The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "You probably can't see the cloth on his uniform at all, on account of the gold and the medals and such." Commander van der Waal's snicker had a nasty edge to it. "My little girl back in Providence likes to play dress-up the same way. Of course, she's got an excuse-she's only eight years old."

  But Lieutenant Commander Garcia said all the right things: "We are pleased to see this great ship in our growing port. We hope it is a sign of friendship between your great republic and our own. Costa Rica and the United States have never been enemies. We do not believe we ever have to be."

  Sam wondered whether the sailors aboard the Confederate freighter could hear Garcia's words, and how they liked them if they could. Hope you don't like 'em for beans, he thought.

  W hen Abner Dowling went to the train station in Salt Lake City, a police officer patted him down before allowing him inside the building. Another cop, and a military policeman with him, went through Dowling's suitcase. "Sorry about this, sir," the MP said when he got to the bottom of Dowling's belongings. "I do apologize for the inconvenience."

  "It's all right," Dowling answered. "Identity cards and uniforms can be faked-we've found that out the hard way. Now you know for a fact I won't be carrying contraband onto the train."

  "Thank you for taking it so well, sir," the military policeman said.

  "No point getting huffy about it," Dowling said. "You were going to search me any which way."

  He was dead right about that. Everyone who left Utah was searched these days, whether at train stations or at checkpoints along the highways. Since assassinating General Pershing, Mormon diehards had set off bombs from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. They were suspected in a couple of murders of prominent men, too, and of bank robberies to finance their operations. And so…

  And so lines into the railroad station were long and slow. Everyone was searched: men, women, children, even babies in flowing robes. At least once, somebody had tried to smuggle out explosives hidden under baby clothes. Dowling only hoped the diehards hadn't succeeded at that game before the U.S. occupiers got wise to it. Every suitcase got searched, too. Some, the ones suspected of false bottoms, also got X-rayed.

  As Dowling took his seat in the fancy Pullman car, he marveled that any ordinary civilians at all got on in Utah. He muttered under his breath, a mutter uncomplimentary to the inhabitants of the state he helped rule. Utah had precious few ordinary civilians, and even fewer who were also Mormons. Up till General Pershing was killed, Dowling had dared believe otherwise. So had the administrators who'd been on the point of relaxing military occupation in Utah.

  It could have become a state like any other, Dowling thought as the train began rolling east. They could have rebuilt the Temple, if they'd wanted to. But some damnfool hotheads made sure that wouldn't happen. I hope they're pleased with themselves. Utah won't get out from under the U.S. Army's thumb for the next ten years now.

  He suspected the man who'd gunned down General Pershing-a man who'd never been caught-and his pals were pleased with themselves. Some people had a vested interest in trouble. If it looked as if calm threatened to break out, people like that would do anything they could to thwart it. And, as they'd shown, they could do plenty.

  Colonel Dowling let out a loud, long sigh. He glanced toward the bed in his compartment. If he wanted to, he could take off his shoes-take off his uniform, for that matter-curl up there, and go to sleep. He didn't have to worry about Salt Lake City, or Utah as a whole, for the next several days.

  Unless the Mormons have planted a bomb under the railroad tracks, he thought. He knew that wasn't likely. But he also knew it wasn't impossible.

  He shook his head, angry at himself. I said I wasn't going to worry about it, and what do I do? Start worrying, that's what.

  He looked out the window. An aeroplane flew past, also heading east but easily outpacing the train. It was one of those new three-motored machines that could carry freight or passengers. Suddenly, Dowling wondered what sort of precautions people were taking at landing fields. A bomb aboard an aeroplane would surely kill everybody on it. Muttering again, this time a sharp curse, he scribbled a note to himself. Maybe the Mormons hadn't thought of trying to bomb aeroplanes, the way they assuredly had thought of bombing trains. Maybe they wouldn't. But maybe they would, too. He wanted to stay one step ahead of them if he could.

  When lunchtime came, he made his way back to the dining car. He was about to dig into a big plate of spare ribs when a clever-looking woman with reddish hair going gray came up to his table and said, "Mind if I join you, Colonel Dowling?"

