In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "Sir, we got us a nigger says he knows you," the guard said.

  "And you waste my time with that shit?" Pinkard said scornfully. "Christ on a crutch, McIlhenny, it happens once a trainload. Either these coons know me or they're asshole buddies with the President, one. Like anybody'd be dumb enough to believe 'em."

  "Sir, this here nigger's named Vespasian," McIlhenny said. "Says you and him and another coon named, uh, Agrippa used to work together at the Sloss Works in Birmingham. Reckon he's about your age, anyways."

  "Well, fuck me," Jeff said in surprise.

  "He's telling the truth?" the gray-uniformed guard asked.

  "I reckon maybe he is," Jeff said. "The last war, they started using niggers more in factory jobs when white men got conscripted. I did work with those two, hell with me if I didn't."

  "We didn't send him on right away," McIlhenny said. "Wanted to find out what you had in mind first. You want, we can get rid of him. Or if you want to see him, we can do that, too."

  "Vespasian." Jefferson Pinkard's voice was far away. He hadn't thought about Vespasian in years. Sometimes the years he'd put in at the steel mill seemed to have happened to someone else, or in a different lifetime. But he said, "Yeah, I'll talk to him. He wasn't a bad nigger-not uppity or anything. And he worked pretty hard."

  "We were gonna put him in a truck," the guard said. If they had, Vespasian wouldn't be seeing anybody this side of the Pearly Gates. He looked apprehensive. Asphyxiating somebody the commandant really knew wouldn't do wonders for your career.

  "Well, I'm glad you didn't." Pinkard heaved his bulk out of the chair behind his desk. A lot of fat padded the hard muscles he'd got working in the foundry. He grabbed a submachine gun off a wall bracket and made sure the drum magazine that fed it was full. If Vespasian had some sort of revenge in mind, he wouldn't go on a truck after all. Instead, he'd get ventilated on the spot. "Take me to him. He in the holding area?"

  "Sure is, sir," the guard answered. Camp Humble had one, to give the guards the chance to deal with prisoners who were dangerous or just unusual.

  "You searched him?" Jeff took nothing for granted. Some of the people who worked for him were dumb as rocks.

  But the guard nodded. "Sure did, sir. Up the ass and everything." He made a face. "He ain't got nothin'."

  "All right, then," Jeff said. It sounded as if the men in gray were on the ball this time.

  When they got to the holding area, he found two more guards aiming assault rifles at Vespasian. One of them blinked. "Be damned," he said. "This mangy old coon wasn't blowing smoke, then?"

  Vespasian wasn't exactly mangy, but he was only a shadow of the burly buck who'd worked alongside Jefferson Pinkard half a lifetime earlier. He was gray-haired and scrawny, and looked like a man who'd been through hell. If his train ride from Birmingham to Camp Humble was like most, he had. A powerful stench clung to him. He hadn't washed in a long time, and hadn't always made it to a toilet or a slop bucket, either.

  He nodded to Jeff not as one equal to another, but as a man who knew another man, anyhow. "Really is you, Mistuh Pinkard," he said, his voice desert-dry and rough. "Been a hell of a long time, ain't it?"

  "Sure as hell has," Jeff answered. He turned to the guards. "Get him some water. Reckon he can use it."

  "Do Jesus! You right about that," Vespasian croaked. When the water came-in a pail, not a glass-he drank and drank. How long had he gone without? Days, plainly. And when he said, "That was mighty fine," he sounded much more like his old self.

  "What ever happened to that no-account cousin of yours or whatever the hell he was?" Jeff asked. "You know the one I mean-the guy they threw in jail. What the hell was his name?"

  "You mean Leonidas?" Vespasian said, and Jeff nodded. The black man went on, "They let him out after the las' war was over-decided he weren't no danger to the country or nobody else. He kept his nose clean afterwards. Got married, had a couple chillun. Died o' TB a little befo' the new war start."

  "How about that?" Jeff said. "I plumb lost touch with Birmingham lately." He hesitated, then waved the guards away. "I'll be all right, dammit," he told them. "I got a gun, and he ain't dumb enough to give me no trouble." They didn't like it, but the man who made the rules could break them, too. When the guards were out of earshot, Jeff asked Vespasian, "Ever hear what happened to that gal I used to be married to?"

