Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  And Featherston let him off the hook after that, which also surprised him. “We need to get down to brass tacks,” the President said. “You’ve both heard about these people bombs up in the USA-Mormons strapping on explosives and blowing themselves to hell and gone as soon as they can take a raft of damnyankees with ’em?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Saul Goldman said. Potter nodded. Goldman went on, “We’ve been working on ways to play them up-to show the Yankees are so low and evil, people will kill themselves before they live under them.”

  That sounded like a good line to take to Potter, but Jake Featherston shook his head. “I was afraid you were gonna do somethin’ like that,” he said heavily. “That’s how come I called you in here-to tell you not to. No way, nohow. Not a word about ’em out of us, and jam the Yankees hard as you can when they talk about ’em. You got that?”

  “I hear you, sir, but I don’t understand.” Goldman looked and sounded pained. Clarence Potter didn’t blame him. Had he been in the communications director’s shoes, he would have been pained, too.

  But Featherston repeated, “Not a word, goddammit, and I’ll tell you why.” He went on, “I don’t want the damn niggers to hear anything about people bombs, you hear me? Not one fucking word! Coons are enough trouble as is. You don’t reckon some of those bastards’d blow themselves to the moon if they could take a raft of decent white folks with ’em? I sure do.”

  “But-” Saul Goldman began. Even starting the protest took nerve; not many people had the nerve to squawk to Featherston’s face.

  Here, though, Potter agreed with the President. “I’m sorry, Mr. Goldman, but I think he’s right,” he said. “We’d better keep the lid on that one for as long as we can, because the niggers will make us sorry if we don’t.”

  “Damn straight,” Featherston said.

  The director of communications still looked unhappy. “Since you’ve made up your mind, sir, that’s the way we’ll do it.” He plainly thought the President was wrong to have made up his mind that way.

  Jake Featherston just as plainly didn’t care. “Make sure you do. And pick up the jamming on the damnyankees, too. We will be sorry-we’ll be sorry as hell-if we can’t keep this quiet.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. President. If you’ll excuse me…” The little Jew left the President’s office very abruptly.

  As soon as the door clicked shut behind Goldman, Jake Featherston let out a long sigh. “I don’t like making Saul do like I tell him instead of like he wants to. He’s good-he’s damn good. You need to give a man like that his head. This time, though, I just don’t reckon I’ve got much choice.”

  Potter nodded. “I think you’re right, Mr. President. I said so.”

  “Yeah, you did.” Featherston eyed him. “You’re not one to do something like that just to make me wag my tail, either.”

  Remembering the weight of the pistol in his pocket as he rode the train up to Richmond in 1936, Potter nodded again. “No, sir. Whatever else I am, I’m no yes-man.”

  “Son of a bitch. I never would’ve known if you hadn’t told me.” Maybe Jake Featherston was remembering that pistol, too. He drummed his fingers on top of his desk. “Got a question for you, Mr. Straight Answer.”

  “Go ahead,” Potter said.

  “Those fucking Mormon people bombs-did any of your men give ’em the idea, or did they come up with it all by themselves?”

  “Mr. President, our people did not have thing one to do with that,” Potter said positively. “Nobody in the CSA-no white man in the CSA, anyhow-is that crazy. The Mormons came up with it on their own.”

  “All right. I believe you. But if I ever find out you’re lying to me about this one, I’ll have your head,” Featherston said. “People bombs hurt the damnyankees, yeah, but they can hurt us a lot worse. And you know as well as I do that Saul won’t be able to clamp down on the news forever. One way or another, this kind of shit always comes out.”

  “I knew that, sir. I wasn’t sure you did,” Potter answered. People who weren’t in the intelligence business often had an exaggerated notion of how easy keeping a secret was.

  Jake Featherston laughed at him. “I never went to a fancy U.S. college, General, but I reckon I may know a thing or two anyways.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Mr. President,” Clarence Potter said stiffly.

