In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Most unwillingly, the U.S. soldier obeyed. "Shit," he muttered. "I went through the last year and a half of the war. I got a Purple Heart. And I'm more scared of your damn shot than I was of the screaming meemies."

  He wasn't the first man to say something like that. With bullets and shells and rockets, you could always think they'd miss. When somebody aimed a hypodermic at your bare ass, he'd damn well connect.

  And O'Doull did. The PFC let out a yip as he pressed home the needle and pressed in the plunger. "You get one on the other side three days from now. If you don't show up, you're in a lot more trouble than you are for coming down venereal. You got that?"

  "Yes, sir," the kid said miserably. "Can I go now, sir?"

  He really did want to escape if he was that eager to return to the clutches of his regular superiors. O'Doull couldn't do anything but stick him, but they could-and would-give him hell. Still, he wasn't quite finished here. "Not yet, son. You need to tell me the name of the woman you got it from, where she lives, and the names of any others you've screwed since. We don't want 'em passing it along to any of your buddies, you know."

  "Oh, hell-uh, sir. Do I gotta?"

  "You sure do. VD puts a man out of action just as much as a bullet in the leg does. So…who was she? And were there any others?"

  "Damn, damn, damn," the PFC said. "There's just the one, anyway. Her name is Betsy, and she lives a couple of miles from here, on a farm outside of Montevallo."

  Montevallo was a pissant little town south of Birmingham. It boasted a small college for women; O'Doull had wondered whether the soldier got his disease from a student with liberal notions. Evidently not. Montevallo also boasted a large oak called the Hangman's Tree, which had come through the war undamaged. The doctor wondered whether the tree and the college were related. The PFC wouldn't know about that, though.

  "You have a last name for Miss Betsy?" O'Doull asked. The soldier shook his head. O'Doull sighed. "One of the things you'll do between now and when I stick your ass again is take some men and get her and bring her back here so we can treat her, too. Got that?"

  "Yes, sir." It was hardly more than a whisper.

  "You'd better have it. And now you can go," O'Doull said. The PFC slunk away. O'Doull sighed. "Boy, I enjoyed that."

  "I bet," Sergeant Lord said. "Still, it beats the crap out of trying to take out a guy's spleen, doesn't it?"

  "Well, yeah," O'Doull admitted. "But damn, we've had a lot of venereals since the shooting stopped." He sighed one more time. "Don't know why I'm so surprised. The guys can really go looking for pussy now, and the Confederate women know they've lost, so they'd better be nice to our troops. But I keep thinking about Donofrio, the medic you replaced. VD isn't the only thing that can happen to you."

  "You told me about that before," Lord said, so politely that O'Doull knew he'd told him at least once too often. The medic went on, "I'm not going to make a fuss about any silly bitch down here."

  "Well, good," O'Doull said, and wondered if it was. Would Goodson Lord make a fuss about a silly boy instead? O'Doull hoped not. If the sergeant was queer, he seemed to be discreet about it. As long as he stayed that way, well, what the hell?

  Betsy came in the next day, cussing out the soldiers who brought her in a command car. She was about eighteen, with a barmaid's prettiness that wouldn't last and a barmaid's ample flesh that would turn to lard before she hit thirty. "What do you mean, I got some kind of disease?" she shouted at O'Doull.

  "Sorry, miss," he said. "Private, uh, Eubanks"-he had to remember the soldier's name-"says you left him a little present. We can cure you with a couple of shots."

  "I bet he didn't catch it from me. I bet the dirty son of a bitch got it somewhere else and gave it to me!" she screeched.

  From the freshness of the U.S. soldier's chancre, O'Doull doubted that. Out loud, he said, "Well, you may be right," which was one of the useful phrases that weren't liable to land you in much trouble. It didn't matter one way or the other, anyhow. "I'm going to need to examine you, maybe draw some blood for a test, and give you a shot, just in case."

  "What do you mean, examine me? Examine me there?" Betsy shook her head, which made blond curls flip back and forth on either side of her face. She would have seemed more alluring-to O'Doull, anyway-if she'd bathed any time lately. "You ain't gonna look up my works, pal, and that's flat, not when I never set eyes on you till just now. What kind of girl d'you reckon I am?"

