The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “Where the hell are we, anyways?” someone asked as they scrambled out of the truck.

  “Where we’re supposed to be,” Blackledge answered. “That’s all you assholes need to know.” He didn’t expect to be loved. That wasn’t his job.

  Captain Cash, on the other hand, was friendly to his men. He could afford to be; he had bastards like Blackledge under him to handle the dirty work. “That town up ahead is Sparta,” he told the soldiers piling out of several trucks. “It’s still ours. We’ve got to make sure it stays ours. Any questions?”

  A bird piped in a tree. All the birds up here in the north sounded strange to Jorge. Even the jays were peculiar. They acted quite a bit like the black-throated magpie-jays he knew back home, but they were only about half the size they should have been. That meant they could only screech half as loud.

  “What are the Yankees throwing at us?” somebody asked after a pause.

  “Everything but the outhouse,” Sergeant Blackledge answered before the captain could say anything. “If they figure out a way to dump that shit on us, they’ll use it, too.”

  After that, no one seemed to want to know anything else. “Come on,” Captain Cash said into the uncomfortable silence. “Let’s go forward.”

  When Jorge and his companions went into the line in Virginia, they’d replaced other soldiers who left the front for rest and refit and recuperation. Here, nobody was coming back as the replacements went forward. That couldn’t mean all the Confederates up there were dead, or the damnyankees would storm through the breach. But it probably did mean the high command couldn’t afford to take anybody out of the line, and that wasn’t good news or anything close to it.

  Confederate 105s banged away at the enemy. Jorge was glad to hear them. They meant things hadn’t all gone to the devil, anyhow. The sun came up. It looked like a nice day.

  Then U.S. guns started answering the 105s. Jorge knew enough to throw himself flat. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started a foxhole. He’d long since learned how to dig without raising up more than a few inches off the ground. Pretty soon, he was in a hole, with the dirt heaped up in front of him to help block fragments.

  Foxhole or not, though, he was still liable to get killed. The Yankees had more guns than his side did, and they weren’t shy about using them. That was when the gas started coming in. He hadn’t seen this kind of bombardment in Virginia. By the time he got there, the war had settled down to skirmishes, with neither side trying very hard to break through.

  It wasn’t like that here. He needed no more than a few minutes to see as much. The damnyankees had already broken through—if they hadn’t driven all the way through Kentucky, they wouldn’t have been over the Cumberland and deep inside Tennessee. The Confederates were doing what they could to counterattack and throw the enemy back.

  So far, everything they could do wasn’t nearly enough.

  Even before the shelling stopped, fighter-bombers made it worse. Because they flew so low, they could put their bombs almost exactly where they wanted. They hit the C.S. artillery positions hard, and then came back to strafe whatever else looked interesting.

  And then, from up ahead, Jorge heard a shout no foot soldier ever wanted to hear: “Barrels!”

  The big, snorting monsters advanced in wedges. Jorge needed a little while to realize they weren’t all the same. The damnyankees put the largest and toughest ones in the lead. They blasted the way clear for the older barrels that came behind. Where are our barrels? he wondered. Wherever they were, they weren’t close enough to do anything about these machines.

  One of the U.S. machines hit a mine and threw a track. Its machine guns and cannon went on firing even so. Jorge picked off a barrel commander standing up in the cupola with a quick burst from his automatic rifle. That barrel kept on coming, though, and sprayed machine-gun bullets all around.

  “Back!” Sergeant Blackledge screamed. “We gotta get back, or we’re all dead!”

  “What’s Captain Cash say?” Jorge asked.

  “How can you say anything when you got your fucking head blown off?” the noncom said.

  Jorge had no answer for that. The Confederates in and around Sparta, Tennessee, had no answer for the oncoming Yankees. Jorge didn’t want to get out of his foxhole, but he didn’t want to get killed where he crouched, either. He ran for a shattered house and made it. Then he ran again. He was lucky. A lot of people weren’t.

  Brigadier General Clarence Potter had got used to long faces. Everybody in the War Department looked as if his favorite aunt had just walked in front of a bus. By the news leaking out of Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole Confederacy might have walked in front of a bus.

  What goes around comes around, he thought unhappily. Up in Ohio, the CSA had taught the United States a lot of lessons about how to use armor and mechanized infantry and aircraft together. Who would have figured the damnyankees made such good students? Now they were giving lessons of their own.

  And they had more in the way of blackboards and chalk and books than the Confederates ever did. Jake Featherston had counted on a quick, victorious war. When he didn’t get one, when he got another grapple instead…A good big man didn’t always lick a good little one, but that was sure as hell the way to bet.

  If Potter wore a vinegar phiz, then, and if just about everybody he saw looked the same way—well, so what? People had earned the right to look gloomy. He took frowns as much for granted as he took the smell of smoke and corruption in the air and the sight of plywood or cardboard over almost every window. He hardly even noticed that the corners of everybody’s mouth turned down.