  "I suppose not." He frowned; she looked familiar, but he couldn't place the face. "You're…"

  "Ophelia Clemens," she said crisply, holding out her hand man-fashion. "We met in Winnipeg, if you'll remember."

  "Good God, yes!" Dowling exclaimed as he shook it. "I'm not likely to forget that!" She'd come to occupied Canada to interview General Custer, and she'd just escaped being blown to bits with him-and with Dowling-when Arthur McGregor planted a bomb in the steakhouse where Custer ate lunch. "How are you, Miss Clemens?"

  "Tolerable well, thanks," the newspaperwoman answered. "Are you also heading to Washington for General Custer's funeral?"

  Dowling nodded. "Yes, I am. I would have gone anyway, but Mrs. Custer also sent me a telegram asking me to be there, which I thought was very kind and gracious of her."

  "Do you have any comments on the general's passing?"

  "It's the end of an era," Dowling said automatically. That he knew it was a cliche made it no less true. He went on, "He was an officer in the War of Secession. He was a hero in the Second Mexican War. He was a hero-probably the hero-of the Great War." Even though he broke orders to do it. Even though he almost got himself court-martialed-and me with him. "And he was a hero all over again, when he was coming home to retire, when he threw back the bomb that Canadian tossed at him." Every word of that was true, too. Dowling knew he would have died if General Custer hadn't stubbornly, irrationally-correctly-believed McGregor was the man who'd been out to kill him. He added, "He lived to ninety, too. That's a good run for anybody."

  "It certainly is." Ophelia Clemens took out a notebook and scrawled in it. A waiter came by. She gave him her order, then turned back to Dowling. "May I ask you something, Colonel?"

  "Go ahead," Dowling replied. "What kind of answer you get depends on what kind of question it is."

  "It always does," she agreed. "Here's what I want to know: Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer always told different stories about what happened during the Second Mexican War. They're both dead now. You can't hurt either one of them with a straight answer. Do you know who had it right?"

  "Do I know for a fact?" Abner Dowling remembered the quarrel he'd listened to in Nashville in 1917, right at the end of the Great War. Roosevelt and Custer had almost come to blows then, though one was in late middle years and the other already an old man. Dowling knew what his opinion was, but that wasn't what Miss Clemens had asked. "Ma'am, I wasn't there. I was a little boy during the Second Mexican War. Even if I had been there, odds are I wouldn't have heard exactly what orders were given, or by whom."

  Ophelia Clemens gave him a sour nod. "I was afraid you were going to say that. I even talked to a couple of the surviving machine gunners-Gatling gunners, they called themselves-but they don't know or don't remember who did what when."

  "We'll probably never know, not for certain," Dowling said.

  "What do you think?" The newspaperwoman poised her pencil over the notebook, ready to take down whatever pearls of wisdom he gave her.

  "Not for publication," he answered at once. The pencil withdrew. He still didn't say what he thought. Instead, he added, "Not even as 'a highly placed source' or anything like that."

  The look she sent him this time was even more sour. "All right," she said at last. "You don't make things easy, do you?"

  "Ma'am, Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer are dead, but you won't find a senior officer who doesn't have strong vie
ws about both of them," Dowling said.

  Ophelia Clemens nodded again. That did seem to make sense to her. "I promise," she said solemnly. "And in case you're wondering, I don't break promises like that. If I did, no one would trust me when I made them."

  Dowling believed her. She was, from everything he'd seen in Winnipeg and here on the train, a straight shooter. She probably had to be, to get ahead in a normally masculine business like reporting. He remembered she'd told him and Custer her father had been a newspaperman, too. Dowling said, "Strictly off the record, I'd bet on Teddy Roosevelt."

  "I thought as much," she said. "Custer was nothing but a phony and a blowhard, wasn't he?"

