Blood and iron

XIII

Jefferson Pinkard's alarm clock went off with a sound like doom. The steelworker thrashed and writhed and finally managed to turn the bloody thing off. He wished he could thump himself in the head and get rid of his headache the same way. Alabama was a dry state, but that didn't mean he and his Freedom Party buddies couldn't lay their hands on some whiskey after meetings when they set their minds to it.

"Ought to know better than to go into work hungover," he said. He did know better. He'd learned better the hard way. He hadn't headed for the Sloss Works hurting in years-not till he threw Emily out of the house after catching her whoring with Bedford Cunningham a second time. Since then… since then, he knew he'd been drinking more than he should, but knowing and stopping were two different critters.

He built up the fire in the stove and got a pot of coffee going. Then he went back to the bathroom and dry-swallowed a couple of aspirins. He lathered his face and shaved. As he was toweling himself dry afterwards, he wondered why he hadn't cut his own throat. It wasn't the first time that question had occurred to him.

After a cup of strong black coffee, after the aspirins started to work, the world looked a little less gloomy. He ate a big chunk of bread and ham and cut off a piece of last night's partly cremated ham steak to toss into his dinner pail. Since he'd thrown Emily out, he'd discovered just what a lousy cook he was. "Ain't starved yet," he declared, and headed out the door. The place was an unholy mess, but he lacked the time, the energy, and the skill to do anything about it.

He had to walk past Bedford Cunningham's cottage on the way to the foundry. He looked straight ahead. He didn't want to see Bedford, even if he was there. He didn't want to see Fanny Cunningham, either. He blamed her, too. If she'd kept her husband happy in bed, he wouldn't have had to go sniffing around Emily.

More steelworkers, white and black, crowded the path leading to the Sloss Works. Greetings filled the air: "Hey, Lefty!" "Mornin', Jeff." "How you is, Nero?" "What's up, Jack?" "Freedom!" Pinkard heard that a couple-three times before he got to the time clock and stuck in his card to start the day. As the aspirins and coffee had done, the slogan made him feel better.

He winced only a little when he stepped out onto the foundry floor. Once he was out there, he knew he'd make it through the day. If he could stand the clangor now, he wouldn't even notice it by the time afternoon rolled around.

Vespasian came onto the floor only a minute or so after he did. "Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," the Negro steelworker said.

"Morning," Pinkard answered. Every time he thought about it these days, the idea of working with a black buck graveled him more. But Vespasian had been out on the foundry floor since 1915, and he wasn't even slightly uppity. He gave Jeff's anger no place to perch. That in itself was infuriating.

They had no time for light conversation, not this morning. The big crucible swung down and poured a fiery load of molten metal down onto the sand of the foundry floor. Steam rose in hissing, stinking clouds. The steel seemed as determined to get free of the mold as any house cat was to get outdoors.

Whatever else Pinkard thought of Vespasian, he had to allow that the big Negro knew his way around steel. Vespasian made as good a partner as Bedford Cunningham ever had, and he wasn't likely to try and sleep with Emily.

Or maybe he is, Jeff thought. Who the hell knows? Emily's liable to be taking on niggers these days. He didn't know what the woman he'd married, the woman he'd loved, was doing these days, not for certain. He'd finally let her back into the house so she could put on some clothes and gather up whatever she could carry in her arms. Then he'd thrown her out again. She hadn't come round the place since. He wouldn't have let her in if she had.

Maybe she was working in a factory somewhere downtown. Maybe she was standing on a streetcorner, shaking her ass whenever a man walked by and hoping he'd give her five or six million dollars for a fast roll in the hay.

"I don't care what she's doing," Pinkard said, quickly, fiercely. Vespasian shouldn't have been able to hear that low-voiced mumble. But the Negro had been on the foundry floor a long time. He'd got as good as anybody could get at hearing under the racket and picking up talk. He knew about Emily. Everybody at the Sloss Works knew about Emily, sure as hell. Just for a second, he looked at Pinkard with pity in his eye.

Jeff glared back, and Vespasian flinched as if from a blow. The last thing in the world Jeff wanted was a black man's pity. "Work, God damn you," he snarled. Vespasian did work, his face as blank of expression now as a just-erased blackboard.

Before Pinkard had been conscripted, he wouldn't have talked to Vespasian that way. He'd thought the Negro a pretty good fellow then. He might not have talked to Vespasian that way before he first heard Jake Featherston speak. He might as well have been blind before. But Featherston had opened his eyes, all right.

"Joining the Freedom Party was the best thing I ever did," he said. If Vespasian heard that, he pretended he didn't.

It was true, though. The Freedom Party gave him a family, a place to go, things to do. If he hadn't been active in the Party, he might have gone clean round the bend when Emily took off her dress for Bedford Cunningham that second time. That Emily might not have done any such thing if he hadn't so immersed himself in the Freedom Party never once entered his mind.

What he did think about was that several of his Party buddies had had their marriages go to hell and gone in the past few months. None of the other blowups had been quite so spectacular as his, but having pals who understood what he was going through because they were going through the same thing made life easier. None of his friends had been able to figure out why they and their wives had broken up. Trying gave them something to talk about at Party meetings and when they got together betweentimes.

The only place where he didn't think that much about the Freedom Party was out on the foundry floor. If you thought about anything but what you were doing out there, you were asking for a trip to the hospital if you were lucky and a trip to the graveyard if you weren't. He'd learned that early on, and re-learned it when he came back to the Sloss Works after the war. Work came first. That was a matter of life and death.

At last, work ended for the day. As the screech of the steam whistle faded, Pinkard turned to Vespasian and said, "See you tomorrow. Freedom!"

Vespasian's lips had started to shape the word see. But he didn't say anything at all. He showed expression now: the expression was pain. Jeff had seen it on Yankees' faces as he drove home the bayonet. Vespasian turned away from him and stumbled off to clock out as if he too had taken a couple of feet of sharpened steel in the guts. He might have had a pretty good notion of Jeff's politics beforehand, but now he was left in no possible doubt. Jeff laughed out loud. The future was on his side. He felt it in his bones.

He clocked out and hurried home to his cottage. Fanny Cunningham sat out on the front porch of hers next door. Jeff leered at her, wondering if this was how Bedford had looked at Emily. It didn't draw Fanny into his arms. She fled back into the house. He laughed again. His hot, burning laughter filled the street, as molten steel filled its mold.

He took some sausages out of the icebox and burned them for supper. His suppers, these days, were of two sorts: burnt and raw. He ate bread with them, and gulped down a glass of homebrew that was no better than it had to be. The dishes sat in the sink, waiting. As far as he was concerned, they could go right on waiting, too. He had a Freedom Party meeting tonight. That was a hell of a lot more important than a pile of goddamn dishes.

"Freedom!' The greeting filled the livery stable. It wasn't a challenge here, nor a shout of defiance: it was what one friend said to another. The men who filled the stable-filled it almost to overflowing; before long, like it or not, the Birmingham chapter would have to find a new place to meet-were friends, colleagues, comrades. Those who'd been in the Party longer got a little more respect than johnny-come-latelys, but only a little. Jeff had joined long enough ago to deserve some of that respect himself

With Barney Stevens up in Richmond, a skinny little dentist named Caleb Briggs led the meetings and led the Party in Birmingham. "Freedom!" he shouted, his voice thin and rasping- he'd been gassed up in Virginia, and wouldn't sound right till they laid him in his grave.

