In at the Death
Page 61
“I’m going to take my objections to your superiors, Captain.” Walker strutted off, his stiff back radiating anger.
Rhodes sighed. “He should have asked Lavochkin—Boris would have plugged him. You see, Chester? He is good for something.”
“Damned if you’re not right,” Martin said. “The nerve of this asshole, though!”
“He was a big fish in a little pond,” Rhodes said, and Chester nodded—nothing except possibly the Apocalypse would ever make Cheraw a big pond. Rhodes went on, “He thinks he has the right to go on being a big fish.”
“Ought to ship him to one of those camps. That’d teach him more about rights than he ever dreamt of, the fucker,” Chester said savagely.
“Yeah.” The company commander sighed again. “He may even be a decent guy. For all I know, he is. Plenty of people did join the Party because it was a meal ticket. I’ve never heard any Negroes claim he was especially bad. But I’ve never heard ’em say he was especially good, either. To me, that means he’s tarred with the Party brush. He might not have done anything much, but he didn’t try to stop anything, either. So screw him.”
“No, thanks—too damn ugly,” Chester said. Rhodes laughed. Chester started thinking of Rita. He’d been a good boy ever since he put the uniform back on, and he knew his right hand better than he’d ever wanted to.
One day followed another. The weather started turning cool and nasty. That was what Chester thought at first, anyhow. Then he realized that, compared to what he would have had to put up with in Toledo, it was pretty damn good. He’d lived in Los Angeles long enough to get spoiled.
He felt more alert now than he had since the very last days of the war. He didn’t want to get hurt just when he was about to head home. Well, he didn’t want to get hurt any old time, but he especially didn’t want to get hurt now. And he knew too well that he could. Cheraw was no more reconciled to the Stars and Stripes than any other part of the dead but still writhing CSA. Locals probed every day to see how much they could get away with. U.S. authorities clamped down hard. That only gave the locals more reasons to hate damnyankees—as if they needed them.
At last, his discharge orders came. So did a travel voucher that would send him up to Philadelphia and then across the country through U.S. territory. He couldn’t have been happier: the sooner he left the Confederacy forever, the happier he’d be.
He was painfully hung over when he boarded the northbound train—but not too hung over to notice the machine guns it carried. He hoped it wouldn’t have to use them; they might make his head explode. Captain Rhodes and a bunch of guys from his platoon—a lot of them the worse for wear, too—saw him off. Lieutenant Lavochkin didn’t. Chester didn’t miss him.
Rhodes and the soldiers waved and shouted as the whistle screeched and the train pulled out of Cheraw. “Lucky stiff!” somebody called. Yeah, Chester thought, gulping three aspirins. He was going home.
Abner Dowling knew more about uranium than he’d ever imagined he would. Before the war, he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of the stuff. Oh, maybe in chemistry, back in the dark ages around the turn of the century. Yes, it was an element. So what? You didn’t do experiments with it, the way you did with copper and sulfur and things like that.
And he knew about saturnium and jovium, which was what the Confederate physicists called elements 93 and 94. Just to confuse the issue, U.S. scientists had named the same elements neptunium and plutonium. He gathered they had different handles in every country that had found them. Back in the vanished days when he was at West Point, no one had dreamt they existed.
“Boy, I didn’t know how obsolete I was till I got here,” he complained to Angelo Toricelli. “Most of what I thought I knew turns out not to be so, and stuff I never imagined is what really counts. You can’t win.”
“Sir, if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t learn this stuff in school, either,” his adjutant answered.
That did make Dowling feel better. Misery, or at least confusion, loved company. “After they reassign us, you know, they’ll have to put permanent bloodhounds on us, to make sure nobody knocks us over the head and hijacks us on account of what we know,” he said.
“Maybe, but maybe not,” Toricelli said. “I mean, you can bet your bottom dollar that everybody who wants a superbomb either has one by now or is already working on one as hard as he can. What do those people need with us?”
