'What can you do about a government that hates you if a majority voted it into office?'
'Get ready to fight,' Morrell answered. 'That's what we're doing here.'
'How soon before we have a real barrel with specifications based on the experimental model here?' Sergeant Pound asked, taking the carburetor out of the carbon tetrachloride and setting it down on a rag.
'They're saying six or eight months in Pontiac,' Morrell replied. 'That's what they're saying, but I'll believe it when I see it. Bet on a year, maybe longer.'
'Disgraceful,' Pound said. 'So much time not even frittered away- thrown away, for heaven's sake.' He rubbed the carburetor with the rag, then passed it to Morrell. 'This thing is better, though. I think it's really clean now, clean enough to work the way it's supposed to.'
'I hope you're right,' Morrell said. 'Put it back in the engine, Sergeant. We'll gas up the beast and see if it runs.'
'Right, sir.' Pound opened the louvers on the engine compartment-one improvement over Great War barrels the experimental model did boast was a separate engine compartment, which drastically reduced noise and noxious fumes for the crew. As Pound turned a wrench, he went on, 'You know, we really ought to have a diesel engine in here, not one fueled by gasoline. A fire starts, gasoline goes up like a bomb. Diesel fuel just burns quietly. The men in the fighting compartment have a much better chance to get away.'
'That's a good idea,' Morrell said. Pound was full of ideas, good, bad, and indifferent. 'Model after next, we ought to think about incorporating it.' He pulled a notebook from his breast pocket and scribbled a few lines so the idea wouldn't be lost.
'Why waste time, sir?' Sergeant Pound asked. 'Why not put it right into the model they're working on now? That way, we'd have it.'
'We'd have it-eventually,' Morrell answered. 'How many plans would they have to change to put a new engine in that compartment? How many dies and stamps and castings would they have to revise? I don't know the exact number, but it's bound to be a big one.'
'We ought to do this right,' Pound insisted.
'We will-eventually.' Morrell used that word again. 'Right now, that we're doing it at all is miracle enough, if you ask me. Just remember, I was in Kamloops a few weeks ago, and you were an artilleryman. Let's get something finished, and then we can set about improving it.'
'Everything ought to be right the first time,' Pound muttered.
'Not everything is. That's why they put erasers on pencils,' Morrell said. 'Or are you one of those people who fill out crossword puzzles in ink?' He was fond of those puzzles himself. Their popularity had exploded since the collapse. They gave people something interesting to do, and you could buy a book of them for a dime.
Michael Pound looked puzzled. 'Of course, sir. Doesn't everybody?' He sounded altogether innocent. Was that sarcasm, or did he really believe people were so generally capable? Morrell suspected he did. Like most men, he judged others by his own standards, and those standards were pretty high. After bending to get a better look at the connection he was making, he said, 'I've got a question for you, sir.'
'Go ahead,' Morrell told him.
'Where do you suppose we could be if we hadn't spent all this time lying fallow, and how big a price will we pay because we did?'
'We'd be a lot further along than we are now, and we'll have to find out. There. Aren't I profound?'
'That's hardly the word I'd use, sir,' Michael Pound replied.
He didn't say what word he would use, which might have been just as well. Morrell said, 'Shall we see if this miserable thing actually runs now?'
'It had better,' Pound said.
He was properly a gunner by trade, but he could drive. He slid down through the turret-an innovation when the experimental model was new, but a commonplace in barrel design nowadays-and into the driver's seat at the left front of the vehicle, next to the bow machine gun. When he stabbed the starter button, the engine wasted no time roaring to life.
'You see, sir?' he said in his best I-told-you-so tones.
'I see,' Morrell answered. 'All right, shut it down for now. We're not ready to go anywhere, not with a two- man crew.'
'We could if we were at war,' Pound said.
'We could if we were but we aren't so we won't.' Morrell had to listen to himself to make sure that came out right. 'Actually, we are at war, but barrels won't do much against the Japs. Now we have to revive some more of the old machines, to have opponents to practice against.' He wished real barrels, modern barrels, would be so easy to face.
T hese days, nobody around Baroyeca was likely to tell anybody how to vote. Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't been sure things would work out that way, but they had. The unfortunate accidents that happened to Don Joaquin's barn and stable-to say nothing of the even more unfortunate accidents that happened to Don Joaquin's guards-had quickly persuaded the prominent men in this part of Sonora not to push too hard against the Freedom Party.
'You understand what it is,' Robert Quinn said at a Freedom Party meeting a couple of weeks after those unfortunate things happened. 'It has been a very long time since anyone told a patron, 'No, senor, you may not do this.' They needed a lesson. Now they have had one. I do not think they will need any more.'
'What could we have done if they had come after us with everything they have?' Rodriguez asked.
Quinn looked steadily back at him. 'It is like this. The rich men around Baroyeca have so much. The Freedom Party has so much.' He held his hands first close together, then wide apart. 'If you put them in a fight, who do you think is going to win?'
'But suppose they talked to the governor,' Rodriguez said stubbornly. 'Suppose they said, 'Call out the state militia. We have to put down these Freedom Party men with guns.' '
' Muy bien — suppose they did that.' The Freedom Party organizer sounded agreeable. 'Suppose they did exactly that. How many soldados in this state, Senor Rodriguez, do you suppose are Freedom Party men?'
'Ahh,' Rodriguez said, and his voice was just one in a small, delighted chorus of oohs and ahhs that filled Freedom Party headquarters. He went on, 'You mean they cannot trust their own soldiers?'
'Did I say that?' Quinn shook his head. 'I did not say that. Would I say anything that would go against the state government? Of course not.'
'Of course not,' Carlos Ruiz agreed in sly tones. 'We don't want to go against the state government. We want to take it over.'
'Ahh,' Hipolito Rodriguez said again. He found winning a national election easier to imagine than toppling the state government. Richmond was far away, and wouldn't matter so immediately. A Freedom Party administration in Hermosillo would send shock waves rippling through Sonora.
Of course, a Freedom Party defeat in November would send shock waves of a different sort rippling through the state. Quinn said, 'Remember, we have to win, or the lesson Don Joaquin learned goes for nothing.'
He didn't say who had taught Carlos Ruiz's patron that lesson. He certainly didn't say the men who'd taught that lesson had got their rifles and ammunition from him. Some things were better unadmitted.
Quietly Hipolito Rodriguez said, 'That lesson had better not go for nothing, whether we win or lose. If they push us too hard, we can still fight.'
'You are a brave man, a bold man,' Quinn said. 'You are the sort of man we want, the sort of man we need, in the Freedom Party.'
Rodriguez shrugged. 'If a patron wants to stay a Radical Liberal, that is all right with me. I used to be a Radical Liberal myself. I changed my mind. They have no business telling me I may not change my mind. I would never try to tell them any such thing.'
'Yes. You have reason. That is how it should be,' Ruiz said. Several other men nodded.
But Robert Quinn said, 'Once we win, well, other parties will just have to get used to that. The difference between the Freedom Party and the other parties in the Confederate States is that we have reason and they do not. If they are wrong, why should we let them pretend they are right?'
'They are political parties, too,' Ruiz said. 'One of these days, they will win an election.'
'I do not think so,' Quinn said. 'I do not think one of them will win an election for a very, very long time once we take over.'
'What do you mean?' Ruiz asked. 'Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That is how politics works.'
