“Yeah, yeah, John, I know.” Mike waved his own hand at the river. “In any factory or mine, there’s always a few goofballs who’ll file a grievance on any grounds, especially if they get in trouble.” He smiled thinly. “Of course—in my official capacity as a union president—you’d never catch me admitting that to the boss.”
Simpson snorted. “Neither did Henry. Ha! And what a laugh that was, sometimes. I remember one guy—took us forever to get rid of the bum—who seemed to have a grievance every week. Invariably after he got disciplined for something. Henry even managed to keep a straight face whenever it got to me in third-step hearings, and he’d argue the case as if he didn’t know just as well as I did that we’d all be better off with the jerk looking for a job somewhere else.”
“Gotta keep management honest,” said Mike. “And that means, now and then, you fight a grievance on behalf of a guy you’d personally just as soon see get run over by a truck. If you start getting too cozy with the boss . . .” He shrugged. “Way it is. What union was that, by the way? Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers? Or PACE, now, as they’re called since they merged with the paperworkers.”
Simpson nodded. “Good outfit,” said Mike. “We almost merged with them once.”
He clasped his own hands behind his back. It seemed like the proper gesture, under the circumstances. “I never once, John, stated that I thought you were a bigot. What I did say—and I won’t retract it—was that your program amounted to a return to Jim Crow. Or, at least, that was the logic of it.” Simpson started to say something, but Mike overrode him.
“Hear me out, dammit. Just once—listen.” Simpson took a deep breath, then nodded abruptly.
“Whether you ever intended it that way, John, is not the issue to me. Wasn’t then, sure as hell isn’t now. I’ll be glad to grant you the best possible motives—simply trying to figure out the best way to deal with a bad situation. But what was clear to me then—and still is—is that we were in the position of a man who had stumbled badly and was about to fall. And the surface he was going to fall on was nothing but broken glass. You wanted us to throw out our hands to break the fall—which would, at best, have ripped our hands to shreds. And I thought we should get out of the stumble by running faster.”
Simpson’s jaws were tight, but he said nothing. Mike nodded toward the looming bulk of the ironclads under construction, then swept his head in a circle, indicating the entire city rising up out of the rubble of what had been the worst massacre in the Thirty Years War.
“Look at it, John. Can you honestly say I was wrong?”
Still, Simpson said nothing. Mike decided not to push the issue any further. Whatever were the good qualities of John Chandler Simpson—many, obviously, as those same ironclads indicated—the ability to admit error was clearly not one of them.
Besides, this horse is easy to swap.
“I realize—” Mike broke off, as if he were momentarily a bit embarrassed. (Which . . . he was, perhaps. Just a tiny bit.) “I realize that I’m a bare-knuckle kind of guy, in a political brawl. So if I insulted you personally, please accept my apology.”
After a moment, Simpson nodded. Very stiffly, to be sure, but . . . a nod was a nod.
“Beyond that, I’ll do what I can to make amends. I imagine, ah . . .”
Simpson smiled coldly. “Oh, indeed. One of the reasons I’ve grown so fond of my assistant, Dietrich Schwanhausser, is because he’s one of the few Germans here who doesn’t assume I eat German babies for breakfast. Thanks to you, and your campaign, my reputation has preceded me.” Bitterly: “And it’s even harder on my wife, who sits at home most days as if she were a leper. If she didn’t have that school expansion project of Veronica Dreeson’s to work on I think she’d go nuts entirely. As least in Grantville, she had some American friends. Here—”