The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  “Uh-huh.” He didn’t try to tell her she was wrong. Instead, he pointed to a shell crater down the street. “They mean it here.”

  “I said I was sorry.” Beckie started to get mad, too. But she knew she’d goofed, so she added, “I’ll try not to do anything like that again.”

  “Okay.” Justin nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “If you weren’t acting like a mystery man …” Beckie said.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Justin muttered. She wondered what he meant. Away from her? That would be great, she thought, and really did get angry. Or did he mean away from Elizabeth? The way it sounded, he meant out of this world. But if he meant that, where did he aim to go?

  She let out a little of her frustration—not much, but a little—by saying, “There’s stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”

  “No,” he said quickly: too quickly, in a way that couldn’t mean anything but yes.

  As if he did say yes, she went on, “It’s okay. Who am I gonna tell it to? Gran?” Her own laugh came close to hysteria. Even she thought that was funny. “Sheriff Cochrane?” That wasn’t funny—it was scary. “The soldiers?” That wasn’t just scary—it was ridiculous.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” he said. She didn’t believe him, even if he sounded a lot more convincing now than he did in his moment of surprise and dismay. He went on, “This is as silly as your idea about the United States holding together.”

  “I didn’t say that was true. I just said it would’ve been neat.” Beckie looked at him. “You’re lying to me. I don’t know why—maybe you’ve got reasons, even if I can’t imagine what they are. But if you are, since you are, we’re not going anywhere much, are we?”

  “I guess not,” he said sadly. “I’m sorry, Beckie.” He didn’t even bother pretending he wasn’t lying any more. “You don’t know what you’re asking for, and I can’t tell you. I wish I could, and I never thought I’d do that in a million years.”

  “You can,” she said. “All you have to do is open your mouth and tell the truth.”

  “It’s not that simple.” He set his can of fizz on the grass not far from the trench. Then he started to walk away.

  “Where are you going?” Beckie called after him.

  “Back to the motel,” he answered over his shoulder. “You called it—this isn’t going anywhere. It’s too bad, but it’s not. Take care. I’ll see you.” By which he had to mean, I won’t see you. He kept walking.

  She couldn’t even tell him he was wrong, because she knew he was right. Knowing that and liking it were two different critters. Beckie stared after him till ambush tears scalded her cheeks.

  Justin sat on the edge of his bed in the motel room, his face buried in his hands. “It’s not the end of the world,” Mr. Brooks said. “You did the right thing, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “It doesn’t,” Justin said. “Chances are we weren’t going anywhere anyway. That doesn’t make me feel any better. Beckie was—is—about the only nice thing here, and now that’s ruined. What am I supposed to do, dance a jig?”

  “This room isn’t big enough,” Mr. Brooks said. Justin looked up long enough to give him a dirty look, then submerged again. The older man went on, “I’m sorry—sort of. But one of the things you’re not supposed to do is give away the Crosstime Traffic secret. California probably has the technology and the computer power to build transposition chambers if they get the idea that they can. And wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Well, this California would be better than some of the other countries in different high-tech alternates,” Justin said.

  “Sure. But better isn’t good, and you can’t pretend it is.” Mr. Brooks sighed. “Chances are we’re fighting a losing battle. Sooner or later, somebody else will figure out how to go crosstime, and we’ll have to deal with it. But later is better than sooner. We need to be in a stronger position ourselves. Look at the slavery scandal we just went through. How are we supposed to tell other people to play nice if we can’t do it ourselves?”

  “Beats me.” Justin looked up again, a little longer this time. “Not easy for me to care right now.”

  “I know,” Mr. Brooks said. “Breaking up always feels like the end of the world.”

  Justin started to ask him what he knew about it. He started to, but he didn’t. Something in the coin and stamp dealer’s expression told him it wouldn’t be a good idea. Randolph Brooks didn’t talk about himself a whole lot. That didn’t mean he hadn’t done things—more things than Justin had, plainly.

