipeline. They've fallen right off a cliff. Nobody's buying steel, not to speak of. There's no point in making it if nobody's ordering. Less than no point, in fact-a big inventory just drives prices down when orders do start picking up. I don't think the bosses are playing games for the sake of playing games, not this time. I wish they were. I'd strike in a red-hot minute."

  "Fine. Wonderful. But somebody'd better tell me how the hell I'm supposed to make ends meet on three-quarters of my proper pay."

  "Well, that depends," Bauer said slowly. "Would you rather try to make ends meet on none of your proper pay? The company's trying hard not to get rid of people. I don't like the bosses, and I never will, but I have to give them credit for that."

  Martin told him exactly where he'd like to give the bosses credit. Bauer laughed. Martin said, "It's not funny, dammit. If my wife didn't have work, we wouldn't make it on three-quarters of a paycheck. I'd sooner take my chances on getting the sack. If I did, I'd look for something else. And if I didn't, I'd be all right."

  "So much for the solidarity of the proletariat," Bauer observed, and Martin felt himself flush. Bauer went on, "But if they didn't get you in the first round of firings, how do you know they wouldn't the next time? Because there will be a next time, Chester, sure as you're standing there."

  "A next time." Martin scowled. "Hadn't thought of that. Bet you're right, though. Who would have thought a loan the Russians couldn't-or maybe wouldn't-pay back would cause all this trouble?"

  "For want of a nail," Bauer said, and then sighed. "We're all going to be wanting nails before too long."

  "Oh, yeah?" Chester said. "If we're all going to be wanting nails, how come they're cutting back on how much steel they're making?"

  "Because whether we want them or not, we won't be able to afford them," Bauer answered.

  "Of course we won't be able to afford them. They're cutting our hours."

  Bauer's smile was full of anything but amusement. "Welcome to the vicious circle."

  That circle was anything but welcome to Martin. He hung around the Party hall till he saw no one had any firm notion of how to respond to the bosses' proposal for cutting hours. No one could decide if it was good because it saved jobs or bad because it cut pay. Martin concluded the proposal would probably go forward. Strong opposition from the workers might have stopped it. If they couldn't decide whether it was good or bad, they would find out by experiment-on themselves.

  He rode the trolley back to the flat he shared with Rita. His own mood was glum, or worse than glum. He'd told Albert Bauer the exact truth. If his hours and pay got cut to three-quarters of what he had now, the only thing that would keep him afloat was his wife's salary.

  And Rita seemed anything but happy when he came through the door. After a perfunctory kiss, she said, "Orders have taken a real tumble since the market started going down. Nobody wants pipe any more-not new pipe, anyway."

  It was spring, a bright spring, the weather full of new-puppy warmth and hope. Ice walked Chester Martin's back even so. He tried to remember when he'd known fear like this. The Roanoke front? He shook his head. That terror had been different, and far more immediate: fear of death and pain and mutilation. This was something else. Fear of loss, fear of hunger, fear of endless misery without escape. Fear of bills. Fear of moving back in with his mother and father-if this quiet, creeping horror didn't lay hold of them, too.

  When Martin laughed, he might have been whistling while walking past a graveyard. "It was just a few weeks ago when we figured we could have any old thing we wanted," he said, and went on to tell Rita about the company's plan to cut everybody's hours.

  She listened to that, her face getting longer and longer. "I know what I want," she said. "I want us to keep our jobs, that's what."

  "Yeah," he said quietly. "That's about what it boils down to, isn't it?"

  "It's hard times when your neighbor's out of work," Rita said. "It's the end of the world when you are."

  "Maybe if the government really had seized the means of production this wouldn't have happened," Chester said, trying to make himself believe it. He couldn't. Shaking his head, he went on, "No, they couldn't've done it, I don't think. It would have meant real class war-and it might not have helped."

  "What are we going to do?" Rita asked. "What can we do?"

