The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” the page answered.

  “Oh.” Flora got to her feet. “Please excuse me,” she told her colleagues. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  The page led her to one of the telephones outside the hearing room. “He’s on this line.”

  “Thank you.” Flora picked up the handset and said, “This is Congresswoman Blackford.”

  “Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “Can you come by here?”

  “Right this minute?” she asked.

  “Well, you might want to,” Roosevelt answered. And what did that mean? Something like, If you don’t you’ll be sorry. Flora couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean.

  “On my way,” she said, and hung up. “Please apologize to the rest of the committee for me,” she told the page. “I’m afraid I need to confer with the Assistant Secretary of War.” The young man nodded and hurried away. Flora wondered what kind of connections he had, to be wearing a sharp blue suit instead of a green-gray uniform. She also wondered how long he would go on wearing his suit. Congressional pages did get conscripted. At least one had got killed.

  And, as she hurried to the exit, she wondered what the other members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would think. People knew she often talked with Franklin Roosevelt. She hoped to heaven they didn’t know why. If they didn’t know why, what would they think? That she and Roosevelt were having an affair? He was married, but that mattered little in high government circles. Reporters knew better than to write such stories. People called it a gentleman’s agreement, though Flora had never seen anything very gentlemanly about it.

  She walked over to the War Department. Sentries there scrupulously compared the photo on her ID card to her face. They searched her handbag. A woman took her into a closed room and patted her down. And they called Roosevelt’s office to make sure she was expected. Only when they were fully satisfied did a soldier escort her to that office far underground.

  “Call when you need to come back up, ma’am,” the soldier said: a polite way of warning, Don’t go wandering around by yourself.

  “I will,” Flora promised.

  Roosevelt’s chief secretary or administrative assistant or whatever he was led her in to the Assistant Secretary of War. Then the man left, closing the door behind him. Did he knew about the work on uranium bombs? Flora wouldn’t have cared to guess one way or the other.

  “How are you, Franklin?” she asked.

  “Oh, a little tired, but not too bad,” he answered. He looked worn and weary, as if he was running on too much coffee, too many cigarettes in that jaunty holder of his, and not enough sleep. Few people with important jobs were doing anything else. He nodded, perhaps trying to make himself believe it. “No, I’m not too bad myself, but the news could be better.”

  “What is the news?” Flora asked.

  “The Confederates bombed our Hanford facility in the wee small hours this morning.”

  “Gevalt!” She sank into a chair. Her knees didn’t want to hold her up. “How bad is it? Do I want to know?”

  “Well, it’s not good,” Roosevelt said. “They know we’re working on this, they knew where we’re working on it, they know it’s important, and they must be working on it, too, or they wouldn’t try so hard to shut us down.”

  Every word of that was true. But he hadn’t told her what she most wanted to know. “How much damage did they do?”

  “Oh. That.” His resonant laugh filled the office. “Now that the sun’s up out there, we can see it’s less than we feared at first. They don’t have aircraft that can carry heavy loads a long way, and it’s hard to bomb accurately at night anyway. They hit some of the works, but they didn’t damage the plant where we’re separating U-235 and U-238 or the pile—that’s what they’re calling the gadget that makes more energy than goes into it.”

  “That would have been bad,” Flora said. “Repairing those things would take a long time.” She didn’t even mention money.

  “Repair isn’t the only worry. If the bombers hit those, we’d have to worry about radioactive contamination like you wouldn’t believe,” Roosevelt said. Flora must have looked blank, for he went on, “That kind of thing can cause cancer. It can poison you. If it’s strong enough, it can come right out and kill you. And it’s very hard to clean up.”

  “But it didn’t happen?” Flora said.

  “It didn’t happen. Hardly any contamination, in fact,” Roosevelt said.

  “Good—I guess.” Flora hadn’t even thought about—what did Roosevelt call it?—radioactive contamination. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible, or that anybody needed to worry about it. She was just starting to realize how much she didn’t know about this whole uranium business.

