Blood and iron ae-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "Freedom!" Pinkard shouted with the rest of the men who'd come together to find, to build, something larger and grander than themselves.

  "Boys, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that Jake Featherston's going to be running for president this year." Briggs paused to suck more air into his ruined lungs-and to let the Party members cheer till they sounded almost as hoarse as he always did. Then he went on, "We've done a little bit of brawling every now and again, but it's not a patch on what we're going to be doing, let me tell you that!"

  More cheers erupted. Jeff pumped his fist in the air. Brambles and thorns in his throat, Briggs went on, "The Whigs will be holding rallies here in town. The goddamn Radical Liberals will be holding rallies here in town." He shook his head. Lamplight reflected wetly from his eyes. "That's not right. Those traitor bastards will try and hold rallies here in town. Are we going to let 'em?"

  "No!" Jeff shouted, along with most of the Freedom Party men. The rest were shouting "Hell, no!" and other, coarser, variations on the theme instead.

  "That's right." Caleb Briggs nodded now, which made his eyeballs glitter in a different way. Jeff could not have said how it was different, but it was. Briggs went on, "That's just right, boys. This is a war we're in, same as the one we fought in the trenches. We would have won that one, only we got stabbed in the back. This time, we hit the traitors first."

  Jeff applauded till his hard, horny hands were sore. Somebody not far away pulled out a flask of moonshine and passed it around. Pinkard took a swig. "Son of a bitch!" he said reverently, his vocal cords for the moment nearly as charred as Briggs'. He passed the flask along, half sorry to see it go, half relieved it was gone.

  Someone started singing "Dixie." Jeff roared out the words, a fiery fury in him that had surprisingly little to do with the whiskey he'd just drunk. The Freedom Party sang "Dixie" at every meeting. Then someone else began "Louisville Will Be Free." That one dated from just after the Second Mexican War, and recounted the greatest fight of that war. With Louisville forced back into the USA in the Great War, it took on a poignancy now that it hadn't had then.

  Tears ran down Jefferson Pinkard's face. They took him by surprise. He wondered if he was weeping for ravaged Louisville or for himself. A great determination filled him. Like his country, he'd paid for doing what he remained convinced was right Sooner or later, everyone else would pay, too.

  "Freedom!'' he cried at the top of his lungs. "Freedom! Freedom!"

  Reggie Bartlett nodded in some surprise when Tom Brearley came into Harmon's drugstore. He hadn't seen much of Brearley since the ex-Navy man went down to South Carolina to talk with Anne Colleton. Reggie had been waiting for fireworks to spring from that meeting. He was still waiting.

  Evidently, Brearley was getting tired of waiting. He said, "All right, Mr. Bartlett, what's your next great idea for blowing the Freedom Party out of the water?"

  "I haven't got another one," Reggie admitted. "Wish to heaven I did."

  "Well, I've got another one." Brearley looked very determined. Reggie could easily picture him peering through a periscope at a U.S. cruiser. Oddly, he also looked much younger than he had before sticking out his chin. He said, "If I can't get those bastards fighting among themselves, I'll just have to take the story to the newspapers."

  "Jesus," Reggie said. "Are you sure you want to do that? I wouldn't, not unless I had my life-insurance premiums all paid up."

  "As a matter of fact, I do," Brearley said, doing a determined and pretty good best to sound unconcerned. "I made sure they were before I went down to talk to Tom Colleton's sister, because I wasn't sure I'd be coming back. But by now Kimball has to know I've talked. He has to figure I'll talk more. That means he'll try and kill me sooner or later-likely sooner. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't tried it yet-him or some of the Freedom Party apes up here. I want to make sure the word gets out before he does." He didn't sound unconcerned any more: just matter-of-fact, a man tackling a job he knew was dangerous.

  Reggie understood that. He wouldn't have, not before the war. Going through the trenches-coming out of the trenches on command to attack-changed a man forever. He knew he would be afraid again, many times in his life. But fear would never paralyze him, as it might have done before. He had its measure now.

