The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  “I had to talk with the president about something,” she answered. “He told me he’d promoted you.”

  “Oh.” Potter’s alarm evaporated. If she’d heard it from Jake Featherston, it was hardly a security breach. “All right.”

  “He told me some of why he promoted you, too,” Anne said. “Do you really think the damnyankees are going to raise hell here if we go to war?”

  “Well, I can’t know, not for sure. But I would, if I were in their shoes. I do know they gave our niggers guns during the last war. If there’s another one, they’d be fools not to do it again. They’re bastards. They aren’t fools. We thought they were in 1914. We’ve been paying for it ever since.”

  “Can we track down the people they’ve got here?” Anne asked.

  “Of course we can,” Potter answered, thinking, No way in hell. More truthfully, he went on, “The harder we go after them, the more careful they’ll have to be, too.”

  “Uh-huh,” Anne said in thoughtful tones.

  She was, dammit, plenty smart enough to see the contradictions between the two things he’d said. He changed the subject: “What were you talking about with the president?”

  “The timing of a propaganda campaign here in South Carolina,” she said. Potter wondered just what that meant. He didn’t want to go into details with her. God only knew how secure this line was. But the likeliest explanation he could come up with on his own was, We were talking about when the war will start.

  Abner Dowling raised field glasses to his eyes and looked across the Ohio River into Kentucky. The mere act of observing Kentucky from afar made him so angry, he wanted to swell up like a bullfrog. As far as he was concerned, he shouldn’t have been looking into a foreign country when he eyed Kentucky. He should have been in the state, getting ready to defend it against the Confederates. If they wanted to take it away from him, they would have been welcome to try. He could have promised them a warm reception.

  Now . . . Now he had to figure out how to defend Ohio instead. The General Staff had generously sent him some plans prepared before the Great War. They would have been just what he needed, except that they ignored airplanes and barrels and barely acknowledged the existence of trucks. Things had changed since 1914. Dowling knew that. He hoped to God the General Staff did, too.

  Some of what the old plans suggested was still sound. All the bridges across the Ohio had demolition charges in place. Artillery covered the bridges and other possible crossing points. Antiaircraft guns poked their noses up among the camouflaged cannons. If the Confederates were going to try to bomb his guns to silence, they wouldn’t have an easy time of it.

  He kept his main force farther back in Ohio than the old plans recommended. Again, the airplane was the main reason why. He also wanted to get some notion of what the Confederates were doing before he committed his men.

  Custer would have charged right at them, wherever they first showed themselves, he thought. The way he rolled his eyes showed his opinion of that. Custer would have charged, sure as the devil. Maybe he would have smashed everything in his way. Maybe he would have blundered straight into an ambush. But he could no more keep from charging than a bull could when a matador waved his cape. Sword? What sword? Custer would have thought, bullishly.

  For better or worse—for better and worse—Dowling was more cautious. If the Confederate Army crossed into the USA, he wanted to slow it down. The way he looked at things, if the Confederates didn’t win quick victories, they’d be in trouble. In a long, drawn-out grapple, the USA had the edge. Dowling didn’t think that had changed since the Great War.

  He raised the field glasses again. Kentucky seemed to leap toward him. Jake Featherston had lied about keeping soldiers out of the state. He’d lied about not asking for more land. How was anybody in the United States supposed to trust him now? You couldn’t. It was as simple as that.

  Even Al Smith had seen the light. The president of the USA had said he would fight back if the CSA tried to take land by force. Dowling was all for that. But so much more could have been done. It could have, but it hadn’t. Everybody’d known the Confederates were rearming. If the USA had been serious about showing Featherston who was boss, the country could have done it quickly and easily in 1935. Nothing would be quick or easy now.

  And the United States weren’t so ready as they should have been. Dowling thought about all the time wasted in the 1920s. The Confederates had been on the ropes then, either on the ropes or smiling and saying how friendly they were. Why build better barrels when you’d never have to use them? As happened too often in politics, never turned out not to be so very long after all.