  "Hang on tight," he said. "We're still working. We're going to lose most of the stocks we bought, though. I hated answering the last margin call-felt like throwing money away. And we probably won't be able to afford to answer the next one."

  "We've got each other. We're healthy." Rita sounded as if she was trying to reassure herself, and not having much luck.

  "It can't get much worse," Chester said. "How could stocks go any lower than they have already? There's got to be a floor somewhere."

  "Yes, but where?" Rita asked, and he had no answer. He felt less ashamed of that than he might have otherwise-for no one else in the USA-no one else in the whole world, by all the signs-had any answer to it, either. No, he wasn't ashamed, but that didn't mean he wasn't frightened.

  He went to work day by day, having nothing else he could do. Before long, his shift did go from eight hours to six. His pay dropped by a quarter, too. He hated that, but he supposed he would have hated being without a paycheck even more. As long as Rita had a job, too, they got by.

  The market continued to sink. Reading the papers, Martin took occasional consolation in noticing Richmond stocks had fallen even further than those on Wall Street. Did misery really love company? He didn't know about that, either. What he did know was that, every day, there seemed to be more misery to go around.

  People started telling stories about brokers jumping off bridges and diving out of windows. Nobody could say whether those stories were true. People told them anyhow. One day in the middle of June, Wall Street stopped sinking. It dove. Maybe brokers didn't, but the market did. The wave of sell orders overwhelmed the ticker tape. It lagged ever further behind the tidal wave of disaster. The last few shares Chester had so proudly held on to went then, on what the papers called Swan-Dive Wednesday. By that time, he'd almost stopped caring. Not till almost four hours after the market closed did the chattering tape finally spit out the last of the day's losses.

  When Thursday dawned, the market didn't open. An eerie calm prevailed at the steel mill. "Reminds me of the day after a big attack that didn't work," Martin said to Albert Bauer as they opened their lunch pails together.

  Bauer had been at the front, too. He nodded. "Or maybe it did," he said, "only we were on the receiving end." He took a bite out of his cheese sandwich. He'd usually eaten bologna or pastrami before the market tumbled. So had Martin. His sandw
ich had cheese in it, too. Cheese was cheaper. Bauer went on, "President Blackford's got almost four years left in his term, but he's a lame duck already. Poor sorry son of a bitch."

  "He's doing everything he can," Chester said. "I like what he said in the paper this morning. 'We have nowhere to go but up.' That's good. He means it, too-you can tell."

  "Oh, yeah. I'm not arguing with you," Bauer answered. "But even if things do go up, what will people remember? They'll remember how far down we went, and who was in the Powel House when we did. Come 1932, he'll have Democrats lined up six deep to run against him."

  Martin thought about that. It made altogether too much sense to be comfortable. "Well, the class struggle takes a step back," he said. "Or probably takes a step back. You never can tell, not for sure."

  "Want to bet?" Bauer said. "I'm as good a Socialist as any man around, and I've got twenty bucks says there'll be a Democrat in Powel House after the '32 elections."

  "You won't get my twenty," Martin said. "Wish I could, but Rita'd kill me-and I think I'd lose the dough. Times are tough enough without throwing it away."

  "Of course, by the time '32 rolls around, I might have forgotten who I made the bet with," Bauer said.

  "Fat chance," Martin answered. "It's not just that you wouldn't forget between now and then, Al. It's that you wouldn't let me forget."

  "Who, me?" Bauer did his best to sound indignant. "Come on. Eat up. We've got to get back to it pretty goddamn quick."

  "Right," Martin said tightly. The company was also cracking down on people who violated its rules. He didn't want to end up on the street. Six hours' pay was better than none at all.

  When he got home that night, he found Rita crumpled in tears on the sofa. "Oh, Lord!" he said. "What's the matter, sweetie?" He feared he knew the answer even without the question he had to ask.

  And he was right. "They fired me," his wife answered. "They told me to clean out my desk and not come back tomorrow-they can't afford to keep me any more. I've been there seven years, and they threw me out like a piece of dirt. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? What are we going to do?"