The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  As often happened, what he wanted and what the Navy wanted were two different beasts. As always happened, what the Navy wanted prevailed. Down into the bowels of the Remembrance he went.

  Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger, his nominal boss, got to their station at the same time he did, coming down the passageway he was coming up. In fact, Sam knew a lot more about the way damage control worked aboard the Remembrance than Pottinger did. His superior, who’d replaced a wounded officer, had spent his whole career up till the past few months in cruisers. Sam, on the other hand, had had two long tours on the carrier. He automatically thought of things like protecting the aeroplanes’ fuel supply. Pottinger thought of such things, too, but he took longer to do it. In combat, a few seconds could mean the difference between safety and a fireball.

  Quite a few of the sailors in the damage-control party wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart above their left breast pockets. Several of them had won other decorations, too. The Remembrance had seen a lot of hard action—and taken more damage than Carsten would have wished.

  A rat-faced Irishman named Fitzpatrick asked, “Sir, you really think them goddamn Japs is gonna leave us alone from now on?”

  He’d aimed the question at Sam. Instead of answering, Sam looked to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. The senior officer had first call. That was how things worked. Pottinger said, “Well, I expect we’re all right for now.”

  Several sailors stirred. Carsten didn’t much like the answer himself. He didn’t and wouldn’t trust the Japanese. So far, their trials of strength with the USA had been inconclusive: both in the Great War, where they’d been the only Entente power that hadn’t got whipped, and in this latest fight, which had been anything but great.

  But then Pottinger went on, “Of course, God only knows how long the quiet will last. The Japs keep bargains for as long as they think it’s a good idea, and not thirty seconds longer. The skipper said as much—remember the Philippines.”

  Sam relaxed. So did the ordinary sailors. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger wasn’t altogether naive after all.

  Everybody stared at corridors painted in Navy gray, at bulkheads and hatchways, at hoses that shot high-pressure salt water, at the overhead pipes that meant a tall man had to crouch when he ran unless he wanted to bang the top of his head, at bare light bulbs inside steel cages: the world in which they operated. Most of the Remembrance lay above them. They might have been moles scurrying through underground tunnels. Every once in a while, a claustrophobe got assigned to damage control. Such men didn’t last long. They started feeling the whole weight of the ship pressing down on their heads.

  Not without pride, one of the sailors said, “We could do our job in the dark.”

  “Could, my nuts,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’ve fuckin’ well done our job in the dark. You don’t need to see to know where you’re at. The way noise comes back at you, where you bump up against fittings, the smells . . . Difference between us and the rest of the poor sorry bastards on this floating madhouse is, we really know what we’re doing.”

  Almost in unison, the other men from the damage-control party nodded. The fighting had given them a fierce esprit de corps. Carsten’s head wanted to go up and down, too. And it would have, had he not known that every other unit on the ship was just as proud of itself and just as convinced the Remembrance would instantly founder if it didn’t do what it was supposed to. Nothing wrong with that. It was good for morale.

  Pottinger said, “Here’s hoping we don’t have to do what we do for a hell of a long time.”

  More nods. Sam said, “Long as we’re hoping, let’s hope we head back to Seattle and get some leave.”

  That drew not only nods but laughter. Pottinger gave Carsten a hard look, but he ended up laughing, too. Sam had always been able to get away with saying things that would have landed someone who said them in a different tone of voice in a lot of trouble. He could smile his way out of bar scenes that usually would have brought out broken bottles.

  Seaman Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, was deadly serious. “How long before we need to start worrying about Confederate submersibles again?” he asked.

  “We’ve already worried about Confederate subs,” Sam said. “Remember that passage between Florida and Cuba we took on the way to Costa Rica? We didn’t spot anything, but God only knows what those bastards had laying for us there.”

  “That’s their own waters, though,” Fitzpatrick protested. “That isn’t what I meant. What I did mean was, how long before we have to worry about them out here in the Pacific? And out in the Atlantic, too—don’t want to leave out the other ocean.”

