The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  After the run, the conscripts “relaxed” with close-order drill. “Left . . . ! Left . . . ! Left, right, left!” the drill sergeant bawled. “To the rear . . . haarch!” He screamed at somebody who couldn’t keep the rhythm if his life depended on it. Armstrong’s company had a couple of those unfortunates, who drew more than their fair share of abuse. He’d never figured out why the Army still needed close-order drill. Doing it where the enemy could see you was a recipe for getting massacred. But he didn’t have any trouble telling one foot from the other, or turning right and not left when he heard, “To the right flank . . . haarch!”

  Lunch that day was creamed chipped beef on toast, otherwise creamed chipped beast or, more often, shit on a shingle. Armstrong didn’t care what people called it. He didn’t care what he got, either, as long as there was plenty of it. He would have eaten a horse and chased the driver—and, considering how fast he could pound out the three miles, he probably would have caught him.

  After lunch came dirty fighting and rifle practice. Like any reasonably tough kid who got out of high school, Armstrong had thought he knew something about dirty fighting. The drill sergeant who’d mercilessly thumped him in the first day’s lesson taught him otherwise. He’d been amazed to discover what all you could do with elbows, knees, feet, and bent fingers. If you happened to have a knife . . .

  “Any civilian who fucks with me better have his funeral paid for,” he said.

  The drill sergeant shook his head. “He may have been through the mill, too. Or he may have a gun. You can’t kick a gun in the nuts. Remember that, or you’ll end up dead.”

  That struck Armstrong as good advice. A lot of what the drill sergeants said struck him as good advice. Whether he would take it was another question. He was no more interested than any other male his age in getting answers from someone else. He thought he had everything figured out for himself.

  After the fighting drill, he and his company marched off to the rifle range. That did help reinforce what the sergeant had said. If you had a Springfield in your hand, you could put a hole in a man—or a man-shaped target—from a hell of a lot farther away than a man could put a boot in your belly. And Armstrong was a good shot.

  “A lot of you guys think you’re hot stuff,” another drill sergeant said. This one had a fine collection of Sharpshooter and Expert medals jingling on his chest. “Listen to me, though. There’s one big difference between doing it on the range here and doing it in the field. In the field, the other son of a bitch shoots back. And if you think that doesn’t matter, you’re dreaming.”

  Armstrong only grunted. He was sure it didn’t matter. He could do it here. As far as he was concerned, that meant he could do it, period.

  The drill sergeant said, “Some of you think I’m kidding. Some of you think I’m talking with my head up my ass. Well, you’ll find out. It’s different in the field. A hell of a lot of guys get out there and they don’t shoot at all. There’s plenty of others who don’t aim first. They just point their piece somewhere—in the air, probably—and start banging away.”

  “What a bunch of fools,” Armstrong whispered to the recruit next to him. He wanted to laugh out loud, but he didn’t. That would have drawn the drill sergeant’s eye to him, which he didn’t want at all.

  As things were, the sergeant sent a scowl in his general direction, but it didn’t light on him personally. The veteran noncom went on, “There’s just one thing you’re lucky about. The other side will have as many fuckups as we do. That may keep some of you alive longer than you deserve. On the other hand, it may not, too. A machine gun isn’t awful goddamn choosy about who it picks out.” His face clouded. “I ought to know.” He wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart, too.

  “Question, Sergeant?” somebody called.

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “Is it true the Confederates are giving their soldiers lots and lots of submachine guns?” the youngster asked.

  “Yeah, that’s supposed to be true,” the sergeant said. “I don’t think all that much of the idea myself. Submachine gun only fires a pistol round. It doesn’t have a lot of stopping power, and the effective range is pretty short.” He stopped and rubbed his chin. It was blue with stubble, though he’d surely scraped it smooth that morning. “Of course, submachine guns do put a hell of a lot of lead in the air. And the goddamn Confederates can hold their breath till they turn blue, but they’re never gonna have as many men as we do. I expect that’s why they’re trying it.”

  Another recruit piped up: “Why hasn’t somebody made an automatic rifle, if a submachine gun isn’t good enough?”

  “The Confederates are supposed to be trying that, too, but there are problems,” the sergeant said. “Recoil, wear on the mechanism, overheating, having the weapon pull up when you fire it on full automatic, keeping it clean in the field—those are some of the things you’ve got to worry about. I wouldn’t fall over dead with surprise if we start using something like that, too, one of these days, but don’t hold your breath, either. And the Springfield is a goddamn good weapon. We won a war with it. We can win another one if we have to.”

  He waited. Sure enough, that drew another question: “Are we going to fight another war with the Confederate States?”

  “Beats me,” the drill sergeant answered. “I’ve done my share of fighting, and I am plumb satisfied. But if that Featherston son of a bitch isn’t . . . You need two for peace, but one can start a war. If he does start it, it’s up to us—it’ll be up to you—to finish it.”

  Armstrong Grimes had no complaints. If he had to be in the Army, he wanted to be there while it was in action. What point to it otherwise? He didn’t think about getting hurt. He especially didn’t think about getting killed. That kind of stuff happened to other people. It couldn’t possibly happen to him. He was going to live forever.

