Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove Page B

the absentminded style he’d no doubt used there. But when he felt the need, the words came out.
    “I feel the same way,” Anne answered. “Anyone with an ounce of sense feels the same way. But the Congressional elections prove nobody knows how to take us from where we are to where we ought to be.”
    “What?” Her brother raised an eyebrow. “Split as near down the middle between Whigs and Radical Liberals as makes no difference? And a couple of Socialists elected from Chihuahua, and one from Cuba, and even one from New Orleans, for Christ’s sake? Sounds to me like they’ll have everything all straightened out by day after tomorrow, or week after next at the latest.”
    Anne smiled at Tom’s pungent sarcasm, but the smile had sharp corners. “Even that mess shouldn’t get things too far wrong. We have to do enough of what the Yankees tell us to keep the USA from attacking us while we’re flat. Whatever dribs and drabs we happen to have left after that can go to putting us back on our feet. Lean times, yes, but I think we can come through them if we’re smart.”
    “Outside of a couple of panics, we haven’t had lean times before,” Tom said. “We do need better politicians than the gang we’ve got. We could use somebody who’d really lead us out of the wilderness instead of stumbling through it for forty years.”
    “Of the current crop, I’m not going to hold my breath,” Anne said. “I—” The telephone interrupted. She picked it up. “Hello?” Her mouth fell open, just a little, in surprise. “Commander Kimball! How good to hear from you. I was hoping you’d come through the war all right. Where are you now?”
    “I’m in Charleston,” Roger Kimball answered. “And what the hell is this ‘Commander Kimball’ nonsense? You know me better than that, baby.” Unlike her brother, Kimball swore whenever he felt like it and didn’t care who was listening. He not only had rough edges, he gloried in them. And he was right—she did know him intimately enough, in every sense of the word, to call him by his Christian name.
    That she could, though, didn’t mean she had to. She enjoyed keeping men off balance. “In Charleston? How nice,” she said. “I hope you can get up to St. Matthews before long. You do know my brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton, is staying with me here in town?”
You do know that, even if you get up to St. Matthews, you’re not going to make love with me right now?
    Kimball was brash. He wasn’t stupid. Anne couldn’t abide stupidity. He understood what she meant without her having to spell it out. Laughing a sour laugh, he answered, “And he’ll whale the living turpentine out of me if I put my hands where they don’t belong, will he? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but I haven’t got the jack for pleasure trips without much pleasure. I’m on the beach, same as every other submarine skipper in the whole goddamn Navy.” Where he could banter about passing on a chance to pay a social call that was only a social call, his voice showed raw pain when he told her the Navy had cut him loose.
    “I’m very sorry to hear that,” she said, and trusted him to understand she understood what grieved him most. “What are you going to do now?”
    “Don’t know yet,” Kimball said. “I may try and make a go of it here, or I may head down to South America. Plenty of navies there that could use somebody who really knows what he’s doing when he looks through a periscope.”
    That was likely to be true. The South American republics had chosen sides in the Great War as the rest of the world had done. Losers would be looking for revenge. Winners would be looking to make sure they didn’t get it.
    Anne said, “Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the very best.”
    “But not enough for you to send your brother out to hunt possums or something, eh?” Kimball laughed again. “Never mind. We’ll get another chance one of these days, I reckon. Good luck to the