"Let me see your paperwork," the man in the white coat said. Armstrong got a glimpse of a couple of pages, too. Just about everything was blank. The man in charge of the test frowned. "You're illiterate?" Seeing the puzzled look on the young man's face, he tried again: "You can't read and write?"
" 'Fraid not," the youth said. "I can sign my name. That's about the size of it."
"Didn't you go to school?"
"A couple years. I never was much good, though. I been workin' ever since."
"Well, uh, Slaughter, no matter how good a name you've got for a soldier, you need to be able to read and write to enter the Army. You're not even in the right place in line. You'll be excused from conscription. I don't know if your exclusion will be permanent or if they'll class you as fit for service in an emergency. But we won't take you now." He glanced towards Armstrong Grimes. "Next!"
Armstrong thought about pretending he couldn't read, too. Too late, though-he'd already filled out his paperwork and done it right. He stepped up to the line and went down the chart as far as he could, switching eyes when the man in the white coat told him to.
"Give me your papers," the man said, then nodded. "You've passed here. Proceed to the next station."
He saw even more guys in white coats than he had at the Polish sausage works where he'd tried to get a job. They measured and weighed him. One of them listened to his heart. Another one took his blood pressure. Another one- this one with a brand new pair of rubber gloves-told him to drop his pants, turn his head to one side, and cough. As he did, the man grabbed him in some highly intimate places. "No rupture," he said, and wrote on Armstrong's papers. "Now bend over and grab your ankles."
"What?" Armstrong said in alarm. "You're not going to-"
But the man in the white coat was already doing it. That was a lot less pleasant than being told to turn his head and cough. "Prostate gland normal," the man said. He took off the gloves and tossed them into a corrugated-iron trash can. Then he wrote on the papers again. As soon as he gave them back, he started putting on a fresh pair of gloves.
"You must go through a lot of those," Armstrong said. He pulled up his pants in a hurry, still stinging a little.
"You bet I do, sonny," the man in the white coat agreed. "All things considered, would you rather I didn't?" Armstrong hastily shook his head. "Well, neither would I," the man said. "Go on to the next station."
They drew blood there. A big, strapping fellow passed out just as Armstrong arrived. The fellow with the hypodermic syringe put it down in a hurry and managed to keep the big young man from banging his head on the floor. He dragged him off to one side and glared at Armstrong. "You're not going to faint on me, are you? This guy was the third one today. Roll up your sleeve."
"I don't think I am," Armstrong said. "What do you need to do this for, anyway?"
"See if you're anemic. See if you've got a social disease. See what your blood group is for transfusions. Hold still, now." The man swabbed the inside of his elbow with alcohol. The needle bit. Armstrong looked away as the syringe filled with blood. He felt a little queasy, but only a little. The man yanked out the needle, stuck a piece of cotton fluff on the puncture, and slapped adhesive tape over it. He wrote on Armstrong's papers. "That's it. You're done."
"Did I pass?" Armstrong asked.
"Unless you're anemic as hell or you've got syphilis, you did," the man replied. "You're healthy as a horse. You'll make a hell of a soldier."
"Oh, boy," Armstrong said.
XVI
"He's kept us out of war." Flora Blackford repeated the Socialist Party slogan to a street-corner crowd in her district. "He's kept us out of war, and he's done everything he could to keep food on the working man's table. If you want to see what the Democrats will do about that, look at what Herbert Hoover did. Nothing, that's what."
People in the mostly proletarian crowd clapped their hands. A sprinkling of hecklers at the back started a chant: "Taft! Taft! Robert Taft!"
Flora pointed at them. "I served in Congress with Senator Taft's father. William Howard Taft was an honorable man. So is Robert Taft. I don't say any differently. But I do say this: Senator Taft would be horrified at the way his supporters are bringing Freedom Party tactics into this campaign."
That got more applause. Next to nobody in this strongly Socialist district had a good word to say about Jake Featherston's gang. But one of the hecklers yelled, "Al Smith's the one who's in bed with the Freedom Party!"
"Al Smith is against war. I am against war. I had a brother-in-law killed and a brother badly wounded in the Great War," Flora said. "If you are going to tell me you are for war-if you are going to tell me Senator Taft is for war-you will have a hard time selling that to the people of this district."
"Taft is for keeping Kentucky and Houston," the heckler called.
"How can you keep a state in the country when its own people don't want to be here?" Flora asked. "That was the lesson of the War of Secession-you can't. Some things you can buy at too high a price."
The crowd applauded again, but less enthusiastically than before. Flora understood why: they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too; to have peace and to hold on to Kentucky and Houston. She wanted the same thing. She understood the people who said the USA had sacrificed too much even to think about giving back the two states. At least half the time, she felt that way herself. She would have liked the idea much better if it didn't involve giving them back to Jake Featherston.
"I don't love the Freedom Party," she said. "But it is in power in the Confederate States, and we can't very well pretend it isn't and hope it will go away. What can we do if we don't try to deal with it?" She was trying to convince herself as well as her audience, and she knew it.
"I'd sock it in the nose!" that iron-lunged heckler yelled. "Taft will sock it in the nose!"
"No, he won't." Flora shook her head. "If he does, he'll have a war on his hands, and I can't believe he wants one. He may talk tough, but his foreign policy won't look much different from President Smith's. And his domestic policy…" She rolled her eyes. "He grows like an onion-with his head in the ground." She said it in English. Some of the people her age and older in the crowd echoed it in Yiddish.
She managed to get through the rest of her speech without too much harassment. She had a pretty good idea why, too: the Democrats didn't think they could beat her. She'd never lost an election in this district. The Democrats had elected a candidate here while she was First Lady, but she'd trounced him as soon as she returned to the hustings.
At the end, she said, "If you're in favor of what President Smith has done, you'll vote for him again, and you'll vote for me. If you're not, you'll vote for Taft. It's about that simple, my friends. Forward with Smith or back with Taft?"
She stepped down from the platform with applause ringing in her ears. When she'd started agitating for the Socialists, she hadn't had a platform-not a real one. She'd made her first few speeches standing on crates or beer barrels. She was right around the corner from the Croton Brewery, where she'd spoken at the outbreak of the Great War. She'd opposed war then; she still did. In 1914, her party hadn't gone along with her. This year, it did.
Why aren't I happier, then? she wondered.
In 1914, the Confederate States hadn't been that different from the United States. Most of the oppressed proletariat in the CSA had been black, but capitalists had oppressed workers almost as savagely in the USA. Now… Things were different now.