Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  Scipio had none, not for the dog, not for himself. The breeze swung one of those open doors on squeaky hinges. The small, shrill noise made the black man start violently. “Do Jesus!” he said, and wished he had even a fraction of his wife’s faith. “The buckra done clean out dis whole part o’ de Terry.”

  He hurried up into white Augusta as if fleeing ghosts. And so he might have been, for there were no living souls to flee in that part of the colored district. No one in the white part of town seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The newsboys hawking the Augusta Constitutionalist shouted about the fighting in Virginia, not what had happened here. Scipio bought a copy anyhow. The story had to go in the paper somewhere . . . didn’t it?

  He found what he was looking for buried near the bottom of page four. It didn’t say much: just that the Augusta police had cleaned out some criminals in the Terry. In the course of the investigation, more than a few Negroes were discovered not to possess papers authorizing them to dwell in our fair city, the reporter wrote. They have been removed for resettlement. Some minor resistance was encountered, but soon overcome.

  Anyone who’d listened to the gunplay the night before would have known the resistance was more than minor. And anyone who’d walked through that part of the Terry could see the cops had cleared out everybody, not just people without the right stamps in their passbooks. But how many white men were likely to do that? And how many were likely to give a damn if they did?

  When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he wasn’t surprised to find Jerry Dover in a state. “We’re missing a waiter, a cook, and a busboy!” Dover exclaimed. “No word, no nothing. They just aren’t here. Three at once! That’s crazy.”

  “Reckon this here gots somethin’ to do wid it.” Scipio showed him the Constitutionalist.

  “Well, shit!” Dover said. “How the hell am I supposed to run a restaurant? Got to get on the phone, get those boys back where they belong.” Off he went, to use what pull he and the Huntsman’s Lodge had. Because he was doing that, Scipio hardly even minded the boys. But Dover returned with a fearsome scowl on his face. Pull or no pull, he’d plainly had no luck.

  Aurelius nodded to Scipio when they bumped into each other in the kitchen. “I was afraid I wasn’t gonna see you no more, Xerxes,” the other waiter said.

  “I been afeared o’ the same thing ’bout you,” Scipio answered. They clasped hands. Still here, Scipio thought. We’re both still here. But for how much longer, if they start cleaning out whole chunks of the Terry at a time?

  “The Star-Spangled Banner” blared from the wireless set in Chester Martin’s living room. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!”

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Al Smith said. It was nine o’clock back East, but only six here in Los Angeles—evening in the autumn, yes, but just barely, especially since summer time stayed in force all year around now that the war was on. The President continued, “Some of the things I have to tell you are less pleasant than I wish they were, but this has never been a country that lived in fear of bad news. Unlike our enemies, we don’t need to lie every time we open our mouths to keep our people in the fight.”

  At the kitchen table, Carl wrestled with arithmetic homework. To him, that was more important than anything the President had to say. Who was to say he didn’t have the right attitude, either? Chester lit a cigarette and held out the pack to Rita. She shook her head. He set the pack on the little table by the sofa.

  “Things in Virginia haven’t gone as well as we wish they would have,” Smith said. “If they had, we’d be in Richmond by now. But we have moved down from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan, and we haven’t given up. We still hold the initiative.”

  Chester blew out a plume of smoke. He’d heard officers talk that way on the Roanoke front in the last war. Add things haven’t gone as well as we wish and we haven’t given up together, and what did you get? The answer was easier to figure out than Carl’s arithmetic problems. What you got was simple—a hell of a lot of dead soldiers.

  “I’m not claiming any great victories down there,” the President continued. “But we’ve hurt the Confederate States, and we aim to go right on hurting them. I said when we declared war that they might have started this fight, but we were going to finish it. I said it, and I meant it, and I still mean it.” The jaunty New York rasp in his voice made him sound all the more determined.