“Go ahead. Be that way!” Dowling said. “But if I catch you talking to a Jap in glasses or a beautiful Russian piano player, you’ll be in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, and you’d better believe it.”
“I’d like to talk to a beautiful Russian piano player,” Toricelli said wistfully. “Hell, I’d like to talk to a beautiful piano player from Seattle.”
If you were a career officer, you often didn’t have time to find a wife. Dowling never had, and he was far from alone in the fraternity of war. George Custer had made it work—although Dowling often thought George was the steed Libbie rode to glory. Irving Morrell was married, too, and by all accounts happily. It could happen. Odds against it were longer than they were in a lot of trades, though.
“Just as long as you don’t say too much to a beautiful piano player from Lexington,” Abner Dowling warned.
“I wouldn’t do that, sir.” His adjutant sounded hurt. “Besides, I haven’t seen a gal here I’d want to give the time of day to.”
Dowling nodded. “I know what you mean.” He didn’t suppose Confederates were uglier or handsomer than U.S. citizens, taken all in all. But the war had hit hard here, especially in the last few months, when the USA tried to blast Lexington flat to keep the CSA from building a superbomb. It didn’t work, but it did take its toll on the locals. People hereabouts still looked haggard and hungry. The Shenandoah Valley was some of the richest farmland in the world, but it got hit, too…and not so many folks were left to raise crops, either.
“And even if I did find a woman I liked here, well, I might want to lay her, but I don’t think I’d ever marry a Confederate,” Toricelli said. “I’d wonder why she wanted to marry me, and all my superiors would wonder whether I’d gone out of my mind.”
He wasn’t wrong. A marriage like that could blight his hopes for promotion. It could also blight his life if it didn’t work, and it was much too likely not to. Even so…Dowling said, “You wouldn’t be the first, you know. We’ve already had a couple of petitions from enlisted men to let them marry local girls.”
“I’d better know, sir,” his adjutant said. “That paperwork crosses my desk before it lands on yours.”
“Yes, yes.” Dowling didn’t want the younger man to think he was forgetting things like that. As soon as they started believing you were past it, you were, whether you knew it or not. Hastily, Dowling went on, “I’m the one who has to decide, though. That’s one more thing they didn’t teach at West Point. Does this PFC really have good reason to marry a Virginia woman? Should I ship him back to the USA instead? Or should I just hose him down with cold water till he comes to his senses?”
“Cold water would put a lot of these proposals or propositions or whatever they are on ice,” Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said gravely.
Dowling sent him a severe look. Toricelli bore up under it like the soldier he was. Dowling said, “If I do let them get married and things go sour, they’ll blame me. Plenty of perfectly normal marriages go bad, God knows. Usually it’s nobody’s fault but the bride and groom’s. Figure anybody would remember that?”
“Fat chance,” Toricelli said. “Sir.”
“I know. But the one where the guy knocked the gal up…I am going to approve that one, hell with me if I’m not. If I say no, her father’s liable to use a shotgun on our soldier, and then we’ll have to take hostages, and it’ll just be a goddamn mess. I’ll pay for an unhappy marriage to stay away from firing squads.”
“That makes sense, sir,” Toricelli said. “Kind of a cold-blooded way to look at things, but it makes sense.”
His adjutant returned a sly stare. “Like with General MacArthur, right?”
“I won’t waste my time answering that, even if it is true.” Dowling stood on his dignity, a shaky position for a man of his bulk.
Before his adjutant could call him on it, a noncom stuck his head into the office and said, “Sir, that professor guy wants to see you.”
“FitzBelmont?” Dowling asked.
The sergeant nodded. “That’s him.”
Dowling didn’t want to see the physicist. He said, “Send him in,” anyway. Sometimes what you wanted was different from what you needed. If this wasn’t one of those times, he could have the pleasure of throwing Henderson FitzBelmont out on his ear.
When FitzBelmont came in, he looked as angry and as determined as a professorial man could. “General, when am I going to get my life back?” he demanded. “It is now almost four months after the surrender, but your interrogators continue to hound me. To be frank, sir, I am tired of it.”