  “It’s very good, believe me,” Roosevelt said. “They could have made things worse for us than they did. We’re not badly delayed, anyhow.”

  “That is good,” Flora said. “What kind of program do the Confederate States have? How far along are they? How do we go about finding out?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, and we’ll have to find a way, respectively.” The Assistant Secretary of War sighed. “That’s all I can tell you right now. As I say, they’re working on it, the same as we are. We’re in a race, and we’d better win.”

  Eight words. As far as Flora could see, they said everything that needed saying. “If we knew where they’re working, we could visit them the same way they just visited us,” she said.

  “If we knew that, we would have done it a long time ago,” Roosevelt said. “We’ve got to look harder, that’s all.”

  “It’s a long way from Confederate territory to Washington State,” Flora said. “That’s one of the reasons you put the uranium works out there, I suppose. How did they manage to fly bombers all the way up there? And what happened to them afterwards?”

  “They got cute,” Franklin Roosevelt said unhappily. “I don’t know what else to tell you. They flew a whole swarm of airplanes out of northwestern Sonora. Some of them headed for Los Angeles. Some attacked Las Vegas and Boulder Dam in Nevada. And some…some we just forgot about.” He looked angry and embarrassed at the same time. “Airplanes flying over the middle of the country—too many people assumed they were ours and didn’t worry about them. That won’t happen again, either.”

  “They didn’t go back to the CSA, did they?” Flora asked.

  He shook his strong-chinned head. “No. We might have done something about that. I hope to heaven we would have done something about it, anyhow. But they flew on to Vancouver Island and landed at strips there. The crews were gone by the time we got people there, and they set fire to the airplanes—or maybe the Canadians who helped them get away did. I don’t know about that. I do know it was a very smart operation, and we’re lucky it didn’t hurt us a lot worse than it did.”

  “What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” Flora asked.

  “You do know the right questions to ask,” Roosevelt said. Flattery? Truth? Both at once? He went on, “From now on, we’ll have fighters overhead all the time. That’s effective immediately. We’ll beef up the antiaircraft guns as soon as we can, and we’ll put a Y-ranging station close by so we can spot the enemy a long way off. And we’ll hit Confederate airports in Sonora and Chihuahua and even Texas to make it harder for them to fly up north.”

  “What do we do about auto bombs? What do we do about people bombs?” Flora asked.

  “Well, the area is well fenced, and the fences are a long way out from the buildings—for one thing, we need room if experiments get out of hand,” Roosevelt answered. “We have a garrison there.” He wrote himself a note. “We’d better reinforce it, and we’d better add some armored vehicles, too. You do know the right questions.” Maybe he really meant it this time.

  “Did we lose any important people?” Flora asked.

  “No. Absolutely not. No. We don’t have as many first-rate physicists as Germany does, but we’
ve got plenty of good people to take us where we’re going,” Roosevelt said. “And the bombers didn’t hit any of them last night, so that’s all right. If we find the Confederates’ project, striking them will hurt them more, or I hope so, anyway. They only have a third as many educated people as we do. They can’t afford to lose anybody.”

  “One more part of the price they pay for leaving their Negroes as nothing but field hands,” Flora said.

  “I agree. But they aren’t even field hands now. They’re…” Roosevelt paused.

  “Victims.” Flora supplied a word.

  “Yes, that’s what they are.” Roosevelt shook his head. “Strange to use a word like that in this day and age. Strange to use it like that, anyhow. If people drown in a flood, they’re victims. If a man runs a stop light and kills a grandmother, she’s a victim. But those aren’t accidents in the CSA. The Freedom Party is doing it on purpose.”

  “Nobody up here wanted to believe that for the longest time,” Flora said.

  “I still don’t want to believe it,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “But I have no choice. It’s true, all right. You deserve a lot of credit for making people see that.”

  “I don’t want it. I wish I didn’t have it,” Flora said. “And speaking of such things, what are we doing to help the Negroes in Richmond?”