  “It does get better eventually,” Mr. Brooks went on. “You know what they say—time wounds all heels.” Did they say that? If they did, did Beckie’s grandmother know about it? Thinking about Beckie, or even her annoying grandmother, still hurt like anything. But Mr. Brooks still hadn’t finished: “It’s bad while it’s going on, though. There’s not much you can do about it. I’m sorry. I’m extra sorry ’cause she’s a nice kid.”

  She’s no kid! But that was one more thing Justin didn’t say. Mr. Brooks was old enough to be his father, so Beckie probably did look like a kid to him. (Thinking about his real father, who had a new lady friend, also hurt.)

  “What am I going to do?” Justin did ask. “I can’t just stay cooped up in here 24/7.”

  “She doesn’t hate you—or it doesn’t sound like she does, anyway,” Mr. Brooks said. “You can just be friends friends, if you know what I mean. Maybe that’s better than nothing.”

  “Maybe.” Justin didn’t sound as if he believed it. The reason was simple: he didn’t. “Seeing her is liable to hurt too much to stand.”

  “Chance you take,” Mr. Brooks said with a shrug. “If it does, you don’t do it anymore.” He could afford to sound callous. He wasn’t the one who’d just had things fall apart. Justin remembered reading something somewhere. Nobody dies of a broken heart. You only wish you could. Whoever said that hit it right on the button. Justin sure wished he could.

  Before he could answer, the Virginia soldiers who’d taken over the rest of the motel started yelling and cussing a mile a minute, maybe faster. Some of them sounded furious. Others sounded scared. They were all shouting about somebody named Adrian. Whether that was a first name or a last, Justin had no idea.

  Then someone said something he couldn’t misunderstand: “He’s got it!”

  He and Mr. Brooks looked at each other. They both mouthed the same one-syllable word. It wasn’t a big surprise that Adrian—or one of the soldiers, anyway—had come down with the disease. It was loose in Elizabeth. Everybody knew that. But knowing it didn’t make this welcome news.

  “Which one is Adrian?” Justin couldn’t keep track of all the soldiers quartered here.

  “I think he’s the big guy, the one about your size,” Mr. Brooks answered. When he said he thought something like that was so, it was, to about four decimal places. He wasn’t a coin and stamp dealer for nothing. He remembered what things were worth, and all the technical details of why they were worth what they were worth, too. So why wouldn’t he keep track of soldiers?

  Men running in army boots outside the motel room sounded a lot like stampeding elephants. Elephants didn’t shout and use foul language, though. Or if they did, people couldn’t understand them, which amounted to the same thing.

  “I think Millard’s got it, too!” somebody yelled. That produced more cussing. Most people in this alternate swore less than they did in the home timeline, but the soldiers were an exception.

  “Here comes the doc!” another soldier hollered. They were all carrying on at something above the tops of their lungs.

  “What can you do for ’em, Doc?” Three or four people shouted the same question at once.

  “If it is the plague, I can’t do anything much,” the military doctor answered. That was the meaning of what he said, anyhow. It came out a lot warmer. He also had unkind things to say about everyone who’d been born in Ohio for the past three hundred years. “And their dogs, too,” he added. />
  “Can you give ’em that globby stuff?” a soldier asked.

  “Gamma globulin, you mean? I can give the shots, but I don’t know how much good they’ll do, or if they’ll do any,” the doctor said. “That stuff is supposed to keep them from getting sick in the first place, not to cure them if they do. But I’ll try it. I don’t see how it can hurt them. And I’ll tell you what y’all better do.”

  “What’s that?” Again, several soldiers asked the question.

  “Get away from this place,” the doctor told them. “Go on—scoot. The less contact you have with infected people, the better your chances of staying well. And send Major Duncan close enough so I can shout at him. This cell-phone jamming is a pain in the … . Anyway, I need to talk to him. We have to figure out whether hanging on to this miserable little piddlepot of a town is worth the risk.”

  Some of the soldiers tried to volunteer to stay and help the military doctor take care of their buddies, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He loudly and foully insisted it was his job, not theirs. Randolph Brooks nodded approval of the men for wanting to stay and of the doctor for not letting them. “He’s got nerve, that one,” the coin and stamp dealer said.