  “Sir?” said an aide at Dowling’s elbow. “Sir?”

  Dowling had been lost in his own gloom. He wondered how long the younger man had been trying to draw his notice. However long it was, he’d finally succeeded. “Yes, Major Chandler? What is it?”

  “Sir, Captain Litvinoff from the Special Weapons Section in Philadelphia has come down from Columbus to confer with you,” Chandler answered.

  “Has he?” Dowling was damned if he wanted to confer with anybody from what was euphemistically called the Special Weapons Section. Regardless of what he wanted, he had little choice. “All right. Let’s get it over with.” He might have been talking about a trip to the dentist.

  “Max Litvinoff, sir,” the captain said, saluting.

  Dowling returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you,” he lied. Litvinoff looked even more like a brain than he’d expected. The captain with the cobalt blue and golden yellow arm-of-service piping on his collar couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was about five feet four, skinny, and homely, with thick steel-rimmed glasses and a thin, dark mustache that looked as if he’d drawn it on with a burnt match for an amateur theatrical.

  However he looked, he was all business. “This will be good terrain for the application of our special agents,” he said briskly.

  He might have been talking about spies. He might have been, but he wasn’t. Dowling knew too well what he was talking about. Dowling also had a pretty good idea why Litvinoff didn’t come right out and say what he meant. People who ended up in the Special Weapons Section often didn’t. It was magic of a sort: if they didn’t say the real name, they didn’t have to think about what they were doing.

  “You’re talking about poison gas.” Dowling had no such inhibitions.

  Max Litvinoff coughed. His sallow cheeks turned red. “Well . . . yes, sir,” he mumbled. He was only a captain. He couldn’t reprove a man with a star on each shoulder. Every line of his body, though, shouted out that he wanted to.

  Too bad, Dowling thought. He’d been up at the front with General Custer the first time the USA turned chlorine loose on the Confederates in 1915. “Gas is a filthy business,” he said, and Captain Litvinoff’s cheeks got redder yet. “We use it, the Confederates use it, some soldiers on both sides end up dead, and nobody’s much better off. What’s the point?”

  “The point, sir, is very simple,” Litvinoff answered stiffly. “If the enemy uses the special agent”—he still wouldn’t say gas—“and we don’t, then our men end up dead and his don’t. Therefore . . .”

  What Dowling wanted to do was yell, Fuck you! and kick the captain in the ass. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. Litvinoff was right. Handing the CSA an edge like that would be stupid, maybe suicidal. “Go on,” Dowling growled.

  “Yes, sir. You will be familiar with the agents utilized in the last war?” Captain Litvinoff sounded as if he didn’t believe it. When Dowling nodded, Litvinoff shrugged. He went on, “You may perhaps be less familiar with those developed at the close of hostilities and subsequently.”

  So I am, Dowling thought. And thank God for small favors. But he couldn’t say that to Litvinoff. He was, heaven help him, going to have to work with the man. What he did say was, “I’m all ears.”

  “Good.” Captain Litvinoff looked pleased. He liked talking about his toys, showing them off, explaining—in bloodless-seemi
ng terms—what they could do. If that wasn’t a measure of his damnation, Dowling couldn’t imagine what would be. Litvinoff continued, “First, there’s nitrogen mustard. We did use some of this in 1917. It’s a vesicant.”

  “A what?” Dowling asked. The Special Weapons Section man might have his vocabulary of euphemisms, but that didn’t even sound like a proper English word.

  Reluctantly, Litvinoff translated: “A blistering agent. Mucus membranes and skin. It does not have to be inhaled to be effective, thought it will produce more and more severe casualties if the lungs are involved. And it is a persistent agent. In the absence of strong direct sunlight or rain, it can remain in place and active for months. An excellent way to deny access to an area to the enemy.”

  “And to us,” Dowling said.

  Captain Litvinoff looked wounded. “By no means, sir. Troops with proper protective gear and an awareness the agent is in the area can function quite well.”

  “All right,” Dowling said, though it was anything but. “What other little toys have you got?”

