In At the Death

XVII

"Hey, Chester!" Captain Hubert Rhodes called. "C'mere a minute."

"What's up, sir?" Chester Martin asked.

"Got something from the War Department that might apply to you," the company commander answered. "You're over fifty, right?"

"Yes, sir," Martin answered. "And some of the shit I've been through, I feel like I'm over ninety."

"Well, I can understand that." Rhodes took a piece of paper out of his tunic pocket. He was in his early thirties, at the most-he didn't need to put on glasses before he read something. "Says here the Army is accepting discharge applications from noncoms over fifty who aren't career military. That's you, right?"

"Yes, sir," Chester said again. "Jesus! Have I got that straight? They'll turn me loose if I ask 'em to?"

"That's what it says. See for yourself." Rhodes held out the paper.

Chester's current reading specs had cost him half a buck at a local drugstore. He'd lost track of how many pairs of reading glasses he'd broken since reupping. These weren't great, but they were better than nothing. He read the order, wading through the Army bureaucratese. It said what Captain Rhodes said it said, all right. "Where do I get this Form 565 it talks about?" he asked. "Or is the catch that they haven't printed any copies of it, so I'm screwed regardless?"

Rhodes laughed, for all the world as if the Army would never pull a stunt like that. But then, like a magician with a top hat, he pulled out a rabbit-or rather, a Form 565. "Came with the bulletin. I wish I could talk you into sticking around, but I know I'd be wasting my breath."

"'Fraid so, sir. I got shot once in each war. Nobody can say I didn't do my bit. I have a wife and a life back in L.A. I want to get back while I've still got some time left." Chester looked at the form. "I've got to get my immediate superior's signature, huh? Well, Lieutenant Lavochkin won't be sorry to see me go-I've cramped his style ever since he got here."

"Good thing somebody did, at least a bit," Rhodes said. Both men laughed, more than a little uneasily. Chester didn't want to think about the massacre he'd been part of. Officially, Rhodes didn't know about that. But what he knew officially and what he knew were different beasts. He went on, "If Boris gives you any trouble, send him to me. I'll take care of it."

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate it, believe me," Chester said. "I'm gonna hunt him up right now. Sooner I get everything squared away, happier I'll be."

"All right." Rhodes stuck out his hand. "It's been a pleasure serving with you, and that's the God's truth."

"Thanks," Chester repeated as they shook. "And back at you. The lieutenant…" He shrugged. No, he wouldn't be sorry to say good-bye to the lieutenant.

He found Boris Lavochkin right where he thought he would: on the battered main street of Cheraw, South Carolina. Lavochkin carried a captured automatic Tredegar and looked extremely ready to use it. By the way he eyed Chester as the veteran noncom approached, he might not have minded using it on him. Lavochkin didn't like getting his style cramped.

Chester pretended not to notice. "Talk to you a second, sir?"

"You're doing it," Lavochkin answered, and lit a cigarette. He didn't offer Chester one, and Chester wasn't sure he would have taken it if Lavochkin had.

"Right," Chester said tightly. He explained about the War Department ukase, and about Form 565. "So all I need is your signature, sir, and pretty soon I'll be out of your hair for good."

"You're bugging out?" Boris Lavochkin didn't bother hiding his scorn.

"Sir, I've put in more combat time than you have," Martin answered. "Like I told Captain Rhodes, I've got a life outside the Army, and I aim to live it. I've seen as much of this shit as I ever want to, by God."

"Suppose I don't sign your stupid form?"

"Well, sir, I've got three things to say about that. First one is, you better go talk to Captain Rhodes. Second one is, you damn well owe me one, on account of I kept you from killing all of us when we superbombed Charleston. And the third one is, you can bend over and kiss my ass."

Lavochkin turned a dull red. Chester stood there waiting. He had a.45 on his belt; few U.S. soldiers ever went unarmed in the former CSA, peace or no peace. But the lieutenant could have shot him easily enough. Lavochkin didn't, even if the Tredegar's muzzle twitched. He was a bastard, but a calculating bastard. "Give me the damn thing. It'll be a pleasure to get rid of you," he snarled.

"Believe me, sir, it's mutual."

Leaning the automatic rifle against his leg, Lavochkin pulled a pen from his left breast pocket and scribbled something that might have been his name. He thrust Form 565 back at Chester. "There!"

"Thank you, sir." Chester's voice was sweet-saccharine-sweet. Boris Lavochkin gave him a dirty look as he took the signed Form 565 back to Captain Rhodes.