  “Has he got any sense?” Justin asked.

  Mr. Brooks shrugged. “He’s already about as exposed as you can be. For that matter, so are we.” Immunity shots or not, Justin could have done without the reminder.

  Once given orders to leave, the soldiers didn’t seem sorry to go. It got quieter than it had been since they took over most of the motel. It got so quiet, it made Justin nervous—he’d grown used to their racket, even if he didn’t like it.

  After a bit, someone—Justin supposed it was Major Duncan—came close enough to shout questions at the doctor. Justin had trouble making out what they were. The major didn’t want to get real close, which was understandable enough. The doctor’s answers were plain enough and then some. He knew how to project. Justin wondered if he’d done drama in high school or college.

  “How are they?” he yelled. “They’re sick, that’s how they are. And they’re getting sicker by the minute, too.” A pause. A muffled question from the major. “Yes, the men lodged here are exposed,” the doctor answered. “Everybody in this whole blinking village is exposed … sir.” Another pause. Another question. “Yes, sir. That includes you.”

  This time, the major let out a very audible squawk. “Can we get them out without risking more people?” he asked, loud enough for Justin to hear him just fine.

  “Won’t be easy,” the military doctor shouted back. “I’m not equipped for isolation cases … . Yes, I should have been … . Yes, those people are idiots, but what do you want me to do about it now?”

  Justin glanced over at Mr. Brooks. The older man’s face bore a small, tight smile. “Some things don’t change from one alternate to another,” he said in a low voice. “The people in the field, the people at the front, have to work around their stupid superiors. Law of nature, near enough.”

  “I guess,” Justin said vaguely. He’d missed some of the back-and-forth between the doctor and the major.

  “You can pull out if you want, sir,” the doctor shouted. “I’ll stay behind and take care of them … . No, I’m not afraid, or not too much. I don’t go into combat, the way you do. I do this instead.”

  Justin thought he would rather go into combat. If you had a gun, at least you could shoot back. What could you do to a tailored virus?

  The major said something. “Sir, I would have to disobey that order,” the military doctor yelled back. “The patients come first. I’ll stay here.”

  “He can play on my team any day,” Mr. Brooks murmured. “Oh, yeah.”

  Another yell from the Virginia major. The doctor didn’t answer. The major said something else. This time, Justin understood it perfectly. It made the officer’s opinion very plain, even if it was on the earthy side. The doctor only laughed. “Thank you, sir. I love you, too,” he said, and blew the major a loud, smacking kiss.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Brooks said. Justin found himself nodding. Whatever else you said about the doc, he had style. As for Justin … Justin had the beginnings of an idea.

  Beckie had started to hope Ohio troops would occupy Elizabeth. Her passport and Gran’s had Ohio visas that were just as good as their Virginia visas. Maybe the Ohioans could do something about the disease they’d turned loose, and wouldn’t keep people in the area they occupied all cooped up. If Beckie and Gran could get back to Columbus, they could probably get back to California.

  She knew better than to say anything about that where Mr. Snodgrass could hear it. He was, and had every right to be, a good citizen of Virginia. If he saw soldiers from Ohio on Prunty Street, he might take out a shotgun and bang away at them. If he did, the Ohioans would likely shoot him and another dozen people besides, but that might not be enough to stop him.

  The soldiers from Virginia were pulling out of Elizabeth again. The disease had got its teeth into them. Beckie thanked heaven that she’d stayed well, and her grandmother, and Mr. Snodgrass. She wasn’t so sure he was glad to be well. He might want to join his wife. He kept going on about how empty his days were without her. Beckie didn’t know what to tell him. What could you tell somebody who said something like that?

  Off to the west and northwest, Virginian guns still fired at the Ohioans in Parkersburg. “How many shells come down on the enemy, and how many land on people who just happen to be in the way?” Beckie wondered after one especially noisy bombardment.

