Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Even half a mile back of the line, they acted a lot more regulation. A soldier in a clean new uniform stared at Armstrong and said, “What are you doing bringing a body back here? Leave him for Graves Registration.”

  “Fuck you, Jack,” Armstrong said without heat. “For one thing, he ain’t dead. For another thing, he’s worth two of Graves Registration and four of you. Point me at the nearest aid station before I kick your worthless ass.”

  Armstrong wasn’t small, but the other man was bigger. Fury wouldn’t have worried him. Armstrong’s complete indifference to consequences did. Maybe he thought Armstrong would just as soon kill him as look at him-and maybe he was right. He said, “There’s a tent behind that pile of bricks. It shields ’em from small-arms fire.”

  “Thanks.” Armstrong headed that way, carrying Cavendish now. The wounded man was a lot lighter than he had been before he got hurt. A corpsman came out before Armstrong got halfway there. “Hey!” he called. “Come give me a hand with this guy.”

  The corpsman trotted toward him. When he got close enough to take a good look at Cavendish, he stopped short, his boots kicking up dust. “Jesus!” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “You should’ve seen him before my sergeant and me patched him up. But he said he wanted to live if he could.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do when a guy says that?”

  “Jesus.” The corpsman looked green, and he’d seen some of the worst things war could do. “Well, I guess we’ve got to try. I’ll help you get him to the tent.”

  “Thank you.” Cavendish’s voice was dreamy and far away. Armstrong had thought he’d long since passed out. The corpsman looked as if he’d just heard a ghost.

  The surgeon in the tent did a double take when he saw Cavendish. Armstrong got out of there before the doc went to work. Watching would have made him sick. That was crazy, but it was true. He went back up to the front line. There, at least, death and mutilation came at random. You didn’t know about them ahead of time. That made them, if not tolerable, at least possible to bear.

  Jefferson Pinkard wondered why the hell the vice president of the Cyclone Chemical Company wasn’t in the Army. Cullen Beauregard-“Call me C.B.”-Slattery couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was obviously healthy, and just as obviously sharp.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “Anything alive, this’ll shift. You don’t need to worry about that at all.”

  “You make it for bugs, though.”

  “That’s right.” Slattery nodded.

  “But it’ll kill rats and mice,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery nodded again. Jeff went on, “And cats and dogs?” Another nod. “And people?”

  “Yes, sir. It will absolutely kill people. That’s why you’ve got to be careful when you use it,” Slattery said. “Matter of fact, the chemical’s the same one some Yankee states use to kill criminals.”

  “Really? Is that a fact?” Jeff said. One more nod from Slattery. He was one of the noddingest people Jeff had ever met. “If you wanted to, you could use it to kill a whole bunch of people, then?”

  “Absolutely. You absolutely could.” The chemical-company official didn’t ask why Pinkard might want to use his product, made to get rid of roaches and other pests, to dispose of large numbers of people instead. What he did say was, “If you use large quantities, you’d be entitled to a bulk discount.”

  “That’s nice. That’s white of you, matter of fact,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery laughed uproariously. He didn’t ask what color the people who might die were. Pretty plainly, he already knew.

  Somewhere in Camp Determination, a work gang of Negroes chanted rhythmically as they carried or dug or did whatever the guards told them to do. Slattery smiled at that, too, the way he might have smiled at a bear playing with a medicine ball in a zoo.

  The shape of his smile decided Jeff. This wasn’t a man who would balk at what needed discussing here. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, then,” Jeff said. “Can your firm design us a facility, I guess you’d call it, that would let us reduce the camp population without leaving the niggers still here any the wiser about what was going on inside?” He’d talked about killing people when it was in the abstract. When it got down to something he might actually do, his own words turned abstract. Reducing population didn’t seem to mean so much.

  “My firm? No, sir. Sorry, but that’s not what we do. We make insecticide,” Slattery answered. Pinkard muttered under his breath; he hadn’t expected a flat refusal. But when the bright young man continued, he discovered he hadn’t got one, either: “But I can put you in touch with some design outfits that will help you along those lines. Just as a guess, I’d say you’d want to call it a delousing station or a bath-house or something like that. Sound reasonable?”

