Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  The first raindrops started kicking up puffs of dust from the red dirt just as Moss ducked into his barracks. The inevitable nonstop card game paused for a moment as people made sure he was someone to be trusted. Then the players got back to the serious business at hand: “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise you five clams.”

  More rain fell, drumming on the roof. That roof would start leaking any minute. Men who weren’t playing cards set buckets and pots where they’d do the most good. Lightning flashed. God’s artillery followed close on its heels.

  “Well, this is fun,” somebody said. The crack got a laugh, but a laugh distinctly nervous around the edges.

  Having grown up in Chicago and spent a lot of time in Ontario, Moss had seen his share of several different flavors of bad weather. What Georgia got, though, was different from anything he was used to. It was more… energetic was the first word that came to mind, and it fit pretty well.

  Rain came down as if Noah were somewhere just over the next rise. Moss didn’t know about forty days and forty nights, but the next forty minutes marked as ferocious a cloudburst as he’d ever imagined. Lightning crackled again and again, a couple of times close enough to make all his hair stand on end. The thunder that followed sounded like a dress rehearsal for the end of the world.

  “Liable to be tornadoes on the edge of a storm like this,” a POW observed.

  “We’re safe, then. We’re not on the edge. We’re in the goddamn middle,” another prisoner said.

  “Besides, who’d notice anything as small as a tornado in the middle of this?” a would-be wit added. He got a laugh, but all he did was prove he didn’t know the first thing about tornadoes, as several POWs from the Midwest loudly explained to him. Moss agreed, even if he didn’t fuss and fume about it. Wherever tornadoes went, they made themselves noticed.

  Colonel Summers looked less and less happy with each minute the downpour went on. Moss had a pretty good notion why, too. He sidled up to the senior officer and murmured, “How well is the tunnel shored up?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” was all Monty Summers said. Moss nodded. If something went wrong, there was damn-all he or any other prisoner could do about it right this minute.

  Before too long, he stopped worrying about the tunnel. He started worrying about whether they would have to be rescued by rowboat instead. That seemed a much more immediate problem. He also wondered whether the Confederates had any rowboats handy. Had they anticipated storms this big?

  Looking out the windows helped very little. Except when lightning tore across the sky, it was almost night-dark. And what the lightning illuminated was mostly a bumper crop of raindrops.

  But after something less than an hour, the storm eased. The thunderheads glided off to the east with ponderous dignity. The subtropical sun of Georgia summer came out again. The ground started to steam-not just the puddles and ponds the rain had left behind but the ground itself.

  Colonel Summers strode to the north-facing window. The starch came out of his shoulders; he might have aged ten years in ten seconds. “There’s a hole in the ground not far from the deadline inside the fence,” he said, his tone that of a man in the room with a deathbed. And so he might have been, for that hole meant the passing of many men’s hopes.

  No one had ever accused the Confederate guards of brilliance. If they’d had any brains at all, they would have been at the front doing something more useful for their country than this. But they didn’t have to be Sir Isaac Newton to figure out that holes in the ground, especially long, straight ones like this, didn’t happen by themselves.

  One of the guards who’d squelched through the mud to the subsidence sighted along it as if down the barrel of a rifle. What he saw when he did was the barracks where Moss stood waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  He didn’t have to wait long. The Confederates advanced on the building. One of them fell on his can in the slick red mud. Normally, the U.S. captives would have laughed and jeered at his clumsiness. No one made a peep now. The guards were unlikely to find much funny about an escape attempt, especially one they hadn’t noticed till the storm betrayed it.

  “Y’all come out right now!” one of them shouted. “Y’all come out or else.”

  The prisoners did come out; Moss, for one, didn’t think the guards were kidding about that or else. Crashing sounds from inside the barracks declared that the Confederates were taking the place apart, looking for where the tunnel started. Along with everybody else in green-gray, Moss stood glumly in the mud, waiting for them to find it.