Rhodes signed, too, and without kicking up any fuss. "I'll send this back to regimental HQ, and they'll move it on to Division," he said. "And then, if all the stars align just right, they'll ship you home."

"Thanks a million, Captain." When Chester spoke to Hubert Rhodes, he sounded as if he meant it, and he did.

"You don't owe the country anything else, Chester," Rhodes said. "I'd like you to stick around, 'cause you're damn good at what you do, but I'm not gonna try and hold you where you don't want to be."

"That's white of you." Martin listened to what came out of his mouth without thought. He shook his head. "There's an expression we have to lose."

"Boy, you said it." Rhodes nodded. "Especially down here, where the whites aren't on our side and the Negroes are-what's left of 'em."

"Yeah," Chester said grimly. Some Negroes had come out of hiding now that U.S. troops were on the ground here. Some more, skinny as pipe cleaners, had come back from the camps in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi. Back before the Freedom Party got its massacre going, South Carolina had had more blacks than whites. It sure didn't any more-not even close.

The ones who had lived through everything wandered around like lost souls. Chester couldn't blame them. How could they rebuild their shattered lives in towns and countrysides where whites had shown they hated them? Chester wouldn't have wanted to try it himself, and he was a middle-aged man with a decent education and a considerable sense of his own worth. What chance did an illiterate sharecropper or his barefoot, maybe pregnant wife have?

While he was wondering about that, a white man in a snappy suit approached him and Hubert Rhodes and said, "Talk to you, Captain?"

"You're doing it," Rhodes said. "What's on your mind?"

"My name is Walker, Nigel R. Walker," the man said. "Up until the surrender, I was mayor of Cheraw. Now there's some foolish difficulty about letting me go back to my proper function in the community."

Rhodes looked at him-looked through him, really. "You were a Party member, weren't you, Mr. Nigel R. Walker?"

"Well, sure," Walker said. "Membership for officials was encouraged-strongly encouraged."

"Then you're out." Rhodes' voice was hard and flat. "No Freedom Party members are going to run things down here any more, and you can take that to the bank. Those are my orders, and I'm going to follow them."

"But you're being unreasonable," Walker protested. "I know of several towns in this state where men with much stronger Party ties than mine are very actively involved in affairs."

Chester knew of towns like that, too. Some occupying officials wanted to put things back together as fast as they could. They grabbed the people who were most likely to be able to do the job. If some of those people had screamed, "Freedom!" for a while, they didn't care. They thought of themselves as efficiency experts. What Chester thought of them wasn't fit to repeat in polite company.

"I know some U.S. officers are skirting those orders," said Captain Rhodes, who felt the same way he did. "And if they can do that with a clear conscience, then they can. I can't. I can't come close. As far as I'm concerned, you disqualified yourself when you joined that pack of murderous goons. Is that plain enough, Mr. Nigel R. Walker, sir, or shall I tell you what I really think of you?"

"I'm going to take my objections to your superiors, Captain." Walker strutted off, his stiff back radiating anger.

Rhodes sighed. "He should have asked Lavochkin-Boris would have plugged him. You see, Chester? He is good for something."

"Damned if you're not right," Martin said. "The nerve of this asshole, though!"

"He was a big fish in a little pond," Rhodes said, and Chester nodded-nothing except possibly the Apocalypse would ever make Cheraw a big pond. Rhodes went on, "He thinks he has the right to go on being a big fish."

"Ought to ship him to one of those camps. That'd teach him more about rights than he ever dreamt of, the fucker," Chester said savagely.

"Yeah." The company commander sighed again. "He may even be a decent guy. For all I know, he is. Plenty of people did join the Party because it was a meal ticket. I've never heard any Negroes claim he was especially bad. But I've never heard 'em say he was especially good, either. To me, that means he's tarred with the Party brush. He might not have done anything much, but he didn't try to stop anything, either. So screw him."

"No, thanks-too damn ugly," Chester said. Rhodes laughed. Chester started thinking of Rita. He'd been a good boy ever since he put the uniform back on, and he knew his right hand better than he'd ever wanted to.

One day followed another. The weather started turning cool and nasty. That was what Chester thought at first, anyhow. Then he realized that, compared to what he would have had to put up with in Toledo, it was pretty damn good. He'd lived in Los Angeles long enough to get spoiled.

