The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh,” Dorothy said. “All right.” She went back to her supper.

  But it wasn’t all right, and Jonathan knew it. He read stories to Dorothy while Laura did the dishes. They all listened to the wireless for a while. Dorothy changed into a long flannel nightgown, brushed her teeth, and came out clutching her favorite doll for good-night kisses,

  After she’d gone to bed, Laura looked at Jonathan and said, “Hello, you damned Yank.”

  He didn’t say, Hello, you collaborator, or even, Hello, you collabo-something. That would only have made things worse. He just shook his head and said, “Kids.”

  “She’ll know what a collaborator is soon enough,” Laura said bitterly. He wouldn’t be able to escape the word by not mentioning it, then. He hadn’t really thought he would, though he had hoped. His wife went on, “The schoolchildren will make sure of that.”

  “She’ll know you’re not a collaborator, too,” Moss said. “You still can’t stand Yanks, even though you married one. And there are plenty of Yanks who’d say I’m the collaborator—collaborator with Canucks, I mean.”

  “Not as many as there used to be,” Laura said. “Not since you started flying again.”

  “Ha! Shows what you know,” Moss told her. “You should hear the way the fellows at the airdrome outside of London needle me.”

  “I don’t want to hear them. I don’t want anything to do with them,” she answered. “If I did, I really would be a collaborator.” She glared at him, daring him to tell her she was wrong.

  He didn’t want to argue about it. They argued enough—they argued too much—without looking for reasons to lock horns. He said, “I want to review those papers I brought home. I’m going to have to put in a lot of work on that appeal when I get to the office tomorrow.”

  A military judge had sentenced one of his clients to five years for lying about his past in the Canadian military when applying for a liquor-store license. Moss was convinced the judge had ignored the evidence. He thought he had a decent chance of getting the verdict overturned; the military courts in occupied Canada weren’t nearly so bad nowadays as they had been shortly after the war.

  But he also wanted to remind Laura of what he did for a living—what he’d been doing for years. To his relief, she nodded. “All right,” she said. “Will it bother you if the wireless stays on? I like the music program that’s coming up next.”

  “I don’t mind a bit,” he said. “I won’t even notice it.”

  As he headed out the door the next morning, he wondered if he should have asked Dorothy which children at the local elementary school were calling Laura and him names. That probably said something about how their parents felt about the U.S. occupiers. He shook his head. He didn’t want to know.

  The sun shone on soot-streaked snow. As usual in early March, Berlin was a gloomy, frozen place. Moss warily looked around before getting into his auto. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Relieved but not reassured, he got in and started the motor. The day seemed just like any other. All the same, he didn’t go to his law office by the route he’d used the day before. He’d had too many threats to care to make things easy for anyone who might want him dead. And, while the bomb that had blown up occupation headquarters hadn’t been aimed at him in particular, it would have killed him just the same if he’d been there when it went off. He came by his caution honestly.

  Getting out of the Ford and walking half a block to the office building was another small, thoughtful stretch of time. No matter how he went from his block of flats to the office, he got there in the end. Somebody could be waiting.

  Nobody was, not today, not outside, not in the lobby, not on the stairs, not in the office. Moss nodded to himself. Now he could get on with business. He lit a cigarette, plugged in the hot plate, and got a pot of coffee going. The first cup would be good. He prepared to enjoy it. By the end of the day, the pot would be mud and battery acid. He knew he’d go right on pouring more from it.

  He was his own secretary. He could have afforded to hire a typist, but the idea had never once crossed his mind. He started pounding away on a typewriter not much younger and not much lighter than he was. The letters that appeared on the sheet of paper were grayer than he would have liked. When he looked in the desk drawer to see if he had a new ribbon, he found he didn’t. He muttered under his breath; he thought he’d bought two the last time he needed them. Either he hadn’t, or this was the second and not the first. Before long, he would have to go shopping again. Ribbons for this ancient model were getting hard to come by.