  This time, Carsten didn’t answer. He looked to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger again. The commander of the damage-control party said, “We’ve already got Jap subs here in the Pacific, and maybe British boats coming up from Australia and New Zealand toward the Sandwich Islands. We’ve got British boats and German boats and French ones, too, in the Atlantic. Enough of those sons of bitches running around loose already. What the hell difference do a few Confederate subs make?”

  Now he got a laugh. Sam joined it, even though he didn’t think Pottinger had been kidding. “Back when I started out in the Navy, all we worried about was surface ships,” he said. “Nobody’d ever heard that aeroplanes were dangerous, and submarines were still half toys. Nobody had any idea what they could do. It’s a different world nowadays, and that’s the truth.”

  “You betcha,” Seaman Fitzpatrick said. “Nobody ever thought of a funny-looking thing called an aeroplane carrier, neither.”

  “Damage control is damage control,” Pottinger said. “Something hurts the ship, we patch it up. That’s what we’re here for.”

  Sailors nodded once more. Carsten didn’t argue with his superior, not out loud. But it was more complicated than that. Shells did one kind of damage, torpedoes another, and bombs a third. Bombs had the potential to be the most destructive, he thought. Unlike shells and torpedoes, they weren’t limited in how much explosive they could carry. And explosive was what delivered the punch. Everything else was just the bus driver to get the cordite to where it did its job.

  Sam didn’t care for that line of reasoning. If bombs could sink ships so easily, what point to having any surface Navy at all? He’d first wondered about that during the war, when an aeroplane flying out from Argentina had bombed the battleship he was on. The damage was light—the bombs were small—but he thought he’d seen the handwriting on the wall.

  Maybe a carrier’s aeroplanes could hold off the enemy’s. But maybe they couldn’t, too. Down in the warm, humid belly of the Remembrance, Sam shivered.

  III

  Jonathan Moss was an American. He had a Canadian wife. After studying occupation law, he’d made his living in Berlin, Ontario, by helping Canucks struggling in the toils of what the U.S. Army insisted on calling justice. Without false modesty, he knew he was one of the best in the business.

  And what was his reward for doing everything he could to give the Canadians a hand? He stared down at the sheet of paper on his desk. He’d just taken it out of an envelope and unfolded it. In block capitals, it said, YANK SWINE, YOU WILL DIE!

  He supposed he ought to turn it over to the occupying authorities. Maybe they could find fingerprints on it and track down whoever had stuck it in the mail. Instead, Moss crumpled up the paper and chucked it into the wastebasket. For one thing, odds were anyone who sent a charming missive of this sort had the elementary common sense to wear gloves while he was doing it. And, for another, taking a crank like this seriously gave him power over you.

  During the war, Moss had flown observation aeroplanes and fighting scouts. He’d gone through all three years without getting badly hurt, and ended up an ace. After the real terror of aerial combat, a cowardly little anonymous threat didn’t get him very excited.

  He methodically went through the rest of his mail. The Bar Association reminded him his dues were payable before December 31. That gave him two and a half weeks
. His landlord served notice that, as of next February 1, his office rent would go up five dollars a month. “Happy day,” he said.

  He opened another nondescript envelope. This one also held a single sheet of paper. Its message, also in untraceable block capitals, was, YOUR WIFE AND LITTLE GIRL WILL DIE, YANK SWINE!

  Seeing that, Moss abruptly changed his mind about the letter he’d thrown away. He fished it from the trash can and flattened it out as best he could. The letters in both were about the same size and in about the same style. Moss rummaged for the envelope in which the first threat had come. He set it next to the one he’d just now opened.

  “Well, well,” he murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?” He was no detective with a microscope, but he didn’t need to be to see that his address on the two envelopes had been typed with two different machines. Not only that, one U.S. stamp bore a Manitoba overprint, while the other had one from Ontario. The notes, as near as he could see, were identical. The envelopes not only weren’t but had been mailed from different provinces. (He checked to see if the postmarks confirmed what the stamps said. They did. One came from Toronto, the other from a town south of Winnipeg.) What did that mean?

