"Neither side ever wanted to fight that one all out, though," Chester said. "That's why it's winding down. It's not anything special Hoover's done."

"They haven't dropped any bombs on his head, the way they did on Blackford's," his father retorted. He wagged a finger at Chester. "Still want to go to Los Angeles after that?"

"Yes!" This time, Rita spoke up before Chester could. She sounded even hungrier for California than he was.

"Thank you, Pa, from the bottom of my heart," Chester said.

"If you get work, I may come out there myself," his father said. "Anybody who thinks I'd miss snow is crazy."

"California," Rita said again, as if she expected to pan for gold and pull nuggets the size of eggs from a clear, cold mountain stream.

"California," Chester echoed, as if he expected to go to Los Angeles and wind up a motion-picture leading man the day after he got there. He went on, "There are people who hop a freight for a chance like this." He had, every now and then, thought of being one of them. "I will pay you back, Pa. So help me God, I will."

"I told you once, I wouldn't stake you if I didn't think you were good for it," Stephen Douglas Martin answered. "Only thing I worry about is how many people will be going out there, looking for whatever they can find."

"At least there are things to find in California," Chester said. "This town is dying on its feet. I've lived here all my life, except for when I was in the Army, but I won't be sorry to say good-bye." He laughed. Sorry? He hadn't been so glad since the day the guns stopped and he realized he'd made it through the Great War alive.

AmericanEmpire: TheCenterCannotHold

A t three in the morning on an early December day when the sun wouldn't be up for hours and hours in Berlin, Ontario, Jonathan Moss thought wistfully of California or the Sandwich Islands or Florida or some other place with a halfway civilized climate. It was snowing outside. It had been snowing for a month. It would go on snowing till April, maybe May. He twisted in bed, trying to go back to sleep. Trust me to move out of Chicago for a place with worse weather, he thought. Most of the time, such musings carried wry amusement. Every so often, as tonight, they felt too much like kidding on the square.

"There," Laura said from the other bedroom. "Isn't that better?"

"Mama," Dorothy said. At not quite a year, she could say a couple of dozen words. That made her advanced for her age. She wasn't nearly advanced enough to keep from needing her diaper changed, though.

"Now lie down and go back to sleep," Laura said. The crib creaked as she put the baby back into it.

"Mama!" Dorothy wailed as her mother left her bedroom and came back to the one she shared with Jonathan. That desperate appeal failing, Dorothy started crying and screaming and making as much racket as she could.

All the books said you were supposed to let children cry themselves out when you put them to bed. After a while, they would get used to the idea that they could settle down by themselves. What the books didn't say was how you were supposed to keep from going crazy while the baby had conniptions. Earplugs might have helped, except that Jonathan had never found any good enough to keep out the noise.

His wife lay down beside him. "What are we going to do?" she said.

"How is she going to learn to go to sleep by herself if you go in there and pick her up?" he asked.

"How are we ever going to go to sleep if she screams her head off for the next two hours?" Laura returned.

Jonathan didn't have a good answer for that, because it had happened. It had happened more than once, as a matter of fact. The books said it wasn't supposed to. Dorothy hadn't read the books. She wasn't advanced enough to know how to read, either.

The next-door neighbors pounded on the wall, which meant the baby's racket had woken them up. "That does it," Laura said, and got out of bed. "I don't care what the books say. I don't want the Boardmans hating us. I'm going to rock her."

"All right." Moss didn't want to argue. He wanted to go back to sleep. And he did, as soon as the screaming stopped.

When the alarm went off a few hours later, Moss thought it was Dorothy crying again. "Turn it off, for Christ's sake!" Laura snarled. Muzzily, he did. His wife started snoring again before he left the room. He made his own coffee in the kitchen, and scrambled some eggs to go with it. Then he put on his overcoat and went downstairs to see if the Bucephalus would start.

It did. A new battery helped. As he piloted the auto to the office, he imagined he was piloting one of the fighting scouts he'd flown during the war. Aeroplanes were faster these days. One-deckers were replacing two-deckers-but then, he'd flown a one-decker, a U.S. copy of the German Fokker, through a long stretch of the war. He figured he could do it again if he ever had to.

An old Ford ran a red light and shot across his path. That was moronic any time, and all the more so with snow on the ground, when stopping was as much a matter of luck as anything else. Fortunately for Moss and the other guy, the Bucephalus did stop. Even so, he wished its headlights were twin machine guns. Then he could have given the fool in the Ford just what he deserved.

That was funny, in a way. He chuckled about it till he got to the office. But the world didn't feel so comfortable as it had a couple of years before. The sputtering war with Japan was only one sign of that. With the Action Francaise in the saddle in France, with Charles XI on the throne there and sounding fiercer every day, with the Mosley thugs a noisy minority in the British Parliament, both the German Empire and the United States, he thought, had reason to worry.

And with the Freedom Party set to take over the Confederate States, the USA had another reason to be anxious, one much closer to home. "Idiots," Moss muttered, cautiously applying the brakes at another light. "How could they have voted for that crazy blowhard?"

Actually, he knew how, or thought he did. The Confederates didn't just want to put their own house in order. Like the French, they wanted revenge for what had happened to them during the Great War. Of course, the French had friends. Little by little, Russia was shaking off the trauma of the war and the endless Red uprising afterwards-an uprising that made the Red revolt in the CSA seem a walk in the park by comparison. And England wanted another crack at Kaiser Bill… and, no doubt, at the United States as well.

A patrol of men wearing green-gray and carrying Springfields tramped past Moss' building as he parked the Bucephalus. That reminded him he was in a land-not a country any more-that also despised his nation. His very shingle reminded him of the same thing. JONATHAN MOSS, it said. OCCUPATION LAW.

He got out of the auto. He was laughing again as he went into the office, not that it was any too funny. Not a day went by when his marriage didn't remind him he was in a land that despised his nation.

At least we're occupying a place without all that many people, he thought. The Germans would have needed to put half their men in France to keep an eye on all the frogs who hate them. That was probably why they'd let the Action Francaise get off the ground: till too late, they hadn't seen it as a real threat. And now King Charles is talking about rearming. I'm sure the Kaiser loves that. But would he start another war to stop it? He's an old man now.

President-elect Featherston also made loud noises about rearming. Moss wished he hadn't remembered that, not least since no one in the USA seemed much inclined to stop him.

Moss turned the key in his door, turned on the lamp in his office, and turned the knob on the steam radiator to make the place feel as if it was at least a little south of the Arctic Circle. That done, he plugged in a hot plate and got a pot of coffee perking. It would be black, oily sludge by this afternoon. He knew that. He knew he'd go on drinking it anyway, too.