Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh. Him.” Straubing waved a hand in a careless gesture of dismissal. “You may as well leave Cincinnatus alone, if that’s what you’re exercised over. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “And you do?” Luther Bliss asked. Calm as ever, Straubing nodded. Bliss spoke in an exasperated growl: “And how come you know so goddamn much, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind my asking, of course?”

  “It’s not very hard, Chief,” Straubing answered, still calm. “I shot that Kennedy bastard myself.”

  “You shot Tom Kennedy?” For once in their lives, Cincinnatus and Luther Bliss said the same thing at the same time with the same intonation: one of astonished disbelief.

  But Lieutenant Straubing only nodded. “I certainly did. He needed shooting. Cincinnatus is one of my better men, and Kennedy was distracting him from his work. He might even have managed to get Cincinnatus involved in something subversive if he’d kept pestering him long enough.”

  Kennedy had got Cincinnatus into several subversive things, but Straubing didn’t know that. Neither did Luther Bliss, who proved it by saying, “We’ve never pinned anything on Cincinnatus here. But you shot Kennedy, Lieutenant? Why in hell didn’t you say something about it to somebody?”

  “I don’t know.” Straubing shrugged. “It never seemed that important. I was only doing my job and making sure one of my men could do his. It’s not like Kennedy was anything but a Rebel diehard. I didn’t think anything more about it than I would have thought about stepping on a cockroach.”

  Cincinnatus believed that; he’d had a long time to watch Straubing’s mind work. After some small pause for thought, Luther Bliss evidently decided he believed it, too. “Lieutenant, you’d have made a lot of people’s lives simpler if you didn’t play your cards so goddamn close to your chest,” he said at last. His eyes flicked to Cincinnatus. “Reckon this fellow’d tell you the same thing.”

  “That’s a fact,” Cincinnatus said. “Everybody reckoned I had somethin’ to do with it. Folks kept tryin’to cipher out who I done it for. Made my life livelier than I really cared for, believe you me it did.”

  “How unfortunate.” Lieutenant Straubing looked as distressed as he ever did, which wasn’t very. “I just thought of him as rubbish who wouldn’t be missed. But if that ends Chief Bliss’ business with you…”

  “Ends this business, anyway.” Bliss touched a finger to the brim of his straw hat. “Obliged to you, Lieutenant. Would have been more obliged if you’d spoken up sooner, but obliged all the same.” Off he went, brisk and competent himself. Ends this business, Cincinnatus thought. That would have to do, though it was far less than he wanted.

  Once inside the shed, Lieutenant Straubing wasted no time and no words: “Let’s get moving, men. We’ve got food and munitions heading down to First Army. One more thing you need to know: with the armistice holding, we’ll be laying off our civilian drivers after this run. We’re hauling less now, and we’ll be doing it with Army personnel only from now on. You civilians have done a good job, and the United States are grateful to you.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” one of those drivers, a white man, demanded before Cincinnatus could get the words out of his mouth.

  “Find other work, of course,” Straubing answered. “I wish you the best of luck, but I’m not your nursemaid.”

  “Some of us got killed haulin’ for you,” Cincinnatus said. “Is that all you got to say, Lieutenant—‘I ain’t your nursemaid’?”

  “Their families are taken care of,” Straubing said. “If you’d been killed, your family would have been taken care of, too. Since you weren’t, you can’t expect the government to hold your hand for you now that your labor is no longer required.”

  He cared about the job. When the job was done, he didn’t care any more. When the job was done, nobody cared any more. Cincinnatus wondered where he’d find work now. He whistled softly under his breath. “God damn,” he said. “Welcome to the United States.”