  He paused and coughed. “There’s something else you need to know about, something I wish I didn’t have to tell you. It says a lot about the people we’re at war with, and what it says isn’t very pretty. You may have heard this before, but it’s the truth, and not the garbage Jake Featherston puts out with that label on it. Those Freedom Party maniacs and butchers really are massacring Negroes. There’s no doubt about it, and they’re doing more of it, and worse, than even the Confederates have ever before.

  “We know this is true because we have photographs that prove it. Some were taken by Negroes who escaped or who came upon piles of bodies before they were buried. Others were taken by Confederate murderers who were proud of what they did. I know that seems incredible, but it’s the truth, too.”

  Chester looked over at Rita. She was also looking his way. Almost at the same time, they both shrugged. Not many Negroes lived in Los Angeles. Come to that, not many Negroes lived anywhere in the USA. Dealing with the ones who’d fled Kentucky when it returned to the CSA had stirred enough hard feelings. He might have been listening to a report about a flood in China. It was too bad, certainly, but it didn’t affect him much.

  The President tried hard to persuade him that it did: “We can’t let people who do these terrible things beat us. Who knows where they would stop? Who knows if they would stop anywhere? We must show them that no one in the world will tolerate even for a moment the crimes against humanity they are committing. We have to stop them. We have to, and with your help and God’s we will. Thank you, and good night.”

  “That was the President of the United States, Al Smith,” the announcer said, as if anyone could have imagined it was, say, the mayor of St. Paul. “We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.” Music came out of the speaker.

  “He’s done better,” Rita said.

  “He sure has,” Chester agreed. “It was like he was saying things weren’t going so well in Virginia, so he’d give us something else to get all hot and bothered about. Except I don’t think very many people will start flabbling about this.”

  “Why should we?” his wife said. “It’s going on in another country—and when was the last time you saw a Negro around here, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I was trying to think of that myself while he was talking,” Chester said. “I couldn’t—not right away, anyhow.”

  “I think there was a colored woman at the grocery store a few weeks ago,” Rita said. “But she wasn’t buying much. She looked like she was just passing through, not like she really lived around here.”

  “Once during the last war, I passed a Negro through our lines,” Chester said. “I expect he was one of the blacks who rose up against the Confederates a little later on. Served ’em right, the way they treated Negroes even back then.”

  His wife nodded. “I suppose so. But when the colored people down there keep on fighting against the government, why would anybody think the government would want to give ’em a kiss?”

  “Beats me,” Chester said. “The Confederates treat their Negroes like dirt, so the Negroes raise Cain, and that makes the Confederates treat ’em worse. Of course, the Freedom Party would treat ’em bad no matter how they behave—I know that. It’s a mess, yeah. But is it really our mess? I don’t think so.”

  Rita nodded again. “That’s a better way to put it. It’s terrible, like you say, but it isn’t really anybody’s fault. It’s . . . one of those things that happen.”

  Carl looked up from his homework. “Can I have a snack?” The President might have been tal
king about the cost of cauliflower for all the attention he’d paid to the speech.

  “How much have you done?” Rita asked—Carl had been known not to pay too much attention to the homework, too.

  He held up the sheet of cheap pulp paper—so cheap it was closer to tan than white, with little bits of wood that hadn’t quite been pulped embedded here and there—he’d folded to make individual squares for all twelve problems. “More than half. See?”

  “Have you done them right?” Chester asked. Carl nodded vigorously. “We’ll check,” Chester warned. “Arithmetic comes in handy all sorts of places. A builder like me needs it every day. Go on and have your snack—but then finish your work.”

  “I will, Dad.” And, after Chester had inhaled half a dozen chocolate cookies and a glass of milk, he did buckle down. Fortified, Chester thought. His son waved the paper in triumph to show he’d finished.

  Rita went over to check it. “This one’s wrong . . . and so is this one.”

  “They can’t be! I did ’em right.” Carl stared at the paper as if his answers had mysteriously changed while he wasn’t looking.

  “Well, you can darn well do ’em over,” Rita told him. “And you’d better not get the same answers this time, or you’ll be in real trouble.”