  Had O'Doull told the truth there, he would have had to listen to more screeching. "This is a medical necessity," he said. "I'm a doctor. I'm also a married man, in case you're wondering."

  Betsy tossed her head in splendid scorn. "Like that makes a difference! I know you're just a dumb damnyankee, but I didn't think even damnyankees were that dumb."

  O'Doull sighed. It didn't make any difference; he'd seen as much plenty of times in Riviиre-du-Loup. He wished he were back there now. Better-much better! — sweet Nicole than this blowsy, foul-mouthed gal. "Get up on the table, please," he said. "No stirrups, I'm afraid. It wasn't made with that in mind."

  "Stirrups? What the hell are you talkin' about?" Betsy said. "And I done told you I don't want to get up there."

  O'Doull's patience blew out. "Your other choice is the stockade," he snapped. "Quit fooling around and wasting my time."

  "Oh, all right, goddammit, if I gotta." Betsy climbed onto the table and divested herself of her drawers. O'Doull put on rubber gloves. He felt as if he needed them more here than with most of the ordinary war wounds he'd treated. "Having fun?" she asked him as he got to work.

  "In a word, no," he answered, so coldly that she not only shut up with a snap but gave him a fierce glare, which he ignored. He went on, "You've got it, all right. You ought to thank your boyfriend for getting you over here."

  "Not likely!" she said, and added some verbal hot sauce to the comment.

  "However you please," O'Doull told her. "Roll over onto your stomach so I can give you your first shot." Goodson Lord ceremoniously handed him a syringe.

  "Will it hurt?" she asked.

  "A little." O'Doull jabbed the needle home. She yipped. He didn't care. "You need to come back in three days for your second injection," he told her.

  "What happens if I don't?" Betsy sure hadn't said no to PFC Eubanks-or, odds were, to a lot of guys before him-but she was cooperating with O'Doull as little as she could.

  "Two things," O'Doull said. "We come and get you, and we tell your folks and everybody in Montevallo how come we came and got you."

  "You wouldn't do that!"

  "When it comes to getting rid of VD, we'll do whatever it takes. Dammit, this is for your own good."

  "Then how come it hurts?" Betsy whined.

  "If we didn't treat you, you'd hurt more down the line," O'Doull said. Actually, a lot of syphilis patients didn't have symptoms for years after the primary lesions went away. Some never did. But syphilis was also the great pretender; a lot of ills that seemed to be other things really went back to the spirochete that caused it. If you could get rid of the germ, you needed to.

  "Might as well get used to it, Doc," Sergeant Lord advised. "This is what we'll see from here on out-guys with drippy faucets, guys in auto crashes, every once in a while a guy who steps on a mine or something."

  "Could be worse," O'Doull said. "Long as we don't start having lots of guys who guerrillas shot, I won't kick."

  "Amen to that," the medic said.

  "Can I go now?" Betsy asked, much as her boyfriend in green-gray had.

  "Yes, you can go," O'Doull answered. "If you don't come back for your next shot, remember, we'll make you sorry you didn't."

  "I won't forget," she said sullenly. "My pa, he'll kill me if he finds out." By the way she scurried away from the aid tent, she meant that literally.

  "Wonder how many round-heeled broads we'll give the needle to," Lord said.

  "Quite a few, I bet," O'Doull said. "And if it's going to be that kind of practice, you can handle it
as well as I can." He was thinking about home again. He wasn't a career soldier; he had a life away from the Army. He had it, and he wanted to go back to it.

  Goodson Lord gave him a shrewd look. "Won't be too long before they start figuring out how to turn people loose, I bet. You paid your dues and then some."

  "Yeah." O'Doull nodded. And once I get back into the Republic of Quebec, they'll never pry me out again. There had been times when his practice in Riviиre-du-Loup bored him. He hadn't been bored the past three years. Scared out of his mind? Astonished? Appalled? All of those, and often, but never bored. He was amazed at how wonderful ennui seemed.

  Abner Dowling stared at Lexington, Virginia, with nothing less than amazement. He turned to his adjutant and said, "Damned if it doesn't look like they used a superbomb on this place."

  Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli nodded. "Yes, sir. The fun we had getting here should have given us a hint, I suppose."

