In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  The Democrats blamed the collapse on the Socialists, too. More to the point, they blamed it on Hosea Blackford. That made Flora see red. Yes, her husband was President when it happened. That didn’t make it his fault. Except, in too many people’s minds, it did. Hosea was a one-term President.

  Herman Bruck looked at his watch. Every two years, he seemed a little plumper, a little grayer. Oh, and I haven’t changed at all, Flora thought. That would have been nice if only it were true.

  “Seven o’clock,” Herman said ceremoniously. “The polls are closed.” He turned on a wireless set.

  None of the results from the East Coast would mean anything for a while. That wouldn’t stop the broadcasters from reporting them and pontificating over them. It wouldn’t stop inexperienced people from flabbling over them if they were bad or from celebrating too soon if they were good.

  “Dewey jumps out to an early lead in Vermont!” a reporter said breathlessly. Flora had to fight the giggles. Of course Dewey led in Vermont. The sky would have to fall for him to do anything else. Vermont had been a rock-ribbed Democratic stronghold for years.

  “Do you think we can hold New York?” Maria asked. That was a more important question. New York had a ton of electoral votes. It went Socialist more often than not, but Dewey the Democrat was a popular governor. How many people would vote for him for President because of that? Enough to swing the state?

  “I hope so,” Flora said. She didn’t know what she could say past that. Polls called the race close, but she didn’t have much faith in them. Pollsters had proved spectacularly wrong before.

  Maine held its elections early, and had already gone for Dewey. A moment later, New Hampshire also fell into his column. Again, none of that was too surprising; only in landslide years did upper New England fall out of the Democratic camp.

  But when early returns showed Dewey with a substantial lead in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Flora began to worry. Both states were in play in most elections. Herman Bruck said, “All depends on where the returns are coming from,” which put the best possible face on things. He wasn’t wrong, but they shouldn’t have needed to fret so soon.

  New Jersey seemed to be going Socialist, and by a solid majority. That made Flora breathe a little easier, anyhow. Any year the Socialists lost New Jersey would probably not be a year where they held on to the Presidency.

  To drive her crazy, returns from Pennsylvania started coming in before any from New York. Those showed the race there neck and neck. How many people in western Pennsylvania were blaming the Socialists for the Confederate invasion two years earlier? Flora thought that would have happened regardless of who was running the country at the time, but she could see how others might see things a different way.

  “Here is some of the early tally from New York,” the newsman said. Everybody yelled for everybody else to hush. “These results show Governor Dewey with 147,461 votes to President La Follette’s 128,889. In the race for Senator—”

  “Where are they coming from?” This time, Bruck wasn’t the only one to ask the question. Several people shouted it at the same time. The newscaster? He went blithely on to results from West Virginia.

  “I’ll find out,” Herman Bruck said, and got on the telephone with the canvassing headquarters downtown. When he hung up, he might have been a balloon that had sprung a slow leak.

  “What’s the matter?” Flora asked, seeing his face.

  “Those are city returns, not upstate,” he answered. The news felt like a blow in the belly to Flora. New York political battles centered on whether Socialist New York City could outvote the Democratic hinterland. If New York City leaned Democratic…

  If New York City leaned that way, it was liable to be a long, unhappy night.

  And it was. The air in Socialist district headquarters went blue with tobacco smoke, and bluer with profanity. State after state fell to the Democrats. The Republican candidate, the energetic young Governor of Minnesota, stole his home state and Wisconsin from the Socialists in three-cornered races, and also took traditional Republican strongholds like Indiana and Kansas.

  Flora held her own seat. Her margin was down from the last election, but she still won upwards of fifty-five percent of the vote. All the same…“I don’t think we’re going to do it,” she said somewhere around one in the morning.

  “How could they be so ungrateful?” Herman Bruck said. “We won the war for them. What more could they want?”