  Featherston laughed some more. “Yeah, likely tell.” But amusement didn’t live long on his face. It never did, not that Potter had seen. The President of the CSA always had to be angry at something or worried about something. And today he had something to be angry and worried about. “Damn niggers are gonna start blowin’ themselves up, sure as hell they are. Damfino how much we can do about it, either.”

  “Massive reprisals,” Potter suggested. “Kill ten coons for every white a people bomb blows up, or twenty, or a hundred.”

  “That won’t stop ’em,” Featherston predicted morosely. “There’ll always be some bastards who think, Who gives a damn what happens after I’m dead? And the ones who go after us without counting the cost are the ones we’ve got to be afraid of.”

  He knew what he was talking about. The Freedom Party had always gone after its foes without counting the cost, whether those foes were Whigs and Radical Liberals, Negroes, or the United States. Potter said, “Yes, sir. You’re right-we’ll still have trouble even if we do that. But I think we’ll have less. We’ll make some niggers think twice before they turn into people bombs. And we’ll make the niggers who don’t want to blow themselves up think twice before they help or cover up for the ones who do. They’d better, anyhow, if they know they’re going to get shot after a people bomb goes off.”

  “It could be.” Featherston picked up a pencil and wrote himself a note. “It’s a better scheme than anybody else has come up with, I’ll say that. Whatever else you are, General, you aren’t soft on niggers.”

  “I should hope not, sir,” Potter said. “That’s how we first met, remember. I was trying to head off the Red uprising before it got started. I was after that officer’s body servant-”

  “Pompey, his name was,” Jake Featherston said at once. Potter wouldn’t have remembered the Negro’s name if they’d set him on fire. Featherston had a truly marvelous memory for detail-and never forgot an enemy or a slight. He went on, “He was a mincing, prissy little bastard, thought his shit didn’t stink. Just what you’d expect from a stinking blueblood like Jeb Stuart III to have for a servant.” He looked as if he wanted to spit on the carpet, or possibly start chewing it.

  And he wasn’t wrong. During the Great War and even afterward, the Confederate States had had too many sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of founding fathers in positions of authority for no better reason than that their ancestors had done big things. It wasn’t like that anymore, Nathan Bedford Forrest III notwithstanding. Forrest was there because of what he could do, not because of what great-grandpa the cavalry general had done. The Freedom Party had swept away most of the Juniors and IIIs and IVs. And that, Potter was willing to admit, needed doing.

  Featherston let the pencil fall. “All right, General. That’s about it, looks like. Main reason I wanted you here was to find out if those damn people bombs were your notion. But you gave me a good idea, and I reckon we’ll try it out when the time comes-and it will, goddammit. I thank you for that.”

  Potter got to his feet. “You’re welcome, Mr. President. We’re on the same side in this fight.”

  “In this one, yeah. How about some of the others?” But Featherston waved that aside. “Never mind. Get out of here.”

  A man in a State Department uniform went in as Potter went out. Potter wondered what that was all about. He knew he could learn with a little poking and prodding. He also knew he’d catch merry hell if anybody found out he was doing it. You didn’t try to find out what was none of your business. That was one of the rules in this game, too. There were often good reasons why it was none of your business.

  After the air con
ditioning under the Gray House, ordinary Richmond late summer seemed twice as hot and muggy as usual. A haze of dust and smoke hung over the Confederate capital: a souvenir of Yankee bombing raids. The same sort of haze was said to hang over Philadelphia.

  Will anything be left of either side when this war is over? Potter wondered. More and more, it reminded him of a duel of submachine guns at two paces. Both countries could strike better than they could defend.

  He didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Maybe taking Pittsburgh away from the damnyankees really would knock them out of the fight. It had a chance of doing that, anyway. Potter couldn’t think of anything else that did.

  A truck dumped gravel and asphalt on the street in front of the Gray House. A heavy mechanized roller started smashing it down into a more or less level surface. And it would stay level till the next time U.S. bombers visited Richmond, or the time after that, or perhaps the time after that.

