In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  “Merci beaucoup. There. And you sent me off to war, and I almost got ventilated more times than I can count. I’d call that a push, or close enough,” O’Doull returned. “And you never come around for no reason. What’s your game this time?”

  “Game?” Quigley was the picture of offended innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And then you wake up. Now tell me another one—one I’ll believe.” O’Doull blew a smoke ring.

  “I never could do that,” Jedediah Quigley complained. He tried, and blew out a shapeless cloud of smoke. He puffed again, and again managed only a smoke blob. O’Doull sat and waited, smoking his own Habana. Sooner or later, the retired colonel would come to the point. If he wanted to go slow, he could go slow. Maybe a patient would come in. That would give O’Doull an excuse to throw him out.

  Time stretched. Quigley smoked his cigar down small. He eyed the glowing coal. O’Doull kept on waiting. Here in Rivière-du-Loup, nothing was likely to happen in a hurry. Relearning that had taken O’Doull a while.

  “If you were going to improve U.S. Army medical care, how would you go about it?” Quigley asked at last.

  “Simple,” O’Doull replied. “I wouldn’t get in a war.”

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are,” the older man told him.

  “Who’s joking?” O’Doull said. “It’s the God’s truth. And I’m a citizen of the Republic. You can’t do anything horrible to me unless I’m dumb enough to decide I’ll let you.”

  “The way you were when you put on the uniform again?”

  “Oui. Certainement. Just like that,” O’Doull said. “And I damn well was dumb, too. Calisse! Was I ever!”

  “How many lives did you save?” Quigley asked.

  “A good many. But any other doc could have done the same. Hell, Granny McDougald could have saved most of them. An experienced medic gets to where he’s just about as good as an M.D. He makes up in experience what he’s missing in education.”

  “That’s something we’d want to know. Can you write it down, along with anything else you can think of?”

  “Why are you picking me? Why are you picking on me?” O’Doull asked. “You’ve got lots of doctors down in the USA and CSA who still belong to the Army. Let them crank out the recommendations.”

  “Some of them will.” If anything fazed Quigley, he didn’t let on. “But we want you, too, exactly because you’re an outsider. You don’t have a military career to care about. You don’t need to worry about stepping on toes.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” O’Doull inquired. “You and your tapeworm? We’ve got some new medicines for that, too.”

  He couldn’t get a rise out of his not especially welcome guest. “Come on, Doctor. don’t be silly. You know I still have connections.”

  “Sure you do. You’re the guy the USA uses to tell the Republic which way to jump,” O’Doull said. “But I’m not the Republic, and you’re not in Quebec City. So you can play nice or you can get lost.”

  “I am playing nice,” Quigley said. “I could be much less pleasant than I am. But if I browbeat you, you wouldn’t do a good job. You really would be helping here, if you’d take the time to do it.”

  How nasty could Jedediah Quigley be if he set his mind to it? O’Doull wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. The thought reshaped itself. He was sure he didn’t want to find out. Yes, that was a lot more accurate.

  “You talked me into it,” he said. Quigley didn’t even look smug. He knew he was a power in the land, all right. Grumpily, O’Doull went on, “You know, you’ll be making me remember some things I’d rather forget.”

  People here didn’t understand what this war was like. They didn’t understand how lucky they were to be ignorant, either. O’Doull would have been happy to let his memories slide down into oblivion, too. But Quigley, damn him, was going to make sure that didn’t happen. Once you started putting things down on paper, they were yours forever-more.

  All Quigley said was, “This is for your country’s good.”

  O’Doull wasn’t having that. “Guys get their balls blown off for their country’s good. You think that makes them feel any better about it?”

  “No, of course not,” Quigley said. “I doubt this will hurt quite so much, though.”

  He was right, dammit. Sighing, O’Doull asked, “When do you want this report?”

  “Two weeks?”

  With another sigh, the doctor nodded. “You’ll have it.” And stay out of my hair after that.

