Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

  So Americans kept doing most of the Constitutional Monarchy’s fighting and most of the dying in Japan. Next to the battles there before World War II ended, even next to the fighting in Europe, the stubborn positional war going on now was small potatoes. But it was like an infected sore that wouldn’t stop oozing casualties. News of young American men killed and young American men maimed wouldn’t go away. Spring passed into summer. Places christened Geisha Gulch and the Valley of the Shadow of Death showed up in the newspapers. They weren’t the kind of names that won popularity contests.

  Charlie went to Stas Mikoian, who was the most reasonable of Joe Steele’s longtime cronies. “You know, if the boss wants to get reelected in 1952, he’s got to do something more about the Japanese War,” he said.

  Mikoian smiled at him. “If the boss wants to get reelected in 1952, he’ll get reelected in 1952, and you can take that to the bank.”

  “He’ll have to cook the books harder than usual to make sure nothing goes wrong,” Charlie said.

  “Nothing will go wrong.” Stas Mikoian kept smiling. Was it an I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile? Charlie didn’t especially think so at the time. At the time, all he thought was that Mikoian should have paid more attention to him. Afterwards, though, he wondered.

  And the Japanese War and its misfortunes weren’t limited to the far side of the Pacific. A few days after Charlie talked with Mikoian, he saw a little story in the Washington Post some AP stringer in New Mexico had filed. An ammunition dump exploded in the desert about a hundred miles south of Albuquerque, it read. The blast, which took place in the predawn hours, lit up the bleak countryside and could be heard for miles. The cause is still under investigation. No casualties were reported.

  Casualties or not, somebody’s head will roll, Charlie thought. Sounds like it was a big boom. Good thing it was off in the middle of nowhere. That’s where they need to keep ammunition dumps. He read the story again. That bleak argued the reporter wasn’t from New Mexico. He smiled to himself, there in the office. If his life hadn’t got tangled up with Joe Steele’s, he might have written the paragraph in the paper himself.

  He wondered if he would be happier now had he kept on writing for the Associated Press. It wouldn’t have been hard to arrange. If he’d taken a leak a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later in that Chicago greasy spoon in 1932, so he didn’t hear Vince Scriabin talking to, well, somebody . . . Those few minutes, the chance filling of his bladder, made all the difference in the world to his life, and to Mike’s, too.

  You could drive yourself clean around the bend if you started wondering about stuff like that. What if Joe Steele’s folks had stayed in the old country instead of coming to America? What would he have become over there? A priest? A Red? Nothing very much? That was the way to bet. The United States was the land of opportunity, the place where a man could rise from nothing to—to five terms in the White House.

  People always liked to believe they were the masters of their souls and the captains of their fate. But just because you liked to believe it didn’t make it true. It seemed at least as likely that people bounced at random off the paddles of God’s pinball machine, and that they could as easily have bounced some other way.

  In a similar vein, hadn’t Einstein said God didn’t play dice with the universe? Something like that, anyhow. But Einstein himself had crapped out before his appointed time, so how much had he known?

  No. That wasn’t a problem of physics or quantum mechanics or whatever you wanted to call it. That was Albert Einstein misreading Joe Steele. Einstein had been mighty good with a slide rule. With people? Not so hot. With Joe Steele, you got only one mistake. Einstein made a big one, and paid a big price.

  What went through Charlie’s mind was I’m still here. Einstein had done more while he was around. Charlie knew that. But Einstein was a genius, and Charlie didn’t fill the bill there. He knew that, too. Genius or not, he was still around to do the things he could do, while Einstein wasn’t. That also counted. As far as Charlie could see, it counted for more than anything else.

  * * *

  Mike sat in the ruins of Yamashita, on the east coast of North Japan, as the sun went down. Red propaganda posters still decorated the walls and fences that the fighting hadn’t knocked down. Workers and peasants marched side by side into a sunny future. Happy tractors—they were smiling cartoons—plowed fields. He couldn’t read the script, but the pictures spoke for themselves.

