Drive to the East

XIII

Dr. Leonard O’Doull wondered how many places he’d set up his aid station since returning to the war. A lot of them-that was all he knew for sure. After a while, they started blurring together. So did cases. What made that worse was, he never saw them again after they went back for more treatment. He never found out whether they got better or worse. They were just arms or legs or bellies or chests or heads-not that he or anybody else this side of God could do much for too many head wounds.

When he complained about that outside the aid tent one day, Granville McDougald said, “Well, Doc, remember the fellow who had the round burrow under his scalp and come out the back?”

“Calisse! I’m not likely to forget him,” O’Doull said. That one would stay in his memory forever. “I haven’t come that close to crapping myself since I was three years old. But most of the bullets don’t go around. They go in.”

McDougald grimaced. He crushed a cigarette under his foot. They’d set up in some woods north of Pittsburgh. Catbirds mewed and squawked in the trees. They made an ungodly racket, not all of it catlike. You didn’t see them all that often. They were gray with black caps and rusty brown under their tails-good camouflage colors-and stayed where leaves and bushes were thick. A cardinal scratching for seeds on the ground, on the other hand…

“I used to love those birds,” O’Doull said sadly, pointing towards it. “Nowadays, though, the color just reminds me of blood.”

“You are cheery this morning, aren’t you?” McDougald studied the plump, crested cardinal. “I still like ’em.”

“To each his own.” O’Doull looked up at the leaves and branches overhead in a different way. “I wish we were a little more out in the open. A tree burst right above us would fill the aid tent with shrapnel.”

“If we were out in the open, we’d get shrapnel from ground bursts that the tree trunks will stop,” McDougald answered, which was also true. “Only way not to worry about artillery is not to have a war, and it’s a little late for that now.”

“Just a bit, yeah,” O’Doull said. “And ain’t it a shame?”

His head came up like a pointer’s taking a scent. So did McDougald’s. But they didn’t smell anything. No, they heard heavy footsteps: the footsteps of stretcher bearers bringing back a casualty. “Doc!” Eddie yelled. “Hey, Doc! Here’s a new model for you!”

“Back to work,” O’Doull murmured, and Granville McDougald nodded. The doctor raised his voice: “Bring him to us, Eddie!” He went inside and washed his hands with soap and disinfectant, taking special care to clean under and around his nails. McDougald did the same. They slipped on surgical masks together. Sometimes O’Doull wondered how much good that did when wounds were often already filthy before they got back to him. He supposed you had to try.

Another groaning wounded man, this one shot in the leg. Except, as Eddie had said, he wasn’t what O’Doull was used to seeing. He was short and swarthy and black-haired, and wore a uniform of cut and color-a khaki more nearly yellow than brown-different from either U.S. green-gray or C.S. butternut. When words broke through the animal noises of pain, they came in Spanish, not English.

“Heard there were Mexican troops in front of us,” McDougald remarked.

“So did I.” O’Doull nodded. “Poor devil came a long way just to let some nasty strangers put a hole in him.”

McDougald shook his head. “He came to put holes in the nasty strangers himself. Suckers always do. They never figure the guys on the other side are gonna shoot back.”

The Mexican soldier’s moans eased. Eddie or one of the other corpsmen must have given him morphine. He said something. O’Doull couldn’t figure out what it was. Spanish and French were related, sure, but not closely enough to let him understand one even if he knew the other.

He spoke in English: “You’ll be all right.” From what he could see of the wound, he thought that was true. The bullet looked to have blown off a chunk of flesh, but not to have shattered any bones. He turned to McDougald. “Put him under.”

“Right you are, Doc.” McDougald settled the ether cone over the wounded man’s face. He and Eddie had to keep the soldier from yanking it off; a lot of men thought they were being gassed when they inhaled the anesthetic. After a few breaths, the Mexican’s hands fell away and he went limp.

O’Doull cleaned out the wound and sewed it up. Had men from the soldier’s own side brought him in, it would have been a hometowner: good for convalescent leave, but nothing that would keep him from coming back to the front. As things were, he’d sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp.

When the job was done, O’Doull nodded to Eddie. “You can take him back to the rear now. If they have anybody who speaks Spanish handy, they’ll probably want to grill him.”

“I suppose,” Eddie said. “Like worrying about the Confederates wasn’t bad enough. Now we’ve got the greasers jumping on us, too.”

No matter what he called Mexicans, he handled this one with the same rough compassion he would have shown any wounded soldier, white, brown, black, or even green. He and the other stretcher bearers carried away the still-unconscious man.

“Interesting,” Granville McDougald said. “Does this mean the Confederates are starting to run low on their own men?”

“Don’t know,” said O’Doull, who hadn’t looked at it like that.

“Well, neither do I,” McDougald allowed. “I don’t think like Jake Featherston or Francisco Jose, thank God. I hope I’m not a son of a bitch or a moron.” That startled a laugh out of O’Doull. The medic went on, “But even if I don’t know, that’s sure how it looks to me.”

“It makes sense,” O’Doull said. “We beat the CSA last time by hammering on them till they couldn’t hammer back anymore. If we’re going to win this war, we’ll have to knock ’em flat again.”

“Flatter,” McDougald said. “Last time, we let ’em up again. If we beat ’em this time, we’d better not do that again. I don’t know how long we’ll have to sit on ’em, but we need to do it, however long it takes.”

“I suppose so,” O’Doull said mournfully. “But remember what Kentucky and Houston were supposed to be like before the plebiscite?”

“I’d better remember-I was in Houston for a while. Half of what went on never made the papers in the USA, let alone in Quebec, I bet.” Granville McDougald paused. He looked very unhappy. “I don’t want to think about how much trouble sitting on the whole Confederacy would be. Those people purely hate us, no two ways about it. But if we don’t occupy them and control them, we’ll have to fight ’em again in another twenty years, and I sure as hell don’t want to do that, either.”

“So what you’re telling me is, we’re in trouble no matter what happens,” O’Doull said. “Thanks a lot, Granny.”

“There’s trouble, and then there’s trouble,” McDougald said. “Trouble is us occupying the Confederate States. Trouble is the Confederates occupying us. If I’ve got a choice, I know which one I’d take.”

“Yeah, me, too,” O’Doull said. “Here’s hoping we’ve got a choice.”

“Now why would you say something like that?” McDougald inquired. “Haven’t you got confidence in our brilliant leaders? Doesn’t the fact that we’re fighting in Pennsylvania mean victory’s right around the corner?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” O’Doull answered. “The only trouble is, whose victory are you talking about?”

McDougald laughed, for all the world as if they were sitting in a saloon telling jokes. The fate of nations? Who could get excited about the fate of nations if the beer was cold and the joint had a halfway decent free-lunch spread? The medic said, “If we were a little farther back of the line and we talked like this, we’d catch hell for defeatism, you know?”

“Yeah, they’d yell at us,” O’Doull agreed. “But that’s all they’d do. If we talked like this on the Confederate side of the line, they’d probably shoot us.”

“Y’all are damnyankee sympathizers.” McDougald’s Southern drawl wouldn’t get him into espionage. “Y’all can have blindfolds. I ain’t gonna waste good Confederate tobacco on you, though-that’s for damn sure.”

