The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  She hurried to the room where the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was meeting. Several Senators and Congressmen were already there. “Morning, Flora,” one of them said. “We pounded the, uh, crud out of Atlanta last night, if half of what they say on the wireless is true.”

  “Good,” Flora replied. About half of what they said on the wireless usually was true.

  “You all right?” the Congressman asked. “You look a little poorly.” Foster Stearns was a granite-ribbed Democrat from New Hampshire: a reactionary, a class enemy, and a good fellow. One of the things Flora had found in Congress was that the people on the other side of the aisle didn’t have horns and a tail. They were just people, no worse and no better than Socialists, and as sincere about what they believed.

  “I’ve been better,” Flora said. “I heard a people bomb—I’m pretty sure that’s what it was—go off when I was coming in.”

  “Oh!” everybody exclaimed. Foster Stearns pulled out a chair and made her sit down. Somebody—she didn’t see who—gave her a paper cup. She took a big swig, thinking it was water. It turned out to be straight gin, and almost went down the wrong pipe. She managed to swallow before she had to cough. She wasn’t used to straight gin right after breakfast—or any other time. But the swig seemed to help. She was less upset afterwards than she had been before.

  More committee members came in. They knew about the bomb, too. “Took out quite a few folks, the miserable son of a bitch,” one of them said, and then, “Excuse me, Flora.”

  “It’s all right,” Flora answered. “That’s not half what I think of him.”

  “Are we all here? Shall we get started?” A Senator and a Congressman asked the same thing at the same time.

  Along with everybody else, Flora looked around the conference room. Robert Taft wasn’t there. And that meant something was wrong. They should have convened five minutes earlier, at nine on the dot. He was always on time, as reliable as the sunrise. “Somebody call his apartment,” Flora said.

  Somebody went outside to do that, and came back a couple of minutes later. “His wife says he left forty-five minutes ago. He was walking in—trying to lose ten pounds.” More than one committee member chuckled, remembering his rotund father.

  Flora knew where Taft lived—much closer to Congressional Hall than she did. And she could make a pretty good guess about how he would have come here. When she did, she gasped in dismay. “I hope I’m wrong,” she said, “but…”

  “What is it?” Congressman Stearns asked. Then he must have drawn his own mental map, for he went pale as milk. “Sweet Jesus Christ, you don’t think the people bomber got him?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, “but he would have been in about the right place at about the wrong time. And the Mormons and the Confederates both hate him like rat poison. The Canadians, too, come to that.”

  “We’d better find out.” Foster Stearns and three other committee members said that or something very much like it. Stearns added, “We don’t even have to adjourn, because we never convened. Come on!” They all hurried toward the entrance.

  “Has Senator Taft come in?” Flora asked the butch policewoman.

  “Not by this way,” she answered, and he would have.

  Flora and the rest of the committee members looked at one another, their consternation growing. Somebody said, “Maybe we’d better start calling hospitals. Philadelphia Methodist is closest to where the bomb went off, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Foster Stearns said while Flora was still forming the picture in her mind. He nodded to the policewoman. “Where’s the nearest telephone we can use?”

  “Down that hallway, sir, on the left-hand side.” She pointed. She was more polite to him than she had been to Flora. With a wave of thanks, Stearns trotted off.

  Along with the other committee members, Flora followed him. Maybe there would be more than one telephone, so they could call several hospitals at once. And even if there weren’t, they would hear the news as soon as he got it.

  He was already talking when Flora came up. “You do have casualties there?” he asked. “How many? Have any gone to other hospitals, too?” To the other Representatives and Senators, he said, “At least a couple of dozen. It’s a bad one.” He spoke into the handset again: “Is Senator Taft there?…He is? How is he? This is Congressman Stearns. I’m on a committee with him.” He waited. Someone spoke into his ear. Flora knew the answer right away—he looked as if the person on the other end of the line had punched him in the stomach. “Thank you, Miss.” He hung up the telephone like a man moving in the grip of a bad dream.

