'I'm afraid you're right,' Anne Colleton said. 'Not many people can see that. In a way, it's good to know someone can.'
'Belshazzar needed Daniel to read the writing on the wall,' Potter said. 'I hope someone can do the job for us.'
'I wish there were no job to do,' Anne answered.
'Well, so do I,' he answered. 'But I'm very much afraid this is only the beginning, and not just for the Confederate States. In a way, misery loves company. In another way, if everyone's in trouble, nobody can help anybody else get out of it.'
Anne Colleton didn't say anything for perhaps half a minute. At last, she told him, 'That makes good sense to me.' Another pause. 'You seem to make very good sense, Mr. Potter. Maybe we should talk some more if we get the chance.'
And what am I letting myself in for if I say yes to that? Potter wondered. But the answer seemed obvious. Trouble. Only question is, how much trouble? He too paused, but not for long. 'Maybe we should, Miss Colleton. Maybe we should.'
W hen Chester Martin got off his shift at the Toledo steel mill, he went straight to the Socialist Party hall not far from the factory. He could have had himself a beer there, but opened a bottle of Nesbit's instead. He wanted to keep his wits about him.
Spotting Albert Bauer, he called, 'What do you think of this management notion?'
'Cutting shifts from eight hours to six, you mean?' Bauer answered.
'Yeah, that's what I mean, all right, unless there's another brand-new management notion I haven't heard about yet,' Chester said.
Bauer didn't look happy. 'Way I see it, we've got two choices,' he said. 'We can say yes, and let 'em cut our pay by a quarter. Or we can so no, and have 'em fire one out of four of us.' He was drinking a beer. He drained it, then added, 'This is what you call being between the Devil and the deep blue sea.'
'I don't trust those management bastards,' Martin said. 'Like as not, it's a trick to pump up their profits and hurt us at the same time. Instead of hiring goons and scabs, they play these games nowadays.'
'I know.' But Bauer looked mighty unhappy. 'Hate to tell you, Chester, but I don't think so, not this time. I've seen the orders going through the pipeline. They've fallen right off a cliff. Nobody's buying steel, not to speak of. There's no point in making it if nobody's ordering. Less than no point, in fact-a big inventory just drives prices down when orders do start picking up. I don't think the bosses are playing games for the sake of playing games, not this time. I wish they were. I'd strike in a red-hot minute.'
'Fine. Wonderful. But somebody'd better tell me how the hell I'm supposed to make ends meet on three- quarters of my proper pay.'
'Well, that depends,' Bauer said slowly. 'Would you rather try to make ends meet on none of your proper pay? The company's trying hard not to get rid of people. I don't like the bosses, and I never will, but I have to give them credit for that.'
Martin told him exactly where he'd like to give the bosses credit. Bauer laughed. Martin said, 'It's not funny, dammit. If my wife didn't have work, we wouldn't make it on three-quarters of a paycheck. I'd sooner take my chances on getting the sack. If I did, I'd look for something else. And if I didn't, I'd be all right.'
'So much for the solidarity of the proletariat,' Bauer observed, and Martin felt himself flush. Bauer went on, 'But if they didn't get you in the first round of firings, how do you know they wouldn't the next time? Because there will be a next time, Chester, sure as you're standing there.'
'A next time.' Martin scowled. 'Hadn't thought of that. Bet you're right, though. Who would have thought a loan the Russians couldn't-or maybe wouldn't-pay back would cause all this trouble?'
'For want of a nail,' Bauer said, and then sighed. 'We're all going to be wanting nails before too long.'
'Oh, yeah?' Chester said. 'If we're all going to be wanting nails, how come they're cutting back on how much steel they're making?'
'Because whether we want them or not, we won't be able to afford them,' Bauer answered.
'Of course we won't be able to afford them. They're cutting our hours.'
Bauer's smile was full of anything but amusement. 'Welcome to the vicious circle.'
That circle was anything but welcome to Martin. He hung around the Party hall till he saw no one had any firm notion of how to respond to the bosses' proposal for cutting hours. No one could decide if it was good because it saved jobs or bad because it cut pay. Martin concluded the proposal would probably go forward. Strong opposition from the workers might have stopped it. If they couldn't decide whether it was good or bad, they would find out by experiment-on themselves.
He rode the trolley back to the flat he shared with Rita. His own mood was glum, or worse than glum. He'd told Albert Bauer the exact truth. If his hours and pay got cut to three-quarters of what he had now, the only thing that would keep him afloat was his wife's salary.
And Rita seemed anything but happy when he came through the door. After a perfunctory kiss, she said, 'Orders have taken a real tumble since the market started going down. Nobody wants pipe any more-not new pipe, anyway.'
It was spring, a bright spring, the weather full of new-puppy warmth and hope. Ice walked Chester Martin's back even so. He tried to remember when he'd known fear like this. The Roanoke front? He shook his head. That terror had been different, and far more immediate: fear of death and pain and mutilation. This was something else. Fear of loss, fear of hunger, fear of endless misery without escape. Fear of bills. Fear of moving back in with his mother and father-if this quiet, creeping horror didn't lay hold of them, too.
When Martin laughed, he might have been whistling while walking past a graveyard. 'It was just a few weeks ago when we figured we could have any old thing we wanted,' he said, and went on to tell Rita about the company's plan to cut everybody's hours.
She listened to that, her face getting longer and longer. 'I know what I want,' she said. 'I want us to keep our jobs, that's what.'
'Yeah,' he said quietly. 'That's about what it boils down to, isn't it?'
'It's hard times when your neighbor's out of work,' Rita said. 'It's the end of the world when you are.'
'Maybe if the government really had seized the means of production this wouldn't have happened,' Chester said, trying to make himself believe it. He couldn't. Shaking his head, he went on, 'No, they couldn't've done it, I don't think. It would have meant real class war-and it might not have helped.'
'What are we going to do?' Rita asked. 'What can we do?'
'Hang on tight,' he said. 'We're still working. We're going to lose most of the stocks we bought, though. I hated answering the last margin call-felt like throwing money away. And we probably won't be able to afford to answer the next one.'
'We've got each other. We're healthy.' Rita sounded as if she was trying to reassure herself, and not having much luck.
'It can't get much worse,' Chester said. 'How could stocks go any lower than they have already? There's got to be a floor somewhere.'
'Yes, but where?' Rita asked, and he had no answer. He felt less ashamed of that than he might have otherwise-for no one else in the USA-no one else in the whole world, by all the signs-had any answer to it, either. No, he wasn't ashamed, but that didn't mean he wasn't frightened.
He went to work day by day, having nothing else he could do. Before long, his shift did go from eight hours to six. His pay dropped by a quarter, too. He hated that, but he supposed he would have hated being without a paycheck even more. As long as Rita had a job, too, they got by.
The market continued to sink. Reading the papers, Martin took occasional consolation in noticing Richmond stocks had fallen even further than those on Wall Street. Did misery really love company? He didn't know about that, either. What he did know was that, every day, there seemed to be more misery to go around.
People started telling stories about brokers jumping off bridges and diving out of windows. Nobody could say whether those stories were true. People told them anyhow. One day in the middle of June, Wall Street stopped sinking. It dove. Maybe brokers didn't, but the market did. The wave of sell orders overwhelmed the ticker tape. It lagged ever further behind the tidal wave of disaster. The last few shares Chester had so proudly held on to went then, on what the papers called Swan-Dive Wednesday. By that time, he'd almost stopped caring. Not till almost four hours after the market closed did the chattering tape finally spit out the last of the day's losses.
