The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  The typewriter started clacking again just then, drowning out the rest. Clarence Potter was far and away the most unusual man Anne had ever met. He not only believed she could take care of herself, he encouraged her to do it. He'd never shown any interest what ever in running her life. A thoroughly competent man, he respected competence wherever he found it, and seemed happy he'd found it in her. Her whole life long, she'd fought against men who either tried to control her or simply assumed they would. Potter hadn't tried. Anne sometimes had trouble figuring out what to make of that.

  Drink in hand, she came back into the front room. "Do you want me to fix one for you, too?" she asked. He didn't expect her to fix drinks. That, no doubt, was why she was willing to do it.

  And he shook his head now. Lamplight glinted from the metal frames of his spectacles. "No, thanks. Not yet. Let me finish up here. I think I've figured out who's been lifting crates from Lucas Williamson's warehouse, and how he can keep it from happening again." Concentration on his face, he went back to typing.

  "You did remember to vote, didn't you?" Anne asked.

  He nodded. "Oh, yes. I'm not going to give the Freedom Party any help at all. The Whigs have done too much of that lately." He went back to typing, and might almost have forgotten Anne was in the room with him.

  She listened to the wireless. The commentator kept on sounding optimistic about the Whigs' prospects. She hoped he was right. Like Clarence Potter, she hoped and believed two different things.

  Ten minutes later, Potter took the sheet of paper out of the machine. "There," he said in his half-Yankee accent, laying it on a neat stack. "Another week's bills paid. Now I get to remember I'm a human being." He went back into the kitchen and fixed a whiskey for himself. Raising it in salute, he added, "It's damn good to see you, you know that? Always nice to have company on the deck as the ship goes down."

  "It won't be as bad as that," Anne said.

  "No, indeed. It'll probably be worse." Potter looked out the window. Twilight was setting in. "Polls'll close before long. Then we'll start getting returns, and then we'll know how big a mess we'll have for the next two years. To tell you the truth, I'd almost sooner not find out."

  "Would you rather stay here and stay in bed, then?" Anne asked. "The election will be what it is, regardless of whether we go to Whig headquarters after supper."

  Potter smiled but shook his head. "Plenty of time for that afterwards. I have this restless itch to know, and it needs satisfying as much as any other urge."

  "All right." And, to Anne's internal surprise, it was all right. She knew Clarence Potter was interested; she'd had plenty of very pleasant proofs of that. If he put business before pleasure… well, didn't she, too? I'm keeping company with a grownup, she thought. It was, in her experience, a novelty, but one she didn't mind.

  When they went out for supper, she ordered a big plate of boiled shrimp. "They don't come fresh to St. Matthews," she said.

  "No, I suppose not," Potter agreed. "When I first moved here, I remember thinking how wonderful all the seafood was." He'd chosen crab cakes for himself. "Now, unless people remind me about it the way you just did, I take it for granted. I shouldn't do that, should I?"

  "No," Anne said. "The whole country's taken too many things for granted."

  "We're liable to pay the price for it, too," he said. "That goes back a long way now, you know-starting when we took it for granted we'd win the Great War and be home to celebrate by the time the leaves turned red and gold."

  The colored waiter brought their suppers. As Anne began to eat, she said, "I took that for granted, and I can't say otherwise. You didn't, did you?"

  "No-but remember, I went to Yale. I was there for four Remembrance Days. I had a pretty fair notion of how desperately in earnest those people were. We figured we could whip them. They went out and made damn sure they could whip us." He took a bite of crab cake, nodded, and went on in meditative tones: "We've always figured we could whip the Freedom Party, too. But the damnyankees aren't the only people who are desperately in earnest. That's what worries me."

  "We'll find out." Anne feared he might be right, but didn't want to think about it, not just then.

  After they finished supper, they walked over to the Whig headquarters. It lay only three or four blocks away. Even in November, bugs still buzzed around street lamps. Something-a bird? a bat? — swooped down, grabbed one of them out of the air, and vanished into darkness again.