  "Fun? Heh. That's one word for it, I guess," Dowling said. As the crow flew, Lexington was only about 110 miles from Richmond. Dowling wished he'd flown from the capital-the former capital? — of the CSA. He'd gone by command car instead, and the roads were disastrously bad…which said nothing about the wrecked bridges and the places where mines were still being cleared. What might have been a two-and-a-half-hour drive ended up taking a day and a half.

  Something moved in the rubble. At first he thought it was a stray dog. Then he realized what it really was: a possum. It looked like a cat-sized rat that had got its nose stuck in a pencil sharpener. The long, bare pinkish tail seemed vaguely obscene. Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli was looking in the same direction. "If that's not the ugliest thing God ever made, damned if I know what is," he said.

  "Now that Jake Featherston's dead, I agree with you," Dowling said, which jerked a laugh from the younger man.

  Washington University lay on the north side of town. U.S. soldiers who'd come down from the north right after the surrender were already thick on the ground there. The only way you could tell the university grounds from the rest of Lexington these days was that they'd taken an even heavier pounding from the skies.

  It didn't do enough, dammit, Dowling thought. In spite of everything that came down on their heads, the Confederate physicists managed to put together a superbomb. Abstractly, Dowling admired the achievement. Staying abstract when they'd blown a big chunk of Philadelphia off the map wasn't so easy, though.

  The surviving physicists were housed in tents surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun nests. A U.S. colonel named Benjamin Frankheimer was in charge of them. Before he let Dowling in to talk with the prisoners, he checked with the War Department.

  "Weren't you told to expect me?" Dowling asked.

  "Yes, sir," Frankheimer replied. "But we haven't met, and I wanted to make sure they confirmed that a man of your description went with your name."

  "You're…a careful man, Colonel."

  "Taking care of people who know this kind of stuff, I need to be, sir." Frankheimer scratched his nose. It was much the most prominent feature on his face: he was little and skinny and looked very, very Jewish. Dowling guessed he'd got this job because he was a scientist himself…till he noticed the fruit salad on the colonel's chest. It showed he'd won a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star with oak-leaf cluster, and a Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster. Frankheimer had had himself a busy war.

  "Well?" Dowling said. "Am I who I say I am?"

  "Oh, yes, sir. No doubt about it," Frankheimer answered. "You're free to go in and do whatever you need to do-now."

  "Thanks." Dowling sounded less sarcastic than he might have. The men inside this heavily guarded compound weren't just dynamite-they were a hell of a lot more explosive than that, and they'd proved it.

  He wasn't astonished when he and Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli had to surrender their sidearms before going in, either. He didn't think of physicists as tough guys, but you never knew. If the fellows with the white lab coats and the slide rules didn't have the chance to grab any weapons, they wouldn't be tempted.

  The first man he saw inside the compound sure didn't look like a tough guy. The fellow was about fifty, on the skinny side, and walked with a limp and a cane. "Can you tell me where Professor FitzBelmont is?" Dowling called to him.

  "That tent there." The middle-aged man pointed.

  "Thanks." Dowling ducked inside.

  He recognized FitzBelmont right away; the photos he'd studied were good likenesses. Tall, tweedy, bespectacled: he looked like a physicist, all right. He gave Dowling a grudging nod. "Pleased to meet you," he said, and then, "I've already met a lot of U.S. officers"-so he probably wasn't very pleased.

  "Come outside with me, Professor," Dowling said. "We've got some talking to do."

  "If you like," FitzBelmont said. "But anything you say to me, my colleagues can also hear. What are you going to do with us, anyway?"

  "Well, that's one of the things I'm here to talk about," Dowling answered. "More than a few people in Philadelphia who want to string you up by the thumbs, paint you with gasoline, and light a match. Then there are the ones who think that's too good for you."

  Some of the scientists and technicians in there with FitzBelmont flinched. He didn't. "I don't understand why," he said. "We were serving our country in the same way that your scientists were serving the United States. If your service is permitted, even heroic, why shouldn't ours be, as well?"

  He had a scientist's detachment-or maybe he was just a natural-born cold fish. "There is a difference, Professor," Dowling said.

  "I fail to see it," Henderson FitzBelmont said.