"Freedom!" Pinkard shouted with the rest of the men who'd come together to find, to build, something larger and grander than themselves.

"Boys, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that Jake Featherston's going to be running for president this year." Briggs paused to suck more air into his ruined lungs-and to let the Party members cheer till they sounded almost as hoarse as he always did. Then he went on, "We've done a little bit of brawling every now and again, but it's not a patch on what we're going to be doing, let me tell you that!"

More cheers erupted. Jeff pumped his fist in the air. Brambles and thorns in his throat, Briggs went on, "The Whigs will be holding rallies here in town. The goddamn Radical Liberals will be holding rallies here in town." He shook his head. Lamplight reflected wetly from his eyes. "That's not right. Those traitor bastards will try and hold rallies here in town. Are we going to let 'em?"

"No!" Jeff shouted, along with most of the Freedom Party men. The rest were shouting "Hell, no!" and other, coarser, variations on the theme instead.

"That's right." Caleb Briggs nodded now, which made his eyeballs glitter in a different way. Jeff could not have said how it was different, but it was. Briggs went on, "That's just right, boys. This is a war we're in, same as the one we fought in the trenches. We would have won that one, only we got stabbed in the back. This time, we hit the traitors first."

Jeff applauded till his hard, horny hands were sore. Somebody not far away pulled out a flask of moonshine and passed it around. Pinkard took a swig. "Son of a bitch!" he said reverently, his vocal cords for the moment nearly as charred as Briggs'. He passed the flask along, half sorry to see it go, half relieved it was gone.

Someone started singing "Dixie." Jeff roared out the words, a fiery fury in him that had surprisingly little to do with the whiskey he'd just drunk. The Freedom Party sang "Dixie" at every meeting. Then someone else began "Louisville Will Be Free." That one dated from just after the Second Mexican War, and recounted the greatest fight of that war. With Louisville forced back into the USA in the Great War, it took on a poignancy now that it hadn't had then.

Tears ran down Jefferson Pinkard's face. They took him by surprise. He wondered if he was weeping for ravaged Louisville or for himself. A great determination filled him. Like his country, he'd paid for doing what he remained convinced was right Sooner or later, everyone else would pay, too.

"Freedom!'' he cried at the top of his lungs. "Freedom! Freedom!"

Reggie Bartlett nodded in some surprise when Tom Brearley came into Harmon's drugstore. He hadn't seen much of Brearley since the ex-Navy man went down to South Carolina to talk with Anne Colleton. Reggie had been waiting for fireworks to spring from that meeting. He was still waiting.

Evidently, Brearley was getting tired of waiting. He said, "All right, Mr. Bartlett, what's your next great idea for blowing the Freedom Party out of the water?"

"I haven't got another one," Reggie admitted. "Wish to heaven I did."

"Well, I've got another one." Brearley looked very determined. Reggie could easily picture him peering through a periscope at a U.S. cruiser. Oddly, he also looked much younger than he had before sticking out his chin. He said, "If I can't get those bastards fighting among themselves, I'll just have to take the story to the newspapers."

"Jesus," Reggie said. "Are you sure you want to do that? I wouldn't, not unless I had my life-insurance premiums all paid up."

"As a matter of fact, I do," Brearley said, doing a determined and pretty good best to sound unconcerned. "I made sure they were before I went down to talk to Tom Colleton's sister, because I wasn't sure I'd be coming back. But by now Kimball has to know I've talked. He has to figure I'll talk more. That means he'll try and kill me sooner or later-likely sooner. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't tried it yet-him or some of the Freedom Party apes up here. I want to make sure the word gets out before he does." He didn't sound unconcerned any more: just matter-of-fact, a man tackling a job he knew was dangerous.

Reggie understood that. He wouldn't have, not before the war. Going through the trenches-coming out of the trenches on command to attack-changed a man forever. He knew he would be afraid again, many times in his life. But fear would never paralyze him, as it might have done before. He had its measure now.

He said, "If you're bound and determined to do it, you'd better think hard about which paper you go to. You don't want to head for the Sentinel, because-"

"Don't teach your grandpa to suck eggs," Brearley said with a wry grin. "Do I look that stupid? Half the time, I reckon Jake Featherston puts that rag out himself. Shame and a disgrace, the garbage it prints."

"Why don't I just shut up?" Reggie said to nobody in particular.

"I don't want you to shut up," Brearley told him. "You go to political rallies for fun. You really think about this stuff, a lot more than I do. So I want your advice: you reckon I should talk to the Whig or the Examiner?"

"Go with the Whigs or the Radical Liberals?" Reggie stroked his chin. After a minute or so of silent thought, he said, "That's an interesting one, isn't it? The Freedom Party's probably giving the Whigs a harder time-they were the ones who ran the country during the war. But I think the Radical Liberals are more afraid of Featherston and his gang, don't you? For one thing, they're farther away from the stand he takes, where some of the right-wing Whigs might as well start yelling 'Freedom!' themselves. And for another, the Rad Libs are running scared. If they don't get a break, the Freedom Party'll be number two in the country after this fall's election. You give them some dirt, they'll run with it."

Tom Brearley looked at him as if he'd never seen him before. "You're wasting your time shoving pills across a counter, Bart-lett. You should have been a lawyer, something like that. You think straight. You think real straight."

"Maybe I do," Reggie said. "You're the one who's not thinking straight now, I'll tell you that. Where the devil am I going to get the money to study law? Where am I going to get the money to get the education I'd need so I could study law? If I'd had a million dollars before the war, it might have been a different story."

Brearley shrugged. "If you want something bad enough, you can generally find a way to get it. What I want right now is to torpedo the Freedom Party. I tried one way. It didn't work. All right-I'll try something else. The Examiner it'll be. Thanks, Bartlett." He sketched a salute and left.

Jeremiah Harmon came up from the back of the drugstore. "I overheard some of that," he said, sounding apologetic- astonishing in a boss. "None of my business, but anybody who goes up against a machine gun without a machine gun of his own is asking for a whole peck of trouble. You ask me, the Examiner's a popgun, not a machine gun. Wish I could say different, but I can't."

"Where do you find a machine gun to fight the Freedom Party?" Reggie asked.

"Haven't the foggiest notion," the druggist replied. "Don't know if there is any such animal. But if I didn't have one, I think I'd stay down in my dugout and hope no big shell caved it in."

He hadn't been to the front. He'd passed the war in Richmond, making pills and salves and syrups. He never pretended otherwise. But the vocabulary of the trenches had come to be part of everyone's day-to-day speech in the CSA. An awful lot of men had passed through the fire. Reggie wasted a moment wondering if expressions from the front line filled the sharp-sounding English of the United States, too.

