The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

  “Okay,” Betsy said. “But I sure like it a lot better than I would if you were behind by that much.”

  He laughed. “Well, when you put it like that, so do I.”

  The air got thick with cigarette smoke and the odd pipe and cigar. Then it got thicker. Jerry was puffing away like everybody else, but he didn’t like it when his eyes started to sting and water. That took a good thing too far.

  More good news kept blaring out of the radio. “This does look like a repudiation of Harry Truman’s domestic and foreign policy,” a broadcaster said. “Unless things out West dramatically change the situation, the Republican Party stands to gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration.”

  More cheers. Jerry shouted along with everybody else. But he couldn’t help wishing the guy on the radio hadn’t mentioned Hoover. If ever there was a jinx…

  But not even the ghost of Hoover and the Depression could jinx the GOP tonight. Around half past ten, when Jerry’s lead had swelled to over 5,000 votes, one of the telephones at campaign headquarters jangled. The staffer who answered it waved to try to cut the hubbub in the room. Not having much luck, he bellowed, “It’s Douglas Catledge, Congressman!”

  Jerry jumped to his feet and hurried over to the phone. The campaign workers yelled and clapped and stamped their feet. But when Jerry waved for quiet, he got it. He grabbed the handset, saying, “Thanks, Irv.” He talked into the telephone: “This is Jerry Duncan.”

  “Hello, Congressman. Doug Catledge here.” The young Democrat sounded tired and sad but determined: about the way Jerry would have sounded in his shoes. One of these days, I will sound that way. Going to Washington is always a round-trip ticket. But not today, thank God, Jerry thought. After an audible deep breath, his opponent went on, “I called to congratulate you…on your reelection.”

  “Thank you very much, Doug. That’s mighty gracious of you,” Jerry said. “You ran a strong campaign. I was worried right up till the polls closed.” He hadn’t been; he’d thought things looked pretty good. But if the other fellow was gracious you had to follow suit.

  “Kind of you to say so,” Catledge replied. “If you don’t mind my two cents’ worth now, I do hope you’ll soft-pedal the pullout foolishness you spouted the past few weeks.”

  Jerry frowned. Douglas Catledge had lost not least because he backed Truman’s policies, and he was telling Jerry what to do? Go peddle your papers, sonny. Jerry came that close to saying it out loud.

  But no. Just because the other guy couldn’t mind his manners didn’t mean Jerry had to imitate him. What he did say was, “The fight over there costs more men and more cash than we can afford. Our dollar is falling against the Swiss franc and the Canadian dollar and even the Mexican peso. It would be falling against the pound, but England’s stuck in this flypaper, too.”

  “If we run away from Germany, either the Russians grab all of it or the Nazis come back in and start getting ready for World War III,” Catledge said. “I don’t think either one helps the United States.”

  “I don’t think either one is anything we’ve got to worry about, not as long as we have the atom bomb,” Jerry answered. “Good night, Mr. Catledge.” He wasn’t about to argue, not tonight.

  “Good night,” Douglas Catledge said sadly. “I still think you’re making a bad mistake.”

  “I know you do. But the voters don’t.” Jerry said “Good night” once more and hung up. He’d got the last word. So had the voters: the only word that mattered in an election. Jerry stood up and held up his hands. Everybody in the crowded room looked his way. “My opponent has just generously conceded,” he told the campaign workers. “I want to thank him, and I want to thank all of you for making my victory possible. I’m the one who’s going back to Washington, but I couldn’t possibly do it alone. Thanks again to every one of you from the bottom of my heart.”

  He got another round of applause. He went over and kissed Betsy. Then somebody stuck a lighted cigar in his mouth. He didn’t usually smoke them, but he took a few puffs with it held at a jaunty angle while the photographers snapped away. It was like a victory lap at the Indianapolis 500. As soon as the photographers were done, he stuck the cheroot in an ashtray and forgot about it.

