XVIII
Spring in Dakota was a riot of burgeoning green and of glorious birdsong. It was one of the most beautiful things Flora Blackford had ever seen. She would have given a great deal not to be seeing it now. If Hosea had won the election . . . But he hadn’t. He’d got trounced. How badly he’d got trounced still ate at Flora.
The shock of President-elect Coolidge’s death, less than a month before he was to take office, had jolted her no less than the rest of the American political world. After that, though, the pain returned. Her husband had to go down to Washington to hand over the reins of power to a man who hadn’t even beaten him in November—one more humiliation piled on all the rest.
As soon as Herbert Hoover took the oath of office, the Blackfords had gone on what the papers called an extended holiday. The papers, for once, were polite. Hosea Blackford had gone back to his home state to lick his wounds, and taken his family with him.
Flora turned away from the farm window that showed Great Plains spring to such good advantage. “When do you think we should go back East?” she asked.
Her husband set down his coffee cup. He managed a crooked smile. “Are the wide open spaces starting to get on your nerves?”
“Yes!” Flora’s vehemence startled even her. Hosea had put it better than she’d managed to, even in her own mind. “I grew up in New York City, remember, on the Lower East Side. Even Philadelphia seems roomy.”
“I’m so sorry for you.” Hosea Blackford sighed. “And I’m sorry, but I really don’t feel like going back yet. People here leave me alone. Nobody in Philadelphia or Washington leaves you alone. I think it’s against the law there.”
“But the country’s in trouble. We need to do something,” Flora said.
He sighed again. “I spent the last four years doing everything I knew how to do. None of it seemed to help much. I’m willing to let someone else worry about it for a while—especially since the people have shown they aren’t willing to let me worry about it any more.”
He sounded tired. Worse, he sounded old. Flora had seen how cruelly he’d aged in four hard years in Powel House. He was, she reminded herself, past his seventieth birthday. When they’d married, his being close to twice her age hadn’t bothered her. It still didn’t, not in most ways. But this loss of vigor, of resiliency, troubled her. She was sure that when she’d first come to know him, when she’d first fallen in love with him, he would have bounced back stronger and faster.
On the other hand, nobody who’d spent three years in the trenches during the Great War came out afterwards the same man he’d been when he went in. Hosea had spent four years in the presidential trenches, and he’d lost the war. She didn’t suppose expecting him to stay unchanged was fair.
“When we do go back,” she said, “I wonder if I ought to take a flat in the Fourteenth Ward.”
“Aha!” her husband said, and smiled. “Something makes me think you want to go back to Congress.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Flora said. “I don’t like seeing my old district in the hands of a Democrat. I don’t like seeing a lot of our districts in the hands of Democrats.”
“Neither do I.” Hosea Blackford’s smile was sour. “I don’t think any of our candidates will ask me to hit the campaign trail for them next year, though. They’d probably want me on the stump for their opponents instead.”
“It’s not that bad,” Flora insisted.
“No—odds are it’s worse,” Hosea answered. “I can’t think of anything less welcome in a political party than a president who’s just lost an election. After a while, I’ll get to be an elder statesman, but right now I’m nothing but a nuisance.” With a mournful shake of the head, he added, “By the the time I get to be an elder statesman, I’ll probably be so elder, I’m dead.”
“God forbid!” Flora exclaimed. No one in her family, no one among the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side, spoke of death straight on like that. Words had power; to speak of something was to help bring it into being. The rational part of her mind knew that was nonsense, but the rational part of her mind went only so deep. Down underneath it, superstition still flourished.
“It’s true,” her husband said. “We both know it’s true, even if you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t need to take out pencil and paper to know how old I am. I get reminded whenever I look in the mirror. I’d like to stay around long enough to see Joshua grow up, but how likely is that? I’ve already beaten the odds by lasting as long as I have.”
“That’s nothing but—” Flora began.
“The truth,” Hosea finished for her. “You know it as well as I do, too. And if you don’t, ask the next insurance salesman you happen to run into. He’ll tell you what the actuarial tables say.”
Flora wanted to tell him that was nonsense. She couldn’t, and she knew it. The best she could do was change the subject: “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Fine.” Now her husband’s grin showed real amusement. “Do you think this new professional football federation’s going to last?”
