In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "Every single minute," Mildred answered proudly. That took the wind out of his sails.

  "Let's go home," Agnes said. "We have a lot of catching up to do." She winked at Morrell. He grinned. He looked forward to trying to catch up, anyhow.

  All over the country-and all over the wreck of the CSA, too-survivors were trying to catch up with their families and trying to make them grow. Some reunions would be smooth, some anything but. Morrell put one arm around his wife, the other around his daughter. They walked off the platform that way. So far, so good, he thought.

  XVIII

  Clarence Potter took his place in the Yankee courtroom. The Yankee kangaroo courtroom, he feared it was. The judges had let his lawyer question witnesses and even bring in Irving Morrell, but how much difference would any of that make? He'd superbombed the town where they were trying him. Evidence? Who gave a damn about evidence? If they felt like convicting him, they bloody well would.

  He nodded to Major Stachiewicz, who'd defended him. "You did what you could. I appreciate it."

  "I didn't do it for you, exactly. I did it for duty," the damnyankee said.

  "I understand that. I don't want to marry you, either. But you made an honest effort, and I want you to know I know it," Potter said.

  "All rise!" said the warrant officer who doubled as bailiff and recording secretary.

  Everyone in the courtroom got to his feet as the judges came in. As soon as the judges sat down, Brigadier General Stephens said, "Be seated." Potter sat. He didn't want to let the enemy know he was nervous. In the rows of seats in the spectators' gallery behind him, reporters poised pens above notebooks.

  Verdict day today.

  The chief judge fixed him with an unfriendly stare. "The defendant will please rise."

  "Yes, Your honor." Potter stood at attention.

  "Without a doubt, General Potter, you caused greater loss of life than any man before you in the history of the North American continent," General Stephens said. That was cleverly phrased. It ignored the hell the USA's German allies unleashed on Petrograd earlier, and it also ignored the hell the United States visited on Newport News and Charleston. All the same, it remained technically true.

  "Also without a doubt," Stephens continued, "you were able to do what you did thanks to a ruse of war, one frowned on by the Geneva Convention. Carrying on the fight in the uniform of the foe skates close to the edge of the laws of war."

  He looked as if his stomach pained him. "However…" He paused to pour himself a glass of water and sip from it, as if to wash the taste of the word from his mouth. Then he had to say it again: "However…" Another long pause. "It has also been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that U.S. forces utilized the identical ruse of war. Executing a man on the other side for something we also did ourselves strikes the court as unjust, however much we might wish it did not. This being so, we find you not guilty of violating the laws of war in bringing your superbomb to Philadelphia."

  Hubbub in the courtroom as reporters exclaimed. Some rushed out to file their stories. No one paid any attention to the chief judge's gavel. Through the chaos, Potter said, "May I tell you something, sir?"

  "Go ahead." No, Brigadier General Stephens was not a happy man. And, over at the prosecutor's table, Lieutenant Colonel Altrock looked as if he'd just found half a worm in his apple.

  "I want to thank the court for its integrity, General," Potter said. "I have to say, I didn't expect it." Not from Yankees was in his mind if not on his tongue.

  Stephens had to know it was there, too. His mouth twisted. "Your enemies are men like you, General," he said. "That, I believe, is the principal meaning of this verdict."

  Potter inclined his head. "The point is well taken, sir."

  "Happy day," Stephens said bleakly. "Please understand: we don't approve of you even if we don't convict you. You will be under surveillance for the rest of your life. If you show even the slightest inclination toward trouble, it will be your last mistake. Do I make myself clear?"

  "Abundantly." Clarence Potter might have complained that he was being singled out for discriminatory treatment. He might have-but he wasn't that kind of fool, anyhow.

  "Very well. I gather the men who debriefed you have now finished?"

  "Yes, sir," Potter said. "They have squeezed me flatter than a snake in a rolling mill." He'd told them everything about his trip up from Lexington to Philadelphia. Why not? Come what might, he wouldn't do that again. He'd told them a lot about Confederate intelligence operations, too, but not everything. They thought he'd told them more than he really had. If they wanted to ferret out C.S. operatives up here, though, he thought they'd need more than he'd given them.