Harmon went back to whatever he'd been doing when Tom Brearley came into the drugstore. He didn't waste a lot of time banging a drum for what he thought. If you agreed with him or decided he had a point, fine. If you didn't, he wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

And it wasn't just an interesting discussion to Reggie Bartlett. He'd signed his name to the letter that had gone down to Tom Colleton. If Freedom Party thugs came after Tom Brearley, they were liable to come after him, too.

All at once, he wished he'd told Brearley to keep the hell away from newspapers. Part of him wished that, anyhow. The rest realized such worries came far too late. The cat had been out of the bag ever since he touched pen to paper.

He started watching the newspapers, especially the Richmond Examiner, like a hawk. Day followed day with no banner headline about a U.S. destroyer sunk after the Confederate States asked for quarter. Maybe Brearley had got cold feet and hadn't bent a reporter's ear after all. In a way, that disappointed Reggie down to the depths of his soul. In another way, one that left him ashamed, it relieved him. Maybe Brearley had talked, and the reporter hadn't believed him. Reggie almost hoped that was so. It would have given him the best of both worlds.

And then one day with March approaching, and with it the first inauguration of a Socialist president of the USA, that banner headline did run in the Examiner, WAR CRIMINAL HIGH IN FREEDOM PARTY CIRCLES! For a moment, Reggie hoped the story under the headline would be about some other war criminal; he wouldn't have been surprised to learn the Freedom Party sheltered battalions of them under its banner.

But it wasn't. The reporter didn't name Tom Brearley-citing concerns for his informant's safety-but he did name Roger Kimball, the Bonefish, and the USS Ericsson. Reggie hadn't known exactly what kind of secret Brearley was keeping. Now he did. Now everybody did. He nodded to himself. Brearley hadn't been stretching things-it was a big one.

The reporter made it sound as if several members of the submersible's crew had confirmed what Brearley said, too. Maybe that was camouflage, to make the story seem more authoritative and to take some of the heat off Brearley. Maybe he really had checked with other crewmen, and that was why the story had waited so long to run.

However that worked, the story made the Freedom Party hopping mad. The very next day, a blistering denunciation ran in the Sentinel. What it amounted to was that the damnyankees had had it coming, and that anyone betraying a Confederate officer who'd done his duty as he saw it deserved whatever happened to him. It didn't quite declare open season on Tom Brearley, but it didn't miss by much. Reggie was glad he didn't figure in the piece in any way.

Jeremiah Harmon said, "Now your friend gets to find out what sort of whirlwind he reaps."

"He's not my-" Reggie stopped. He'd been about to say that Brearley was no friend of his. The only reason they knew each other was that the ex-Navy man had married an old flame of his. But they shared a common foe: the Freedom Party. That might not make them friends, but it did make them allies.

Harmon noted Reggie's pause, nodded as if his assistant had spoken a complete sentence, and went back to work. A customer came into the drugstore, marched up to the counter, and demanded a ringworm salve. Reggie sold him one, knowing the best the store offered were none too good. Doctors and researchers had got pretty good at figuring out what caused a lot of ailments. Doing anything worthwhile about them was something else again.

Tom Brearley came by a couple of days later. He grinned a skeletal grin at Reggie. "Still here," he said in sepulchral tones.

Reggie made shooing motions. "Well, get the hell out of here" he hissed. "You think I want to be seen with you?"

His acting was too good; Brearley turned and started to leave. Only the laughter Reggie couldn't contain stopped him. "Damn you," Brearley said without heat. "You had me going there. Freedom Party's still screaming about traitors. Seems to be the only song they know."

"Anybody give you any real trouble?" Reggie asked.

Brearley shook his head. "Not yet, thank God. The only people in the Freedom Party who know what I look like live down in South Carolina. But they know my name. They can find out where I live." He patted the waistband of his trousers. His coat concealed whatever he kept there, but Reggie had no trouble figuring out what it was. Brearley said, "They want to try and give me a hard time, I'm ready for 'em."

"Good." Reggie hesitated, then asked, "How's Maggie doing?"

"Pretty well," Brearley answered. "She doesn't take the whole business as seriously as I do. She hasn't paid that much attention to politics, and she doesn't really know what a pack of nasty… so-and-so's join the Party."

Reggie wasn't sure he took the whole business as seriously as Brearley did, either. Then he recalled his relief at not getting into the newspaper. Maybe-evidently-he took things seriously after all.

Unable to stomach his own cooking, he stopped in a greasy spoon for supper. He regretted it shortly thereafter; the colored fellow sweating at the stove knew less about what to do there than he did. When he got home, he gulped bicarbonate of soda. That quelled the internal rebellion, but left him feeling gassy and bloated. He read for a while, found himself yawning, and went to bed.

Bells in the night woke him. He yawned again, enormously, put the pillow over his head, and very soon went back to sleep. When morning came, he was halfway through breakfast before he remembered the disturbance. "Those were fire bells," he said, and then, "Good thing the fire wasn't next door, I reckon, or I'd be burnt to a crisp right about now."

Somebody had been burnt to a crisp. Newsboys shouted the story as they hawked their papers. "Liar's house goes up in smoke! Read all about it!" a kid selling the Sentinel yelled.

A cold chill ran through Reggie Bartlett. He didn't buy the Sentinel; that would have been the same as putting fifty thousand dollars in the Freedom Party's coffer. Two streetcorners farther along, he picked up a copy of the Examiner and read it as he walked the rest of the way to Harmon's drugstore.

He shivered again as he read. The paper reported that Thomas and Margaret Brearley had died in "a conflagration that swept their home so swiftly and violently that neither had the slightest chance to escape, which leads firemen to suspect that arson may have been involved." It talked about Brearley's naval career in general terms, but did not mention that he'd served aboard the Bonefish.

Jeremiah Harmon had a newspaper in his hand when Reggie walked into the drugstore. Reggie didn't need to ask which story he was reading. "You see?" the druggist said in his mild, quiet voice.

"Oh, yes," Reggie answered. "I see. God help me, Mr. Harmon, I sure do."

Sylvia Enos sank into the trolley seat with a grateful sigh. She didn't often get to sit on her way to the galoshes factory. And, better yet, the seat had a copy of the Boston Globe there for the grabbing. She snatched up the paper before anyone else could. Every penny she didn't spend on a newspaper could go to something else, and she needed plenty of other things, with not enough pennies to go around.

Most of the front page was filled with stories about the inauguration of President Sinclair, which was set for day after tomorrow. Sylvia read all of them with greedy, gloating interest; she might not be able to vote herself, but the prospect of a Socialist president delighted her. She didn't quite know what Upton Sinclair could do about Frank Best, but she figured he could do something.

Another prominent headline marked the fall of Belfast to the forces of the Republic of Ireland. No wonder that story got prominent play in Boston, with its large Irish population. "Now the whole of the Emerald Isle is free," Irish General Collins was quoted as saying. The folk of Belfast might not agree-surely did not agree, else they wouldn't have fought so grimly-but no one on this side of the Atlantic cared about their opinion.

