American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

“He reads X rays, sir—went to night school to learn the trade,” Toricelli said, not without pride. “My sister and he’ve got five children, and another one on the way. I don’t know what they’ll do if he doesn’t find something quick.”

  “I hope he does,” Dowling said, on the whole sincerely. “Who would have thought the bottom could drop out of things so fast?”

  “Nobody,” Captain Toricelli answered. “But it has.”

  He was right about that, too. The Army censored Salt Lake City papers pretty hard. Pain came through their pages even so. Stories of half-done buildings abandoned, of banks going under, of people losing jobs, couldn’t very well be prettied up. And the only way to leave those stories out of the newspapers would have been to have no papers at all.

  Captain Toricelli touched a fat document on his desk. “Don’t tell me what that is,” Dowling said. “Let me guess: another normalization petition.”

  “Right the first time,” his adjutant said.

  “It’s not as though I haven’t seen enough of them,” Dowling said. Every few months, the Mormons of Salt Lake City—and the occasional gentile, too—would circulate petitions asking that Utah finally be treated like any other state in the USA. Dowling had got a couple of dozen since coming to the state capital. With a sigh, he went on, “They still haven’t figured out I’m not the one they ought to send these to, because I have no authority to grant them. They should go to General Pershing—he’s supreme commander of the military district.”

  A thoroughly precise man, Toricelli said, “He hasn’t got authority to grant them, either. Only the president and Congress can do that.”

  “What do you think the chances are?” Dowling asked.

  “Better than decent, if the Mormons can keep their noses clean,” Captain Toricelli answered. “The Socialists seem to want to do it.”

  “I know.” Dowling packed a world of meaning into two words. “They think a zebra can change its stripes, the way the one in that Englishman’s fable did. I think . . .” He shook his head. “What I think doesn’t matter. I don’t make policy. I just get stuck with carrying it out.” He picked up the petition. It was a hefty one; it had to weigh a couple of pounds. “I’ll take this to General Pershing’s office, if you like.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to do that, sir,” Toricelli said. “It’s not important. I can fetch it next time I go over there.”

  “I’m on my way,” Dowling said. “Better Pershing’s adjutant should have it on his desk than you on yours.”

  He caught Toricelli’s eye. They shared a slightly conspiratorial chuckle. “Thank you very much, sir,” the young captain said.

  “You’re welcome,” Abner Dowling answered. “I’ve got to go over there and talk with the general about his scheme for mounting better guard on Temple Square. We need to do it; every broken rock from the Temple and the Tabernacle counts for a sacred relic with the more radical Mormons these days.”

  “Yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “But there’s a certain problem in shooting anybody who bends to pick up a pebble in the square, too.”

  “A certain problem, yes,” Dowling agreed. “And that’s what I’ve got to talk to General Pershing about. How do we keep the Mormons from getting symbols of revolt without provoking them and ruining what ever bits of goodwill we’ve managed to build up since the war ended?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” his adjutant replied. “I hope you and the commanding general can find a way.”

  “So do I. Can’t hope for much in the way of normalization if they’re still picking up broken rocks and dreaming of treason.” Dowling tucked the petition under his arm and strode down the hall to his superior’s office. He took no small pleasure in dropping the document on Pershing’s adjutant’s desk, and in watching the papers already there jump as it thudded home.

  “Thank you so much, sir,” Pershing’s adjutant, a major named Fred Corson, said with a sickly smile. “The general is waiting for you.” He sounded reluctant to admit even that much to Dowling.

  “Hello, Colonel,” General Pershing said when Dowling walked in. A grin spread across his bulldog features. “Was that the thump of a normalization petition I heard just then?”

  “It certainly was, sir,” Dowling answered.

  “Well, I’ll forward it to Philadelphia,” the commandant said. “That’s my duty. And there that petition will sit till the end of time, along with all the others.”

  “Unless the Socialists decide to grant them all, that is,” Dowling said.