  Secretary of State Robert Lansing had come before the Transportation Committee to discuss the integration of the railroads in lands conquered from Canada and the Confederate States into the rail network of the USA. Chairman Taft plainly feared some members’ questions might go further afield, but fearing that and being able to do much about it were two different things. “I recognize the distinguished Representative from New York,” he said with a strange sort of polite reluctance.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Flora Hamburger said. She knew she had to follow her course with care, lest she be ruled out of order. “Now, Mr. Secretary, will these railroads be brought into our network to make trade easier with the CSA and whatever is left of Canada after peace is finally established?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Lansing paused to draw on a cigarette and to run a hand through his fine head of gray hair. “That is one of the principal purposes of the integration. The other, of course, is to provide for the defense of the United States, railroads being so important to the transport of men and matériel.” He spoke with the precision of the longtime lawyer he had been.

  “I see.” Flora nodded. “And against which parts of Canada does the administration see a need for future defense?”

  “Those parts not annexed to the United States or to our ally, the Republic of Quebec,” Lansing answered.

  “I understand as much, yes,” Flora said. “Which parts will those be?”

  “We anticipate that the Republic of Quebec will have borders substantially similar to those of the former province of Quebec,” the secretary of state said.

  When he said no more, Flora asked, “And the rest of Canada?”

  “Areas under military occupation, we anticipate annexing,” Lansing said. “Areas not presently occupied are being negotiated with British and Canadian representatives. Whatever we do not annex will naturally fall within our economic sphere of influence, as Holland and Belgium will fall within Germany’s and Serbia and Albania within Austria-Hungary’s.”

  He made fewer bones about exploitation than Flora had thought he would. She asked, “And what of the Confederate States?”

  “Again, we shall annex such land as we now hold, pending adjustments to create frontiers appropriate to our needs and acceptable to the Confederate States, which may be required to exchange territory for any we yield back to them,” Lansing said. “I remind you that this land is different from that of Canada, as it was formerly part of the territory of the United States.”

  “Did we not abandon our claim of sovereignty over it when we recognized the CSA?” Flora asked sharply.

  “So the Confederates now say,” Lansing returned—he might look dry and dusty, but he was dangerous, tarring her with the brush of the beaten enemy. “The view of the president is that recognition of the CSA was granted under duress and maintained by coercion on the part of the Confederates and their allies.”

  “The peace, then, will be as harsh as you can make it,” Flora said.

  Congressman Taft looked unhappy, but the question followed logically from others Lansing had answered without hesitation. He answered this one without hesitation, too: “Yes, ma’am. The stronger the peace from our point of view, the better off we shall be and the longer our foes will need to recover from it and menace us again.”

  “Wouldn’t we be better off making them our friends?” Flora asked.

  “Perhaps we might be, if they showed any interest in friendship,” Lansing said. “The next such interest they do show, however, will be the first.”

  Democrats up and down the committee table laughed. Some of them even snickered. The chairman rapped loudly for order. Flora felt her face flush. The question, while heartfelt, had sounded naive. “If we do annex Canada, I expect a large influx of Socialist voters,” she remarked.

  “No one, as yet, is speaking of making U.S. states from Canadian provinces, so the question of voter affiliation in them is moot,” Lansing replied. “Again, this differs from our approach to territory formerly under Confederate
administration.”

  “Of course it does,” Flora said. “Ex-Confederates are likely to make good Democrats, since they’re reactionary to the core.”

  Taft’s gavel came down again. “That is out of order, Miss Hamburger.”

  “Is it out of order to suggest that the administration will make whatever peace is to its advantage, and will worry about its advantage before it worries about the people’s advantage?” Flora asked. “Perhaps the administration is out of order, and I am not.”

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Taft plied the gavel with such vigor, his beefy face turned red. “We shall have no more such outbursts,” he declared.

  Flora inclined her head to the committee chairman. “Never ask any questions that might be difficult or inconvenient, is what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Chairman?” she said. “Never ask any questions where the American people really need to know the answers. Never mind the First Amendment. Is that what you mean? If it is, Teddy Roosevelt is a lot more like Kaiser Bill than he thinks, or than he wants us to think.”

  A couple of other Socialist congressmen on the Transportation Committee loudly clapped their hands, and the lone Republican with them. William Howard Taft, however, turned redder still: almost the color of a ripe beet. “It is intolerable that you should impugn the administration and the president in this way,” he boomed.