Sylvia opened the paper to the inside pages. She picked and chose there; the factory was getting close. A headline caught her eye: REBEL ACCUSER PERISHES IN SUSPICIOUS FIRE. Most of the story was about the death of a man whose name was spelled half the time as Brierley and the other half as Brearley. He had drawn the wrath of the Freedom Party, a growing force in the CSA, the Globe's reporter wrote, by claiming that a leading Party official in one of the Carolinas was, while in the C.S. Navy, responsible for deliberately sinking the USS Ericsson although fully aware that the war between the United States and Confederate States had ended. The Freedom Party has denied this charge, and has also denied any role in the deaths of Brierley and his wife.

The trolley came to Sylvia's stop. It had already started rolling again before she realized she should have got off. When it stopped again, a couple of blocks later, she did get off. She knew she should hurry back to the factory-the implacable time card would dock her for every minute she was late, to say nothing of the hard time Frank Best would give her-but she couldn't make herself move fast, not with the way her mind was whirling.

Not a British boat after all, she thought. It was the Rebs. They were the ones George worried about, and he was right. And they did it after the war was over, and the fellow who did it is still running around loose down there. She wanted to scream. She wanted to buy a gun and go hunting for the submarine skipper. Why not? He'd gone hunting for her husband.

"Are you all right, dearie?" May Cavendish asked when Sylvia came in and put her card in the time clock. "You look a little peaked."

"I'm-" Sylvia didn't know how she was, or how to put it into words. She felt as if a torpedo had gone off inside her head, sinking everything she thought she'd known since the end of the war and leaving nothing in its place. Stunned and empty, she went into the factory.

Frank Best greeted her, pocket watch in hand. "You're late, Mrs. Enos."

Most days, she would have apologized profusely, hoping in that way to keep him from bothering her too much. Most days, it would have been a forlorn hope, too. Now she just looked at him and nodded. "Yes, I am, aren't I?" She walked past him toward her station near the molds. If he hadn't quickly stepped out of the way, she would have walked over him. He stared after her. She did not look back over her shoulder to see.

After a while, he came up to her carrying a pair of rubber overshoes. "Thought you could slip these by me, did you?" he said: his usual opening line.

She looked at the galoshes. The red rings around the top looked fine to her, which meant they'd look fine to a customer, too. "They're all right, Mr. Best," she said, brushing a wisp of hair back from her eyes with the sleeve of her shirtwaist. "I really don't have time to play games today. I'm sorry."

He stared at her again, in complete astonishment. "I could have you fired," he said. "You could be on the street in fifteen minutes."

"That's true," she said calmly, and bent to paint a couple of overshoes coming down the line at her.

"Have you gone out of your mind?" the foreman sputtered.

"Maybe." Sylvia considered it for a moment. "I don't think so, but I rather wish I would."

"You're kid-" Frank Best began. He studied Sylvia. She wasn't kidding. That must have been obvious, even to him. He started to say something else. Whatever it was, it never passed his lips. He walked away, shaking his head. He was still carrying the galoshes about which he'd intended to give her a hard time.

So that's the secret, she thought. She'd been drunk only a few times in her life, but she had that same giddy, headlong, anything-can-happen feeling now. Act a little crazy and Frank will leave you alone.

But she hadn't been acting. She didn't just feel drunk. She felt crazy. The world had turned sideways while she wasn't looking. Everything she thought she'd known about who'd killed George turned out to be wrong. Now she was going to have to grapple with what that meant.

As she painted red rings on the next pair of overshoes, she suddenly wished Upton Sinclair hadn't won the election after all. Sinclair, when he talked about dealings with other countries, talked about reconciliation and improving relations with former foes. That had sounded good during the campaign. Now-

Now Sylvia wished Teddy Roosevelt were going to be inaugurated again come Friday. With TR, you always knew where he stood. Most of the time, Sylvia had thought he stood in the wrong place. But he would have demanded that Confederate submersible skipper's head on a silver platter. And, if the Rebs hesitated about turning him over, TR would have started blowing things up. He wouldn't have stopped blowing things up till the Confederates did what he told them, either.

Sylvia sighed. So much for Socialism, she thought. As soon as she wanted the United States to take a strong line with their neighbors, she automatically thought of the Democrats.

That's why they ran things for so long, she realized. Lots of people had wanted the United States to take a strong line with their neighbors. As soon as people thought they didn't need to worry about the CSA and Canada, England and France, any more, they threw the Democrats out on their ear. She'd wanted to throw the Democrats out on their ear, too. Maybe she'd been hasty.

How am I going to get revenge with Upton Sinclair in the Powel House or the White House or wherever he decides to live? she wondered. He won't do it. He's already said he wouldn 't do things like that. Will I have to do it myself?

She laughed, imagining herself invading the Confederate States singlehanded. What would she wear? A pot helmet over her shirtwaist and skirt? A green-gray uniform with a flowered hat? And how would she get rid of the Reb who'd killed her husband? With a hatpin or a carving knife? Those were the most lethal weapons she owned. She had the feeling they wouldn't be enough to do the job.

She kept on doing her job, as automatically as if she were a machine. The factory owners hadn't figured out how to make a machine to replace her. The minute they did, she'd be out of work. Millions of people, all over the country, were in that same boat. That was another reason Sinclair had beaten TR.

When the dinner whistle blew, Sylvia jumped. She couldn't decide whether she thought it came too soon or too late. Either way, it shouldn't have come just then. It snapped her out of a haze: not the haze of work, but the haze of a mind far away-in the Confederate States, in the South Atlantic, and back in her apartment with her husband.

Still bemused, she picked up her dinner pail and went out to meet her friends. "What in the world did you say to Frank?" Sarah Wyckoff demanded. "He's been walking around all morning like he just saw a ghost."

"And the way he's been looking at you," May Cavendish added, taking a bite from a pungent sandwich of summer sausage, pickles, and onions. "Not like he wants to get his hands inside your clothes, the way he usually does, but more like he's scared of you. Tell us the secret."

"I don't know," Sylvia said vaguely. She remembered talking with the foreman not long after the shift started, but hardly anything of what had passed between them. Most of what had gone on since she'd seen that story in the Boston Globe was a blur to her.

"You all right, dearie?" May asked.

"I don't know," Sylvia said again. She realized she had to do better than that, and did try: "I'm having a lot of trouble keeping my mind on my work-on much of anything-this morning."

"Well, I know all about that" Sarah said. "This isn't the most exciting place they ever built, and that's the Lord's truth." May nodded while lighting a cigarette.

Sylvia lit one, too. The surge of well-being that went with the first couple of puffs penetrated the fog around her wits. In thoughtful tones, she asked, "May, what would you do if you could find the soldier who killed your husband? I mean the soldier, the one who fired the machine gun or rifle or whatever it was"

"I don't know," May Cavendish answered. "I never thought about that before. For all I know, he's already dead." Her eyes went flat and hard. When she spoke again, her voice was cold as sleet: "I hope he's already dead, and I hope he took a long time to die, too, the stinking son of a bitch." But then, after a savage drag on her cigarette, she sounded much more like her usual self, saying, "But how could you ever tell? With so many bullets flying around, nobody knew who shot people and who didn't. Herbert always used to talk about that when he came home on leave." Now she sighed and looked sad, remembering.

"I suppose you're right," Sylvia said. She'd forgotten the differences between the wars the Army and the Navy fought. She knew the name of her husband's killer: Roger Kimball. She knew he lived down in South Carolina and agitated for the Freedom Party. She had no idea whether the Freedom Party was good, bad, or indifferent.