  “Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” Gran said. To her, nothing Virginia did in the war could be wrong. To Beckie, the cliché sounded like one of the things the mysterious they would say.

  “It’s a hard business, war,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “A lot of the time, I think nobody comes out on top.”

  “I think you’re right,” Beckie said. Gran just sniffed. Beckie hadn’t really expected anything else from her.

  Somebody rang the doorbell. If that wasn’t one of the soldiers wanting something, it was likely to be Mr. Brooks and Justin. Beckie couldn’t very well tell Justin not to come over. This wasn’t her house—it was Mr. Snodgrass’. And Justin hadn’t done anything to make her hate him. He’d just … disappointed her. If he couldn’t tell her whatever it was that he couldn’t tell her, then they weren’t going anywhere no matter what. She’d wondered if they might. Knowing they wouldn’t—was too bad.

  Even if they weren’t, he still made better company than anybody else in Elizabeth. That was pleasant and annoying at the same time, because it reminded her of what might have been.

  Today, though, Mr. Brooks beat him to the news: “The doctor who’s treating the sick soldiers has come down with it himself. It’s a shame—he was brave to stay with them.”

  “I haven’t felt so good myself lately,” Gran said. She was healthy as a horse, but she couldn’t stand to let anybody upstage her.

  “Are they sick, or are they dead?” Mr. Snodgrass asked.

  “At least one of them is dead,” Justin said before Mr. Brooks could answer.

  Beckie sent him a sharp look. He didn’t sound nervous or scared, the way he should have talking about something as nasty as germ warfare. He sounded excited. His eyes glowed. He was thinking about something, all right. What? Did Mr. Brooks notice? He didn’t seem to. To Beckie, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

  “That’s a terrible business,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “These Ohio people, you want to hunt ’em with coon hounds and tree ’em and shoot ’em right out of the blamed tree, is what you want to do.” He didn’t sound as if he was kidding. Would he have felt the same way if his wife hadn’t got sick and died? He might have. Virginia was his state, and Ohio was giving it a hard time.

  “It’s pretty bad, all right,” Mr. Brooks said. “I don’t like it that our doctors haven’t got a better handle on the disease by now.”

  Mr. Snodgrass’ face had been angry. It went grim, which was scarier. “I don’t like that, e
ither, not even a little bit. What does it say about our state? Only two things I can think of, and neither one of ’em is good. Maybe our people are just asleep at the switch, and they’ll get off the shilling and set to work in a spell. That’s bad enough, but the other choice is worse. Maybe those Ohio, uh, so-and-so’s”—he nodded to Beckie before he said that, so it would have been something juicier if she weren’t around—“really are smarter than the best we’ve got. If they are, that means we’re in deeper than anybody figured on when the war started.”

  “I hope not,” Mr. Brooks said. “If people decide that’s so, the consul won’t get reelected, and you can take that to the bank.”

  “If it is so, he shouldn’t be,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “They ought to ride him out of town on a rail instead.”

  Listening to older people going on about Virginia politics was the last thing Beckie wanted to do. At least getting hit by a shell was a quick end—a lot quicker than getting bored to death. Any second now, Gran would jump in, and Beckie already knew all her opinions by heart. Gran’s politics were a little to the right of Attila the Hun’s.

  “You want a fizz, Justin?” Beckie asked. “We can talk about stuff outside.” She was still mad at him—how couldn’t she be, when he was hiding things from her?—but talking with him had to be more interesting than what was happening in here.

  His face lit up. “Sure!” Did he think she’d forgiven him already? If he did, he was dumber than she thought he was.

  Going into the kitchen sobered her. Mr. Snodgrass had nailed a plywood square to the outside of the house to keep the bugs out and the air conditioning in till he could get proper repairs made. Every time Beckie saw the hole that square patched, she remembered the dreadful day she almost died. If not for Justin, she might have. She couldn’t very well forget that, even if she was mad at him.

  The half-roofed trench in the back yard was sobering, too. The cold fizz can felt wonderful against her blistered palm. Of all the things she’d never imagined herself doing, digging like a mole stood pretty high on the list.