The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Lieutenant Commander Pottinger laughed. "We won't know who won till day after tomorrow, when we read it in the newspapers."

  "Yeah." It wasn't exactly funny, but Carsten laughed, too. "As long as we live through it, we've come out all right." A Japanese aeroplane and an American machine both splashed into the Pacific within a quarter of a mile of the Remembrance. Sam hoped somebody would live through the fight.

  T he Kansas City Star was the daily published closest to Leavenworth that was actually worth reading. Irving Morrell had discovered that during his last stay in Kansas. Now, of course, the wireless supplemented the paper. Back then, wireless had only started passing from Morse code to voice. Even now, the newspaper gave him a far more detailed picture than the quick reports on the wireless could.

  "I don't think anybody knows who won this stupid battle, Agnes," he said two days after reports about the sea fight north of the Sandwich Islands started coming in. "I really don't. If you look at our claims, we sank the whole Jap fleet and didn't take a scratch. If you look at theirs, they did it to us."

  His wife shrugged and poured him another cup of coffee. "My bet is, both sides are lying as hard as they can."

  "My bet is, you're right," Morrell answered. "I suppose we'll sort it out in time for Mildred's children to study about it in school."

  Hearing her name made his daughter look up from her scrambled eggs. "Study what in school?" she asked.

  "A big naval battle in the Pacific," her father said.

  She rolled her eyes. "For heaven's sake, who cares?"

  Agnes laughed. "If everybody felt that way, we wouldn't have to fight any more wars. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?"

  "That would be wonderful," Morrell said with the deep conviction of a man who'd seen-who'd taken part in-the worst man could do to his fellow man. He gulped the scalding coffee. "That would be wonderful, but it's not going to happen any time soon, no matter how much I wish it would. Speaking of which, I'm off to the Barrel Works."

  "All right, dear." Agnes got up, too, and came over to give him a kiss. "I'll see you when you get back. Some more things should be out of boxes by then."

  "Good." Morrell was convinced he could no more escape from boxes than a bug could get out of a spiderweb. He wondered how many times he'd moved in the course of his military career. He didn't try to count them all up. That way lay madness.

  Barbed wire enclosed a field in which sat the experimental barrel he'd been working with ten years earlier. The machine hadn't been in the field all those years; it would have been a rusted, useless hulk if it had. Even though the Socialists had stopped work on new barrels for so long, the Army had carefully greased this one and stored it in a garage, in case it was ever wanted again. Morrell gave the General Staff-not his favorite outfit-reluctant credit for that. He didn't know what he would have done if he'd had to start altogether from scratch.

  Sentries at the gate saluted. "Good morning, Colonel," they chorused.

  "Morning, boys." Morrell pointed into the field. "Who's working on the barrel?"

  "Sergeant Pound, sir," one of the sentries answered.

  "I might have known." Morrell opened the gate and went inside. One of the sentries closed it after him. As he hurried toward the barrel, he called, "You're up early today, Sergeant."

  "Oh, hello, sir." Sergeant Michael Pound was a broad-shouldered, muscular man with close-cropped brown hair and a neat mustache showing the first silver threads. "The carburetor still isn't what it ought to be, you know."

  "I'm not surprised, seeing how long the whole vehicle's been sitting there doing nothing," Morrell answered. "How are you going to get it clean?"

  Sergeant Pound held up a coffee can. "There's this new solvent called carbon tetrachloride. It gets grease off of anything," he said enthusiastically. He was wild for any new invention; that was what had drawn him into barrels in the first place. "It's wonderful stuff-nonflammable, a really excellent cleaner. Only one drawback." He plopped the carburetor into the can.

  "What's that?" Morrell asked, as he was surely supposed to.

  "If you use it indoors, it's liable to asphyxiate you," Pound replied. "Some people are fools, of course. Congressmen get excited about that sort of thing. They want to ban the stuff. If you ask me, anyone who's dumb enough not to read the label deserves whatever happens to him." He had no patience with incompetent people, no doubt because he was so all-around competent himself.

  Morrell slapped him on the back. "It's damn good to see you again, Sergeant, to hell with me if it's not."