"What would you do, Sylvia?" Sarah asked. "If you knew?"

"Who can say?" Sylvia sounded weary. "I like to think I'd have the gumption to try and kill him, but who can say?" The whistle blew, announcing the end of the dinner break. "I like to think I'd have the gumption to try and kill Frank Best, too, but it hasn't happened yet," Sylvia added. Chuckling, she and her friends went back to work.

Flora Hamburger remembered the last presidential inauguration she'd attended, four years before. That long? She shook her head in wonder. So much had changed since 1917. She'd been brand new in Congress then, unsure of herself, unsure of her place in Philadelphia. Now she was starting her third term. The war had still raged. Now the United States were at peace with the world. And she'd gone to the inauguration of a Democrat then. Now-

Now half the bunting that decorated Philadelphia was the traditional red, white, and blue. The other half was solid red, symbol of the Socialists who had come into their own at last.

A lot of people in Philadelphia were going around with long faces. Being the home of the federal government since the Second Mexican War, it had also been the home of the Democratic Party since the 1880s. Now President Sinclair would be choosing officials ranging from Cabinet members down to postmasters. A horde of Democrats who'd thought they owned lifetime positions were discovering they'd been mistaken and would have to go out and look for real work.

President-elect Sinclair had chosen to hold the inauguration in Franklin Square, to let as large a crowd as possible see him. He'd thought about going down to Washington, D.C., but the de jure capital remained too war-battered to host the ceremony. Philadelphia it was. "We are the party of the people," he had said a great many times. "Let them know how they are governed, and they will ensure they are governed well."

Before Sinclair took the presidential oath, Hosea Blackford would take that of the vice president. Flora shook her head again. In March 1917, she'd had a mild friendship with the Congressman from Dakota. Now… Now I am the mistress of the vice president-elect of the United States.

The title should have left her feeling sordid and ashamed- and it did, sometimes. What, after all, was mistress but a fancy word for fallen woman? But she also knew she'd never been so happy as in the time since she and Blackford became lovers. Did that make her depraved? She didn't think so-most of the time, she didn't think so-though no doubt others would if they knew.

Whatever she was, it didn't show on the outside. Dressed in a splendid maroon wool suit (Herman Bruck would have approved) and a new hat, she had one of the best seats for the ceremony. Why not? She was a Socialist member of Congress. Then she wondered, Is it a matter of rank? Is this what we get? Will we become part of the ruling class, the way the Democrats did?

She hoped not. The people had elected Upton Sinclair to prevent that kind of thing, not to promote it. Then all her thought about anything but the immediate present blew away. A rising hum from the enormous crowd behind her announced the arrival of the motorcars full of dignitaries who would go through the ceremony that marked the changing of the guard for the United States.

People clapped and cheered to see them. In the lead, behind an honor guard of soldiers and Marines, strode Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a little thinner, a little more stooped, than he had been when Flora first saw him four years before, but he still moved like a much younger man.

Behind him came Vice President McKenna, an amiable nonentity who was almost as fat as Congressman Taft. In white tie and tails, he looked like a penguin that had swallowed a beach ball. And behind McKenna walked Theodore Roosevelt, also in white tie and tails. As he moved toward the raised platform on which President Sinclair would take the oath of office, Senators and Representatives got to their feet and began to applaud him. Democrats rose sooner than Socialists and Republicans, but soon, regardless of party, members of both houses of Congress stood and cheered the man who had led the United States to victory in the Great War.

Roosevelt did not seem to have expected such a tribute. He doffed his stovepipe hat several times. Once, he took off his spectacles for a moment and rubbed at his eyes. Had he got a cinder in them, or was he wiping away a tear? Flora had trouble believing that of an old Tartar like TR. Then, spotting her among the crowd of nearly identical-looking men, the outgoing president waved and blew her a kiss. He could hardly have astonished her more if he'd turned a cartwheel.

She stayed on her feet after he passed, as did all the other Socialists, most of the Midwestern corporal's guard of Republicans, and the more courteous Democrats-about half. Here came Hosea Blackford, about to make the change from vice president-elect to vice president. He too wore formal attire. He didn't look like a penguin, not to Flora. He looked splendid.

Flora called his name while she was applauding. He smiled at her, but he was smiling at everybody. He hurried after Roosevelt toward the platform.

And behind him-in front of another honor guard, this one of sailors and soldiers-walked the man of the hour, Upton Sinclair. Craning her neck to look back at him, Flora saw a sea of red flags waving in the crowd. Her heart slammed against her rib cage in excitement and delight. As the dialectic predicted, the people had at last turned to the party that stood for their class interests.

Up on the platform, Theodore Roosevelt shook Sinclair's hand, a formal gesture, and then slapped him lightly on the back, one much less so. The president that was and the president that would be grinned at each other. Flora remembered how Senator Debs had stayed personally cordial toward TR even after losing two presidential elections to him.

Whatever Roosevelt and Sinclair said to each other, they were too far away from the microphone for it to pick up their words. Chief Justice Holmes stood by it, a Bible in his hand. He beckoned to Hosea Blackford. When Blackford took the vice-presidential oath, the electric marvel let the whole enormous crowd hear him doit.

Then Justice Holmes summoned the president-elect to the microphone. His amplified oath filled the vast, echoing silence in Franklin Square: "I, Upton Sinclair, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

"Congratulations, Mr. President," Oliver Wendell Holmes said. As Roosevelt had done, he reached out to shake Sinclair's hand. What had been quiet erupted into a vast roar of noise: the noise of almost forty years of Socialist struggle finally rewarded with victory.

Upton Sinclair lifted up his hands. As if he were a magician, silence returned. Into it, he said, "It's time for a change!" — the same theme he'd used in Toledo, the theme the Socialists had used through the whole campaign. "We've been saying that for a long time, my friends, but now the change is here!"

More fervent applause followed, as did scattered shouts of, "Revolution!" Sinclair raised his hands again. This time, quiet was slower in coming.

At last, he got it. He said, "We are at peace, and I hope and expect we shall remain at peace throughout my term." That drew more cheers, and a jaundiced look from Theodore Roosevelt Sinclair went on, "And we shall have peace here at home as well, peace with honor, peace with justice, peace at last. We shall have not the peace of the exploiter who rules his laborers by force and fear, but the peace of the proletariat given its rightful place in the world."

The crowd roared its approval. Theodore Roosevelt looked like a thunderstorm about to burst. But all he could do was frown impotently. Upton Sinclair had the microphone. Upton Sinclair had the country.

He said, "If the capitalists will not give the workers their due, this administration will see to it that the rights and aspirations of the laboring classes are respected. If the capitalists will not heed our warnings, this administration will see to it that they heed our new laws. If the capitalists go on thinking that the means of production are theirs and theirs alone, this administration will prove to them that those means of production belong in the hands of the people, which is to say, the hands of the government. For too long, the trusts have had friends in high places. Now the people have friends in high places."

