In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "Just in case," Morrell answered. Getting rid of the horrible stuff wouldn't hurt. He was sure of that.

  Abell always looked pale. He seemed damn near transparent now. He might have aged ten years in the few days since Morrell last saw him. "My God!" he said. "They beat us to the punch. I didn't think they could, but they did."

  "Have you been up top?" Morrell asked. "Did you see it with your own eyes?"

  "No." Abell had always wanted to deal with things from a distance. Was that a strength or a weakness? Probably both at once, Morrell thought. The General Staff officer went on, "How did they get it here? They couldn't have used an airplane-I swear to God they don't have a machine that can carry it. And our Y-ranging gear didn't spot a thing coming up from the south."

  "They must have sneaked it in, God damn them," Morrell said. "Remember how they broke through in eastern Ohio? They had a whole battalion of guys in our uniforms, in our vehicles, who could talk like us. What do you want to bet they did the same damn thing again-and made it work?" He'd made it work himself, getting over the Tennessee River in front of Chattanooga.

  Abell managed a shaky nod. Then he reached for a telephone. "With a little luck, they won't get away. We can shoot every last one of them if we catch them in our uniforms."

  Morrell nodded. That was what the laws of war said. Whether the USA would want to shoot those Confederates if it caught them might be a different story. How much could they tell interrogators about their uranium-bomb project?

  "We'd better catch them," Abell said as he slammed down the telephone after barking into it with unaccustomed heat. "They can't get away with that. How many thousands of people did they just murder?"

  Would it have been better had the enemy dropped the bomb out of an airplane and then flown away? Would it have been better had he dropped ton after ton of ordinary bombs instead, or machine-gunned as many people as he'd killed in this one blast? Morrell found himself shaking his head. It wouldn't have been any better, but it would have been more familiar. That mattered, too. The uranium bomb was something brand new. Poison gas had carried some of that same whiff of horror during the last war. People took it for granted now.

  Would they come to take uranium bombs for granted, too? How could they, when each one could devastate a city? And these were just the early ones. Would next year's model level a whole county, or maybe a state?

  "My God," Abell said again. "Those stinking crackers…and they beat us. There won't be one stone left on top of another one by the time our bombers get through with Lexington-I'll tell you that."

  The last time he and Morrell talked about uranium bombs, he'd waltzed around the name of the town where the CSA was working on them. This time, he'd slipped. He was human after all, and would probably have to do penance before the altar of Security the Almighty.

  He realized as much a few seconds too late. "You didn't hear that from me," he said in some embarrassment.

  "Hear what?" Morrell asked innocently.

  "I wonder if we could drive down the Shenandoah Valley and take that place away from them," Abell said. Even though he was embarrassed, now that the cat was out of the bag he was letting it run around.

  "Wouldn't take long to pull an assault force together." Morrell spoke with the assurance of a veteran field commander. "Don't know how hard the Confederates would fight back-hard as they can, I bet. Now that they've used one bomb, how long do they need to build another one?"

  "That I can't tell you, because I don't know. I wouldn't tell you even if I did, but I don't," Abell said. "Days? Weeks? Months? Twenty minutes? I just have no idea."

  "All right," Morrell said. The General Staff officer was liable to lie about something like that, but Morrell didn't think he was, not this time. He went on, "This would have been a lot worse if they'd brought it here by the government buildings instead of blowing it up across the river."

  "I don't think they could have-it wouldn't have been easy, anyhow," Abell said. "We search autos and trucks before we let them in here. Auto bombs are bad enough, but put a couple of tons of high explosive in a truck…" He didn't finish, or need to. "One of those was plenty to make us clamp down."

  "Good for you, then. You just saved the President and Congress and us. I mean, I hope you did." Morrell told him about the black rain. "Exactly how dangerous is that stuff, anyway?"

  "We'll all find out. I don't know the details. I'm not sure anybody does." Abell looked down at his own soft, immaculately tended hands. "I do believe you were wise to wash off as much as you could. It's like X-rays: you want to keep the exposure to a minimum."

