Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Why, he even knew how the image had been ever so slightly edited. She could be vain about the silliest things. His phone buzzed. He picked it up. “Yes, Brittany?”

  “Your wife’s on the line, Mr. Kloster,” his secretary said. “Something she wants you to get on the way home.”

  “Sure, put her through.” Justin was still chuckling when his wife came on the line. “Okay, what do you need at the store, Lindsey?”

  Must and Shall

  Most alternate-history stories about the Civil War have to do with a Confederate victory. I’ve done some of that sort myself—The Guns of the South and How Few Remain look at two different ways the South might have won, and create two very different worlds. What’s less immediately obvious is that the North also had different ways of winning the war, ways that would have produced different aftermaths. “Must and Shall” looks at one of the less pleasant of these.

  * * *

  12 July 1864—Fort Stevens, North of Washington, D.C.

  General Horatio Wright stood up on the earthen parapet to watch the men of the Sixth Corps, hastily recalled from Petersburg, drive Jubal Early’s Confederates away from the capital of the United States. Down below the parapet, a tall, thin man in black frock coat and stovepipe hat asked, “How do we fare, General?”

  “Splendidly.” Wright’s voice was full of relief. Had Early chosen to attack the line of forts around Washington the day before, he’d have faced only militiamen and clerks with muskets, and might well have broken through to the city. But Early had been late, and now the veterans from the Sixth Corps were pushing his troopers back. Washington City was surely saved. Perhaps because he was so relieved, Wright said, “Would you care to come up with me and see how we drive them?”

  “I should like that very much, thank you,” Abraham Lincoln said, and climbed the ladder to stand beside him.

  Never in his wildest nightmares had Wright imagined the President accepting. Lincoln had peered over the parapet several times already, and drawn fire from the Confederates. They were surely too far from Fort Stevens to recognize him, but with his height and the hat he made a fine target.

  Not far away, a man was wounded and fell back with a cry. General Wright interposed his body between President Lincoln and the Confederates. Lincoln spoiled that by stepping away from him. “Mr. President, I really must insist that you retire to a position of safety,” Wright said. “This is no place for you; you must step down at once!”

  Lincoln took no notice of him, but continued to watch the fighting north of the fort. A captain behind the parapet, perhaps not recognizing his commander-in-chief, shouted, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!”

  When Lincoln did not move, Wright said, “If you do not get down, sir, I shall summon a body of soldiers to remove you by force.” He gulped at his own temerity in threatening the President of the United States.

  Lincoln seemed more amused than anything else. He started to turn away, to walk back toward the ladder. Instead, after half a step, he crumpled bonelessly. Wright had thought of nightmares before. Now one came to life in front of his horrified eyes. Careless of his own safety, he crouched by the President, whose blood poured from a massive head wound into the muddy dirt atop the parapet. Lincoln’s face wore an expression of mild surprise. His chest hitched a couple of times, then was still.

  The captain who’d shouted at Lincoln to get down mounted to the parapet. His eyes widened. “Dear God,” he groaned. “It is the President.”

  Wright thought he recognized him. “You’re Holmes, aren’t you?” he said. Somehow it was comforting to know the man you were addressing when the world seemed to crumble around you.

  “Yes, sir, Oliver W. Holmes, 20th Massachusetts,” the young captain answered.

  “Well, Captain Holmes, fetch a physician here at once,” Wright said. Holmes nodded and hurried away. Wright wondered at his industry—surely he could see Lincoln was dead. Who, then, was the more foolish, himself for sending Holmes away, or the captain for going?

  21 July 1864—Washington, D.C.

  From the hastily erected wooden rostrum on the East Portico of the Capitol, Hannibal Hamlin stared out at the crowd waiting for him to deliver his inaugural address. The rostrum was draped with black, as was the Capitol, as had been the route his carriage took to reach it. Many of the faces in the crowd were still stunned, disbelieving. The United States had never lost a President to a bullet, not in the eighty-eight years since the nation freed itself from British rule.