The red flags dipped and waved. The crowd in Franklin Square screeched itself hoarse. The Democratic minority in the House and Senate listened to President Sinclair in stony silence. So did Chief Justice Holmes. Flora noticed that, even if Sinclair did not. Sinclair might propose laws, Congress might pass them… and the Supreme Court might strike them down.

But that would be later. Now there was only the headiness of victory. Flora felt it, too, and applauded loudly when President Sinclair made an eloquent call for equity among nations. If we d had equity among nations all along, she thought, my brother would walk on two legs.

But even pain and bitterness could not last, not today. After President Sinclair's speech ended, the celebrating began. Every saloon in Philadelphia had to be packed. So did every ballroom. Not every Socialist had proletarian tastes in amusement-far from it.

Flora went to a reception at Powel House for the Socialist Congressional delegation. She met the president and his wife, a vivacious redhead named Enid who was wearing an off-the-shoulder green velvet gown that would have caused multiple heart attacks on the Lower East Side; Flora's district was radical politically but not when it came to women's clothes.

Sinclair was also dashing in the clawhammer coat he still wore. "I want you to go right on being the conscience of the House," he told Flora.

"I'll do my best, Mr. President," she said.

Senator Debs came up then, and shook the president's hand. ''Congratulations, Upton," he said graciously. "You've done what I couldn't do. And now that you have done it, I've got a question for you." He waited till Sinclair nodded, then asked, "What do you propose to do about the claims this Confederate submarine sank one of our ships after the war was over?"

"Examine them. Study them," the new president answered. "Not go off half-cocked, the way TR would. The Confederates are having their own political upheavals. The claims may have more to do with those than with the truth. Once I know what's what, I'll decide what I need to do."

Debs nodded, but said, "That Freedom Party down there could do with some slapping down. It's reaction on the march"-a sentiment with which Flora agreed completely.

"Once I know what's what, I'll decide what I need to do," President Sinclair repeated. Flora had hoped for more, but had to be content with that.

The reception went on for a very long time. Flora had grown more used to late hours in Philadelphia than she'd ever been in New York City, but she was yawning by the time it got to be half past one. Hosea Blackford-Vice President Hosea Blackford- said, "I'm heading home, Flora. Can I give you a ride?" He grinned. "I get a housing allowance, but no house-shows where the vice president fits into the scheme of things. So why should I move?"

"That would be very kind, your Excellency," Flora said with a smile that made Blackford snort. The vice president's nondescript Ford seemed out of place among the fancy motorcars around Powel House. In companionable silence, he drove Flora back to the apartment house where they both lived.

No matter how tired she was, she invited Blackford into her flat. He cocked an eyebrow. "Are you sure?"

"Of course I am." Flora stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear: "I've never done this with a vice president before "

He laughed out loud, and was still laughing when he stepped inside. After Flora closed the door behind him, he said, "I should hope not! Walter McKenna would have squashed you flat." Flora squeaked in outrage. Then she started to laugh, too. He took her in his arms. She forgot she was tired. She knew she'd be reminded in the morning, but for now-she forgot.

Cincinnatus Driver and his family had never lived in an apartment house before moving to Iowa. One thing he hadn't been able to investigate at the Covington, Kentucky, public library was how much houses cost in Des Moines. It was a lot more than it had been down in Covington, either to buy or to rent. The two-bedroom flat he'd found was much more in his price range, even if none of the rooms was big enough to swing a cat. But the flat had electricity, which went some way toward making up for that. He'd never lived in a place with electricity before. He liked it. Elizabeth liked it even better.

The apartment house was in the near northwestern part of town, west of the Des Moines River and north of the Raccoon. It was as close as Des Moines came to having a colored district, although only a little more than a thousand Negroes were hardly enough to constitute a real district in a city of over a hundred thousand. The Drivers shared their floor with two other black families and one white; the proprietor of a Chinese laundry lived upstairs. Nobody was rich, not in that neighborhood. People got by, though. As far as Cincinnatus could tell, they got by rather better than they had in Covington.

"I want to go to school, Pa," Achilles yelled to Cincinnatus when he came home worn from a day's hauling one evening. "Some of my friends go to school. I want to go to school, too."

"You'll go to school in the fall," his father told him. "You turn six then. We'll put you in this kindergarten they have here."

In Covington, white children had kindergartens. Black children hadn't had any formal schooling till the USA took Kentucky away from the CSA. Cincinnatus was unusual in his generation of Negroes in the Confederate States in being able to read and write; he'd always had a restless itch to know. Having that kind of itch was dangerous in a country where, up until not long before he was born, it had been not merely difficult but illegal for blacks to learn their letters.

"What can I get for you, dear?" Elizabeth asked, coming out of the kitchen. "How did it go today?"

"Got plenty of hauling business," Cincinnatus answered. "Folks was right-the Des Moines runs high in the springtime, even more so than the Ohio does, and boats get up here that can't any other time of year. Won't have so much to do in the summertime. Last summer, when we got here, I wondered for a while if we was goin' to starve."

"We made it." Elizabeth's voice was warm with pride.

"Sure enough did," Cincinnatus agreed. "I want to see if we can get ourselves a little bit ahead of things while the river's high. Always good to have some money socked away you don't have to spend right now."

"Amen," Elizabeth said, as if he'd been a preacher making a point in the pulpit.

"Amen," Achilles echoed; he liked going to church of a Sunday morning.

Cincinnatus smiled at his son. Then he looked back to his wife. "What I'd like me right now is a bottle of beer. I knew Iowa was a dry state, but I didn't reckon folks here'd take it so serious. Down in Kentucky, folks always preached against the demon rum, but that didn't stop 'em from drinkin' whiskey. Didn't even hardly slow 'em down none. People round these parts mean it."

"Most of 'em do, uh-huh." Elizabeth nodded. Her eyes sparkled-or maybe it was a trick of the sun-bright electric bulb above her head. She turned and went back into the kitchen. Her skirt swirled around her, giving Cincinnatus a glimpse of her trim ankles. Some of the white women in Des Moines were wearing skirts well above the ankle-scandalously short, as far as he was concerned. He would have something to say if Elizabeth ever wanted to try that style.

She opened the icebox, then came back into the living room. In her hand was a tall glass of golden liquid with a creamy white head, on her face a look of triumph. Cincinnatus stared at the beer. "Where'd you get that?"

"Chinaman upstairs makes it," Elizabeth answered.

"I'll be." He shook his head in wonder. "I didn't even know Chinamen drank beer, let alone made it." He took the glass from Elizabeth, raised it to his mouth, and cautiously sipped. He smacked his lips, pondering, then nodded. "It ain't great beer, but it's beer, sure enough."

"I know." Now Elizabeth's eyes definitely twinkled. "Had me some before I'd pay the Chinaman for it. Don't drink that all up now-why don't you bring it to the table with you? Beef stew's just about ready."

Spit jumped into Cincinnatus' mouth. "I'll do that." Beef was cheap here, and plentiful, too, compared to what things were like in Kentucky. He ate his fill without worrying about whether he'd go broke on account of such lavish meals. He still ate a lot of pork, but now more because he liked it than because he couldn't afford anything better.

