Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  That was part of the plan. As long as they thought they were going somewhere else, they would stay docile. They wouldn’t cause trouble unless they figured they were going on a one-way trip. The one-armed officer worked hard to keep them unsuspecting: “You men, we want y’all to be clean and tidy when we ship you out of Camp Determination. We’re going to get you that way before you leave. You’re gonna take baths. You’re gonna be deloused. No horseplay, or we will make your black asses sorry. Y’all got that?”

  “Yes, suh,” the Negroes chorused. Black heads bobbed up and down. The Negroes didn’t think anything was wrong. They were dirty. Most if not all were lousy. They probably wanted to get clean, and they could see why the men who ran the camp would want them to be that way before they left. Oh, yes—everything made perfect sense to them. But it made a different kind of sense to the guards and their superiors.

  “Come on, then,” the one-armed officer said. “Keep in formation, now, or you’ll catch it.” The Negroes had no trouble obeying. They often marched here and there through the camp in formation.

  Guards opened the barbed-wire gate separating the main camp from that building. In the Negroes went. Two guards waited in an antechamber. One of them said, “Strip naked and stow your stuff here. Everybody remember who put what where. You get in a fight over what belongs to who, you’ll be sorry. You got that?” Again, the Negroes nodded.

  So did Hipolito Rodriguez, watching as the black men shed their rags and set down their sorry bundles. This was a very nice touch. It convinced the prisoners they’d come back. The large contingent of guards was hardly necessary. A handful of men could have done the job. But Rodriguez understood why Jefferson Pinkard had assigned so many men to the prisoners. The more ready for trouble you were, the less likely you were to find it. And with visiting firemen watching, you couldn’t afford it.

  A sign on the wall above an onward-pointing arrow said DELOUSING AHEAD. The Negroes who could read went that way without hesitation. Most of the others followed. “Move along, move along,” the guards said, and chivvied the rest of the men into the room at the end of the corridor.

  It could hold a lot more than a hundred people—but this was, after all, only a test. Even here, the deception continued. A doorway was set into the far wall. A sign above it said TO THE BATHS.

  At the officer’s nod, Rodriguez shut the door through which the Negroes had gone in. That door didn’t match the rest of the scene. It was thick and made of steel, and had rubber gasketing all around the edge to make an airtight seal. Rodriguez spun the wheel in the center of the door’s back, making sure it fit snugly against the frame and locking it in place.

  Above the wheel, a small window with rounded corners let him look into the chamber he’d just sealed off. More rubber gasketing, inside and out, made sure what was inside that chamber would stay there.

  Other windows were set into the chamber’s walls. They too were protected with rubber inside and out. Guards took their places at some of them. Higher-ranking camp officials and the delegation from Richmond already stood by the rest. They wanted to see how this building worked out.

  Near the center of the chamber stood half a dozen steel columns, painted the same gray as the walls. The bottom two or three feet of them were not solid metal, but a grillwork too fine to poke a finger through. The naked Negroes in there milled about. Some of them went up to one column or another. A man rapped on a column with his knuckles. Rodriguez heard the dull clang.

  He knew exactly when guards up above the ceiling poured the Cyclone into the columns. All the Negroes sprang away from them as if they’d become red-hot. Men started falling almost at once. Not all of them fell right away, though. Some ran for the doorway marked TO THE BATHS. They pounded on it, but—what a surprise!—it didn’t open.

  And some ran back to the door through which they’d come. Desperate, dying fists battered against the steel. An agonized face looked out at Rodriguez, with only glass and the gasketing between them. Startled, he took a step away from the door. The Negro shouted something. Rodriguez couldn’t make out what he said. His words were drowned in the chorus of yells and screams that dinned inside the chamber.

  As the insecticide took hold, the black man’s face slid down and away from the window. The frantic pounding on the door eased. One by one, the shouts and screams faded and stopped. Rodriguez looked in again. A few of the huddled bodies in the chamber still moved feebly, but only a few. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they all lay still.