  When Anne and Clarence Potter came into the headquarters, they got their share, and more than their share, of suspicious looks. Anne had former Freedom Party ties that made people distrust her. Her companion didn't, but he did have the unfortunate habit of saying exactly what he thought, and that regardless of what the received wisdom was.

  But then someone called out to them: "Have you heard the news?"

  Potter shook his head. Anne said, "No, that's what we came here for. What's the latest?"

  "Horatio Standifer out in North Carolina," the man replied. "In Congress since before the war, but a Freedom Party man just did him in."

  "Oh, good God," Potter said. "If Standifer lost his seat, nobody's safe tonight. And if nobody's safe tonight, then God help the country tomorrow."

  "What's the news here in South Carolina?" Anne asked.

  "Not as bad as that," the Whig said. "We're going to lose the seat we picked up two years ago, and maybe one more besides."

  Potter pointed at the blackboard on which new results were going up. "Maybe two more besides, looks like to me."

  After a second look at the numbers, the other Whig scowled and nodded. "Maybe two more besides," he admitted, and went off as if Potter had some sort of contagious disease.

  He does, Anne thought. He tells the truth as he sees it, and he pulls no punches. Such men are dangerous.

  Returns from Georgia started coming, and then Tennessee and Alabama. The more of them there were, the longer the faces at Whig headquarters got. People started slipping over to the saloon across the street. Some of them came back. Others didn't-they stayed away and began the serious business of drowning their sorrows.

  Clarence Potter didn't go. Each new seat lost to the Freedom Party-and those came in one after another, with no possible room for doubt in most of them-brought not howls of dismay from him, but rather a bitter smile. He might have been telling the world, I knew this was going to happen. Now here it is, and what are you going to do about it? No one in the Whig headquarters seemed to have the slightest idea what to do about it… except for the men who headed across the street to get drunk.

  As Anne watched the man she was with, so he watched her, too. After a while, he said, "It's probably not too late for you, you know."

  "What do you mean?" she asked, though she had a pretty good idea.

  And, sure enough, he said, "Your politics aren't that far from Jake Featherston's. If you want to, you can probably make your peace with him."

  She wanted to haul off and slap him. She wanted to, but she couldn't, for the same thought had crossed her mind. He told her the truth as he saw it, too. Still, she said, "I don't know. I turned him down once when he asked for money, years ago. He doesn't forget things like that."

  Potter laughed scornfully. "I'll tell you what he won't turn down. He won't turn down money if you give it to him now, that's what."

  Anne wondered about that. She decided Potter was probably half right. Jake Featherston might take her money if she offered it to him again. But would he ever trust her, ever let her have any real influence? She had her doubts. Featherston struck her as a man whose memory for slights an elephant would envy.

  Casually, Clarence Potter added, "If you do go back to him, we're through. I don't know how much that means to you. I hope it means something. Losing you would mean a lot to me. But I've known Featherston longer than any of the 'Freedom!'-shouting yahoos who go marching for him these days. We aren't on the same side, and we're never going to be."

  "What if he gets elected president?" An
ne asked.

  A muscle jumped in his right cheek, perhaps an inch below his eye. "No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the Confederate people, but I still find that hard to imagine-even harder than it was in 1921, when he came so close. And 1933's still a long way away. Things are bound to look better by then." He paused and sighed. "And the way you asked that question makes me wonder if we aren't through anyhow."

  "Up till now, you never put any conditions on me," Anne said. "I liked it that you never put any conditions on me."

  "Up till now, I never imagined I needed to," he answered. "But I can't put up with the Freedom Party. I'm sorry, but I can't."

  "Don't you want revenge on the USA?" she asked.

  "I don't want anything that badly," Potter said.

  Anne sighed. "Some things are worth any price." He shook his head. Now she sighed. "It's been fun, Clarence," she said. "But I'll do what I think I have to do, and not what anyone else tells me to. Not ever." No wonder I never got married, she thought. She walked out of the Whig headquarters and back toward her motorcar.

  K amloops, British Columbia, was a long way from Philadelphia, and a long way from the Confederate States, too. That didn't keep news from getting there about as fast as it got anywhere else, though, not in this age of telegraph clickers and wireless sets. Colonel Irving Morrell studied the Confederate election returns with a sort of horrified fascination.

