The Disunited States

by Harry Turtledove

  Gran walked in gnawing on a roll. She took one look at her cousin and said, "Ethel Snodgrass, are you coming down sick with that stupid plague?" There never was a situation that Gran couldn't make worse with a few ill-chosen words.

  "Of course not," Mrs. Snodgrass, and started sneezing again as if it were going out of style.

  "I reckon maybe I will call the doctor," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Just to stay on the safe side." He gave Gran a dirty look. Beckie didn't blame him a bit. He walked into the other room to use the phone. Beckie didn't blame him for that. He couldn't want his wife to hear how worried he had to be.

  Beckie couldn't make out what he was saying, either. She could make out his tone of voice, though. If he wasn't scared to death, she'd never heard anybody who was.

  She thought of Charlie Clark, and wished she hadn't. Talking about death wasn't the same when you'd seen the real thing. And then she thought about the waitress at the diner. What was her name? Irma, that was it. She was dead, too. Beckie looked at Mrs. Snodgrass, then looked away in a hurry. She didn't care for any of the directions her mind was going in right now.

  Mr. Snodgrass walked into the front room again. He said,

  "Well, hon, they're going to send an ambulance from Parkers-burg. Be here in twenty minutes, a half hour, they told me."

  "That's silly," Mrs. Snodgrass said. "It's nothing but a summer cold."

  Gran started to say something about that. Beckie kicked her in the ankle, accidentally on purpose. Gran jumped. "You be careful!" she said. "What in the world do you think you're doing?"

  "I'm sorry, Gran," Beckie said, meek as you please. If Gran got mad at her . . . well, so what? Gran had got mad at her lots of times, and this wouldn't be the last one—not even close. However much Gran fussed and fumed, Beckie could deal with it. Poor Mrs. Snodgrass, on the other hand, really had something wrong with her. She wouldn't need Gran making things worse.

  Mr. Snodgrass nodded to Beckie. "You're all right," he murmured. Gran—surprise!—never noticed.

  Beckie started trying to figure out how she felt herself. Was she warmer than she should have been? Did she need to sneeze? To cough? To do anything she wouldn't normally do? She knew that was silly ... in a way. In another way, it wasn't. When you were with somebody who was all too likely to have a horrible disease, how could you not worry about coming down with it yourself?

  She heard the ambulance's siren long before it got to the Snodgrasses' house. Sound carried amazingly far in Elizabeth. In Los Angeles, the constant background noise of cars and machinery and airplanes and everything else that went into a big city muffled and blunted distant sounds. Not here. Here, the background noise was birdsongs and the wind in the trees, and that was about it.

  The ambulance screeched to a stop in front of the house. All up and down Prunty, people would be coming out to stare at it. Beckie was as sure of that as if she could see them herself. What else did they have to do for excitement? And, like her, they had something real to worry about.

  Mr. Snodgrass let the paramedics into the house. They were dressed in what looked like spacesuits. A shame space travel never quite panned out, Beckie thought. Satellites that relayed signals and kept an eye on the weather came in handy. Probes had flown all across the Solar System and men had gone to the moon and Mars. But there didn't seem to be much room for people anywhere but Earth.

  All that went through Beckie's mind in less than a second. The lead paramedic hurried over to Mrs. Snodgrass, who'd got visibly sicker while everybody waited for the ambulance. "How do you feel, ma'am?" he asked. Coming from behind his respirator, his voice sounded all ghostly.

  "Cold," she answered. "Cold and kind of purple. I mean ... I don't know what I mean." Beckie shivered. That didn't sound good.

  The paramedic stuck a thermometer tip in Mrs. Snodgrass' ear. "What's her temperature?" her husband asked anxiously.

  "It's just over 104, sir," the paramedic said. Beckie translated that into the Celsius degrees she was used to. Over forty! That was a high fever. The man went on, "We'll have to take her in." He turned to his partner. "Give these people shots, George."

  "Right," George said.

  "What kind of shots?" Mr. Snodgrass said.

  "Gamma globulin, made from the blood serum of people who've had this thing," the paramedic answered. "We don't know how much good it will do, but it won't hurt you. And you've sure as the devil been exposed."