  A bell rang. Several heavy ceiling fans came on; he could feel their vibration through his feet. They sucked the poisoned air out of the chamber. After about ten more minutes, another bell chimed. Now the door marked TO THE BATHS opened—from the outside. Guards went in and carried corpses out to the waiting trucks.

  Rodriguez nodded to himself. This would work. Those hundred black men hadn’t come close to filling the chamber. Of course, this was only a practice run. Now that they knew things really went about the way they’d expected, they could load in a lot more mallates. Load them in, take them out, load in the next batch . . . You could use ordinary trucks to haul away the bodies now, too, and you could pack them much tighter with dead men than you could with live ones. Yes, the scheme would definitely do what it was supposed to.

  “Attention!” the one-armed officer called.

  Automatically, Rodriguez stood stiff and straight. Here came Jefferson Pinkard with one of the men from Richmond: a burly fellow with a tough, square, jowly face. Rodriguez recognized him right way. It was the Attorney General, Don Fernando Koenig, the biggest man in the Freedom Party except for Jake Featherston himself! No wonder everything had to go just right today!

  Pinkard and the Attorney General stopped. “Sir, this here’s my buddy, Hip Rodriguez,” the camp commandant said. “He helped give me the notion for this whole setup.”

  “Well, good for him, and good for you, too, Pinkard. This is all first-rate work, and I’ll say so to the President.” Koenig stuck out his hand in Rodriguez’s direction. “Freedom!”

  Dazedly, Rodriguez shook it. “Freedom, señor!”

  Then Koenig clapped him on the back—man to man, not superior to inferior. “We’re going to have freedom from these damn niggers, aren’t we? And you’ve helped. You’ve helped a lot.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rodriguez said. “Thank you, sir.”

  Koenig and Pinkard went on their way. The rest of the guards stared at Rodriguez in awe.

  ****

  Jake Featherston had been in Pennsylvania before. During the Great War, the Army of Northern Virginia had pushed up almost to within shelling distance of Philadelphia. That almost counted for everything. If the de facto capital of the USA had fallen along with Washington, would the enemy have been able to go on with the fight? No way to know now, but a lot of people in the CSA doubted it. As things were, Jake had survived the grinding retreat through Pennsylvania and Maryland and back into Virginia. He’d survived defeat, and hoped for victory.

  Now he was within shelling distance of Pittsburgh, in the western part of Pennsylvania. Confederate 105s boomed in their gun pits, sending shells south toward the Yankee defenders and the factories and steel mills they fought to hold. He wanted to take off his uniform shirt and serve one of those 105s himself. He’d done that before, too, over in Virginia.

  His bodyguards were more nervous now than they had been then. “Sir, if we can shell the damnyankees from here, they can reach us here, too,” one of them said. “What do we do then?”

  “Reckon we jump in a hole, just like the gunners.” Jake pointed to the foxholes a few feet away from each 105.

  “Yes, but—” the bodyguard began.

  “No, no buts,” Featherston said firmly. “Chances are I’m safer here than I am back in Richmond, and that’s the God’s truth.”

  The guard looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. The man was young, brave, and good at what he did. He also had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam. Most of the time, th
e lack didn’t affect the way he did his job even a dime’s worth. Every once in a while . . . “Sir, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice couldn’t have been any stiffer if he’d starched and ironed it.

  “Hell I don’t,” Jake said. “Difference is, here I know where the enemy’s at. I know what he can do, and I know what I can do about it.” He pointed to the foxholes again. “In Richmond, any goddamn son of a bitch could be kitted out with explosives. If he’s got the balls to blow himself up along with me, how you gonna stop him?”

  All his bodyguards looked very unhappy. Featherston didn’t blame them. He was very unhappy about people bombs himself. A man willing—no, eager—to die so he could also kill made a very nasty foe. War and bodyguarding both assumed the enemy wanted to live just as much as you did. If he didn’t give a damn . . .

  If he didn’t give a damn, then what would stop a rational soldier or assassin wouldn’t matter a hill of beans to him. That seemed more obvious to the President of the CSA than it did to his guards. They didn’t want to admit, even to themselves, that the rules had changed.