  “Walk with me, sir, if you’d be so kind,” Litvinoff said, and led him away from the officers and men in his entourage. When the young captain was sure they were out of earshot, he went on, “We also have what we are terming nerve agents. They are a step up in lethality from other agents we have been utilizing.”

  Dowling needed a second or two to figure out what lethality meant. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. “Nerve agents?” he echoed queasily.

  “That’s right.” Litvinoff nodded. “Again, these are effective both by inhalation and through cutaneous contact. They prevent nerve impulses from initiating muscular activity.” That didn’t sound like anything much. But his next sentence told what it meant: “Lethality occurs through cardiopulmonary failure. Onset is quite rapid, and the amount of agent required to induce it is astonishingly small.”

  “How nice,” Dowling said. Captain Litvinoff beamed. Dowling muttered, “I wonder why we bother with bullets any more.”

  “So do I, sir. So do I.” Litvinoff was dead serious—under the circumstances, the exact right phrase. But then, as grudging as a spinster talking about the facts of life, he admitted, “These nerve agents do have an antidote. But it must be administered by injection, and if it is administered in error, it is in itself toxic.”

  “This is all wonderful news,” Dowling said—another thumping lie. He had been looking forward to lunch. He usually did. Now, though, his appetite had vanished. And a new and important question occurred to him: “Good to know we have these things available. But tell me, Captain, what are the Confederates likely to throw at us if the war starts?”

  Max Litvinoff blinked behind his spectacles. “I am more familiar with our own program. . . .”

  “Dammit, Captain, I’m not just going to shoot these things at the enemy. I’ll be on the receiving end, too. What am I going to receive? What can I do about it?”

  “Respirators are current issue. Protective clothing is rather less widely available, and does tend to restrict mobility in warm, humid climates,” Litvinoff said. Dowling tried to imagine running around in a rubberized suit in Ohio or Kentucky in July. The thought did not bring reassurance with it. The Special Weapons Section officer went on, “The Confederate States are likely to be familiar with nitrogen mustard. Whether they know of nerve agents, and of which sorts, I am less prepared to state.”

  “Does somebody in the War Department have any idea? Can you tell me who would?” Dowling asked. “It might be important, you know.”

  “Well, yes, I can see how it might,” Litvinoff said. “Unfortunately, however, defenses against these agents are not my area of expertise.”

  “Yes, I gathered that. I’m trying to find out from you whose area of expertise they are.”

  “Knowing that does not fall within my area of expertise, either.”

  Dowling looked at him. “Captain, why the hell did you come out here in the first place?”

  “Why, to give you information, sir.”

  He meant it. Dowling could see as much. Seeing as much didn’t make him very happy—or give him much information, either.

  XX

  Flora Blackford had been to a lot of Remembrance Day parades, in New York and in Philadelphia. This year’s parade in New York City took her back to the days before the Great War, when the holiday had truly been a day of national mourning. People had commemorated the loss of the War of Secession and of the Second Mexican War, and had pledged not to fail again. Flags had flown upside down on Remembrance Day, symbolizing the country’s distress.

  Since the Great War, Remembrance Day had faded some in the nation’s consciousness. People had a triumph to remember now, not just a pair of scalding defeats. The custom of flying flags upside down had fallen into disuse. Teddy Roosevelt had been the first to abandon it, in the Philadelphia parade in 1918, the year after the war ended.

  This year, the custom was back. Anyone who cared to look could see war clouds looming up from the south, bigger and blacker with each passing day. If that wasn’t cause for distress, Flora didn’t know what would be.

  In the limousine just ahead of hers rode Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the ambassador from the German Empire, and his Austro-Hungarian opposite number, whose name Flora never could recall. Schacht was a much more memorable character. He spoke fluent English, as well he might, given his two middle names. He was a financial wizard, even in hard times. Nobody knew how much money he had, or exactly how he’d got it.

