Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  Back to what was his problem. He clacked away at the big upright machine. It had a stiff action, but that didn’t matter; he was a two-fingered typist with a touch like a tap-dancing rhinoceros. You did not state when we could expect success from your own work. Its early completion could result in a major increase in efficiency. Hoping to hear from you soon on this point, I have the honor to remain. . . . He finished the flowery closing phrases on automatic pilot, took out the sheet of paper, and signed the squiggle that might have been his name.

  He put the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Professor FitzBelmont’s name and Washington University on the outside. Then he took it down the hall to the couriers’ office, first carefully locking the door to his own office behind him. He nodded to the major in charge of the War Department’s secret couriers. “Morning, Dick,” he said. “I need one of your boys to take this out of the city.”

  “Yes, sir. We can do that.” The dispatching officer took the envelope, glanced at the address, and nodded. “Do you want someone who’s been there before, or a new man?” That was the only question he asked. Who Henderson V. FitzBelmont was and what the professor was working on were none of his business, and he knew it.

  “Either way will do,” Potter answered. FitzBelmont might recognize a courier he’d seen before. Then again, he might not. He wasn’t quite the absentminded professor people made jokes about, but he wasn’t far removed, either. Potter got the feeling subatomic particles and differential equations were more real to him than most of the human race.

  “We’ll take care of it, then,” the major said. “You’ll want the courier to report delivery, I expect?”

  “Orally, when he gets back here,” Potter said.

  The major raised an eyebrow. Potter looked back as if across a poker table. He held the high cards, and he knew it. So did the major. “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “Thanks, Dick.” Potter went back to his own office. Whatever you say, sir. He liked the sound of that. As a general, he heard it a lot. The more he heard it, the more he liked it.

  How long had it been since Jake Featherston heard anything but, Whatever you say, sir? Since he took the oath of office in 1934, certainly. In most things, nobody’d tried arguing with him for years before that. And he was a man who’d liked getting his own way even when he was only an artillery sergeant.

  If somebody had tried telling the President more often, the country might be in better shape right now. Or it might not—Featherston might just have ordered naysayers shot or sent to camps. He’d done a lot of that.

  Potter lit a cigarette and blew a meditative cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling. Two questions: was Jake Featherston leading the Confederate States to ruin, and could anybody else do a better job if Featherston came down with a sudden case of loss of life?

  With the building disaster in Pittsburgh, with Featherston’s stubborn refusal to cut his losses and pull out (which looked worse now than it had when Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Potter sat on the park bench), the answer to the first had gone from unlikely through maybe and on toward probably, even if it hadn’t got there yet.

  As for the second . . . Potter blew out more smoke. That wasn’t nearly so obvious. Nobody could wear Jake Featherston’s shoes. The Vice President? Don Partridge was a cipher, a placeholder, somebody to fill a slot because the Confederate Constitution said you needed to fill it. His only virtue was knowing he was a lightweight. Ferdinand Koenig? The Attorney General would have the Freedom Party behind him if the long knives came out. He was able enough, in a gray, bureaucratic way, but about as inspiring as a mudflat. As a leader . . . ? Potter shuddered. Ferd Koenig was one of those people who made a terrific number two but a terrible number one. Unlike some of them, he had the sense to realize it.

  Which left—who? Congress was a Freedom Party rubber stamp. Potter couldn’t think of any governor worth a pitcher of warm spit. Besides, most people outside a governor’s home state had never heard of him.

  What about Forrest? Clarence Potter blinked, there in the privacy of his office. He was surprised the idea had taken so long to occur to him. He laughed at himself. “You old Whig, you,” he murmured. If the armed forces were going to overthrow the President—and it wouldn’t happen any other way—who better to take over the government than the chief of the General Staff? The Freedom Party had danced on the spirit of the Constitution while holding on to most of the letter. Throwing it out the window altogether seemed not just unnatural but wicked. But Forrest just might do.

