Harry Turtledove - Fallout

The town hall had gone up in the 1880s. It was brick and granite, built with smug Victorian confidence that it would still be an important place two hundred years from when it went up. Back then, the British Empire had been the unchallenged, the unchallengeable, mistress of the world. Here it was, only a lifetime later, and the Empire was a tattered ruin of its grander self. The home country, still in the grip of crippling austerity after the last war, had been hit again, harder, by this new one.

People nowadays laughed at how smug and certain their grandparents had been. No one now was certain about anything-and how could you be, when the town where you lived might get seared out of existence in the next moment? But that sureness that their achievements would last forever made Daisy envy her ancestors…and also made her want to weep at the foundering of all their hopes.

Inside the hall, signs with arrows directed people to where they needed to go. By now, she knew which window to visit without resorting to them. The window had a newly printed sign held in place above it by sticky tape: FAKENHAM SURVIVOR BENEFITS. This was where the government gave what it could spare to the townsfolk the Russians hadn’t managed to murder with their atom bomb.

The clerk looked up from a form he’d been filling in. “Ah, Mrs. Baxter,” he said. “How are you this morning?” His smile and something in his voice told her he liked the way she looked.

She smiled back, not quite with the same warmth. He was polite, which made his regard more a compliment than an annoyance. She wanted to keep it that way. “I’m fine, Mr. Jarvis, thanks,” she said. “And you?”

“I’m very well, very well indeed,” he replied. “You’ve come for the weekly allotment?”

“That’s right.” She wondered why else she or anyone else would come to this tan-painted, poorly lit corridor. Unless you had to be here, you’d stay as far away as you could.

“Here you are.” He handed her an envelope. She looked inside to make sure the money the state said she was entitled to was in there. When she saw it was, she signed the line on the allotment roster that also held her typewritten name. She turned to go, but Mr. Jarvis said, “Wait a moment, please.”

“Yes?” Now she didn’t sound one bit warm. Was he going to prove a bother after all?

But all he did was hand her another envelope. “This came in for you yesterday. As you’ll know, the post to Fakenham has been, ah, rather badly disrupted since the, ah, unfortunate incident.”

“The A-bomb, you mean,” she said. Government officials thought they could hide the mushroom cloud behind a thicker cloud of meaningless words.

“Well, yes.” Mr. Jarvis didn’t care to admit it but couldn’t very well deny it.

“Thank you very much,” she said, giving him credit for admitting it and more because he wasn’t in fact trying to urge himself on her.

Sure enough, the envelope had gone to the Owl and Unicorn’s address in ruined Fakenham. It was from her insurance company. Bloody took them long enough, she thought as she opened it.

It has come to our attention that the property at the above-mentioned address may have been adversely affected by the unfortunate events of 11 September 1951, she read. A soft snort escaped her. The insurers talked as if they wanted to be bureaucrats. She waded through a couple of paragraphs of turgid drivel before she got to the meat. As acts of war and acts of God are specifically disallowed under the provisions of Clause 6.2.3.a.3 of your policy, we regret to inform you that we have no financial obligation in the matter of damages suffered on or about the above-mentioned date in regard to the unfortunate events thereof.

A scribbled signature followed. She read it again. No financial obligation. Yes, it still said the same thing. No, she hadn’t read it wrong. They weren’t going to pay. She only wished she were less surprised. Insurance companies were there for themselves first and you only later, if at all. They were very good at taking in premiums. Sending money the other way? That, they weren’t so happy about.

She knew what Bruce would say if she showed him the letter. He’d note the London address and offer to make a special bombing run for her. He couldn’t do it, but the offer would be nice. Unless the government did more for her and her townsfolk than it had so far, the offer would be all she got.

What the company said might be legal, but it hardly seemed fair. She’d just had her pub in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was that enough to ruin her for life? The insurance outfit thought so.

With sudden startling clarity, she realized letters like hers were how the Bolsheviks got started. When the ones above you didn’t give a damn about what happened to you, what did you do? You got rid of them. Good God! I’ve just turned Red myself, Daisy thought-proudly.

–

Harry Truman had eaten rubber chicken at more political dinners than he could remember, let alone count. Sometimes it was good rubber chicken. The fried drumsticks he’d had in Kentucky on his 1948 reelection campaign he did still remember, and fondly. The stuff he’d downed in Reno on that same campaign he also recalled, but not so happily. He’d had the trots for most of a week after that banquet.

What was on his plate here in Buffalo tonight wouldn’t go down in either of those columns. He could eat it. It wasn’t interesting. If it had been a baseball player, it would have been a backup infielder with a decent glove who hit .250 but had no power. Serviceable. Not memorable.

A local politico named Steven Pankow stood up to introduce him. Pankow aspired to be mayor of Buffalo after the next election. He might well make it. He had the self-confidence, the glibness, and the money he’d acquired from a successful career selling cars.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great privilege to present to you the President of the United States, Mr. Harry S Truman,” he said from the lectern. He also had a slight Polish accent, which in this part of the country was in itself a political asset of sorts.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Pankow,” Truman said as he walked to the lectern. Then he said it again into the mike. He got a warm hand from the crowd of dignitaries and other prosperous upstate Democrats. Applause never went stale. He went on, “Thank you all for coming to the museum today to take a look at the dinosaur.”

That won him a laugh, maybe a bigger one than the joke deserved. But many a truth was spoken in jest. He’d volunteered for his own political extinction, but he would have been pushed if he hadn’t jumped.

“The cast always changes, but the show goes on,” he said. “It has to. We need to elect as many Democrats as we can in November, from the top of the ticket all the way down, to make sure the so-and-sos on the other side do as little damage as possible. The way things look, the Republicans seem to be running on the slogan ‘Throw the rascals in !’?”

He got another laugh for what looked like another jesting truth. The real problem, or what looked like the real problem to Truman and the rest of the pols in the room, was that the Republicans were all too likely to throw their rascals in and the ones who were Democrats out.

“We’ve held the White House and Congress for the past twenty years,” Truman went on. “Oh, the Republicans took Congress a few years ago, but they made such a do-nothing mess of it, the people made them give it back two years later.”

They blistered their palms clapping for that. Had the President been in the audience instead of giving the speech, he would have clapped, too. He’d won the tag Give ’Em Hell Harry not least by tearing into the Republican-led Congress when he was running for his own term in 1948. That had gone a long way toward giving him the election.