  He said, "If you're bound and determined to do it, you'd better think hard about which paper you go to. You don't want to head for the Sentinel, because-"

  "Don't teach your grandpa to suck eggs," Brearley said with a wry grin. "Do I look that stupid? Half the time, I reckon Jake Featherston puts that rag out himself. Shame and a disgrace, the garbage it prints."

  "Why don't I just shut up?" Reggie said to nobody in particular.

  "I don't want you to shut up," Brearley told him. "You go to political rallies for fun. You really think about this stuff, a lot more than I do. So I want your advice: you reckon I should talk to the Whig or the Examiner?"

  "Go with the Whigs or the Radical Liberals?" Reggie stroked his chin. After a minute or so of silent thought, he said, "That's an interesting one, isn't it? The Freedom Party's probably giving the Whigs a harder time-they were the ones who ran the country during the war. But I think the Radical Liberals are more afraid of Featherston and his gang, don't you? For one thing, they're farther away from the stand he takes, where some of the right-wing Whigs might as well start yelling 'Freedom!' themselves. And for another, the Rad Libs are running scared. If they don't get a break, the Freedom Party'll be number two in the country after this fall's election. You give them some dirt, they'll run with it."

  Tom Brearley looked at him as if he'd never seen him before. "You're wasting your time shoving pills across a counter, Bart-lett. You should have been a lawyer, something like that. You think straight. You think real straight."

  "Maybe I do," Reggie said. "You're the one who's not thinking straight now, I'll tell you that. Where the devil am I going to get the money to study law? Where am I going to get the money to get the education I'd need so I could study law? If I'd had a million dollars before the war, it might have been a different story."

  Brearley shrugged. "If you want something bad enough, you can generally find a way to get it. What I want right now is to torpedo the Freedom Party. I tried one way. It didn't work. All right-I'll try something else. The Examiner it'll be. Thanks, Bartlett." He sketched a salute and left.

  Jeremiah Harmon came up from the back of the drugstore. "I overheard some of that," he said, sounding apologetic- astonishing in a boss. "None of my business, but anybody who goes up against a machine gun without a machine gun of his own is asking for a whole peck of trouble. You ask me, the Examiner's a popgun, not a machine gun. Wish I could say different, but I can't."

  "Where do you find a machine gun to fight the Freedom Party?" Reggie asked.

  "Haven't the foggiest notion," the druggist replied. "Don't know if there is any such animal. But if I didn't have one, I think I'd stay down in my dugout and hope no big shell caved it in."

  He hadn't been to the front. He'd passed the war in Richmond, making pills and salves and syrups. He never pretended otherwise. But the vocabulary of the trenches had come to be part of everyone's day-to-day speech in the CSA. An awful lot of men had passed through the fire. Reggie wasted a moment wondering if expressions from the front line filled the sharp-sounding English of the United States, too.

  Harmon went back to whatever he'd been doing when Tom Brearley came into the drugstore. He didn't waste a lot of time banging a drum for what he thought. If you agreed with him or decided he had a point, fine. If you didn't, he wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

  And it wasn't just an interesting discussion to Reggie Bartlett. He'd signed his name to the letter that had gone down to Tom Colleton. If Freedom Party thugs came after Tom Brearley, they were liable to come after him, too.

  All at once, he wished he'd told Brearley to keep the hell away from newspapers. Part of him wished that, anyhow. The rest realized such worries c
ame far too late. The cat had been out of the bag ever since he touched pen to paper.

  He started watching the newspapers, especially the Richmond Examiner, like a hawk. Day followed day with no banner headline about a U.S. destroyer sunk after the Confederate States asked for quarter. Maybe Brearley had got cold feet and hadn't bent a reporter's ear after all. In a way, that disappointed Reggie down to the depths of his soul. In another way, one that left him ashamed, it relieved him. Maybe Brearley had talked, and the reporter hadn't believed him. Reggie almost hoped that was so. It would have given him the best of both worlds.

  And then one day with March approaching, and with it the first inauguration of a Socialist president of the USA, that banner headline did run in the Examiner, WAR CRIMINAL HIGH IN FREEDOM PARTY CIRCLES! For a moment, Reggie hoped the story under the headline would be about some other war criminal; he wouldn't have been surprised to learn the Freedom Party sheltered battalions of them under its banner.