  “I’ll try.” Carl might have been sentenced to ten years at San Quentin. He erased what he’d done and tried again. When he was done, he pushed the paper across the table to his mother. “There.”

  She inspected the revised problems. “That’s more like it,” she said. Carl brightened. But she wasn’t going to let him off the hook so soon. “If these answers are right, that means the ones you got before were wrong, doesn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh,” Carl said unwillingly.

  “How come you didn’t get ’em right the first time?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I did.”

  “ ’Cause you were goofing around, that’s why. Are you going to goof around when your teacher gives you a test?” Rita asked. He shook his head. He knew that question had only one safe answer. His mother continued, “You’d better not. I’m going to be looking for that test paper when you come home with it. If you only get a C, I’ll make you sorry. And don’t think you can hide it from me if you do bad, either, ’cause that won’t work. I’ll call up Mrs. Reilly and find out what you got. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Mommy,” Carl said in a very small voice. Telephoning the teacher was a parent’s ultimate weapon. Kids had no defense against it this side of running away from home.

  “All right, then.” Rita seemed satisfied that she’d bombed him into submission. “Do you have any more homework?” He shook his head again. She ruffled his hair. “Then go take a bath and get into your pajamas, why don’t you?”

  A spark of resistance flared. “Do I hafta?”

  She ruthlessly squashed it. “Yes, you have to. Go on. Scoot.” Routed, Carl retreated to his bedroom. He came out in pajamas: the garments of surrender.

  “Honestly,” Rita said after she and Chester had played with him and read to him and finally kissed him good night. “Getting him to do anything is like pulling teeth.” She scowled at Chester. “Why are men always like that?”

  “Because women would walk all over us if we weren’t,” he answered, and tickled her. There was probably something in the Geneva Convention about that, especially since he wasn’t ticklish himself, which meant she couldn’t retaliate in kind.

  They did have a more enjoyable way of unknotting such problems than the earnest diplomats at Geneva had imagined. Afterwards, they both smoked cigarettes. Then Chester turned out the lamp on his nightstand. Rita stayed up a while with a mystery. As he rolled himself into a cocoon of blankets—one more Geneva violation—she said, “You do remember Sue and Otis and Pete are coming over for dinner tomorrow night?”

  “I do now,” he said, and fell asleep.

  He was glad to see his sister and brother-in-law and nephew. Sue had a beaky face much like his. Where he was going gray, her hair remained a time-defying sandy brown. He suspected a bottle helped her defy time, but he’d never asked. Otis Blake had a wide, perfect part along the top of his head—the scar from a bullet crease. An inch lower and Sue never would have had the chance to meet him. Their son was several years older than Carl.

  “I’m working with glass again,” Otis said. “When they found out I had plate-glass experience, they put me on cockpits.” Till the war boom started, he’d been in and out of work since coming to California. He’d spent years in a plate-glass plant in Toledo before the business collapse got him along with so many others.

  “Good for you, Otis.” Chester meant it. He’d helped out when he could. Otis had done the same for him back in Ohio when Chester lost his steel-mill job there while his brother-in-law still had work.

  “You ought to get a war-plant job,” Otis said. “I’m making more money than I ever did before.”

  “I’m doing all right where I am,” Chester said. “I like building better than steel, too.”

  “You’re losing money,” his brother-in-law declared.

  “Not much,” Chester answered. “We’re getting raises. The contractors know they’ve got to give ’em to us, or else we darn well will quit and start making airplanes or shells or whatever else the war needs.”

  “Before too long, I’ll be able to start paying back some of what I owe you,” Otis said. “Haven’t wanted to show my face around here till I could tell you that.”

  Chester shrugged. “Hey, I never worried about it. It’s not like you didn’t carry me for a while. If you can do it without hurting yourself, great. If you can’t—then you can’t, that’s all.”

  “You’re all right, Chester,” Sue said softly.