He felt more alert now than he had since the very last days of the war. He didn't want to get hurt just when he was about to head home. Well, he didn't want to get hurt any old time, but he especially didn't want to get hurt now. And he knew too well that he could. Cheraw was no more reconciled to the Stars and Stripes than any other part of the dead but still writhing CSA. Locals probed every day to see how much they could get away with. U.S. authorities clamped down hard. That only gave the locals more reasons to hate damnyankees-as if they needed them.

At last, his discharge orders came. So did a travel voucher that would send him up to Philadelphia and then across the country through U.S. territory. He couldn't have been happier: the sooner he left the Confederacy forever, the happier he'd be.

He was painfully hung over when he boarded the northbound train-but not too hung over to notice the machine guns it carried. He hoped it wouldn't have to use them; they might make his head explode. Captain Rhodes and a bunch of guys from his platoon-a lot of them the worse for wear, too-saw him off. Lieutenant Lavochkin didn't. Chester didn't miss him.

Rhodes and the soldiers waved and shouted as the whistle screeched and the train pulled out of Cheraw. "Lucky stiff!" somebody called. Yeah, Chester thought, gulping three aspirins. He was going home.

A bner Dowling knew more about uranium than he'd ever imagined he would. Before the war, he wasn't sure he'd ever heard of the stuff. Oh, maybe in chemistry, back in the dark ages around the turn of the century. Yes, it was an element. So what? You didn't do experiments with it, the way you did with copper and sulfur and things like that.

And he knew about saturnium and jovium, which was what the Confederate physicists called elements 93 and 94. Just to confuse the issue, U.S. scientists had named the same elements neptunium and plutonium. He gathered they had different handles in every country that had found them. Back in the vanished days when he was at West Point, no one had dreamt they existed.

"Boy, I didn't know how obsolete I was till I got here," he complained to Angelo Toricelli. "Most of what I thought I knew turns out not to be so, and stuff I never imagined is what really counts. You can't win."

"Sir, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't learn this stuff in school, either," his adjutant answered.

That did make Dowling feel better. Misery, or at least confusion, loved company. "After they reassign us, you know, they'll have to put permanent bloodhounds on us, to make sure nobody knocks us over the head and hijacks us on account of what we know," he said.

"Maybe, but maybe not," Toricelli said. "I mean, you can bet your bottom dollar that everybody who wants a superbomb either has one by now or is already working on one as hard as he can. What do those people need with us?"

"Go ahead. Be that way!" Dowling said. "But if I catch you talking to a Jap in glasses or a beautiful Russian piano player, you'll be in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, and you'd better believe it."

"I'd like to talk to a beautiful Russian piano player," Toricelli said wistfully. "Hell, I'd like to talk to a beautiful piano player from Seattle."

If you were a career officer, you often didn't have time to find a wife. Dowling never had, and he was far from alone in the fraternity of war. George Custer had made it work-although Dowling often thought George was the steed Libbie rode to glory. Irving Morrell was married, too, and by all accounts happily. It could happen. Odds against it were longer than they were in a lot of trades, though.

"Just as long as you don't say too much to a beautiful piano player from Lexington," Abner Dowling warned.

"I wouldn't do that, sir." His adjutant sounded hurt. "Besides, I haven't seen a gal here I'd want to give the time of day to."

Dowling nodded. "I know what you mean." He didn't suppose Confederates were uglier or handsomer than U.S. citizens, taken all in all. But the war had hit hard here, especially in the last few months, when the USA tried to blast Lexington flat to keep the CSA from building a superbomb. It didn't work, but it did take its toll on the locals. People hereabouts still looked haggard and hungry. The Shenandoah Valley was some of the richest farmland in the world, but it got hit, too…and not so many folks were left to raise crops, either.

"And even if I did find a woman I liked here, well, I might want to lay her, but I don't think I'd ever marry a Confederate," Toricelli said. "I'd wonder why she wanted to marry me, and all my superiors would wonder whether I'd gone out of my mind."

He wasn't wrong. A marriage like that could blight his hopes for promotion. It could also blight his life if it didn't work, and it was much too likely not to. Even so…Dowling said, "You wouldn't be the first, you know. We've already had a couple of petitions from enlisted men to let them marry local girls."

"I'd better know, sir," his adjutant said. "That paperwork crosses my desk before it lands on yours."

"Yes, yes." Dowling didn't want the younger man to think he was forgetting things like that. As soon as they started believing you were past it, you were, whether you knew it or not. Hastily, Dowling went on, "I'm the one who has to decide, though. That's one more thing they didn't teach at West Point. Does this PFC really have good reason to marry a Virginia woman? Should I ship him back to the USA instead? Or should I just hose him down with cold water till he comes to his senses?"