  “What we can, which isn’t much,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “Our fighters strafe the Confederates. We bomb their positions as we can. Some of the weapons the Negroes are using, they got from us. Smuggling arms isn’t easy, but we do what we can.”

  “The Confederates did a pretty good job of helping the Mormons in Utah,” Flora said.

  “More space and fewer people out there,” Roosevelt replied. “Getting things into Richmond’s never been easy. The Negroes are making the most of what we got them—and of what they got on their own. I will say that for them.”

  “They really can fight, can’t they?”

  “It does seem that way.”

  “Then why doesn’t the U.S. Army let our Negroes put on the uniform and go after the Confederates?” Flora asked. “God knows they have the incentive to do it.”

  “I can’t change that policy myself, you know,” Roosevelt said.

  Flora nodded impatiently. “Yes, of course. But you can recommend a course of action to the President. He could change it by executive order—I don’t think he needs the consent of Congress to enlist Negro troops.”

  “I’d say you’re right about that,” Roosevelt replied. “My one worry is, I don’t know how our white soldiers would like Negroes fighting alongside of them.”

  “Who’d have a better reason to fight hard than colored troops?” Flora said. “If I were a black man in uniform, I wouldn’t want to surrender to the Confederates. Would you?”

  “When you put it that way, no,” Roosevelt admitted. “I’ll speak to President La Follette about this. You might do the same. The final decision will be up to him, though.”

  “Yes,” Flora said. For the past year, Charlie La Follette wasn’t just someone who could help make the upper Midwest vote Socialist. He was the man who decided things, and he seemed to be doing it well enough. “I’ll talk to him, and we’ll see what happens after that.”

  Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the station. “Rivière-du-Loup!” the conductor called. “All out for Rivière-du-Loup!” He spoke French, as most people did in the Republic of Quebec.

  Dr. Leonard O’Doull hardly noticed. To him, French seemed at least as natural as English. Home, he thought, and got to his feet. After two years away, Rivière-du-Loup looked very good indeed. After almost two years of war, the Republic of Quebec—officially neutral in the war that convulsed the rest of North America—looked very good indeed, too.

  People waiting on the platform waved as he and two other men and a woman got off the train. Nicole dashed up to him. He squeezed the air out of his wife, then did the same with his son. “You should get married more often, Lucien,” he said. “It lets me take leave.”

  Lucien O’Doull sent him a severe look. “You’re as bad as Uncle Georges,” he said. “I only intend to get married once, thank you very much.”

  “As bad as me? Thank you very much, Lucien.” Georges Galtier, the younger of Nicole’s two brothers, was the family wit, the family cynic, the family punster and practical joker. Most of the Galtiers were swarthy and slight. Georges was dark, but almost as tall as Leonard O’Doull, and half again as wide through the shoulders. His older brother, Charles, stopped picking on him in a hurry when he began to get his full growth. Charles was no coward, but also no fool. No Galtiers were fools.

  Charles came up to O’Doull now. He looked achingly like his father. Lucien Galtier, after whom O’Doull’s son was named, was several years dead. “Good to see you again,” Charles said gravely. “Good to see you safe.” He sounded like his father, too, though he didn’t have much of the old man’s whimsy. Georges had got all of that, and a little more besides. They both made successful farmers, though. Crops didn’t care if you were funny or not.

  Hand in hand with Lucien stood his fiancée. Paulette Archambault was a dentist’s daughter; the match, if not made in heaven, was certainly one that had a lot of study behind it. Paulette had black hair and blue eyes and a nice figure. O’Doull had no trouble understanding what his son saw in her. “Welcome to the family,” he said.

  “Thank you very much,” Paulette said. “There’s…a lot of it, isn’t there?”

  As if to prove her point, Nicole’s three sisters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne, greeted O’Doull, too, each with a husband at her side. Jeanne, the youngest, was pregnant again. O’Doull tried to remember if this would be her fifth or sixth. He couldn’t. But all the Galtier children had big broods except for Nicole. Lucien O’Doull might be an only child, but he was an only with a raft of first cousins.