  But it wasn't. The reporter didn't name Tom Brearley-citing concerns for his informant's safety-but he did name Roger Kimball, the Bonefish, and the USS Ericsson. Reggie hadn't known exactly what kind of secret Brearley was keeping. Now he did. Now everybody did. He nodded to himself. Brearley hadn't been stretching things-it was a big one.

  The reporter made it sound as if several members of the submersible's crew had confirmed what Brearley said, too. Maybe that was camouflage, to make the story seem more authoritative and to take some of the heat off Brearley. Maybe he really had checked with other crewmen, and that was why the story had waited so long to run.

  However that worked, the story made the Freedom Party hopping mad. The very next day, a blistering denunciation ran in the Sentinel. What it amounted to was that the damnyankees had had it coming, and that anyone betraying a Confederate officer who'd done his duty as he saw it deserved whatever happened to him. It didn't quite declare open season on Tom Brearley, but it didn't miss by much. Reggie was glad he didn't figure in the piece in any way.

  Jeremiah Harmon said, "Now your friend gets to find out what sort of whirlwind he reaps."

  "He's not my-" Reggie stopped. He'd been about to say that Brearley was no friend of his. The only reason they knew each other was that the ex-Navy man had married an old flame of his. But they shared a common foe: the Freedom Party. That might not make them friends, but it did make them allies.

  Harmon noted Reggie's pause, nodded as if his assistant had spoken a complete sentence, and went back to work. A customer came into the drugstore, marched up to the counter, and demanded a ringworm salve. Reggie sold him one, knowing the best the store offered were none too good. Doctors and researchers had got pretty good at figuring out what caused a lot of ailments. Doing anything worthwhile about them was something else again.

  Tom Brearley came by a couple of days later. He grinned a skeletal grin at Reggie. "Still here," he said in sepulchral tones.

  Reggie made shooing motions. "Well, get the hell out of here" he hissed. "You think I want to be seen with you?"

  His acting was too good; Brearley turned and started to leave. Only the laughter Reggie couldn't contain stopped him. "Damn you," Brearley said without heat. "You had me going there. Freedom Party's still screaming about traitors. Seems to be the only song they know."

  "Anybody give you any real trouble?" Reggie asked.

  Brearley shook his head. "Not yet, thank God. The only people in the Freedom Party who know what I look like live down in South Carolina. But they know my name. They can find out where I live." He patted the waistband of his trousers. His coat concealed whatever he kept there, but Reggie had no trouble figuring out what it was. Brearley said, "They want to try and give me a hard time, I'm ready for 'em."

  "Good." Reggie hesitated, then asked, "How's Maggie doing?"

  "Pretty well," Brearley answered. "She doesn't take the whole business as seriously as I do. She hasn't paid that much attention to politics, and she doesn't really know what a pack of nasty… so-and-so's join the Party."

  Reggie wasn't sure he took the whole business as seriously as Brearley did, either. Then he recalled his relief at not getting into the newspaper. Maybe-evidently-he took things seriously after all.

  Unable to stomach his own cooking, he stopped in a greasy spoon for supper. He regretted it shortly thereafter; the colored fellow sweating at the stove knew less about what to do there than he did. When he got home, he gulped bicarbonate of soda. That quelled the internal rebellion, but left him feeling gassy and bloated. He read for a while, found himself yawning, and went to bed.

  Bells in the night woke him. He yawned again, enormously, put the pillow over his head, and very soon went back to sleep. When morning came, he was halfway through breakfast before he remembered the disturbance. "Those were fire bells," he said, and then, "Good thing the fire wasn't next door, I reckon, or I'd be burnt to a crisp right about now."

  Somebody had been burnt to a crisp. Newsboys shouted the story as they hawked their papers. "Liar's house goes up in smoke! Read all about it!" a kid selling the Sentinel yelled.

  A cold chill ran through Reggie Bartlett. He didn't buy the Sentinel; that would have been the same as putting fifty thousand dollars in the Freedom Party's coffer. Two streetcorners farther along, he picked up a copy of the Examiner and read it as he walked the rest of the way to Harmon's drugstore.