  He spooned beef stew out of a C-ration can. It wasn’t one of his favorites, but it beat hell out of going hungry. Down in South Japan, they were trying to make the Japs use the Roman alphabet all the time. The idea was to link them to the wider world. Whether they wanted to be linked that way . . . Eisenhower didn’t bother to ask. He just followed Joe Steele’s orders.

  Trotsky was supposed to be the one who tore everything up by the roots. But the Russians hadn’t tried to change the way people in North Japan wrote. What did it say when Joe Steele was more radical than Mr. World Revolution?

  A soldier came over to Mike and asked, “Hey, Sarge, are we gonna move up toward Sendai tonight?”

  Sendai was the next real city, about ten miles north of Yamashita. It held about a quarter of a million people. It was also the place where the North Japanese were digging in for a serious stand. All the same, Mike shook his head. “Doesn’t look that way, Ralph. Our orders are to sit tight right where we are.”

  “How come?” Ralph said. “If we hit ’em when they’re off-balance, like, maybe we can punch through ’em an’ get this goddamn stupid useless fucking war over with.”

  Mike chuckled. “Tell me again how you feel about it. I wasn’t quite sure the first time.” He held up a hand. “Seriously, though, all I do is work here. You want to get the orders changed, go back to Division HQ. That’s where they came from.”

  “Oh, yeah. They’re gonna listen to a PFC.” Ralph patted his single stripe. “But I still say we’re missin’ a good chance.”

  “I think so, too, but I can’t do anything about it, either. Maybe we’ll bomb ’em tonight or something.” Mike paused to slap at a mosquito. There weren’t nearly so many of them now in August as there had been during spring, but Japan seemed to be without them only when it was snowing.

  Ralph slapped, too. “What we ought do is bomb this place with that new shit, that DDT,” he said. “Beats the bejesus out of Flit and like that. I mean, it really kills the little sonsabitches.”

  “Yeah.” Mike wasn’t lousy. He didn’t have fleas. He got sprayed every week or two, and the pests couldn’t live on him. “It’s the McCoy, all right.”

  He walked around his section’s perimeters, making sure the sentries were where they needed to be and stayed on their toes. The main North Japanese force was up at Sendai, sure. But those bastards liked to sneak men in civilian clothes, sometimes even women, back into areas they’d lost and have them toss grenades at the Americans and try to disappear in the confusion afterwards. Whenever you fought Japs, you needed to stay ready all the time or you’d be sorry.

  About half past ten, Mike was getting ready to roll himself in his blanket. He’d learned to sleep anywhere at any time in the labor encampment. That came in handy for a soldier, too.

  Before he dropped off, though, bombers droned overhead, flying from south to north. They really were going to hit Sendai, then. They hadn’t used the B-29s all that much lately, even at night. North Japanese fighters and flak made the big planes suffer.

  The ones tonight were flying so high, he could hardly hear their engines. Considering how much noise B-29s made in the air, that was really saying something. The North Japanese in Sendai knew they were coming, though. Their antiaircraft guns sent a fireworks display of tracers into the sky. Mike hoped the crews would come through safe.

  He twisted in his hole. Like a dog or a cat, he looked for the most comfortable way in which to sleep. He’d just
found it and closed his eyes when a new sun blazed in the north.

  Even in the hole, even with his eyes closed, the hideous glare tore at his sight. He clapped his hands to his face. That wouldn’t have helped, either, if the light hadn’t faded quickly. As it faded, a thunderous roar, like that of every artillery piece in the world going off at once, left him half deaf. Wind whistled past him for a moment, though the night had been calm till then.

  He scrambled to his feet. Now he could bear to look to the north. He gaped at what he saw. Lit from within, a cloud of gas and dust and God knew what rose high into the sky, higher and wider every moment. It had a terrible and terrifying beauty unlike anything he’d ever dreamt of.

  Even though it was so far away, he felt heat against his face, as he would have from the real sun. What had happened to Sendai, right under . . . whatever that was? What had happened to the North Japanese troops crowding Sendai? Whatever had happened to them, he was sure he didn’t need to worry about them any more.