  Framed on the wall of the front room was a note from Teddy Roosevelt hoping Chester would recover from his war wound. They’d met on one of TR’s tours of the Great War trenches. From that day to this, Chester had never found any words that mattered so much to him. Now maybe he had.

  The USS Remembrance lay at anchor off the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui. The airplane carrier hadn’t come back to Pearl Harbor after her cruise up to Midway. Somebody with a lot of braid on his sleeves had decided that putting an extra ninety miles or so between the Remembrance and a Japanese attack from the west would help keep her safe. Sam Carsten wasn’t completely convinced, but nobody except the sailors in the damage-control party cared about his opinion.

  His boss wasn’t thrilled, either. “If they bomb us in Pearl Harbor, we sink in shallow water and we’re easy to refloat,” Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger grumbled at a general-quarters drill. “If they bomb us here, down we go, and they never see us again. There’s a hell of a lot of water underneath us.”

  “If we can figure that out, how come the brass can’t?” Szczerbiakowicz asked.

  “Beats me, Eyechart,” Sam said. “You want stuff to make sense all the time, why the hell’d you join the Navy?”

  “You got me there, Lieutenant,” the Pole said. “Why the hell did you join the Navy?”

  “Me?” Sam hadn’t thought about it for a while. “Mostly because I didn’t want to walk behind a horse’s ass the rest of my life, I guess. My folks had a farm, and I knew that was hard work. I figured this would be better. And it is—most of the time.”

  “Yeah, most of the time,” Szczerbiakowicz agreed dryly. Everybody laughed, not that it was really funny. You weren’t likely to run into dive bombers and battleships and submarines on a farm.

  When the all-clear sounded, Sam went up to the flight deck. Destroyers and cruisers flanked the Remembrance to the west; their antiaircraft guns would help defend the vital ship if the Japs figured out she wasn’t at Pearl Harbor. To the east lay Maui. Lahaina had been the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii till 1845. It had been a boomtown in whaling days. Now it seemed to have forgotten its lively past, and slumbered the days away—until Navy ships anchored offshore, when it perked up amazingly. Sam had seen the enormous
banyan tree in the town square, which had to shade an area a couple of hundred feet across. Any town whose main attraction was a tree wasn’t the most exciting place God ever made.

  Fighters buzzed high overhead. The Remembrance’s Y-ranging antenna swung round and round, round and round. Nobody’s going to catch us with our pants down, Sam thought approvingly. But how many carriers did the Japanese have? It was possible—hell, it was easy—to be ready for battle in a tactical sense but to get overwhelmed strategically.

  That thought came back to haunt him at supper. He was halfway through a good steak—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a better one—when the intercom suddenly announced, “Midway reports itself under attack by Japanese aircraft. The island has launched aircraft along the vector given by the enemy machines. We are proceeding to lend our assistance.”

  No sooner had the metallic words died away than the engines rumbled to life under Sam’s feet. Somebody down the table from him said, “Godalmighty—we’re not wasting any time, are we?”

  Commander Dan Cressy had been swearing under his breath. The officer’s remark made him revert to straightforward English: “We’ve wasted more than three hours just by being here instead of in Honolulu. Now we get to find out how much that costs us.”

  “We have all the supplies we need, sir?” Sam asked.

  “We have enough fuel to get us to Midway, and we have enough aviation gas to fly our airplanes,” Cressy answered. “What more do we need past that?”

  Carsten said the only thing he could: “Nothing, sir.” If they had enough fuel to come home from Midway, the exec hadn’t said a word about it. He hadn’t said anything about food, either. They could get there, and they could fight once they did. Past that . . . well, they could worry about everything else afterwards.

  Captain Stein came on the intercom a little later, urging men who weren’t on duty to go out on the flight deck and keep an eye peeled for periscopes. “We have fancy new sound gear since the last war,” the captain said, “but nothing is perfect. One of you may see something everybody else misses. It’s worth a try.”