  The sergeant said, “And if he does start another war, you will finish it, right? You’ll kick the CSA’s mangy ass around the block, right?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” the young men shouted. They were all as convinced of their own immortality as Armstrong Grimes.

  “I can’t hear you.” The sergeant cupped a hand behind one ear.

  “Yes, Sergeant!” The recruits might have been at a football game. Armstrong yelled as loud as anybody else.

  “That’s better,” the drill sergeant allowed. “Not good, but better.” Hardly anything anybody did in basic training was good. You might be perfect, but you still weren’t good enough. They wanted you to try till you keeled over. People did, too.

  Supper was fried chicken and canned corn and spinach, with apple pie à la mode for dessert. It wasn’t great fried chicken, but you could eat as much as you wanted, which made up for a lot. Armstrong used food to pay his body back for the sleep it wasn’t getting.

  After supper, he had a couple of hours to himself—the only time during the day when he wasn’t either unconscious or being run ragged. He could write home—which he didn’t do often enough to suit his mother—or read a book or get into a poker game or shoot the breeze with other recruits winding down from an exhausting day or do what he usually did: lie on his cot smoking cigarette after cigarette. People said they were bad for your wind. He didn’t care. He got through his three miles without any trouble, and the smokes helped him relax.

  “You think there’s going to be a war?” somebody asked. The question had been coming up more and more often lately.

  “If there is, the goddamn Confederates’ll be sorry,” somebody else answered.

  “Damn right,” Armstrong said in the midst of a general rumble of agreement.

  “We can lick ’em,” someone said, and then added what might have been the young man’s creed: “If our fathers did it, hell, we can do it easy.”

  “Damn right,” Armstrong said again. Two hours after he sacked out, they had a simulated night attack. He bounced out of bed to repel imaginary enemies. He didn’t miss the sleep. Why would he? He was already too far behind for a little more to ma
tter.

  Colonel Clarence Potter imagined a man he had never seen. He didn’t know if the man lived in Dallas or Mobile or Nashville or Charleston or Richmond. Wherever he lived, he fit right in. He sounded like the people around him. He looked like them, too, and acted like them. When the time came to shout, “Freedom!” he yelled as loud as anybody. When he had a few beers in a saloon, he grumbled about what the damnyankee innovation of the forward pass had done to the great game of football.

  And when he was by himself, this man Potter had never seen would write innocent-looking letters or send innocent-sounding wires up to the United States. He would be doing business with or for some firm or other based north of the Mason-Dixon line. And some of his messages really would be innocent, and some of them would go straight to the U.S. War Department in Philadelphia.

  The man Potter had never met—would never meet—was the mirror image of the spies he ran in the USA. He’d had the idea. He had to assume his opposite number up in the United States had had it, too. He didn’t like that, but he had to believe it. He kept wondering how much damage that imaginary U.S. spy could do.

  Trouble was, the bastard almost certainly wasn’t imaginary. A German had trouble sounding like a Frenchman, and vice versa. But a Yankee and a Confederate were too close to begin with. Differences in accent were small things. If you came from the USA, you had to remember to say things like note or banknote instead of bill. People would follow you if you used your own word, but they’d know you were a foreigner. But if you were careful, you could get by.

  Something else worried Clarence Potter. He ran spies. The probable counterpart of one of the fellows he ran would also be a spy. If you had people in place as spies, though, wouldn’t you also have them in place as provocateurs? As saboteurs?

  He didn’t know whether the Confederates had provocateurs and saboteurs lurking in the USA. He didn’t know because it was none of his business. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. In philosophy up at Yale, though, he’d learned about what Plato called true opinions. He was pretty damn sure he had one of those about this question. He also had some strong opinions about where he’d put provocateurs and saboteurs.

  He sat down in front of his typewriter to bang out a memorandum. In it he said not a word about spies, provocateurs, and saboteurs in the United States. He did mention the possibility that their U.S. equivalents were operating in the Confederate States. It would be unfortunate, he wrote, if the USA were able to take advantage of similarities between the two countries in language, custom, and dress, and it is to be hoped that steps to prevent such dangerous developments are currently being taken.

  When he reread the sentence, the corners of his mouth turned down in distaste. He didn’t like writing that way; it set his teeth on edge. He would rather have come straight to the point. But he knew the officers who would see the memorandum. They wrote gobbledygook. They expected to read it, too. Active verbs would only scare them. They were none too active themselves.

  As soon as he fired the memorandum up the chain of command, he stopped worrying about it. He judged he probably wouldn’t get an answer. If the Army or the Freedom Party or somebody was watching out for suspicious characters, he wouldn’t. Nobody would bother patting a busybody colonel on the hand and saying, “There, there. No need to worry, dear.”

  A few days later, he was writing a note when the telephone on his desk rang. His hand jerked a little—just enough to spoil a word. He scratched it out before picking up the handset. “Clarence Potter.” He didn’t say he was in Intelligence. Anyone who didn’t already know had the wrong number.