  Morrell looked at his own hands and at his uniform, which still bore the marks of those unnatural drops. Were there little X-ray machines in them? Something like that, he supposed. Maybe there were more in the dust in the air. "We sure never learned any of this stuff at West Point," he said.

  "Who knew back then?" John Abell said. "Nobody, that's who. Half of what we learned just went obsolete."

  "More than half," Morrell said. "New rules from now on."

  "If we live long enough," Abell said.

  "Yeah. If." Morrell looked at his splotched uniform again. "I think the new Rule Number One is, Don't get in a war with anybody who's got this damn bomb."

  "A little too late for that now," the General Staff officer pointed out.

  "Don't remind me," Morrell said.

  I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth."

  This wasn't the familiar studio in Richmond, from which Jake Featherston had bellowed defiance at the world since the days when he was a discredited rabble-rouser at the head of a withering Freedom Party. He had no idea whether that wireless studio still stood. He would have bet against it. Richmond had fallen, but the Confederates put up a hell of a fight before they finally pulled out.

  Portsmouth, Virginia, then. It wasn't where Featherston wanted to be-he'd always wanted to broadcast in triumph from Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. And I will yet, goddammit, he thought savagely. But Portsmouth would have to do for now. The station had a strong signal, and somehow or other Saul Goldman had patched together a web to send Jake's words all over the CSA-and up into Yankeeland, too. If Saul wasn't a wizard, he'd do till a real one showed up.

  The speech. "Truth is, we just showed the damnyankees what we can do. Just like the Kaiser-one bomb, and boom! A city's gone. Philadelphia will never be the same." He didn't exactly say the uranium bomb (no, from the reports he got from FitzBelmont, it was really a jovium bomb, whatever the hell jovium was) had blown up all of Philly. If his Confederate listeners wanted to think he'd said that, though, he wouldn't shed a tear.

  "Maybe St. Louis the next time. Maybe Indianapolis or Chicago. Maybe New York City or Boston. Maybe Denver or San Francisco. Who knows? But one bomb, and boom! No more city, whatever it is."

  He didn't say when the next C.S. jovium bomb would go off. He had excellent reason for not saying anything about that: he had no idea. Henderson FitzBelmont didn't even want to guess. U.S. bombers were hitting Lexington harder than ever. Some of the bombs had armor-piercing noses, too, so they dug deep before going off. They were causing trouble.

  But the CSA got in the first lick anyway!

  "The damnyankees reckoned they had us down for the count," Jake gloated. "They forgot about how much we love…freedom! They'll never lick us, not while we can still load our guns and fire back. And we can."

  As if on cue, cannon boomed in the distance. The studio insulation couldn't swallow all of that noise. Some were antiaircraft guns banging away at the U.S. bombers that constantly pounded the whole Hampton Roads area. And others were the big guns from the few surviving Confederate warships, now turned against land targets rather than enemy cruisers and destroyers. The damnyankees were pushing toward Portsmouth and Norfolk by land. Anything that could slow them down, the Confederates were using.

  Since some of that artillery noise was going out over the air, Featherston decided to make the most of it. "You hear that,
people?" he said. "That noise shows we are still in the fight, and we'll never quit. They say our country doesn't have a right to live. I say they don't have a right to kill it. They won't, either. If you don't believe me, ask what's left of Philadelphia."

  He stepped away from the mike. Behind the glass wall that took up one side of the studio, the engineer gave him a thumbs-up. This wasn't the fellow he'd worked with for so long in Richmond, but some stranger. Still, Jake thought he'd given a good speech, too. Nice to find out other folks could tell.

  "Well done, Mr. President," Saul Goldman said when Jake stepped out into the corridor. "What a speech can do, that one did."

  "Yeah." Featherston wished the Director of Communications hadn't put it like that. What a speech could do…A speech might make soldiers fight a little longer. It might make factory hands work a little harder. All that would help…some.

  No speech in the world, though, could take back Kentucky or Tennessee. No speech in the world could take back Atlanta or Savannah, or unsever the divided body of the Confederacy. No speech could take back the rocket works in Huntsville, and no speech could keep Birmingham from falling any day now.