  “He’s gone, isn’t he?” Flora said.

  “He is.” Stearns nodded dazedly. “Massive internal injuries, she said. They did everything they could, but….” He spread his hands.

  “Do they know who the bomber was?” Two or three people asked the same question.

  Now Stearns shook his head. “Only pieces left. The woman at the hospital said it was a man. Maybe what he’s got in his pockets will tell them more—or maybe it won’t.”

  Something flashed through Flora’s mind. A story she’d read to Joshua, back when he cared about stories and not Springfields. “Pocketses,” she muttered, but the memory wouldn’t take any more shape than that. “Whoever did it, he hurt us when he did. Robert was a good friend to his friends, and a bad enemy to his enemies.”

  “He was a stiff-necked old grouch,” she heard one of her fellow Socialists whisper to another.

  That was also true; no one who’d ever had much to do with Robert Taft would or could deny it. Taft had no patience for people who didn’t measure up to his own stern notions of rectitude. Despite wide political differences, he and Flora had got on well for years. Beyond any doubt, that said something about her. They made odd friends, the austere Ohio aristocrat and the New York garment worker’s daughter, odd but good.

  And now they didn’t. I’ll have to go to the funeral, she thought. She had a black dress that was getting too much wear these days. Part of that was the war’s fault, part her own for reaching her fifties. No matter how often you told them not to, people kept dying on you.

  “I think,” Congressman Stearns said, “we’d better go back and let some unhappy Army officers know we’re adjourning.”

  Going on the way Taft wanted would have meant convening the committee and raking those bungling officers over the coals. Flora was sure of that. She was just as sure she had no more heart for it than her colleagues did.

  Two of the officers—a brigadier general and a colonel—were in the conference room when the committee members returned. “Good God!” the colonel exclaimed when he heard the news. “He was a son of a bitch—everybody knew that—but he was our son of a bitch, and everybody knew that, too.”

  His words more pungently echoed Flora’s. She kept feeling at the hole losing Robert Taft left in her spirit. It seemed as real, and as painful, as the hole from a lost tooth in her mouth. The dentist gave her codeine after doing his worst to her. There was no codeine for a hole in the spirit. It would have to hurt till time turned it from an open, bleeding wound to a scar.

  Before she even knew she was doing it, she started to cry. So much already lost in this war. And she thought about Joshua’s latest letter. She’d lost so much—and she still had so much to lose.

  Jefferson Pinkard thought Humble, Texas, was mighty well named. It lay twenty miles north of Houston, and was about the size of Snyder—three or four thousand people. For a while after the turn of the century, Humble might have been Proud: they struck oil there, and a lot of people got rich. Then the mad inflation after the Great War wiped out everybody’s money, rich and poor alike, and after that the wells started running dry. Some of them still pumped, but they weren’t making anybody rich these days. Lumber from the pine woods around the town helped business keep going.

  Humble would just about do, Jeff decided. He’d looked at a lot of small towns in southeastern Texas, and this one seemed bes
t suited to his purposes. A railroad ran through it; building a spur off the main line would be easy. Local sheriffs and Mexican soldiers had already cleaned most of the Negroes out of the area. If he had to build a new camp here, he could do that.

  He’d rather have stayed in Snyder, but that wouldn’t fly much longer. Who would have thought the United States cared enough about Negroes to try to keep the Confederates from getting rid of them? What business of the damnyankees was it? If they wanted to let their blacks live, they could do that. But they didn’t like them well enough to let more from the CSA come over their border.

  Jeff could see advantages to starting over. He could do things the right way from the beginning. The bathhouses that weren’t would go up as an organic part of the camp, not as add-ons. He could build a proper crematorium here, get rid of the bodies once and for all, instead of dumping them into trenches. Yes, it could work.

  It would disrupt routine, though. To a camp commandant, routine was a precious thing. Routine meant the camp was operating the way it was supposed to. When routine broke down, that was when you had trouble.