  "Thank you very much, sir," Michael Pound replied. "I felt I was wasting my time these past few years in the artillery. Of course, the Army would have thrown me out on my ear if I'd tried to stay in barrels, but the men in charge of things aren't exactly the smartest ones we've got, are they?"

  "I believe I'll plead the Fifth on that one," Morrell said, laughing. "Do you think you could do a better job of it?"

  "Sir, I'm sure I could." Pound wasn't joking. Because he did so many things well, he thought he could do anything. Sometimes he turned out to be right. Sometimes he was disastrously wrong. Occasional disasters did nothing to damage his self-confidence.

  "How did you put up with going back to the artillery after the Barrel Works closed down?" Morrell asked.

  "Well, for one thing, sir, like I said, if I hadn't they would have found something else even worse for me to do-or they would have thrown me out altogether, and that wouldn't have been good, not when the collapse came," Pound said. "And besides, I always thought the politicians would eventually come to their senses. I just never imagined they'd take so long."

  "Who did?" Morrell said. He'd asked for Sergeant Pound by name when he came back to Leavenworth. The man was worth his weight in gold-which, considering his massive frame, was no mean statement. If he occasionally suffered delusions of omnipotence… well, nobody was perfect.

  "Knaves. Fools and knaves," he said now: one of his favorite phrases.

  "You'd better be careful," Morrell warned him. "You're starting to sound like you belong in the Freedom Party."

  "Oh, no, sir. I didn't say they were a pack of traitors who need to be lined up against a wall and shot." Pound had no trouble imitating the Freedom Party's impassioned rhetoric. He added, "Besides, that Featherston is a dangerous lunatic. If he gets elected this fall, he's liable to show just how dangerous he is."

  "I wish I could tell you you were wrong," Morrell said.

  "He's liable to prove as troublesome to us as those Action Francaise people are to the Kaiser," Pound said. "What can you do about a government that hates you if a majority voted it into office?"

  "Get ready to fight," Morrell answered. "That's what we're doing here."

  "How soon before we have a real barrel with specifications based on the experimental model here?" Sergeant Pound asked, taking the carburetor out of the carbon tetrachloride and setting it down on a rag.

  "They're saying six or eight months in Pontiac," Morrell replied. "That's what they're saying, but I'll believe it when I see it. Bet on a year, maybe longer."

  "Disgraceful," Pound said. "So much time not even frittered away- thrown away, for heaven's sake." He rubbed the carburetor with the rag, then passed it to Morrell. "This thing is better, though. I think it's really clean now, clean enough to work the way it's supposed to."

  "I hope you're right," Morrell said. "Put it back in the engine, Sergeant. We'll gas up the beast and see if it runs."

  "Right, sir." Pound opened the louvers on the engine compartment-one improvement over Great War barrels the experimental model did boast was a separate engine compartment, which drastically reduced noise and noxious fumes for the crew. As Pound turned a wrench, he went on, "You know, we really ought to have a diesel engine in here, not one fueled by gasoline. A fire starts, gasoline goes up like a bomb. Diesel fuel just burns quietly. The men in the fighting compartment have a much better chance to get away."

  "That's a good idea," Morrell said. Pou
nd was full of ideas, good, bad, and indifferent. "Model after next, we ought to think about incorporating it." He pulled a notebook from his breast pocket and scribbled a few lines so the idea wouldn't be lost.

  "Why waste time, sir?" Sergeant Pound asked. "Why not put it right into the model they're working on now? That way, we'd have it."

  "We'd have it-eventually," Morrell answered. "How many plans would they have to change to put a new engine in that compartment? How many dies and stamps and castings would they have to revise? I don't know the exact number, but it's bound to be a big one."

  "We ought to do this right," Pound insisted.

  "We will-eventually." Morrell used that word again. "Right now, that we're doing it at all is miracle enough, if you ask me. Just remember, I was in Kamloops a few weeks ago, and you were an artilleryman. Let's get something finished, and then we can set about improving it."

  "Everything ought to be right the first time," Pound muttered.