  "Strictly off the record," Dowling repeated, "he was a humbug and a blowhard. But if you say he was nothing but a humbug and a blowhard, you're wrong. He always went straight after what he wanted, and he went after it as hard as he could. When he was right-and he was, sometimes-that made him one of the most effective people the world has ever seen. The rest may be true, but don't forget that part of him."

  Ophelia Clemens considered that. In the end, a little reluctantly, she nodded. "Yes, I suppose you have something. People need to judge a man by what he did, not just by the way he acted."

  "Custer did a lot," Dowling said. "No two ways about that." He might have managed more, he might have managed better, if he hadn't become a self-parody in his later years. But what he had done would be remembered as long as the United States endured.

  Dowling told Custer stories all the way from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., some on the record, some off. Ophelia Clemens wrote down what she could and either laughed or rolled her eyes at the rest. Dowling was sorry they went their separate ways after the train rolled into Union Station.

  He paid his respects to Libbie Custer, who sat beside the general's body where it lay in state in the Capitol. "Hello, Colonel," Custer's widow said. "We had a fine run, Autie and I. I don't know what in heaven's name I'll do without him."

  "I think you'll manage," Dowling said, on the whole truthfully. He'd always reckoned Mrs. Custer the brains of the outfit.

  "I suppose I could," she said now. "But what's the point? I spent the past sixty-five years taking care of the general. Now that he's gone, what am I supposed to do with myself? I haven't much time left, either, you know."

  With no answer for that-how could he contradict an obvious truth? — Dowling murmured, "I'm sorry," and made his escape.

  He marched in the mourners' procession behind Custer's flag-draped coffin. The general's funeral was modeled on Teddy Roosevelt's; Dowling found it strangely fitting that the two men, longtime rivals in life, should be equals in death. The only difference he could see was that no foreign dignitaries came to say their farewells to General Custer.

  A bespectacled man hoisted a boy onto his shoulders. In the funereal hush, his words carried: "Look, Armstrong. There goes the man you're named for."

  Custer's final wishes-or maybe they were Libbie's wishes-were that his remains be buried at Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington in what was now West Virginia. He would spend eternity with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert E. Lee, presumably, would spend it gnashing his teeth at having not one but two U.S. heroes take their final rest on his old estate.

  "Well, to hell with Robert E. Lee," Dowling muttered, and he felt sure both Custer and Roosevelt would have agreed with him.

  F lora Blackford had spent years speaking in front of crowds of workers. A women's club in Philadelphia wasn't the same thing. Speaking as First Lady in front of organizations like this wasn't even like speaking in the House of Representatives. There'd been plenty of cut-and-thrust in the House. Here, Flora had to be polite whether she wanted to or not.

  "I'm sure you'll agree that we can return to prosperity, and that we will return to prosperity," she told the plump, prosperous women. Even if it was noncontroversial, it was also a campaign speech, with the 193 °Congressional election just around the corner. "The worst is over. From where we are now, we can only go up."

  The women applauded. She'd told them what they wanted to hear, what they wanted to believe. She wanted to believe it herself. She'd wanted to believe it ever since the stock market crashed right after her husband became president. She'd wanted to, but believing got harder every day.

  "We were the party of prosperity through the 1920s," she insisted. "We don't deserve to be labeled the party of depression."

  Even though the women applauded again, Flora knew more than a little depression herself. Her husband had done what only twenty-nine men had done before him-he'd become president. And what had it got him? Only curses and the blame for the worst collapse the United States had known since the bad times after the Confederate States broke away in the War of Secession.

  She got through the speech. She'd learned all about getting through speeches despite a heavy heart when she'd had to stand up in Congress after her brother David lost a leg in the Great War. She had to do a good job here. The coming election would be the first chance voters had to say anything about the Blackford administration and the Socialist Party since things went sour.

  What would they say when they got the chance? Nothing good, she feared. The Socialists, naturally, had taken credit for everything that had gone right in their first two terms, Upton Sinclair's terms, in Powel House, regardless of whether they'd caused it. Political parties did that. How could they keep from getting the blame for everything that was going wrong now? The Democrats-even the remnants of the Republicans-were certainly doing their best to pin that blame on the party of Marx and Lincoln and Debs.