  The U.S. brigadier general didn't laugh, or even smile. "You may collect the balance of the pay owed you as an officer POW under the Geneva Convention. And then you may…go." He drank more water.

  Go where? Potter wondered. Nothing left of Charleston, not any more. And not much left of Richmond, either. Not much left of the CSA, come to that. He was a man without a country. Turning him loose might have been the cruelest thing the USA could do. All the same, he preferred it to getting his neck stretched.

  "May I ask a favor of the court, sir, before I return to civilian life?" he said.

  "What sort of favor?" If you needed a dictionary illustration for suspicious, General Stephens' face would have filled the bill.

  "May I beg for a civilian suit of clothes? This uniform"-Potter touched a butternut sleeve with his other hand-"is less than popular in your country right now."

  "There are good and cogent reasons why that should be so, too," the chief judge said. But he nodded a moment later; he was at bottom a fair-minded man. "I admit your request is reasonable. You will have one. If, however, you had asked for a U.S. uniform in place of your own, I would have refused you. You've already done too much damage in our clothing."

  "My country is no longer at war with yours, General." My country no longer exists. "While our countries were at peace, I lived peacefully"-enough-"in mine. I intend to do the same again."

  The suit they gave him didn't fit especially well. The wide-brimmed fedora that went with it might have looked good on a twenty-five-year-old…pimp. The kindest thing he could say about the gaudy tie was that he never would have bought it himself. He knotted it without a murmur now. The less he looked like his usual self, the better he judged his chances of getting out of Philadelphia in one piece.

  Green banknotes-no, they were bills up here-filled his leatherette wallet. He wondered what the economy was like down in the ruins of the CSA. Would inflation run mad, the way it had after the Great War? Or were the Yankees ramming their currency down the Confederacy's throat this time? Either way, a wallet stuffed with greenbacks looked like good insurance.

  They even gave him a train ticket to Richmond. That settled where he would go, at least for the time being. If he didn't have to pay for the ticket, he could hang on to some more of his POW pay.

  That seemed a good thing, because he had no idea how to make more money. All his adult life, he'd been either a soldier-and the bottom had been blown out of the market for Confederate soldiers-or a private investigator-and he was, at the moment, one of the least private men on the continent.

  His chuckle was sour, but not sour enough to suit one of the U.S. MPs keeping an eye on him. "What's so damn funny?" the Yankee asked.

  "I may be reduced to writing my memoirs," Potter answered, "and that's the kind of thing you do after you don't expect to do anything else."

  The MP's glance was anything but sympathetic. "You want to know what I think, Mac, you already did too goddamn much."

  "That only shows I was doing my job."

  "Yeah, well, if I was doing my job…" The U.S. sergeant swung his submachine gun toward Potter, but only for a moment. Discipline held. A good thing, too, Potter thought.

  They hustled him out of the courthouse through a back door. A crowd of reporters gathered at the front of the building. No
ne of them paid any attention to the aging man in tasteless clothes who went by in the back seat of a Ford.

  U.S. train stations didn't work exactly the same way as their C.S. equivalents did, but they were pretty close. Potter found the right platform at the Broad Street station and waited for the train to come in.

  Some of the men on it turned out to be released Confederate POWs. Some looked like Yankee hotshots on their way down to the CSA to see what they could make by picking the corpse's bones. Some just looked like…people. Potter wondered what they thought of him. In his present getup, he thought he looked pretty shady.

  He got to Richmond late in the afternoon. A U.S. first lieutenant stood on the platform holding a sign with his name on it. He thought of walking by, but why give the United States excuses to land him in trouble? "I'm Clarence Potter," he said.

  "My name is Constantine Palaiologos," the U.S. officer said. "Call me Costa-everybody does." His rueful smile probably told of lots of childhood teasing. "Since I got word you'd be coming here, I found an apartment for you."