  * * *

  Joe Steele’s voice came out of the radio: “Yesterday, August 6, 1949—a day which will live in history—the United States of America harnessed the power that lights the stars to bring peace between the two warring nations that now share the Home Islands of Japan.”

  Charlie beamed. He beamed so much that Esther smiled, too, and asked, “That’s your opening, isn’t it?”

  “You bet it is,” Charlie said. The news was big enough that what Joe Steele had to say about it was bound to wind up in Bartlett’s. The President would get the credit, but Charlie would know where the words came from even if nobody else but his wife did.

  “A B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Sendai last night,” Joe Steele went on. “It was a legitimate military target because of its factories and because North Japanese troops were massing there for a fresh attack against American forces at Yamashita, ten miles to the south. This one bomb had the explosive power of twenty thousand tons of high explosive. It was two thousand times as strong as the biggest bomb that fell on Germany during World War II.

  “We used this terrible weapon with reluctance. But it has become clear that the North Japanese and their Russian backers cannot be made to recognize the legitimacy of the Constitutional Monarchy of Japan by anything but extraordinary measures. And so we have now turned to those measures. To the leaders of North Japan and to all who prop them up, I give a warning they would do well to heed. Enough is enough.”

  “That sounds like we have more of those atomic bombs piled up somewhere ready to go,” Esther said.

  “It sure does,” Charlie said. “But you can’t prove anything by me. I didn’t know we had the one till it went off.” He had known Rickover and his pet physicists and engineers were working on it, but not that they’d succeeded. The eggheads Rickover had pulled out of the regular labor encampments and into his special one probably wouldn’t have to break any more rocks or pave any more roads.

  “Here’s hoping this means your brother gets out of the war in one piece,” Esther said.

  “That would be good. That would be wonderful, in fact,” Charlie said. “As far as I know, Mike hasn’t been on this side of the Pacific since he shipped out in—God!—1943.”

  Esther looked and listened to make sure Sarah and Pat couldn’t hear what she had to say. Charlie not only recognized the gesture, he used it himself. Satisfied, she said, “He probably doesn’t want to get any closer to Joe Steele than he can help.”

  “No, he probably doesn’t.” Charlie sighed and started to take a Chesterfield out of the pack. Then he decided he didn’t have the urge that badly; he could wait a little longer. After another sigh, he went on, “Not everything Joe Steele’s done has been bad. We’re the richest, strongest country in the world now. We sure weren’t when he took over. We were out on our feet like a fighter who walked into a left hook.”

  His wife checked again. Only after that did she say, “Well, you’re right. I can’t argue. But we used to be the freest country in the world. I don’t think we are now. Do you? Is what we got worth what we’ve lost?”

  “I can’t begin to tell you,” Charlie said. “When the kids’ kids are all grown up, ask them. Maybe they’ll have an answer.”

  “What’s that thing in the New Testament?” Esther snapped her fingers in frustration, trying to remember. “Something about, What does it profit—?” She shook her head; she couldn’t finish the quote.

  But Charlie could: “‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”

  “That’s the one! It’s a darn good question, isn’t it? Even if it’s goyish, I mean.” She sent him a crooked grin of the kind he was more used to feeling on his own face than to seeing on hers.

  “It is a good question,” he said. “But that’s not how I look at things. For me, it’s more like ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’”

  “This Caesar’s done a lot of rendering, hasn’t he?” Esther said. “Mike would think so.”

  “Yeah, I guess he would,” Charlie agreed. “But so would all those North Japanese troops at Sendai. They got rendered down in spades.”

  Esther made yet another check to be sure the children couldn’t hear. She dropped her voice all the same: “What happens when he dies, this term or next term or the one after that? What do we do then? Do we turn back the clock and try to pretend he never happened? Or do we go on the way . . . the way he’s shown us?”

  Charlie whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Babe, I have no idea.” The only person who’d ever mentioned to him the possibility of Joe Steele dying was John Nance Garner, and the Vice President hadn’t believed it would happen—certainly not soon enough to do him any good.