  “Thank you kindly.” By the way Quigley said it, O’Doull was taking care of something he wanted to do, not something he’d been browbeaten into taking on. The older man rose, nodded, and went on his way.

  Outside, snow would lie at least ankle deep. This was Rivière-du-Loup, all right. O’Doull had grown up in Massachusetts. He was used to rugged weather. Rivière-du-Loup outdid everything he’d ever known back in the States. It wasn’t even close.

  Half an hour later, he had a patient. “Hello, Doctor,” said Martin Lacroix, a plump, prosperous baker whose shop lay down the street from O’Doull’s new office.

  “Bonjour,” O’Doull replied. “What seems to be your trouble, Monsieur?”

  “Well, I have this rash.” Lacroix pulled up his shirt sleeve to display his left biceps. “I’ve tried home remedies on it, but they don’t do much good.”

  “I’m not surprised—that’s ringworm,” O’Doull said. “You should keep it covered as much as you can, because it can spread. I’ll give you a prescription to take to the pharmacy. Put it on twice a day, and it should clear things up in a month or so.”

  “A month?” the baker said in dismay. “Why not sooner? If you give me a shot or some pills, can’t I get rid of it in a few days?”

  People knew there were new medicines that could cure some ailments quickly and easily. Naturally, people thought the new medicines could cure any ailment quickly and easily. But things didn’t work that way. O’Doull spent a while explaining the difference between microbes and fungi. He wasn’t sure Lacroix got it. The baker left carrying the prescription but shaking his head.

  After a case like that, writing about the work O’Doull had done during the war didn’t seem so bad. That, at least, had mattered. This? While he was sewing and splinting and cutting, he’d looked forward to this with a fierce and simple longing. Now that he had it again, he discovered the danger of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. It could prove as unfortunate in real life as in fairy tales.

  He was home with Nicole. That was as good as it always had been. But his practice…After you’d spent time as a battlefield surgeon, prescribing ringworm salve didn’t seem the same.

  Another patient came in. Françoise Boulanger had arthritis. And well she might—she was seventy-seven, and she’d worked hard all her life. She hurt, and she had trouble moving. O’Doull didn’t have much to offer her: aspirin to take the edge from pain and inflammation, heating pads and warm baths to soothe a little. He would have given her the same advice before the Great War. If he’d been practicing before the War of Secession, he would have substituted laudanum for aspirin. Françoise might have got hooked on the opiated brandy, but it would have done as much for her pain as the little white pills did, maybe more.

  Leaning on her cane, she shuffled out of the office. Is this what I’ve got to look forward to for the rest of my professional life? God! If he could have brought Nicole with him, he would have run for Alabama and a military hospital.

  A little boy with strep throat made him feel happier. Penicillin would take care of that, and would make sure the kid didn’t come down with rheumatic fever or endocarditis. O’Doull felt he’d earned his fee there and done some real good. All the same, he wasn’t used to taking it easy any more. He wondered if he ever would be.

  A corporal waited on the platform when Abner Dowling got off the train at the Broad Street station. Saluting, the noncom said, “I’ll take you to the War Department, sir.”


  “Obliged,” Dowling said. The corporal grabbed his suitcase, too. It wasn’t heavy, but Dowling didn’t complain. Ten years earlier, he knew he would have. He still wasn’t as old as George Custer had been when the Great War broke out, but he needed only another six years.

  Philadelphia looked better than it had the last time he was there. More craters were filled in. More ruined buildings were torn down. Of course, the superbomb hadn’t gone off right here.

  “How are things on the other side of the river?” he asked.

  “Sir, they’re still pretty, uh, fouled up.” The corporal would have said something strong talking with one of his buddies. As he braked for a red light, he added, “That’s such a big mess, God knows when they’ll set it to rights.”

  “I suppose,” Dowling said.

  “Believe it, sir. It’s the truth.” The corporal sounded missionary in his zeal to convince.