  Two possibilities occurred to him. One was that somebody didn’t like him and had got his bother-in-law or someone of that sort to help show how much. Somebody like that was a pest. The other possibility was that he’d fallen foul of a real organization dedicated to—What? To making his life miserable, certainly, and, odds were, to making Canada’s American occupiers unhappy en masse.

  He’d hoped time would reconcile Canada to having lost the Great War. The longer he stayed here, the more naive and forlorn that hope looked. English-speaking Canada had risen once on its own, in the 1920s. More recently, the Empire of Japan had tried to ignite it again. Great Britain wouldn’t have minded helping its one-time dominion make the Yanks miserable, either.

  With a sigh, Moss put both sheets of paper and both envelopes in a buff manila folder. With a longer, louder sigh, he donned his overcoat, earmuffs, hat, and mittens. Then he closed the door to the law office—as an afterthought, he locked it, too—and left the building for the two-block walk to occupation headquarters in Berlin.

  Had he been in a tearing hurry, he could have left off the earmuffs and mittens. It was above zero, and no new snow had fallen since the middle of the night. Moss had grown up around Chicago, a city that knew rugged weather. Even so, his wartime service in Ontario and the years he’d lived here since had taught him some things about cold he’d never learned down in the States.

  He saw three new YANKS OUT! graffiti between the building where he worked and the red-brick fortress that housed the occupation authority. Two shopkeepers were already out getting rid of them. He suspected the third would in short order. Leaving anti-American messages up on your property was an offense punishable by fine. Occupation Code, Section 227.3, he thought.

  The sentries in front of occupation headquarters jeered at him as he came up the steps: “Look! It’s the Canuck from Chicago!” He wasn’t in the Army—indeed, most of his practice involved opposing military lawyers—so they didn’t bother wasting politeness on him.

  “Funny boys,” he said, at which they jeered harder than ever. He went on into the building, or started to. Just inside the entrance, a sergeant and a couple of privates stopped him. “They’ve beefed up security, sir,” the sergeant said. “Orders are to pat down all civilians. Sorry, sir.” He didn’t sound sorry at all.

  Moss shed his overcoat and held his arms out wide, as if he were being crucified. After he passed the inspection, he went on to the office of Major Sam Lopat, a prosecutor with whom he’d locked horns more than a few times. “Ah, Mr. Moss,” Lopat said. “And what sort of fancy lies have you got waiting for me next time we go at each other?”

  “Here.” Moss set the manila folder on the major’s desk. “Tell me what you think of these.”

  Lopat raised one eyebrow when Moss failed to come back with a gibe. He raised the other when he saw what the folder held. “Oh,” he said in a different tone of voice. “More of these babies.”

  “More of them, you say?” Moss didn’t know whether to feel alarmed or relieved. “Other people have got ’em, too?”

  “Hell, yes,” the military prosecutor answered. “What, did you think you were the only one?” He didn’t wait for Moss’ reply, but threw back his head and laughed. “You civilian lawyers think you’re the most important guys in the world, and nothing is real unless it happens to you. Well, I’ve got news for you: you aren’t the cream in God’s coffee.”

  “And you are—” But Jonathan Moss checked himself. He wanted information from Lopat, not a quarrel. “All right, I’m not the only one, you say? Tell me more. Who else has got ’em? Who sends ’em? Have you had any luck catching the bastards? I guess not, or I wouldn’t have got these.”

  “Not as much as we’d like,” Lopat said, which was pretty obvious. “We’ve torn apart the towns where they’re postmarked, but not much luck. You can see for yourself—all the Canucks need is a typewriter and a pen, and they could do without the typewriter in a pinch. If it makes you feel better, there’s never been a follow-up on one of these. Nobody’s got shot or blown up the day after one of these little love notes came.”

  “I’m not sorry to hear that,” Moss admitted. “You didn’t say who else got a—love note.” He nodded to Lopat, acknowledging the phrase.