  Mr. Snodgrass took his shot without a word. So did Beckie, but it wasn't easy—she didn't like needles, not even a little bit. Gran kicked up a fuss. Beckie might have known she would— she kicked up a fuss about everything. "They say gramma glo-fulin isn't good for you," she squawked. Beckie was sure she'd never heard of gamma globulin in her life before—if she had, she would have pronounced it better. But her mysterious they had something to say about everything.

  "Look here, ma'am—if you want to get sick, that's your business," George said. "But if you get sick and spread it to other people like this pretty little girl here"—he pointed at Beckie with a gloved hand—"that's Virginia's business. So I'm going to give you this shot no matter what. It's the best hope for staying well you've got."

  "They say—" Gran broke off with a yip, because the paramedic did what he'd said he would do. She let him put alcohol on the spot where he'd stuck her. If looks could have killed, though, George would have fallen over on the floor.

  Instead, he and his partner put Mrs. Snodgrass on a stretcher and carried her out. The ambulance shrilled away. Gran watched avidly till it turned the corner on State Route 14 and disappeared. Other people's catastrophes were meat and drink to her.

  Mr. Snodgrass watched, too, but not the same way. All at once, he looked shrunken and ancient. He'd been spry enough to seem much younger than his years. He suddenly didn't. They'd crashed down on him like a landslide, and his shoulders slumped under the weight of them. "Are you all right?" Beckie asked softly.

  He shook himself like a man coming out of cold water. Every bit of his attention had been with the ambulance. Now he had to call himself back to the real world, and it wasn't easy for him. "Am I all right?" He might have been asking himself the same question. After some serious thought, he shook his head. "Well, now that you mention it, no. Ethel and me, we haven't spent more than a handful of nights apart the past forty-five years. It'll be powerful strange, lying down tonight and trying to sleep without her lying there next to me."

  "I'm sorry," Beckie said. "I'm sorry about everything."

  "I only wish I could have gone with her, but they weren't about to let me," he said. "I guess they worried I might come down with it myself. Like I care! If she's not with me, what difference does it make whether I live or die? But I suppose I might pass it on to other folks if I come down sick, and that wouldn't be right."

  How am I supposed to answer him? Beckie wondered. She couldn't see any way at all. The ambulance siren faded into silence. Mr. Snodgrass still seemed old.

  "Do you think we ought to be doing this?" Justin asked as he and Mr. Brooks walked toward the Snodgrasses' house. Then he answered his own question: "Well, why not? Way things are, it's about even money who's exposing whom to what."

  Randolph Brooks nodded. "That's how I look at it, too. What with Irma breathing in our faces every day for who knows how long, we're not taking any big chances ourselves. And everybody there has already been up close to the virus. Besides, Ted Snodgrass is a friend of mine. These are the least I can do." He hefted the flowers he was carrying.

  Justin nodded. Before coming to Elizabeth, he'd wondered if people from the home timeline really could make friends with the locals. Now that he'd got to know Beckie, he saw they could. People were people, no matter where they came from. And this alternate's breakpoint was only a little more than three hundred years old. Folks here still had a lot in common with those from his America.

  The weather had everything in common with his America's. It was hot and humid. Walking just the few blocks from the motel to the ho
use on Prunty made sweat stand out on his face and made his shirt stick to him as if it were glued to his hide. He wondered how people had lived, he wondered how they'd worked, before air-conditioning was invented. A lot of them hadn't, or not for very long—doing hard labor in weather like this really could lay you low.

  That was one of the reasons the white colonists imported African slaves into the South. They thought the Negroes could stand the climate better than they could themselves—and if the Negroes were doing the hard work in the fields, they wouldn't have to. If you thought of people as chattels, as property of the same sort as cattle or sheep, it made good logical sense.

  If.

  African Americans weren't property any more in this alternate, of course. Even in the states that tried hardest to keep them as slaves, they'd been legally free for two centuries now. But the difference between legally free and legally equal—let alone socially equal—made a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon. Blacks hadn't been able to cross it anywhere here— except in Mississippi, where they'd put whites on the wrong side of it. People here had a lot in common with those from his America, yes . . . but not enough.