  Dowling already believed. He’d spent too much time talking with Henderson V. FitzBelmont to do anything else. FitzBelmont wasn’t the most exciting man ever born—an understatement. But he’d put a superbomb together while the United States was doing their goddamnedest to blow Lexington off the map. Dowling didn’t like him, but did respect his professional competence. So did the U.S. physicists who’d interrogated him. They were impressed he’d done as much as he had under the conditions in which he had to work.

  The War Department looked a lot better than it had when the Confederates tried their best to knock it flat. Now repairmen could do their job without fighting constant new damage. The concrete barriers around the massive structure remained in place. No C.S. diehards or Mormon fanatics or stubborn Canucks—rebellion still flared north of the border—could grab an easy chance to auto-bomb the place.

  Dowling walked from the barricades up to the entrance. He wheezed climbing the stairs. His heart pounded. He was carrying a lot of weight around, and he’d just reminded himself how young he wasn’t. I made it through the war, though. That’s all that—well, most of what—really counts.

  Despite the stars on his shoulder straps, he got frisked before he could go inside. The soldiers who patted him down didn’t take anything for granted. When Dowling asked about that, one of them said, “Sir, the way things are, we’ll be doing this forever. Too many assholes running around loose—uh, pardon my French.”

  “I’ve met the word,” Dowling remarked. The enlisted men grinned.

  A corporal in a uniform with creases sharp enough to shave with took Dowling down into the bowels of the earth to John Abell’s office. These days, the more deeply you were buried, the bigger the wheel you were. And Abell was a bigger wheel—he now sported two stars on his shoulder straps.

  “Congratulations, Major General,” Dowling said, and stuck out his hand.

  “Thanks.” The General Staff officer’s grip was stronger than his slender build and pallid face would have made you think. He’d been fair almost to the point of ghostliness even before he started impersonating a mole. But he had to be really good at what he did to rise as high as he had without a field command. Well, that was nothing Dowling hadn’t already known.

  “What’s the latest?” Dowling asked.

  “We finally have a handle on the rising in Saskatoon,” Abell answered. “They surrendered on a promise that we’d treat them as POWs—and that we wouldn’t superbomb the place.”

  “Good God!” Dowling said. “Were we thinking of it?”

  “No—but the Canucks don’t need to know that,” the younger man replied.

  “Well, well. A use for superbombs I hadn’t thought of,” Dowling said. “Just knowing we’ve got ’em on inventory is worth something.”

  “Indeed,” Abell said. “Speaking of which, how is Professor FitzBelmont?”

  Before answering, Dowling asked, “Am I allowed to talk about that with you?”

  Abell’s smile was cold, but his smiles usually were. “Oh, yes. That’s one of the reasons you were ordered back here.”

  “He’s a more than capable physicist, and he had some good engineers working under him,” Dowling said. “That’s the opinion of people who ought to know. What with as much of this town as he blew up, I’d say they’re right.”

  “What do we do with him?” Abell asked.

  “He’s kind of like a bomb himself, isn’t he? All that stuff he knows…Damn good thing Featherston didn’t want to listen to him at first. Damn good thing. If the Japs or the Russians kidnapped him, I’d flabble,” Dowling said. “And he’d sing. He’d sing like a nightingale. He’d probably think it was…interesting.”

  “Our German allies don’t want the Russians getting a superbomb,” Abell said. “Nobody wants the Japanese getting one.”

  “Except them,” Dowling said.

  “Yes. Except them.” John Abell jotted something in a notebook. Even upside down, his script looked clear and precise. “Probably about time for him to have an unfortunate accident, don’t you think? Then we won’t have to worry about what he’s up to and where he might go—or, as you say, might be taken.”

  What had he just written down? Kill Henderson FitzBelmont, the way someone else might have written eggs, salami, ½ pound butter? Dowling didn’t know, but that was what he would have bet. And Abell wanted his opinion of the idea, too. What was he supposed to say? What came out of his mouth was, “Well, I think we’ve learned about as much from him as we’re going to.”

  Abell nodded. “That was my next question.”

