The Second Coming by John Dalmas

Hank stood uncomfortable and worried.

Her expression changed to grimness. “What would you think if I declared martial law tomorrow?” she asked.

He voiced his syllables carefully, the words spaced, speeding a bit as he got tracked. “It seems to me you were right when you said it shouldn’t be done hastily. And to me, tomorrow seems too soon. At least politically.”

Face hard, eyes hard, she looked at him, then nodded curtly. “Thanks for your viewpoint, Groenveldt. Go home and get some sleep, and tomorrow don’t stay so late. Perfecta deserves to see more of her husband.” He turned to leave, but her voice stopped him at the door. “And, Hank, I agree with you. About martial law. But I might do it anyway. I need to be effective, for chrissake!”

She snapped the final three words, her voice rising in pitch and volume.

He paled and nodded. “Yes, ma’am, you do,” he answered quietly. Then he went home and had his own bad dreams.

* * *

Senate Republican leader Riley Woodrow was large and rumpled. He looked like a long-ago Crimson Tide offensive guard gone to seed. Which he was. The press liked him. Many of them didn’t care for his politics, but they liked him. From a rural community and farm roots, he had the homespun and somehow courtly style of an earlier generation. His language was colorful, and he enjoyed political confrontation. Sometimes he even went out of his way to inspire it, which kept things lively; interesting. Yet he was seldom truly insulting, and almost never truculent.

Riley Woodrow had always been staunchly conservative, but not far enough to the right to join the breakaways who’d formed the America Party. Initially he’d even lampooned them, but when they’d proved they could be a force in Congress, at least for a while, he’d made peace with them.

And with that, he steered his cohorts rightward in an effort at damage control, because several seemed a threat to switch parties.

That rightward tack had cost him two seats, moderate Republicans who joined earlier breakaways to the Center Party. But there’d been no avoiding it, and they’d tended to vote with the Centrists anyway. So he held that rightward course, making common cause with the Americists whenever his scruples allowed.

He didn’t actually dislike Florence Metzger—she was about as good as he could reasonably hope for, given the times—but as a matter of politics, he undercut her whenever practical. She was, after all, an opponent.

And a woman. He had no qualms about women in the Senate, but as the nation’s chief executive? Metzger had a woman’s genes, a woman’s glands, and “a woman’s inability to make good decisions under pressure,” as he’d put it privately.

Furthermore, it had been a bad day. At least three of his borderline votes against balanced budget override authority were wavering. Lose two of them without picking up others, and he’d lose the floor vote. And these people pushing microphones at him, usually an agreeable experience, were going to ask questions he couldn’t answer frankly, because his reasons would hurt his cause.

“Senator Woodrow, what do you think the president’s prospects are tomorrow?”

“What prospects? She’s too old to snag herself a boyfriend.”

No one laughed. Not a good time for jokes, Riley, he told himself, and not a very good joke. You ought to know better.

“Senator, could the depression ever become serious enough that you’d relent and pass her request?”

He fixed the man with one of his better glowers. “Son,” he said, “basic principles of governing have been bent or discarded too often in the past. The White House calls it expediency, but it’s really panic. Do it often enough, like the liberals have, and you end up with no principles at all.

“That’s where they are in the White House today. No principles at all. No integrity. Florence Metzger wasn’t too bad as a senator, but since she’s been in the Oval Office, she’s become morally corrupt.”

He realized as soon as he’d said “morally corrupt” that he’d overstepped, but barged on. “The crisis we find ourselves in today is the fault of a Democrat-Centrist coalition, and electing Florence Metzger president. And when the American people correct those mistakes, we can get the country back on track again.”

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