  The machine was more interesting to Clarence Potter than the job it was doing. Not long before, a swarm of Negroes with hand tools would have done work like that. No more. Machinery was much more common than it had been… and there weren’t so many Negroes around. Potter nodded to himself. Both halves of that suited him fine.

  Hipolito Rodriguez awkwardly sewed a sergeant’s-no, a troop leader’s-stripes onto the left sleeve of his gray tunic. The letter that came with his promotion notice said it was for “contributions valuable to the safety and security of the Confederate States of America.” That left the guards at Camp Determination who hadn’t been promoted both puzzled and jealous. It also gave the noncoms whose ranks he’d suddenly joined something new to think about.

  Tom Porter, who’d been Rodriguez’s squad leader till he got the promotion, added two and two and got four. “This has to do with those new buildings going up alongside the men’s and women’s half, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “I think maybe it does, si,” Rodriguez answered. He was still getting used to the luxury of the noncoms’ quarters. He had a room of his own now, with a closet and a sink. No more cot in the middle of a barracks with a lot of other noisy, smelly guards. No more shoving everything he owned into a footlocker, either. He had more room to be a person as a troop leader; he wasn’t just one more cog on a gear in a vast machine.

  “I know you helped give the commandant the idea for those new buildings,” Porter said. “If they work out as well as everybody hopes, I reckon you’ve earned your stripes.”

  Porter’s acceptance helped ease the transition from ordinary guard to troop leader. It meant the other noncoms made it plain they would back Rodriguez if he ran into trouble. With that going for him, he didn’t, or never more than he could handle by himself. And those buildings rapidly neared completion.

  Nobody ever called them anything but that. If you talked about one of them, it was that building. The guards knew what they were for; they’d been briefed. They had to be, by the nature of things. But, also by the nature of things, they didn’t call them by their right names. If you didn’t name something, you didn’t have to dwell on what it really was and really did. Not thinking about those things helped you sleep at night.

  A few of the guards, men who’d come to Camp Determination as it went up, would sometimes talk about shooting Negroes in the swamps of Louisiana. They were mostly matter-of-fact, but they would also talk about comrades who couldn’t stand the strain. “So-and-so ate his gun,” they would say. That was how Rodriguez learned Jeff Pinkard’s new wife was a dead guard’s widow. He’d known she was married before; two boys made that obvious. The details…

  “Poor son a bitch just couldn’t take it,” a guard said sympathetically.

  “He shoot himself, too?” Rodriguez asked with a certain horrid fascination.

  “Nope.” The veteran guard shook his head. “Chick must’ve got sick of guns. He ran a hose from his auto exhaust into the passenger compartment and fired up the motor. Sure as hell wish we’d’ve had those trucks back then. You don’t have to worry so much about what you’re doing when you load one of them.”

  “The trucks, they came after this fellow kill himself?” Rodriguez said.

  “That’s right.” The guard who was talking didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about that. Maybe there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. To Rodriguez, the timing seemed… interesting, anyhow. Senor Jeff was good at getting ideas from things that happened around him.

  Rodriguez almost remarked on that. Then he thought better of it. He couldn’t prove a thing, after all-and he couldn’t unsay something once he’d said it. Better to keep his mouth shut.

  And keeping his mouth shut proved a good idea, as it usually did. A few days later, an officer tapped him for special duty, saying, “The commandant tells me you won’t screw this up no matter what. Is that a fact?” He sent Rodriguez a fishy stare.

  “I hope so, sir,” Rodriguez answered. He recognized that stare. He’d seen it before on white Confederates. They looked at him, saw a Mexican, and figured he wasn’t good for much. He asked, “What do I got to do?”

  “Well, we’re going to test out one of those buildings,” the officer answered. “We’re going to pick about a hundred niggers and run ’em through it.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I do that. Don’t you worry,” Rodriguez said.

  His confidence seemed to relieve the officer. “All right,” the man said. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the side of his leg. His right sleeve was pinned up short, as his right arm ended just below the shoulder-he too came out of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade. He went on, “This has to go good, mind you. We got bigwigs from Richmond comin’ out to watch the show.”