  This one said, “Mr. President, there’s no evidence anyone in the CSA has thought of doing anything like that.”

  Jake Featherston laughed in his face. “Evidence? First evidence’ll be when somebody damn well does blow himself up. It’s coming. Sure as shit, it’s coming. I wish like hell we could stop it, but I don’t see how. We can’t jam all the U.S. wireless stations—too many of ’em. And they can’t hardly talk about anything else. Fucking Mormons.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “Good thing there aren’t hardly any of them in our country,” the bodyguard said, proving he’d missed the point.

  If he were smarter, if he were able to think straighter, he probably wouldn’t want to be a bodyguard. You couldn’t get all hot and bothered because people weren’t the way you wanted them to be. Oh, you could, but a whole fat lot of good it would do you. Taking them as they were worked better. Will this fellow see it if I spell it out in small, simple words? Jake wondered.

  The decision got made for him. He knew what that rumbling, rushing sound in the air was. “Incoming!” he shouted, and was proud his yell came only a split second after the first artilleryman’s.

  He sprang for the foxholes, and was down in one before the first shells landed. The men who fought the 105s were just as fast, or even faster. Some of his bodyguards, though, remained above ground and upright when shells burst not far away. They didn’t know any better—they weren’t combat troops. Here, ignorance was expensive.

  “Get in a hole, goddammit!” he yelled. Some of the artillerymen were shouting the same thing. And the bodyguards who hadn’t been hit did dive for cover, only a few seconds slower than they should have. But a barrage was a time when seconds mattered.

  Till things let up, Jake couldn’t do anything. If he came out of his foxhole, he was asking to get torn up himself. He wasn’t afraid. He’d proved that beyond any possible doubt in the last war. But he knew too well the CSA needed him. That kept him where he was till the U.S. bombardment moved elsewhere.

  That bombardment wasn’t anything that warned of an attack. It was just harassing fire, to make the Confederates keep their heads down and to wound a few men. During the Great War, Jake had fired plenty of shells with the same thing in mind.

  If he wasn’t the first one out of a foxhole when the shelling eased, he couldn’t have been later than the third. “Fuck,” he said softly. You forgot what artillery could do to a man till you saw it with your own eyes. One of his guards lay there, gutted and beheaded—except the reality, which included smell, was a hundred times worse and only a tenth as neat as the words suggested.

  Another bodyguard lay hunched over on his side, clutching his ankle with both hands. He had no foot; he was doing his best to keep from bleeding to death. Jake bent beside him. “Hang on, Beau,” he said, far more gently than he usually spoke. “I’ll make you a tourniquet.” His boots—the same sort he’d worn in the field in the last war—had strong rawhide laces. He pulled one out, fast as he could. “Easy there. I got to move your hands so I can tie this son of a bitch.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Beau sounded preternaturally calm. Some wounded men didn’t really feel it for a little while. He seemed to be one of the lucky ones, though he hissed when the President of the CSA tightened the tourniquet around his ragged stump. Jake used a stick to twist it so the stream of blood slowed to the tiniest trickle. He’d tended to battlefield wounds before; his hands still remembered how, as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

  “Morphine!” he yelled. “Somebody give this poor bastard a shot! And where the hell are the medics?”

  The men with Red Cross smocks were already there, taking charge of other injured guards. One of them knelt by Beau. The medic injected the bodyguard, then blinked to find himself face to face with Jake Featherston. “You did good, uh, sir,” he said. “He ought to make it if everything heals up all right.”

  “Hear that, Beau?” Jake said. “He says you’re gonna be fine.” The medic hadn’t quite said that, but Jake didn’t care. He wanted to make the bodyguard as happy as he could.

  “Fine,” Beau said vaguely. Maybe that was shock, or maybe it was the morphine hitting him. The medics got him onto a stretcher and carried him away. Jake wondered what kind of job he could do that didn’t require moving around. The President shrugged. Beau would be a while getting better, if he did.

