Julius Lemp smiled. It wasn’t that he thought the sailor was wrong. On the contrary. He was a U-boat man himself, after all, not a surface puke. He remembered how horribly out of place he’d felt when Captain Patzig summoned him to the bridge of the Admiral Scheer. Aboard the U-30, he was lord of all he surveyed. On the pocket battleship, he felt like a poor relation, and a damn scruffy poor relation at that, even if he’d put on his best clothes for the visit.
“Skipper?” said the man who’d spotted the mine.
“Eh?” Lemp came back to the here-and-now. “What is it, Sievert?”
“Was that a Russian mine, or one of ours?”
“I don’t know,” Lemp replied after a moment’s thought. “Considering where we are, it could be either. I sure couldn’t tell through field glasses. And I’ve heard the Ivans just copied our model when they started making their own mines, so there might not have been much to tell from.”
“You couldn’t read the ‘Made in Moscow’ plate bolted to the shell, eh?” Sievert asked with a grin.
“Er-no.” Lemp managed a chuckle of his own, even if it took some effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but the poor thing did suffer from lack of exercise.
“Well, it won’t take us out, and it won’t take any of our surface ships out, and we’ll do for any Russian ships we come across,” the rating said.
“That’s right.” Lemp nodded. No jokes lurking in the underbrush there. He felt relieved.
The watchers on the conning tower had gone on scanning sea and sky even while the gun crew played with its big, loud toy. Lemp would have been furious had they let the fireworks distract them. In the Baltic’s close confines, trouble was never far away. It could land on you all too fast even when you were lucky enough to spot it before it showed up. If you didn’t… If you didn’t, some flying-boat crew would go home to paint a U-boat silhouette on the side of their fuselage and then fly off to look for more unwary Germans.
I should have paid more attention, too, Lemp thought. He made a quick scan himself, first with the naked eye and then sweeping his binoculars through a quadrant of the sky. Nothing. His breath smoked as he sighed with gratitude aimed at a God Who didn’t listen enough. He remembered the horror that had coursed through him when he’d spotted a small silver speck in the sky not too long before. He’d been about to shout for a crash dive before he realized the planet Venus probably wouldn’t strafe the U-30.
He made a more careful scan of the sea, looking for periscopes. No matter how much the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe harried them, Red Fleet U-boats did get out into the Baltic. Ending up on the wrong end of one of their eels would be embarrassing, to say the least.
Again, nothing. His boat might have had the sea all to itself. He was master of everything he surveyed: gray water and gray sky. A gull winging its way south didn’t acknowledge his supremacy. Gulls never did. They were an ill-bred lot, scroungers and scavengers and ne’er-do-wells. They were quite a bit like submariners, in other words.
His nose flinched when he had to lay below after his watch ended. He logged the incident with the mine. His script was tiny, cramped, and precise. Things could have been better: he might have sunk a Russian battleship. But they could also have been worse: nothing at all might have happened on his watch. Or no one might have spotted an approaching enemy U-boat. He wouldn’t have had to log anything then: he would have been a trifle too dead. The one small detail aside, he couldn’t see anything to like about that.
FDR was coming to Philadelphia. The election was only a few days away. Four more years? Peggy Druce hoped so. At least, she supposed she hoped so. Everything in the world seemed to have turned inside out and upside down since England and France did their spectacular back-flip with Germany.
Before the big switch, Roosevelt had sent England and France as many planes and guns as American factories could crank out, along with a whole fleet of destroyers he said the United States didn’t need any more. Wendell Willkie, the latest Republican to try to boot FDR out of the White House, hadn’t yelled at him for that. He’d yelled at the President for not doing more and not doing it faster. A bunch of Republicans were isolationists, but not Willkie.
Trouble was, all of a sudden isolationism looked a lot better than it had even a few weeks earlier. If England and France were on Hitler’s side against Russia, they weren’t using the American guns and planes and ships against the Fuhrer, the way FDR had had in mind. Nobody in Washington was (or, at least, admitted to being) in love with Stalin, but nobody much wanted to see all those weapons turned against him, either.
Willkie’s trouble was, he agreed too much with Roosevelt. He was Tweedledum complaining about Tweedledee. After the big switch, some Republicans tried to boot him off the ticket and run somebody more in line with how they figured the party ought to think. Their only problem was, they settled on Alf Landon again: a man only a diehard isolationist Republican could love. (And even then, remembering how FDR had trounced him in 1936, it wasn’t easy.) Landon’s campaign mostly amounted to I told you so. He himself had no hope of winning. The more votes he stole from Willkie, the easier the time FDR would have.
“You ready?” Herb called to Peggy. “The rally starts at half past seven.”
“Just about.” Peggy patted each cheek with a powder puff one more time. Looking in the mirror made her sigh. It would have to do, but it was a long way from perfect. Well, too goddamn bad, she thought. She was a long way from perfect. Perfect would have been twenty-five-twenty-nine, tops.
They drove down into the city. Blazing street lamps and headlights and neon signs reminded Peggy she wasn’t in Europe any more. She supposed they’d lifted the blackout in London and Paris. People there were probably happy as could be. You could buy happiness, all right-as long as you didn’t care what you paid for it.
A valet-a kid, maybe still in high school, maybe just out-took charge of Herb’s Packard in the parking lot. As Herb tipped him, Peggy reflected that he would be wearing a different kind of uniform on the other side of the Atlantic. The USA didn’t know how lucky it was.
At the Arena on Market Street, Herb confidently said, “Druce-that’s D-R-U-C-E,” to an important-looking fellow with a clipboard.
The man ran his finger down a typed list. The moving finger suddenly stopped. “Oh, yes, sir!” he said, and then, to a younger fellow standing behind him, “Eddie, take Mr. and Mrs. Druce down front. Make sure they’ve got good seats.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Terwilliger,” Eddie said. “Come with me, folks.”
They couldn’t have got better seats unless he put them up on the podium. Peggy recognized most of the big shots who were sitting up there: Pennsylvania politicos and union leaders. Herb was neither, for which she thanked heaven.
He seemed happy enough with where Eddie put them. Peggy also recognized quite a few of the couples sitting near them. The men of the family were doctors, lawyers, accountants. Clothes and double chins said they’d done well for themselves. Several couples were obviously Jewish. Remembering what she’d seen in Czechoslovakia and Germany, Peggy felt better about being here because of that.
Senator Guffey introduced the President. He spent a few minutes laying into the Republicans before he did. If you listened to him, the Republicans had their nerve for running anybody at all against FDR, and even more nerve for trying to run two people. “The Donkey is always the Donkey,” he said, “but over there it’s like 1912 all over again. They’ve got the Elephant and the Bull-Something.”
Peggy joined the laugh. She was old enough to remember 1912. Taft had run as a regular Republican, and Teddy Roosevelt (FDR’s distant cousin) on the Progressive or Bull Moose ticket. Nobody in his right mind would call starchy, upright Alf Landon a Bull Moose. Guffey had to be thinking of something more like Bullshit.