  "Yes, suh." Vespasian nodded. "She went downhill pretty bad. Got to drinkin' an' carryin' on with men. Ain't heard nothin' 'bout her in a while, though. Dunno if she's alive or dead."

  "Huh." Jeff 's grunt was more self-satisfied than anything else. Run around on him, would Emily? Whatever she got after he cut her loose served her right, as far as he was concerned. "Bitch," he muttered under his breath. "Probably had a goddamn taxi meter between her legs."

  Vespasian either didn't catch that or had the sense to pretend he didn't. He lifted the pail to his mouth again. Pinkard tensed. If he threw it…But he set it down and wiped his mouth on his filthy sleeve. "Ask you somethin' now, suh?"

  "Go ahead," Jeff told him.

  "What you do with me, now that I'm here?"

  "You give people trouble?"

  "Now, Mistuh Pinkard, you know I ain't like that," Vespasian said reproachfully.

  "I sure do." Jeff nodded. "I told McIlhenny the same thing when he said you were asking for me. So you just stay in the barracks and do like the guards tell you, and everything'll be fine."

  "Sure weren't fine comin' here." Vespasian didn't sound as if he believed a word of it. He was nobody's fool, evidently. Jeff knew what kind of lies he was telling. He didn't have anything against Vespasian as a man, but he didn't have the kind of affection for him that would have made him want to keep his former coworker around in defiance of the rules. The rules said the Confederacy needed to get rid of blacks. They caused the country more trouble than they were worth. From everything Jefferson Pinkard had seen, that was the gospel truth. And it was just Vespasian's hard luck that he'd finally wound up at Camp Humble.

  So Jeff shrugged and spread his hands and went right on lying. "I am sorry about that, honest to God. Wish it could've been better. But there's a war on." That was the handy-dandy excuse for anything these days.

  "Ain't no reason to leave a man in his own filth. Ain't no reason to have people die on the way to this here place," Vespasian said. "What's gonna happen to us all now that we's here?" Fear and apprehension roughened his voice.

  "You got to remember, this is nothin' but a transit camp," Jeff said-one more lie piled on all the others. "You'll get some food, you'll get cleaned up, and we'll send you on the way again." And so they would, on a journey from which Vespasian wouldn't come back. "Then you'll sit out the war somewhere else. Once we're done licking the damnyankees, I reckon you'll go on back to Birmingham. We'll sort all that shit out then."

  "I got to wait till we lick the USA, reckon I'll be at that other camp forever," Vespasian said.

  The gibe held much more truth than Jeff wished it did. It also played on his own fears. He tried not to show that, but he did call the guards back. "Take him off to the barracks that's scheduled for the bathhouse next," he told them. "Once he gets cleaned up, we'll go from there."

  "Yes, sir," the guards chorused. One of them nudged Vespasian. "Come on. You heard the boss. Get moving."

  Away Vespasian went. Did he know Jeff had just ordered him liquidated? Pretty soon, he'd go up the crematorium stack, one more smudge of soot in a system that didn't work as well as advertised. Jeff might have found a lesson there had he been looking for one. Since he wasn't, he didn't worry about it. He had a job to do, and he aimed to keep at it till it was done.

  C ongresswoman Flora Blackford was sick to death of war. She didn't know of anyone in the USA who wasn't. But she also didn't know of anyone except a few fools and lunatics who wanted to make peace with the Confederate States and Jake Featherston. There'd been more doubt and disagreement during the Great War. Had the European powers patched up a peace
then, odds were the USA and CSA would have done the same. Now…The one thing Featherston had done was unify the United States-against him. No arguments about workers' solidarity now, not even from the hardcore wing of the Socialist Party. Getting rid of the enemy came first.

  Her secretary stuck her head into Flora's inner office. "The Assistant Secretary of War is on the line, Congresswoman," she said.

  "Thank you, Bertha. Put him through," Flora said.

  She picked up the telephone on her desk even before the first ring finished. "Hello, Flora," Franklin Roosevelt boomed. "How are you this lovely morning?"