  "No wonder Charlie Clark carried a gun," Justin muttered.

  "No wonder at all—but don't say that out loud," Mr. Brooks replied.

  "Don't say this out loud. Don't say that out loud." Justin knew he was losing his temper, but couldn't seem to help it. "Sure is a wonderful place where we're staying. Oh, yeah."

  "Do you want the VBI men knocking on our door again?" the coin and stamp dealer asked. "They will, if you make people in Elizabeth suspicious of you. And if they think you've got anything to do with a Negro uprising, all the gloves come off. Can you blame them for thinking like that?"

  You bet I can. Justin started to say it, but a gesture from Mr. Brooks made him hold his tongue. The older man mouthed one word. Bugs. Was somebody aiming a parabolic mike at them right now? Had the VBI men planted tiny microphones in their hotel room? In the Snodgrasses' home? In their pockets? It could happen in the home timeline. Here? The technology here wasn't as good, but was it good enough? Justin wouldn't have been surprised.

  So Mr. Brooks was talking as if other people were listening. And Justin knew he had to do the same—for now, anyway. "No, of course not," he said. "An uprising would be terrible." That was true .. . from a white Virginian's point of view. Justin's real opinion was better left unsaid if anyone here was listening.

  Mr. Brooks knocked on the Snodgrasses' door. Mr. Snod-grass opened it a moment later. "You didn't need to do that," he said when he saw the flowers.

  "I think I did," Mr. Brooks said. "And whether I needed to or not, I wanted to. How's she doing? Have you heard?"

  "Well, that's right kind of you. Come on in." Ted Snodgrass stepped aside to make room. He didn't seem to want to answer Mr. Brooks' question, but finally he did: "I haven't heard anything really bad. They've got her in intensive care in Parkers-burg, and they're doing everything they know how to do. Heaven only knows how I'm going to pay for it all, but I'll worry about that later. We'll see what the insurance covers."

  Virginia didn't have government-paid health coverage, the way the U.S.A. in the home timeline did. You bought insurance yourself. If you couldn't afford to, you paid up front when you got sick. If you couldn't afford to do that, you went in hock up to your eyebrows—or you stayed away from doctors. To Justin, that wasn't a medical system. It was more like a bad joke.

  Several other bouquets already perfumed the living room. Neighbors, Justin thought. He lived in a suburb in northern Virginia in the home timeline. If someone in his family got sick, the neighbors might not even know about it. This alternate had good points as well as bad.

  Beckie came into the front room. "How are you?" Justin asked her.

  "Worried," she said, which was a straight answer. "You?"

  "Yeah, me, too. Still okay so far, though." As he had once before, Justin knocked on his head, as if to knock on wood. He had more confidence in the home timeline's immunity shots than in this alternate's gamma globulin, but he wasn't quite sure he ought to. "Shall we go out back and talk?" he asked.

  "Sure. Why not?" she said.

  The back yard wasn't likely to be bugged. Of course, if his own clothes were ... He didn't think that was likely, either, but Mr. Brooks was right to worry. You never could tell. They grabbed a couple of fizzes from the refrigerator and went out. Justin laughed. "Maybe we should have stayed inside after all. It sure is nicer with the air conditioning."

  "You grew up in Virginia, and you say that? The humidity here drives me nuts," Beckie said. "But out here we won't have Gran hovering around trying to listen to everything we say."

  He laughed again. She wasn't worried about bugging—she was worried about being bugged. "Your grandmother seems nice enough," he said. He'd done that before, too. You had to stay polite about other people's relatives.

  The people whose relatives they were didn't have to stay polite. That was part of what made having relatives fun. Beckie sure didn't bother. "Only goes to show you don't know her very well," she said. "She's . . ." She stopped, shaking her head.

  "That bad?" Justin was thinking of an aunt of his who drank too much every once in a while. When she did, she liked to tell stories—endless stories—about him as a little boy. That made him awfully glad to have her around.