“To be frank, sir, I don’t give a flying fuck.” Abner Dowling didn’t blow his cork, but he didn’t need to waste politeness on FitzBelmont, either. “When you went to work for Jake Featherston, you sold your soul to the Devil. Now you’ve got to buy it back, one nickel at a time. If the boys aren’t finished with you, too bad. You have a train to catch, or what?”
“I would like to be a normal human being in a normal country, not a…a bug under a microscope.” The professor didn’t have the force of personality to hold anger together very long. His voice went high and shrill and petulant.
“Sorry, but that’s what you are. Get used to it,” Dowling said. “You’re going to be under the microscope for the rest of your life. You’re too dangerous for us not to keep tabs on you. If you don’t believe me, ask what’s left of Philadelphia.”
“I can’t do that again. You’ve made very sure I can’t,” FitzBelmont said. “And some of your interrogators are nothing but idiots. You know more about the physics of fission than they do.”
“God help them if that’s true.” Dowling hadn’t known anything about 235 and 238 and the other magic numbers till this assignment landed on him. He hoped he’d learned enough to be effective, but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.
“Well, it is,” Professor FitzBelmont said. “One imbecile asked me why we didn’t use iron instead of uranium. It was easier to find and to make, he said, and much cheaper, too. The frightening thing is, he was serious.”
“And the answer is…?” Dowling asked.
“Very simple, General. I’m sure you can figure it out for yourself: you can do whatever you please to iron, but you’ll never make a superbomb out of it. The same goes for lead or gold or most other things you can think of.”
“Not all of them?” Dowling said sharply.
Professor FitzBelmont hesitated. “If I didn’t know for a fact that your physicists were already working on this, I wouldn’t say a word. Not ever.”
“Well, you already did. Now go on,” Dowling told him.
“It’s theoretically possible, using isotopes of hydrogen with a superbomb for a fuse, you might say, to make a bomb a thousand times as powerful as the ones we have now, a bomb that burns the way the sun burns—a sunbomb, you might say.”
“A thousand times as strong as a superbomb?” Dowling’s mind bounced off that like a rotary saw recoiling from a spike driven into a tree trunk. “Good God in the foothills! You could blow up a thousand Philadelphias or Petrograds?”
“You could blow up an area more than thirty times as wide as the area those bombs destroyed,” FitzBelmont said. “Area varies as the square of the diameter, of course.”
“Of course,” Dowling agreed in a hollow voice. “So a…a sunbomb could pretty much blow Rhode Island off the map?”
“How big is Rhode Island?” By the way FitzBelmont said it, he didn’t waste time keeping track of U.S. geography.
“I don’t know exactly,” Dowling said. “A thousand square miles—maybe a little more.”
Henderson FitzBelmont got a faraway look in his eyes. Doing the math, Dowling realized. FitzBelmont finally nodded. “Yes, that’s about right. One of those bombs should destroy most of it. Why do you have such a small state?”
“Beats me.” Dowling couldn’t recall enough colonial history to come up with the reason. It didn’t matter, anyhow. What did matter…“How long would it take to build one of these sunbomb things?”
“I don’t know,” FitzBelmont said. “I would be surprised if anyone had them in five years. I would be surprised if no one had them in twenty-five.”
“Good God!” Dowling said again. If God wasn’t in the foothills, He was probably running for them. The general tried to imagine a world where six or eight countries had sunbombs. “How would you fight a war if a bunch of your neighbors could blow you into next week if you got frisky?”
“General, I wouldn’t,” FitzBelmont said bleakly. “Whether that will stop the politicians…”
“Ha!” Dowling stabbed out a forefinger at him. “You’ve got your nerve saying something like that after you went and worked for Jake Featherston.”
The professor turned red. “He led my country in time of war. What should I have done? Not helped him?”
That wasn’t a question with a simple answer. Had the CSA won, U.S. scientists would have asked Confederate interrogators the same thing, hoping to stay out of trouble. Yeah, but we weren’t gassing our own people by the millions, Dowling thought. To which victorious Confederates would have replied, So what? And if all or even most physicists felt the way FitzBelmont did…The world was in big trouble, in that case.