"Cold water would put a lot of these proposals or propositions or whatever they are on ice," Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said gravely.

Dowling sent him a severe look. Toricelli bore up under it like the soldier he was. Dowling said, "If I do let them get married and things go sour, they'll blame me. Plenty of perfectly normal marriages go bad, God knows. Usually it's nobody's fault but the bride and groom's. Figure anybody would remember that?"

"Fat chance," Toricelli said. "Sir."

"I know. But the one where the guy knocked the gal up…I am going to approve that one, hell with me if I'm not. If I say no, her father's liable to use a shotgun on our soldier, and then we'll have to take hostages, and it'll just be a goddamn mess. I'll pay for an unhappy marriage to stay away from firing squads."

"That makes sense, sir," Toricelli said. "Kind of a cold-blooded way to look at things, but it makes sense."

"You get as old as I am, if you're hot-blooded you're either dead or you're George Custer, one," Dowling said. "I know damn well I'm not Custer-thank God! — and I wasn't dead last time I looked. So…I try not to blow my cork unless my cork really needs blowing."

His adjutant returned a sly stare. "Like with General MacArthur, right?"

"I won't waste my time answering that, even if it is true." Dowling stood on his dignity, a shaky position for a man of his bulk.

Before his adjutant could call him on it, a noncom stuck his head into the office and said, "Sir, that professor guy wants to see you."

"FitzBelmont?" Dowling asked.

The sergeant nodded. "That's him."

Dowling didn't want to see the physicist. He said, "Send him in," anyway. Sometimes what you wanted was different from what you needed. If this wasn't one of those times, he could have the pleasure of throwing Henderson FitzBelmont out on his ear.

When FitzBelmont came in, he looked as angry and as determined as a professorial man could. "General, when am I going to get my life back?" he demanded. "It is now almost four months after the surrender, but your interrogators continue to hound me. To be frank, sir, I am tired of it."

"To be frank, sir, I don't give a flying fuck." Abner Dowling didn't blow his cork, but he didn't need to waste politeness on FitzBelmont, either. "When you went to work for Jake Featherston, you sold your soul to the Devil. Now you've got to buy it back, one nickel at a time. If the boys aren't finished with you, too bad. You have a train to catch, or what?"

"I would like to be a normal human being in a normal country, not a…a bug under a microscope." The professor didn't have the force of personality to hold anger together very long. His voice went high and shrill and petulant.

"Sorry, but that's what you are. Get used to it," Dowling said. "You're going to be under the microscope for the rest of your life. You're too dangerous for us not to keep tabs on you. If you don't believe me, ask what's left of Philadelphia."

"I can't do that again. You've made very sure I can't," FitzBelmont said. "And some of your interrogators are nothing but idiots. You know more about the physics of fission than they do."

"God help them if that's true." Dowling hadn't known anything about 235 and 238 and the other magic numbers till this assignment landed on him. He hoped he'd learned enough to be effective, but he wouldn't have sworn to it.

"Well, it is," Professor FitzBelmont said. "One imbecile asked me why we didn't use iron instead of uranium. It was easier to find and to make, he said, and much cheaper, too. The frightening thing is, he was serious."

"And the answer is…?" Dowling asked.

"Very simple, General. I'm sure you can figure it out for yourself: you can do whatever you please to iron, but you'll never make a superbomb out of it. The same goes for lead or gold or most other things you can think of."

"Not all of them?" Dowling said sharply.

Professor FitzBelmont hesitated. "If I didn't know for a fact that your physicists were already working on this, I wouldn't say a word. Not ever."

"Well, you already did. Now go on," Dowling told him.

"It's theoretically possible, using isotopes of hydrogen with a superbomb for a fuse, you might say, to make a bomb a thousand times as powerful as the ones we have now, a bomb that burns the way the sun burns-a sunbomb, you might say."

"A thousand times as strong as a superbomb?" Dowling's mind bounced off that like a rotary saw recoiling from a spike driven into a tree trunk. "Good God in the foothills! You could blow up a thousand Philadelphias or Petrograds?"

"You could blow up an area more than thirty times as wide as the area those bombs destroyed," FitzBelmont said. "Area varies as the square of the diameter, of course."

"Of course," Dowling agreed in a hollow voice. "So a…a sunbomb could pretty much blow Rhode Island off the map?"

"How big is Rhode Island?" By the way FitzBelmont said it, he didn't waste time keeping track of U.S. geography.

