The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Will we after this one?” Flora asked. “If we don’t, what will they eventually do to us because we didn’t?”

  “Whatever they can, probably. We put off the evil day as long as we’re able to, that’s all,” Taft said.

  “I suppose so.” Flora also supposed she sounded uneasy. If Taft knew about the U.S. project out in western Washington, he’d never given any sign of it. Flora didn’t want to talk about the possibility of splitting atoms, or about the possibility of one bomb’s being able to destroy a whole city. The Confederate States weren’t so big a country as the United States. But they were plenty big enough to conceal a project like that.

  If the Confederacy lost the war, that kind of project would also fall to pieces…wouldn’t it? It would take lots of money and lots of equipment a beaten CSA wouldn’t be able to afford or to hide. But the fastest way to go from a beaten country to one ready to stand on its own two feet again was to make a bomb like that.

  “The Mormons.” She got back to the issue at hand. “If we’re not going to slaughter them all, we’ve got to accept their surrender. I don’t see any other choice. Do you, really?”

  “No-o-o.” Taft sounded most reluctant to accept his own conclusion, for which Flora could hardly blame him. “But what can we do with them once we do?”

  “Sit on them in Utah or sit on them somewhere else,” Flora said. “Those are the only two things we can do. Which would you rather?”

  “If we drive them out, we bring gentiles into Utah to take their place,” Taft said. “That won’t be easy or cheap, either.”

  “Robert, from now on nothing this government does will be easy or cheap,” Flora said. Taft pursed his lips as if biting down on an unripe persimmon. Democrats hated letting the government spend money, except on guns. But he didn’t contradict her. She went on, “We have to worry about whether we do the right thing. Finding it won’t always be easy, but we have to try.”

  “Right now, nothing comes ahead of beating Jake Featherston,” Taft said. “Nothing.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’ll find many people in the USA to tell you you’re wrong,” Flora said. “I sure won’t. He’s a danger to us and he’s a danger to his own country.” And if he gets one of those uranium bombs, he’s a danger to the whole world. Again, she swallowed that worry. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but you were right and Al Smith was wrong in 1940. We never should have allowed the plebiscites that gave Kentucky and Houston back to the CSA. Featherston uses the empty space in west Texas as a shield against us, and he used Kentucky as a springboard to attack us.”

  “He said he was going to,” Taft said. “He told us what he had in mind, and we didn’t listen to him. It almost makes you think we deserve what’s happened since. Aren’t we paying for our own stupidity?”

  “We’re paying for our own decency,” Flora answered. “It’s not quite the same thing, or I hope it’s not. And that brings us back to the Mormons, I’m afraid. Can we be right and decent at the same time?”

  “If we don’t wipe them off the face of the earth, if we do accept their surrender, how do we make sure we don’t give them a chance to pay us back for letting them live?” Taft asked. “That’s what it comes down to.”

  “Occupy the land they still hold. Disarm them as thoroughly as we can. Maybe ship them out of Utah; I don’t know. Hostages for good behavior, I suppose.” Flora grimaced. She didn’t like that. But she could see that it had a better chance of controlling the Mormons than a lot of other things did. Taft nodded at each suggestion. Then she said, “Freedom of worship as long as they render unto Caesar.” She laughed; she’d quoted the New Testament twice in the space of a few minutes.

  “They’ll use it as an excuse to take lots of wives. They’ll use it as an excuse to get together and plot against us, too,” Taft said.

  “We have to give them a carrot along with the stick,” Flora said. “Otherwise, they’ll just keep fighting. Wouldn’t you, if you didn’t get anything by quitting? And do you know what else? As long as all their marriages after the first one are unofficial, I’m sick of flabbling about them. Life is too short.”

  Taft grumbled discontentedly. He was a straitlaced man. But when they discussed the surrender offer in the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, he didn’t oppose her when she made the same proposal. She hoped that was a good sign.

  From Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. In one way, Dr. Leonard O’Doull thought that was progress. When he’d labored in the hospital on the University of Pittsburgh campus, the Confederates still had a chance to break through, to run wild in the second year of the war as they did in the first.