  "Worse," Beckie said without the least hesitation. "Back home, I could put up with her—sort of, anyhow—because we could get away from each other. But we've been in each other's pockets ever since this miserable trip started, and I don't think I'm going to want to have much to do with her for the rest of my life. All she ever does is complain and blame other people. Nothing's ever her fault. If you don't believe me, just ask her."

  Justin laughed. Then he realized Beckie wasn't kidding, not even a little bit. "I'm glad you made the trip," he said.

  "I'to not!" she exclaimed. "I wish I were in California, thirty-five hundred kilometers away from bombs and missiles and uprisings and diseases and everything else."

  "Oh," Justin said in a very small voice. He'd wanted to say he was glad she'd come to Virginia because he wouldn't have met her if she hadn't. That would have made a pretty speech. But it was also pretty selfish when you got right down to it, which he hadn't. Coming to Virginia made it a lot more likely that she would get killed. Had he thought about that before he stuck his foot in his mouth? No, not even a little bit.

  She raised an eyebrow. He had the bad feeling she knew exactly what he was thinking. "I like you," she said. "Don't get me wrong. As long as I'm stuck here, it's nice that I've made a friend. But I'd still rather be home. If that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," he said, which was . . . half true, anyway. "I understand how you feel." He wasn't lying there. He wished he'd thought faster.

  She changed the subject on him: "Remember how I was talking about the old United States a while ago?"

  "Uh-huh." Justin wasn't likely to forget that, or how much it had scared him.

  "If they hadn't fallen apart, this kind of stuff couldn't happen," she said. "States wouldn't go to war with each other whenever they felt like it, because there'd be something bigger to stop them."

  She was right—if you ignored the Civil War. But this was one of those times when being right did no good at all. "You're only about three hundred years too late to worry about it now," he pointed out.

  "I know." She nodded sadly. "Still, they should have been able to do something back then. Have you ever written a story or drawn a picture where you know exactly how you want it to turn out—you've got this image inside your head—but what you end up with isn't like that because you just aren't good enough to make it come out right?"

  "Oh, sure." Justin nodded, too. "Who hasn't?"

  "That's what the United States reminds me of," Beckie said.

  "It was a good idea—they were a good idea?—but the people in charge didn't know how to put them together so they'd stick. It's too bad." />
  "I guess." Justin was lucky enough to come from a timeline where the Constitution took care of the problems with the Articles of Confederation. Till coming here, he took that for granted. He didn't now.

  Beckie sighed. "But you're right—it's too late now. Nothing will make any of the states give up power to some bigger government. And so we'll have lots of stupid little wars. I just hope we don't have any big ones."

  "Me, too," Justin said. "How many states have atomic bombs and missiles these days?"

  "Most of them," Beckie said, which was answer enough.

  "Well, we haven't blown ourselves up yet. They haven't blown themselves up in Europe yet, either," Justin said. "They may be luckier over there than we are, because they've come closer." This was an alternate where people talked about great powers, not superpowers. There were no superpowers here. But there were plenty of great powers, powers with bombs and missiles and know-how enough to ruin anyone who pushed them too far. Britain, France, Prussia, and Italy in Europe, Russia and Ukraine farther east, India, two or three Chinese states, Japan, California, Texas, New York, Brazil, Argentina, Chile . . . Nobody with any sense messed with them. Virginia and Ohio were down in the second rank. They could devastate each other, but couldn't really stand up against, say, Britain or California.

  Alliances ran around this alternate like fault lines. Every so often, somebody shifted from one camp to another. When that happened, it was like an earthquake. This alternate had known about nuclear weapons almost as long as the home timeline.

  They'd been used a few times here, as they had there. But the Big One, the nuclear exchange with everyone throwing everything at everyone else, hadn't happened either place. Maybe that was luck. Maybe it was simply terror.

  There were alternates where the missiles did fly. Crosstime Traffic didn't operate in many of them. What was the point? Crosstime Traffic needed to trade to stay in business, and those shattered alternates didn't have much worth trading. If this one blew itself to hell and gone, Crosstime Traffic would pull out of here, too. Nobody would have to worry about whether this alternate discovered crosstime travel on its own, not any more.