  Flora looked out the masking-taped window. It was pouring rain, and the weatherman said there was a chance of sleet tonight. Winter hadn't got to Philadelphia, but you could see it coming. Roosevelt's office down in the bowels of the War Department was only a few blocks from hers. "Have you been down there so long you've forgotten it's not July any more?" she asked.

  He chuckled merrily. "Well, you can see when you come over."

  Telephone lines coming out of the War Department and the Congressional office building were supposed to be the most secure in the USA. Saying too much over them wasn't a good idea anyhow. Roosevelt had something interesting, though. Flora was sure of that. "On my way," she told him, and hung up.

  Had the weather been halfway decent, she would have walked. As things were, she flagged a cab. Even the short ride showed her a couple of hits from the new Confederate rockets. They were aiming at the center of government, but weren't especially accurate; they fell all over Philadelphia. No warning was possible. The only thing you could do to stay safe was to be somewhere else when they came down.

  "Ain't they terrible? Ain't they wicked?" said the cab driver, a middle-aged woman. "How come we don't got nothin' like that?"

  "I expect we're working on them." Flora wasn't exactly giving away military secrets by admitting that.

  "We shoulda done it first," the cabby said. "Blow them Confederate bastards to kingdom come without our boys gettin' hurt."

  "That would be good." Flora thought of her own son. Joshua was in basic training now. Pretty soon, if the war didn't end first, they'd give him a rifle and turn him loose on the enemy. The enemy, unfortunately, had rifles-among other things-too.

  Flora paid the driver, opened the cab's door, opened her umbrella, and splashed up the broad stairs to the entrance to the War Department. She didn't get very wet, but she didn't exactly stay dry, either. At the entrance, soldiers examined her ID with remorseless care before letting her in. She didn't get very far in even then, not at first. A hard-faced woman frisked her in a sandbagged revetment that could blunt the force of a people bomb. Only then did a private with peach fuzz escort her down, down, down to Franklin Roosevelt's office.

  "You look like something the cat dragged in," the Assistant Secretary of War exclaimed. "Can I fix you a drink? Purely medicinal, of course."

  "Of course," Flora said, deadpan. "Thanks. I'd love one."

  The medicinal alcohol turned out to be some fine scotch. "Confiscated from a British freighter," Roosevelt explained. "I arranged for a friend of mine in the Navy Department to get some good Tennessee sipping whiskey, and this is how he scratched my back."

  "Nice to have friends," Flora said. "I like scotch better, too."

  "I still owe him a little something, or maybe not such a little something," Roosevelt said. "The Navy's been nice to us lately."

  "Has it?" Flora said. When Roosevelt nodded, she went on, "Does that have something to do with why you called me over?"

  He beamed at her. "I knew you were smart. It sure does. A few days ago, one of our destroyer escorts met the U-517 somewhere in the North Atlantic. The Navy and the Germans worked out just where. It doesn't matter anyhow, except that they did meet. The skipper of the submersible passed a package to the skipper of the Josephus Daniels-that's the destroyer escort. Our ship brought the package in to Boston, and now we've got it."

  "What is it?" Flora asked. "Something to do with uranium, unless I'm crazy."

  "Right the first time," Franklin Roosevelt agreed. "We finally managed to talk the Kaiser into letting us know just how far along the Germans are."

  "And?"

  "And they're ahead of us. Well, no surprise-most of the top nuclear physicists come from Germany or Austria-Hungary, and Bohr from Denmark is working for them, too," Roosevelt said. "But this will speed us up. I don't know all the details yet. Our people are still trying to figure out what the details are, if you know what I mean. It's good news, though."

  "Sounds like it," Flora said. "Have we got any good news about these Confederate rockets?"

  "Not much." Roosevelt's jaunty smile slipped. When it did, she could see how worn and weary he was. He looked like a man busy working himself to death. She couldn't even say anything, because he was far from the only one doing the same thing. He paused to light a cigarette and suck in smoke through the holder he liked to use. "About all we can do is bomb their launchers, and they've made them portable, so the damn things-excuse me-aren't easy to find."

  "And in the meantime we sit here and take it," Flora said. "Can we bomb the factories where they make the rockets?"