  And they did. He’d known they would. They were stupid, but not stupid enough to miss it. Their leader came out with his face even hotter than the weather. “You sons of bitches!” he screamed. “How dare you try and escape from this here prison? How dare you?”

  “We have the right.” Moss spoke up, the lawyer in him touched by that peculiar brainless fury. “The Geneva Convention says so.”

  That rocked the Confederate guard officer back on his heels. But he rallied, barking, “It also says I got the right to punish the bastards who try an’ break out. ’Fess up, y’all. Who worked on that there tunnel? Rest of you’ll have an easier time if we can punish the real criminals.”

  Every single U.S. prisoner raised his hand at the same time. Most of them hadn’t had anything to do with the tunnel. Some, the new fish, hadn’t even known it was there. They raised their hands anyway, without hesitation. Moss was proud of them.

  What the guard officer felt was something else again. “All right. All right,” he said heavily, and snorted like a boar hog. “Y’all reckon you’re so goddamn smart. Well, you’ll all catch it together, then, and see how you like that.” He stormed away. Moss hoped he would take a pratfall in the mud, but no such luck. The rain was on the Confederate side every which way today.

  Dr. Leonard O’Doull was about to get on a train that would take him back from Virginia to Ohio (or perhaps, given the way things were going, only to western Pennsylvania) when a clerk bounced out of a command car with a canvas sack slung over his shoulder. “Hang on, Doc!” he called. “I got mail for youse guys.”

  Youse guys was as far outside the bounds of ordinary English as the Confederate y’all. A lot of languages had separate forms for second-person singular and plural. English didn’t, but kept trying to invent them. The thought flashed through O’Doull’s mind and flew away in a split second, replaced by simple joy. “Give it here,” he told the clerk. “I thought it would be weeks catching up with us.”

  Red Crosses adorned the tops of the cars and the sides of the locomotive. Locomotive and cars alike were painted white. With luck, that would keep the Confederates from dropping bombs on the train or machine-gunning it from the air. There had been a few horrible incidents, but only a few. There had also been a few south of the Mason-Dixon line. O’Doull wondered if Jake Featherston’s propaganda machine had manufactured those, but wouldn’t have been surprised if they proved real. War was full of things like that.

  He stopped worrying about the war when he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter with a stamp from the Republic of Quebec. Sorting through the pile, he found several of those, and one from his brother-in-law, Georges Galtier. Seeing that one made him smile in a different way. Among his wife’s relatives, Georges was the zany, the cuckoo, the odd man out-sometimes very odd indeed.

  “Gotta go, Doc. Good luck to you.” Without waiting for a reply, the Army mail clerk hopped back into the command car and drove away.

  O’Doull carried the stack of envelopes and magazines and newspapers and small packages up into the train. “Mail call!” he shouted, and for the next couple of minutes he was the most popular guy around.

  Once the mail was all doled out, that popularity naturally faded. Only Granville McDougald hung around. He looked glum. To show why, he held up an envelope. It had a big handstamp on it: RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESSEE DECEASED.

  “I’m sorry, Granny,” O’Doull said. “Who is it?”

 
“Fellow I’ve known since the Great War. He lost a hand then, so they wouldn’t let him stay in the Army, not even as a medic. Dammit, Don was a good guy-one of the best. Now I’ve got to see if I can come up with his sister’s address, find out what happened to him.”

  The letter had gone to Trenton, New Jersey. Confederate bombers certainly reached that far. But other things could happen to a middle-aged man, too. As a middle-aged man himself, O’Doull knew that much too well. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” he repeated. “Whatever it was, I hope it was quick.”

  “Yeah. Amen,” McDougald said. They’d both seen too many men who lingered in agony and would not let go of life, even if some of them wanted to. A fast end-dead before he knew what hit him-was far from the smallest mercy the world had to offer, and the world didn’t offer it often enough.

  “Here.” O’Doull reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of brandy. “Have a knock of this. Medicinal, you know.”