  He’d dealt with some ordinary correspondence and was working on the appeal when his first client of the day came in. “Mr. Godfrey, isn’t it?” Moss said, turning the swivel chair away from the typewriter stand and toward the front of the office. “How are you today, sir?”

  “I’ll do, Mr. Moss, thank you.” Toby Godfrey did not look like the plump, red-faced English squire his name might have suggested. He was skinny and sallow and wore a perpetually worried expression. Since the occupation authorities were taking a long and pointed look at his affairs, he had reason to wear that kind of look, but Moss suspected he’d had it long before the Great War started.

  “Let me check your file, Mr. Godfrey.” Jonathan got up and pulled it out of a steel four-drawer cabinet. Looking at what was there reminded him of what wasn’t. “You were going to get me your certificate of discharge and your certificate of acceptance.” A Canadian man who’d fought in the Great War and couldn’t prove he had accepted U.S. authority after the surrender in 1917 had a very hard time of it indeed if he ever came to the notice of a military court.

  Godfrey coughed: a wet sound, half embarrassed; half, perhaps, tubercular. “I have the certificate of discharge,” he said. “As for the other . . .” He coughed again. “I would, of course, be happy to sign a certificate of acceptance now. That would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it?”

  “A little,” Moss said glumly. A military prosecutor would claim Godfrey had signed the certificate only because of his dispute with the occupying authorities. He would also claim everything Godfrey had done over the past twenty-odd years was illegal because he’d done it without having a certificate on file. A military judge would be inclined to listen to that kind of argument, too, because occupation law presumed the worst about men who’d tried to kill U.S. soldiers.

  “I’m sure you’ll do your best,” Godfrey said.

  “If you can’t find that certificate, I’m making bricks without straw,” Moss warned. “You’d do better trying to settle—if they will.”

  “But I’ve lived a quiet, peaceable life since 1917. No one can say otherwise,” Toby Godfrey protested. “That must count for something!”

  “A little,” Moss said again, even more glumly than before.

  Godfrey seemed not to hear that glumness—seemed to refuse to hear it, in fact. Clients were often like that: full of their own hopes and fears, they became deaf and blind to anything that ran against whatever they already had in their minds. The Canadian said, “I’m sure you’ll do your very best, Mr. Moss.”

  Moss nodded. “I will. But I tell you frankly, I’ve taken a lot of cases where I liked the odds better. If you can arrange a compromise with the occupying authorities . . .”

  Godfrey wouldn’t hear of it. He must have thought it was a way of asking for more money, for he set ten crisp, new ten-dollar bills on the desk. “Your very, very best, Mr. Moss.” He didn’t even wait for a reply. He got up and stuck out his hand. Moss took it. His client left the office.

  Moss scooped up the money. I’ll have to mail him a receipt, he thought, sighing. He would do his best. If you were fighting a foe too much bigger and stronger than you were, sometimes your best wasn’t good enough. The Canadians had found out all about that during the Great War, and Jonathan Moss had been one of the men who taught them the lesson.

  He turned the swivel chair back to the typewriter stand and started banging away again. He’d just got up a good head of stea
m when somebody knocked on the door. “Come in,” he called. Who the devil? went though his mind. Clients didn’t usually knock, and he had no one scheduled till the afternoon. The mailman didn’t knock, either. Besides, the mail wouldn’t get here for at least another hour. Just in case, Moss’ hand found the pistol he’d taken to keeping in a desk drawer.

  In walked Major Rex Finley. Moss pulled his hand out of the drawer. “Hello, Major,” he said. “This is a surprise. What brings you here?”

  “A government-issue Chevy, and I hope it’ll bring me back to London, too,” answered the officer who commanded the airdrome there.

  Laughing, Jonathan pointed to the chair across from his desk and said, “Well, sit down and tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I’ve come to say good-bye,” Finley said. “I’ve been transferred to Wright Field, outside of Dayton, Ohio. Captain Trotter will be in charge of things here from now on. You’ll be able to keep flying. Don’t worry about that. Before too long, we may want every trained man we can find.” His voice had an edge to it.

