Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

“Hello, Franklin,” she said. “What can I do for you?” Roosevelt had never called her at the apartment before.

  “How would you like to ring in the New Year with me at the War Department?”

  She hesitated only a moment. “I’ll be over as soon as I can get a cab.”

  “See you in a little while, then.” He hung up.

  She didn’t think the USA’s military planners had a fancy party waiting for her. But the Assistant Secretary of War wasn’t going to go into detail about why he wanted to see her, not over the telephone. She called the cab company. They started to tell her she would have to wait half an hour. “It’s our busiest day of the year, lady. Sorry.” The dispatcher didn’t sound the least bit sorry.

  “This is Congresswoman Blackford.” Flora didn’t tell him he would be sorry if she didn’t get a cab sooner than that, but she didn’t need to, either. He got the message, loud and clear.

  A cab sat waiting when she got to the street. An ordinary person wouldn’t have been able to summon one so fast. Remembering that chafed at her Socialist sense of equality. She consoled herself by thinking she carried more responsibility than an ordinary person. From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs. Right now, she needed to get to the War Department in a hurry.

  The cabby hopped out and held the door open for her. “Where to, ma’am?” he asked. She told him as she got in. He nodded. “Fast as I can,” he promised; the dispatcher must have let him know who she was.

  He kept his word, but he couldn’t go very fast. Confederate bombers had been over the night before, so some of the roads had fresh craters, while sawhorses and red tape closed off others so specialists could try to defuse time bombs. Flora had heard their life expectancy was measured in weeks. That information was secret from the public, but she feared the specialists knew it.

  Not far from downtown, the wreckage of a downed C.S. airplane further snarled traffic. “Nice to see we nail one every once in a while,” the taxi driver said. “Those . . . people need to pay for what they do.” The little pause said he’d remembered just in time that he carried someone important.

  “Yes.” Flora almost spoke more strongly herself. There wasn’t enough plywood and cardboard in Philadelphia—there probably wasn’t enough in the world—to cover up all the windows the Confederates had blown out. So many buildings had pieces bitten from them, or were only charred ruins. Ordinary bombs could start fires, and the Confederates dropped incendiaries, too. One popular propaganda poster showed a long, skinny incendiary bomb with Jake Featherston’s bony face at one end clamped in a pair of tongs and about to go into a bucket of water. Underneath the sizzling Confederate President were three words: COOL HIM OFF!

  “Here you go, ma’am.” The driver pulled up in front of the War Department. It had taken plenty of damage, too, even if it was built from the best reinforced concrete taxpayer dollars could buy. Most of its business went on underground these days. Flora didn’t know how far underground the tunnels ran. She didn’t need to know. Not many people did.

  She paid the cabby. Her breath smoked as she went up the battered steps. She showed the sentries her identity papers. “I’m here to see Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” she said.

  “Hold on for a minute, ma’am.” One of them picked up a telephone and spoke into it. After not much longer than the promised wait, he hung up and nodded to her. “You can go ahead, ma’am. You’re legit, all right. Willie, take her to Mr. Roosevelt’s office.”

  Willie looked younger than her own Joshua. He led her down endless flights of stairs. All she knew when he walked her along a corridor was that at least one more level lay below the one she was on. He stopped at a door with ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR neatly painted on the frosted-glass window. “Here you are, ma’am. When you need to come up, call the front desk and somebody will come down to guide you.”

  Don’t go wandering around on your own, he meant. “All right,” Flora answered. Willie looked relieved.

  She opened the door. “Hello, Flora! Come in,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said. Sitting at his desk, a cigarette holder in his mouth at a jaunty angle, he looked strong and virile. But he sat in a wheelchair, and went on, “You’ll have to excuse my not rising, I’m afraid.” A shrug of his broad shoulders might have added, What can you do?

  “Of course,” Flora said quickly, and then, “Happy New Year.” She couldn’t go wrong with that.