  “Yes. Unless. In that case, Colonel, you and I will both need new assignments, because normal states don’t have soldiers occupying them. Part of me won’t be sorry to get away.” Pershing rose from behind his desk and went over to the window not far away. He looked at his fortified headquarters, and at Salt Lake City beyond. “Part of me, though, will regret leaving this state, because I’m convinced that, no matter what this administration may believe, Utah isn’t ready for normalization. As a matter of fact, here we—”

  Abner Dowling heard a distant pop! It might have been a motorcar backfiring, or a firecracker going off. It might have been, but it wasn’t. At the same instant as he heard it, or perhaps even a split second before, the window in front of which General Pershing was standing shattered. Pershing made a surprised noise. That was the best way Dowling could have described it. It didn’t hold much pain. Before Dowling fully realized what had happened, the military commandant of the state of Utah crumpled to the carpet in front of him.

  “General Pershing?” Dowling whispered. He hurried over to the fallen man. He needed a moment to add two and two together. Only when he saw the neat hole and the spreading bloodstain in the middle of Pershing’s chest did he fully understand what he was seeing. “General Pershing!” he said, sharply this time.

  He grabbed for Pershing’s wrist and felt for a pulse. He found none. Aside from that, the sudden sharp stink in the room told him what he needed to know. Pershing had fouled himself when the bullet struck home.

  Thinking of a bullet made Dowling think of the man who’d fired it. He peered out through the shattered window. The U.S. perimeter around the headquarters ran out for several hundred yards. The gunman must have shot from well beyond it, which meant he had to be a brilliant sniper. In war-ravaged Utah, that was anything but impossible, as Colonel Dowling knew all too well.

  Only while Dowling was shouting for Pershing’s adjutant did he pause to wonder whether the sniper was still out there, peering through a telescope on his Springfield and waiting for another shot. He was, at the moment, too shocked, too stunned, to worry about it.

  Major Corson hurried in. In his outer office, he hadn’t even heard the gunshot. Dowling’s shouts were what drew him. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said, which summed it up as well as anything. “Is he—?” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

  Dowling did: “He’s dead, all right. He dropped down like somebody let all the air out of him. He was dead before he hit the rug—never knew what hit him.”

  Out on the perimeter, soldiers had started shouting and pointing. A couple of them started running. Dowling noted all that as if from a very great distance. In one sense, whether they caught the sniper mattered a great deal. In another sense, it hardly mattered at all. The damage was done, and more than done.

  Pershing’s adjutant saw the same thing. He got the truth into four words: “So much for normalization.”

  “Yeah,” Dowling said. “We just went back to square one.”

  “Sir, you’re senior officer in the state right now,” Corson said. Dowling nodded; the city commandants in both Provo and Ogden were lieutenant colonels. Pershing’s adjutant looked to him with desperate appeal in his eyes. “What are your orders?”

  You’re in charge of Utah. God help you, you poor, sorry bastard. Dowling tried to pull himself together. “Fetch a doctor. It won’t do any good, but fetch him. Send men after that sniper.” He feared that wouldn’t do any good, either, but he had to try. “
Call the president and the War Department, in that order. Let them know what’s happened. After that, we close Salt Lake City down. We take hostages. We do whatever we have to do to let the Mormons know that if they want to play rough, we’re going to play ten times rougher. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Corson answered. He saluted and hurried away, leaving Dowling alone with General Pershing’s body.

  If the Mormons want to play rough, we’ll play ten times rougher? Dear God in heaven, had he really said that? He nodded. He had. And, in saying it, he’d sounded a great deal like General George Armstrong Custer. He hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t intended to. But he had, all the same. Custer had rubbed off on him after all. And if that wasn’t a chilling thought . . .

  If that wasn’t a chilling thought, maybe it was a reminder that Custer, for all his enormous flaws—and nobody knew them better than Dowling; a general had no more secrets from his adjutant than a man from his valet—had ended up the most successful soldier in the history of the United States.