After supper, while Elizabeth washed dishes, Cincinnatus got out a reader and went to work with Achilles. The boy had known for some time the alphabet and the sounds the letters made; up till just a couple of weeks before, he'd had trouble-trouble often to the point of tears-combining the sounds of the letters into words. Cincinnatus, who had learned to read a good many years later in life, vividly remembered that himself.

Now, though, Achilles had the key. "Ban," he read. "Can. Dan. Fan. Man. Pan. Ran. Tan. Bat. Cat. Fat. Hat. Mat. Pat. Rat. Sat. Den. Fen… What's a fen, Pa?"

"Dunno. Let's find out." Cincinnatus had a dictionary. Because of the catch-as-catch-can way he'd become literate, his vocabulary had holes. He used the dictionary to fill them. Riffling through it now, he answered, "A fen is like a swamp. Go on, Achilles. You're doin' swell."

"Hen. Men. Pen. Ten. Wen." That one made the dictionary open again, as dx?. Achilles beamed. "I can read, Pa!"

"You're gettin' there," Cincinnatus agreed. "We'll keep at it." He figured Achilles would have to work twice as hard at school to get half the respect he deserved. That was what life handed you along with a black skin. People would call Achilles a damn nigger, sure as the sun would come up tomorrow. But nobody would call Achilles a damn dumb nigger, not if Cincinnatus had anything to do with it.

"I want to read stories like the ones you read to me," Achilles said.

"You're gettin' there," Cincinnatus said again. "Now let's work on this a little while longer, and then you'll get to bed." Achilles liked learning to read any time. Faced with the choice between trying to read some more and going to bed, he would have read till four in the morning had his father let him. Cincinnatus didn't let him, because he wanted-and needed-to get some sleep himself. Achilles squawked, but was soon breathing heavily; when he did yield to sleep, he yielded deeply and completely.

So did Cincinnatus, because he was very tired. He slept through the alarm clock; Elizabeth had to shake him awake. A couple of cups of coffee and some scrambled eggs got him moving. He jammed a cloth cap onto his head kissed Elizabeth, and went downstairs to fire up the Duryea.

He felt more affection for the truck than he ever had down in Covington. It had run very well since the overhaul he'd given it before moving to Iowa. He wished he'd overhauled it sooner; it would have served him better in Kentucky. He climbed in and drove to the wharves along the Des Moines.

At the high-water season, steamboats were tied up at almost all the piers. Some of the haulers who took their goods to merchants and warehouses were black like him; most were white. Despite his color, he had no trouble getting work. The sheer volume of unloading had something to do with that. But he'd also established a reputation for dependability. He hoped that would give him a boost when the river went down and jobs grew scarcer.

After hauling dry goods to several general stores, a cargo of plates and bowls to a china shop, and a truckful of reams of paper to the State Capitol over on the east side of the Des Moines, he came back to the wharves to eat his dinner. A couple of other colored drivers, Joe Sims and Pete Dunnett, pulled their trucks up alongside of his within five minutes of each other. They carried their dinner pails over to the bench where he was eating.

"Business is bully," said Sims, a stocky, very black man in his mid-forties. "Here's hoping it lasts."

Dunnett was thinner, young, and paler; he might have had a quarter portion of white blood in his veins. "That's right," he said. He and Sims both spoke with an accent Cincinnatus found peculiar. It had some of the rhythms of the black speech with which he was familiar, but only some. It was also heavily tinted by the sharp, nasal, almost braying speech of white Iowans. Because the Negroes of Des Moines were such a small minority, the white sea around them diluted their dialect.

Cincinnatus said, "Sure enough would be good if it did. Ain't nothin' wrong with money, nothin' a-tall."

Dunnett and Joe Sims looked at each other. After a moment, Sims said, "First time we heard you talk, Cincinnatus, we thought you were a dumb nigger, you lay on that ain 't stuff so thick. We know better now, but you still talk the way my great-grandpa did."

"I talk like I talk. Can't hardly help it," Cincinnatus said with a shrug. In Covington, his accent had passed for a mild one among Negroes.

Pete Dunnett added, "That fancy handle you've got didn't help, either."

"What's wrong with my name?" Now Cincinnatus really was peeved. "When I came up here and found out all the U.S. niggers had names like white folks, I reckoned that was like oatmeal without sugar or salt or butter or milk or nothin'."

TVI rather have me a boring name than sound like I was named after a city," Dunnett retorted.

"The city's named after me, not the other way round," Cincinnatus said. "I mean, the city and me both got named for the same fellow from back in ancient days."

"Still sounds funny," Joe Sims said. "And what's your kid's name?"

"Achilles," Cincinnatus said. "He was a hero." He paused a little while in thought, then went on, "You niggers up here in the USA, they let you-all have last names. They let you have plenty of stuff, too-down in Covington, you-all'd be a couple of really rich niggers. When it was the Confederate States down there, most of us hardly had nothin' but our one name. We had to pack everything we could into it."

Sims and Dunnett glanced at each other again. "We've had hard times, too," Dunnett said. He sounded a little defensive. Cincinnatus didn't answer. Dunnett had reason to sound defensive. White men had patrolled the Ohio to keep blacks from the Confederate States out of the USA. Nobody had ever needed to patrol the Ohio to keep blacks from the United States out of the CSA. Blacks in the USA knew perfectly well the distance between the frying pan and the fire.

Sam Carsten would sooner not have had the new stripe on his sleeve that showed he was a petty officer second class. He hadn't lost his ambition-far from it. But he'd earned that stripe by doing a good job as head of his gun crew after Willie Moore got killed. It had blood on it, as far as he was concerned.

The USS Remembrance steamed west across the Atlantic toward Boston harbor. Sam didn't have to worry about taking shellfire here. He didn't have to worry about renegade Confederate submersibles, either. What he'd learned about the C.S. boat that had sunk the U.S. destroyer after the war was over filled him with rage. Under that rage lay terror. A Rebel boat could have stalked his old battleship, the USS Dakota, just as readily.

A deck hand jerked the prop on a Wright fighting scout. The two-decker's engine thundered to life. The prop blurred into invisibility. The Remembrancers steam catapult hurled the fighting scout into the sky.

"Bully," Sam said softly. Launching aeroplanes had fascinated him even aboard the Dakota. The fascination had changed to urgency when land-based aeroplanes bombed his battleship off the Argentine coast. He'd imagined air power on the sea then. He lived it now, and still found it awe-inspiring.

Behind him, a dry voice spoke: "I wonder how long we'll be able to keep them in the air."

Sam turned. If Commander Grady had wanted to stick a KICK ME sign on him, he stood close enough to do it. "What do you mean, sir?" Sam asked, thinking he knew and hoping he was wrong.

"How much longer will we be able to keep them in the air?" the gunnery officer repeated. "You're not stupid, Carsten. You understand what I mean. Will the Socialists put enough money into the Navy to keep this ship operating? Right now, your guess is as good as mine."

"Yes, sir," Sam said dully. His guess was that the Socialists would shut down as much as they could. Except when the war dragged some into the Navy, Socialists were thinly scattered aboard warships: almost as thinly scattered as colored people in the USA. He didn't know a great deal about what Socialist politicians thought, except that they didn't think much of the Navy or the Army.