“A Kentucky colonel you’re not,” O’Doull said. But then he thought about the warning that had come in: Confederate soldiers in U.S. uniform were supposed to be operating behind U.S. lines. They were supposed to have good U.S. accents, too. O’Doull had no idea if that was true, or how you went about telling a disguised Confederate from an average screwup. He also wondered what to do if one of those Confederates in U.S. clothing came into the aid station. Then he wondered how the devil he’d know.

Scipio got more frightened every day. Nothing had changed in the Terry since the sweep that would have swept out his family and him. Nothing had changed, no, but trouble was in the air. Something new was stirring, and he didn’t know what it was.

He came right out and asked Jerry Dover. The manager at the Huntsman’s Lodge just shrugged and said, “I haven’t heard anything.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio said. “Them Freedom Party stalwarts, they looks like they gwine kill all o’ we, an’ you ain’t heard nothin’?”

“If I had, I’d tell you,” Dover said. “This time, I think you’re flabbling over nothing.”

“Ain’t you got no mo’ errands fo’ me to run? Ain’t you got no errands fo’ me an’ my whole fambly to run?” Scipio paused, then switched dialects to the one he hardly ever used: “Mr. Dover, please understand me-I am a desperate man, sir.” He had to be desperate to use his white man’s voice.

It rocked Dover, the way it would have rocked any white in the CSA. Biting his lip, the restaurant manager muttered, “If I’d known you were that goddamn sharp, I never would’ve sent you to Savannah.”

Scipio wanted to laugh, or possibly to scream. Jerry Dover had worked alongside him for more than twenty years. If that didn’t give Dover the chance to figure out what kind of brains he had… Scipio knew what the trouble was, of course. All that time, he’d talked like a nigger, and an ignorant nigger at that. Perception clouded reality. Like so many whites, Dover had assumed anybody who sounded like an illiterate field hand had to be as ignorant and probably as stupid as a field hand.

Of course, there were holes in that line of thought. Dover had known all along that he could read and write and cipher. Set that against sounding like a buck from the Congaree swamps, though, and it suddenly became small potatoes.

“What was in that envelope I took there?” Scipio pressed his advantage. He didn’t get one very often, and knew he had to make the most of it. “Something for the United States? Something for the Freedom Party? Something for a lady friend of yours, perhaps?” Even to himself, he sounded smarter when he talked like a white man. If that wasn’t a measure of what living in the Confederate States his whole life had done to him, he didn’t know what would be.

Jerry Dover turned red. “Whatever it was, it’s none of your damn beeswax,” he snapped. “The less you know about it, the better off we both are. Have you got that?”

He made sense, no matter how much Scipio wished he didn’t. If they arrested Scipio instead of just hauling him off to a camp, he couldn’t tell them what he didn’t know. Of course, he could tell them Dover’s name, at which point they’d start tearing into the restaurant manager. And how would he stand up to the third degree? Scipio almost looked forward to finding out. If Dover’s ruin didn’t so surely involve his own, he would have.

“Somethin’ else you better keep in mind,” Dover said. “Wasn’t for me, you’d be dead. Wasn’t for me, you’d be in wherever niggers go when they clean out part of the Terry. Instead, you’re still walkin’ around Augusta, and you don’t seem any too goddamn grateful for it.”

“If walking around Augusta involved anything even approaching freedom-lowercase f, mind you-I would be grateful,” Scipio said. “But this is only a slightly more spacious prison. I don’t ask for much, Mr. Dover. I could accept living as I did before the war began. It was imperfect, but I know it was as much as I could reasonably expect from this country. What I have now, sir-I do believe a preacher would call it hell.”

He’d hoped his passion-and his accent-would impress the white man. Maybe they even did. But Dover said, “All I got to tell you is, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You go on about a preacher? You ought to get down on bended knee and thank God you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Where Scipio had rocked him before, now he shook the black man. He sounded as if he knew exactly what he was talking about. “Mr. Dover, if what you say is true, then my family and I have even more urgent reasons to leave Augusta immediately.”

“Bullshit,” Dover said. Scipio blinked as if he’d never heard the word before. “Bullshit,” Dover repeated. “What the hell makes you think things are better anywhere else, for crying out loud?”

Scipio bit down on that like a man breaking a tooth on a cherry pit in his piece of pie. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed, startled for a moment back into his usual way of talking. He’d always thought of Augusta as an aberration, a disaster. If it wasn’t…

“Jesus ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” Jerry Dover said brutally. “Don’t be dumber than you can help, all right? If you reckon you’re the only one in the world with troubles, what does that make you? Besides a damn fool, I mean?”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio said again, softly this time. “What am I gonna do?”

He wasn’t asking the question of the restaurant manager. He wasn’t asking God, either. He was asking himself, and he had no more answers than either God or Dover did.

Dover thought he had one: “Get your ass out there, do your job, and keep your head down.”

Had Scipio been alone in the world, that might even have sufficed. As things were, he shook his head. “I got a wife, Mistuh Dover. I got chilluns.” He couldn’t talk like a white man now; that would have hurt too much. “I wants dem chilluns to do better’n I ever done. How kin dey do dat? Likely tell, dey don’t even git to grow up.” Tears filled his eyes and his voice.

Dover looked down at his desk. “I don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

“He’p me!” Scipio burst out. “You gots to he’p me. Git me outa here.”

“How? Where?” the restaurant manager demanded. “You reckon I got some magic carpet that’ll fly you to Mexico or the USA? If you do, give me some of whatever you’re drinking, on account of I want to get goofy, too.”

Scipio looked wildly around him. The walls of Dover’s office seemed to be closing in. Except it wasn’t the office alone… “You know somethin’, Mistuh Dover?” he said. “This whole country-this whole goddamn country-ain’t nothing but a prison camp fo’ black folks.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t do nothin’ about that, neither,” Jerry Dover said. “All I can do is run this place here. And if you aren’t out there waiting tables in five minutes, I start having trouble doing that.”

“No, suh,” Scipio said, and Dover blinked; whites in the CSA seldom met outright refusal from Negroes. Scipio went on, “Reckon you do more’n dat. Reckon you never woulda sent me to Savannah, you didn’t do more’n dat.” He still didn’t know why the white man had sent him there. He didn’t care, either. That he’d gone gave him a weapon. “You got to he’p me. You got to he’p my chilluns.”

“I already have,” Dover said quietly. Scipio grimaced. That was true. Dover went on, “You want me to do more than I can do. You want me to do more than anybody can do. I can’t make you turn white. That’s what you really want out of me, isn’t it?”

He made Scipio grimace again. Even when times were relatively good for blacks in the CSA, skin lighteners and hair straighteners-a lot of them, especially the lighteners, only quack nostrums-sold briskly. The worse times got, the better they sold, too. These days, anyone who could possibly pass for white was doing it. Scipio’s own skin was far too dark even to let him think about it. Bathsheba was lighter, but not light enough. Neither were Antoinette and Cassius. They were all irredeemably marked as what they were.

“Damn you, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said dully.

“I’m sorry. Hell, I am sorry. I didn’t want things to turn out like this,” Jerry Dover said. “I’m no goddamn Freedom Party goon. You know that. But I can’t stick my neck out too far, either, not unless I want it chopped.”

Scipio tried to hate him. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Dover wasn’t as big a man as he might have been. But plenty were smaller, too, and not all of them were white. Dover didn’t even use his advantage in color and class to order Scipio out of his office. He just waited. Scipio could tell no hope was to be had here. He left by himself.