  "Sweet Jesus Christ!" he said, looking at the newspaper that had set them out in detail.

  "Er-yes, sir," his aide-de-camp said, and chuckled.

  "No offense, Lieutenant," Morrell said hastily. "Just a manner of speaking."

  "Oh, yes, sir. I know that," Lieutenant Ike Horwitz answered. "You're not like that damn German sergeant who was tagging along with your buddy from the General Staff over there."

  "I should hope not." Morrell set the paper on Horwitz's desk. "But look at this. For heaven's sake, look at this. The Freedom Party went from-what? — nine Congressmen to twenty-nine. They won three governorships down there. They took control of four state legislatures, too, and that means they'll start electing Senators, because their state legislatures still choose 'em. They didn't switch to popular vote, the way we did."

  "That's a big pickup, no doubt about it." Horwitz leaned forward to study the numbers. He looked up at Morrell. "I'm awful damn glad I'm a Jew in the USA, and not a shvartzer in the CSA."

  "A what?" Morrell said, and then he nodded, making the connection from Yiddish to German. "Oh. Yeah. I bet you are."

  "There's people here who don't like Jews-plenty who feel just like that stupid sergeant," Horwitz said. "But it isn't all that bad. Hell, even the president's wife's Jewish, not that I've got any use for her politics or his. If you're colored in the Confederate States, you've got to be shaking in your shoes-if they let you have any shoes."

  He was right. Morrell hadn't even wondered what the Negroes in the CSA felt about the election returns he'd been dissecting. He rarely thought about Negroes. What white man in the USA did? Maybe Horwitz, being a Jew, was more likely to look at other people who had a hard time in their homeland.

  "I'll tell you what," Morrell said. "Write me an appreciation of the Confederate Negroes' likely response to this. Do a good job on it and I'll forward it to Philadelphia, see if I can get you noticed."

  "Thank you, sir. That's damn white of you," his aide-de-camp answered.

  Morrell's own thoughts were on the more immediate. "Any time the Freedom vote goes up, that's trouble for us, because those bastards want another shot at the USA. And Featherston's boys haven't seen numbers like these since 1921. I hope to heaven the president sits up and takes notice."

  "What do you think the odds are?" Lieutenant Horwitz asked.

  "Do I look like a Socialist politician to you? I'd better not, that's all I've got to say," Morrell replied. "They cut off Confederate reparations early, they haven't been checking about rearmament near as hard as they should have, they've cut our budget…" He sighed. "They think everybody should just be friends. I wish that would work, I really do."

  "People vote for it," Horwitz said. "Nobody wants to go through another war like the last one."

  "No, of course not. But both sides have to want peace. You only need one to have a war. And the only thing worse than fighting a war like that is fighting it and losing. Ask the Confederates if you don't believe me."

  "I don't need to ask anybody," Horwitz said. "I can see that for myself. Anyone with a brain in his head ought to be able to see that for himself. But what are we going to do?"

  "That's the question, all right." Morrell drummed his fingers on the desktop. "I don't know. I just don't know. Half of those people who voted for Featherston's gang of goons probably don't hope for anything but jobs and three square meals a day if he calls the shots. They sure aren't getting 'em with the folks they've got running things now."

  His aide-de-camp smiled unhappily. "And isn't that the sad and sorry truth, sir? When I joined the Army, I never thought I'd be glad to be in for the food and for the roof over my head. But that's how it looks nowadays. If I were a civilian, I'd probably be scuffling like everybody else."

  "Good point." Morrell nodded. "We're insulated from that, anyhow, thank God."

  "I suppose the Socialists are doing everything they can there," Ike Horwitz said grudgingly. "Feeding people who are out of work and giving some of 'em makework jobs-it's not great, God knows, but it's better than nothing, you know what I mean?"

  "I guess so." Morrell sighed. "If you give a man something for nothing, though, will he want to stand up on his own two feet again when times get better, or will he keep wanting a handout for the rest of his life?"