  He hardly noticed, that is, till a young lieutenant—who wore the same hangdog expression as everybody else—escorted Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont into his office. No matter how tweedy FitzBelmont was, he looked as happy as if he’d just got engaged to an eighteen-year-old bathing beauty. Seeing his smile was like getting a surprise flashbulb in the kisser. Clarence Potter couldn’t remember the last time he’d met such unalloyed joy.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “Whatever you’re drinking, I want a slug, too.”

  Professor FitzBelmont had learned the ropes about security. He didn’t let out a peep till the lieutenant saluted, left, and closed the door behind himself. Only after the latch clicked did he say, “General, we are self-sustaining!”

  “That’s nice,” Potter answered, deadpan. “So you’re making enough money that you don’t need a handout from the government, are you?”

  “No, no, no!” FitzBelmont didn’t quite say, You damned fool, but the thought plainly hovered in his mind. Then he sent Potter a suspicious stare over the tops of his spectacles. “I believe you’re having me on.”

  “Who, me?” Potter sounded as innocent as a guilty man could. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he quickly grew serious. “I’m not sure I do know what you’re talking about, so suppose you spell it out for me.”

  “We have a lattice of uranium—enriched uranium, with more U-235 than you’d find in nature—and graphite that is producing more neutrons in each generation than it needs to generate in order to produce the next generation.”

  “I see…I think. Does that mean it’ll go boom if you pull out all the stops or whatever you need to do?”

  “Well—no,” FitzBelmont admitted. “But it is an indispensable first step.”

  “Have the United States already done it?” Potter asked.

  “You would know for a fact better than I, General,” Professor FitzBelmont said. Potter wished that were true. He knew the damnyankees had that establishment out in Washington State, but that was all he knew. He hadn’t been able to sneak any spies into the project—or, if he had, they hadn’t managed to get any reports out, which amounted to the same thing. U.S. security there was tight, and all the tighter after the Confederates’ bombing raid a few months before. FitzBelmont, meanwhile, went on, “While I don’t know for sure, I’d say it’s highly likely.”

 
; That matched Potter’s opinion better than he wished it did. The United States wouldn’t be committing the kind of resources they were if they didn’t think they had a winner. Were they spending more than the Confederacy was? They hid the budget as best they could (so did his own government), but he thought they were. “So they’re still ahead of us?” he said.

  “Again, I can’t prove it. Again, if I were a gambling man, I’d bet that way,” FitzBelmont said.

  “We’re all gambling men right now, Professor,” Potter said. “We’re gambling that you and your people can get this done before the damnyankees do—and before they rip our guts out just in the ordinary way of making war.”

  “Rip our…?” Henderson FitzBelmont frowned. “Do I take it that the true state of affairs in Kentucky and Tennessee is less salubrious than the press and the wireless make it out to be?”

  “Less…salubrious. That’s one way to put it.” Abstractly, Potter admired the professor’s choice of words. The damnyankees were tearing the Confederacy a new asshole out West, and nobody seemed able to slow them down much, let alone stop them. “We are in trouble over there. They’re aiming at Chattanooga right now. They haven’t got there, but that’s where they’re heading.”

  “Oh, my,” Professor FitzBelmont said. “That’s…a long way from the Ohio River.”

  “Tell me about it,” Clarence Potter said. He’d almost got sent west a couple of times himself, not as an Intelligence officer but as a combat soldier. The War Department was throwing every experienced officer into the fight. Only Jake Featherston’s loud insistence that he needed a spymaster had kept Potter in Richmond this long. Even Featherston’s insistence might not keep him here forever.

  “Unfortunate,” FitzBelmont murmured. “Um…You are aware that my team’s experiments require large amounts of electricity?”

  “Yes,” Potter said. “And so?”

  “The supply has been erratic lately, erratic enough to force delays,” FitzBelmont said. “I have no idea who can do anything about that, but I’d appreciate it if someone would. If you are the person to ask, I hope you’ll pass the word to the proper authorities.”

  Clarence Potter didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He ended up laughing, because he didn’t want Henderson FitzBelmont to see him cry. “Have you been paying attention to the war news, Professor? Any attention at all?”

  “I know it’s not good,” FitzBelmont said. “We were just talking about that. But what does it have to do with the electricity supply?”

  He was good at what he did. There wasn’t a better nuclear physicist in the CSA. Potter knew that. He’d had every one of the small band of physicists investigated. But outside his specialized field, Henderson V. FitzBelmont lived up to almost every cliché about narrowly specialized professors. As gently as he could, Potter said, “You know we’ve lost a lot of dams on the Cumberland and the Tennessee? The Yankees blew some, and we blew others to try to slow them down.” And it didn’t work well enough, dammit, he added, but only to himself.

  “Well, yes, certainly, but…” Much more slowly than it should have, a light went on in FitzBelmont’s eyes. “You’re telling me those dams produced some of the electricity I use.”

  “Not just what you use, Professor, and you aren’t the only one feeling the pinch,” Potter said. “Some of our factories have had to cut production, and we just can’t afford that.”

  “If we don’t have adequate power, heaven only knows how we can go forward,” FitzBelmont said. “This isn’t something we can do with steam engines and kerosene lamps.”