  “Sounds sensible. I was thinking along those lines myself, to tell you the truth,” said Pinkard, who hadn’t been. He picked up a pencil and wrote, Delousing? Baths? on a sheet of foolscap. Maybe Slattery saw through him, maybe not. He went on, “Now, these outfits you’re talking about-they in Arkansas like you? If I have my druthers, I want to work with somebody local, you know what I mean?”

  “I sure do, and I respect that,” Slattery said quickly. Respecting it didn’t mean agreeing with it, but did mean he’d go along if he wanted the Cyclone Chemical Company to get the business. When Jefferson Pinkard wanted his druthers these days, he damn well got them. He remembered wishing for them in the last war, wishing and not getting. A lot of things about growing older were damned unpleasant (his last visit to the dentist leaped to mind). But if you were halfway decent at what you did, you got your druthers a lot more often than you had when you were younger. As if to underscore that, C.B. Slattery continued, “Naturally, we work with people from Little Rock a lot of the time. But I do believe a couple of these outfits have branches in Texas-Dallas or Houston, I’m not quite sure which.”

  “Well, you can wire me the details when you get home,” Jeff said, and it was Slattery’s turn to write himself a note. “I’ll do some checking on my own, too.” If Slattery thought he could set up some sweetheart deal, maybe rig kickbacks for Cyclone Chemical, he could damn well think again.

  He wasn’t fool enough to let on that he’d had anything like that in mind. “You go right ahead, sir. I think you’ll find out the firms I recommend are competitive in quality and in price.” He paused to pull out a pack of cigarettes, offer one to Jeff, and then stick one in his own mouth. Once they both had lights, he remarked, “Something else occurs to me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You might want to site this, ah, facility away from the main camp and take prisoners to it. You’d be less likely to spook the spooks that way, if you know what I mean.” Slattery had a disarming grin.

  He also had a point. Jeff scribbled some more on that sheet of foolscap. “Could be,” he said. It applied the same principle as telling Negroes they were going to another camp when they got into the trucks from which they would never get out. “We could move ’em right on through, just like a… factory.”

  The word that first crossed his mind, that caused the pause, was slaughterhouse. He didn’t want to say that, any more than he wanted to talk about killing Negroes rather than reducing population. It made him think too openly about what this camp was for.

  “You sure could.” C.B. Slattery fairly radiated enthusiasm. “It’d be a privilege for my firm to be affiliated with such a patriotic enterprise. Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Jeff echoed automatically. “You’ll be hearing from us. I expect some of those designers may, too, so get me that word quick as you can. Like I say, though, I’ll check out some other outfits in these parts along with ’em.”

  “You know your business best.” No, Slattery wasn’t about to argue. No matter who built the places where the Negroes went in and didn’t come out, the chemical that made sure they didn’t come out would come from his company. He said, “Freedom!” one more time and hurried out of Pinkard’s office. By the way he moved,
his next appointment was just as urgent and just as important as this one. It wasn’t likely to be, but treating it that way made him a good businessman.

  Jeff got up and watched him leave the administrative center, then went back to his desk. He picked up the telephone and called Richmond. He wanted Ferdinand Koenig knowing what was going on every step of the way. The Attorney General heard him out-he did try to keep things short-and then said, “This all sounds pretty good. Only one thing bothers me a little.”

  “What’s that?” Jeff asked. Whatever bothered Jake Featherston’s right-hand man was guaranteed to be dead on arrival.

  “This whole business of building the, uh, fumigator-whatever the hell you want to call it-away from the camp. That means we’re using trucks again. I thought one of the big points of building the fumigator in the first place was getting away from the goddamn trucks.”