  “You look tired,” Jeanne told Leonard O’Doull. She was a farm wife with a flock of children, and she was telling him he looked tired? If that wasn’t madness, damned if he knew what would be.

  O’Doull managed a—tired—shrug. “I’ve been busier than I wish I were,” he said, and let it go there. Coming back to a country of peace, a country at peace, felt surreal. He’d got used to the tensions of emergency surgery, to the cries of wounded men, to the smells of ether and alcohol and pus and blood and shit, to washing gore from his hands more often than Lady Macbeth ever did. The only familiar odor on the platform was tobacco smoke. Perfume? For all he’d smelled it lately, perfume might be a Martian invention.

  “You look like a man who needs a drink,” his wife said.

  “Amen!” he exclaimed. Everybody laughed except Nicole, who understood he wasn’t kidding. They’d known each other for more than a quarter of a century now. If one of them didn’t understand the other, nobody ever would.

  “Let’s go back to the house,” Nicole said. With the six Galtier children and their spouses and progeny leaving, the platform lost a big part of the crowd on it.

  A house with a lawn in front of it. No broken windows. No bullet holes. No chunks bitten out by artillery or bombs. No craters in the front yard. No gunshots close by. No soldiers stumbling by with numb, stunned faces and thousand-yard stares. No, this wasn’t Mars. It seemed more alien than that.

  Instead of decay, O’Doull smelled cooking of a sort he’d almost forgotten. He knew Nicole would do herself proud when it came to food. But…“Will we have enough to drink?” A lot of his nieces and nephews were getting old enough to hoist a glass. And Georges always seemed to have a hollow leg.

  But Nicole said, “Don’t worry about it.” He did worry, till she went on, “For one thing, I bought twice as much as I thought we’d need. And, for another, the farmer across the road from Charles makes the best applejack in Temiscouata County. He makes a lot of it, too.”

  When Leonard O’Doull heard that, he stopped flabbling. A lot of people with apple orchards turned out homemade Calvados. Quality varied widely from one
farm to another, often from one batch to another. None of it went through the tiresome formalities involving taxes. The Republic of Quebec loved distillers no more than the Dominion of Canada did before it, and had no better luck bringing them to heel.

  O’Doull took packs of Raleighs and Dukes out of his suitcase and distributed them to his wife, his son, and his in-laws. They would have repaired his popularity had he lost it. Quebec got U.S. tobacco, and not enough of that. No one had tasted mild, flavorful cigarettes like these since the early days of the war.

  “How did you get them through Customs?” Georges asked. His face was wreathed in smiles, and in smoke.

  “I’m in U.S. uniform.” O’Doull tapped the gold oak leaf on one shoulder strap. “I speak pretty good French, too. And I let the inspectors have a couple of packs apiece, so they didn’t bother me a bit.”

  “Such things are wasted on those swine, but what is a man to do?” Georges said with a philosophical shrug.

  If the man was Leonard O’Doull, he was to eat too much and to get drunk. He wasn’t loud and boisterous, but he felt the applejack buzzing in him. He’d feel it in the morning, too, but he didn’t worry about that. He ate, he drank, he talked—and he didn’t tell war stories. His Quebecois extended family didn’t know how lucky they were not to know much about what he did, and he didn’t intend to enlighten them.

  A lot of relatives stayed at the house. They slept in the front room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. O’Doull didn’t mind. Even now, not everybody had a motorcar. For those who didn’t, going back out to a farm and then coming into town again for the wedding the next day would be slow and inconvenient. All the same, he whispered to Nicole, “You didn’t ask one of your sisters to share the bedroom, did you?”

  “Why would you want to know that?” his wife asked archly.

  “Ha!” he said. “You’ll find out.”

  “With so many people here?” Nicole said. “It’s upstairs, remember. If we’re not careful, the bed will squeak, and they’ll laugh at us.”