  I won’t keep this command long, Dowling thought. They’ll bring in someone with stars on his shoulder straps as fast as they can. Meanwhile, though, it was his. He had to do the best job he could while it remained his.

  A doctor dashed into Pershing’s office, little black bag in hand. “What do you need, Colonel?” he asked.

  “Not me, Major,” Dowling answered. “It’s General Pershing who’s dead.” Along with any hope for peace in Utah for God only knows how long.

  Jake Featherston strode through the streets of Richmond, his bodyguards surrounding him front and back, left and right. He moved swiftly and confidently, and with such abrupt decision that his turns would sometimes take even the alert guards by surprise, so they’d have to scramble to stay with him.

  Richmond was not the city it had been before the war. By now, ten years after the Confederate States had yielded to the United States, almost all the damage from U.S. bombing aeroplanes had been repaired. Even so, something was missing from the city’s heart. Before the Great War, everybody in Richmond had known the CSA sat on top of the world.

  Nowadays . . . Nowadays, Richmond felt poor and shabby. Everything looked gray. It all needed cleaning up, hosing down, painting. Nobody bothered to give it any such thing. And the people seemed as gray and grimy and defeated as the town in which they lived. Jake had thought the same thing even before the stock market submerged, but it was much more noticeable now.

  He hurried past a man with shoulders slumped from lugging heavy sample cases to firms that weren’t buying, that wouldn’t have been buying if he’d been selling gold for the price of lead. That luckless drummer was a dead man walking—till he saw Jake. He straightened up. His eyes got back their spark. “Freedom, Mr. Featherston!” he called.

  “Freedom to you, pal,” Featherston answered. “Hang on. Just remember, we’ll lick those bastards yet.”

  “How?” the man asked. “What can we do?”

  “Same thing I’ve been saying all along,” Jake told him. “First thing is, we’ve got to get rid of the stupid bastards who landed us in this mess in the first place. They aren’t fit to carry guts to a bear, but they’ve been running this country—and running it straight into the ground—ever since the War of Secession. That means the politicians and the bonehead generals in the War Department.”

  “Sounds good to me. Sounds mighty damn good to me,” the salesman said. “What else?”

  “Got to pay back the niggers,” Featherston said. “Got to get strong again, so we can look the USA in the eye again. Got to get strong, so we can spit in the USA’s eye, too, if we ever have to. How do you like that?”

  “Me? I like it fine,” the man said. “You go on and give ’em hell.”

  “Just what I intend to give ’em. But I’ll need your help, buddy. Remember, vote Freedom come November. We’ve got to get this country on its feet again. I’ve been saying that for years. Now maybe people will start paying attention to me.” He walked on, leaving the drummer with a last, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” the fellow echoed.

  Back in the middle of the 1920s, that luckless drummer had probably been comfortable enough to vote Whig. Bad times made the Freedom Party grow. Featherston knew as much. He looked around. He’d seen plenty of bad times right after the war, when the money went down the toilet. This . . . This felt worse. This felt as if the Confederate States were closing down, one store, one factory, at a time, and might never open for business again.

  “Freedom!” somebody else called—a woman, her voice high and shrill with worry.

  “Freedom, dear,” Jake told her. “Everything’s going to be just fine.” He waved and kept going.

  During the war, he’d usually had a pretty good notion of whether the troops in front of him would succeed in an attack—or, later, if they would succeed in holding back the damnyankees when they attacked. Now, after years wandering in the wilderness, he felt things in his own country turning his way again.

  Shame it took a panic and a crash to do it, he thought. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. If you don’t grab with both hands when you get the chance, you deserve what ever happens to you. He intended to grab what ever the times gave him. He’d had one chance, and seen it go glimmering. God damn you to hell and gone, Grady Calkins. That had been the first time. He’d wondered if he would ever see another. Now, here it was again, if he could make it so.

  He and his escorting guards rounded a corner. One of them pointed up Grace Street toward Capitol Square. “Look at that, boss,” he said. “Isn’t it a shame and a disgrace?”