"I don't know exactly," Dowling said. "A thousand square miles-maybe a little more."

Henderson FitzBelmont got a faraway look in his eyes. Doing the math, Dowling realized. FitzBelmont finally nodded. "Yes, that's about right. One of those bombs should destroy most of it. Why do you have such a small state?"

"Beats me." Dowling couldn't recall enough colonial history to come up with the reason. It didn't matter, anyhow. What did matter…"How long would it take to build one of these sunbomb things?"

"I don't know," FitzBelmont said. "I would be surprised if anyone had them in five years. I would be surprised if no one had them in twenty-five."

"Good God!" Dowling said again. If God wasn't in the foothills, He was probably running for them. The general tried to imagine a world where six or eight countries had sunbombs. "How would you fight a war if a bunch of your neighbors could blow you into next week if you got frisky?"

"General, I wouldn't," FitzBelmont said bleakly. "Whether that will stop the politicians…"

"Ha!" Dowling stabbed out a forefinger at him. "You've got your nerve saying something like that after you went and worked for Jake Featherston."

The professor turned red. "He led my country in time of war. What should I have done? Not helped him?"

That wasn't a question with a simple answer. Had the CSA won, U.S. scientists would have asked Confederate interrogators the same thing, hoping to stay out of trouble. Yeah, but we weren't gassing our own people by the millions, Dowling thought. To which victorious Confederates would have replied, So what? And if all or even most physicists felt the way FitzBelmont did…The world was in big trouble, in that case.

W hen Jorge Rodriguez could, he walked into Baroyeca to meet the train. He couldn't always. Farm work had no peaks and valleys, the way soldiering did; you needed to keep at it every day. The damnyankees still hadn't let Miguel out of their POW camp. Jorge hoped he was all right. Maybe he'd been wounded, and word never got to Sonora. Maybe he was dead, and word never got here. He hadn't written since the end of the war, and things inside the CSA were falling apart by then.

But maybe he would get off the train one afternoon, good as new or somewhere close. The hope kept Jorge walking. He'd seen enough to know you never could tell. And if he stopped in at La Culebra Verde for a glass of beer before he came home, well, it was nothing his father hadn't done before him.

Every so often, nobody got out when the train stopped in Baroyeca. It wasn't a big city, and never would be. If not for the silver and lead mines in the hills back of town, it wouldn't have been a town at all. When the mines closed between the wars, the town almost died. Even the trains stopped coming for a while.

Jake Featherston had fixed that. He'd fixed lots of things. You couldn't say so, not unless you wanted to get in trouble with the Yankees. Jorge had enough sense to keep his boca cerrada. A couple of people who didn't…disappeared.

One afternoon, a tall, balding fellow whose remaining hair was yellow mixed with gray stepped down and looked around in wonder. Anybody with that coloring and those beaky features stood out in swarthy, mestizo-filled Baroyeca.

"Seсor Quinn!" Jorge exclaimed-not his brother, but another familiar face he hadn't seen for a long time.

"Hola," Quinn said, and then went on in his deliberate, English-accented Spanish: "You're one of Hip Rodriguez's boys, but I'm damned if I know which one."

"I'm Jorge," Jorge answered in English. "Pedro's back, too. I was hoping Miguel would be on the train. That's why I came. But the damnyankees are still holding him. How are you, Seсor Quinn?"

"Tired. Whipped," Quinn said. "Just like the rest of the country." The train pulled out of the station, heading south. Quinn and Jorge both coughed at the dust it kicked up.

Jorge looked around. Nobody was in earshot. In a low voice, he asked, "Are you going to start the Freedom Party up again, Seсor Quinn?"

"Not officially, anyway. I'd put my neck in the noose if I did," Quinn answered. He'd lived in Baroyeca a long time, building the Party up from nothing and nowhere. Also quietly, he continued, "As far as los Estados Unidos know, I'm nothing but another POW. If they find out I was an organizer, God knows what they'll do to me."

"They won't hear from me," Jorge promised. "My father, he always thought you were a good man."

"Well, I always thought he was a good man, too," Robert Quinn said. "I was sad to hear he'd passed away, and even sadder to hear how. I've wondered about that a lot, and it doesn't make much sense to me."

"It doesn't make much sense to anybody." Jorge didn't mention Camp Determination. The way things were nowadays, you kept your mouth shut about what went on in places like that. What could his father, a good Party man, have seen or felt that made him decide those camps weren't doing the right thing? It had to be something on that order. Jorge was sure no personal problem would have made Hipolito Rodriguez eat his gun.

