To drive her crazy, returns from Pennsylvania started coming in before any from New York. Those showed the race there neck and neck. How many people in western Pennsylvania were blaming the Socialists for the Confederate invasion two years earlier? Flora thought that would have happened regardless of who was running the country at the time, but she could see how others might see things a different way.

"Here is some of the early tally from New York," the newsman said. Everybody yelled for everybody else to hush. "These results show Governor Dewey with 147,461 votes to President La Follette's 128,889. In the race for Senator-"

"Where are they coming from?" This time, Bruck wasn't the only one to ask the question. Several people shouted it at the same time. The newscaster? He went blithely on to results from West Virginia.

"I'll find out," Herman Bruck said, and got on the telephone with the canvassing headquarters downtown. When he hung up, he might have been a balloon that had sprung a slow leak.

"What's the matter?" Flora asked, seeing his face.

"Those are city returns, not upstate," he answered. The news felt like a blow in the belly to Flora. New York political battles centered on whether Socialist New York City could outvote the Democratic hinterland. If New York City leaned Democratic…

If New York City leaned that way, it was liable to be a long, unhappy night.

And it was. The air in Socialist district headquarters went blue with tobacco smoke, and bluer with profanity. State after state fell to the Democrats. The Republican candidate, the energetic young Governor of Minnesota, stole his home state and Wisconsin from the Socialists in three-cornered races, and also took traditional Republican strongholds like Indiana and Kansas.

Flora held her own seat. Her margin was down from the last election, but she still won upwards of fifty-five percent of the vote. All the same…"I don't think we're going to do it," she said somewhere around one in the morning.

"How could they be so ungrateful?" Herman Bruck said. "We won the war for them. What more could they want?"

A country too strong for the Confederates even to think of attacking, that's what. Flora looked around in the gloomy, smoky headquarters. No, the ghost of Robert Taft wasn't sitting right behind her. But it might as well have been. The old Democratic stalwart had an answer for the Socialist cri de coeur.

After another hour, the newsman said, "Governor Dewey and Senator Truman are going to claim victory."

The Vice President-elect spoke first. His high, twangy voice full of good humor, he said, "I'm holding in my hands a copy of the Chicago Tribune. The headline reads, LA FOLLETTE BEATS DEWEY! I don't know where they got that headline from, but tonight Tom Dewey and the Democratic Party are winners!" Cheers interrupted him. He went on, "And tonight the American people are winners, too!" More cheers. "It is now my privilege to introduce the new President of the United States, Tom Dewey!"

"Thank you, Harry," the President-elect said. "I am humbled and honored to be chosen to lead the United States in these tense and trying times. I call on all people-Democrats, Socialists, and Republicans-to unite behind me to bind up the wounds of war and help guide the country into an era of peace and one of renewed prosperity and hope."

Applause almost drowned him out. He said all the right things. Charlie La Follette could have used his speech without changing more than a couple of words. Flora would rather have heard it from La Follette than Dewey.

La Follette had gone back to Wisconsin to vote. He didn't even carry his home state. A few minutes after the Democrats, he came on the wireless. "The people have spoken," he said. "I congratulate Governor Dewey-President-elect Dewey, as he is now-and wish him the best of luck in the next four years. I did not expect to be President of the United States during the most profound crisis of the twentieth century. Under Jake Featherston, the Confederate States aimed not merely at beating us but at crushing us and subjecting us so we could never rise again. Instead, we triumphed in the hardest war ever fought on this blood-soaked continent.

"Perhaps we did not do everything as well as we might have. That is easier to see in hindsight than it was through foresight. But the people have called us to account for it, as is their right. May the new President fare well in ruling the territories we have gained, and in the complex field of international relations. With superbombs, everyone is suddenly everyone else's nearest neighbor. I will serve President Dewey in whatever capacity he may find useful, or in none if that be his pleasure. Serving the people of the United States has been the greatest privilege of my life. Thank you, God bless you, and good night."

"That was Charles La Follette, the outgoing President of the United States," the announcer said unnecessarily.

"A good good-bye," Herman Bruck said as the wireless started catching up on races that remained close.

"I wanted a good victory speech, dammit," Flora said. All through the crowded Socialist headquarters, heads bobbed up and down.

"Changeover time," Maria Tresca remarked, and it would be. It looked as if the Democrats would also capture the House, though the Senate would stay in Socialist hands. But an earthquake would hit the executive branch. Since 1920, only Herbert Hoover's single term had broken the Socialists' hold on the Presidency. Lots of new and untested officials would try out lots of new and untested policies.

Flora might have been in line to chair the House Judiciary Committee. Not now. Back to the minority. That hadn't happened very often since the end of the Great War. If the Democrats proposed foolish laws now that they ruled the roost, she would do her best to keep them from passing.

"Why are the people so ungrateful?" Bruck wondered out loud.

"There's a story," Maria said. "Back in the days when Athens held ostracisms to get rid of politicians they didn't like, an illiterate citizen who didn't recognize Aristides the Just came up to him and asked him to write 'Aristides' on a potsherd. He did, but he asked why. The man answered, 'I'm tired of hearing him called "the Just." ' And that's what happened to us, or something like it."

Flora found herself nodding. She said, "Still, it's a shame to run on a platform where the main plank is 'Throw the rascals in.'"

She got a laugh. If it was tinged with bitterness-well, why wouldn't it be? She thought the Socialists deserved better than they'd got from the people, too. No matter what she thought, though, she couldn't do anything about it. Every so often, the government turned over. The world wouldn't end. The country wouldn't go down the drain-even if the party in power always tried to make the voters think it would if the opposition won.

She'd lost a brother-in-law to war. Her own brother had lost a leg. Her son lost only a finger. Other than that, Joshua was fine, and it wouldn't much affect the rest of his life. Next to important things like that, how much did elections really matter?

A ll the arguing was over. Jonathan Moss had done everything he could. He'd tried his damnedest to convince the U.S. military court that Jefferson Pinkard had followed his own superiors' legal orders when he ran his extermination camps in Louisiana and Texas. He'd done his best to persuade them that the USA had no jurisdiction over what the Confederates did to their own people.

Now the military judges were deliberating. Pinkard sat in the courtroom, large and blocky and stolid. Only the way his jaw worked on some chewing gum showed he might be nervous.

"You gave it everything you had," he told Moss. "I thought that Jew who got hurt was hot stuff, but you're good, too. Don't reckon he could've pulled any rabbits out of the hat that you didn't."