That wasn’t what she’d had in mind. “I don’t care,” she said tartly. “What I think is, it’s disgraceful to pay men so much to run around with a football when so many people can’t find work at all. Talk about a waste of money!”
“It’s an amusement, the same as an orchestra is an amusement,” her husband said. “Nothing wrong with them. We need them. Especially in hard times, we need them.”
“An orchestra is worthwhile,” Flora said. “A football game?” She shook her head.
“A lot more people go to watch the Philadelphia Barrels than to the Philadelphia Symphony,” Hosea said.
Since that was true, Flora could only stick out her chin and say, “Even so.”
“Amusement is where you find it,” Hosea said. “I’m not going to be elitist and look down my nose at anything.”
To a good Socialist, elitist was a dirty word. Flora tried to turn it back on her husband: “When the top football players make more than the president of the United States—and some of them do—they’re the elitists.”
“They asked one of them about that two or three years ago. Did you happen to see what he said?” Hosea Blackford asked. Flora shook her head. She paid as little attention to sports as she could. One of her husband’s eyebrows rose. “What he told the reporter was, ‘I had a better year than he did.’ All things considered, how could anyone tell Mr. Gehrig he was wrong?”
“A choleriyeh on Mr. Gehrig!” Flora said furiously. “Nothing that happened was your fault.”
That eyebrow lifted again. “The Party told that to the voters. We told them and told them and told them. And Herbert Hoover is president of the United States today, and here I am in Dakota. If you’re there, it’s your fault.”
“It isn’t fair,” Flora said.
Hosea laughed out loud, which only made her angrier. “Joshua might try to use an argument like that, but you shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s the way politics works. ‘What have you done for me lately?’ is the question voters always ask—and maybe it’s the question they should always ask. Teddy Roosevelt won the Great War. They didn’t give him a third term, though, because of all the strikes and unrest that came afterwards. That’s how Upton got to be president—and how I got to be vice president, if you remember.”
“I’m not likely to forget,” she answered. “I was so proud of you. And I’m still proud of you, and I still think you ought to be president, not that . . . that lump of a Hoover.”
“As a matter of fact, I agree with you. I think you’re sweet, too,” he added. “Unfortunately, fifty-seven percent of the voters in the United States had a different opinion, and theirs counts for more than ours.” He sighed. “It was even worse in the Electoral College, of course.”
“Not right,” Flora muttered.
“What’s not right, Mama?” That was Joshua, still in his flannel pajamas. He was yawning. From somewhere on one side of the family or the other, he’d found a taste for sleeping late. On the Lower East Side—or, for that matter, on a Dakota farm—he would have had to get up early whether he wanted to or not. As the son of a man first vice president and then president, he could usually sleep as late as he wanted to. Privilege is everywhere, Flora thought.
But she had to answer him: “It’s not right that your father lost the election.”
“Oh.” Joshua tried to frown, but a yawn ruined it. “Why not? The other guys got more votes, didn’t they?”
Hosea laughed. “That’s it in a nutshell, Josh. The other guys got more votes.”
Josh. Flora didn’t like the one-syllable abridgement of a perfectly good name. Joshua Blackford was rolling, majestic. Josh Blackford sounded like someone who wore overalls and a straw hat. And if that’s elitist, too bad, she thought. Hosea didn’t see the problem.
“The point is, the other guys”—she used her son’s phrase as if it had quotation marks around it—“shouldn’t have got more votes.”
Joshua muttered something under his breath. Flora thought she heard, “Stinking Japs.” Without a doubt, the Japanese bombing of Los Angeles had been the last straw—or rather, the last nail in the coffin. If Joshua wanted to think his father would have won without that, he could. Flora wanted to think the very same thing. The only problem was, she knew better. Looking at the last nail in the coffin meant ignoring all the others, and there were a lot of them.
“You’ll win again in four years, though, won’t you, Father?” Joshua had a boy’s boundless confidence in his father. He also had a boy’s strange notions about the way time worked.
Neither of his parents said anything. Hosea Blackford would be too old to nominate in 1936, even if he’d never lost an election in his life. Since he’d lost the way he had, the Socialists would be trying their best to forget he’d ever existed.