  Of course, if you looked at it another way, routine at Camp Determination had already broken down. Damnyankee bombing raids and the U.S. Eleventh Army’s drive toward Snyder had ruined it. How could you run a proper camp when you weren’t sure how much population you needed to reduce from one day to the next? How could you when you didn’t know whether soldiers in green-gray would start shelling you soon? That hadn’t happened yet, but Jeff knew it could.

  When he talked to the mayor of Humble about running up a camp outside of town, that worthy said, “You’ll use local lumber, won’t you? You’ll use local labor?”

  “Well, sure,” Jeff answered. “As much as I can, anyways.”

  “Sounds good, General,” the mayor said, eyeing the wreathed stars on either side of the collar on Jeff’s uniform. Pinkard didn’t explain about Freedom Party ranks—life was too short. The mayor went on, “Once you get this place built, reckon you’ll want to keep some local boys on as guards? And some of the older fellas who maybe got hurt the last time around or maybe aren’t up to marching twenty-five miles a day?” The mayor himself, with a big belly, a bald head, and a bushy white mustache, fell into that last group.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Jeff said. “If they’ve got what it takes, I’ll use ’em.”

  The mayor beamed. He thought Pinkard had made a promise. Jeff beamed, too. He knew damn well he hadn’t. The mayor stuck out his pudgy hand. “Sounds like we got ourselves a deal,” he said.

  “I hope so,” Jeff said, shaking on it. “Still have to clear things with Richmond, too, you understand.” If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.

  But the mayor did. “Well, sure, General. That’s how things work nowadays, isn’t it?” he said. “You want to use my telephone?” He seemed proud to have one on his desk.

  “I sure as hell do,” Pinkard answered. He slid the telephone over to his side of the desk, but didn’t pick up the handset or dial the long-distance operator till the mayor ate humble pie and scurried out of his own office. Then Jeff listened to the inevitable clicks and pops on the line as his call went through. And then he listened to the voice of Ferdinand Koenig’s secretary, which was sultry enough to fit into any man’s wet dream.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” she purred. “I’m sure he’ll speak to you. Hold on, please.”

  “I thank you kindly.” It wasn’t even that Jeff was a week and several hundred miles away from his wife. Edith could have been standing beside him and he would have been extra polite to a woman with a voice like that.

  “Koenig here.” The Attorney General of the CSA, by contrast, sounded like a raspy old bullfrog. But he had Jake Featherston’s ear, so he didn’t need to be sexy. “You find what you were looking for, Pinkard?”

  “Reckon I did, sir. I’m in a little town called Humble, up north of Houston. Got a railroad line, and a spur to a new camp’d be easy to build. Mayor’s damn near wetting his pants, he wants it in his back yard so bad.”

  “Humble, you say? Hang on. Let me look at a map.” There was a pause while Koenig rustled papers; Jeff listened to him do it. He came back on the line. “All right—I found it. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Yankee bombers’d have a devil of a time getting there from anywhere, wouldn’t they?”

  “If they wouldn’t, sir, we are really and truly fucked,” Pinkard replied.

  A cold silence followed. Then the Attorney General said, “You want to watch your mouth. I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”

  “Yeah, I reckon you have.” Jeff wasn’t eager to kowtow to a voice on the line from Richmond, no matter how important that voice’s owner was. “But wasn’t I telling you the truth?” He used Jake Featherston’s catchphrase with sour relish. “Things don’t look so good right now, do they?”

  “Maybe not, but we’ll lick the damnyankees yet. You just see if we don’t.” Ferd Koenig sounded absolutely confident.

  “Hope like hell you’re right, sir.” Jeff meant that. “Can we talk about this Humble place some more?” The biggest advantage he saw to closing down Camp Determination was purely personal: it would let him get his family the hell out of Snyder without looking as if they were running away. They’d come through every Yankee bombing raid so far, but how long could they stay lucky? Long enough, he hoped.

  He wondered if Koenig felt like raking him over the coals some more, but the Attorney General backed off. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said. “Reckon it’ll suit.”