  “Dayton,” Moss said musingly. “That’s down toward the border, isn’t it?”

  Major Finley nodded. “It sure is, and it’ll be even closer if there’s a plebiscite in Kentucky and we lose.” Neither of them said anything after that for a little while. If there was a plebiscite, the USA would lose. Everything Moss knew about Kentucky told him as much. By Finley’s expression, he had the same opinion.

  At last, Moss asked, “Do you really think it will come to . . . that?”

  “I don’t know,” Finley replied. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Well, well.” Moss whistled tunelessly. “Do you want to go out and get drunk?”

  “Too early in the day for me,” Finley said with genuine regret. “And, like I said, I have to be able to drive back to London. But don’t let me stop you.”

  “I’ve got work to do myself.” Jonathan looked for a silver lining: “Maybe we’re wrong. Here’s hoping we’re wrong.”

  Major Finley nodded. “Yes. Here’s hoping.” But he didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  Mary Pomeroy cut up pieces of fried pork chop and put them on Alec’s plate along with some string beans. Her son ate string beans only under protest. He would eat them, though, and only rarely required threats of imminent bodily harm. Not even threats of imminent bodily harm would make him eat spinach. Bodily harm itself wouldn’t; Mary and Mort had both made the experiment, which had left everyone in the family unhappy.

  Mort dug in. “That’s good,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Mary answered. “What’s the news at the diner?”

  “Not a whole lot,” her husband said. “Two different tables of Yank soldiers talking about whether there’ll be a whatchamacallit down south.”

  “A plebiscite?” Mary asked.

  Mort nodded. “That’s it. I hear it a dozen times a day, and I never remember it.”

  “If there is one, the people down there will vote to leave the United States. They’ll vote to be Confederates again,” Mary said.

  “I suppose so.” Mort lit a cigarette. He didn’t care one way or the other.

  That he didn’t care disappointed Mary. She did her best not to let it infuriate her. “What do you suppose would happen if we had one of those plebiscites here in Canada?” she asked.

  Mort didn’t answer right away. He was blowing smoke rings for Alec. He was good at it; he could send them out one after another. His son watched in goggle-eyed fascination. Only when Mort ran out of smoke did he shrug and say, “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think we’d vote to be Canadians again, to be free again?” Mary blazed. “Don’t you think we’d vote to send the Yanks packing?”

  “I suppose so.” But Mort still didn’t sound very excited. “But we’re not going to get to vote, you know.”

  “Why not?” Mary said. “If the people in those states ever get to, we should, too. I don’t want to be a Yank any more than somebody in Houston does.”

  After another virtuoso set of smoke rings, Mort said, “I’ll tell you why not. Because those other places have the Confederate States shouting for ’em all the time. Who’s going to shout for us? We can’t even shout for ourselves.”

  Canadians didn’t shout, or not very much. One surefire way to tell Yanks in Canada was by how much noise they made. Mary didn’t just want to shout. She wanted to scream. “We ought to be shouting for ourselves. We’re just as much a country as the United States are.”

  “I suppose we could be, if—” Mort began.

  Alec interrupted: “More smoke rings, Daddy!”

  But Mort stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Next time I light up, sport,” he told the little boy, and turned back to Mary. “I suppose we could be, if they let us,” he said, picking up where he’d left off. “But they aren’t going to let us, and there’s nobody who can make them let us. We’re stuck. We might as well get used to it. If we do, maybe they’ll ease up on us a little more.”

  Mary had never imagined hating her husband. She came unpleasantly close to it now. Mort wasn’t a collaborator. Mary never would have had anything to do with him if he were, no matter how he stirred her. But he was—what would you call somebody like him?—an accommodator, that was it. He knew he was a Canadian. He even liked being a Canadian, and was proud of it. He didn’t think staying a Canadian was worth a big fight, though. All he wanted to do was get along from one day to the next.