  Scriabin, Mikoian, Kagan, Hoover, Wyszynski, Marshall . . . They all had to know the boss was mortal. And they had to know that acting as if they knew would send them crashing down in ruin.

  A couple of days went by. The first Americans got into Sendai, breathing through masks and wearing lead-lined clothes. Pictures were horrific. The one that particularly made Charlie shudder was of a man’s shadow, printed on the sidewalk by the flash of the bomb. The shadow was the only thing left of the man who’d cast it. He’d gone up in smoke a split second later.

  While the Americans were bombing Japan during World War II, a handful of damaged B-29s that couldn’t get back flew on to Russia instead. The Reds interned the crews: for most of the war, they hadn’t been fighting the Japs. They also kept the planes. They kept them and they copied them, the same way they copied DC-3s. Russian Tu-4s looked and performed almost the same as their American models. The North Japanese flew a few bombing raids with them early in the Japanese War: or, more likely, Russian crews handled the flying for them. Those raids didn’t do that much, and pretty soon they stopped.

  On the night of August 9, a lone B-29 flew high over Nagano, a medium-sized city in South Japan. No one paid any special attention to it. There was a war on. Warplanes came by every now and then. Only this one wasn’t a B-29. It was a Tu-4. A bomb fell free. The plane made a tight turn and got out of there as if all the demons of hell were after it.

  And they were. Not quite a minute later, Nagano was incinerated the way Sendai had been three days earlier. Radio Moscow’s shortwave English-language broadcast explained the whys and wherefores: “The capitalist jackals of South Japan demanded American aid in their unjust struggle against the peace-loving Japanese People’s Republic. Recently, that aid became destructive to an unprecedented and barbarous degree. In response, the peace-loving Japanese People’s Republic called on its fraternal socialist ally for assistance against imperialist aggression. That assistance has been proffered.

  “President Steele, the arch-aggressor of the postwar world, declared that enough was enough. As the leader of the Red vanguard of world revolution, Leon Trotsky agrees. Enough
is enough. These devastating bombs can fall upon the territory of countries other than the two Japans. The world struggle may prove painful, but we shall not shrink from it.”

  When photos from Nagano began coming out, they looked just as dreadful as the ones from Sendai. The only difference was, some of the ones from Nagano had mountains in the background, while some of those from Sendai showed the Pacific. The dead, the melted, the scorched, and, soon, the people dying of radiation sickness in both cities looked pretty much the same.

  “What are we going to do?” Charlie asked Stas Mikoian. “How many bombs do we have? How many has Trotsky got? Do we want to start playing last-man-standing with him?”

  “That’s about what it would come down to, all right, only I don’t know if anybody’d be left standing. I don’t know just how many bombs we have, either,” Mikoian said. Charlie took that with a grain of salt, not that he could do anything about it short of calling Mikoian a liar. The Armenian went on, “And I have no idea how many Trotsky has. I didn’t know he had one till he dropped it.”

  “What does the boss think? I haven’t had the nerve to ask him.”

  Mikoian scowled. “He wants to kill Einstein all over again, that’s what. I’ve got a hard time blaming him, too. If we’d started on the bomb in ’41 instead of ’45, we would have kept the whip hand on the Russians for years.”

  Maybe that was what Einstein was afraid of, Charlie thought. If Joe Steele had the atomic bomb and Leon Trotsky didn’t, wouldn’t he have held it over Trotsky’s head like a club, or else bashed him with it? Sure he would have. But saying as much to Mikoian wouldn’t be Phi Beta Kappa. Charlie hadn’t been Phi Beta Kappa himself, but he could see that.

  He found one more question: “What’ll we do about the Japanese War now?”

  “Wind it up as quick as we can. What else are we supposed to do?” Mikoian said. “If we keep going like this, pretty soon there won’t be any Japanese left alive to fight over.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Charlie said. That had looked obvious to him since the news came out of Nagano. He was damn glad it looked that way to Joe Steele and his other henchmen, too.