  No speech, not to put too fine a point on it, could keep the Confederate States of America from being really and truly screwed. "Dammit," Featherston said, "I didn't reckon things'd end up like this."

  "Who would have, sir?" Goldman was loyal. Not only that, he didn't aspire to the top spot himself, maybe because he knew damn well no Confederate general or Party bigwig would take orders from a potbellied little Hebe. The combination-and his skill at what he did-made him invaluable.

  They also meant Jake could talk more freely to him than to anyone else except perhaps Lulu. "No, this ain't how things were supposed to work," the President repeated. "Swear to God, Saul, if the Yankees lick us, it's on account of we don't deserve to win, you know what I mean?"

  "What can we do? We have to win," Goldman said.

  Featherston nodded. He had the same attitude himself. "We'll keep fighting till we can't fight any more, that's what. And we won't surrender, not ever," he said. "If we ever stop fighting, it'll only be on account of we got nobody left to fight with, by God."

  The Director of Communications nodded. "You've always been very determined. I knew it right from the first time you started broadcasting on the wireless." He shook his head in wry wonder. "That's more than twenty years ago now."

  "Sure as hell is," Jake said. You could see those years in Goldman's gray hair, in how little of it he had left, in his waistline and double chin. On the outside, time had dogged Featherston less harshly. He had lines on his face that hadn't been there then, and his hairline had retreated at the temples, too. But he remained whipcord lean; hate burned too hot in him to let him settle down and get fat. "And you know what?" he went on. "Even if the war turns out rotten, I've had a good life. I've done most of the things I always aimed to do. How many men can say that, when you get right down to it?"

  "Not many," Goldman agreed.

  "Damn right." Featherston paused to light a cigarette. He didn't like to smoke just before he went on the air; his voice was raspy enough anyway. "The folks who live down here after this war is over, whoever the hell they turn out to be, they won't have to worry about nigger trouble ever again, no matter what. And that's thanks to me, goddammit." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest.

  "Yes, Mr. President."

  But Goldman didn't sound happy. Jake had artilleryman's ear, and didn't hear so well as he had once upon a time. While he might miss words, though, he was still dead keen for tone. "What's eating you, Saul?" he asked.

  "I guess it's the way you put it, sir," the Director of Communications said slowly. "I can see the Tsar talking about Jews like that, or the Ottoman Sultan talking about Armenians."

  When nobody flabbled much about the way the Sultan got rid of his Armenians, that had encouraged Jake to plan the same for the blacks in the CSA. He'd said as much in Over Open Sights, too. Because he liked Goldman, he was willing to believe the other man had just forgotten. "The Tsar's a damn fool, even if he is on the same side as us," he said. "Jews are white men, dammit. And so are Armenians…I reckon. Can't talk about those folks the same way you do about niggers. Biggest mistake folks here ever made was shipping niggers over from Africa. Nobody ever tried to fix it…till me. And I damn well did."

  Saul Goldman still didn't look convinced. Maybe his being Jewish was finally causing problems after all. His people had been persecuted unjustly. That might make it hard for him to see that Negroes really deserved what the Freedom Party was giving them. If he was getting pangs of conscience now, he'd sure taken his own sweet time doing it. Trains had been carrying blacks off to the camps since before the war started, and Saul's propaganda helped justify it to the Confederate people and to the world.

  "C'mon outside," Jake told him. "Maybe you need some fresh air. It'll help clear your head."

  "Maybe." Goldman didn't argue. Like anyone who bumped up against Jake Featherston, he'd soon come to realize arguing with him didn't do a damn bit of good.

  It was a fine spring day. The savage heat and humidity that would close down soon hadn't yet descended on Portsmouth like a smothering blanket. A newly arrived hummingbird, ruby throat glittering, sucked nectar from a honeysuckle bush. The smell of growing things filled the air.