  "How…efficient," Potter murmured.

  Lieutenant Palaiologos didn't even try to misunderstand him. "We do intend to keep an eye on you," he said. "The building wasn't badly damaged during the war, and it's been repaired since. It's better than a lot of people here are living."

  "Thanks…I suppose," Potter said.

  He smelled death in the air as the lieutenant drove him through the battered streets. He'd smelled it in Philadelphia, too; it was part of the aftermath of war. It was stronger here, not surprisingly. People looked shabbier than they did in the USA. They walked with slumped shoulders and downcast eyes-they knew they were beaten, all right. For the first time since the early days of the Lincoln administration, the Stars and Stripes flew all over the city, not just above the U.S. embassy.

  The apartment building didn't look too bad. Some of its neighbors still showed bomb damage, but it even had glass in the windows again. Freshly painted spots of plaster probably repaired bullet holes, but there weren't a whole lot of buildings in Richmond that a bullet or two hadn't hit.

  "So-is this where you keep all the old sweats?" Potter asked.

  "No, General," Palaiologos answered seriously. "We try to separate you people as much as we can. The further apart you are, the less you'll sit around plotting and making trouble."

  In the USA's shoes, Potter probably would have arranged things the same way. He let the young lieutenant show him his new digs. It was…a furnished apartment. He could stand living here. Once he got a wireless and a phonograph and some books, it might not even be too bad.

  "Did I see a stationery store around the corner?" he asked.

  "I think so," Lieutenant Palaiologos said.

  "As long as you've got a motorcar, will you take me over there and run me back?"

  "All right." Palaiologos spoke without enthusiasm, but he didn't say no.

  Potter bought a secondhand typewriter, a spare ribbon, and two reams of paper not much better than foolscap. He got the U.S. officer to lug the typewriter up to the flat, which was on the second floor.

  "I said I might write my memoirs," Potter told him after he put it on the kitchen table. "I may as well. Maybe the book'll make me enough money to live on." Palaiologos' grunt was nothing if not skeptical (and weary-the typewriter weighed a ton). Potter didn't care. He ran a sheet of paper into the machine. HOW I BLEW UP PHILADELPHIA, he typed in all caps. By Clarence Potter, Brigadier General, CSA (retired). He took out the title page and put in another sheet. I first met Jake Featherston late in 1915…

  O ne more Election Day in New York City. One more trip to Socialist Party headquarters over the butcher's shop. One more tray of cold cuts from the Democrat downstairs.

  Flora Blackford put corned beef and pickles on a bagel. "One more term, Flora," Maria Tresca said.

  "Alevai." Flora knocked wood. One reason she kept getting reelected was that she never took anything for granted. She wasn't too worried this time around, not for herself. She hadn't been worried about the national ticket, either, not till the past couple of weeks. Now…"I hope Charlie La Follette does what he ought to."

  On paper, the President of the USA had the world on a string. The war was over. He'd been at the helm when his country won it. The United States bestrode North America like a colossus: the Stars and Stripes flew from Baffin Island to below the Rio Grande. Surely people would be grateful for that…wouldn't they?

  Not if they listened to the Democrats, they wouldn't. Tom Dewey and his running mate were saying the war was all the Socialists' fault in the first place. If Al Smith hadn't given Jake Featherston his plebiscite, the Confederate States wouldn't have got Kentucky and the state of Houston back. How could they have gone to war without Kentucky?

  Nobody now seemed to remember there'd been guerrilla war in Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah before the plebiscite. Flora agreed that Al Smith might have chosen better. But what he did choose wasn't halfway between idiocy and treason, no matter how the Democrats made it sound.

  They were saying they could have fought the war better, too. And they were saying the United States went into it unprepared because the Socialists spent years gutting War Department budgets. Those budgets hadn't been exactly luxurious when Democrat Herbert Hoover ran things, either. Because of the economic collapse, nobody'd had much money to spend on guns…nobody but Jake Featherston.