  “Sure. Thanks, Doc. You’re a medical genius.” McDougald took the bottle and raised it in salute. “Here’s to you, Don.” He took one long swig, then handed it back. O’Doull put it away and closed the bag.

  As an officer, O’Doull had a Pullman berth. He took his letters there to read them in curtained-off privacy. He opened the one from Georges first. It was the usual nonsense from his brother-in-law: the usual nonsense with the usual ironic sting. Aren’t you glad I am not an English-speaking Canadian? Georges wrote-in English, not the French that was his usual language and that he used for almost all of the letter. He went on in English for one more sentence: If I were, you might have to shoot me. After that, he returned to his own tongue and the usual doings in and around Riviere-du-Loup.

  O’Doull wondered whether Georges had had someone else compose that English for him. He would have studied the language in school before the Great War, when Quebec was still part of Canada, but when would he have needed it since? Of course, being Georges, he might have remembered it just so he could make a sarcastic nuisance of himself thirty years later. The uprising in anglophone Canada worried O’Doull, too, and not because he might be called on to pick up a rifle himself.

  He went through his wife’s letters one by one, starting with the earliest. He got more gossip from Riviere-du-Loup, and a different view of a small scandal involving a greengrocer and the butcher’s wife. Georges had treated the whole thing as a joke. To Nicole, the butcher was a brute and his wife looking for happiness wherever she could find it. O’Doull himself knew all the people involved, but not well. He wouldn’t have cared to judge where, if anywhere, the rights and wrongs lay.

  Nicole didn’t talk about the Canadian uprising till her next to last letter. Then she wrote, There is a bill in the House of Deputies to extend military service. I am lighting candles and praying it does not pass.

  “So am I, sweetheart,” O’Doull muttered, and then, “Moi aussi.” He’d seen news about that bill, too. The United States were doing everything they could to get the Republic of Quebec to contribute more men to quelling the revolt north of the forty-ninth parallel. That way, the United States wouldn’t have to pull so many of their own men off the fighting front against the Confederates, or even out of rebellion-wracked Utah.

  But if the Republic of Quebec did contribute more soldiers, one of them was much too likely to be a young man named Lucien O’Doull. One of the great advantages of living in Quebec was that the country was technically neutral, even if it inclined toward the USA. Leonard O’Doull hadn’t had to worry about his boy’s becoming a soldier. He hadn’t had to-but now he did.

  Nicole, naturally, kept a close eye on the bill’s progress. Her latest letter reported that it had come out of committee. I do not know anyone who favors this bill, not a single soul, she wrote bitterly. It moves forward anyway. It moves forward because the politicians are afraid of what the United States will do to us if it fails.

  She was bound to be right about that. Without the United States, there wouldn’t have been a Republic of Quebec. The Republic’s economy had very strong ties to the USA, as strong as the Americans could make them. If Quebec made the United States unhappy, the USA could make the Republic unhappier.

  O’Doull swore under his breath. He understood both sides, but, because of Lucien, hoped the Republic’s politicians would show some backbone. All politics is personal, he thought.

  After getting everything off her chest, his wife went back to family chatter and the nine-days’ wonders of Riviere-du-Loup. It was as if she didn’t want to look at what she’d written about the bill, either. Only one more sentence at the end of the letter betrayed her worry: I wish you were home.

  “I wish I was home, too, dammit,” O’Doull muttered. But he damn well wasn’t, and whose fault was that? No one’s but his own. The United States were his country, and he’d volunteered to help them in a way that best matched his skills and talents. And so here he was in a white-painted train, rumbling along toward more trouble. “Happy day.”

  He wondered how the United States could find more trouble than they already had. With Japan bearing down on the Sandwich Islands, with the Confederates raising hell in Ohio and heading for Pennsylvania, with the Mormons still kicking up their heels in Utah and the Canucks north of the border, that looked as if all the troubles in the world, or at least on the continent, had come home to roost.