  But so did nastier odors: the stench of death and the slightly less noxious stink of spilled fuel oil. Yankee bombers had been punishing Hampton Roads ever since the war began. They had reason to, damn them; this was the most important Confederate naval installation on the Atlantic coast.

  As in Richmond, few buildings had survived undamaged. Not many warships were fit to put to sea from here, either. Salvage crews were clearing a sunken cruiser and destroyer from the channel. That steel would find another use…if the Confederacy lasted long enough.

  It will, dammit, Featherston thought, angry at himself for doubting. The sun sparkled off the waves-and off the thin, iridescent layer of fuel oil floating atop them. A moored cruiser, laid up with engine trouble and bomb damage, let go with a salvo of eight-inch shells. They'd come down on the damnyankees' heads soon enough.

  A few U.S. airplanes buzzed over Hampton Roads. Jake took that for granted nowadays. C.S. air power did what it could, but it couldn't do enough to hold the enemy at arm's length any more, not even above Virginia. By the sound of the engines, most of the engines were above Newport News, on the north side of the mouth of the James. Antiaircraft guns flung shells at them, but the bursts were too low to bring them down.

  Jake pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket and wrote, We need stronger AA. The Confederate States needed lots of things right now. He had no idea when engineers could get around to designing a larger-caliber antiaircraft gun, let alone manufacture one, but it was on the list.

  He looked down to put the notebook back in his pocket. That spared his eyes when a new sun sprang into being above Newport News, six or eight miles away from where he was standing. He suddenly had two shadows, the new one far blacker than the old. Slowly, the new shadow started to fade.

  Saul Goldman had his hands clapped over his face-maybe he'd been looking the wrong way. Jake stared north in open-mouthed awe, even when a quick, fierce, hot blast of wind almost knocked him ass over teakettle. That toadstool cloud rising high into the sky was the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen, but it had a strange and dreadful beauty of its own.

  Goldman took his hands away. He blinked. Tears ran down his face. "I can see you-sort of," he said. "Is…this what we did to Philadelphia?"

  "Yeah." Jake's voice was soft and dreamy, almost as if he'd just had a woman. He might not have been able to stop the damnyankees from making their bomb, but in spite of everything he'd finished ahead of them. Both sides had staggered over the finish line. Still, the CSA won first prize.

  "Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'may rabo…" Saul went on in a language Jake didn't know.

  The President of the CSA hardly noticed
. He'd struck first, and he'd struck at the enemy capital. Newport News? He snapped his fingers. Who cared?

  X

  I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth." The voice coming out of the wireless set and the boundless arrogance it carried were absolutely unmistakable. The President of the CSA went on, "If the Yankees reckoned they'd blow me up when they dropped their fancy bomb, they reckoned wrong, and they went and killed a big old pile of innocent women and babies, the way the murderers always do."

  "Damn!" Flora Blackford turned off the wireless in disgust. Blasting Jake Featherston off the face of the earth was the only way she saw to end this war in a hurry. Blasting Newport News off the face of the earth had its points, but it was only one town among many.

  The lies Featherston could tell! To listen to him, the U.S. uranium bomb was designed solely to slaughter civilians. What about the one his men had touched off right across the Schuylkill from downtown Philadelphia? Well, that one was an attack against the U.S. government and military. It was if you believed Featherston, anyhow. Of course, if you believed Featherston there you also likely believed him when he said ridding his country of Negroes was a good idea, when he said the USA had forced him into war, and when he said any number of other inflammatory and improbable things.

  If Jake Featherston said he believed in God, it would be the best argument Flora could think of for either atheism or worshipping Satan, depending. She nodded to herself and wrote that down on a notepad. It would make a good line in a speech.

  One thing Featherston had said even before the U.S. uranium bomb went off did seem to be true, worse luck: the United States hadn't caught the Confederate raiders who'd brought the bomb north. Flora supposed those raiders wore U.S. uniforms and could sound as if they came from the USA. All the same, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have to look into the Army's failure to hunt them down.

  But the Joint Committee had something else on the agenda this morning. They were going across the Schuylkill for a firsthand look at what the explosion of a uranium bomb was really like.