  That didn’t-quite-happen. Now, after a hard winter and a rugged spring, the enemy was gone from U.S. soil east of the Mississippi. This summer, the United States would have the chance to show what they could do.

  Granville McDougald summed up O’Doull’s worries in one pithy sentence: “How are we going to fuck it up this time?”

  Even more than To be or not to be?, that was the question. The U.S. push toward Richmond had shown a lot of the ways not to fight a war. Daniel MacArthur seemed to do his best to acquaint the War Department with every single one of them. He hadn’t come west to lead whatever the United States would do out here. That struck O’Doull as at least mildly encouraging.

  But when he looked around at what was left of Cincinnati, when he thought about all the devastation between Pittsburgh and here, he came close to despairing. His church taught that despair was the one unforgivable sin, and he understood why, but it was hard to avoid anyway. “Have we got enough left to do what we need to do?” he asked.

  “Have the Confederates got enough left to stop us?” McDougald returned.

  That was the other side of the coin, all right. Plainly, the Confederates had put everything they had into the invasion of Ohio and Pennsylvania. “They aren’t running up the white flag,” O’Doull said. The ruins of Cincinnati proved that, too. After sullenly pulling back across the Ohio-and after rescuing most of the force they had north of the river-Featherston’s men started methodically shelling the Ohio city from emplacements in Kentucky. Their attitude seemed to be that if the United States wanted to use Cincinnati as a base from which to invade C.S. territory, they were welcome to try.

  Most of the casualties U.S. doctors were treating came from artillery rounds. Bombs caused the rest; Confederate airplanes didn’t come over every night, but they came whenever they could. U.S. bombers also did their best to smash up targets on the far side of the river.

  “When do you think the balloon will go up?” McDougald asked. The hospital where they worked was painted white and had big Red Crosses on the walls and roof. O’Doull didn’t think the Confederates shelled and bombed it on purpose. That didn’t mean it didn’t get hit every now and again. C.S. bombs and shells didn’t have eyes; they couldn’t see exactly where they were going.

  O’Doull remembered other offensives in days and years gone by. “When we’ve gathered everything together so there’s no possible doubt about where we’re going or what we’re doing,” he answered. “When we’ve given the Confederates all the time they need to get ready to knock us for a loop.”

  McDougald raised an eyebrow toward the bald crown of his head. “You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you, Doc?”

  “Well, hell, Granny, you asked,” O’Doull said. “Tell me that’s not how we usually do things.”

  “Can’t,” Granville McDougald admitted. “Wish to God I could, but I damn well can’t. Besides, it looks like we’re filling Cincinnati up with everything under the sun so we can pop the Confederates in the nose.”

  “Doesn’t it just?” O’Doull said. “And don’t you suppose they’ve got a suspicion that we might want to cross the river here? Wouldn’t you?”

  “Not me. I’ve given up having suspicions. They end up getting confirmed, and then I’m unhappy,” the medic said. “I don’t like being unhappy. It makes me sad when I am.”

 
; “Er-right,” O’Doull said. McDougald smiled back, calm as a cynical Buddha.

  Before either one of them could go any further with it, they got called into an operating room. They had no room for a difference of opinion there. What needed doing was only too obvious: nothing any surgeon in the world could do would save an arm mangled like that one.

  “Want to do the honors, Granny?” O’Doull said. “I’ll pass gas for you if you care to.”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind,” McDougald answered. “A straight amputation I can manage, and he’ll get the same result from me as he would from you. It’s the complicated stuff where you’ve got an edge on me.”

  To some degree, that was true. The degree was less than McDougald made it out to be. Scrupulously polite, the medic didn’t pretend to have an M.D.’s skills. But he did have close to thirty years of experience at repairing wounded men. Plenty of doctors knew less than he did, and were more arrogant about what they did know.

  O’Doull knew he was an amateur anesthetist himself. He’d knocked out patients back in Quebec before operating on them. He’d done it in the field, too, but he wasn’t all that confident in his own skills.