“Won’t you?” Joshua asked again.
“I like to think I would win against Mr. Hoover,” Hosea said slowly. “He doesn’t seem to me as if he’s moving things in the right direction. But I don’t know if I would want to run again, and I don’t know if the Socialist Party would nominate me if I did. We would have to see how things look in 1936 before we could know.”
Flora added, “The next election for president is almost four years from now. That’s a long time.”
“Especially in politics,” her husband added.
Joshua nodded. He’d just turned seven; to him, four years were a very long time indeed. He said, “I think you still ought to be president.”
“Thank you, son,” Hosea Blackford said.
“I think the very same thing,” Flora said, and ruffled Joshua’s hair. He was dark like her, but otherwise looked more like his father, with a long face, prominent cheekbones, and a straight, pointed nose. He also had more of his father’s temperament: he was steadier than Flora, and not given to sudden enthusiasms that took control of him for days or weeks at a time.
“Who do the Socialists have that could be any better than you, Dad?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine anyone better. Flora ruffled his hair again. Neither could she. But she knew the practical politicians in the Socialist Party would have a different opinion—and Hosea really would be too old to run again in 1936. He probably would have been too old to run in 1932 if he hadn’t been the incumbent.
“One way or another, everything will work out fine,” she said. Joshua believed her. He was still only a little boy.
The Remembrance steamed west across the Pacific, accompanied by three destroyers, a light cruiser, a heavy cruiser, and two battleships. Sam Carsten wished one of the battlewagons would have been the Dakota, but no such luck. His old ship was off doing something else; he had no idea what.
Repairs in Seattle had been as quick as the Navy yard there could make them. He did his best not to worry about that. Back during the Great War, the Dakota had been hastily repaired after battle damage—and her steering had never been reliable again. Her steering probably still wasn’t reliable. So far as Sam knew, the Japanese torpedo hadn’t damaged the Remembrance’s steering—but what had it damaged that hasty repairs might not discover? He hoped he—and the ship—wouldn’t find out the hard way.
Commander van der Waal wasn’t aboard. Broken ankles healed at their own pace; you couldn’t hurry them. A new damage-control officer, a lieutenant commander named Hiram Pottinger, was nominally in charge of antitorpedo work. But Pottinger’s previous service had been in cruisers. Sam knew the Remembrance backwards and forwards and inside out—literally inside out, after the torpedo hit off the Canadian coast. Most of the burden fell on his shoulders.
He’d led the sailors in the damage-control parties when things looked black. That had earned him respect he could have got no other way. It had also earned him thin new gold stripes on his cuffs; he’d been promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, for what he’d done. Glad as he was of the promotion, he could have done without some of the respect. He feared he would end up trapped in an assignment he’d never wanted.
Martin van der Waal had always insisted it was an important assignment. Even had Sam been inclined to argue, the experience of getting torpedoed would have changed his mind. But he agreed with his injured superior. Important, antitorpedo work definitely was. That still didn’t mean he cared to make a career of it.
He spent as much time as he could on deck. That meant more tinfoil tubes of zinc-oxide ointment, but he did it anyhow. Watching aeroplanes take off and land never failed to fascinate him. He got plenty of chances to watch, for the Remembrance flew a continuous air patrol. The Japanese Navy had ships out here, too, and who found whom first would have a lot to do with how any fight turned out. The way the arrester hook caught the cables stretched across the deck and brought a landing aeroplane to an abrupt halt still fascinated him.
One perfect morning, he was taking the air on the flight deck after breakfast when alarms began to sound. Klaxons hooting in his ears, he ran for his battle station, wishing it weren’t deep in the bowels of the aeroplane carrier. He wanted to be able to see what was going on. As usual, the Navy cared not at all for what he wanted.
“What’s the word, sir?” he panted as he came up to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.
“Nothing good,” his superior answered. “One of our machines spotted a whole flight of aeroplanes with meatballs on their wings heading this way.”
“There’s no Jap base within a couple of thousand miles of where we’re at,” Sam said. The light went on in his head before Pottinger needed to enlighten him: “We’ve found a Japanese aeroplane carrier or two.”