Taking orders in the restaurant, bringing them back to the kitchen, and carrying food out again felt strangely surreal. The prosperous white men and their sleek companions treated him as they always would have: like a servant. They talked as if he weren’t there. Had he been a U.S. spy, he could have learned some interesting things about railroad repairs and industrial bottlenecks. He could have picked up some pointers on barrel deployment from an officer trying-the wrong way, in Scipio’s view-to impress a really beautiful brunette.

He kept waiting to hear word about the Terry, about yet another cleanout. He’d been doing that ever since the night when the Angel of Death, thanks to Jerry Dover, passed over his family and him. But the whites in the Huntsman’s Lodge never talked about things like that. Maybe they didn’t want to think about them while they were eating venison or duck in orange sauce and drinking fancy French wine. Or maybe they weren’t quite so oblivious to the colored staff as they let on.

It was probably some of each. Scipio wouldn’t have wanted to think about sending people off to camps while he was enjoying a fine meal, either. And, while whites in the CSA often pretended to ignore Negroes, they knew they couldn’t really afford to do it very often. They would pay, and pay high, if they did.

He got through the evening. He clocked out of the Huntsman’s Lodge and walked through Augusta’s dark, silent streets-the city remained under blackout even if no Yankee bombers had ever appeared overhead-toward the Terry. It was like going back to jail-with the barbed wire all around, just like that.

“Halt!” called one of the policemen and stalwarts at the gate. “Advance and be recognized. Slow and easy, or you never get another chance.”

They were jumpy tonight. Scipio didn’t like that; it was too likely a harbinger of trouble. “Ain’t nobody but me,” he said. What would the ruffians have done if he’d used his white man’s voice with them? Shot him, probably, for not being what they expected.

As things were, they laughed. “It’s the old spook in the boiled shirt,” one of them said. The gate creaked as they opened it. “Go on through.” They didn’t even ask for his passbook. Whatever the shape of the trouble they were flabbling about, it wasn’t his.

The Terry’s streets were even quieter than those of the white part of Augusta. Scipio imagined he heard ghosts moaning along them, but it was only the breeze… or was it? With more than half the Negroes scooped out of the place and carried off to a fate unknown but unlikely to be good, ghosts were bound to be wandering the streets where so many real people no longer went.

His apartment was dark. Bathsheba had got a couple of kerosene lamps after the electricity was cut off, but kerosene was hard to come by these days, too. They used it only when they had to. He navigated with the confidence of a man who knew where everything was whether he could see it or not. His wife had left his nightshirt out for him on a chair by the bed. He sighed with relief at escaping the tuxedo. Sleep dissolved night terrors.

Breakfast was bread and jam. Cassius and Antoinette were already up when Scipio rose. His son said, “Pa, we got to fight the ofays. We don’t fight ’em, reckon they go an’ kill us all.”

“We do fight de buckra, reckon dey kills all o’ we anyways,” Scipio answered.

“Leastways we gets to hit back,” Cassius said.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/He thinks too much: such men are dangerous. Having watched the brutal collapse of the Congaree Socialist Republic, Scipio knew black uprisings against whites in the CSA had no hope. He looked around. Was there hope anywhere else in the Terry? Not that he could see. All he said was, “Be careful, son. Be careful as you kin.”

Cassius’ face lit with a terrible joy, the joy of a man who had nothing left to lose.

Midnight was the traditional time for the knock on the door. Had the police come then, Cincinnatus Driver would have greeted them with the bolt-action Tredegar he’d hidden under a floorboard in the front room. But they caught up with him in the middle of the afternoon and found him on the street, armed only with a cane.

There were four of them. Three were older than Cincinnatus. The fourth, who must have been a cadet or a pup or whatever they called it, couldn’t have been above sixteen. But he carried a.45, while the regular cops sported two submachine guns and a shotgun. They didn’t come into the colored part of Covington without being ready for trouble.

They started to walk on past Cincinnatus. Then one of the geezers-he wore a bushy mustache that had been red once but was almost all white now-paused and said, “You’re Cincinnatus Driver, ain’t you?”

Cincinnatus thought hard about denying it. But if he did, they’d ask him for his passbook, and that would prove he’d lied. The truth seemed a better bet. “Yes, suh,” he said, and waited to see what happened next.

“He’s on the list!” the cadet exclaimed, his voice breaking.

“He sure as hell is,” the cop with the mustache agreed. Cincinnatus didn’t like the sound of that. As usual in the CSA, what a Negro liked or didn’t like didn’t matter. The cop gestured with his submachine gun. “You’re gonna come along with us.”

“What for?” Cincinnatus yelped. “I ain’t done nothin’!” He didn’t think he had done anything they could prove. Hadn’t they grabbed him once and let him go?

The white-mustached cop chuckled. “Buddy, if I had a dime for every asshole I nabbed who hadn’t done anything, I could’ve quit workin’ a hell of a long time ago. Now you can come along quiet-like or you can come along some other way. But you’re gonna come. So what’ll it be?”

One cane against all that firepower made ridiculous odds. And the policemen were pros. The old-timers didn’t come close enough to let Cincinnatus lash out even if he’d been crazy enough to do it. When the kid started to, one of them pulled him back and explained how he’d almost been a damn fool. “I’ll come quiet,” Cincinnatus said.

“Smart fellow,” the mustachioed cop said. He turned to the cadet. “He’s smarter’n you are, Newt. How’s that make you feel?” By the look on Newt’s face, it made him want to cry.

A blue jay scolded Cincinnatus and the policemen for having the nerve to walk under the oak tree where it perched. A little kid playing in his front yard stared at them, eyes enormous in his dark face. So did a drunk draped over a front porch. Cincinnatus happened to know the drunk reported to Lucullus Wood. He feared that wouldn’t help him.

When the gate closed behind him and he passed out of the barbed-wire perimeter around the colored quarter, that small latch click had a dreadfully final sound. A police car waited just beyond the gate. The policeman with the mustache took Cincinnatus’ cane away when he got into the back seat, then got in beside him. “I’ll give it back when we get to the station,” he said in the tones of a man just doing his job. “Don’t want you trying anything silly, though.”

“Know how to get what you want, I reckon,” Cincinnatus said. The cop laughed.

When they got to the station, they didn’t tell Cincinnatus what he was charged with. He feared that was a bad sign. They stuck him in a cell by himself. None of the other cells close by had anybody in it, so he had no one to talk to. He feared that was a bad sign, too.

But they let him keep the cane. Maybe they knew how much trouble he had getting around without it. Police, though, weren’t in the habit of showing white prisoners consideration, let alone blacks. Sitting on the edge of the cot-the only place he could sit except for the concrete floor-he scratched his head.

A guard who must have been called back from retirement brought him supper on a tray: two cheese sandwiches on coarse, brownish bread and a big cup of water. Cincinnatus shoved the empty tray and cup out into the hall and went back to the cot.

The guard nodded when he came back to pick up the tray. “You know the drill, all right. Reckon you been in the joint before.”

“Not for anything I did,” Cincinnatus said.

“Likely tell. That’s what they all say.” Bending made the guard swear under his breath: “Goddamn rheumatism.”

Cincinnatus had never expected to sympathize with a screw. But he had aches and pains, too. Whatever his thoughts, the guard never knew them. The white man would have taken sympathy as weakness. Show weakness in a place like this and you were… even worse off than you were already, which wasn’t good.