  “Same to you,” Roosevelt answered. “And I hope it will be a Happy New Year for the country, too. We’re in better shape now than we were when 1942 started, anyhow. I don’t think the Confederates will be able to get out of the noose around Pittsburgh, and that will cost them. That will cost them plenty.”

  “Good,” Flora said. “Lord knows they’ve cost us plenty. Is that what you wanted to talk about tonight?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. I wanted to tell you Columbus has discovered America.”

  Flora didn’t know how to take that. With a smile seemed the best way. “I thought he might have,” she agreed. “Otherwise we’d be doing this somewhere else and speaking a different language—a couple of different languages, I expect.”

  Roosevelt’s big, booming laugh filled the office. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. But that’s the message we got back from Washington State—Hanford, the name of the town is—the other day. It means they’ve done the first big part of what they set out to do.”

  “And what is that, Franklin?” she asked. “I’ve sat on the secret for so long, don’t you think I’m entitled to find out?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk about tonight,” he answered. “I have clearance from the President to tell you what’s what.” He cocked his head and gave her a coy, even an arch, smile. “So you want to know, eh?”

  “Maybe a little,” Flora said, and Roosevelt laughed again.

  “Tell me everything you know about uranium,” he said.

  Flora sat silent for perhaps half a minute. “There,” she said. “I just did.”

  This time, Roosevelt positively chortled. “Well, that’s what I said when this whole thing started—my exact words, to tell you the truth. Now I’m going to tell you what the professors with the slide rules told me.”

  And he did. He was a lively, well-organized speaker. He could have lectured at any college in the country. Flora’s head soon started spinning even so. Uranium-235, U-238, uranium hexafluoride, centrifuges, gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion . . . It all seemed diffuse to her, and quite a bit of it seemed gaseous.

  “What have they done out there now?” she asked.

  “They’ve enriched enough uranium to have a self-sustaining reaction,” Roosevelt replied. Enriched, Flora had learned, meant getting a mix with more U-235—the kind that could explode—and less U-238, which couldn’t. A sustained reaction wasn’t an explosion, but she gathered it was a long step on the way towards one.

  “If everything goes right and we get the weapon soon enough, this could win us the war, couldn’t it?” Flora said.

  “Well, nobody knows for sure,” Roosevelt answered, “but the professors seem to think so.”

  “The Germans are working on it, too?” she asked.

  “Yes. No doubt about it. They’re the ones who found fission in the first place,” he said.

  “All right. What about the Confederates?” Flora asked.

  “We think they have something going on,” the Assistant Secretary of War said carefully. “We don’t know as much about it as we wish we did. We’re trying to find out more.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.” Flora’s own calm meant she would have started screaming at him if he’d told her anything else. “How much do they know about what we’re doing?”

  “That is the question.” Maybe Roosevelt was quoting Hamlet, maybe just answering her. “The truth is, we’re not sure. Counterintelligence hasn’t picked up whatever intelligence they’ve gathered on us.”

  “I hope you’re trying everything under the sun
,” Flora said, again in lieu of yelling.

  “Oh, yes,” Roosevelt said. “So far, we’ve only figured out one defense against these atomic explosions.”

  “Really? That’s one more than I’d imagined,” Flora said. “What is it?”

  “To be somewhere else when they go off.”

  “Oh.” Flora laughed. But Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t laughing now. He meant it. Another thing she hadn’t imagined was a race where the winners won everything and the losers were probably ruined forever. “How long between the, uh, sustained reaction and a real bomb we can use?”

  Roosevelt spread his hands. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The physicists say anywhere between six months and ten years, depending on how fast they can solve the engineering problems.”

  “That’s no good!” Flora said. “If it’s ten years for us and six months for the CSA, we’ll never get the chance to finish.”

  “They tell me it’s more likely to be the other way around,” Roosevelt said. “For one thing, we do seem to have started before the Confederates did. For another, we’ve got three times as many physicists and engineers and such as they do.”