  Losing the war is wicked. Anything else? Next to losing this war to the USA, anything else looks good. Anything at all. Potter nodded decisively. About that, he had no doubts at all. The United States had forced a harsh peace on the Confederate States in 1917, but hadn’t kept it going for very long. Terms would be even worse this time, and the United States would make sure the Confederates never got off their knees again.

  The next time Potter saw Nathan Bedford Forrest III in the cafeteria, he nodded casually and said, “Something I’d like to talk to you about when we have the chance.”

  “Really?” Forrest said, as casually. “Can we do it here?”

  Potter shook his head. “No, sir,” he answered. “Needs privacy.” From one general to another, that wasn’t a surprising thing to say. For a split second, Forrest’s eyes widened. Then he nodded and put some silverware on his tray.

  ****

  Michael Pound grinned as his barrel rumbled forward, jouncing over rubble and grinding a lot of the big chunks into smaller ones. “Advancing feels good, doesn’t it, sir?” he said.

  Lieutenant Don Griffiths nodded. “You’d better believe it, Sergeant. We’ve done too much falling back.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pound wouldn’t have argued with that for a moment. “Looks to me like the Confederates are starting to feel the pinch.”

  “Here’s hoping,” Griffiths said. “I wouldn’t want to try reinforcing and supplying an army the size of theirs by air, I’ll tell you that. And I don’t think they’ve got an airstrip left that our artillery can’t reach.”

  “My heart bleeds—but not as much as they’re going to bleed before long,” Pound said. “I wonder why they haven’t tried to break out to the west. Somebody in their high command must have his head wedged. Too bad for them.” He had no respect for his own superiors. Finding out some dunderheads wore butternut was reassuring.

  A rifle bullet pinged off the barrel’s armored side. That wouldn’t do the Confederates any good. As if to prove it wouldn’t, the bow machine gun chattered. Pound peered through his own gunsight, but he couldn’t see what the bow gunner was shooting at—if he was shooting at anything. It hardly mattered sometimes.

  Off to the left, something on the Confederate side of the line blew up with a roar loud enough to penetrate the barrel’s thick skin. “That sounded good,” Pound said. “Wonder what it was.”

  “Want me to stick my head out and look around?” Lieutenant Griffiths asked.

  “Not important enough, sir,” Pound answered. “Who knows if our machine gun took out whoever was shooting at us?” Barrel commander was a dangerous job. Now that Pound had finally found an officer with some notion of what he was doing, he didn’t want to lose him for no good reason. There were too many times when a barrel commander had perfectly good reasons for exposing himself to enemy fire.

  Something else blew up, even louder. Griffiths put a hand to his earphones. He often did that when he was getting a wireless message. Sergeant Pound had no idea whether it helped or how it could, but he’d never said anything about it to the officer. It couldn’t hurt.

  Lieutenant Griffiths leaned forward to use the speaking tube to the driver’s position: “Forward again, and a little to the left, but slowly,” he said. He turned to Pound. “That was an ammunition dump. They won’t be able to shell us so well for a while.”

  “We hope,” said Pound, ever willing to see the cloud next to the silver lining.

  “Well, yes. We hope. There
’s always that,” Griffiths agreed. “But we’ve got infantry moving up with us. With luck, they’ll keep the short-range trouble away from us. As for the other side’s barrels and antibarrel guns—we’ve done all right so far. Of course, we’ve got a pretty good gunner.”

  “So we do.” Pound knew his own talents too well to be modest about them. Half a second later than he should have, he added, “You’re not bad at spotting trouble before it spots us. Best way to get rid of it that I know.”

  No sooner had he said that than something clanged against the front of the turret with force enough to shake the whole barrel. I’m dead, Pound thought. Only a moment later did he realize he would have been too dead to think if that round had got through. Thank God for the upgraded armor on the new turret. If this beast hadn’t been retrofitted, I’d be burnt meat right now.

  Without waiting for orders, the driver roared forward, looking for cover behind the nearest pile of rubble. Then, abruptly, he slammed on the brakes. “Did you see it, sir?” Pound asked.

