"Geoffrey A. Landis - The Eyes of America" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

The Eyes of America

by Geoffrey A. Landis

It was an enlightened year, a young century from which to spring forward into the
future, a year in which people pushed the new boundaries of freedom.

It was an era of marvels, and who knew what could or could not be done? Men had
sent their signals by etheric wave across the English Channel, and the mighty
Niagara had been tamed and harnessed to the yoke of man. Locomotive rails
tunneled across and under the great Rocky Mountains, and America, the stripling
giant, had beaten the tired empire of Spain to the ground in a war of only three
months. Men now talked of airships that would fly to the moon, and of telephones
to breach the vapory wall between worlds.

It was 1904. Who knew what marvels would be next?

·····


The room was smoke-filled, but that was no surprise; the rooms where real decision
making occurred were always smoke-filled.
"Damn Democrats," Horovitz said. "They're going to ruin everything we fought for."

"Indeed," Hanna said. Marcus Hanna, the Ohio senator, was the chairman of the
Republican party, but Horovitz was its invisible leader. "You are only stating the
obvious. But who have we got?"

"Damn that communist, that anarchist, that swine," Horovitz said. "Why'd he have
to shoot Teddy? Couldn't he have shot McKinley? Damn it to hell, we need Teddy
now, more than ever."

Levi Horovitz—Leggy, to his friends, of which he had few, at least inside
politics—was short and rotund. He was rarely seen in public, and never without a
soggy cigar clamped in his teeth. For nearly twenty years, Horovitz had been the
hidden power behind the Republican party—since 1884, when, with the aid of a
handful of carefully paid newsmen, he had orchestrated his candidate Jimmy Blaine
into the Republican nomination over the incumbent Chester Arthur.

Horovitz was bitterly aware that he would never serve in office himself. He could
never get elected, not in this century, not in the next. Not a Jew. Not even in
America, the most enlightened country in the world. But he had adapted, and
presidents and generals danced to his orders.

"Roosevelt's not much good to us now, six feet under," Hanna said. In Hanna's
private opinion, Roosevelt had never been any good for the Republicans; the
damned cowboy had been unsafe and erratic. But there was no percentage in talking
against a war hero, especially a dead one; Hanna had learned that lesson well.
"Better come up with somebody else."