  “I don’t have the whole list. Investigation isn’t my department, you know. I go into court once they’re caught—and then you do your damnedest to get ’em off the hook.” The military prosecutor leered at Moss, who stonily stared back. With a shrug, Lopat went on, “Far as I know, the other people these have come to have all been part of the occupation apparatus one way or another. You’re the first outside shyster to get one, or I think you are. Doesn’t that make you proud?”

  “At least,” Moss said dryly, and Lopat laughed. Moss tapped one of the notes with a fingernail. “Prints?”

  “We’ll check, but the next ones we find’ll be the first.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much. You would have landed on these fellows like a bomb if you knew who they were,” Moss said. Lopat nodded. Something else occurred to Moss. “You think this has anything to do with that telephone threat I got last year, where the guy told me not to start my auto or I’d be sorry?”

  The military prosecutor frowned. “I’d forgotten about that. I don’t know what to tell you. Pretty damn funny, you know? You’re the best friend—best American friend—the Canucks have got. You’re married to one of theirs, and I know what she thinks of most Yanks, me included. You’re the best occupation lawyer between Calgary and Toronto, anyway. Makes sense they’d want to get rid of me. I don’t like it, but it makes sense. But why you? Seems to me they ought to put a bounty on anybody who even messes up your hair.”

  “I’ve wondered about that, too. Maybe they’re angrier at Laura for marrying me than they are at me for marrying her.”

  “Maybe.” But Lopat didn’t sound convinced. “In that case, why aren’t they trying to blow her up instead of you?”

  “I don’t know,” Moss answered. “As long as this isn’t too much of a much, though, I won’t lose any sleep over it.” He redonned his cold-weather gear. “I’ll see you in court, Major, and I’ll whip you, too.”

  “Ha!” Lopat said. “You been smoking doped cigarettes, to get so cocky?”

  After a few more good-natured insults, Moss left occupation headquarters. By then, a wan sun had come out. His long shadow stretched out to the northwest as he walked back to the building where he practiced.

  He’d just set one foot on the steps leading up the sidewalk when the bomb went off behind him. Had he had an infantryman’s reflexes, he would have thrown himself flat. Instead, he stood there frozen while glass blew out of windows all around and fell clinking and clattering to the ground like sharp-edged, glittering snowflakes.

  Already, a great cloud of black
smoke was rising into the sky. Looking over his shoulder, Moss realized it came from the direction of the building he’d just left. He started running, back in the direction from which he’d come. At every step, his shoes crunched on shattered glass. He bumped into a bleeding man running the other way. “Sorry!” they both gasped. Each one kept going.

  When Moss rounded the last corner, he came on a scene whose like he hadn’t met since the days of the war. Occupation headquarters had had plenty of guards, but someone, somehow, had sneaked a bomb past them. The red brick building had fallen in on itself. Flames shot up from it. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay all around. Moss stepped on an arm that stopped abruptly, halfway between elbow and wrist. It still had on shirt sleeve and wristwatch. Blood dribbled from the end. His stomach lurched.

  Here and there, survivors were staggering or pulling themselves out of the building. “My God!” one of them—a woman secretary—said, over and over. “My God! My God!” Maybe she was too stunned to say anything else. Maybe she couldn’t find anything else that fit. She cradled a broken arm in her other hand, but hardly seemed to know she was hurt.

  A hand sticking out from under bricks opened and closed. Moss dashed over and started clawing at the rubble. The soldier he pulled out was badly battered, but didn’t seem to have any broken bones. “God bless you, pal,” he said.

  Fire engines roared up, sirens screaming. They began playing water on the wreckage. Moss looked for more signs of life under it. As he threw bricks in all directions, he wondered if the people who’d planted this bomb were the same ones who’d written him his notes. If they were, Sam Lopat had been wrong about them—not that he was likely to know that any more.

  Down in southern Sonora, winter was the rainy season. Hipolito Rodriguez had planted his fields of corn and beans when the rains started, plowing behind his trusty mule. Now, with 1934 giving way to 1935, he tramped through them hoe in hand, weeding and cultivating. A farmer’s work was never done.