  “Is it tolerable that the administration and the president should impugn the truth?” Flora returned.

  She got no answer. What she got was an early adjournment of the committee. Robert Lansing stuffed papers into his briefcase and scurried away, looking back over his shoulder as if he expected dogs to come after him with teeth bared. His alarmed expression gave Flora some satisfaction, but not enough.

  She went back to her office and stared in dismay at the mountain of paperwork awaiting her there. She’d wanted to go visit David at the Pennsylvania Hospital, but she wouldn’t have the chance, not today, not if she was going to do the job she’d been elected to do. Duty ran strong in her.

  If she couldn’t take the time to visit, she could telephone. When the hospital operator answered, she said, “This is Congresswoman Hamburger. I’d like to speak to one of the doctors seeing my brother.” In this matter, she did not hesitate to use her influence. She could learn from the doctor, but she couldn’t make him do anything he wouldn’t have otherwise except talk to her.

  “Please wait, ma’am,” the operator said, as Flora had known she would. Flora impatiently drummed her fingers on the broad oak surface of the desk.

  “This is Dr. Hanrahan, Congresswoman,” a man’s voice said at last. Flora brightened; of all David’s doctors, Hanrahan seemed the most open. “We tried fitting a prosthesis on your brother this morning. The stump isn’t ready yet, I’m afraid, but he tolerated the padded end of the artificial leg better than he has. Things are healing in there, no doubt about it. And it was very good to see David upright, if only for a little while.”

  Tears stung her eyes. “I wish I could have been there to see that,” she said. “How soon will he be walking? How well will he walk?”

  “No way to tell how soon,” Hanrahan said. “I wish we had some better way to fight infection than we do, but his body will have to win that battle. How well…He’s always going to have a rolling motion to his stride, ma’am; that’s the way the knee joint on the prosthesis works. But I hope he’ll be able to get by without even a cane.”

  “Alevai,” Flora said, which surely meant nothing to an Irishman. She returned to English: “I hope you’re right. That would help a lot.” She wondered if it would help enough for her brother ever to find a wife.

  Maybe Hanrahan was thinking along with her, for he said, “A lot of good men got wounded in this war, Miss Hamburger. People won’t hold injuries against them, not nearly so much as they did before the fighting started. You don’t mind my saying so, there ought to be a law against people who do dumb things like that, anyhow.”

  “I am going to write that down, Dr. Hanrahan,” Flora said, and she did. The Democrats, no doubt, would scream that such laws were not the federal government’s job. The only federal laws they liked readied the country for war. Maybe she could make them think about the aftermath of war, too.

  After she got off the telephone with the doctor, she attacked the papers on her desk, only to be interrupted by Bertha, her secretary, who said, “Congressman Blackford would like to see you, Miss Hamburger.”

  Flora blinked but nodded. Into the inner office came Hosea Blackford, a wide smile on his handsome face. “From everything I hear, Flora, you sent Mr. Lansing home with a tin can tied to his tail. That’s not easy; he’s a clever fellow.”

  “Yes, I saw that,” Flora said. “But if he insists on treating everyone else like an idiot, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”

  “A song one could sing about a great many people, from TR on down,” Blackford said. “But what one could do and what one does are often different. One thing you’ve become since you got here, Flora, is the conscience of the Congress.”

  Nobody had ever called her anything like that before. She felt herself flush, and hoped Blackford couldn’t see her blushing. “Thank you very much,” she said at last. “I’m just doing the best I can.” Her smile was wry. “There have been times when you’ve said I was trying to do too much.”

  “Not here, not now,” the congressman from Dakota answered. “Maybe I was wrong before, too. But certainly not now. You’ll have given Lansing and Roosevelt both something to think about.” He hesitated, then changed the subject: “Will you let me take you out to supper to celebrate a splendid day of witness grilling?”