  Diana McGraw walked into the campaign headquarters about fifteen minutes later. The campaign workers gave her a hand, too. Jerry joined in. His wife, he noticed, didn’t. No, Betsy never came out and said anything about Diana, but she didn’t need words to make her feelings plain.

  “Congratulations,” Diana said. “When the radio said Catledge had conceded, I figured I could come over without causing too much distraction.”

  “We’re going to have another term,” Jerry said. Betsy’s smile might have been painted on.

  “Another term,” Diana agreed. “How long do you think it will take to get the bonehead in the White House to bring our men home?”

  “Good question. If Truman’s shown one thing, it’s that he’s at least as stubborn as FDR ever was,” Jerry answered.

  “But Congress holds the purse strings,” Diana said. “If you don’t give him the money to keep troops in Germany-”

  “Have to see what things look like, what the lineup is after they count all the votes,” Jerry said. He’d been trying to make that calculation himself. Knowing the numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the upcoming Eightieth Congress would help only so much. Some Democrats would steer clear of Truman for fear of losing the next time around, while some Republicans would stick with him because they were scared of Stalin-or just because the people in their districts thought occupying Germany was still a good idea.

  Diana, of course, had her sights set on one thing and one thing only. “The sooner the boys come home, the sooner no more mothers will start hating the Western Union delivery boy,” she said.

  How were you supposed to answer that? Jerry couldn’t, all the more so because he thought she was right. But she seemed sure the election would make things happen as if by magic. As a multiterm Congressman, Jerry Duncan knew better. There’d be plenty of horse trading and log rolling before anything got done. Washington was like that. It always had been. If it ever changed, he would be astonished.

  “If Truman won’t see reason, you ought to impeach him and throw him out on his ear,” Diana said.

  Jerry held up a hand like a traffic cop at a busy intersection. “Don’t even try to get anybody to talk impeachment. You’d only be wasting your time, and no one would listen to you,” he said. “Truman’s not doing anything unconstitutional. He’s just wrong. There’s a big difference.”

  “If they impeached everybody in Washington who was wrong, the place’d be empty inside of two weeks,” Betsy said.

  “If you’re wrong enough-” Diana began.

  Maybe she had something, too. If Roosevelt had been on the point of losing the war, wouldn’t people have run him out of town on a rail? Jerry suspected they would…which, in those days, would have left Henry Wallace President of the United States, a genuinely scary thought. Truman had no Vice President at the moment. That would make the Speaker of the House President if he got impeached. And the new Speaker would be a Republican….

  Ed McGraw read the paper while he ate bacon and eggs over easy and toast with butter and jam and smoked a cigarette. “Well,” he said, “looks like you’ve got the kind of Congress you’re gonna need.”

  “What are the final numbers?” Diana asked around a mouthful of toast-she was eating breakfast, too.

  Her husband read from the front-page story: “‘If present trends continue, the House in the Eightieth Congress will consist of at least 257 Republicans, 169 Democrats, and one American Labor Party member. The final eight races are too close for a winner to be declared. In the Senate, there will be at least fifty-three Republicans and forty-two Democrats. Again, the final Senate race is still up in the air.’”

  “That’s amazing,” Diana said. “The Democrats had big majorities in both houses of Co
ngress the last time around.”

  Ed rustled the newspaper to show he wasn’t done yet. “‘This historic reversal is surpassed in recent times only by the Democratic sweep that went with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election,’” he read. “‘Pundits believe many of the voters who turned to the GOP yesterday did so in protest against President Truman’s costly and bloody occupation of Germany. Diana McGraw’s opposition movement galvanized voter unhappiness.’” He grinned at her around the cigarette, which was about to singe his lips. “How about that, babe? You and zinc and sheet metal.” In the nick of time, the butt went into the ashtray.

  “How about that?” Diana echoed. She didn’t quite get the joke, but Ed had been making factory jokes she didn’t quite get ever since they were newlyweds. She went on, “Jerry said something like that last night, but he’s on the same side as we are, so it’s hard to take him all that seriously.”