  In the front row of dignitaries, Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee glared up at Hamlin. He had displaced the man from Maine on Lincoln’s reelection ticket; had this dreadful event taken place a year later (assuming Lincoln’s triumph), he now would be President. But no time for might-have-beens.

  Hamlin had been polishing his speech since the telegram announcing Lincoln’s death reached him up in Bangor, where, feeling useless and rejected, he had withdrawn after failing of renomination for the Vice Presidency. Now, though, his country needed him once more. He squared his broad shoulders, ready to bear up under the great burden so suddenly thrust upon him.

  “Stand fast!” he cried. “That has ever been my watchword, and at no time in all the history of our great and glorious republic has our heeding it been more urgent. Abraham Lincoln’s body may lie in the grave, but we shall go marching on—to victory!”

  Applause rose from the crowd at the allusion to “John Brown’s Body”—and not just from the crowd, but also from the soldiers posted on the roof of the Capitol and at intervals around the building to keep the accursed rebels from murdering two Presidents, not just one. Hamlin went on, “The responsibility for this great war, in which our leader gave his last full measure of devotion, lies solely at the feet of the Southern slaveocrats who conspired to take their states out of our grand Union for their own evil ends. I promise you, my friends—Abraham Lincoln shall be avenged, and those who caused his death punished in full.”

  More applause, not least from the Republican Senators who proudly called themselves Radical: from Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and bespectacled John Andrew of Massachusetts. Hamlin had been counted among their number when he sat in the Senate before assuming the duties, such as they were, of the Vice President.

  “Henceforward,” Hamlin declared, “I say this: let us use every means recognized by the Laws of War which God has put in our hands to crush out the wickedest rebellion the world has ever witnessed. This conflict is become a radical revolution—yes, gentlemen, I openly employ the word, and, what is more, I revel in it—involving the desolation of the South as well as the emancipation of the bondsmen it vilely keeps in chains.”

  The cheers grew louder still. Lincoln had been more conciliatory, but what had conciliation got him? Only a coffin and a funeral and a grieving nation ready, no eager, for harsher measures.

  “They have sowed the wind; let them reap the whirlwind. We are in earnest now, and have awakened to the stern duty upon us. Let that duty be disregarded or haltingly or halfway performed, and God only in His wisdom can know what will be the end. This lawless monster of a Political Slave Power shall forevermore be shorn of its power to ruin a government it no longer has the strength to rule.

  “The rebels proudly proclaim they have left the Union. Very well: we shall take them at their word and, once having gained the victory Providence will surely grant us, we shall treat their lands as they deserve—not as the states they no longer desire to be, but as conquered provinces, won by our sword. I say we shall hang Jefferson Davis, and hang Robert E. Lee, and hang Joe Johnston, yes, hang them higher than Haman, and the other rebel generals and colonels and governors and members of their false Congress. The living God is merciful, true, but He is also just and vengeful, and we, the people of the United States, we shall be His instrument in advancing the right.”

  Now great waves of cheering, led by grim Thaddeus Stevens himself, washed over Hamlin.
The fierce sound reminded him of wolves baying in the backwoods of Maine. He stood tall atop the rostrum. He would lead these wolves, and with them pull the rebel Confederacy down in ruin.

  11 August 1942—New Orleans, Louisiana

  Air brakes chuffing, the Illinois Central train pulled to a stop at Union Station on Rampart Street. “New Orleans!” the conductor bawled unnecessarily. “All out for New Orleans!”

  Along with the rest of the people in the car, Neil Michaels filed toward the exit. He was a middle-sized man in his late thirties, most of his dark blond hair covered by a snap-brim fedora. The round, thick, gold-framed spectacles he wore helped give him the mild appearance of an accountant.

  As soon as he stepped from the air-conditioned comfort of the railroad car out into the steamy heat of a New Orleans summer, those glasses steamed up. Shaking his head in bemusement, Michaels drew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped away the moisture.

  He got his bags and headed for the cab stand, passing on the way a horde of men and boys hawking newspapers and rank upon rank of shoeshine stands. A fat Negro man sat on one of those, gold watch chain running from one pocket of his vest to the other. At his feet, an Irish-looking fellow plied the rag until his customer’s black oxfords gleamed.