  More and more Canadians seemed to be accommodators these days. That made Mary want to scream, too. Accommodate enough, accommodate long enough, and you weren’t a Canadian any more, were you? Not as far as she could see. Didn’t you turn into a pale imitation of a Yank instead?

  “You want to go to the cinema Saturday night?” Mort asked. “The new film about Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment is supposed to be good. And they say Marion Morrison makes a first-rate TR.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said tightly, fighting hard against despair. Mort already sounded like a pale imitation of a Yank. He would have denied it if she’d called him on it. She didn’t. She didn’t want a fight. Life was too short, wasn’t it?

  If you don’t fight, aren’t you giving up, too? she asked herself. She supposed that was partly true, but only partly. She still cared about the wrongs the Americans had committed in occupying her country. She didn’t, she wouldn’t, forget.

  “Oh,” Mort said. “Almost slipped my mind.”

  “What?” Mary asked.

  “You know Freddy Halliday?” Mort said. That was a silly question; Rosenfeld wasn’t such a big town that everybody didn’t know everybody else. Mary nodded impatiently. Her husband went on, “He says the public library really will open in two weeks. He says, ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ ”

  “Do you think it will happen?” Mary asked. Freddy Halliday had been trying to bring a public library to Rosenfeld for years. He hadn’t had much luck till lately. Now he actually had a building a few doors down from the general store. He had it because the pharmacist who was supposed to come up from Minneapolis had got cold feet, but he did have it. Whether he had anything besides the building was a subject of much speculation in town.

  “He says he has a permit from the occupying authorities in Winnipeg and a budget and books,” Mort answered. “I don’t know if he really does. If he doesn’t, we ought to ride him out of town on a rail, to teach him not to get our hopes up.”

  “My hopes are up,” Mary said. “You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn’t cost you anything.” She turned to Alec. “I wonder if it’ll have any children’s books for you.”

  “Read me a story?” Alec asked, cued by the word books.

  “After supper,” Mary said. That made Alec shovel food into his mouth like a stoker fueling a fast freight. Mary hoped most stokers had better aim than her little boy did.

  It began to look as if Freddy Halliday had all the things he clai
med he had. A brass plaque that said ROSENFELD PUBLIC LIBRARY went up above the door to the forsaken pharmacy. A formidably stout maiden lady, a Miss Montague, moved into a ground-floor flat in the Pomeroys’ block of flats and began spending all her waking hours in the building. A large truck brought crates of something to the place. If those crates didn’t hold books, what was in them?

  The promised opening day came . . . and went. Everybody in town joked about it—everybody except Freddy Halliday, who remained resolutely upbeat. A week later, the Rosenfeld Public Library did in fact open its doors.

  Mary wasn’t there for the opening. Alec came down with a cold, which meant he had to stay home, which meant she had to stay home, too. She didn’t get to the library for another week. It was a bright spring day, the sky a deep, almost painful, blue overhead. The few white clouds dappling it only made the glorious color deeper. Out on the farms beyond the edge of town, people would be taking advantage of this glorious weather to plant. Mary could just enjoy it. Walking along with Alec’s little hand in hers, she felt guilty about not doing more.

  In the library, Miss Montague sat behind a large wooden desk and under an almost equally large QUIET, PLEASE! sign. She did smile at Alec, and pointed to, sure enough, the children’s section. She didn’t even breathe fire when Alec whooped with delight at finding books he hadn’t seen before.

  Mary arranged to get a library card for herself and one for Mort. She stole brief glimpses of novels and nonfiction books, encyclopedias and magazines and newspapers. “Look at all the telephone books,” she said, trying to keep Alec interested so she could go on looking around. “You can find out the telephone number of anybody in Canada or the United States.” She refused even to name the Republic of Quebec, stolen from her country as Kentucky and Houston had been stolen from the CSA.

  “Why?” Alec asked her.

  “So you can call them if you want to.”

  “But we don’t got a telephone.”

  “Don’t have a telephone. But if we did, we could.”