  “Serves them right for not educating their Negroes.” Flora stopped and grimaced. These days, the Confederates were doing worse with their Negroes than not educating them. Thinking of what they were doing made her say, “We’d better win this race.”

  “I think we will.” Franklin Roosevelt sounded confident—but then, he usually did. “Whether we’ll win it in time to use one of those bombs in this war . . . That I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”

  “What about Germany and England and France? What about Japan?” Flora asked.

  “As I said, we have to guess the Kaiser is somewhere ahead of us. How far, I don’t know,” Roosevelt said. “The others? I don’t know that, either. If we have intelligence about what they’re doing, it doesn’t come through me.” Flora thought it should have, but that wasn’t her province. She decided she had done the right thing by not making a fuss about the budget entry she’d found. If this worked, it would win the war.

  And if it didn’t, how many hundreds of millions of dollars would they have thrown down a rathole? As 1942 passed into 1943, she tried not to think about that.

  A rmstrong Grimes had charge of a platoon. In the middle of Salt Lake City in the middle of winter, he could have done without the honor. But Lieutenant Streczyk was somewhere far back of the line, his left leg gone below the knee. He’d been unlucky or incautious enough to step on a mine.

  One of these days, they might send another junior officer out to the front to take charge of things. But the Utah campaign got what other fronts didn’t want or need, and these days didn’t get a whole lot of that. Till some luckless and probably brainless lieutenant showed up, Armstrong had the job.

  Yossel Reisen commanded the squad that had been his. “If this shit keeps up, we’ll be majors by the time we got out of here,” Armstrong said.

  “I don’t even care if I’m a corporal when I get out of here,” Yossel answered. “As long as I get out, that’s all that matters.”

  “Well, yeah. I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong, on account of you’re not,” Armstrong said. “Wish to God the Mormons would pack it in and quit. They gotta know ain’t no way in hell they can win.”

  “I don’t think they care. I think all they’ve got left is going down swinging.” Yossel paused to light a cigarette. He and Armstrong sprawled behind a stone wall that protected them from snipers. If Armstrong stuck his head up, he could see the rebuilt and rewrecked Mormon Temple ahead. He didn’t—if he were so foolish, a Mormon rifleman would put a round in his ear. After a drag, Yossel went on, “Jews were like that once upon a time. They rose up against the Romans whenever they saw the chance . . . and the Romans handed them their heads every damn time.”

  Palestine, these days, was a sleepy Ottoman province. It had lots of Arabs, some Jews, and just enough Turks to garrison the towns and collect taxes. No matter how holy it was, nothing much ever happened there. Odds were nothing ever would.

  Something erupted from behind the Mormon lines. “Screaming meemie!” Armstrong yelled.

  The spigot-mortar bomb came down a few hundred yards away. Even that was close enough to shake him with the blast. “They really do love you,” Yossel Reisen said. “Ever since you had that Mormon strip, we’ve got more little presents like that than anybody else.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Armstrong said, not because Reisen was wrong but because he was right. Armstrong wished he hadn’t given the Mormon a hard time, too. Fighting these maniacs was hard enough when you were just one enemy among many. When they were trying to kill you in particular . . . The most Armstrong could say was that they hadn’t done it yet.

  U.S. artillery woke up about ten minutes later. Shells screamed into the area from which the screaming meemie had come. But then, the launcher was bound to be long gone.

  “How far do you think it is to the Temple?” Armstrong asked. His voice sounded strange because he was talking through his gas mask. Some of the crap the Army threw at the Mormons was liable to blow back into the U.S. positions. And the Mormons still had gas of their own, which they fired from mortars whenever the artillery used it against them. Armstrong didn’t know whether they got it from the CSA or cooked it up in a basement in Ogden. He didn’t care, either. He did know it was a major pain in the rear.

  Yossel Reisen also looked like a pig-snouted Martian monster in a bad serial. “Couple miles,” he answered, sounding almost as unearthly as he looked.

