Chester laughed, too, and passed the bowl. "Talking to you and Mother, I sound like a Socialist. When I talk to people down at the Socialist hall, I sound like a Democrat half the time. I've noticed that before. I'm stuck in the middle, you might say."

"People who can see both sides of the question usually are," his mother told him. "It's not the worst place in the world to be."

Sue Martin looked curiously at Chester. "With that Purple Heart in your bedroom, I'd think you'd be the last one to want to let the Confederates up off the floor."

He shrugged. "Like Mother says, maybe it's time for the war to be over and done with. Besides, the one thing I don't want to do is have to fight those… so-and-so's again." Talking about a new war almost made him slip back into the foul language of the trenches. "If they can settle down because they're not paying reparations any more, that might not be too bad."

"You make good sense, son," Stephen Douglas Martin said. His wife nodded. After a moment, so did Sue. Martin's father went on, "Now, what are the odds that anybody in Congress would know common sense if it flew around Philadelphia in an aeroplane?"

"There's a Socialist majority," Martin said. But that didn't prove anything, and he knew it. "We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"

Out of the blue, Sue asked, "How do you think that Congresswoman you met would vote? You know the one I mean-the one whose brother got wounded while he was in your squad?"

"Flora Hamburger," Martin said. "Yeah, sure, I know who you mean. That's a good question. She usually does what's right. I don't really know. We'll have to keep watching the newspapers, I guess."

"Flora Hamburger." Louisa Martin snapped her fingers. "I know where I saw that name. She's the one who got engaged to the vice president a little while ago." She looked from her son to her daughter and back again, as if to say getting engaged would satisfy her: catching a vice president was unnecessary.

"Mother," Sue said in warning tones.

"She's just giving you a rough time," Martin said. That got his sister and his mother both glaring at him. He forked up some peas, freshly conscious of the dangers peacemakers faced when they stepped between warring factions.

When Chester looked up from the peas, he found his father eyeing him with more than a little amusement. Stephen Douglas Martin had the good sense to stay out of a quarrel he couldn't hope to influence.

Over the next few days, the debate about reparations stayed in the newspapers, along with the reprisals the Army was taking against the perennially rebellious Mormons in Utah. The collision of two aeroplanes carrying mail elbowed both those stories out of the headlines for a little while, but the excitement about the crash died quickly-though not so quickly as the two luckless pilots had.

When Flora Hamburger came out in favor of ending reprisals, the papers carried the news on the front page. "Conscience of the Congress says yes!" newsboys shouted. "Reparations repeal seen as likely!"

Martin was less impressed with the announcement than he would have been before Congresswoman Hamburger got engaged to Vice President Blackford. In a way, that made her part of the administration proposing the new policy. But then again, from what he knew of her, she wasn't so easy to influence. Maybe she was speaking her mind after all.

"I think the bill will pass now. I hope it works out for the best, that's all," Martin said when Sue asked him about it that night over oxtail soup. "Can't know till it happens."

"When you do something, you can't know ahead of time what will come of it," his father said. ^Politicians will tell you they do. but they don't. Sometimes, you just go ahead and do things and see where they lead."

"That's how the war happened," Martin said. "Nobody imagined it would be so bad when it started. When it started, people cheered. But we locked horns with the Rebs and the Canucks, and for the longest time nobody could go forward or back. I hope this doesn't go wrong the same way, that's all."

"Sometimes being afraid of what could go wrong is a good reason not to do anything," Stephen Douglas Martin observed.

"You're a Democrat, all right," Chester said.

"Well, so I am," his father agreed. "Upton Sinclair's been in for more than a year now, and I'm switched if I can see how he's set the world on fire."

Louisa Martin said, "We already set the world on fire once, not very long ago. Isn't that enough for you, Stephen?"

"Well, maybe it is, when you put it like that," her husband said. "If letting the Confederates off the hook means we don't have to fight another war, I suppose I'm for it. But if they start spending the money they would have given us on guns and such, that'll cause trouble like you wouldn't believe." He raised his mug of beer. "Here's hoping they've learned their lesson." He sipped the suds.

"Here's hoping," Chester Martin echoed. He drank, too. So did his mother and sister.

Roger Kimball was drunk. He'd been drunk a lot of the time since Grady Calkins shot President Wade Hampton V Staring down into his glass of whiskey, he muttered, "Stupid bastard. Stupid fucking bastard." Calkins might as well have taken his Tredegar and shot the Freedom Party right between the eyes.

The whiskey, Kimball decided, was staring back at him. He drank it down so it wouldn't do that any more. Any old excuse in a storm, he thought. He poured himself a fresh glass. Maybe this one would be more polite. Whether it was or not, he'd drink it.

He did a lot of his own pouring these days. Too many people recognized him on the streets and in the saloons of Charleston. A few weeks before, a lot of those people would have greeted him with a wave and a cheery call of "Freedom!" Now they glared. Sometimes they cursed. One man had threatened to kill him if he saw him again. Kimball wasn't too alarmed-he knew how to take care of himself-but he spent more time in his flat than he had.

That meant his bankroll shrank with every day's inflation. He didn't get into so many card games as he had, which was too damn bad, because they'd been what kept him afloat. Without them, the millions that paid the rent one week bought a sandwich the next week, a cigar the week after that, and were good only as pretty paper the week after that.

"God damn Grady Calkins," he said, and drank some of the polite whiskey. It wasn't fair. The more whiskey he drank, the more obviously it wasn't fair. The Freedom Party still stood for exactly the same things as it had before the madman shot the president. Kimball still thought those things were as important as he had then. A couple of weeks before, people had applauded him and applauded Jake Featherston. Now they wouldn't give the Freedom Party the time of day. Where was the justice in that?

Tears came into his eyes, a drunk's easy tears. One rolled down his cheek-or maybe that was just a drop of sweat. Charleston in the summer, even early in the summer, taught a man everything he needed to know about sweating and then some.

Kimball knocked back the rest of his drink. At last, instead of leaving him furious or maudlin, it did what he wanted it to do: it hit him over the head like a rock. He staggered into the bedroom, took off his shoes, lay down diagonally across the bed, and passed out before he could undress.

Sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window woke him the next morning. It seemed so hot, so bright, so molten, he thought for a moment he'd died and gone to hell. He squinted his eyes down to narrow slits so he could come close to bearing the glare. When he rolled away from it, his head pounded like a sub-mersible's diesel running at full throttle.

His mouth tasted as if too many people had stubbed out too many cigars in there. Greasy sweat bathed his body from aching head to stockinged feet. He thought about getting up and taking a small nip to ease the worst of the pain, but his stomach did a slow, horrified loop at the mere idea.