  He shivered again as he read. The paper reported that Thomas and Margaret Brearley had died in "a conflagration that swept their home so swiftly and violently that neither had the slightest chance to escape, which leads firemen to suspect that arson may have been involved." It talked about Brearley's naval career in general terms, but did not mention that he'd served aboard the Bonefish.

  Jeremiah Harmon had a newspaper in his hand when Reggie walked into the drugstore. Reggie didn't need to ask which story he was reading. "You see?" the druggist said in his mild, quiet voice.

  "Oh, yes," Reggie answered. "I see. God help me, Mr. Harmon, I sure do."

  Sylvia Enos sank into the trolley seat with a grateful sigh. She didn't often get to sit on her way to the galoshes factory. And, better yet, the seat had a copy of the Boston Globe there for the grabbing. She snatched up the paper before anyone else could. Every penny she didn't spend on a newspaper could go to something else, and she needed plenty of other things, with not enough pennies to go around.

  Most of the front page was filled with stories about the inauguration of President Sinclair, which was set for day after tomorrow. Sylvia read all of them with greedy, gloating interest; she might not be able to vote herself, but the prospect of a Socialist president delighted her. She didn't quite know what Upton Sinclair could do about Frank Best, but she figured he could do something.

  Another prominent headline marked the fall of Belfast to the forces of the Republic of Ireland. No wonder that story got prominent play in Boston, with its large Irish population. "Now the whole of the Emerald Isle is free," Irish General Collins was quoted as saying. The folk of Belfast might not agree-surely did not agree, else they wouldn't have fought so grimly-but no one on this side of the Atlantic cared about their opinion.

  Sylvia opened the paper to the inside pages. She picked and chose there; the factory was getting close. A headline caught her eye: REBEL ACCUSER PERISHES IN SUSPICIOUS FIRE. Most of the story was about the death of a man whose name was spelled half the time as Brierley and the other half as Brearley. He had drawn the wrath of the Freedom Party, a growing force in the CSA, the Globe's reporter wrote, by claiming that a leading Party official in one of the Carolinas was, while in the C.S. Navy, responsible for deliberately sinking the USS Ericsson although fully aware that the war between the United States and Confederate States had ended. The Freedom Party has denied this charge, and has also denied any role in the deaths of Brierley and his wife.

  The trolley came to Sylvia's stop. It had already started rolling again before she realized she should have got off. When it stopped again, a couple of blocks later, she
did get off. She knew she should hurry back to the factory-the implacable time card would dock her for every minute she was late, to say nothing of the hard time Frank Best would give her-but she couldn't make herself move fast, not with the way her mind was whirling.

  Not a British boat after all, she thought. It was the Rebs. They were the ones George worried about, and he was right. And they did it after the war was over, and the fellow who did it is still running around loose down there. She wanted to scream. She wanted to buy a gun and go hunting for the submarine skipper. Why not? He'd gone hunting for her husband.

  "Are you all right, dearie?" May Cavendish asked when Sylvia came in and put her card in the time clock. "You look a little peaked."

  "I'm-" Sylvia didn't know how she was, or how to put it into words. She felt as if a torpedo had gone off inside her head, sinking everything she thought she'd known since the end of the war and leaving nothing in its place. Stunned and empty, she went into the factory.

  Frank Best greeted her, pocket watch in hand. "You're late, Mrs. Enos."

  Most days, she would have apologized profusely, hoping in that way to keep him from bothering her too much. Most days, it would have been a forlorn hope, too. Now she just looked at him and nodded. "Yes, I am, aren't I?" She walked past him toward her station near the molds. If he hadn't quickly stepped out of the way, she would have walked over him. He stared after her. She did not look back over her shoulder to see.

  After a while, he came up to her carrying a pair of rubber overshoes. "Thought you could slip these by me, did you?" he said: his usual opening line.

  She looked at the galoshes. The red rings around the top looked fine to her, which meant they'd look fine to a customer, too. "They're all right, Mr. Best," she said, brushing a wisp of hair back from her eyes with the sleeve of her shirtwaist. "I really don't have time to play games today. I'm sorry."

  He stared at her again, in complete astonishment. "I could have you fired," he said. "You could be on the street in fifteen minutes."