  Flora hesitated, too. The memory of Herman Bruck’s pestering still grated on her. But Blackford was as smooth as Bruck, back in New York City, wished he were. An invitation to supper was not necessarily an invitation to anything else (though it wasn’t necessarily not such an invitation, either). Well, she always had a hatpin. “All right,” she said.

  Blackford ate shad at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, not far from city hall. “I never got seafood in Dakota, but I make up for it here,” he said. “If only oysters were in season.” Flora would never have thought of eating an oyster, no matter how secular she became. She contented herself with a beefsteak that did indeed provoke contentment.

  Over supper, she told Blackford of the idea she’d got from Dr. Hanrahan. His eyes glowed. “I think we can pass that,” he said. “The Democrats won’t want people—people like us, for instance—to say they don’t care about cripples.”

  “No, especially when their war made so many cripples.” Flora scowled. “And speaking against it is useless. Everyone says, ‘But we won!’ You warned me it would be that way. I didn’t believe it, but you were right.”

  “I wish I’d been wrong, but that’s the way the world works.” Blackford beckoned to the waiter. “Let me have the bill, please.”

  He drove them back to the apartment building where they both lived. It was natural for them to go upstairs together when their flats were across the hall from each other. “Thank you for a very nice evening,” Flora said in the hallway.

  “Thank you for your excellent ideas—and for your excellent company.” Hosea Blackford tipped his hat, then leaned forward and kissed Flora on the mouth. He drew back before she even thought of yanking out a hatpin. Instead of trying to get into her apartment, he went into his own. “Good night,” he said, and shut the door.

  “Good night,” Flora said, slower than she should have. She went into her own apartment, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the front-room sofa. Her thoughts whirled. She’d been glad of the kiss. Blackford was twice her age, and a gentile to boot. But she’d been glad of the kiss. She was too honest with herself to deny it. And she was far too surprised and confused to have any idea what it meant. She wished her family’s apartment had a telephone, but it didn’t. All she could do was go to bed and think and think and think.

  After rumbling through Tennessee inside a ba
rrel, Colonel Irving Morrell found Philadelphia mild and dry by comparison. To anyone coming from anywhere else, the de facto capital of the United States would have been its usual hot, muggy summer self. For once, Morrell was not sorry to return to the General Staff. With the shooting over, the action, such as it was, would be here.

  He sat in a little room with a littler window and an overhead fan doing a desultory job of stirring the air. “Good to see you again, Colonel,” General Leonard Wood said. “You being one of our leading experts on barrels, we want your ideas on how thoroughly to restrict the CSA in building and deploying them.”

  “Sir, my view on that is very simple,” Morrell said. “I think we ought to forbid them to have anything to do with barrels, on pain of war. The more of them they have, the more they do with them, the more trouble they’ll cause us. Those machines knock everything we thought we knew about defense in war into a cocked hat.”

  The chief of the U.S. General Staff frowned. “That won’t be easy. They have a sizable motorcar industry. A plant that manufactures motorcars won’t have any great trouble turning out barrels, too.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand that,” Morrell said. “If I had my way, though, I’d put that in the treaty: no barrels. I expect they’ll cheat, or try to cheat. As soon as we catch them at it, I’d take a new bite out of Arkansas or Texas or Tennessee—and make them cough up the barrels, too. Do that once and they aren’t so likely to take a chance on our doing it twice.”

  Brigadier General Mason Patrick, who wore a pilot’s wings on his left breast pocket, said, “I told you the same thing in regard to aeroplanes, didn’t I, General Wood?” He nodded to Morrell. “Good to see there’s someone else with his head on his shoulders. We just licked these bastards. I want to kick ’em while they’re down. If they build up to where they can take another whack at us in ten or fifteen years, we’ve wasted a lot of lives since 1914.”

  Leonard Wood sighed. “The other side of the coin is, if they sit tight for ten or fifteen years and then start building barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles and all the other tools of war we don’t want them to have, will we have the will to go in and set a foot on their necks, or will we say, ‘Look how much trouble we had beating them the last time. They’ve only got a few of these little toys, so why should we worry about them?’ That’s what makes me wake up sweating of nights.”