  “I understand that. But you need to understand you’re not the only one with a problem,” Potter said.

  How much did that matter? Would the Confederacy let factories work more slowly to make sure the uranium-bomb project stayed on track? Without the weapons the factories made, how were the Confederate States supposed to hold back the latest U.S. thrust? The other side of that coin was, could the Confederates hold back the latest U.S. thrust even with all those factories going flat-out?

  If the answer to that was no…If the answer to that is no, what the devil were we doing getting into this war in the first place? Potter wondered. Jake Featherston had counted on his quick knockout. The difference between what you counted on and what you got explained why so many people had unhappy marriages.

  But if the Confederate States had to count on the uranium bomb for any hope of victory, and if there was no guarantee they would ever get it built, and if there was a more than decent chance the United States would beat them to the punch…If all that was true, the Confederacy was in a hell of a lot of trouble.

  “Do you want to see the President, Professor?” Potter asked. “I’m sure he’d be glad to have this news straight from the horse’s mouth.” Well, straight from some part of the horse, anyhow.

  Henderson FitzBelmont shook his head. “Thank you, but that’s all right. You can deliver it. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. President Featherston, uh, intimidates me.”

  “President Featherston intimidates a lot of people,” Potter said. That was true. Featherston intimidated him, and he was a lot harder to spook than any tweedy professor ever born. In fairness, though, he felt he had to go on, “I don’t think he would try to be intimidating after news like this. I think he’d be much more likely to pull out a bottle and get drunk with you.”

  By the look FitzBelmont gave him, that was intimidating, too. How many years had it been since he went out and got drunk? Had he ever done anything like that? With most people, Potter would have taken the idea for granted. He didn’t with the professor.

  “Do I need to know anything else?” he asked. “You’ve got a self-sustaining reaction, and you need all the electricity you can steal. Is that it?”

  “That is the, ah, nucleus, yes.” Professor FitzBelmont smiled at his own joke.

  So did Clarence Potter, in a dutiful way. As quickly as he could, he eased the professor out of his office. Then he called the President of the CSA—this couldn’t wait. “Featherston here.” That harsh, furious voice was familiar to everyone in the CSA, and doubly so to Potter, who’d heard it in person long before most Confederate citizens started hearing it on the wireless.

  The line between his own office and the President’s bunker was supposed to be secure. He picked his words with care all the same: “I just had a visit from the fellow at the university.”

  “Did you, now?” Jake Featherston said with sudden sharp interest. “And what did he have to say?”

  “He’s jumped through one hoop,” Potter answered. “I’ll send you the details as soon as I can. But we really are moving forward.”

  “Hot damn,” Featherston said. “The fucking Yankees are moving forward, too. I swear to God, Potter, sometimes I wonder if this country deserves to win the war. If we let those nigger-loving mongrels kick the crap out of us, we aren’t the kind of people I reckoned we were.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, sir,” Potter said, in lieu of something like, I see. It’s not your fault we’re losing the war. It’s God’s fault. Potter didn’t think that was true. But even if it were, it didn’t help, because what could a mere mortal do about God? “I do know our friend thinks he can get this done.”

  “Does he think he can get it done in time?”

  Hearing that question made Potter feel better. It showed the President still had a feel for the essential. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. It depends on how far along the United States are with their own project.”

  “Screw the United States,” the President said. “Question is, can we keep our heads above water any which way till the professors come through?” That showed a feel for the essential, too. All things considered, Clarence Potter wished it didn’t.

  Dr. Leonard O’Doull had been with a retreating army. Now he served with an advancing one. From things he’d heard, most people’s morale was sky high these days. His wasn’t. At an aid station, you saw just as much misery going forward a
s you did going back. The only difference was, he didn’t suppose the Confederates were so likely to overrun the tent while he was operating.

  “It doesn’t seem like enough,” he said, looking up from a resection of a kid’s ripped-up lower intestine.

  Granville McDougald looked at him over his surgical mask. “Yeah, well, you take what you can get, Doc,” the veteran noncom said. “Only thing worse than fighting a war and winning is fighting a war and losing.”

  “Is that really worse?” O’Doull put in another suture, and another, and another. Sometimes he felt more like a sewing machine than anything else. “This poor bastard’s going to be left with a semicolon instead of a colon any which way.”

  “A semi—?” McDougald sent him a reproachful stare. “That’s awful, Doc. Period.”

  Did he really say awful? Or was it offal? He was right either way. But once you started making puns, you also started hearing them whether they were there or not. And wasn’t that one short step from hearing the little voices that weren’t there?

  “Is it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.

  “Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind. But he went on, “If you have to get shot, better to do it so not so many people on your side will get shot after you. Do you really want to see Featherston’s fuckers opening up with machine guns whenever they feel like target practice all over the USA?”

  “Well, no,” O’Doull admitted. He dusted the wounded soldier’s entrails with sulfa powder. Maybe the kid would escape the wound infection that surely would have killed him in any earlier war. Maybe. O’Doull started closing. If the soldier did live, he would have an amazing scar. “Still and all, though, Granny, I wonder if I should have come back from Quebec.”