  "Not everything is. That's why they put erasers on pencils," Morrell said. "Or are you one of those people who fill out crossword puzzles in ink?" He was fond of those puzzles himself. Their popularity had exploded since the collapse. They gave people something interesting to do, and you could buy a book of them for a dime.

  Michael Pound looked puzzled. "Of course, sir. Doesn't everybody?" He sounded altogether innocent. Was that sarcasm, or did he really believe people were so generally capable? Morrell suspected he did. Like most men, he judged others by his own standards, and those standards were pretty high. After bending to get a better look at the connection he was making, he said, "I've got a question for you, sir."

  "Go ahead," Morrell told him.

  "Where do you suppose we could be if we hadn't spent all this time lying fallow, and how big a price will we pay because we did?"

  "We'd be a lot further along than we are now, and we'll have to find out. There. Aren't I profound?"

  "That's hardly the word I'd use, sir," Michael Pound replied.

  He didn't say what word he would use, which might have been just as well. Morrell said, "Shall we see if this miserable thing actually runs now?"

  "It had better," Pound said.

  He was properly a gunner by trade, but he could drive. He slid down through the turret-an innovation when the experimental model was new, but a commonplace in barrel design nowadays-and into the driver's seat at the left front of the vehicle, next to the bow machine gun. When he stabbed the starter button, the engine wasted no time roaring to life.

  "You see, sir?" he said in his best I-told-you-so tones.

  "I see," Morrell answered. "All right, shut it down for now. We're not ready to go anywhere, not with a two-man crew."

  "We could if we were at war," Pound said.

  "We could if we were but we aren't so we won't." Morrell had to listen to himself to make sure that came out right. "Actually, we are at war, but barrels won't do much against the Japs. Now we have to revive some more of the old machines, to have opponents to practice against." He wished real barrels, modern barrels, would be so easy to face.

  T hese days, nobody around Baroyeca was likely to tell anybody how to vote. Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't been sure things would work out that way, but they had. The unfortunate accidents that happened to Don Joaquin's barn and stable-to say nothing of the even more unfortunate accidents that happened to Don Joaquin's guards-had quickly persuaded the prominent men in this part of Sonora not to push too hard against the Freedom Party.

  "You understand what it is," Robert Quinn said at a Freedom Party meeting a couple of weeks after those unfortunate things happened. "It has been a very long time since anyone told a patron, 'No, senor, you may not do this.' They needed a lesson. Now they have had one. I do not think they will need any more."

  "What could we have done if they had come after us with everything they have?" Rodriguez asked.

  Quinn looked steadily back at him. "It is like this. The rich men around Baroyeca have so much. The Freedom Party has so much." He held his hands first close together, then wide apart. "If you put them in a fight, who do you think is going to win?"

  "But suppose they talked to the governor," Rodriguez said stubbornly. "Suppose they said, 'Call out the state militia. We have to put down these Freedom Party men with guns.' "

  " Muy bien — suppose they did that." The Freedom Party organizer sounded agreeable. "Suppose they did exactly that. How many soldados in this state, Senor Rodriguez, do you suppose are Freedom Party men?"

  "Ahh," Rodriguez said, and his voice was just one in a small, delighted chorus of oohs and ahhs that filled Freedom Party headquarters. He went on, "You mean they cannot trust their own soldiers?"

  "Did I say that?" Quinn shook his head. "I did not say that. Would I say anything that would go against the state government? Of course not."

  "Of course not," Carlos Ruiz agreed in sly tones. "We don't want to go against the state government. We want to take it over."

  "Ahh," Hipolito Rodriguez said again. He found winning a national election easier to imagine than toppling the state government. Richmond was far away, and wouldn't matter so immediately. A Freedom Party administration in Hermosillo would send shock waves rippling through Sonora.

  Of course, a Freedom Party defeat in November would send shock waves of a different sort rippling through the state. Quinn said, "Remember, we have to win, or the lesson Don Joaquin learned goes for nothing."

  He didn't say who had taught Carlos Ruiz's patron that lesson. He certainly didn't say the men who'd taught that lesson had got their rifles and ammunition from him. Some things were better unadmitted.

  Quietly Hipolito Rodriguez said, "That lesson had better not go for nothing, whether we win or lose. If they push us too hard, we can still fight."