The other damage-control officer shook his head. “Not quite. Their aeroplanes have found us, but we haven’t found them yet.”
“Heading back along their bearing would be a pretty good bet,” Carsten said.
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger nodded. He was a tall, lean man with a weathered face, hollow cheeks, a long, narrow jaw, and a pointed nose. He looked like a New Englander, but had a Midwestern accent. “I expect you’re right,” he said. “This is liable to be a damn funny kind of naval battle, you know? We’re not even in sight of the enemy’s fleet, but our aeroplanes are going to slug it out with his.”
As if to underline his words, one machine after another roared into the sky, the noise of the straining engines loud even several decks below the one from which the aeroplanes were taking off. “Long-range artillery, that’s what they’ve turned into,” Sam said. “They can hit when our battleships can’t.”
Pottinger nodded again. “That’s right. Battleships are probably obsolete, though plenty of men will try and run you out of the Navy if you say so out loud.” He made a disdainful noise. “Plenty of men likely tried to run people out of the Navy if they spoke up for steam engines and ironclads, too.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Sam had known more than a few officers who never stopped pining for the good old days.
Something burst in the water not far from the Remembrance. He felt the carrier heel into the sharpest turn she could make, and then, a moment later, into another one in the opposite direction. More bombs burst around her.
Hiram Pottinger might have been talking things over back on shore, for all the excitement he showed. “Zigzags,” he said approvingly. “That’s what you do against submersibles, and that’s what you do against aeroplanes, too.”
“Well, yes, sir,” Carsten said. “That’s what you do, and then you hope like hell it works. You get hit by a bomb, that could put a little crimp in your morning.” He did his best to imitate his superior’s nonchalance.
One-pounders and other antiaircraft guns on the deck started banging away at the attacking aeroplanes. So did the five-inch guns in the sponsons under the flight deck. The noise was terrific. They could reach a lot farther than the smaller weapons, but couldn’t fire nearly so fast.
“I wonder what’s going on up there,” Sam said. “I wonder how nasty it is.”
“It’s no walk in the park,” Pottinger said.
“I didn’t figure it was, sir,” Sam said, a little reproachfully. He’d seen plenty of nasty action—it didn’t come much nastier than what he’d been through in the Battle of the Three Navies. A moment later, he realized Pottinger, if he’d ever been in a battle before, had probably gone through it down here.
Maybe this was harder. Carsten wouldn’t have believed it beforehand, but it might have been true. When he was fighting a gun, he had some idea, even if only a small one, of what was going on. Here . . . Here it might have been happening in a distant room. The only difference was, what happened in that distant room might kill him.
Later, he wished he hadn’t had that thought at that moment. The Remembrance shuddered when a bomb burst on her flight deck. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, “Oh, shit,” which summed up Sam’s feelings perfectly. Then Pottinger added, “Well, time for us to go to work.”
“Yes, sir,” Carsten agreed.
That was how he got up to the flight deck in the midst of combat. He wanted to be there, but not under those circumstances. The flight crew were already doing what they had to do: manhandling steel plates across the hole the bomb had torn in the deck and doing everything they could to flatten out the torn lips of steel.
“Well done,” Pottinger shouted. “We have to be able to land aeroplanes and get them in the air again.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. His boss might be new to carrier duty, but he’d just proved he understood the essence of it. Sam went on, “They could have done a lot worse if they’d fused the bomb differently.”
“What do you mean?” Lieutenant Commander Pottinger asked.
“If they’d given it an armor-piercing tip and a delayed fuse, it would have gone through before it blew up,” Sam answered. “Then we’d really be in the soup.”
“Urk,” Pottinger said, which again matched Sam’s thought.
Sam said, “They’re like us: they’re still learning what all they can do with aeroplanes and carriers, too.”
An aeroplane with the red Rising Sun of Japan painted on wings and fuselage roared overhead, machine guns in the wings blazing. The engine was even louder than the guns; the fighter couldn’t have been more than fifty feet above the deck. Bullets struck sparks from the new steel plates. Others smacked flesh with wet thuds. Men shrieked or crumpled silently. Streams of tracers from the Remembrance’s antiaircraft guns converged on the Japanese machine. For a dreadful moment, Sam thought it would get away in spite of all the gunfire. But then flames and smoke licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit. The fighter slammed into the sea.