  The head of the bodyguard contingent came up with fire in his eye. He’d got his trousers muddy; Jake judged that accounted for at least part of his bad temper. When the man spoke, he did his best to stay restrained: “Sir, can we please move to a safer location? You see what almost happened to you here.”

  Jake shook his head. “Not to me, by God. I know what to do when shells start coming down. I’m sorry as hell some of your men didn’t.”

  “And if a shell had landed in your hole, Mr. President?” the bodyguard asked.

  “It didn’t, dammit,” Jake said. The guard chief just looked at him. Jake swore under his breath. The man was right, and he knew it. Admitting somebody else was right and he himself wrong was the hardest thing in the world for him. He didn’t do it now, not in so many words. He just scowled at the bodyguard. “I reckon I’ve seen what I came to see.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The man saluted. He called to the other guards who hadn’t been hurt: “We can get him away now!”

  They all showed as much relief as a drummer who finds out his latest lady friend isn’t in a family way after all. And they hustled Jake back from the gun pit with Olympic speed. He thought it was funny. The guards thought it was anything but. One of them scolded him: “Sir, did you want to get yourself killed?”

  If he’d asked whether Jake wanted to get the guards killed, the President would have gone up in smoke. But that wasn’t what he’d wanted to know, and so Jake Featherston only sighed. “No. I wanted to watch the damnyankees catch it.”

  “Well, you’ve done that, and now you’ve seen we can catch it, too,” the bodyguard said. “Will you kindly leave well enough alone?”

  “Sure,” Featherston said, and all the bodyguards brightened. Then he added, “Till the next time it needs doing.” Their shoulders slumped.

  “We really shouldn’t be anywhere close to the line,” the guards’ leader said. “Damnyankee airplanes are liable to drop bombs on our heads. Even less we can do about that than we can about artillery, dammit.”

  Jake laughed raucously. “Jesus H. Christ, don’t the damnyankees come over Richmond about every other night and drop everything but the fucking kitchen sink on our heads? Bastards’d drop that, too, if they reckoned it’d blow up.”

  Some of the bodyguards smiled. Their chief remained severe. “Sir, you’ve got a proper shelter there, not a, a—hole in the ground.” He slapped at the knees of his trousers. Not much mud came away. He fumed. He didn’t like to get dirty.

  “Hell of a lot of good a proper
shelter did Al Smith,” Jake said. That made all the guards unhappy again. They didn’t like remembering all the things that could go wrong. Jake didn’t like remembering those things, either, but he would do it if he could score points off men who liked it even less.

  The guard chief changed the subject, at least a little: “Sir, couldn’t you just stay somewhere safe and follow the war with reports and things?”

  “No way in hell,” Jake replied at once. “No place’d stay safe for long. Soon as the Yankees found out where I was at, they’d send bombers after me. I don’t care if I went to Habana—they’d still send ’em. But that’s beside the point. Point is, you can’t trust reports all the goddamn time. Sometimes you’ve got to, yeah. You can’t keep up with everything by your lonesome. But if you don’t get your ass out there and see for yourself every so often, people’ll start lying to you. You won’t know any better, either, ’cause you haven’t been out to look. And then you’re screwed. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” the bodyguard said mournfully. He knew what that meant. It meant he and his men would have to keep worrying, because Jake would go on sticking his nose where the damnyankees could shoot it off.

  Airplanes droned by overhead. Jake looked for the closest hole in the ground. So did most of the guards. They weren’t combat troops, no, but a trip to the field taught lessons in a hurry. The airplanes flew from west to east. They had familiar silhouettes. Jake relaxed—they were on his side.

  None of the bodyguards relaxed. They weren’t supposed to, not while they were on duty. Their leader said, “Mr. President, can we please take you someplace where you’re not in quite so much danger?”

  “Gonna fly me to the Empire of Brazil?” Jake quipped. A few guards gave him another round of dutiful smiles. Most stayed somber. He supposed that was just as well. Like sheep dogs, they had to be serious about protecting him. Trouble was, he made a piss-poor sheep.