  Back before the Great War, people had talked about how encircled the United States were, with the CSA, Canada, Britain, and France all keeping a wary eye on the giant they’d tied down. The country had burst its bounds in the war, and dominated North America for a generation. Now everybody else was trying to get the ropes back on again.

  If Canada broke away from U.S. occupation, if British influence returned to the northern part of the continent, how long could the Republic of Quebec stay independent? That had to be on the minds of the politicians in Quebec City. It was on Leonard O’Doull’s mind, too. But so was his son, and his son counted for infinitely more.

  Engine puffing, iron wheels screeching against the track and throwing up sun-colored sparks, the train stopped. O’Doull opened the curtains in front of the window and looked out. They were, as far as he could tell, in the middle of nowhere. Something had gone wrong up ahead, but he couldn’t make out what.

  The conductor was a Medical Service corporal. O’Doull hoped he made a better corpsman than conductor, because he wasn’t very good at his secondary role. But he did have an answer when the doctor asked him what had happened farther west: “Sabotage.” He seemed to take a certain somber pleasure in the word.

  “ ’Osti!” O’Doull burst out, which made the noncom give him a curious look. O’Doull looked back in plain warning. The other man decided walking down the corridor would be a good idea.

  O’Doull shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the corporal. No, the trouble was just the opposite. As long as Confederate operatives sounded reasonably Yankeelike, they could hide in plain sight till they went off to work mischief in the middle of the night.

  No doubt U.S. operatives were doing the same thing on the other side of the border, and helping C.S. Negroes in their sputtering civil war against Jake Featherston’s government. O’Doull hoped they were, anyhow. But that didn’t do him, or this train, any good at all.

  Three hours later, after a repair crew filled in a crater and laid new track across it, the train got rolling again. By then, the sun was going down in the west and O’Doull was going up in smoke. If he was going to be useful, he wanted to be useful. He couldn’t do a damn thing stuck here on a train track.

  Unlike most trains, this one rolled through the night all lit up. Trains full of soldiers and weapons and raw materials sneaked along, trusting to darkness to hide them from Confederate aircraft. This one showed its true colors, and the enemy left it alone.

  ">There were whispers that the Confederates sometimes used the Red Cross to disguise troop movements. O’Doull hoped that wasn’t so. It would make C.S. raiders want to disregard the sy
mbol when the USA used it, and it would make the United States distrust even legitimate Confederate uses. Things were hard enough as they were. Did they have to-could they-get even worse?

  XI

  Back when Cincinnatus Driver lived in Confederate Covington before the Great War, he hadn’t liked going to the zoo. Animals in cages had reminded him too strongly of the black man’s plight. Then when he moved up to Des Moines after the war, he’d been able to take his kids to the zoo there and enjoy it himself. He’d felt freer there-and, to be fair, Des Moines had a much fancier zoo than Covington’s.

  Now things had come full circle. Here he was, back in Covington. Here he was, back in the CSA. And here he was, caged.

  When the barbed-wire perimeter around the colored quarter went up, a few blacks figured it was just for show, to let colored people know who was boss without really intending to imprison them. Cincinnatus could have told them they were fools. The Freedom Party lied about plenty of things, but not about what it thought of Negroes. Some of the optimists tried to slip between the strands or attacked them with wire cutters, right there where the guards could see them.

  Cincinnatus had known for years what automatic-weapons fire sounded like. Hearing it again saddened him without greatly surprising him. The guards’ callousness afterwards did surprise him. They left the bodies they’d shot where they fell, so the sight and, after a day or two, the stench would intimidate the Negroes inside the perimeter.

  He didn’t talk to Lucullus about the odious and odorous events. For one thing, visiting Lucullus probably put him on some kind of list. The powers that be in Covington already had too many reasons to put him on a list. And, for another, Lucullus remained in a state of shock at being closed off from the outside world. Cincinnatus had never dreamt the barbecue cook could stay downcast for so long, but that seemed to be what was going on.