He waited for them to come and start squeezing him for whatever they thought he knew. No matter what they did, he couldn’t tell them much about Luther Bliss. He had no idea where the U.S. secret policeman was staying, or even if he was still in Covington. If they started asking him about Lucullus, though… He could do Lucullus a lot of harm. He didn’t want to, but he knew the best will in the world wouldn’t always stand up against enough pain.

They left him in there. They fed him. The food was a long way from good, but he didn’t go hungry. They took out the honey bucket twice a day. It was just… jail. It didn’t feel as if they were softening him up for anything drastic. They could easily have done much worse.

Maybe they thought they were lulling him. He didn’t mind. He would take whatever he could get. Boredom wasn’t much, but it beat the hell out of brutality. If he yawned, if he paced-well, so what? He could have bled. He could have spat out teeth. He’d heard of things they could do with a motorcar battery and some wires that made his stomach turn over. Compared to any of that, boredom was a walk in the park on a sunny spring day.

It had to end. And when it did, it was even worse than he’d feared. Police didn’t come for him. Instead, the man at the head of three guards who carried submachine guns was a jackbooted Confederate major with a face like a clenched fist. “You’re Cincinnatus Driver?” he barked.

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus admitted apprehensively.

“Damnfool notion, letting niggers have last names,” the officer muttered. Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut. It wouldn’t do him any good-he was all too sure of that-but it wouldn’t harm him, either. Anything he said might have. The major glowered at him. The man’s mouth got even tighter. Cincinnatus hadn’t thought it could. One of the guards had a key. He opened the cell door. “Come on,” the major said. “Get out. Get moving.”

Cincinnatus obeyed-what choice did he have? “Where you takin’ me?” he asked. They couldn’t get too angry at him for wanting to know.

That didn’t mean they would tell him. “Shut up,” the major said. “You’re coming along with me.” He looked as if he would sooner have scraped Cincinnatus off the soles of those highly polished boots than had anything more personal to do with him. Cincinnatus wasn’t all that eager to have anything to do with the major, either. The white man, however, had a choice. As usual, Cincinnatus got none.

They marched him down the corridor to the front desk. The Confederate officer signed whatever paperwork he had to sign to take Cincinnatus farther than that. Then he and two of the guards took Cincinnatus out of the city jail altogether (the third one, the one with the key, stayed behind). They bundled him into a motorcar and took him up to the docks on the Ohio. Another auto pulled up beside his. To his surprise, his father got out of that one. Seneca Driver had his own contingent of guards. “What’s goin’ on, Son?” he asked.

“Beats me,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Shut up, both of you,” the major said. “Into the boat.” He pointed. It was a smallish motorboat with, at the moment, a Red Cross flag draped across what had to be a machine-gun mount up near the bow. Awkwardly, Cincinnatus obeyed. Then he helped his father into the boat, though the older man was probably sprier than he was.

The engine roared to life. The motorboat arrowed across the river to the Cincinnati side. More guards waited at a pier there. One of them condescended to give Cincinnatus a hand as he struggled out of the boat. “Thank you, suh,” he said softly.

“Shut up! No talking!” The major had strong opinions and what seemed to be a one-track mind. He pointed to a waiting motorcar painted C.S. butternut. “Get in.”

Soldiers stood near the motorcar. The automatic rifles they carried made the submachine guns he’d seen before seem children’s toys by comparison. Their expressions said they would just as soon shoot him as look at him. He got into the auto. One of them got in beside him. “Don’t fuck with me, Sambo,” the Confederate said casually, “or you’ll never find out how the serial down at the Bijou turns out.”

“I ain’t done nothin’,” Cincinnatus said. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’, neither.” The soldier only grunted. He didn’t believe a word of it. Another heavily armed man sat in the front seat next to the driver.

Away went the motorcar. Cincinnatus looked out the window. Cincinnati had taken more battle damage than Covington. The people on the streets looked shabby and unhappy. He never saw Confederate soldiers in parties smaller than four. That told him a lot about what the occupied thought of their occupiers.

“Can I look out the back window, suh, without you shootin’ me?” he asked the soldier.

After considering, the man nodded. “Hand me your stick first,” he said. “Move slow and careful. Don’t get cute, or you’ll be sorry-but not for long.”

Cincinnatus obeyed in every particular. He saw what he’d hoped to see: another motorcar full of soldiers right behind this one. With any luck at all, that one also held his father. He swung around so he was sitting straight ahead again. “Thank you kindly, suh.”

“Huh,” the Confederate soldier said, and then, “Looks like we’re here.”

Here was the Cincinnati city jail. Cincinnatus wondered if he’d just traded one cell for another. Nobody told him to get out of the auto, though. In fact, three more motorcars joined the ones he and his father were in. The procession headed west and north through occupied Ohio.

Most of the countryside looked normal, as if war had never touched it. Here and there, usually around towns, were patches of devastation. You could see where U.S. soldiers had stood and fought and where they’d been outflanked, outmaneuvered, and forced from their positions.

The little convoy passed through checkpoint after checkpoint. At one of them, a soldier put something on the wireless aerial to Cincinnatus’ auto. He couldn’t see what it was. He asked permission to look back at the motorcar behind him again. The soldier with the automatic rifle looked disgusted but nodded. He didn’t get any less alert. He also showed no sign of needing to take a leak, though they’d been traveling for quite a while. Cincinnatus didn’t know how much longer he could go on before asking for a stop. He didn’t know if he’d get one, though, even if he asked.

A white flag flew from the other auto’s aerial. He supposed his motorcar carried the same flag of truce. But when he asked about it, the soldier stared through him and said, “Shut up.” He didn’t argue with an armed man.

Just before he had to ask for a stop-and just after they’d rolled through a small town called Oxford-the convoy halted on its own. “Where the hell are they?” the driver grumbled.

“They’ll be here,” said the other man in the front seat. “Ain’t like we never done this before.”

Sure enough, five minutes later another convoy of motorcars approached from the west. Those also had white flags on their wireless antennas. They were painted green-gray, not butternut. The soldier next to Cincinnatus nudged him with the muzzle of his rifle. “Get out.” He obeyed. The soldier passed him his cane. His father left the auto behind him. Three skinny white men who needed shaves emerged from the other motorcars.

Along with U.S. soldiers, five whites got out of the green-gray autos. Cincinnatus’ dour major went up to confer with a U.S. officer who might have been his long-lost twin. They signed some papers for each other. The C.S. major turned back. “You are exchanged!” he shouted to Cincinnatus and the others. “You’re the damnyankees’ worry now. Far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to you. Go on-git!”

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus whispered as he limped forward into U.S. custody. That cop in Covington hadn’t lied to him after all. “Do Jesus!” He looked back to his father. “Come on, Pa. I think we’re goin’ home.”

Sergeant Michael Pound had a new barrel. Considering what had happened to the old one, that was anything but a surprise. But this wasn’t a new barrel of the same old style. U.S. engineers had rapidly figured out they needed to do something about the fearsome new machine the Confederates had introduced. Their answer was… not everything it might have been, but a damn sight better than no change at all.

The chassis hadn’t changed much. The engine was of similar design to the old one, but put out an extra fifty horsepower. That was all to the good, because the new barrel was heavier, and needed the extra muscle to shove it around.