“Scratch one fucker!” Sam shouted exultantly.
A sailor next to him was down and groaning, clutching his leg. Red spread over his trousers. “It hurts!” he groaned. “It hurts bad!”
“George!” Sam’s exultation turned to dismay in the space of a heartbeat. He’d known George Moerlein ever since first coming aboard the Remembrance. Seeing him down with a nasty wound made Sam’s stomach turn over. By the way the petty officer was bleeding, he needed help right away. Sam tore off his belt and wrapped it around Moerlein’s thigh above the bullet wound, tight as he could. “Give me a hand over here!” he yelled.
“Let’s get him down to sick bay, sir,” a sailor said. He helped Carsten haul George Moerlein up. Moerlein moaned and then, mercifully, passed out. As they hauled the petty officer towards a passageway, another Japanese fighter strafed the Remembrance. Bullets cracked past Sam and clattered off the flight deck. He breathed a sigh of relief when he had steel between him and the deadly chaos overhead.
As soon as he saw a sailor, though, he said, “Here, take over for me. Get this man below. I’ve got duty topside.” He hurried back up to put his life on the line again, though he did his best not to think of it like that.
Off to starboard, one of the American destroyers was on fire from bow to stern and sinking fast. Boats and men in life jackets bobbed around her. Even as Sam watched, the destroyer rolled over and went to the bottom. In these waters, the bottom was a long, long way down. Sam shivered at how far down it was.
A bomb burst in the sea not far from the Remembrance, drenching Carsten and most of the others on deck. Even so, a sailor with wigwag signals guided an aeroplane to a landing. Maintenance men fueled it. Its prop started spinning again. Down the flight deck it rolled, bumping over the hasty repairs, and up into the air again.
“Didn’t think we could do that,” Sam said to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.
“He must have been flying on fumes, or he never would have tried coming in,” Pottinger agreed. “Lucky the Japs have let up a little.”
“I wonder what we’re doing to them,” Sam said. “Worse than this, I hope. We’d better be, by God.”
“Yes, we’d better be. But how can we know?” Pottinger said. “They’re over the horizon. The only ones who have any real idea how the fight’s going are our pilots.”
“No, sir—not even them,” Sam said. His superior raised an eyebrow. He explained: “They don’t know what the Jap pilots are doing to us, just like the Japs can’t be sure what we’re doing to them. Maybe the fellows in the wireless shacks—ours and theirs—have the big picture. Maybe nobody does. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing?”
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger laughed. “We won’t know who won till day after tomorrow, when we read it in the newspapers.”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t exactly funny, but Carsten laughed, too. “As long as we live through it, we’ve come out all right.” A Japanese aeroplane and an American machine both splashed into the Pacific within a quarter of a mile of the Remembrance. Sam hoped somebody would live through the fight.
The Kansas City Star was the daily published closest to Leavenworth that was actually worth reading. Irving Morrell had discovered that during his last stay in Kansas. Now, of course, the wireless supplemented the paper. Back then, wireless had only started passing from Morse code to voice. Even now, the newspaper gave him a far more detailed picture than the quick reports on the wireless could.
“I don’t think anybody knows who won this stupid battle, Agnes,” he said two days after reports about the sea fight north of the Sandwich Islands started coming in. “I really don’t. If you look at our claims, we sank the whole Jap fleet and didn’t take a scratch. If you look at theirs, they did it to us.”
His wife shrugged and poured him another cup of coffee. “My bet is, both sides are lying as hard as they can.”
“My bet is, you’re right,” Morrell answered. “I suppose we’ll sort it out in time for Mildred’s children to study about it in school.”
Hearing her name made his daughter look up from her scrambled eggs. “Study what in school?” she asked.
“A big naval battle in the Pacific,” her father said.
She rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, who cares?”
Agnes laughed. “If everybody felt that way, we wouldn’t have to fight any more wars. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“That would be wonderful,” Morrell said with the deep conviction of a man who’d seen—who’d taken part in—the worst man could do to his fellow man. He gulped the scalding coffee. “That would be wonderful, but it’s not going to happen any time soon, no matter how much I wish it would. Speaking of which, I’m off to the Barrel Works.”
