“Over who should own Vilnus, of all things completely meaningless here,” Pearlmutter said; the case had been a ten-days’ wonder in Rolfeston. “With Poland and Lithuania occupied by the Russians, too. Meshuggeneh!”
Rolfe nodded. Shipping people to another dimension didn’t necessarily make them forget the feuds they’d left behind, not at first and sometimes not ever. Hopefully their children would. He went on: “For the legal subcommittee I propose… let’s see. You’ll head it up, Sol; under you, hmmm, Dave Howden, Harry Throckham, and Andy O’Brien.”
“Captain!” the big redhead yelped. “I’m working my ass off getting the machine shop back in shape after the fire! And I’m no shyster, by God.”
Rolfe grinned; Pearlmutter had given a stifled groan of resignation and an appealing glace. He’d figured out what the head of the committee had in mind immediately, and wasn’t looking forward to paring things down enough that O’Brien didn’t object. Andy wasn’t stupid by any means, but he wasn’t an intellectual either.
“That’s the reason, Andy,” he said. “Sol’s smart as a whip, but he does love splitting a split hair until the remnant violates the laws of physics. You don’t have fifteen generations of Talmudic scholars in your blood. I want something straightforward.”
“I make sure what Sol produces is simple enough for a dumb mick to understand, eh, Captain?” O’Brien said, laughing. “Well, when you put it like that…”
“Any objections?” Rolfe said, looking down the table at the twelve men who sat on the Central Committee of the Gate Control Commission. “All right, both measures passed by acclamation. Next item…”
When the meeting broke up, Pearlmutter lingered for a moment. Rolfe gave the window a longing look—he had a sweet little ketch docked, just begging for singlehanding on a day like this—but business was business. A leader’s business was mostly managing his subordinates and knowing how to delegate and how to keep them working together; that was turning out as true here as it had been running Baker company.
“What’s bothering you, Sol?”
“Captain… you mentioned it.” The Jew’s face took on a twist of distaste. “Did you have to recruit those fucking Nazi mamzers? Please, no more of them!”
Rolfe sighed. “Sol, we’ve been over this ground before. We needed skilled labor—and best of all, they really, really wanted, needed, to jump into a hole and pull it in after them. They’re not going to complain about staying in New Virginia, not if they were too hot for Brazil or Paraguay to hold. The supply of Americans who fit the ticket is limited.”
“Yeah, I recognize the logic. I still want to puke every time I see one of those SS fucks. Puke on his dead body after I shove my bayonet into his guts and twist it.”
“Well, look at it this way, Sol. They’re taking orders from you. Can you imagine how happy that makes them?”
That brought a snort of unwilling laughter. “There is that; if they weren’t here, I’d never get to kick a Nazi’s tokhus, would I? Which, I grant you, is some satisfaction; so is the way they have to smile and pretend they like it. A kholereye on them all anyway. But they could be dangerous, Captain. Don’t think they’ve given up dreaming of a little Aryan kingdom all their own.”
Rolfe grinned. “Sol, do you think I’m idiot enough to trust them?”
The smaller man blushed. “Sorry, Captain.”
“Sane, sensible people aren’t likely to be desperate enough to want to come here—not to live, at least. Sane, sensible people stay home in their stalls and chew their cuds; what we get, are going to get, are desperate broken men, mad dreamers, or both. I’m not going to let enough of any one kind in to have any chance of taking over, and I’m not going to let too many of them settle in a group. Spread around, von Traupitz and his cohorts’ll eventually vanish into the New Virginian majority, the good old melting pot. Besides, that well’s about dry. The ones left FirstSide have either found good hiding places or been caught.”
“Where do we go next for manpower?” Pearlmutter said. “Labor’s our big bottleneck, now that we have enough FirstSide mining properties to cover our output. We’re too big to get all our supplies through the Gate, which means as we expand, a higher share of each new input of labor has to go to support functions here, everything from schools to power plants. Now, if you’d let us use hydraulic mining—that’s a labor-saving method.”
“And it chews up the landscape even worse than dredging,” Rolfe said. “What’s that saying you told me? ‘We don’t crap where we eat’? From now on, I’m only going back FirstSide for business and visits to a gallery or two. Let them dine in the latrine.”
“Then we need more workers,” Pearlmutter said.
“I made some contacts in Africa FirstSide last year. They may be very useful; it wasn’t just a safari. That area could be valuable for recruiting settlers as well as covering our gold output.”
Pearlmutter’s eyes went up. “I didn’t think you were that keen on the schwartzers, Captain.”
Rolfe made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve no problems with well-behaved Negroes, in their place; I’ve known plenty who were better citizens than a lot of poor whites—it’s just simpler not to bring them here. I meant colonists of various sorts, like those Dutchmen we got from the East Indies. We’re already getting a few French from North Africa, and that’s going to be a major source. From what I saw and heard and what I’ve read since, the African pot is starting to boil and it’ll get hotter fast. A pity; I enjoyed Kenya, but it’ll give us opportunities. And I think we may be able to get more people more from the U.S. over the next decade; from the South, particularly, for much the same reasons. The war—both the world wars—cracked the foundations of the white man’s empires, and the dust will be a long time settling. ”
Pearlmutter rolled his eyes. “Oh, wonderful. The KKK, yet,” he muttered.
“Not very likely,” Rolfe said, his lip curling in a slight sneer. “The scum who call themselves the KKK in modern times are nothing but dim-witted sadists and white-trash Negro haters, led by confidence men out to make a buck. I wouldn’t hire them to shovel out a stable, not least because they’d be too drunk to do a good job.”
He relaxed. “Sorry. The original Klan after the Civil War was a gentleman’s outfit, Confederate officers fighting against Northern occupation—Forrest himself disbanded it when things got out of hand. What I mean is that there will be a fair number of respectable people unhappy that their right of community self-government’s being trampled, and ready to move.”
“Well, you’d know, Captain. Until I joined the army, I’d never been farther from New York than the Catskills,” Pearlmutter said.
“Rebecca and you on for dinner Sunday? She and Louisa can talk about that Schools Council business afterward, and we can play chess.”