Almost all the weight gain came from the new turret. It was bigger than the old one. Its armor was thicker and better sloped. And it had been upgunned. Instead of a 37mm gun-an inch and a half to a gunner-it now carried a 60mm piece-a little less than two and a half inches. That still didn’t match the three-inch monster the new Confederate barrels used, but it was big enough to make any enemy barrel say uncle, where you had to be damn good or damn lucky to hurt the new C.S. machine with the 37mm cannon.

And the 60mm gun was absolutely the biggest one that would fit on the turret ring of the old chassis. A new, improved body took a lot longer to turn out than a reworked turret. The Confederates must have been planning their Mark 2 while the Mark 1 was just starting production. The USA hadn’t done that. And so, instead of a proper Mark 2, the United States had to make do with Mark 1.5, more or less.

“Ugly beast,” Pound said, laying a hand on its armored flank. He didn’t see how anybody could argue with that. The new turret went with the old chassis about the way a rhino’s head went with a cow’s body. Everything on the Confederates’ new barrels fit together with everything else. They had a grim, functional beauty. The Mark 1.5 was just grim.

“Well, Sergeant, Featherston’s fuckers will think it’s ugly, too, especially after it bites them a few times.” That was Cecil Bergman, Pound’s new loader. He was a skinny little guy, which helped him do his job-even though the new turret was bigger on the outside, it had even less room within than the old one.

“That’s a fact. The new gun will make them sit up and take notice. About time, too,” Pound said. “Maybe we have a chance of holding them out of Pittsburgh now. Maybe.” He sounded anything but convinced.

He sounded that way because he was unconvinced. The U.S. Army hadn’t been able to stop the latest Confederate push, any more than it had been able to stop the Confederate drive up through Ohio the summer before. If you couldn’t stop the enemy, how the devil were you supposed to win the war? Pound saw no way.

He could have elaborated on the many failings of the U.S. War Department, but Bergman hissed at him and jerked a thumb off to the left. “Here comes the lieutenant,” he warned.

Second Lieutenant Don Griffiths was typical of the breed. He was young, he didn’t know much, and one of the things he didn’t know was how much he didn’t know. He had blond hair and freckles and couldn’t possibly have bought a drink without proving to the bartender that he was over twenty-one.

Sergeant Pound and PFC Bergman saluted him. He returned the gesture. “Men, we have our orders,” he said.

He sounded full of enthusiasm. It was too early in the morning for Pound to feel enthusiasm or much of anything else except a deep longing for another cup of coffee. But Griffiths stood there waiting expectantly, so Pound did what he was supposed to do: he asked, “What are they, sir?”

“We are going to drive the enemy out of Pennsylvania,” the lieutenant said grandly.

“What? All by ourselves?” Pound said.

Don Griffiths wagged a finger in his face. “I’ve heard about you, Sergeant-don’t think I haven’t,” he said. “You haven’t got the right attitude.”

“Probably not, sir,” Pound agreed politely. “I do object to being killed for no good reason.”

“Don’t get smart with me, either.” Griffiths’ voice didn’t break the way the late Lieutenant Poffenberger’s had, but he still sounded like a kid. “I’ll bust you down to private faster than you can say Jack Robinson.”

“Go ahead, sir,” Pound answered, politely still. “I’ll never get rich on Army pay no matter what my rank is, and if I’m a private again I’ll get out from under you. Besides, how likely is either one of us to live through the war? Why should I get excited about whether my sleeve has stripes on it?”

Lieutenant Griffiths gaped at him. The gold bar Griffiths wore on each shoulder strap was the only thing he had going for him. He couldn’t imagine anybody who didn’t care about rank. In fact, Pound did, very much, but the best way to hang on to what he had and be able to mouth off the way he wanted to was to pretend indifference. “You are insubordinate,” Griffiths spluttered.

“Not me, sir. Bergman is my witness,” Pound said. “Have I been disrespectful? Have I been discourteous? Have I been disobedient?” He knew he hadn’t. He could be much more annoying when he stayed within the rules.

Griffiths proved it by spinning on his heel and storming away. PFC Bergman chuckled nervously. “He’s gonna get you in Dutch, Sarge,” Bergman predicted.

“What can he do to me? Throw me in the stockade?” Pound laughed at the idea. “I hope he does. I’ll be warm and safe in a nice cell back of the line, three square meals a day, while he’s stuck up here with unfriendly strangers trying to shoot his ass off. The worst thing he could do to me is leave me right where I am.”

Bergman shook his head. “Worst he could do is bust you and leave you where you’re at.”

Pound grunted. That, unfortunately, was true. He didn’t think Lieutenant Griffiths had the imagination to see it; if he’d had that kind of imagination, he would have been a real officer, not a lowly shavetail. Pound proved right. The next time Griffiths had anything to do with him, the barrel commander pretended their last exchange hadn’t happened. Pound played along. He watched the way Griffiths eyed him: like a man watching a bear that might or might not be ready to charge.

Their barrel moved out the next morning. Several platoons of the new machines rumbled north and west from the classically named town of Tarentum. Tarentum lay northeast of Pittsburgh; the barrels wanted to knock in the head of the Confederate column sweeping past the industrial center. Another enemy column was pushing up from the southwest. If they met, they would put Pittsburgh in a pocket. That had happened to Columbus the summer before. If the Confederates brought it off here, they could smash up the U.S. defenders in the pocket at their leisure.

Pittsburgh was the most important iron and steel town in the United States. If it fell, how could the country go on with the war? If it fell, would the country have the heart to go on with the war? Those were interesting questions. Michael Pound hoped he-and the USA-didn’t find out the answers to them.

“This is pretty good barrel country, sir,” he remarked to Lieutenant Griffiths after they’d been rolling along for a while.

“It is?” Griffiths sounded suspicious, as if he feared Pound was pulling his leg. “I thought you wanted wide-open spaces for barrels, not all these trees and houses and other obstructions.”

Anyone who used a word like obstructions in a sentence was bound to have other things wrong with him, too. “You do, sir, if you’re on the attack,” Pound said patiently. “But if you want to defend, if the enemy’s coming at you, having enough cover to shoot from ambush is nice.”

“Oh.” The lieutenant weighed that. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

“I’m glad, sir.” Now Pound sounded-and was-dead serious. “Because the point of the whole business is to kill the other guys and not get killed ourselves. That’s the long and short of it.”

Griffiths didn’t disagree with him. The young officer opened the cupola and stood up in the turret to see what he could see. Pound just got glimpses through the gunsight-which was also improved from the one in the earlier turret. The Confederates hadn’t got here yet, so the landscape wasn’t too badly battered. That didn’t mean he would have wanted to live here even if no one had ever heard of war. Coal mines, tailings from coal mines-he’d heard the locals call the stuff red dog-and factories dealing with coal and steel and aluminum dotted the landscape. Some of the factories belched white or gray or black or yellowish smoke into the sky even though the enemy was only a few miles away. They were going to keep operating till the Confederates overran them.

Michael Pound scowled. When they shut down, all the workers would try to get away at once. He’d seen that before. They’d clog the roads, U.S. troops would have trouble going around them or through them, and the Confederates would have a high old time bombing them and shooting them from the air.