  A country too strong for the Confederates even to think of attacking, that’s what. Flora looked around in the gloomy, smoky headquarters. No, the ghost of Robert Taft wasn’t sitting right behind her. But it might as well have been. The old Democratic stalwart had an answer for the Socialist cri de coeur.

  After another hour, the newsman said, “Governor Dewey and Senator Truman are going to claim victory.”

  The Vice President–elect spoke first. His high, twangy voice full of good humor, he said, “I’m holding in my hands a copy of the Chicago Tribune. The headline reads, LA FOLLETTE BEATS DEWEY! I don’t know where they got that headline from, but tonight Tom Dewey and the Democratic Party are winners!” Cheers interrupted him. He went on, “And tonight the American people are winners, too!” More cheers. “It is now my privilege to introduce the new President of the United States, Tom Dewey!”

  “Thank you, Harry,” the President-elect said. “I am humbled and honored to be chosen to lead the United States in these tense and trying times. I call on all people—Democrats, Socialists, and Republicans—to unite behind me to bind up the wounds of war and help guide the country into an era of peace and one of renewed prosperity and hope.”

  Applause almost drowned him out. He said all the right things. Charlie La Follette could have used his speech without changing more than a couple of words. Flora would rather have heard it from La Follette than Dewey.

  La Follette had gone back to Wisconsin to vote. He didn’t even carry his home state. A few minutes after the Democrats, he came on the wireless. “The people have spoken,” he said. “I congratulate Governor Dewey—President-elect Dewey, as he is now—and wish him the best of luck in the next four years. I did not expect to be President of the United States during the most profound crisis of the twentieth century. Under Jake Featherston, the Confederate States aimed not merely at beating us but at crushing us and subjecting us so we could never rise again. Instead, we triumphed in the hardest war ever fought on this blood-soaked continent.

  “Perhaps we did not do everything as well as we might have. That is easier to see in hindsight than it was through foresight. But the people have called us to account for it, as is their right. May the new President fare well in ruling the territories we have gained, and in the complex field of international relations. With superbombs, everyone is suddenly everyone else’s nearest neighbor. I will serve President Dewey in whatever capacity he may find useful, or in none if that be his pleasure. Serving the people of the United States has been the greatest privilege of my life. Thank you, God bless you, and good night.”

  “That was Charles La Follette, the outgoing President of the United States,” the announcer said unnecessarily.

  “A good good-bye,” Herman Bruck said as the wireless started catching up on races that remained close.

  “I wanted a good victory speech, dammit,” Flora said. All through the crowded Socialist headquarters, heads bobbed up and down.

  “Changeover time,” Maria Tresca remarked, and it would be. It looked as if the Democrats would also capture the House, though the Senate would stay in Socialist hands. But an earthquake would hit the executive branch. Since 1920, only Herbert Hoover’s single term had broken the Socialists’ hold on the Presidency. Lots of new and untested officials would try out lots of new and untested policies.

  Flora might have been in line to chair the House Judiciary Committee. Not now. Back to the minority. That hadn’t happened very often since the end of the Great War. If the Democrats proposed foolish laws now that they ruled
the roost, she would do her best to keep them from passing.

  “Why are the people so ungrateful?” Bruck wondered out loud.

  “There’s a story,” Maria said. “Back in the days when Athens held ostracisms to get rid of politicians they didn’t like, an illiterate citizen who didn’t recognize Aristides the Just came up to him and asked him to write ‘Aristides’ on a potsherd. He did, but he asked why. The man answered, ‘I’m tired of hearing him called “the Just.” ’ And that’s what happened to us, or something like it.”

  Flora found herself nodding. She said, “Still, it’s a shame to run on a platform where the main plank is ‘Throw the rascals in.’”

  She got a laugh. If it was tinged with bitterness—well, why wouldn’t it be? She thought the Socialists deserved better than they’d got from the people, too. No matter what she thought, though, she couldn’t do anything about it. Every so often, the government turned over. The world wouldn’t end. The country wouldn’t go down the drain—even if the party in power always tried to make the voters think it would if the opposition won.