  "Why am I not surprised?" Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli murmured.

  "Hush," Dowling said, and then, to FitzBelmont, "It's simple. I'll spell it out for you. We won. You lost. There. Is that plain enough?"

  "To the victors go the spoils?" FitzBelmont said. "Is that what this war was about?"

  "That's part of it. If you don't believe me, ask Jake Featherston," Dowling answered. FitzBelmont turned red, so maybe at one point or another he had asked the late, unlamented President of the CSA. Dowling continued, "The other part is, now you can't go on murdering your own smokes any more."

  FitzBelmont got redder. "I didn't know anything about that."

  "I ought to kick your scrawny ass for lying, you miserable son of a bitch," Dowling said with weary revulsion. "If I had a dime for every Confederate shithead who told me the same thing, I'd be too rich to wear this uniform-you'd best believe I would. Where the hell did you think all the coons in fucking Lexington disappeared to? You think somebody swept 'em under the goddamn rug?"

  "I never even considered the issue," Professor FitzBelmont said.

  Dowling almost did haul off and belt him. But the way FitzBelmont said it gave him pause. Unlike most of his countrymen, the physicist might have been telling the truth. From the reports the USA had on FitzBelmont, he had trouble noticing anything bigger than an atomic nucleus.

  "How many millions did they do in, Angelo?" Dowling asked.

  "Best guess right now is about eight million, sir," his adjutant replied. "But that could be off a million either way, easy."

  "And you never considered the issue?" Dowling tried to wither Henderson FitzBelmont with his scorn.

  "I'm afraid not," FitzBelmont said, unwithered. "We had no Negroes at all involved in the project. Even our cooks and janitors were whites or Mexicans. Negroes were deemed to be security risks, and so we did not see them. It's as simple as that, I'm afraid."

  The Confederates had good reason to think Negroes might be security risks. Blacks had brought the USA lots of good intelligence data. Dowling didn't know how much in the way of physics a cook or janitor could understand. Understand it or not, anybody could steal papers, though. Which reminded him…

  "Under the terms of the surrender, you're supposed to keep all your paperwork intact. You've done that?"

  "What survives of it, yes, certainly."

  "What's that me
an?" Dowling demanded.

  "You ought to know," Professor FitzBelmont said. "Your airplanes have been bombing Lexington for the past year. Do you think you didn't do any damage? You'd better think again."

  "Huh," Dowling said. The Confederate physicist had a better excuse than The dog ate my homework. He and his pals could have destroyed anything, and then blamed it on U.S. bombers. Dowling didn't know what he could do about it, either.

  "It is possible for you to expect too much of us, you know," FitzBelmont said.

  "Maybe. I'm not the expert," Dowling agreed. "But you will be interrogated by people who are experts-I promise you that. Even if your paperwork is gone, they'll figure out what you were up to. And yes, you're obliged to cooperate with them."

  "If we don't?" the physicist asked.

  Dowling made hand-washing motions. "God help you, in that case. You can bet your bottom dollar nobody else will."

  "You have an unpleasant way of making your point," Professor FitzBelmont said.

  "Thank you," Dowling answered, which stopped FitzBelmont in his tracks.

  After a moment, the physicist asked, "When will they let us go?"

  "Beats me," Dowling answered cheerfully. "Suppose you'd won. When would you have let our superbomb people go? Ever?"

  "I…don't know," the Confederate scientist said slowly. That, at least, struck Dowling as basically truthful. Henderson FitzBelmont went on, "Surely you understand that we can't be dangerous to the United States without facilities like the ones we had here. You can't make a superbomb with a blackboard and chalk."

  "I don't know anything about that. It's not my call to make, anyhow," Dowling said. "My job is to make sure you're here, to make sure you're well protected, and to put you at the disposal of our scientists when they get around to needing you. I'm taking care of that right now."

  "How about making sure we're well treated?" FitzBelmont asked.

  "Believe me, Professor, you are," Dowling said. "You have shelter. You have enough to eat. You have a doctor and a dentist when you need one. Compared to the average white man in the CSA these days, you're in hog heaven. Compared to the average Negro in the CSA…Hell, you're alive. That puts you ahead of the game right there."