  “Yeah, about what I figured,” Armstrong agreed. “How long you think we’ll need to get there? How hard will those Mormon fuckers fight to hang on to it?”

  “Too long, and even harder than they’ve fought already,” Yossel said.

  That wasn’t scientific, but it matched what Armstrong was thinking much too well. He said, “What do you think the odds are we’ll live through it?”

  This time, Reisen didn’t answer right away. When he did, he said, “Well, we’re still here so far.”

  Armstrong almost asked him what the odds of that were. The only reason he didn’t was, he already knew the answer. The odds were damn slim. He wouldn’t have been leading a squad if that people bomb hadn’t got Sergeant Stowe. He wouldn’t have had the platoon if that mine hadn’t nailed Lieutenant Streczyk. Either or both of those disasters could have happened to him just as easily. So could a thousand others. The same went for Yossel. But they were both still here, neither of them much more than scratched.

  In the next few days, Armstrong really started wondering how long he would last. More and more barrels came forward. Most were the waddling monsters kept in storage since the Great War, but some more modern machines went into the mix. None, though, had the stouter turrets and bigger guns that marked the latest models. Every time one of those rolled off the assembly line, it headed straight for the closest Confederate concentration.

  More artillery came in, too. And when the weather cleared enough for bombers and fighters to fly, there were more of them, and less antiquated machines, than usual. He knew the signs. The United States were gearing up for another big push.

  All the support would help. When the balloon went up, though, it would still be man against man, rifle against rifle, machine gun against machine gun, land mine against dumb luck. Armstrong had a wholesome respect for the men he faced. Nobody who’d been in the line more than a few days had anything but respect for the men of what they called the Republic of Deseret.

  Armstrong respected them so much, he wished he didn’t have to go after them one more time. Such wishes usually mattered not at all. This time, his fairy godmother must have been listening. The high command pulled his battered regiment out of the line and stuck in a fresh one that was at full strength.

  “Breaks my heart,” Armstrong said as he trudged away from what was bound to be a bloody mess.

  “Yeah, I can tell,” Yossel Reisen agree
d. “I’m pretty goddamn disappointed myself, if anybody wants to know the truth.” They both laughed the giddy laughs of men who’d just got reprieves from the governor.

  The rest of the soldiers heading back into reserve were every bit as relieved. They were dirty and skinny and unshaven. Their uniforms were faded and torn and spotted. A lot of them wore ordinary denim jackets and canvas topcoats liberated from the ruins instead of Army-issue warm clothing. Their eyes were far away.

  By contrast, the men replacing them might have stepped out of a recruiting film. They were clean. Their uniforms were clean. Their greatcoats were the same green-gray as everything else. Armstrong was younger than most of the rookies, but felt twenty years older. These fellows hadn’t been through hell—yet.

  “Does your mama know you’re here?” he called to a natty private moving up.

  By the private’s expression, he wanted to say something about Armstrong’s mother, too. He didn’t have the nerve. It wasn’t just that Armstrong outranked him, either. The kid probably hadn’t seen action yet. Armstrong’s grubby clothes, his dirt, and his whiskers said he had. He’d earned the right to pop off. Before long, the youngster would enjoy it, too—if that was the word, and if he lived.

  “Look at all these men.” Yossel nodded toward the troops marching past. “Remember when our regiment was this big?”

  “Been a while.” Armstrong tried to work out just how long it had been. He needed some thought. “Shit, I think we’d taken enough casualties after the first time we ran into the Confederates in Ohio to be smaller than that outfit.”

  “I think you’re right,” Yossel said. “And they never send enough replacements to get us back up to strength, either.”

  “Nope.” Armstrong pulled out a pack of cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth, and offered them to Yossel. The other noncom took one. He lit it. Armstrong leaned close to get his started, then went on, “The ones we do get aren’t worth much, either.”

  “If they live long enough, they mostly learn,” Yossel said. “Those first few days in the line, though . . .”