  She’d lost a brother-in-law to war. Her own brother had lost a leg. Her son lost only a finger. Other than that, Joshua was fine, and it wouldn’t much affect the rest of his life. Next to important things like that, how much did elections really matter?

  All the arguing was over. Jonathan Moss had done everything he could. He’d tried his damnedest to convince the U.S. military court that Jefferson Pinkard had followed his own superiors’ legal orders when he ran his extermination camps in Louisiana and Texas. He’d done his best to persuade them that the USA had no jurisdiction over what the Confederates did to their own people.

  Now the military judges were deliberating. Pinkard sat in the courtroom, large and blocky and stolid. Only the way his jaw worked on some chewing gum showed he might be nervous.

  “You gave it everything you had,” he told Moss. “I thought that Jew who got hurt was hot stuff, but you’re good, too. Don’t reckon he could’ve pulled any rabbits out of the hat that you didn’t.”

  “Thanks,” Moss said. If he’d satisfied his client, his own conscience could stay reasonably clear. That was just as well, because he had no doubt in his own mind that Pinkard was guilty. If they didn’t hang him, would they—could they—hang anybody?

  “All rise!” the warrant officer who transcribed the proceedings intoned as the panel of judges entered the courtroom.

  Moss stood and came to attention. Jeff Pinkard stood but didn’t. He’d loudly denied that the court had any jurisdiction over him. That wouldn’t endear him to the men who judged him. Everyone sat down again.

  “We have reached a verdict in United States vs. Jefferson Davis Pinkard,” the chief judge said.

  Beside Moss, Pinkard stiffened. His jaw set. He might claim he was ready for the Army to convict him, but he wasn’t, not down deep. Who could be? No one was ever ready to face his own death.

  “The defendant will please rise,” the chief judge said.

  Pinkard did. This time, without being asked, he did come to attention. Maybe the solemnity of the moment pressed on him in spite of himself. He’d fought in the Great War. Nobody said he’d been anything but brave. Nobody said that about Jake Featherston, either. Bravery wasn’t enough, not by itself. The cause for which you showed courage counted, too.

  “Jefferson Davis Pinkard, we find you guilty of crimes against humanity,” the chief judge said. Pinkard’s shoulders sagged. The breath hissed out of him, as if he’d been punched in the gut. The officer pronouncing his fate continued, “We sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, at a date to be set by competent military authority. May God have mercy on your soul.”

  Jonathan Moss jumped to his feet. “Your Honor, I appeal this conviction and the sentence you’ve imposed.”

  “You have that privilege,” the chief judge said. “Appeals will be heard by the Secretary of War and, no doubt, by the President of the United States. I do not believe the upcoming change in administrations will affect the process.”

  He was bound to be right. The outgoing Socialists wouldn’t show mercy to someone like Jeff Pinkard. They were the ones who’d brought him to justice in the first place. And the Democrats had campaigned by saying, If we were running things, we would have been even tougher. Still, you had to go do everything you could.

  “Do you have any statement for the record, Mr. Pinkard?” the chief judge asked.

  “Damn right I do,” Pinkard said—he had no quit in him. “You can hang me. You won, and you caught me, so you can. But that don’t make it right. I was doing a job of work in my own country, following orders from the Attorney General of the CSA—”

  “Ferdinand Koenig has also been sentenced to death, among other things for giving those orders,” the chief judge broke in.

  Jeff Pinkard shook his head. He was furious, not bewildered. “It’s none of your goddamn business what we did. It wasn’t your country, and they weren’t your people.”

  “We made it our business,” the chief judge replied. “We want people everywhere to get the message: doing things like this is wrong, and you will be punished for it. And besides, Mr. Pinkard, you know as well as I do—if you’d won the war, you would have started in on us next.”

  Pinkard didn’t even waste time denying it. He just said, “Yeah, and you’d’ve had it coming, too. Fuck you all, assholes.”