  Here, though, everything was straightforward. As soon as the man went out, McDougald got to work with scalpel and bone saw, taking the mangled arm off above the elbow. He tied off bleeders one after another, closed the dreadful wound, and sighed. “Whatever that poor guy was, he won’t be when he wakes up.”

  “Maybe he was left-handed,” O’Doull said.

  “Mm-maybe.” McDougald was a lefty himself. “Odds are long, though. And even if a one-armed man has his good arm, he’s still got a hard road in front of him.”

  “Better than dying,” O’Doull said.

  “I suppose you’re right. I never once heard a dead man say he’d rather be the way he was than short an arm,” McDougald said.

  “You never…” O’Doull’s voice trailed away as he worked through the possibilities in that. “How many dead people do you usually talk with?”

  “Oh, not that many,” Granville McDougald said. “Harder than anything getting a straight answer out of ’em.”

  “I believe you,” O’Doull said. “Have you noticed it’s pretty damn hard getting a straight answer out of you, too?”

  “Out of me? Nah.” McDougald shook his head. “I’m as transparent as glass. The only problem with that is, too many of our people are as breakable as glass, which isn’t so good.”

  He could spin out nonsense, or sometimes stuff that seemed like nonsense but wasn’t, faster than O’Doull could pin him down on it. O’Doull mostly didn’t try; only the sheer outrageousness of the medic’s latest effort pulled a protest out of him.

  Before he could do any more squawking, an officer who pretty plainly wasn’t a doctor came into the O.R. “Major O’Doull?” the stranger asked. When O’Doull admitted he was himself, the newcomer said, “I’m Vic Hodding. I’m a captain in Intelligence.”

  Granny McDougald let out a soft snort. Above Hodding’s surgical mask, his cat-green eyes swung toward the medic. McDougald blandly stared back. Nobody could prove a thing, even if the editorial message came through loud and clear. “Well, Captain, what can I do for you?” O’Doull asked, wondering if he really wanted to know.

  “We’ve got a wounded man we brought back from the other side of the Ohio,” Hodding replied. “He knows some things we really need to find out. What are the drugs that would help pull them out of him?”

  “Rack and thumbscrews often work wonders,” McDougald said, hardly bothering to hide his scorn.

  Hodding glanced toward him again. “Who is this man?” he inquired of O’Doull with a certain dangerous formality.

  “Never mind,” O’Doull answered. “If you need help from me, you don’t need to know. And if you don’t need help from me, I’ll be damned if I tell you. And I’ll do everything I know how to do to stop you from making trouble for him.”

  Captain Hodding took that more calmly than O’Doull expected-more calmly than he would have himself, he thought. “He must be good at what he does,” the Intelligence officer remarked. O’Doull said nothing. Hodding went on, “Anyway, we need answers from this guy. Strongarm stuff may just get us lies-and besides, we don’t like to do it, no matter what Mr. High And Mighty there says. What goes around comes around, and the Confederates are too likely to pay us back if we get rough.”

  O’Doull could see what Granny McDougald was thinking. So then they pay us back with needles instead. Oh, boy. But needles were less likely to wreck a man for life than some of the other things interrogators did.

  “What do you think this guy knows?” O’Doull asked. Vic Hodding stood mute. O’Doull made an impatient noise. “Look, I’m going to be there while you’re questioning him, right? So what the hell are you flabbling about? You don’t want me there, go find some other guy to do this for you.”

  After some thought and an apparent wrestle with himself, Hodding nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, Doc. You have need-to-know.” The way he brought out the phrase would have told O’Doull he was in Intelligence even without any other evidence. He continued, “We infiltrated some people down south of the river and extracted this guy. What he doesn’t know about their trains and trucks in Kentucky and Tennessee isn’t worth knowing. We should have got him out clean, but he put up more of a fight than we figured.” He shrugged. “These things happen.”

  “In films, the guy always has the secret for the new poison gas,” O’Doull said.

  “Yeah, and the blonde with the big boobs teases it out of him, and he loves every minute of it,” Hodding said. “Doctors in films never treat ringworm, either. But if the Confederates have trouble moving supplies, that makes our life a hell of a lot easier.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Granville McDougald murmured, “Pentothal?”