  “There y’are, sir,” the shoeshine man said, his half-Brooklyn, half-Southern accent testifying he was a New Orleans native. The Negro looked down at his shoes, nodded, and, with an air of great magnanimity, flipped the shoeshine man a dime. “Oh, thank you very much, sir,” the fellow exclaimed. The insincere servility in his voice grated on Michaels’ ears.

  More paperboys cried their trade outside the station. Michaels bought a Times-Picayune to read while he waited in line for a taxi. The war news wasn’t good. The Germans were still pushing east in Russia and sinking ship after ship off the American coast. In the South Pacific, Americans and Japanese were slugging away at each other, and God only knew how that would turn out.

  Across the street from Union Station, somebody had painted a message: yanks out! Michaels sighed. He’d seen that slogan painted on barns and bridges and embankments ever since his train crossed into Tennessee—and, now that he thought about it, in Kentucky as well, though Kentucky had stayed with the Union during the Great Rebellion.

  When he got to the front of the line at the cab stand, a hack man heaved his bags into the trunk of an Oldsmobile and said, “Where to, sir?”

  “The New Orleans Hotel, on Canal Street,” Michaels answered.

  The cabbie touched the brim of his cap. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice suddenly empty. He opened the back door for Michaels, slammed it shut after him, then climbed into the cab himself. It took off with a grinding of gears that said the transmission had seen better days.

  On the short ride to the hotel, Michaels counted five more scrawls of yanks out, along with a couple of patches of whitewash that probably masked others. Servicemen on the street walked along in groups of at least four; several corners sported squads of soldiers in full combat gear, including, in one case, a machine-gun nest built of sandbags. “Nice quiet little town,” Michaels remarked.

  “Isn’t it?” the cabbie answered, deadpan. He hesitated, his jaw working as if he were chewing his cud. After a moment, he decided to go on: “Mister, with an accent like yours, you want to be careful where you let people hear it. For a damnyankee, you don’t seem like a bad fellow, an’ I wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen to you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind,” Michaels said. He wished the Bureau had sent somebody who could put on a convincing drawl. Of course the last man the FBS had sent ended up floating in the Mississippi, so evidently his drawl hadn’t been convincing enough.

  The cab wheezed to a stop in front of the New Orleans Hotel. “That’ll be forty cents, sir,” the driver said.

  Michaels reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a half-dollar. “Here you go. I don’t need any change.”

  “That’s right kind of you, sir, but—you wouldn’t happen to have two quarters instead?” the cabbie said. He handed the big silver coin back to his passenger.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Michaels demanded, though he thought he knew the answer. “It’s legal tender of the United States of America.”

  “Yes, sir, reckon it is, but there’s no place hereabouts I’d care to try and spend it, even so,” the driver answered, “not with his picture on it.” The obverse of the fifty-cent piece bore an image of the martyred Lincoln, the reverse a Negro with his manacles broken and the legend sic semper tyrannis. Michaels had known it was an unpopular coin with white men in the South, but he hadn’t realized how unpopular it was.

  He got out of the cab, rummaged in his pocket, and came up with a quarter and a couple of dimes. The cabbie didn’t object to Washington’s profile, or to that of the god Mercury. He also didn’t object to seeing his tip cut in half. That told Michaels all he needed to know about how much the half-dollar was hated.

  Lazily spinning ceiling fans inside the hotel lobby stirred the air without doing much to cool it. The colored clerk behind the front desk smiled to hear Michaels’ accent. “Yes, sir, we do have your reservation,” she said after shuffling through papers. By the way she talked, she’d been educated up in the Loyal States herself. She handed him a brass key. “That’s room 429, sir. Three dollars and twenty-five cents a night.”

  “Very good,” Michaels said. The clerk clanged the bell on the front desk. A white bellboy in a pillbox hat and uniform that made him look like a Philip Morris advertisement picked up Michaels’ bags and carried them to the elevator.