Not five minutes after that thought crossed his mind, the barrel slowed and then stopped. Lieutenant Griffiths shouted from the cupola: “You people! Clear the road at once! At once, I tell you! You’re impeding the war effort!” Pound wouldn’t have moved for anybody who told him he was impeding anything. This crowd didn’t, either.

And they paid for not moving. No Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to pummel them, but they were in range of Confederate artillery. So were the advancing U.S. barrels. That didn’t worry Pound very much-except for the rare unlucky direct hit, long-range bombardment wouldn’t hurt them. He did tug on Griffiths’ trouser leg and call, “Better get down, sir. Fragments aren’t healthy.”

“Oh. Right.” The lieutenant even remembered to close the cupola hatch after himself. He was faintly green, or more than faintly. “My God!” He gulped. “What shellfire does to civilians out in the open… It’s a slaughterhouse out there.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said, as gently as he could. “I’ve seen it before.” He’d got glimpses through the gunsight here, too, and was glad he’d had no more than glimpses. Shrapnel clattered off the sides and front of the barrel. There were times when sitting in a thick armored box wasn’t so bad, even if it was too damn hot and nobody in there with you had bathed anytime lately.

Griffiths spoke to the driver over the intercom: “If you can go forward without smashing people, do it.” The barrel moved ahead in low gear. Pound didn’t like to think about what it was running over, so he resolutely didn’t. The lieutenant peered through the periscope: a far cry from sticking your head out and looking around, but nobody would have done that under this kind of shellfire. Well, maybe Irving Morrell would have, but officers like him didn’t come along every day.

Suddenly, Griffiths let out an indignant squawk. “What is it, sir?” Pound asked.

“Our men,” Griffiths answered. “Our soldiers-retreating!”

Pound got a brief look at them, too, and liked none of what he saw. “We’d better find an ambush position pretty quick, then, sir,” he said. “We’re going to have company.”

Griffiths didn’t get it right away. When he did, he nodded. A stone wall that hid the bottom half of the barrel wasn’t perfect cover, but it was a lot better than nothing.

“Have an AP round ready,” Pound told Bergman. The loader tapped him on the leg to show he’d heard.

“There’s one!” Griffiths squeaked with excitement. “Uh, front, I mean!”

“Identified,” Pound confirmed. “Range six hundred yards.” He added, “Armor-piercing.” Bergman slammed the round into the breech. With quick, fussy precision, Pound lined up the sights on the target: one of the new-model C.S. barrels. Now to see what this new gun could do. He nudged Lieutenant Griffiths. “Ready, sir.”

“Fire!” Griffiths said, and the cannon spoke.

Here in the turret, the report wasn’t too loud. The empty casing leaped from the breech and clattered down onto the deck. Cordite fumes made Pound cough. But he whooped at the same time, for fire spurted from the enemy barrel. “Hit!” he shouted, and Griffiths with him. The old gun wouldn’t have pierced that armor at that range.

“Front!” Griffiths said again, more businesslike this time. “About ten o’clock.”

“Identified,” Pound replied. He scored another hit. Whatever the Confederates wanted today, they weren’t going to buy it cheap.

Out of the line. Armstrong Grimes knew only one thing besides relief: resentment that he’d have to go back when his regiment’s turn in reserve was up. For the time being, though, nobody would be shooting at him. He wouldn’t be ducking screaming meemies. He wouldn’t wonder if the stranger in a green-gray uniform was really a U.S. soldier, and worry that that unfamiliar face might belong to a Mormon intent on cutting his throat or stabbing him in the back and then sneaking away.

He turned to Sergeant Rex Stowe, who tramped along beside him down what had been a highway and was now mostly shell holes. “Ain’t this fun?”

“Oh, yeah. Now tell me another one.” Stowe needed a shave. His helmet was on crooked. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He looked like most of the other U.S. soldiers trudging through the wreckage that had been Provo.

“Anybody figure this fight would take so long when it started?” Armstrong persisted. “We’ve been here forever, and we’re still not in Salt Lake City.” He was no lovelier than his sergeant, and had no doubt he smelled as bad, too.

“We’re doing it on the cheap,” Yossel Reisen complained. “We could end this mess in a hurry if we’d put enough men and barrels and bombers into it.”

“Write your Congresswoman,” Stowe said-a joke that had grown old in the company.

But Reisen answered, “I’ve done it. Aunt Flora says the Confederates and now Canada are taking away what we need.”

Sergeant Stowe didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Neither did Armstrong. They both outranked Yossel, but when it came to clout… Armstrong had none, and as far as he knew Stowe didn’t either. Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, had all the clout in the world-and didn’t want to use any of it.

If he had wanted to use it, he would have been anywhere but here. Provo looked as if God had dropped a cigarette here and then ground it out with a hobnailed boot. The city had fallen weeks ago, but smoke still rose here and there. The smell of death lingered, too. By the urgent insistence it took on every now and then, some of the dead were a lot more recent than the fall of the town.

As Armstrong and his buddies slogged south, other soldiers came north. They were cleaner and better barbered, but their faded uniforms and hard, watchful faces said this wasn’t the first time they were heading up to the front. “What’s new?” one of them called in Armstrong’s general direction.

“You know about the fucking spigot mortar?” he replied.

“Sure do.” The soldier going the other way nodded. “Ka-boom! They had that the last time I went up.”

“Yeah, but now they’ve started loading the screaming meemies with mustard gas. They can carry a lot of it, too.”

“Well, shit,” the other soldier said bitterly. “If it’s not one goddamn thing, it’s another. If I have to put on that rubber gear, the heat’ll kill me.”

It was probably somewhere in the upper nineties. That wasn’t so dreadful as it would have been back in Washington or Philadelphia. As people from out West never got tired of saying, it was a dry heat. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hot, though. And when you wore full antigas gear, you cooked in your own juices. Who needed humidity then?

A little blond girl came out of the ruins to stare at Armstrong. She was about eight years old, and would have been pretty if she weren’t scrawny and filthy and wearing what looked like a torn burlap bag for a dress. The stony hatred on her face didn’t help, either.

“Jesus!” He wanted to make the sign of the cross to ward off that look, and he wasn’t even Catholic. “She’ll shoot at us in the next go-round, and her kid’ll pick up a gun in the one after that.”

“We oughta just shoot all of these bastards and start over here,” Stowe said. “Treat ’em like the Confederates treat their niggers. Then we could do this place right.”

“You think Featherston’s fuckers really are doing that shit?” Armstrong said. “Seems hard to believe.”

“You’d better believe it-it’s true,” Yossel Reisen said. “My aunt knows more about that stuff than she ever wanted to find out. They’re filthy down there, really filthy.”

His aunt was likely to know if anybody did. Armstrong said, “Still seems crazy to me. Why would anybody want to do that to somebody else just on account of what he looks like? I mean, I’ve got no use for niggers, God knows, but I don’t want to kill ’em all.” He had no idea how many oversimplifications and unexamined ideas he’d packed into that, and was probably lucky he didn’t.

“People do it all the time,” Yossel said. “You’re not Jewish, that’s for sure.”

“Nope, not me.” Armstrong might have had more to say on the subject of Jews, too, but not where his buddy could hear it. You didn’t do things like that. Life at the front was tough enough as is. If you pissed off somebody who might save your ass one day soon, you only made it worse.

A sign led to the trucks that would take them back to the R and R center at Thistle. Before long, they’d have to leave again, but Armstrong looked forward to getting clean, getting deloused, and eating real food and sleeping on a real mattress.