“All right, dear.” Agnes got up, too, and came over to give him a kiss. “I’ll see you when you get back. Some more things should be out of boxes by then.”
“Good.” Morrell was convinced he could no more escape from boxes than a bug could get out of a spiderweb. He wondered how many times he’d moved in the course of his military career. He didn’t try to count them all up. That way lay madness.
Barbed wire enclosed a field in which sat the experimental barrel he’d been working with ten years earlier. The machine hadn’t been in the field all those years; it would have been a rusted, useless hulk if it had. Even though the Socialists had stopped work on new barrels for so long, the Army had carefully greased this one and stored it in a garage, in case it was ever wanted again. Morrell gave the General Staff—not his favorite outfit—reluctant credit for that. He didn’t know what he would have done if he’d had to start altogether from scratch.
Sentries at the gate saluted. “Good morning, Colonel,” they chorused.
“Morning, boys.” Morrell pointed into the field. “Who’s working on the barrel?”
“Sergeant Pound, sir,” one of the sentries answered.
“I might have known.” Morrell opened the gate and went inside. One of the sentries closed it after him. As he hurried toward the barrel, he called, “You’re up early today, Sergeant.”
“Oh, hello, sir.” Sergeant Michael Pound was a broad-shouldered, muscular man with close-cropped brown hair and a neat mustache showing the first silver threads. “The carburetor still isn’t what it ought to be, you know.”
“I’m not surprised, seeing how long the whole vehicle’s been sitting there doing nothing,” Morrell answered. “How are you going to get it clean?”
Sergeant Pound held up a coffee can. “There’s this new solvent called carbon tetrachloride. It gets grease off of anything,” he said enthusiastically. He was wild for any new invention; that was what had drawn him into barrels in the first place. “It’s wonderful stuff—nonflammable, a really excellent cleaner. Only one drawback.” He plopped the carburetor into the can.
“What’s that?” Morrell asked, as he was surely supposed to.
“If you use it indoors, it’s liable to asphyxiate you,” Pound replied. “Some people are fools, of course. Congressmen get excited about that sort of thing. They want to ban the stuff. If you ask me, anyone who’s dumb enough not to read the label deserves whatever happens to him.” He had no patience with incompetent people, no doubt because he was so all-around competent himself.
Morrell slapped him on the back. “It’s damn good to see you again, Sergeant, to hell with me if it’s not.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” Michael Pound replied. “I felt I was wasting my time these past few years in the artillery. Of course, the Army would have thrown me out on my ear if I’d tried to stay in barrels, but the men in charge of things aren’t exactly the smartest ones we’ve got, are they?”
“I believe I’ll plead the Fifth on that one,” Morrell said, laughing. “Do you think you could do a better job of it?”
“Sir, I’m sure I could.” Pound wasn’t joking. Because he did so many things well, he thought he could do anything. Sometimes he turned out to be right. Sometimes he was disastrously wrong. Occasional disasters did nothing to damage his self-confidence.
“How did you put up with going back to the artillery after the Barrel Works closed down?” Morrell asked.
“Well, for one thing, sir, like I said, if I hadn’t they would have found something else even worse for me to do—or they would have thrown me out altogether, and that wouldn’t have been good, not when the collapse came,” Pound said. “And besides, I always thought the politicians would eventually come to their senses. I just never imagined they’d take so long.”
“Who did?” Morrell said. He’d asked for Sergeant Pound by name when he came back to Leavenworth. The man was worth his weight in gold—which, considering his massive frame, was no mean statement. If he occasionally suffered delusions of omnipotence . . . well, nobody was perfect.
“Knaves. Fools and knaves,” he said now: one of his favorite phrases.
“You’d better be careful,” Morrell warned him. “You’re starting to sound like you belong in the Freedom Party.”
“Oh, no, sir. I didn’t say they were a pack of traitors who need to be lined up against a wall and shot.” Pound had no trouble imitating the Freedom Party’s impassioned rhetoric. He added, “Besides, that Featherston is a dangerous lunatic. If he gets elected this fall, he’s liable to show just how dangerous he is.”