  "You are a brave man, a bold man," Quinn said. "You are the sort of man we want, the sort of man we need, in the Freedom Party."

  Rodriguez shrugged. "If a patron wants to stay a Radical Liberal, that is all right with me. I used to be a Radical Liberal myself. I changed my mind. They have no business telling me I may not change my mind. I would never try to tell them any such thing."

  "Yes. You have reason. That is how it should be," Ruiz said. Several other men nodded.

  But Robert Quinn said, "Once we win, well, other parties will just have to get used to that. The difference between the Freedom Party and the other parties in the Confederate States is that we have reason and they do not. If they are wrong, why should we let them pretend they are right?"

  "They are political parties, too," Ruiz said. "One of these days, they will win an election."

  "I do not think so," Quinn said. "I do not think one of them will win an election for a very, very long time once we take over."

  "What do you mean?" Ruiz asked. "Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That is how politics works."

  "Not always," Rodriguez said. "How many times in a row have Whigs been presidents of the Confederate States? Every single time, that's how many. If the Freedom Party is good enough to win, it will win just as many elections. That's what you meant, isn't it, Senor Quinn?"

  "Sure it is, Senor Rodriguez," Quinn said easily, with a small laugh. "That is exactly what I meant."

  Rodriguez wondered why he laughed. Because he hadn't meant exactly that? If he hadn't, what had he meant? What could he have meant? Rodriguez shrugged. Whatever it was, he didn't think he needed to worry about it very much.

  Someone asked, " Senor Quinn, how do we make certain the Freedom Party wins in Sonora this November?"

  "That is a good question. That is a very good question." Now Robert Quinn sounded not only serious but altogether sincere. "We ourselves here can only make sure we win in Baroyeca." He waited for nods to show everyone understood that, then went on, "We have to do a few things. We have to let people know what the Party will do for them once it wins. We have to let them know what it will do for the country once it wins. We have to show them the other parties cannot do the things they
promise, and that most of what they promise is not good anyway. And we have to do everything we can to keep them from having the chance to tell their lies."

  Hipolito Rodriguez understood all of that but the last. "What do you mean, Senor Quinn?" he asked. "How do we keep them from doing that?"

  "However we have to," the Freedom Party man said bluntly. "However we need to. Don Joaquin had a sad accident, verdad?" Again, he waited for nods. Again, he got them. Everybody here knew what kind of accident Don Joaquin had had. Nobody much felt like talking about details-better safe than sorry. Quinn continued, "When they come here to make speeches and stir up their followers, we do not let them. We shout, we heckle, we make enough of a disturbance to keep them from talking to an audience. If they cannot talk, they cannot get their message out, eh?"

  "Si, senor." Several men said it together. Rodriguez wasn't one of them, but he nodded. If the Freedom Party got to talk and no one else did, that was surely a large advantage. But…

  He held up his hand. Quinn pointed his way. " Senor, how do we keep them from talking on the wireless?" he inquired.

  "Ah, Senor Rodriguez, you do ask interesting questions." As always, Quinn was scrupulously polite. He treated the men who'd joined the Freedom Party as if they were dons. Most white men thought of Sonorans and Chihuahuans as nothing but greasers. If Quinn did, he kept it to himself. That was another reason his following grew and grew. He continued, "We cannot stop that, not altogether-not yet. But it does not matter so much here in Sonora, because fewer places here have electricity than is true in most of the Confederate States."

  Carlos Ruiz clicked his tongue between his teeth. "That is not fair. That is not right."

  "I agree with you, Senor Ruiz," Quinn said. "It is one of the things the Freedom Party will fix once we have power. But, whether we like it or not, it is true, and we have to take it into account." He paused and looked around the room. "Are there any more questions? No? All right, then. This meeting is adjourned."

  Rodriguez was the first one to start out of the Freedom Party headquarters. From across the street, a shot rang out. Whoever held that gun didn't really know what to do with it. The bullet cracked past Rodriguez's head and thudded into the planking of the building behind him. Automatic reflex made him throw himself flat. Another bullet sang through the air where he'd stood a moment before. Glass shattered. Chunks rained down on him.