  “All right, then. Next question is, how do we get it built? I used niggers to run up Camp Determination, but I don’t figure that’d work this time around. Can I get me a team of Army engineers, or are they all busy over in Tennessee and Georgia?” That Jeff could mention the Army’s being busy in Georgia said how badly things were going.

  Ferd Koenig didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have ’em,” he promised. “Population reduction is a priority, by God. We’ll take care of this, and in jig time, too. You get ready to finish what you’ve got going on at Camp Determination, and we’ll run up the camp by Humble. Plans’ll be about the same as the ones you used before, right?”

  “Yes, sir, except we’ll want the bathhouses built in instead of tacked on, if you know what I mean,” Pinkard said. “And I’d like a crematorium alongside, too. More ground in use around here—not so much room for dozers to scrape out the big old trenches we’d need.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Ferd Koenig said. “We’ve got ’em in place at a couple of other camps. Design’s already taken care of, so all we’ve got to do is run up another one.”

  “That sounds good. I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” Jeff said.

  “Let me write it down so I make sure I have it straight.” Koenig did, then read it back. “That about cover things?”

  Jeff thought before he answered. If he’d forgotten something, getting it fixed after the engineers left wouldn’t be so easy. But he couldn’t think of anything—and then he did. “Mayor here wants to make sure you hire locals for some of the work.”

  “Oh, sure—we always take care of shit like that. Gotta keep those boys happy, too,” the Attorney General said indulgently. “You get ready to move, ’cause this one’ll go up faster’n hell. We don’t want to pull the engineers off the line any longer than we have to.”

  “I’ll handle that, sir,” Jeff said. “You can count on it.”

  “If I couldn’t, somebody else’d be there. Freedom!” Koenig hung up.

  The mayor was plainly worrying about his telephone bill when Jeff called him back in. Jeff wondered if the man had ever called anywhere as far away as Virginia. He would have bet against it. But the mayor’s face lit up when Jeff said, “Well, Ferd Koenig reckons Humble will suit us as well as I do. Some Army engineers’ll come in to run up the camp, and then, by God, then we’ll get down to business.”

  “That’s mighty fine news—mighty fine,” the mayor said. “Uh—you do r
ecall I’d like some of our people from around these parts to help do the work?”

  “Ferd says the engineers’ll take care of that,” Pinkard told him. His repeated use of the Attorney General’s nickname seemed to impress the mayor even more than the near-promise.

  “Good news. Damn good news.” The mayor reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle and a couple of glasses. “We ought to have us a drink to celebrate.”

  “I sure don’t mind,” Jeff said. The mayor’s whiskey turned out to be rotgut, but Jeff didn’t flabble. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t drunk rotgut before. One drink led to several, and to his staying over in Humble a night longer than he’d intended. The mayor offered to get him a girl for the evening, but he turned that down. He was more practical than virtuous. Any woman the mayor got him would be a pro, and with a pro you never could tell what you were bringing home to your wife. That wouldn’t be so good, especially not with a baby on the way pretty soon.

  He set out across Texas for Snyder the next morning. As usual, the sheer size of the state flabbergasted him. The drive in the old Birmingham felt more like crossing a country. Even real cities like Dallas and Fort Worth seemed dwarfed by the immensity all around them. Bomb damage seemed diminished and spread out, too. He knew the USA had hit both towns hard the year before, but he saw only a few battered, firescarred buildings.

  West of Fort Worth, woods grew scarcer and the prairie stretched as far as the eye could see. Every so often, Jefferson Pinkard began to spot shot-up motorcars by the side of the road. Some were merely pocked with bullet holes. A couple had bloodstains marring the paint of one door or another; a hasty grave was dug beside one of those. And some were charred wrecks: autos where a bullet had gone through the engine or the gasoline vapors in a mostly empty fuel tank.

  Pinkard kept a wary eye on the sky. The Birmingham had nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide if U.S. fighters or fighter-bombers swooped down. Maybe he could get out and hide in a ditch while they shot up the auto. That was his best hope, anyhow.