“I wish I could tell you you were wrong,” Morrell said.
“He’s liable to prove as troublesome to us as those Action Française people are to the Kaiser,” Pound said. “What can you do about a government that hates you if a majority voted it into office?”
“Get ready to fight,” Morrell answered. “That’s what we’re doing here.”
“How soon before we have a real barrel with specifications based on the experimental model here?” Sergeant Pound asked, taking the carburetor out of the carbon tetrachloride and setting it down on a rag.
“They’re saying six or eight months in Pontiac,” Morrell replied. “That’s what they’re saying, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Bet on a year, maybe longer.”
“Disgraceful,” Pound said. “So much time not even frittered away—thrown away, for heaven’s sake.” He rubbed the carburetor with the rag, then passed it to Morrell. “This thing is better, though. I think it’s really clean now, clean enough to work the way it’s supposed to.”
“I hope you’re right,” Morrell said. “Put it back in the engine, Sergeant. We’ll gas up the beast and see if it runs.”
“Right, sir.” Pound opened the louvers on the engine compartment—one improvement over Great War barrels the experimental model did boast was a separate engine compartment, which drastically reduced noise and noxious fumes for the crew. As Pound turned a wrench, he went on, “You know, we really ought to have a diesel engine in here, not one fueled by gasoline. A fire starts, gasoline goes up like a bomb. Diesel fuel just burns quietly. The men in the fighting compartment have a much better chance to get away.”
“That’s a good idea,” Morrell said. Pound was full of ideas, good, bad, and indifferent. “Model after next, we ought to think about incorporating it.” He pulled a notebook from his breast pocket and scribbled a few lines so the idea wouldn’t be lost.
“Why waste time, sir?” Sergeant Pound asked. “Why not put it right into the model they’re working on now? That way, we’d have it.”
“We’d have it—eventually,” Morrell answered. “How many plans would they have to change to put a new engine in that compartment? How many dies and stamps and castings would they have to revise? I don’t know the exact number, but it’s bound to be a big one.”
“We ought to do this right,” Pound insisted.
“We will—eventually.” Morrell used that word again. “Right now, that we’re doing it at all is miracle enough, if you ask me. Just remember, I was in Kamloops a few weeks ago, and you were an artilleryman. Let’s get something finished, and then we can set about improving it.”
“Everything ought to be right the first time,” Pound muttered.
“Not everything is. That’s why they put erasers on pencils,” Morrell said. “Or are you one of those people who fill out crossword puzzles in ink?” He was fond of those puzzles himself. Their popularity had exploded since the collapse. They gave people something interesting to do, and you could buy a book of them for a dime.
Michael Pound looked puzzled. “Of course, sir. Doesn’t everybody?” He sounded altogether innocent. Was that sarcasm, or did he really believe people were so generally capable? Morrell suspected he did. Like most men, he judged others by his own standards, and those standards were pretty high. After bending to get a better look at the connection he was making, he said, “I’ve got a question for you, sir.”
“Go ahead,” Morrell told him.
“Where do you suppose we could be if we hadn’t spent all this time lying fallow, and how big a price will we pay because we did?”
“We’d be a lot further along than we are now, and we’ll have to find out. There. Aren’t I profound?”
“That’s hardly the word I’d use, sir,” Michael Pound replied.
He didn’t say what word he would use, which might have been just as well. Morrell said, “Shall we see if this miserable thing actually runs now?”
“It had better,” Pound said.
He was properly a gunner by trade, but he could drive. He slid down through the turret—an innovation when the experimental model was new, but a commonplace in barrel design nowadays—and into the driver’s seat at the left front of the vehicle, next to the bow machine gun. When he stabbed the starter button, the engine wasted no time roaring to life.
“You see, sir?” he said in his best I-told-you-so tones.
“I see,” Morrell answered. “All right, shut it down for now. We’re not ready to go anywhere, not with a two-man crew.”
“We could if we were at war,” Pound said.
“We could if we were but we aren’t so we won’t.” Morrell had to listen to himself to make sure that came out right. “Actually, we are at war, but barrels won’t do much against the Japs. Now we have to revive some more of the old machines, to have opponents to practice against.” He wished real barrels, modern barrels, would be so easy to face.