  In 1915, riots had marred the Remembrance Day parade here. Even now, no one knew if Socialists or Mormons had started the fighting. Then, Flora had been in the crowd lining Fifth Avenue. She remembered the then ambassadors from Germany and Austria-Hungary going past. She’d never imagined that she might be taking part in the parade herself one day.

  Socialists wouldn’t protest or disrupt the parade this year, not with Al Smith in Powel House. What heckling there was came from Democrats. Flora heard shouts like, “We should have cleaned house a long time ago!” and, “Now you Red bastards say you’re patriots!” That infuriated her and stung at the same time, for she knew it held a little truth. In politics as in life, the best slams often held a little truth.

  There might have been more rude shouts than she heard. Her open car rolled along in front of a marching band that blared out martial music. The conductor wasn’t John Philip Sousa, whom she’d seen in 1915, but he thought he was.

  Behind the band rolled another limousine. This one carried two ancient veterans of the War of Secession. More limousines carried survivors from the Second Mexican War. A handful of veterans from that war were still spry enough to march down the street on their own, too.

  After them came what seemed like an endless stream of Great War veterans, organized by the year of their conscription class. They were the solid, middle-aged men who shaped opinion and ran the country these days. The way they marched said they knew it, too.

  More limousines followed them. They carried Great War veterans who wanted to parade but had been too badly wounded to march. Her brother rode in one of them. David Hamburger hadn’t asked Flora to keep him out of the Army. He’d come out of the war with only one leg. He’d never asked Flora to pull strings for him since . . . till this Remembrance Day parade. She’d done it, and gladly. If he was a stubborn Democrat—so what? The Democrats turned out to have been closer to right about Jake Featherston than the Socialists had. Flora didn’t admit that in public, but she knew it was true.

  Few cheers came from the crowds that lined the streets. Remembrance Day wasn’t a holiday for cheers. But the crowds were thicker than on any Remembrance Day that Flora remembered since the euphoric one after the end of the Great War.

  The parade rolled along Fifth Avenue: limousines, marching bands, veterans, clanking military hardware, and all. More people filled Central Park, where it ended. Spring made the air taste sweet and green. Wherever people weren’t standing, robins and starlings hopped on the grass
, digging up worms.

  Strangely, the cheery birds made Flora sad. There are liable to be plenty of fat worms soon, she thought, because the bodies of our young men will feed them.

  A temporary speaker’s platform stood in the middle of a meadow now packed with people. Policemen—one tough Irish mug after another—kept a lane clear for the limousines. They pulled up behind the platform. Dignitaries got out and ascended. Flora took her place with the rest. The other women on the platform were there because they were wives. Flora had her place because of what she did, and she was proud of it.

  Governor LaGuardia, a peppery little Socialist in an outsized fedora, called the German ambassador to the microphone. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht spoke better, more elegant English than the governor. “We have been rivals, your country and mine, because we are both strong,” he said. “The strong notice each other. They also draw the jealousy of the weak. Like you, we have neighbors who would like to bite our ankles.” That patrician scorn drew a laugh. Schacht went on, “So long as we stand together, though, nothing can overcome us both.” He got another big hand, and sat down.

  The Austro-Hungarian envoy—his name was Schussnigg, Governor LaGuardia said—delivered a thickly accented speech that sounded ferocious but didn’t make much sense. When he stepped away from the microphone, the applause he got seemed more relieved than anything else.

  LaGuardia himself made a speech that called down fire and brimstone on the Democratic Party and the Confederate States in equal measure. Then he introduced the mayor of New York City, who was just as Italian as he was, and who ripped the Socialists and the Confederate States up one side and down the other. The two men glared at each other. Flora couldn’t help laughing.

  More speeches followed, some very partisan, others less so. Then Governor LaGuardia said, “And now, the former First Lady of the United States, New York City’s favorite daughter, Congresswoman Flora Blackford!”

  Flora stood up and strode to the microphone. A few cries of, “Blackfordburghs!” floated out of the crowd, but only a few. She hadn’t expected not to hear them. If anything, she got less heckling than she’d looked for.