  The Democrats blamed the collapse on the Socialists, too. More to the point, they blamed it on Hosea Blackford. That made Flora see red. Yes, her husband was President when it happened. That didn't make it his fault. Except, in too many people's minds, it did. Hosea was a one-term President.

  Herman Bruck looked at his watch. Every two years, he seemed a little plumper, a little grayer. Oh, and I haven't changed at all, Flora thought. That would have been nice if only it were true.

  "Seven o'clock," Herman said ceremoniously. "The polls are closed." He turned on a wireless set.

  None of the results from the East Coast would mean anything for a while. That wouldn't stop the broadcasters from reporting them and pontificating over them. It wouldn't stop inexperienced people from flabbling over them if they were bad or from celebrating too soon if they were good.

  "Dewey jumps out to an early lead in Vermont!" a reporter said breathlessly. Flora had to fight the giggles. Of course Dewey led in Vermont. The sky would have to fall for him to do anything else. Vermont had been a rock-ribbed Democratic stronghold for years.

  "Do you think we can hold New York?" Maria asked. That was a more important question. New York had a ton of electoral votes. It went Socialist more often than not, but Dewey the Democrat was a popular governor. How many people would vote for him for President because of that? Enough to swing the state?

  "I hope so," Flora said. She didn't know what she could say past that. Polls called the race close, but she didn't have much faith in them. Pollsters had proved spectacularly wrong before.

  Maine held its elections early, and had already gone for Dewey. A moment later, New Hampshire also fell into his column. Again, none of that was too surprising; only in landslide years did upper New England fall out of the Democratic camp.

  But when early returns showed Dewey with a substantial lead in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Flora began to worry. Both states were in play in most elections. Herman Bruck said, "All depends on where the returns are coming from," which put the best possible face on things. He wasn't wrong, but they shouldn't have needed to fret so soon.

  New Jersey seemed to be going Socialist, and by a solid majority. That made Flora breathe a little easier, anyhow. Any year the Socialists lost New Jersey would probably not be a year where they held on to the Presidency.

  To drive her crazy, returns from Pennsylvania started coming in before any from New York. Those showed the race there neck and neck. How many people in western Pennsylvania were blaming the Socialists for the Confederate invasion two years earlier? Flora thought that would have happened
regardless of who was running the country at the time, but she could see how others might see things a different way.

  "Here is some of the early tally from New York," the newsman said. Everybody yelled for everybody else to hush. "These results show Governor Dewey with 147,461 votes to President La Follette's 128,889. In the race for Senator-"

  "Where are they coming from?" This time, Bruck wasn't the only one to ask the question. Several people shouted it at the same time. The newscaster? He went blithely on to results from West Virginia.

  "I'll find out," Herman Bruck said, and got on the telephone with the canvassing headquarters downtown. When he hung up, he might have been a balloon that had sprung a slow leak.

  "What's the matter?" Flora asked, seeing his face.

  "Those are city returns, not upstate," he answered. The news felt like a blow in the belly to Flora. New York political battles centered on whether Socialist New York City could outvote the Democratic hinterland. If New York City leaned Democratic…

  If New York City leaned that way, it was liable to be a long, unhappy night.

  And it was. The air in Socialist district headquarters went blue with tobacco smoke, and bluer with profanity. State after state fell to the Democrats. The Republican candidate, the energetic young Governor of Minnesota, stole his home state and Wisconsin from the Socialists in three-cornered races, and also took traditional Republican strongholds like Indiana and Kansas.

  Flora held her own seat. Her margin was down from the last election, but she still won upwards of fifty-five percent of the vote. All the same…"I don't think we're going to do it," she said somewhere around one in the morning.

  "How could they be so ungrateful?" Herman Bruck said. "We won the war for them. What more could they want?"

  A country too strong for the Confederates even to think of attacking, that's what. Flora looked around in the gloomy, smoky headquarters. No, the ghost of Robert Taft wasn't sitting right behind her. But it might as well have been. The old Democratic stalwart had an answer for the Socialist cri de coeur.