When Jorge Rodriguez could, he walked into Baroyeca to meet the train. He couldn’t always. Farm work had no peaks and valleys, the way soldiering did; you needed to keep at it every day. The damnyankees still hadn’t let Miguel out of their POW camp. Jorge hoped he was all right. Maybe he’d been wounded, and word never got to Sonora. Maybe he was dead, and word never got here. He hadn’t written since the end of the war, and things inside the CSA were falling apart by then.
But maybe he would get off the train one afternoon, good as new or somewhere close. The hope kept Jorge walking. He’d seen enough to know you never could tell. And if he stopped in at La Culebra Verde for a glass of beer before he came home, well, it was nothing his father hadn’t done before him.
Every so often, nobody got out when the train stopped in Baroyeca. It wasn’t a big city, and never would be. If not for the silver and lead mines in the hills back of town, it wouldn’t have been a town at all. When the mines closed between the wars, the town almost died. Even the trains stopped coming for a while.
Jake Featherston had fixed that. He’d fixed lots of things. You couldn’t say so, not unless you wanted to get in trouble with the Yankees. Jorge had enough sense to keep his boca cerrada. A couple of people who didn’t…disappeared.
One afternoon, a tall, balding fellow whose remaining hair was yellow mixed with gray stepped down and looked around in wonder. Anybody with that coloring and those beaky features stood out in swarthy, mestizo-filled Baroyeca.
“Señor Quinn!” Jorge exclaimed—not his brother, but another familiar face he hadn’t seen for a long time.
“Hola,” Quinn said, and then went on in his deliberate, English-accented Spanish: “You’re one of Hip Rodriguez’s boys, but I’m damned if I know which one.”
“I’m Jorge,” Jorge answered in English. “Pedro’s back, too. I was hoping Miguel would be on the train. That’s why I came. But the damnyankees are still holding him. How are you, Señor Quinn?”
“Tired. Whipped,” Quinn said. “Just like the rest of the country.” The train pulled out of the station, heading south. Qu
inn and Jorge both coughed at the dust it kicked up.
Jorge looked around. Nobody was in earshot. In a low voice, he asked, “Are you going to start the Freedom Party up again, Señor Quinn?”
“Not officially, anyway. I’d put my neck in the noose if I did,” Quinn answered. He’d lived in Baroyeca a long time, building the Party up from nothing and nowhere. Also quietly, he continued, “As far as los Estados Unidos know, I’m nothing but another POW. If they find out I was an organizer, God knows what they’ll do to me.”
“They won’t hear from me,” Jorge promised. “My father, he always thought you were a good man.”
“Well, I always thought he was a good man, too,” Robert Quinn said. “I was sad to hear he’d passed away, and even sadder to hear how. I’ve wondered about that a lot, and it doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“It doesn’t make much sense to anybody.” Jorge didn’t mention Camp Determination. The way things were nowadays, you kept your mouth shut about what went on in places like that. What could his father, a good Party man, have seen or felt that made him decide those camps weren’t doing the right thing? It had to be something on that order. Jorge was sure no personal problem would have made Hipolito Rodriguez eat his gun.
“Tell you what,” Quinn said, still softly. “If nobody down here rats on me, well, we’ll see what we can do if the damnyankees step on our toes too hard. We may not be able to hold meetings and stuff, but that doesn’t mean the Freedom Party’s dead. It’s not dead unless we decide it’s dead. How’s that sound?”
“Good to me.” Jorge didn’t say Freedom! or ¡Libertad! or give the Party salute. You were asking for trouble if you did things like that. But he knew he wouldn’t be the only one watching the United States to see what they did.
And he also knew the United States would be watching Baroyeca, as they would be watching all of the CSA, or as much of the country as they could. If they sensed trouble, they would land on it with both feet. You played the most dangerous game in the world if you even thought about rising up against the damnyankees.