As happened too often in the Army, somebody’d screwed up. There were far more soldiers than trucks to take them to Thistle or anywhere else. The men milled around, waiting for something to happen. A lot of Army life was like that. A captain climbed up on what was left of a brick wall and shouted that more trucks would be along in an hour or so. The cheers he drew were distinctly sarcastic. The catcalls, on the other hand, came from the heart. The captain turned red and got down in a hurry.

Armstrong didn’t know what drew his eye to the woman who walked toward the crowd of soldiers. Maybe it was just that she was a woman. Most of the ones he’d seen lately wore dungarees and carried rifles and wanted to kill him. He returned the favor the best way he knew how.

This one had on a dress, a baggy dress that reached almost to her ankles. Her face was pinched and pale. Maybe that was what kept Armstrong’s eye on her-not her good looks, though she wasn’t half bad, but her absolute determination. An alarm bell went off in his mind. He nudged Rex Stowe. “Sergeant, something’s wrong with that broad.” He pointed.

“Yeah?” Stowe didn’t see it for a second. Then he did. “Yeah.” He took a step toward her, and started to take another one-

And the world exploded.

Next thing Armstrong knew, he was on his back. Something that stung ran into his eyes. He put up a hand and discovered it was blood. He was bleeding from the leg, too, and from one arm. He looked around. Yossel Reisen, somehow, was still on his feet and didn’t seem to be scratched. Sergeant Stowe was down and moaning, both hands pressed to a swelling scarlet stain on his belly.

“She blew herself up!” The words seemed to come from a million miles away. Armstrong realized the bomb must have stunned his ears. He hoped they weren’t ruined for good.

He scrambled to his feet. Closer to the woman-who wasn’t there anymore, of course-the landscape was a surreal mess of bodies and body parts. How many had she killed? How many had she hurt? Armstrong watched a soldier pull a nail out of his arm. He realized the woman hadn’t just carried explosives. She’d had shrapnel, too. She’d done what she’d done on purpose, and she’d made sure she did as much damage as she could when she did it.

“You all right?” Yossel’s voice came from far, far away, too.

“If I’m not, I’ll worry about it later,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got to do what we can for these poor mothers.”

He bent beside Rex Stowe and gave him a shot of morphine. He might have wasted it; Stowe was going gray. He put a dressing on the noncom’s wound, but blood soaked through right away. “Corpsman!” Yossel Reisen shouted. But a dozen other soldiers were yelling the same thing, and no medics seemed close by. Who would have thought trouble might strike here?

Nobody would have. Nobody had. And that was probably why it had happened here. The men waiting for transport hadn’t paid any attention to the Mormon woman… till too late.

Yossel Reisen slapped a bandage on Armstrong’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Yossel said absently-he had other things on his mind. In disbelieving tones, he went on, “She blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up on purpose.”

“She sure as shit did.” Armstrong liked that no better than his buddy did. “How do you stop somebody who wants to make like a bomb?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody else does, either,” Yossel said. “Who would have thought anybody could be that crazy?”

“Mormons,” Armstrong said. The Mormons had caused so much trouble for the USA, and had notions so different from those of most Americans, that blaming things on them just because they were Mormons came easy. But even Armstrong, who was anything but reflective, realized more than that went into it. Despite the heat, he shivered. “A woman. She waited till she could hurt the most soldiers, and then-she did.”

“They could pull shit like this anywhere,” Yossel Reisen said, a new horror in his voice. “Anywhere at all. On a bus, in a subway, in a theater, at a football game-anywhere there’s a crowd. If you hate enough and you want to hit back enough… you just do.”

“Fuck.” Armstrong meant the word more as prayer than as curse. He said the worst thing he could think of to follow it: “You’re right.”

Men with Red Cross armbands did rush up then. They got Rex Stowe on a stretcher and carried him away. He was still breathing, but Armstrong didn’t think he’d live. Even if he did, he’d be out of the war for months, probably for good.

Bodies and pieces of bodies remained after all the wounded were taken away. So did the butcher-shop stink of blood. Armstrong walked over to where the woman had been standing. He found a torn and charred shoe that wasn’t Army issue. But for that, there was no sign she’d ever existed-except the carnage all around. “Fuck,” he said again, no less reverently than before.

A dozen U.S. trucks painted Army green-gray rumbled up then. The drivers stared in disbelief at the blood-soaked scene. “What the hell happened here?” one of them said.

Somebody threw a piece of broken brick at his truck. It clanged off the hood. “You son of a bitch!” the soldier shouted. “If you’d got here on time, we wouldn’t have been here when she did that!”

Another rock or brick banged off a different truck. For a moment, Armstrong wondered if the soldiers who’d survived the bomb would lynch the truck drivers. They might have if a burly first sergeant hadn’t said, “She was gonna do it anyways. If it wasn’t us, it woulda been the next poor bunch of bastards. What the fuck you gonna do?”

He was so obviously right-and so large-that he threw cold water on the lynching bee. An officer thought to set up a perimeter in case more Mormons decided to blow themselves to kingdom come for their cause. And then the unwounded and the walking wounded got on the trucks and headed down to Thistle after all. What the fuck are you gonna do? Armstrong thought. Like Yossel, he had no idea. He hoped somebody did.

Flora Blackford had never warmed to the Philadelphia cheese steak. The only way they could have made it more treyf was to add ham and oysters. She stuck with pastrami on rye. Robert Taft probably wouldn’t have minded if they’d added ham and oysters to his cheese steak. Those weren’t forbidden foods for him.

The Old Munich was near the damaged Congressional building. It had pretty good prices and air conditioning. Looking around, Flora didn’t think she could assemble a quorum from the Representatives and Senators in the place, but she didn’t think she would miss by much, either.

Taft raised a schooner of beer. “Here’s to you-most of the time,” he said, and sipped from it.

Flora had a gin and tonic: almost as good a cooler as the refrigerated air. “Same to you,” she said. “We see eye to eye about the war, anyhow.”

“Seems that way.” Taft made a very unhappy face. “Maybe the President knew what he was doing when he tried to come to terms with the Mormons.”

“Maybe.” Flora sounded unhappy, too. Did Taft know that woman had almost blown up her nephew? Instead of asking, she went on, “Would you be comfortable making peace with people who do things like that?”

“It depends,” Taft said judiciously. “If peace meant they weren’t going to do them, I might. If every nut with a grievance is going to strap on some dynamite and start seeing how many honest people he can take with him, we’ve really got a problem.” He drained the schooner. “The way things look now, we’ve really got a problem.”

Flora remembered that she was about to answer. The explosion outside beat her to the punch. Women screamed. So did a couple of men. Flora didn’t, quite. What came out instead-a soft, “Oh, dear God!”-was close to a sob of despair.

Taft jumped to his feet, the cheese steak forgotten. “We’d better see if we can do anything to help,” he said, and hurried out of the Old Munich. Flora paused long enough to pay the check, then ran after him.

A bus halfway down the block sprawled sideways across the road. The crumpled shape was burning fiercely. Window glass glittered in the streets and on the sidewalk like out-of-season snow. Some people were still trapped on the bus. Their shrieks dinned in Flora’s ears. One of them threw himself out a window. He was on fire. Passersby tried to beat on the flames with their hats and with their hands.