"Tell you what," Quinn said, still softly. "If nobody down here rats on me, well, we'll see what we can do if the damnyankees step on our toes too hard. We may not be able to hold meetings and stuff, but that doesn't mean the Freedom Party's dead. It's not dead unless we decide it's dead. How's that sound?"

"Good to me." Jorge didn't say Freedom! or ЎLibertad! or give the Party salute. You were asking for trouble if you did things like that. But he knew he wouldn't be the only one watching the United States to see what they did.

And he also knew the United States would be watching Baroyeca, as they would be watching all of the CSA, or as much of the country as they could. If they sensed trouble, they would land on it with both feet. You played the most dangerous game in the world if you even thought about rising up against the damnyankees.

"Can I buy you a glass of beer, Seсor Quinn?" Jorge asked.

"No, but you can let me buy you one, by God," the Party organizer answered. "I've got plenty of money, believe me. Some of the people who think they can play poker haven't got the sense God gave a duck."

Jorge smiled. "All right. Do you remember where La Culebra Verde is?"

"I'd damn well better," Quinn said. "ЎVбmonos, amigo!"

It was dark and cool and quiet inside the cantina. A couple of men looked up from their drinks when Jorge and Robert Quinn walked in. It stayed quiet in there, but now the silence was one of suspense. Slowly and deliberately, the bartender ran a damp rag over the counter in front of them. "What can I get for you, seсores?" he asked.

"Dos cervezas, por favor." Quinn set a U.S. half-dollar on the bar. He sat down on a stool. Jorge perched next to him. The bartender made the silver coin disappear. He drew two beers and set them in front of the new customers.

"Thanks." Jorge put down another quarter. "One for you, too, or whatever you want."

"Gracias." Bartenders didn't always want the drinks customers bought them. This time, though, the man in the boiled shirt did pour himself a beer.

"ЎSalud!" Quinn raised his glass. He and Jorge and the bartender drank. "Madre de Dios, that's good!" Quinn said. Was he even a Catholic? Jorge didn't know. He'd never worried about it till now.

One of the men at a table in the back raised a finger to show he and his friends were ready for a refill. The bartender filled glasses and set them on a tray. A barmaid picked them up and carried them off, her hips swinging. Jorge followed her with his eyes. So did Robert Quinn. They grinned at each other. Once you got out of the Army, you remembered how nice it was that the world had pretty girls in it.

As the beers emptied, the bartender murmured, "Good to have you back, Seсor Quinn. We didn't know if we would see you again."

"Good to be back," Quinn said. "There were some times when I wondered whether anybody would see me again, but war is like that."

"Sн." Jorge remembered too many close calls of his own. The man behind the bar was about his father's age. Had he fought in the Great War? Jorge didn't know; again, he'd never wondered till now.

"What are we going to do here, Jorge?" Robert Quinn asked. "Are you ready to live quietly under the Stars and Stripes? Or do you remember what your country really is?" He hadn't been so bold in the train station. Could one beer have done it to him?

Jorge looked down at his glass. He looked around the cantina. His mind's eye took in the rest of Baroyeca and the family farm outside of town. All that made him feel less determined than he had over at the station. "Seсor Quinn," he said sadly, "I have seen all the fighting I want to see for a long time. I am sorry, but if the damnyankees do not bother me, then I do not care to bother them, either. If they do bother me, the story will be different."

"Well, that's a fair answer," Quinn said after silence stretched for more than half a minute. "You've done your soldiering. If you don't want to do it again, who can blame you? I wish you felt different, but if you don't, you don't." He drained his glass and strode out of La Culebra Verde.

"Did you make him unhappy?" the bartender asked.

"I'm afraid I did. He doesn't want the war to be over, but I've had enough. I've had too much." He wondered how Gabe Medwick was getting along. He hoped the U.S. soldiers had picked up his wounded buddy back in the Virginia woods. Was Gabe back in Alabama by now, or did he still languish in a POW camp like Miguel?

And what about Sergeant Blackledge? Jorge would have bet anything that he was raising trouble for the Yankees wherever he was. That man was born to bedevil anybody he didn't like, and he didn't like many people.

The bartender drew another beer and set it in front of Jorge. "On the house," he said. "I don't want to go to the hills. I don't want the United States shooting hostages here. I don't want to be one of the hostages they shoot. Por Dios, Jorge, enough is enough."

"Some men will eat fire even if they have to start it themselves," Jorge said, looking at the door through which Robert Quinn had gone.