  “Take him away,” the chief judge said, and several burly soldiers did just that. With a weary sigh, the chief judge used the gavel. “This court is now adjourned.”

  Major Goodman came over to Moss. “You did everything you could, Colonel. You had a losing case and a losing client. He’s a cold-blooded, hard-nosed son of a bitch, and he deserves everything he’s going to get.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Moss said. “You still have to try. He’s got courage. I was just thinking that a minute ago.”

  “Courage is overrated. How many brave butternut bastards did we just have to kill?” the military prosecutor said. “You have to understand what you’re fighting for. Otherwise, you’re an animal—a brave animal, maybe, but an animal all the same.”

  “I won’t argue with you. I feel the same way,” Moss said.

  “He can’t complain he wasn’t well represented,” the chief judge said. “You did a fine job, Colonel. You did everything we let you do, and you would have done more if we’d left more in the rules.”

  “Not letting me do more will be part of the appeal,” Moss said. “The question of jurisdiction still troubles me.”

  “You saw the evidence,” the chief judge said. “Did you go to Camp Humble and see the crematoria and the barracks and the barbed wire? Did you go out to Snyder and take a look at the mass graves?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t want to prejudice myself against him any worse than I was already,” Moss said.

  “All right. I can understand that. It speaks well of you, as a matter of fact. But what are we supposed to do with him? Tell him not to be naughty again and turn him loose? I’d break every mirror in the house if we did.”

  “Well, so would I, when you put it that way,” Moss said. “One of the reasons I don’t feel worse about defending him is that I knew he wouldn’t get off no matter what I did. Still, technically…”

  The chief judge made a slashing motion with his right hand. “The law is about technicalities a lot of the time. Not here. We aren’t about to let quibbles keep us from making Pinkard and Koenig and the rest pay for what they can. I hear we were going to shoot Featherston without trial if we caught him, but that got taken care of.”

  “Didn’t it just?” Moss said. “That colored kid’s got it made. He’ll be a hero the rest of his life. Too damn bad all the other blacks had to pay such a price.” He suspected one reason the United States were making so much of Cassius was to keep from noticing their own guilty conscience.

  “What about you, Colonel?” the chief judge asked. “You’re going through the motions with the app
eal, and we both know it. What are you really going to do once this case winds down?”

  “Looks like private practice,” Moss answered without enthusiasm. “In wartime, the Army didn’t mind using pilots with gray hair. I even got to fly a turbo in combat, and that was something, no two ways about it. But they don’t want to keep me in that slot now, and I can’t even say I blame ’em. Fighter pilot is really a young man’s game.”

  “I was impressed with the way you handled yourself here,” the judge said. “Are you interested in joining the Judge Advocate’s staff full time? This is one of those places where you can count on skill to beat reflexes. Look at me, for instance.” His hair was grayer than Moss’.

  “Huh,” Moss said: an exclamation of thoughtful surprise. “Hadn’t even thought of that, sir. Don’t know why not. Probably because I got this assignment taking over from the poor guy in the motorcar crash. It always felt temporary to me.”

  The chief judge nodded. “I take your point. And if you’ve had enough of living on an officer’s salary, I can see that, too. You’ll eat steak more often if you go civilian.”

  Moss started to laugh. “I’ll tell you another reason you took me by surprise: I spent my whole career between the wars, trying to kick military justice in the teeth up in Canada.”

  “I know. I checked up on you,” the chief judge said calmly. “If you wanted to, you could do the same thing here. Lord knows you’d have plenty of business.”

  “That crossed my mind, sir,” Moss said. “Can’t say it thrills me, though. Far as I can see, the Canucks got a raw deal. I think I’d say the same thing if I didn’t fall in love with a Canadian girl. But the white Confederates? I was on the ground in Georgia for a couple of years, remember. Those people deserve everything they’re getting, and another dollar’s worth besides.”