  “It’s a judgment on the damn Whigs, that’s what it is,” Jake answered.

  Back just after the Great War ended, Capitol Square had been full of soldiers fresh out of the Army. They’d had nowhere to go and nothing to do, so they’d camped there, many of them still with their weapons—enough to make the police leery of trying to clear them out, anyhow, even though they’d rioted more than once.

  Now tents and shanties sprouted in the square once more. Jake didn’t know who all was in them. Some veterans, certainly. But some men who weren’t, and a lot of women and kids, too. People who’d lost jobs and lost their homes or couldn’t pay the rent on a flat any more . . . where else were they going to go?

  Again, the police were going easy on them. Clearing them from the shantytown by force would have made dreadful headlines. Another guard said, “Those people shouldn’t ought to be in a mess like that. Ain’t their fault, not most of the time. But that ain’t the only shantytown in the country, neither.”

  “Damn right it ain’t, Joe,” Featherston agreed. “There’s one outside of every town in the CSA. And you’re right—most of the people in ’em are decent, hardworking folks who’re just down on their luck.” He slapped Joe on the back, hard enough to stagger him. “And I’ll be go to hell if you didn’t just give me next week’s wireless talk on a silver platter.”

  By then, going into the studio was second nature for him. When the red light came on, he rasped out the greeting he’d been using for years: “This is Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, and I’m here to tell you the truth.”

  Inside the glassed-in room next to the studio, the engineers nodded at him—everything was going the way it should. And his words were going out to far more people in the CSA than they had a few years before. A whole web of stations, a nationwide web, was getting this broadcast now. It went everywhere, from Richmond to Miami to deep in Sonora. And stations near the postwar, U.S.-imposed border beamed it up into Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah.

  “Truth is,” Jake went on, “all across our country people are losing their jobs. Truth is, all across our country they’re losing their homes. Truth is, all across our country they’re trying to get by in shacks and tents a God-fearing dog wouldn’t want to live in. And the truth is, my friends, the Whig Party doesn’t care.”

  He banged his fist down on the table, hard enough to make papers jump in front
of him—but not hard enough to make them fall off or to tip over the microphone. He’d had practice with that thump. “So help me God, friends, that is the truth. I’m ashamed to say it about anybody in these Confederate States, but it is. What are the Whigs doing to help these folks get new jobs? Nothing! What are the Whigs doing to help ’em hang on to their houses? Nothing! What are the Whigs doing to keep ’em from starving? Nothing, one more time! ‘That’s not the government’s job,’ is what they say.

  “Well, friends, I’m going to tell you something. The Whigs proved how useless they were two years ago, when the big floods came. Did they do anything much for the poor, suffering people in Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi and Louisiana? Did they? In a pig’s ear they did. They patted ’em on the head and said, ‘Sure wish you good luck. Y’all’ll be just fine.’ Were they just fine? You know better’n I do.

  “I’ll tell you something else, too. This here panic, this here crash, is dragging more people under than Mother Nature ever dreamt of doing. And that’s happening all over the Confederate States, not just in the Mississippi Valley. God help us all, there’s a shantytown in Capitol Square here in Richmond. The fat Whig Congressmen could look out their windows and see the poor hungry folks. They could, but they don’t.”

  On and on he went, finishing, “Two years ago, the Supreme Court—the bought and paid-for Supreme Court—said Burton Mitchel could run for president again. Well, he did, and he got himself elected again, too. And now we’re all paying for it.

  “So if you want things to work again, if you want us to be strong again, if you want to tie a can to the Whigs’ tail—and to the Supreme Court’s tail, too—if you don’t want to have to live in a shack like a nigger cotton-picker, vote Freedom in November. God bless you all, and thank you kindly!”

  The lead engineer drew a finger across his throat. The red light in the studio went out. Jake Featherston leaned back in his chair, then gathered up his papers and left the small, soundproofed room.

  Saul Goldman, the station managed, waited in the hallway. “That was a strong speech, Mr. Featherston, a very strong speech,” he said.