The Victorious Opposition by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

smaller basket inside the big one, cushioning them with straw. She didn’t go back to the house right after that. Instead, she walked over to an old iron-tired wagon wheel that had been lying there since the Great War, maybe even since before it started. The iron, by now, was red and rough with rust. It rasped against her palms—which were softer than they had been—as she shoved the wheel aside.
    Mary scraped aside the dirt under it, and lifted a board under the dirt. The board concealed a hole in the ground her father had dug. In it lay his bomb-making tools, the tools the Yanks had never found. She scooped up sticks of dynamite, blasting caps, fuses, crimpers, needle-nosed pliers, and other bits of specialized ironmongery, and put them in the basket.
    She was just replacing the wheel over the now-empty hole when her nephew Anthony charged into the barn. “What you doing, Aunt Mary?” he asked.
    “I was squashing a spider that had a web under there,” she lied smoothly. Anth made a horrible face. She made as if to clop him with the picnic basket. He fled, giggling. She went out to the car and put the basket in the trunk.

II
    S aul Goldman was a fussy little fellow, but good at what he did. “Everything’s ready now, Mr. President,” he said. “Newsreel photographers, newspaper photographers, and the wireless web connection. By this time tomorrow, everyone in the Confederate States will know you’ve signed this bill.”
    “Thanks, Saul,” Jake Featherston said with a warm smile, and the little Jew blossomed under the praise. Jake knew Goldman was exaggerating. But he wasn’t exaggerating by much. The people who
needed
to know he was signing the bill would hear about it, and that was what mattered.
    At a gesture from the communications chief, klieg lights came on in the main office of the Gray House. Featherston smiled at the camera. “Hello, friends,” he said into the microphone in front of him. “I’m Jake Featherston. Just like always, I’m here to tell you the truth. And the truth is, this bill I’m signing today is one of the most important laws we’ve ever made in the Confederate States of America.”
    He inked a pen and signed on the waiting line. Flashbulbs popped as the photographers did their job. Jake looked up at the newsreel camera again. “We’ve had too many floods on our big rivers,” he said. “The one in 1927 came close to drowning the middle of the country. Enough is enough, I say. We’re going to build dams and levees and make sure it doesn’t happen again. We’ll use the electricity from the dams, too, for factories and for people. We’ve needed a law like this for years, and now, thanks to the Freedom Party, we’ve got it.”
    “Mr. President?” A carefully prompted reporter from a Party paper stuck his hand in the air. “Ask you a question, Mr. President?”
    “Go right ahead, Delmer.” Featherston was calm, casual, at his ease.
    “Thank you, sir,” Delmer said. “What about Article One, Section Eight, Part Three of the Constitution, sir? You know, the part that says you can’t make internal improvements on rivers unless you aid navigation? Dams don’t do that, do they?”
    “Well, no, but they do lots of other things the country needs,” Jake answered.
    “But won’t the Supreme Court say this law is unconstitutional?” the reporter asked.
    Featherston looked into the cameras as if looking at a target over open sights. He had a long, lean face, a face people remembered if not one conventionally handsome. “Tell you what, Delmer,” he said. “If the Supreme Court wants to put splitting hairs ahead of what’s good for the country, it can go right ahead. But if it does, I won’t be the one who’s sorry in the end. Those fools in black robes will be, and you can count on that.”
    He took no other questions. He’d said everything he had to say. The microphones went off. The bright lights faded. He leaned back in his swivel chair. It creaked. Saul Goldman