  “No, goddammit.” Griffiths sounded angry at himself. “That son of a bitch knows where we’re at, and I didn’t spot the muzzle flash. Wherever he is, he’s hidden good.”

  “Not sporting,” Pound agreed. He’d been more than happy enough to ambush C.S. barrels from an empty garage, but having them turn the tables on him wasn’t playing fair. Someone with a more objective view might not have found that unfair, but so what? It wasn’t the impartial observer’s neck. It was his.

  He traversed the turret, staring through the gunsight as he did. The hatch opened. Lieutenant Griffiths stood up to get a better look than he could through the periscopes in the cupola. This was one of those times. Griffiths might get shot, but he also might get a better look at the hidden cannon or barrel that had just come within inches of incinerating him.

  It didn’t fire again, which argued that the rubble in front of Pound’s barrel gave pretty good protection. A rifle bullet snapped past; as always, the sound seemed hatefully malicious. Lieutenant Griffiths ducked a little—you did that without thinking—but he didn’t come back inside the steel shell. He had balls. Pound nodded approvingly.

  Probably not somewhere close, the gunner thought, looking for straight lines that broke the irregular pattern of the ruins of Pittsburgh. If the enemy were close, he would have a better shot at the U.S. barrel. And, if he were close, his round likely would have penetrated in spite of the improved turret. A cannon made a damned effective door knocker.

  There! Or Pound thought so, anyhow. “Armor-piercing!” he snapped.

  “Armor-piercing,” Cecil Bergman answered. The loader slammed a black-tipped cartridge into the breech. Pound worked the elevation handwheel. Fifteen hundred yards was a long shot. As near as he could tell, he fired at the same time as the C.S. gunner. The enemy’s shot snarled past, a few feet high. Pound’s struck home. The enemy barrel started to burn.

  “Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths shouted. “How on earth did you make that shot?”

  “Twenty-odd years of practice, sir,” Pound answered. The Confederate gunner hadn’t had so much—though he’d hit Pound’s barrel before Pound even knew he was there. He wouldn’t get another chance now. A great cloud of black smoke was rising, almost a mile away.

  The shot ricocheting inside the barrel would have killed or maimed some of the crew. The fire would be searing the rest. By the way the smoke billowed out, that barrel was a total loss. Odds were the crew was, too. Pound had bailed out of a crippled barrel, but then only the engine compartment was burning. Could anyone get out here? He didn’t think so.

  I just killed five men. Most of the time, he didn’t worry about that. When he watched a barrel brew up, it was only a machine that died. But he’d just had his own brush with death, and it reminded him of the soldiers inside the barrels. He knew what they were going through; he’d come close to going through it himself. If he’d met them in a bar, he could have drunk the night away talking shop with them.

  But they’d just done their best to kill him, and their best was hideously close to good enough. They’re dead and I’m alive and that’s how I want it to be.

  “We can move up a little more now, sir,” he said.

  Griffiths thought about it, then nodded. He called up to the driver. The barrel came out from behind the pile of wreckage and clattered towards another one. Pound tensed when it came out into the open. If the Confederates had drawn a bead on them . . . But no hardened-steel projectile tore into the machine’s vitals. He breathed again as a pile of tumbled bricks came between his machine and the people who wanted to do unto it as he’d done unto theirs.

  U.S. foot soldiers ran forward with the barrels. A Confederate machine gunner opened up on them. “Front!” Lieutenant Griffiths shouted.

  “Identified!” Pound answered. He turned his head and shouted to the loader: “HE!”

  “HE,” Bergman said. A white-tipped high-explosive round went into the breech. Pound lined up the sights on the C.S. machine gun’s winking muzzle. He jerked the lanyard. The cannon bellowed. The shell casing clanked on the floor of the fighting compartment.

  A 2.4-inch shell didn’t have room for a whole lot of explosive. A three-incher from one of the Confederate barrels would have held almost twice as much. Sandbags and rubble flew from in front of the C.S. gun, but it kept shooting. Tracers drew fiery lines through the air.