  Rodriguez shrugged. “Maybe it go good. Maybe it go wrong. I dunno. All I know is, it don’t go wrong on account of me.”

  The other man considered that. He finally nodded. “Fair enough. Make sure all the ordinary guards you’re in charge of feel the same way.”

  “Si, senor. I do that,” Rodriguez promised.

  Because they were trying things out for the first time-and because bigwigs from Richmond were watching-they used far more guards than they normally would have to deal with a hundred black men. They got the Negroes formed up in a ten-by-ten square. The inmates carried whatever small chattels they intended to take away to the new camp where they thought they were going.

  That was part of the plan. As long as they thought they were going somewhere else, they would stay docile. They wouldn’t cause trouble unless they figured they were going on a one-way trip. The one-armed officer worked hard to keep them unsuspecting: “You men, we want y’all to be clean and tidy when we ship you out of Camp Determination. We’re going to get you that way before you leave. You’re gonna take baths. You’re gonna be deloused. No horseplay, or we will make your black asses sorry. Y’all got that?”

  “Yes, suh,” the Negroes chorused. Black heads bobbed up and down. The Negroes didn’t think anything was wrong. They were dirty. Most if not all were lousy. They probably wanted to get clean, and they could see why the men who ran the camp would want them to be that way before they left. Oh, yes-everything made perfect sense to them. But it made a different kind of sense to the guards and their superiors.

  “Come on, then,” the one-armed officer said. “Keep in formation, now, or you’ll catch it.” The Negroes had no trouble obeying. They often marched here and there through the camp in formation.

  Guards opened the barbed-wire gate separating the main camp from that building. In the Negroes went. Two guards waited in an antechamber. One of them said, “Strip naked and stow your stuff here. Everybody remember who put what where. You get in a fight over what belongs to who, you’ll be sorry. You got that?” Again, the Negroes nodded.

  So did Hipolito Rodriguez, watching as the black men shed their rags and set down their sorry bundles. This was a very nice touch. It convinced the prisoners they’d come back. The large contingent of guards was hardly necessary. A h
andful of men could have done the job. But Rodriguez understood why Jefferson Pinkard had assigned so many men to the prisoners. The more ready for trouble you were, the less likely you were to find it. And with visiting firemen watching, you couldn’t afford it.

  A sign on the wall above an onward-pointing arrow said DELOUSING AHEAD. The Negroes who could read went that way without hesitation. Most of the others followed. “Move along, move along,” the guards said, and chivvied the rest of the men into the room at the end of the corridor.

  It could hold a lot more than a hundred people-but this was, after all, only a test. Even here, the deception continued. A doorway was set into the far wall. A sign above it said TO THE BATHS.

  At the officer’s nod, Rodriguez shut the door through which the Negroes had gone in. That door didn’t match the rest of the scene. It was thick and made of steel, and had rubber gasketing all around the edge to make an airtight seal. Rodriguez spun the wheel in the center of the door’s back, making sure it fit snugly against the frame and locking it in place.

  Above the wheel, a small window with rounded corners let him look into the chamber he’d just sealed off. More rubber gasketing, inside and out, made sure what was inside that chamber would stay there.

  Other windows were set into the chamber’s walls. They too were protected with rubber inside and out. Guards took their places at some of them. Higher-ranking camp officials and the delegation from Richmond already stood by the rest. They wanted to see how this building worked out.

  Near the center of the chamber stood half a dozen steel columns, painted the same gray as the walls. The bottom two or three feet of them were not solid metal, but a grillwork too fine to poke a finger through. The naked Negroes in there milled about. Some of them went up to one column or another. A man rapped on a column with his knuckles. Rodriguez heard the dull clang.

  He knew exactly when guards up above the ceiling poured the Cyclone into the columns. All the Negroes sprang away from them as if they’d become red-hot. Men started falling almost at once. Not all of them fell right away, though. Some ran for the doorway marked TO THE BATHS. They pounded on it, but-what a surprise! — it didn’t open.