"He will find hotheads. People like that always do. Look at Jake Featherston." The bartender never would have said such a thing while the Freedom Party ruled Baroyeca. It would have been worth his life if he had. He went on, "I don't think anyone will speak to the soldados from los Estados Unidos if Seсor Quinn stays here quietly. But if he goes looking for stalwarts…Then he's dangerous."

Was the bartender saying he would turn in Robert Quinn if Quinn tried to raise a rebellion? If he was, what was Jorge supposed to do about him? Kill him to keep him from blabbing? But that was raising a rebellion, too, and Jorge had just told Quinn he didn't want to do any such thing.

He also didn't want to sit by while something bad happened to his father's old friend. Sometimes nothing you did would help. He had the feeling that that was true for much of the CSA's last war against the USA.

He also had the feeling it would be true if Confederates tried to mix it up with the USA in the war's aftermath. Yes, they could cause trouble. Could they cause enough to make U.S. forces leave? He couldn't make himself believe it.

When he came back to the farm alone late that afternoon, his mother's face fell, the way it always did when he came back alone. "No Miguel?" she asked sadly.

"No Miguel. I'm sorry, mamacita." Then Jorge told of meeting Robert Quinn as the Freedom Party man got off the train.

His mother only sniffed. Next to her missing son, a man who wasn't from the family didn't cut much ice. The news excited Pedro, though. "Does he want to-?" He didn't go on.

"Yes, he does," Jorge answered. "I told him I didn't." He spoke elliptically, as Pedro had, to keep from making their mother flabble.

Pedro looked discontented. But Pedro hadn't done a whole lot of fighting. He'd spent most of the war behind barbed wire. He didn't have such a good idea of what the United States could do if they decided they wanted to. Jorge did. What he'd seen in Virginia as the war wound down would stay with him for the rest of his life. The overwhelming firepower and the will to use it scared him more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.

"What are we going to do? Sit here quiet for the rest of our lives?" Pedro asked.

"You can do what you want," Jorge answered. "Me, I'm going to stay on the farm and see how things go. We have a crop this year, and that's enough for now. If things change later, if the United States make life too hard to stand…Then I'll worry about it. Not until."

"What kind of patriot are you?" his brother asked.

"A live one," Jorge answered. "That's the kind I want to go on being, too. Los Estados Confederados are dead, Pedro. Dead. I don't think they'll come back to life no matter what we do."

"You think we're beaten."

"Sн. That's right. Don't you?"

Pedro didn't answer. He stormed out of the farmhouse instead. Jorge started to go after him, then checked himself. His brother could figure out what was going on without him. Jorge hoped he could, anyhow.

The Oregon cruised off the Florida coast. The weather was fine. It felt more like August than October to George Enos. Back home in Boston, the leaves would be turning and it would be getting cold at night. Everything stayed green here. He didn't think autumn would ever come.

All the same, he didn't want to stay stuck on the battleship the rest of his life. He wanted to get home to Connie and the boys. Fighting in a war was one thing. Yeah, you needed to do that; he could see as much. Occupation duty? As far as he was concerned, they could conscript somebody else for it.

He griped. Most of the sailors on the Oregon who weren't career Navy guys were griping. Griping let off steam, and did no other good he could see. Nobody who mattered would pay attention. Nobody who mattered ever paid attention to ratings. That was how the Navy operated.

"Hey, you sorry bastards are stuck," Wally Fodor said. "We can't just pretend the fucking Confederates'll be good little boys and girls, the way we did the last time around. We know better now, right?"

"All I know is, this ain't what I signed up for," George answered. "I got a family. My kids hardly remember who I am."

"As soon as you swore the oath and they shipped your sorry rear end to Providence, they had you. They had you but good," the gun chief said. "You might as well lay back and enjoy it."

"I've been screwed long enough," George said. "Too damn long, to tell you the truth. I want to go home. I'm not the only one, either-not even close. Congress'll pay attention, whether the brass does or not."

"Don't hold your breath-that's all I've got to tell you." Fodor gave what was much too likely to be good advice.

In the meantime, there was Miami, right off the starboard bow. If anybody got out of line, the Oregon's big guns could smash the city to bits. That was what battleships were good for nowadays: blasting the crap out of people who couldn't shoot back. In the Great War, they'd been queens of the sea. Now they were afterthoughts.

"Think we'll get liberty?" one of the shell-jerkers asked, a certain eagerness in his voice. Miami had a reputation almost like Habana's. Didn't hot weather produce hot women? That was how the stories went, anyhow.