  “Hello, Potter. You are a sneaky son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “Hello, Mr. President,” Potter answered cautiously. “Is that a compliment or not? In my line of work, I’m supposed to be.”

  “Hell, yes, it’s a compliment,” Jake Featherston answered. “It’s also a judgment on us. We’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do to the damnyankees. We ain’t worried near enough about what them bastards can do to us.”

  When his grammar slipped that far, he was genuinely irate. He’d also told Potter what the call was about. “You’ve read the memorandum, then?”

  “Damn right I’ve read it. Those two whistle-ass peckerheads above you kicked it up to me. They were going, ‘What do you want to do about this here?’ ”

  Clarence Potter had a hard time swallowing a snort. Featherston might be president of the CSA, but he still talked like a foul-mouthed sergeant, especially when he took aim at officers. Potter asked, “What do you want to do about it, Mr. President?”

  “You asked the questions. I want somebody to get me some answers. I sure as shit don’t have enough of ’em right now. How would you like to do it? I’ll make you a brigadier general on the spot.”

  Only two promotions really mattered: the one up from buck private and the one to general’s rank. All the same, Potter said, “Sir, if I have a choice, I’d rather work on our assets there than their assets here. I want to hit those people when the time comes.”

  “Even if it costs you the promotion?” Featherston could only mean, How serious are you?

  “Even if it does,” Potter said firmly. “I didn’t expect to come back into the Army anyway. I didn’t do it for a wreath around my stars. I did it for the country.” And to keep from giving you an excuse for getting rid of me. He didn’t say that. Why remind Featherston?

  “All right, then. You’ve got it—and the promotion,” the president said. “That’s your baby now, General Potter.”

  It did feel good. It felt damn good, as a matter of fact. And it felt all the better because Potter hadn’t expected he would ever get it. When he said, “Thank you, Mr. President!” he sounded much more sincere than he’d thought he would while talking to Jake Featherston.

  “I reckon you’ve earned it,” Featherston answered. “I reckon you’ll do a good job with it, too. You wait half an hour, and then you go right on into Brigadier General McGillivray’s office and get to work. From here on out, it’s yours.”

  “Yes, sir,” Potter said, but he was talking to a dead line. He wondered briefly why the president wanted him to wait, but only briefly. He’d known Jake Featherston more than twenty-five years. He could guess what Jake would be doing with that half hour.

  And his guess proved good. When he walked into his superior’s—no, his former superior’s—office, Brigadier General Stanley McGillivray was white and trembling. “I gather you are to replace me?” he choked out when he saw Potter.

  “I gather I am.” Potter had ripped into a good many incompetent officers in his time, but he didn’t have the heart to say anything snide to McGillivray. The other Intelligence officer was a broken man if ever he’d seen one. He was so terribly broken, in fact, that Potter, for once, was moved more to sympathy than to sarcasm. “I hope the president wasn’t too hard on you?”

  “That, Colonel Potter—excuse me: General Potter—is what they call a forlorn hope,” McGillivray answered bitterly. “I think you will find everything in order here. I think you will find it in better condition than I have been given credit for. Good day. Good luck.” By the way he stumbled out of the office, he might almost have been a blind man.

  “Poor bastard,” Potter muttered. Anyone who ran into the cutting torch of Jake Featherston’s fury was going to get charred. He’d seen that for himself, more often than he cared to remember.

  And then he put Stanley McGillivray out of his mind. He was familiar with only about a third of the work that this desk did. He had to learn the rest of it . . . and he had the strong feeling he had to learn it in a tearing hurry. Featherston sure as hell wouldn’t wait for him. Featherston had never been in the habit of waiting for anybody.

  Potter went through the manila folders on the desk one by one. Some of them held things he’d expected to find. A few held surprises. He’d hoped they would. If he’d been able to figure out everything McGillivray was doing, wouldn’t the damnyankees have done the sa
me thing?

  Some of the surprises were surprises indeed. The Confederates had been running people in Philadelphia since before the Great War. They’d recruited young men who needed this or that—and some who needed to make sure this or that never became public. Not all those young men had lasted. Some had died in the war. Some hadn’t had the careers they’d hoped they would, and so proved useless as sources. But a handful of them, by now, were in position to know some very interesting things, and to pass them on.

  The assets farther west were interesting, too. Most of Potter’s notions of where they were proved right. Again, he got some surprises about who they were. That didn’t matter so much. As long as he could use them . . .

  He also checked the procedures Brigadier General McGillivray had in place for staying in touch with his people in the USA in case normal communications channels broke down—in plain English, in case there was a war. They weren’t bad. He hoped he could find a way to make them better. The real problem he saw was how slow they were. He understood why that was so, but he didn’t like it. “There’s got to be a better way,” he muttered, not sure if he was right.

  Late that afternoon, the telephone in the new office rang. When he picked it up, Anne Colleton was on the other end of the line. “Congratulations, General Potter,” she purred in his ear.

  “Jesus Christ!” Potter sat bolt upright in his new swivel chair. It was a different make from the one he’d used before; he wasn’t used to it yet. Its squeak sounded funny, too. “How did you know that?”