How long for a depth charge to reach the depth for which it was fused? The new pair seemed to be taking forever. Maybe they were duds, Kimball thought. The damnyankees couldn't have come up with a way to make them work all the time…could they?
Wham! Wham! Maybe they could. "Jesus!" Tom Brearley exclaimed. "That took forever!" Kimball wasn't the only one for whom time had stretched like a rubber band, then. The exec turned to him with a smile as radiant as any worn, greasy man could show in that light. "Well ahead of us, both of 'em, sir."
"Yeah," Kimball said, as if he hadn't just bet his life and won. "Now we sit here for as long as the batteries will let us and wait for our little friends up there to get tired and go away. How long can we wait, Tom?"
Brearley checked the gauges. "It would be longer if we hadn't tried that sprint after we sank the destroyer, sir, but we've got charge enough for five or six hours."
"Should be enough," Kimball said jovially. It had better be enough, echoed in his mind. He took a deep breath and made a face. "Things'll stink too bad for us to stand it any longer'n that, regardless." That was phrased like a joke and got laughs like a joke, but it wasn't a joke, and everybody knew it. The longer you sat submerged, the fouler the air got. That was part of the nature of the boat.
Five and a half hours after the Bonefish sank its target, Ben Coulter found he couldn't keep a candle alight in the close, nasty atmosphere inside the pressure hull. "If we had a canary in here, sir, it would have fallen off its perch a hell of a long time ago," he said to Kimball.
"Yeah," the captain answered. His head ached. He could feel how slowly he was thinking. He nodded to Brearley. "Blow forward tanks, Tom. Bring her up to periscope depth."
A long, careful scan showed nothing on the horizon. Kimball ordered the Bonefish to the surface. Wearily, he climbed the ladder to the top of the conning tower, the exec close behind him to make sure the pressurized air didn't blow him out the hatch when he opened it.
When he did undog the hatch, his stomach did its best to crawl up his throat: all the stenches so long trapped inside the submersible seemed ten times worse when they rushed out in a great vile gale and mixed in his lungs with the first precious breath of fresh, clean sea air. Fighting down his gorge, he climbed another couple of rungs and looked around. Late-afternoon sunshine felt as savagely bright as it did during a hangover. The ocean was wide and empty. "Made it again, boys," he said. The crew cheered.
Maria Tresca fiddled microscopically with Flora Hamburger's hat. The Italian woman stepped back to survey the results. "Better," she said, although Flora, checking the mirror, doubted the naked eye could tell the difference between the way the hat had looked before and how it did now.
"Remember," Herman Bruck said, "Daniel Miller isn't stupid. If you make a mistake in this debate, he'll hurt you with it."
He looked and sounded anxious. Had he been running against the appointed Democratic congressman, he probably would have made just such a mistake. Maybe he sensed that about himself and set on Flora's shoulders his worries about what he would have done.
"It will be all right, Herman," she said patiently. She sounded more patient than she was, and knew it. Beneath her pearl-buttoned shirtwaist, beneath the dark gray pinstriped jacket she wore over it, her heart was pounding. Class warfare in the USA hadn't reached the point of armed struggle. The confrontation ahead, though, was as close an approach as the country had yet seen. Democrat versus Socialist, established attorney against garment worker's daughter…here was the class struggle in action.
Someone pounded on the dressing-room door. "Five minutes, Miss Hamburger!" the manager of the Thalia Theatre shouted, as if she were one of the vaudevillians who usually performed here on Bowery. She felt as jumpy as any of those performers on opening night. The manager, who stomped around as if he had weights in his shoes, clumped down the hall and shouted, "Five minutes, Mr. Miller!"
Those last minutes before the debate went by in a blur. The next thing Flora knew, there she stood behind a podium on stage, staring out over the footlights at the packed house: a fuller house than vaudeville usually drew, which was the main reason the manager had rented out the hall tonight. There in the second row sat her parents, her sisters-Sophie with little Yossel in her arms-and her brothers.
And here, at the other podium to her right, stood Congressman Daniel Miller, appointed to the seat she wanted. He wasn't quite so handsome and debonair as his campaign posters made him out to be, but who was? He looked clever and alert, and the Democrats had the money and the connections to make a strong campaign for whatever candidate they chose.
Up in between the two candidates strode Isidore Rothstein, the Democratic Party chairman for the Fourteenth Ward. A coin toss had made him master of ceremonies rather than his Socialist opposite number. More tosses had determined that Miller would speak first and Flora last.
Rothstein held up his hands. The crowd quieted. "Tonight, we see democracy in action," he said, making what Flora thought of as unfair use of his party's name. "In the middle of the greatest war the world has ever known, we come together here to decide which way our district should go, listening to both sides to come to a fair decision."
Here and there, people in the crowd applauded. Flora wondered how much anything they did here tonight would really matter. The Democrats would keep a strong majority in Congress unless the sky fell. One district-what was one district? But Myron Zuckerman had spent his whole adult life working to improve the lot of the common people. His legacy would be wasted if this Democrat kept this seat to which he had been appointed. Plenty of reason there alone to fight.
"And now," Isidore Rothstein thundered, a bigger voice than had any business coming out of his plump little body, "Congressman Daniel Miller!" Democrats in the crowd cheered. Socialists hissed and whistled.
Miller said, "Under Teddy Roosevelt, the Democrats have given every American a square deal. We are pledged to an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, to treating every individual as an individual and as he deserves"-the code phrase Democrats used when they explained why they were against labor unions-"to the rights of cities and counties and states to govern themselves as far as possible, and to-"
"What about the war?" a Socialist heckler shouted. Before the debate, the two parties had solemnly agreed not to harass each other's candidates. Both sides had sounded very sincere. Flora hadn't taken it seriously, and didn't expect the Democrats had, either.
Daniel Miller was certainly ready for the shout. "And to keeping the commitments made long ago to our friends and allies, I was about to say," he went on smoothly. "For years, the USA was surrounded by our enemies: by the Confederacy and Canada and England and France, even by the Japanese. Germany was in the same predicament on the European continent. We are both reaching out together for our rightful places in the sun. Not only that, we are winning this war. It hasn't been so easy as we thought it would be, but what war is? To quit now would be to leave poor Kaiser Bill in the lurch, fighting England and France and Russia all alone, or near enough as makes no difference, and to guarantee that the old powers will hold us down for another fifty years. Do you want that?" He stuck out his chin. In profile, as Flora saw him, his jawline sagged, but from the front he probably looked most impressively political.
She made her own opening statement. "We are winning this war, Mr. Miller says." She wouldn't call him Congressman. "If you want to buy a pound of meat, you can go down to the butcher's shop and get it. If you have to pay twenty dollars for it, you begin to wonder if it's worth the price. Here we are, almost two and a half years into a fight the Socialist Party never wanted, and what have we got to show for it? Quebec City is still Canadian. Montreal is still Canadian. Toronto is still Canadian. Winnipeg is still Canadian. Richmond is still Confederate. Our own capital is still in Confederate hands, for heaven's sake.