  “Jerry…” Ed McGraw shoveled in a forkful. He took a bite of toast. Then he lit another cigarette. “Ever figure you’d call a Congressman by his first name?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Diana started to say that the Congressman’s wife didn’t like it very much. She swallowed the words before they came out. Why have Ed wondering whether Betsy Duncan had a good reason not to like it? That would set Ed wondering, too, which wouldn’t be good when nothing was going on between her and Jerry. And, she realized a beat later, it would be even worse if something were going on.

  “You’re hot stuff, kiddo.” Ed took the cigarette butt out of his mouth long enough to drink some coffee. After that, it went right back in. “But I’ve known you were hot stuff since high school.”

  “Oh, you-!” she said fondly. She never had confessed some of the things that went on in the back seat of his beat-up old Chevy before they got married. What the priest in the booth didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him…and God, of course, had already seen it.

  “So how does it feel?” he asked. He’d never looked for any of the limelight himself. He wasn’t that kind of man. All he cared about were his house and his job and their family. “You know all these big shots. You met the President and everything. You get your name in the papers.”

  “I wish nobody’d ever heard of me,” Diana said. “That would mean we had Pat back. To hell with all this other stuff.”

  No, she didn’t usually swear in front of her husband. She hardly noticed doing it this time. Ed didn’t notice at all. His big bald head bobbed up and down. “You got that right. Oh, boy, do you ever. I’d trade anything for another minute with him, even. But you don’t get those chances over again.”

  “You sure don’t.” Diana drained her own coffee mug. She looked at the clock above the stove. It always ran fast, but she made the correction without conscious thought. “You’d better get going.”

  “I know. I know.” Ed stood up. He grabbed his sheet-metal dinner pail. “Tongue sandwich in here?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good-one of my favorites.” Ed leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, leaving affection and the smell of tobacco smoke behind. Then he was out the door and heading for work, right on time. Ever since they got married, he’d been as reliable as the machines he tended.

  Diana smiled as the Pontiac backed down the driveway and chugged out into the street. Ed was reliable here, too-not just on the job. She didn’t want him to think she was running around, even if he didn’t always leave her glowing in bed any more. He’d never given her any reason to think he was, not even during the war, when all those Rosie the Riveter types flooded into the plant. Some of them-plenty of them, in Diana’s jaundiced opinion-were looking for more than work. If they’d found it, they hadn’t found it with Ed.

  Reaching across the kitchen table, Diana snagged the newspaper. Ed always got it first, because he had to hustle out the door-and, not to put too fine a point on it, because he was the man. But she could look it over now. It had maps and charts showing Senators and Representatives by party in the old Congress and the new.

  No doubt Jerry was right (yes, I do know my Congressman by his first name, Diana thought): some Republicans would back the occupation, while some Democrats would vote against it. But the more Republicans in Congress, the better the chances it would end soon. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that.

  “We will bring them home,” Diana said, there in the empty kitchen. It would have been empty even if Pat did come home: he would’ve gone off to work with Ed. But it would have been a different empty. It wouldn’t have been such an aching emptiness. Pat would have been gone, but he wouldn’t have been gone. Diana nodded to herself. Pretty soon, nobody else would have to worry about the aching kind of emptiness. She hoped.

  XX

  More than a year and a half after the war in Europe was supposed to have ended, London remained a sorry, miserable place. Food was still rationed. So was coal. People wore greatcoats even indoors. Demobilized soldiers seemed to huddle in theirs as they ambled along looking for work-but jobs were as hard to come by as everything else in Britain these days.

  Police Constable Cedric Mitchell counted himself lucky. He’d had his position reserved for him when he came back from the war-if he came back. Plenty of his mates hadn’t. He’d made it across the Channel from Dunkirk in a tugboat that got strafed by two Stukas. Then he’d gone to North Africa, and then on to the slow, bloody slog up the Italian boot. Now he had a Military Medal, a great puckered scar on the outside of his right thigh, and nightmares that woke him up shrieking and sweating once or twice a week.