  “Well, yes, sir,” Jeff said reluctantly. “Only problem I see with building it here is, the niggers won’t take long to figure out this is the end of the line if we do. We’ll have more trouble from ’em in that case. Camp’s been pretty quiet so far, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I understand that, but we’ve got to think about efficiency, too,” Koenig said. “If we can give your trucks back to the Army-minus your exhaust hookup, of course”-he laughed, which meant Pinkard had to do the same-“that’ll help the war effort a lot. We need all the transport we can get right now, what with the big push into Pennsylvania. And you’ve got a good solid perimeter around the camp, right? You’ve got guards who know what they’re doing, right?”

  “Well, yes, sir,” Jeff repeated. He couldn’t very well say the camp didn’t have a solid perimeter, or that the guards didn’t know what the hell they were doing. If he said that, he wouldn’t stay camp commandant for another five minutes, and he wouldn’t deserve to, either.

  “All right, then,” the Attorney General said. “Any trouble comes up, I reckon you’ll be able to handle it. A few bursts from the guards’ submachine guns should settle most troubles pretty damn quick. If they don’t, well, the machine guns in the towers outside the barbed wire sure as hell will.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pinkard said one more time. Everything Ferd Koenig said was true. If the Negroes caused trouble, the guards ought to be able to smash it.

  “Good.” Koenig sounded pleased. “You keep at it, Pinkard. I’m sure everything will work out fine. Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Jeff said, but he was talking to a dead line.

  He hung up, swearing under his breath. Everything Koenig said was true, yeah, but what he said was only part of the story. Jeff remembered how things had been back at Camp Dependable in Louisiana when his guards were reducing population by taking niggers out to the swamps and shooting them. Not only had that put a strain on the white men, it had also made them stay on edge every minute of the day and night. The Negroes in the camp had known too well they had nothing to lose. If they tried to nail a guard, they’d get killed, sure. But if they didn’t, they’d get killed anyhow. So why not try to take somebody with you when you went?

  Camp Determination wasn’t like that now. The blacks here believed this wasn’t the last stop. They were wrong, but the belief itself mattered. It mattered a lot. Because they still believed they had a future, they were much more docile than they would have been otherwise.

  Building the fumigator here would ruin all that. They’d figure out what was what. How could they help it? Everybody knew Negroes weren’t as smart as white people, but they wouldn’t have to be geniuses to figure this out. And guards would have to stay on their toes every second from then on.

  But now Jeff had his orders. He wished he’d never called Richmond. He should have just gone ahead and built the fumigator where he wanted it and then told Ferd Koenig what he’d done. The Attorney General would have gone along with it. The way things worked out, Jeff was stuck.

  He swore again, louder this time, sat down to look at a map of Camp Determination, and then swore some more. Pretty plainly, he’d have to build two fumigators, one for men, the other for women and pickaninnies. Otherwise, the sexes would meet on the way to getting eliminated, and that would cause all kinds of trouble-to say nothing of making inmates’ attitudes even worse than they would be anyhow.

  After another look at the map-and some more venting of his spleen-he decided how things would have to work. The fumigators could go at, or even next to, the present outer boundaries of the camp. That way, he could use the current perimeter to separate them from the areas where the Negroes lived. Maybe he could send people through on the pretext that they had to be deloused before going to a new camp. That would explain why they didn’t come back.

  How long could he keep them from learning that only bodies left Camp Determination? Not forever, he feared. But he could buy at least some time that way. The longer he didn’t have to worry about uppity niggers, the better he liked it. And he would be following orders.

  Irving Morrell got his first look at one of the new Confederate barrels just outside of Salem, Ohio. The town, east of Canton, called itself “Ohio’s City of Friends.” It had been founded by Quakers, and many still lived there. What was happening around Salem now had nothing to do with those peaceable people or their ideals.

  A U.S. 105 firing over open sights had knocked out the barrel in question. The young lieutenant who gravely explained that to Morrell didn’t see anything funny about it. He didn’t associate it with Jake Featherston’s ranting tract of the same name. Morrell wondered whether to explain why he was laughing. In the end, he didn’t. Any joke you had to explain wasn’t funny.