  “If we’re going to do this, it really does have to look like an accident,” Dowling said. “We give the diehards a martyr if we screw up.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The people we use are reliable,” Abell said. “Very sad, but if the professor tried to cross the street in front of a command car…”

  “I see.” Dowling wondered if he saw anything but the tip of the iceberg. “How many Confederates have already had, uh, unfortunate accidents?”

  “I can’t talk about that with you,” the General Staff officer answered. “Some people we can’t convict for crimes against humanity still don’t deserve to live, though. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

  Dowling thought about that. He thought about everything that had happened in the CSA since Jake Featherston took over. Slowly, he shook his head. “Nope. I won’t say boo.”

  “Good. I didn’t expect you would.” Abell gave another of his chilly smiles. “Tell me, General, have you given any thought to your retirement?”

  The question might have been a knife in Abner Dowling’s guts. So this is the other reason they called me to Philadelphia, he thought dully. He didn’t know why he was surprised. Not many men his age were still serving. But he thought he’d done as well as a man could reasonably do. Of course, when you got old enough, that didn’t mean anything any more. They’d kick you out regardless. If it had happened to George Custer—and it had—it could happen to anybody.

  With that in mind, Dowling answered, “Custer got over sixty years in the Army. I’ve had more than forty myself. That doesn’t match him, but it’s not a bad run. I’m not ready to go, but I will if the War Department thinks it’s time.”

  “I’m afraid the War Department does,” Abell said. “This implies no disrespect: only the desire to move younger men forward. Your career has been distinguished in all respects, and no one would say otherwise.”

  “If I’d held Ohio…” But Dowling shook his head. Even that probably wouldn’t have mattered much. The only way you could keep from getting old was by dying before you made it. The past three years, far too many people had done that.

  “It’s not personal or political,” Abell said. “I understand that you feel General Custer’s retirement was both.”

  “Oh, it was,” Dowling said. “I was there when the Socialists stuck it to him. There was blood on the floor by the time N. Matoon Thomas got done.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder. Custer was a, ah, vivid figure.” Abell wasn’t lying. And the sun was warm, and the ocean was mois
t. The General Staff officer went on, “I repeat, though, none of those factors applies in your case.”

  “Bully,” Dowling said—slang even more antiquated than he was. “I get put out to pasture any which way.”

  “If you’d been asked to retire during the war, it might have shown dissatisfaction with your performance. We needed your experience then. Now we have the chance to train younger men,” Abell said.

  He was putting the best face he could on it. He wasn’t a hundred percent convincing, but he didn’t miss by much. Even so…“How long before they put you out to pasture?” Dowling asked brutally.

  “I may have a few more years. Or they may ask me to step down tomorrow,” Abell answered with every appearance of sangfroid. “I hope I’ll know when it’s time to say good-bye. I don’t know that I will, but I hope so.”

  “Time to say good-bye,” Dowling echoed. “When I started, no one was sure what the machine gun was worth. Now FitzBelmont talks about blowing up Rhode Island with one bomb.”

  “Best thing that could happen to it,” Abell observed.

  “Heh,” Dowling said. “Maybe it is time for me to go.”

  “Believe me, the Army appreciates everything you did,” Abell said. “Your success in west Texas changed the whole moral character of the war.”

  Dowling knew what that meant. Not even U.S. citizens who didn’t like Negroes could stomach killing them in carload lots. That was why Jefferson Pinkard would swing. Dowling’s Eleventh Army had shown that the massacres weren’t just propaganda. The Confederates really were doing those things—and a lot of them were proud of it.

  “Well…thank you,” Dowling said. It wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped to be remembered for when he graduated from West Point, but it was better than not being remembered at all. As Custer’s longtime adjutant, he’d been only a footnote. The one time he’d been important was when he lied to the War Department about what Custer and Morrell planned to do with barrels. That, he hoped, wouldn’t go down in history. In this war, he’d carved out a niche for himself. It wasn’t a Custer-sized niche. If anybody had that one this time around, it was Irving Morrell. But a niche it was.