  He also had a new dream that wasn’t so nasty: to retire to Algiers or Naples or somewhere else with decent weather one day. Down in those countries, winter didn’t mean long, long nights and fogs and endless coughs and shivers. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but he damn well had.

  “Italy’s wasted on the bloody Eyties,” he muttered, his breath adding to the mist that swirled in front of Parliament. “Fucking wasted.”

  He walked his beat, back and forth, back and forth. The most lethal weapon he carried was a billy club. Thinking of that made him snort, which also added to the mist. No Jerry’d sneak up behind him and cut his throat here. No stinking dago who still loved Mussolini’d chuck a German potato-masher grenade into his foxhole. He didn’t need a Sten gun or a fighting knife or an entrenching tool-which could be a lot more lethal than a knife if you knew what to do with it, and he did.

  A fellow in American pinks and greens-khaki trousers and olive-drab jacket-looked left before he stepped out into St. Margaret’s Street. “Watch yourself, Yank!” PC Mitchell shouted. The American froze. A truck rumbled past from the direction in which he hadn’t looked.

  “Jesus!” he said. “Why don’t you guys drive the right way?”

  “We think we do,” Mitchell answered. “And since you’re over here, you’d jolly well better think so, too.”

  “That’s the third time the past two weeks I almost got myself creamed,” the Yank said.

  Do you suppose you ought to suspect a trend? But Mitchell didn’t say it. Even though the Americans were two years late getting into the war-a year better than the last time around, at that-they’d done all right once they got going. He’d fought alongside them in Italy, so he knew they’d paid their dues. And Britain would have gone under without the supplies they sent. So…

  “Well, have a care crossing,” was what did come out of Mitchell’s mouth. His sergeant would have been proud of him. He beckoned the American on. “Seems safe enough now.”

  “It seemed safe enough before,” the Yank said darkly. But he made it from the houses of Parliament to Westminster Abbey without getting run down. Not that many cars were on the road. Petrol was still rationed, too, and hard to come by.

  PC Mitchell wondered how long the country would need to get back to normal. Then he wondered if it ever would. India wanted to leave the Empire, and nothing short of another war seemed likely to keep it in. Without India, what was left wasn�
��t worth tuppence ha’penny. And there wouldn’t be a war on the far side of the world when Germany, only a long spit away, had turned into a running sore.

  Blam! No sooner had Mitchell heard the explosion than he was flat on his belly. It hadn’t knocked him over-he’d hit the dirt. That was a hell of a big bomb going off somewhere not far enough away-not close enough to hurt him, but nowhere near far enough away.

  Across the street, the Yank in pinks and greens had also flattened out like a hedgehog smashed by a lorry. He’s seen action, too, then, Mitchell thought as he started to scramble to his feet.

  Lorries. No sooner had they crossed his mind than a big one-one of the kind the USA had built by the millions during the war-came tearing down the middle of the street toward him. It was as if the driver knew he ought to stay on the left but had trouble remembering. “Jesus!” Mitchell said, furiously blowing his whistle. Just what the poor sorry world needed: a drunken Yank driving a deuce-and-a-half like he’d just been let out of the asylum.

  Then PC Cedric Mitchell got one glimpse of the driver’s face as the fellow swerved across the street toward Westminster Abbey. The bloke was a nutter, all right, but not that kind of nutter. Not barking mad but exalted mad. He had the face of someone about to do something marvelous, and the devil with the consequences. He had a face that made PC Mitchell hit the dirt again.

  Right after Nazi fanatics bombed the Eiffel Tower, soldiers had appeared in front of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s and a few other places. Then, when nothing happened, they vanished again. Mitchell had most of a second to wish men with rifles and Sten guns were anywhere close by-or even that bobbies like him carried firearms.

  Then the fanatic in the truck-and he couldn’t have been anything else-touched it off. The other explosion had been too close for comfort, frightening but not dangerous. This one…When this one went off, it was like getting stuck in the middle of the end of the world.