  Neither was the new barrel. It stank of gasoline and cordite and burnt paint and rubber and burnt flesh. Morrell’s nostrils tried to pinch in on themselves to hold out as much of that horrible smell as they could. His stomach lurched as soon as he recognized it. He’d smelled it too often before.

  No barrel in the world could withstand a direct hit from a 105 at point-blank range. Getting hits with an artillery piece even at point-blank range was a much bigger problem, though. The best antibarrel weapon was still another barrel.

  When Morrell walked around the charred corpse of this one, he got the feeling that the machines he commanded were like boys trying to stop men. The long gun with the big bore, the sloped armor, the low profile… This was what the USA should have had at the start of the war.

  He turned to the lieutenant. “Can the inch-and-a-half guns on our barrels hurt these monsters at all?”

  “They can penetrate the side armor, sir,” the youngster answered. “That frontal plate-I’m afraid not. Our barrels’ armor-piercing rounds mostly just bounce off.”

  “Happy day,” Morrell muttered, and then, “We’ve got to upgun. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. “But the turret ring on our present model won’t let us mount a three-incher like these bastards have. Two and a fraction, that’s it-and even then we need a new turret to hold the larger weapon.”

  “We’ve got to do it,” Morrell said, more to himself than to his guide. “Building a whole new machine from the ground up-well, we should have started a long time ago. Since we didn’t, we’ve just got to squeeze the most out of what we have for a while longer.”

  “Can we?” the lieutenant asked-a question Morrell wished he didn’t have to contemplate.

  After a moment’s thought, he answered, “Of course we can, son-because we’ve got to. Now where’s the map that shows our armored dispositions?”

  “It’s back in town, sir,” the young lieutenant said. Morrell wished it were farther forward: one of a lot of things he wished that he wasn’t going to get. Back to Salem they went. Refugees from farther west clogged the road. Some of them tried to take shelter in Salem, even as the people who lived there cleared out.

  Once upon a time, before bombs and artillery started landing on it, Salem had been a pleasant little city. It had held ten or twelve thousand people, and had bo
asted a flour mill, a dairy outfit, a couple of china factories, and some metalworks. It also boasted a monument to one Edwin Coppock, an abolitionist who’d raided Harpers Ferry with John Brown, and who’d been hanged with him. If the Confederates took Salem, they would blow that to hell and gone.

  When Morrell actually got a look at the armored dispositions in northeastern Ohio, his own disposition soured, and his temper almost blew to hell and gone. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve got them scattered all over the damned landscape!”

  “They support the infantry, sir,” the shavetail said.

  “No, no, no, no, no!” Morrell didn’t pound his head against the wall in the pleasant little clapboard house now doing duty for his headquarters. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said. As far as he was concerned, that restraint should have been worth a medal. “We’ve been at war for more than a year now. Hasn’t anybody learned anything about anything?”

  “Sir?” The lieutenant, an earnest young man, realized he was out of his element.

  Morrell didn’t try to explain. It would have taken too long. But the officer he was replacing hadn’t learned a thing from two wars’ worth of barrel tactics. The one thing you needed to do to get the most out of your armor was to mass it, to use it as the spearhead to your attack. Putting some of it here, some of it there, and some more of it in a no-account town twenty miles away was asking-begging-to get defeated in detail. And the Confederates-who, while they were manifest sons of bitches, were also capable sons of bitches when it came to handling armor-were only too happy to oblige.

  The study Morrell went into was more nearly black than brown. “How the hell can I get my forces concentrated so I can do something with them?” he muttered.

  “How can our infantry respond to the Confederates if they don’t have barrels to stiffen them, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

  The look Morrell gave him should have left him charred worse than the burnt-out C.S. barrel. “I don’t want to respond to Featherston’s fuckers,” he ground out. The young lieutenant’s eyes widened, perhaps at the obscenity but more likely at the heresy. Morrell proceeded to spell it out: “I want to make Featherston’s fuckers respond to me. I can’t do that, can I, unless I can pull together enough barrels to get their attention?” It seemed obvious to him. Why didn’t it seem obvious to anybody else in a green-gray uniform?