  "When we find 'em, we'll bomb 'em," Roosevelt promised. "I wish the Confederates would paint Rocket Factory on the roof in big letters. It sure would make reconnaissance a lot easier. We do keep plugging away."

  "I'm so glad," Flora murmured, which made Roosevelt laugh. "What about the town where they're working on uranium? Are we still giving it the once-over?"

  "Every chance we get," he replied. "They've got antiaircraft fire like you wouldn't believe all around Lexington-oops. Pretend you didn't hear that."

  "Pretend I didn't hear what?" Flora said, and Franklin Roosevelt laughed again.

  "Yeah, the flak is thick enough to land on, the pilots say," he continued, "and they put night fighters in the air, too. They've quit pretending it's not important. They know we know it is, and they're doing their best to keep us away."

  "I take it their best isn't good enough?"

  The Assistant Secretary of War shook his strong-jawed head. "Not even close. We're punishing them-that's the only word for it. I happen to know their boss researcher went to Richmond not long ago to squall like a branded calf. I wish I would have found out sooner. I might have tried to arrange to put him out of action for good."

  "You have people in Richmond who can arrange that?" Flora asked with faint, or maybe not so faint, distaste. The Confederates made a policy of rubbing out U.S. officers they found dangerous. Turnabout was fair play, but even so…"War is a filthy business."

  "It sure is. And the only thing worse than a war is a lost war. Two of those a lifetime ago almost ruined the country forever," Roosevelt said. "So, yes, there are people who would have tried to make sure Professor So-and-So never stood up in front of a blackboard again. No guarantees, of course, but we would have had a go at it."

  "Would killing him make that much difference to the Confederate war effort?"

  "No way to be sure, but we think so. He gets almost anything he wants when it comes to money and equipment. They know how important a uranium bomb is for them. If they get it first, they can still lick us. If they don't, we'll knock them flat and then we'll start kicking them."

  "Alevai," Flora said. Roosevelt looked quizzical; no reason he should know Yiddish. She explained: "It means something like hopefully or God willing."

  "He'd better be willing. If He's not, He's as sleepy as Elijah said Baal was," Roosevelt said. "They need licking, dammit. That Camp Determination turned out to be even worse than you said. I hadn't imagined it could, but there you are. What General Dowling found would gag a maggot. It really would."

  Flora resisted the impulse to shout, I told you so! She had, over and over again, but it was too late to do anything about that now. Instead, she said, "It's not the only camp they're running. They've got plenty more, from east Texas to Alabama. If we can wreck the rail lines going into them,
we slow the slaughter, anyhow."

  "We're doing some of that," Roosevelt said. "It's not our top priority, I admit. Beating the enemy in the field is. But we're doing what we can." He clicked his tongue between his teeth. "With all the effort the Confederate States are putting into the camps, I think Featherston would just as soon kill off his Negroes as beat us. If that's not insane, it's certainly strange."

  "Depends on how you look at things," Flora replied. "Even if they lose, the Negroes will still be gone for good. And the Freedom Party thinks it is good."

  "If they lose, the Freedom Party is gone for good. I don't think they've figured that out yet," Roosevelt said grimly. "If they lose, chances are the Confederate States of America are gone for good, too. I'm sure those goons haven't figured that out yet."

  "What do we do with them?" Flora asked. "Can we occupy everything from the border of Alaska all the way to the Rio Grande?"

  "Can we not?" Roosevelt returned, and she had no good answer for him.

  "What we got from the Germans really will help us build our bomb?" she said. He was bound to be right about one thing: winning came first.

  "The physicists say it will. They're right more often than they're wrong, seems like. They'd better be, anyhow," Roosevelt said. "I just pray some British or French sub hasn't carried papers like that to the Confederacy."

  "Oy!" That dismayed Flora into Yiddish again. "That would be terrible!"

  "It sure would," Roosevelt said. "And the Confederates have something to trade for it, too. I bet the English and the French would just love to shoot rockets way into Germany."

  "Oy!" Flora repeated. "What can we do about it?"

  "Sink all the submersibles we can, and hope we get the one that's packed full of secret plans," Roosevelt answered. "And yes, I know-what are the odds? But we can't very well tell the enemy not to help their allies. That would make them more likely to do it, not less."