  O’Doull nodded. “Best chance I’ve got.” He turned to the Intelligence officer. “Sodium pentothal may make him not care so much about what he says. Or it may not. Drugging a guy and making him spill his guts is another one of those things that work better in films.”

  “All right. Do what you can,” Hodding said. “He’s likelier to blab with the stuff in him than without it, right?” O’Doull nodded again-that was true, and didn’t commit him to anything. Captain Hodding gestured toward the door. “Come on, then.”

  The Confederate officer was wounded in the leg and shoulder. He glared at O’Doull. “I am Travis W.W. Oliphant, colonel, C.S. Army.” He gave his pay number.

  “Pleased to meet you, Colonel. I’m Major O’Doull. I’m a doctor, and I’m going to give you something to make you feel a little better,” O’Doull said. Colonel Oliphant looked suspicious, but he didn’t try to fight as O’Doull injected him.

  After a little while, the Confederate said, “I do feel easier.” Pentothal sneaked up on you. It didn’t make your troubles go away, but it did mean you weren’t likely to remember them once you came out from under it.

  Captain Hodding started questioning Oliphant. The logistics specialist didn’t seem to worry about what he said. A lot that came out was drivel, but enough wasn’t to keep Hodding scribbling notes. O’Doull gave the colonel more pentothal. Too much and he’d stop making sense altogether. Not enough and he’d clam up. O’Doull found what seemed the right dosage by experiment.

  “Thanks, Major,” Hodding said when Colonel Oliphant ran dry. “I think you helped.”

  “Well, good,” O’Doull answered, and wondered if it was. Would he want to look in a mirror the next time he passed one?

  Instead of going off to the peaceful, even bucolic campus of Washington University, Clarence Potter summoned Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont to Richmond. Potter wanted the nuclear physicist to see what the war was doing to the capital of the CSA. Maybe then FitzBelmont wouldn’t think of his experiments as abstractions that could move along at their own pace. Maybe.

  If some Florida cinema studio needed a professor out of central casting, it could do much worse
than Henderson FitzBelmont. He was tweedy. He was bespectacled. Clarence Potter wore eyeglasses, too, and had since he was a young man. But he didn’t look perpetually surprised at the world around him the way Professor FitzBelmont did.

  He met the physicist in Capitol Square, across Ninth Street from the War Department. The bench on which he waited was the one where he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III hadn’t quite plotted against Jake Featherston. It gave a fine view of the bombed-out ruins of the Capitol, of the craters whose dirt sported new grass and even flowers as spring advanced, and of the sandbagged statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. If you looked around, you could see more of what almost two years of Yankee air raids had done to Richmond.

  Professor FitzBelmont came into Capitol Square at two o’clock, just when Potter asked him to. Potter stood up and waved. He kept waving till FitzBelmont spotted him. A look of relief on his face, the professor waved back and picked his way over the battered ground to the bench.

  “Hello, uh, General,” FitzBelmont said, sticking out a hand.

  “Professor.” Potter shook hands. Henderson FitzBelmont did have a respectable grip. Potter gestured to the bench. “Have a seat. We’ve got some things to talk about.”

  “All right.” Professor FitzBelmont looked around. “I must say I’ve seen views that inspired me more.”

  “You surprise me,” Potter said.

  “I do? Why?” the physicist said. “It’s dreary, it’s battered, it’s sad-I can’t think of one good thing to say about it.”

  “That’s why it ought to inspire you,” Potter said. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Henderson V. FitzBelmont blinked. Potter went on, “It shows you that your country’s in trouble. If any one man can get us out of trouble, you’re him. If we have uranium bombs, we win. It’s that simple.”

  “Mr. Potter-” FitzBelmont began.

  “General Potter, please,” Potter broke in. He saw the faint scorn the other man didn’t have the sense to hide. Nettled, he did his best to explain: “It means as much to me as Professor does to you, and I had to go through a lot to earn it-not the same kinds of things you did, but a lot.”