“He blew himself up!” shouted a man with blood rilling down his face. “The motherfucker blew himself up! He had a, a thing, and he pushed it, and he blew himself up.” He paused, then spoke again in an amazingly calm voice: “Somebody get me a doctor.” He folded up and passed out.

Plenty of others were wounded. Flora couldn’t tell whether some had been on the bus or were just luckless passersby. Others, the burned, had obviously been passengers along with the man with the thing-some sort of switch, Flora supposed. She tore her handkerchief in half and made two bandages with it. After that, she used the tissues in her handbag on smaller cuts.

Robert Taft sacrificed his handkerchief and his tie. Then he took off his shirt and his undershirt and used a pocket knife to cut them into strips of cloth. “Other people need them worse than I do,” he said, and he wasn’t the only bare-chested man around, either.

“Good for you,” Flora told him. “Let me have some of those, too, please.”

Ambulances roared up, sirens wailing. Philadelphia was good at responding to disasters. And so it should have been-it had had enough practice. “Somebody put a bomb on the bus?” asked a white-coated man from an ambulance.

“Somebody was a bomb on the bus,” a woman answered. The man’s answer was eloquent, heartfelt, and altogether unprintable.

“Well,” Taft said, “looks like we have the answer to my question, and it’s not the one I wish we had.” He was splashed with blood past his elbows. His trousers were bloodstained, too, but Flora didn’t think any of the gore was his.

She glanced down at herself. The cotton print dress she had on would never be the same. Blood also dappled her arms. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked, a question aimed more at the world at large than at Senator Taft. “How do we fight people who’ll kill themselves to hurt us?”

“If we have to, we-” Taft broke off, as if really hearing what he’d been about to say. He shook his head. “Good Lord. I started to sound like Jake Featherston.”

“Yes.” Flora wanted to cry, or to scream. Here, for once, the USA faced a knottier problem than the CSA. Negroes looked like Negroes. Mormons? Mormons looked and talked just like anybody else. Anybody here could be a Mormon, and could have another bomb waiting. How would you know till it went off?

“Good Lord,” Taft said again. “We’re going to have to start searching people before we let them gather. Football games, films, trains, buses, department stores-for all I know, we’ll have to check anybody who goes into the Old Munich.”

“I was thinking how many members of Congress were in there,” Flora said shakily. “If that bomber had walked inside instead of blowing up the bus…” Philadelphia was its usual hot, muggy summer self. That kind of weather wouldn’t last much longer, but it was still here-sweat ran down Flora’s face. She shivered anyhow.

“Auto bombs are bad enough,” Taft said. “People bombs…” Like Flora, he seemed to run out of words. He spread his bloody hands. “What could be worse?”

What were they working on, out in western Washington? Something they thought might win the war. Whatever it was, that all but guaranteed it would be a horror worse than any they’d known up till now. Worse than poison gas? Worse than the camps where the Confederates were systematically doing away with their Negroes? She had trouble imagining such a thing. That didn’t mean the people out in Washington State had any trouble, though.

While horror swelled inside her, rage seemed to fill Taft. “This is no fit way to fight,” the Senator from Ohio ground out. “If they want to meet us like men, that’s one thing. If they want to see how many innocent civilians they can blow up-”

“They used it against soldiers first,” Flora said, remembering Yossel’s narrow escape again. “And we drop bombs on civilians all over the CSA. It’s just that… Who would have expected people to be weapons instead of using weapons?”

“Well, the genie’s out of the bottle now,” Taft said grimly. “Nobody in the world is safe from here on out. Nobody, do you hear me? There isn’t a king or a president or a prime minister somebody doesn’t hate. A man comes up to you in a reception line. Maybe you didn’t appoint him postmaster. Maybe he just hears voices in his head. You reach out to shake his hand. Next thing you know, you’re both dead, and a dozen people around you, too. How do you stop something like that?”

Flora only shrugged helplessly. For thousands of years, war had been based on the notion that you wanted to hurt the other side without getting hurt yourself. Now the rules had shifted under everybody’s feet. How could you stop someone who embraced death instead of fleeing it?

Fresh dread filled her when she thought about how useful a weapon like this might be. Surely the United States could find men willing to die for their country. If you sent them after Jake Featherston and you got him, weren’t you doing more to win the war than you would by smashing a division or two of ordinary soldiers?

But the Confederates would have targets of their own. I might even be one, Flora thought, and ice walked up her back again. Like it or not, it was true. Nobody in the USA had spoken out more ferociously than she had about what the Confederate States and the Freedom Party were doing to their Negroes.

“How many more of these bombs will we see in the next week? In the next month? In the next year?” Taft asked. “We’ve never known anything like this before. Never. That Canadian who kept blowing up American soldiers after the last war, the one who tried to blow up General Custer-he finally blew himself up, but he didn’t want to. If he’d been like these Mormons, he could have gone to a rally and done even worse.” He suddenly laughed, which made Flora stare.

“What could possibly be funny about this?” she demanded.

“I’d like to see Featherston’s face when he hears about it,” Robert Taft answered. “He knows how many people… mm, don’t love him, shall we say? He’s the one who’ll really have reason to be shaking in his boots. Sic semper tyrannis, by God-thus always to tyrants, if your Latin’s rusty.”

It was; Flora hadn’t even thought about those classes in close to forty years. At the time, she hadn’t thought they were good for anything; it wasn’t as if she were likely to train for the Catholic priesthood! Looking back, though, they’d probably improved her English. And, looking back, that had probably been the point. It sure hadn’t occurred to her then.

What Taft said made a certain amount of sense. What he said often did. People who had or should have had bad consciences would worry more about men-or women-with bombs than others would. And yet… “The Mormons are using them against us,” she said bleakly.

“Yes, but the Mormons are a pack of crazy fanatics,” Taft said. But that wouldn’t do, and he realized it wouldn’t. “I see what you’re saying. I wish I didn’t. To them, we look like the tyrants.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Flora agreed. “A lot of it’s like beauty-it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

“God help us,” Taft said.

“Omayn,” Flora said, “or amen, if you’d rather.”

“That doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Taft said. Flora believed him; whatever else he was, he was no anti-Semite. He sadly shook his head. “What are we going to do?”

“I can’t begin to tell you, and I wish I could,” Flora answered. “We might have a better chance now if we’d done something different a lifetime ago, but it’s a little late to worry about that now.”

“Yes-just a little,” Taft said. “We have this pack of people who hate us right there in the middle of the country, and the most we can hope for, as far as I can see, is that they do us as little harm as we can manage.” Taft absently wiped his high forehead with the heel of his hand, and left a red streak on his skin.

“This has gone on for too long,” Flora said. “If we don’t settle it once and for all during the war, we have to try afterwards.” That sounded good, but what did it mean? She listened to her own words with the same sick horror Taft had known before her. What could settling it once and for all during the war mean but killing all the Mormons? If the United States did that, they wouldn’t have to worry about it afterwards-except when the country looked at itself in a mirror. Flora shuddered. All the carnage around her hadn’t nauseated her the way that thought did. “Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. “There’s a little bit of Jake Featherston in me, too.”

“A little bit of that bastard’s in every one of us,” Taft said. “The point of the exercise is not to let him out.”

“Well, Senator, we’ve found one more thing we agree on.” Flora held out her bloodstained hand. Taft clasped it in his.