  When they got to room 429, Michaels opened the door. The bellboy put down the bags inside the room and stood waiting for his tip. By way of experiment, Michaels gave him the fifty-cent piece the cabbie had rejected. The bellboy took the coin and put it in his pocket. His lips shaped a silent word. Michaels thought it was damnyankee, but he wasn’t quite sure. The bellboy left in a hurry.

  A couple of hours later, Michaels went downstairs to supper. Something shiny was lying on the carpet in the hall. He looked down at the half-dollar he’d given the bellboy. It had lain here in plain sight while people walked back and forth; he’d heard them. Nobody had taken it. Thoughtfully, he picked it up and stuck it in his pocket.

  A walk through the French Quarter made fears about New Orleans seem foolish. Jazz blasted out of every other doorway. Neon signs pulsed above gin mills. Spasm bands, some white, some Negro, played on streetcorners. No one paid attention to blackout regulations—that held true North and South. Clog-dancers shuffled, overturned caps beside them inviting coins. Streetwalkers in tawdry finery swung their hips and flashed knowing smiles.

  Neil Michaels moved through the crowds of soldiers and sailors and gawking civilians like a halfback evading tacklers and heading downfield. He glanced at his watch, partly to check the time and partly to make sure nobody had stolen it. Half past eleven. Didn’t this place ever slow down? Maybe not.

  He turned right off Royal Street onto St. Peter and walked southeast toward the Mississippi and Jackson Square. The din of the Vieux Carré faded behind him. He strode past the Cabildo, the old Spanish building of stuccoed brick that now housed the Louisiana State Museum, including a fine collection of artifacts and documents on the career of the first military governor of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler. Johnny Rebs kept threatening to dynamite the Cabildo, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  Two great bronze statues dominated Jackson Square. One showed the square’s namesake on horseback. The other, even taller, faced that equestrian statue. Michaels thought Ben Butler’s bald head and rotund, sagging physique less than ideal for being immortalized in bronze, but no one had asked his opinion.

  He strolled down the paved lane in the formal garden toward the statue of Jackson. Lights were dimmer here in the square, but not too dim to keep Michaels from reading the words Butler had had carved into the pedestal of the statue: the union must and shall be preserved, an adaptation of Jackson�
�s famous toast, “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved.”

  Michaels’ mouth stretched out in a thin hard line that was not a smile. By force and fear, with cannon and noose, bayonet and prison term, the United States Army had preserved the Union. And now, more than three-quarters of a century after the collapse of the Great Rebellion, U.S. forces still occupied the states of the rebel Confederacy, still skirmished in hills and forests and sometimes city streets against men who put on gray shirts and yowled like catamounts when they fought. Hatred bred hatred, reprisal bred reprisal, and so it went on and on. He sometimes wondered if the Union wouldn’t have done better to let the Johnny Rebs get the hell out, if that was what they’d wanted so badly.

  He’d never spoken that thought aloud; it wasn’t one he could share. Too late to worry about such things anyhow, generations too late. He had to deal with the consequences of what vengeful Hamlin and his like-minded successors had done.

  The man he was supposed to meet would be waiting behind Butler’s statue. Michaels was slightly surprised the statue had no guards around it; the Johnny Rebs had blown it up in the 1880s and again in the 1920s. If New Orleans today was reconciled to rule from Washington, it concealed the fact very well.

  Michaels ducked around into the darkness behind the statue. “Four score and seven,” he whispered, the recognition signal he’d been given.

  Someone should have answered, “New birth of freedom.” No one said anything. As his eyes adapted to the darkness, he made out a body sprawled in the narrow space between the base of the statue and the shrubbery that bordered Jackson Square. He stooped beside it. If this was the man he was supposed to meet, the fellow would never give him a recognition signal, not till Judgment Day. His throat had been cut.

  Running feet on the walkways of the square, flashlight beams probing like spears. One of them found Michaels. He threw up an arm against the blinding glare. A hard Northern voice shouted, “Come out of there right now, you damned murdering Reb, or you’ll never get a second chance!”