Read Online Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online Page B

could defeat the police, no man in blue would be safe.
    “Next time,” somebody not far away panted, “next time we bring our own guns to the dance, by Jesus!”
    “That’s right,” somebody else said. “They want a war, we’ll give ’em a fucking war, see if we don’t.”
    All Martin wanted was to be able to work and to bring home a halfway decent wage. He didn’t think that was too much to ask. The men who ran the steel mill—the trust bosses with their top hats and diamond pinky rings, so beloved of editorial cartoonists—evidently thought otherwise. A bullet slapped into the flesh of a man close by. Martin had heard that sound too many times on too many fields to mistake it for anything else. The steelworker crumpled with a groan.
    Martin dashed around a corner. After that, he didn’t need to worry about getting shot. The people on the street weren’t striking; they were going about their ordinary business. If the cops suddenly started spraying lead through their ranks, they—or their survivors—could complain to city hall with some hope of being heard.
    It looked to be open season on picketers, though. Martin realized he was still holding the stick he’d used against the police to such good effect. As casually as he could, he let it fall to the pavement. Pulling his cap down over his eyes (and wondering how it had managed to stay on his head through the melee), he trudged down the street toward the nearest trolley stop.
    Several policemen, pistols drawn, ran past him while he stood waiting. His eyes widened; maybe he’d been wrong about how much mayhem the cops were willing to dish out to the general public. Since he didn’t do anything but stand there, they left him alone. If he’d tried to flee…He didn’t care to think what might have happened then.
    When the trolley came clanging up to the stop, he threw a nickel in the fare box and took a seat even though it was heading away from his parents’ flat, where he was staying. He rode for more than a mile, till he’d put the steel mill well behind him. When he did get off, he was only a block or so away from the county courthouse.
    Across the street from the building stood a statue of Remembrance, a smaller replica of the great one in New York harbor. Remembrance had finally brought the United States victory over the CSA. What sort of statue would have to go up before anyone recognized that the working man deserved his due? How long would it take before he did?
    Those were questions that made Martin look at Remembrance in a new way. His left arm bore a large, ugly scar, a reminder of what he’d suffered for his country’s sake. What was his country willing to do for him?
    “Shoot me again, that’s what,” he muttered. “Is that what I fought for?”
    Teddy Roosevelt made noises about caring over what happened to the ordinary working man. Martin’s brief meeting with the president in the trenches had made him think Roosevelt was sincere. He wondered what Roosevelt would say about what had happened in Toledo. That would tell whether he meant what he said.
    Martin wondered if writing him a letter would do any good. He doubted it. He knew what happened when a private wrote a general a letter: either nothing, or somebody landed on the private like a ton of bricks. Roosevelt would do what he would do, and Chester Martin’s view of the matter wouldn’t count for beans.
    “That’s not right,” he said. “That’s not fair.” But it was, he knew too well, the way the world worked.
    After a while, he took a streetcar back to his parents’ apartment building in Ottawa Hills. His younger sister, Sue, was at work; she’d landed a typist’s job after he recovered from his wound and went back to the front. His father was at work, too. That graveled him some; Stephen Douglas Martin had been a steelworker longer than Chester had been alive. He labored down the street from the plant his son was striking.
He
had a good job and a good day’s pay;