Joe Steele by Harry Turtledove Page B

announcers sounded like this guy. Besides, Charlie wasn’t inclined to fuss about anything then. He liked the new apartment. He could walk through the living room with a good chance of evading the shin-eating coffee table. More space did make a difference. He could grab Esther and go to bed with her whenever he felt like it, too. That also made a difference, one much more pleasant than that which came from a larger front room.
    â€œThis is Joe Steele.” The President didn’t sound like a pretty good actor. He sounded like someone who should have been a tough guy but had somehow ended up with an education instead. His voice held a faint rasp. Some of that might have come from the pipe he smoked. The rest he would have had anyway. Anybody who didn’t hear the don’t-mess-with-me in his voice wasn’t listening hard enough. To Charlie, it was as unmistakable as the warning buzz of a rattlesnake’s tail.
    â€œI want to talk to you tonight about my bill for electrifying the Tennessee Valley,” Joe Steele said. “It’s an important bill. It will build dams up and down the river. The dams will give thousands of people jobs for years. They will stop the floods that have drowned the lowlands in those parts every so often since only Indians lived there. And the electricity the dams generate will bring millions of people into the twentieth century.”
    The President paused to cough. “Only when the farmer is surrounded by electrical wiring will he fully become an American citizen. The biggest hope and weapon for our country is industry, and making the farmer part of industry. It is impossible to base construction on two different foundations, on the foundation of large-scale and highly concentrated industry,and on the foundation of very fragmented and extremely backward agriculture. Systematically and persistently, we must place agriculture on a new technical basis, and raise it to the level of an industry.”
    He coughed again. He used that cough, Charlie realized, as a kind of punctuation mark to show when he was moving from one idea to another. “This is also the logic behind my new system of community farms. But in the Tennessee Valley, some men have grown rich by keeping most farmers poor and backward. They are trying to bottle up the bill authorizing the dams and the electrical industry so they can hold on to their control of them. I wanted to talk to you on the radio tonight to ask you to urge your Representative and Senator to support the Tennessee Valley electrification project. This is
your
government. Its leaders have to listen to
your
will. If they don’t, we will throw them on the ash-heap of history, where they belong. Thank you, and good night.”
    â€œThat was President Joe Steele, speaking from the White House,” the announcer said. “We’ll be right back after this important message.”
    The important message plugged a brand of coffee that, to Charlie, tasted like Mississippi mud. Lighting a Chesterfield, he asked Esther, “What did you think of the speech, sweetie?”
    â€œLet me have one of those, please,” she said. He tossed her the pack. After she lit up, she went on, “I noticed something interesting at the end.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œHe said ‘
your
government.’ He said ‘the leaders will listen to
your
will.’ But then he said
we
would throw them out if they didn’t. Not
you
would—
we
would.”
    â€œAre you sure?” Charlie asked. “I didn’t catch that.”
    â€œI’m positive.” Esther nodded emphatically.
    â€œOkay,” Charlie said. His wife was nobody’s dope. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her—well, no, she was pretty enough that he might have wanted something to do with her, but he wouldn’t have wanted to marry her—if she had been. He did a little thinking himself. “Probably just political talk. He