  Pound abstractly admired the enemy gunners’ nerve. If a round burst right in front of him, he would have got the hell out of there. They kept doing what they’d been trained to do. “Another round,” he said. In went the shell. He swung the cannon’s muzzle a gnat’s hair to the left and fired again.

  Another hit, but the enemy gun went on firing. He needed two more rounds before it fell silent. The stink of cordite was thick in the turret. “Stubborn bastards,” Lieutenant Griffiths said.

  “Yes, sir,” Pound agreed, coughing. “They’re the ones you’ve especially got to get rid of.”

  With the machine gun knocked out, U.S. infantry moved up some more. They took casualties. With automatic rifles and submachine guns, the Confederate soldiers could outshoot them. But how long could the Confederates keep outshooting them if more ammunition didn’t come into Pittsburgh?

  The Confederates couldn’t use captured U.S. ammo unless they also used captured Springfields. They’d chosen different calibers on purpose, to make it harder for U.S. soldiers to turn captured automatic rifles against them. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. It probably was. But it cut both ways.

  Off to the left, a U.S. barrel got hit and started burning. Nothing in Pittsburgh came cheap. Nothing came easy. The Confederates weren’t going to quit, and they fell back only when they had no choice. How long could they keep it up?

  He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. People with shoulder straps and metal ornaments on them had to fret about such things. All he had to do was shoot whatever he and Lieutenant Griffiths spotted in front of their barrel and hope like hell nobody shot him. He nodded. That would do nicely.

  Shells started bursting around them. The bursts weren’t the ordinary kind; they sounded wrong, and even through the gunsight he saw the crawling mist that spread from them. “Gas!” he yelled.

  Griffiths clanged down the hatch on top of the cupola. “I saw it,” he said. “I was hoping those fuckers were running short. No such luck, I guess.”

  “No, sir,” Pound said as he put on his mask. Out in the open, U.S. infantrymen paused to do the same. Pound went on, “Now we’ll throw some at the Confederates, just to make sure they have to wear masks, too. As long as both sides have it, it doesn’t change anything.”

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Griffiths answered. He had his mask on, too. “But I am saying it’s out there.” Pound couldn’t very well quarrel with that. The barrel commander started to wave to emphasize his point. He choked off the gesture before it was well begun. The inside of a turret was a crowded place.

  Michael Pound made a good pr
ophet, as he often did. A U.S. gas barrage followed in short order. It was heavier than the one the enemy had laid down. Infantrymen advanced in short rushes. The barrel moved up to the next decent firing position. Another block of Pittsburgh, cleared of Confederates.

  XIX

  NEW YEAR’S Eve. One more day till 1943. Flora Blackford was back in her Philadelphia apartment. She hadn’t expected to be anywhere else. Even if she hadn’t campaigned at all, she thought she would have beaten Sheldon Vogelman. People in her district were used to reelecting her. She nodded to herself. It was a nice habit for them to have.

  Joshua was out with friends. “I’ll be back next year,” he’d said. How long had people been making that joke? Probably as long as people had divided time into years. He was liable to come back drunk, too, even if he was underage. Well, if he did, the hangover the next morning ought to teach him not to do it again for a while. She could hope so, anyhow.

  “Underage,” she muttered, and clicked her tongue between her teeth. He would turn eighteen in 1943. Old enough to be conscripted. And conscripted he probably would be. He was healthy. He didn’t have flat feet, a punctured eardrum, or bad eyes. Nothing could keep him out of the war—except being a Congresswoman’s son.

  And he was as stubborn and as stupid as her brother had been in the last war. He didn’t want her to do anything to keep him out. Not even Uncle David’s artificial leg could make him change his mind. He didn’t believe anything like that would happen to him. No one ever believed anything would happen to him—till it did.

  The telephone rang. It made her start. She hurried towards it, more relieved than anything else. If she was talking to somebody, she wouldn’t have to worry about Joshua . . . so much. “Hello?”

  “Flora?” That cheerful baritone could belong to only one man.