  "You ask me, sir, most people want to work if you give 'em the chance," Horwitz answered. "Other thing is, if they do starve, talking about the rest of their lives starts looking pretty silly, doesn't it? And if they're afraid they're going to starve, then what happens? Then they start voting for somebody like Jake Featherston in the USA, right?"

  "I suppose so," Morrell said again. Up till now, his politics had always been firmly Democratic; he'd never had to think about it. He still didn't, not really. But he'd never been a man to worry about subtleties, either, and now he wondered whether he'd made a mistake. "You're saying the Socialists are giving us a safety valve, aren't you?"

  "I wouldn't have put it quite that way, but yes, sir, I guess I am," Lieutenant Horwitz answered. "If things blow up, what have we got? Trouble, nothing else but." Like any soldier-and like anyone else with an ounce of sense-he was convinced staying out of trouble was a good idea.

  A couple of days later, Morrell went into the town of Kamloops to do some shopping-Christmas was coming, and he wanted to buy some things for Agnes and Mildred that he couldn't hope to find at the post exchange. The weather was crisp and chilly, the sun shining bright out of a blue, blue sky but not giving much in the way of warmth even so.

  The reception he got in Kamloops gave little in the way of warmth, either. Here a dozen years after the end of the war, the Canucks cared for the green-gray uniforms their occupiers wore no more than they had after the USA finally battered them into submission. People on the streets turned their backs when Morrell walked by.

  Most of them did, anyhow. He'd got used to that. What he hadn't got used to were the ragged-looking men who held out their hands and whined, "Spare change, pal?" And he especially hadn't got used to the respectable-looking men who held out their hands and said the same thing. One of them added, "Been a long time since my twin boys saw any meat on the table."

  "Why don't you get a job, then?" Morrell asked.

  "Why?" The man glared at him. "I'll tell you why, even though you're a damned fool to need telling. Because there damned well aren't any jobs to get, that's why. Lumber companies aren't hiring-that's what I got fired from. Farms aren't taking on hired men, not when they can't sell half the sheep and cows and wheat they raise. Even here in town, only way you can keep your job i
s if you're somebody's brother-if you're just a brother-in-law, you're in trouble. That's why, you stinking Yank."

  Well, I asked him, and he went and told me, Morrell thought. He dug in his pocket and gave the Canadian some coins. "Here, buddy. Good luck to you."

  "I ought to spit in your eye," the hungry man told him. "Hell of it is, I can't. I've got to tip my hat"-he did-"and say, 'Thank you, sir,' on account of I need the money so goddamn bad."

  Never in all his days had Morrell heard Thank you, sir sound so much like Go to hell, you son of a bitch.

  And he discovered the problem that sprang from giving one beggar some money. As soon as he did, all the others became four times as obnoxious, swarming around him and cursing him as foully as they knew how when he pushed past without doing for them what he'd done for one of their fellows. Maybe they hoped they'd make him feel guilty. All they really did was make him mad.

  He'd just shaken free of the crowd when a woman sidled up to him. Skirts were longer than they had been a couple of years before, and the day wasn't warm, but what she wore displayed a lot of her. "Want a good time, soldier?" she said. "Three dollars."

  She was skinny. Like any town with soldiers in it, Kamloops had its share of easy women, but she didn't look as if she'd been part of their sorry sisterhood for very long. "What did you used to do?" Morrell asked quietly.

  "What difference does it make?" she answered. "Whatever it was, I can't do it any more. Do you want to go someplace?"

  "No, thanks," he answered. She cursed him, too, with a sort of dreary hopelessness that hit him harder than the anger the male beggars had shown.

  Even the storekeepers' attitudes seemed different from the way they had before things went sour. He'd never seen men so glad to take money from him. When he remarked on that, the fellow who'd just sold him a doll for Mildred said, "You bet I'm glad. You're only the second customer I've had today. Anybody with any money at all looks good to me right now. How am I going to pay my bills if nobody buys anything from me? And if I can't pay my bills, what happens then? Do I end up out on the street? I sure hope not."