  After the speech, after the coffee and cakes and polite talk that followed, she went back to the presidential residence. Traveling by chauffeured limousine to the Powel House struck her as expensive and wasteful, to say nothing of being the very opposite of egalitarian. But against entrenched presidential custom the Socialists had struggled in vain. The limousine waited for Flora outside the women's club-waited for her and whisked her away.

  When she got back to Powel House, she found her husband studying a bill. "Is that the new relief authorization from Congress?" she asked.

  Hosea Blackford nodded. "That's what it is," he said. "I'm going to sign it, too-even makework is better than no work at all, and no work at all is what too many people have these days. But it feels like putting a bandage on a man who's just been shot through the heart. How much good is it going to do?"

  He'd been president for only a little more than a year and a half. The pressure of the job, though, had aged him more in that time than all the years he'd spent as vice president. His hair was thinner and grayer, his face more wrinkled and more weary-looking; his clothes hung on him like sacks, for he'd lost weight, too.

  Would he look this way if things hadn't gone wrong? Flora wondered. Guilt gnawed at her. She'd encouraged Hosea to run for president. If she hadn't, the country would be blaming someone else for its troubles now. Shantytowns inhabited by men who'd lost their homes wouldn't be called Blackfordburghs. Comics wouldn't tell jokes about him on the vaudeville stage and over the wireless.

  Then he said, "It's a good thing I've got this job instead of Calvin Coolidge. If he were sitting here, he'd veto this bill and all the others like it. Things would be a lot worse then-I'm sure of it. We have hungry people now-we'd have starving people then. The class struggle would go straight to the streets."

  Tears stung her eyes. She said, "I was just thinking I never should have put you through all this."

  "You didn't put me through it," he answered. "I did it myself. I wanted it, too, you know. And, in spite of everything, I think I'm a better man for the job than Coolidge would have been."

  "The country doesn't deserve you," Flora said.

  "Oh? Are you saying it does deserve Coolidge?" her husband asked with a wry grin. "I'm not sure even Massachusetts deserves him."

  "That's not what I meant, and you know it," Flora said with some asperity.

  "Maybe not, sweetheart, but it's
what you said," Hosea Blackford answered. Even that wry grin had trouble staying on his face. "If only something we tried would do some real good for the country, so people would believe we had hope."

  "Things would be a lot worse without the relief programs and the dole," Flora insisted. "We'd have men out selling apples on street corners to try to stay alive."

  "We might as well, even now," her husband said. "I haven't seen the country so gloomy since… since before the Great War."

  Flora knew what a hard time he had bringing that out. The Socialists still looked at the war in terms of the lives it had squandered, the lives it had wrecked, the ruin it had wrought. They didn't usually talk about the triumph it had been, as Democrats were in the habit of doing. But before the war, the USA, caught between the CSA and Canada, with England and France always ready to pounce, had a downtrodden feel. Enemies had ganged up on the United States twice. The fear those enemies might do it again had filled the country-and, perhaps, with reason.

  No more. Now the United States had their place in the sun. No one had a bigger place, either. Only the Empire of Germany came close. The Kaiser's monarchy was a rival, yes, but not the deadly foes the Confederacy and her allies had seemed in the old days, the days before they were beaten at last.

  And, from 1917 to 1929, under Theodore Roosevelt and then under Upton Sinclair, the United States had walked tall, had walked proud. After half a century of furtive skulking, the United States had strutted. But now this. Nobody in all the world was strutting these days. Everyone was trying to figure out how to fix what had gone wrong. No one, though, was having much luck.

  "What are we going to do?" Flora asked.

  "You mean, besides take a drubbing at the polls next Tuesday?" her husband asked in turn. "I don't know, dear. I really don't, and I wish to heaven I did. If I knew what to do, I'd be doing it. You can bet on that." He drummed his fingers on the desk. "Blackfordburghs." He spoke the word as if it were a curse. And so, in a way, it was: a curse on him, and a curse on the party he headed.