He looked at Commander Grady. Grady had always been as proud of the Remembrance as if he'd designed her himself. Now, looking from the flight deck to the conning tower, his eyes were dull, all but hopeless: the eyes of a man who expected a loved one to die. Sighing, he said, "It was a good idea, anyhow. It still is a good idea."

"It sure as hell is, sir," Carsten said hotly. "It's a swell idea, and anybody who can't see that is a damn fool."

"Lot of damn fools running around loose in the world," Grady said. "Some of them wear fancy uniforms. Some of them wear expensive suits and get elected to Congress or elected president. Those fools get to tell the ones in the fancy uniforms what to do."

"And the ones in the fancy uniforms get to tell us what to do." Sam's laugh was harsh as salt spray. "It's the Navy way." He couldn't think of another officer to whom he would have said such a thing. Grady and he had been through a lot together.

"Damn it," Grady said in a low, furious voice, "we proved what this ship can do. We proved it, but will we get any credit for it?"

"No way to tell about that, sir," Carsten answered, "but I wouldn't bet anything I cared to lose on it."

"Neither would I," Grady said. "But I tell you this: we did show what the Remembrance can do. Congress may not be watching. President Upton goddamn Sinclair may not be watching. You can bet, though, the German High Seas Fleet was watching. The Royal Navy was watching. And if the Japs weren't watching, too, I'd be amazed. Plenty of countries are going to have squadrons of aeroplane carriers ten years from now. I hope to God we're one of them." Before Sam could say anything to that, Grady wheeled and rapidly strode away.

Carsten tried to figure out where he'd be ten years down the line. Likeliest, he supposed, was chief petty officer in charge of a gun crew. He could easily see himself turning into Hiram Kidde or Willie Moore. He'd just have to follow the path of least resistance.

If he wanted anything more, he'd have to work harder for it. Mustangs didn't grow on trees. And, if he aimed at becoming an officer, he'd have to get lucky, too. He wondered how much he really wanted that kind of luck. What was good for him might turn out to be anything but good for other people. He thought of Moore again, Moore writhing on the floor with his belly torn open.

The steam catapult hissed like a million snakes, hurling another fighting scout into the air. The crew of the Remembrance kept honing their skills. They were, at the moment, the best in the world at what they did, whether Congress appreciated it or not. They were also, at the moment, the only ones in the world who did what they did. Sam wondered how long that would last. He remembered the German sailors in Dublin harbor staring and staring at the aeroplane carrier. Kaiser Bill's boys built better aeroplanes than the USA did; the Wright two-deckers were Al-batros copies. Could the Germans build better aeroplane carriers, too?

One of the Wright machines roared low over the flight deck. Had it shot up the deck, Sam would not have cared to be standing there. On the other hand, the flight deck bristled with machine guns and one-pounders. Had that fighting scout been painted with the Stars and Bars instead of the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords, it would have got a warm welcome.

It zoomed above the Remembrance again, this time even lower and upside down. A couple of the sailors on deck saluted the pilot with upraised middle fingers. Sam didn't, but he felt like it. He hadn't had a whole lot to do with the pilots aboard the aeroplane carrier: they were officers, and pretty much kept to themselves. But what he had seen made him wonder if their marbles had spilled out of their ears as they flew, because they didn't seem to give two whoops in hell whether they lived or died.

Staring after the fighting scout after it finally rolled back to right side up, Sam decided that made a certain amount of sense. The rickety contraptions the pilots flew had a habit of falling out of the sky by themselves. The pilots had to take them into harm's way, and had to land them on the rolling, pitching deck of a warship. You probably needed to be crazy to want to do any of that. And, if you weren't crazy when you started doing it, you'd get that way after a while.

As if to prove the point, the pilot of the other fighting scout dove out of the sky on the Remembrance like a sparrowhawk swooping on a field mouse. In an impossibly short time, the aeroplane swelled from buzzing speck to roaring monster. It seemed to be heading straight for Sam. He wanted to dig a hole in the deck, dive in, and then pull the planking and steel over himself: an armored blanket to keep him safe and warm. A couple of sailors started to run. Their comrades screamed curses at them. He understood why, but had to work to hold his own feet still.

At the last possible instant, the Wright two-decker pulled out of the dive. Sam couldn't help ducking; he thought one wheel of the landing gear would clip him. It wasn't quite so close as that, but he did have to snatch at his cap to keep it from blowing off his head and perhaps into the sea. Had it gone into the drink, the price of a new one would have come out of his pay.

The two-decker almost went into the drink, too, off to port of the Remembrance. Carsten would have sworn its lowest point was lower than the aeroplane carrier's deck. The landing gear didn't quite touch the wavetops, but a flying fish might have leaped into the cockpit. Then the Wright started to gain altitude again, much more slowly than it had shed it.

"That bastard's nuts," somebody said, shaken respect in his voice.

"That bastard's nuts almost got cut off him," somebody else said, which was also true, and made everybody who heard it laugh to boot.

A fellow with bright-colored semaphore paddles strode out near the edge of the deck to guide the aeroplanes in to the controlled crash that constituted a landing aboard ship. His wigwagged signals urged the pilot of the first fighting scout up a little, to starboard, up a little more… Sam had learned to read the wigwags, just as he'd picked up Morse as a kid.

Smoke spurted from the solid rubber tires as they slammed against the deck. The hook under the fuselage caught a cable. The aeroplane jerked to a halt. Watching it, Carsten understood why the fighting scouts had needed strengthening before they came aboard the Remembrance.

As the pilot took off his goggles and climbed out of the aeroplane, his face bore an enormous grin. What was he thinking? Lived through it again, probably. Sailors hauled the two-decker out of the way so the other fighting scout could land.

Here he came, chasing the aeroplane carrier from astern. As before, the semaphore man stepped out and signaled to the approaching flying machine. Sam wondered why he bothered. That fellow had pulled out of his dive without help. If he couldn't land the same way…

Up, the man with the paddles signaled, and then Up again, more emphatically. The bow of the Remembrance slid down into a trough; the stern rose. Sam kept his balance as automatically as he breathed. So did the signalman. He had the paddle raised, urging more altitude, when the aeroplane slammed into the carrier.

The pilot almost got it onto the ship. That made things worse, not better. He still killed himself, and debris from the aeroplane scythed along the deck, cutting down the fellow with the semaphore paddles and half the crew waiting to take the aeroplane to the hydraulic lift and stow it belowdecks.

Sam sprinted forward, dodging blazing fuel and oil like a halfback dodging tacklers in the open field. He skidded to a stop beside a sailor who was down and moaning and clutching his thigh. Blood was soaking his trouser leg and puddling on the deck under him. He couldn't keep losing it that fast for long. Sam unhooked his belt, yanked it off, and doubled it around the man's leg above the wound for a tourniquet.

"It hurts!" the sailor moaned. "Christ, it hurts!"

"Hang on, pal," Sam said. More sailors came running across the deck, some with stretchers. Sam waved to draw their eyes. The sailor might live. As for the pilot… His head lay about ten feet away, still wearing goggles. Carsten looked down at the planking. Yeah, flyboys earned the right to be crazy.