George didn't know whether to believe the stories. He did know he'd been away from Connie long enough to hope to find out if they were true. He could hope it would be his last fling before he went back to his wife for good. That would help him feel not so bad about doing what he wanted to do anyway.

But Wally Fodor repeated, "Don't hold your breath. Besides, do you really want to get knocked over the head if you go ashore? They don't love us down here. Chances are they're never going to, either."

"Hey, I don't care about love," the shell-jerker said. "Long as I can get it in, that's good enough." Laughter said it was good enough for most of the gun crew.

They didn't get liberty. They did get fresh produce. Boats came alongside to sell the battleship fruit and meat and fish. Fresh orange juice and lemonade appeared in the galley. So did fresh peas and green beans, and salads with tender lettuce and buttery avocados and tomatoes and celery. The sailors ate fried shrimp and fried fish and spare ribs and fried chicken.

George had to let his belt out a notch. The chow beat the hell out of any Navy rations he'd had before. Bumboats brought out fresh water, too, enough so the crew didn't have to use seawater and saltwater soap when they showered. If that wasn't a luxury, he'd never known one. Peace had its advantages, all right.

He'd just stripped off his uniform to get clean when an enormous explosion knocked him ass over teakettle. "The fuck?" he said, which was one of the more coherent comments from the naked sailors.

Klaxons hooted. He ran for his battle station without thinking about his clothes. Bodies lay on the deck. He'd worry about them later. Right now, he had a job to do, and he could do it with pants or without. He wasn't the only naked man heading for duty-not even close.

Petty Officer Fodor had a cut on his face and another one on his arm. He didn't seem to notice either one. "They blew up a goddamn bumboat," he said. "Right alongside us, they blew up a goddamn bumboat."

"They're idiots if they did," George said. The Oregon, like any modern battleship, had sixteen-inch armor belts on either side to protect against gunfire and torpedoes. They weren't perfect, as the melancholy roll of torpedoed battlewagons attested. But they were a hell of a lot better than nothing. A blast that might have torn a destroyer in two dented the Oregon and killed and hurt people exposed to it without coming close to sinking her.

"This is the captain speaking!" the PA blared. "Odd-numbered gun stations, aid in casualty collection and damage assessment. Even numbers, hold your posts."

As the skipper repeated the order, George and the other men from his twin-40mm mount dashed off to do what they could for the sailors who hadn't been so lucky. There were a lot of them: anybody who'd been on deck when the bumboat exploded was down and moaning or down and thrashing or down and not moving at all, which was worst.

Some of the paint was burning. Men already had hoses playing on the fires. The stink made George's asshole pucker. When your ship got hit, that odor was one of the things you smelled. And he almost fell on his face skidding through a puddle of seawater from the fire-fighters.

He knelt by a burned man who was clutching his left shoulder. "C'mon, buddy-I'll give you a hand," he said.

"Thanks." The wounded sailor groped for him. "Sorry. I can't see a goddamn thing."

"Don't worry about it. The docs'll fix you up." George had no idea whether they could or not. The other man's face didn't look good, which was putting it mildly. "Your legs all right? I'm gonna get you on your feet if I can."

"Give it a try," the injured man said, which might have meant anything. He groaned and swayed when George hauled him upright, but he didn't keel over again. George got the fellow's good arm around his own shoulder. He also got blood on his own bare hide, but that was something to flabble about later.

Helping the other sailor down three flights of steep, narrow steel stairs when the poor guy couldn't see where to put his feet was an adventure all by itself. George managed. Other sailors and groups were carrying injured men and trying to get them down in stretchers without spilling them out.

In the sick bay and in the corridors outside it, the battleship's doctors and pharmacist's mates were working like foul-mouthed machines. One of the mates took a quick look at the sailor George had brought down. "Put him there with them," he said, pointing to a group of other men who were hurt but not in imminent danger of dying. "We'll get to him as soon as we have a chance to."

"Good luck, pal," George said as he eased the wounded sailor down. It was painfully inadequate, but it was all he could offer.

"Thanks. Go help somebody else," the other man said. Somebody-maybe a pharmacist's mate, maybe a rating one of the doctors had dragooned-stuck a needle into him. Morphine sure wouldn't hurt.

George was helping to get another injured man down to first aid when someone said, "I wonder what we'll do to Miami for this."

"Blow the fucking place off the fucking map," the wounded sailor said. That sounded good to George. He'd heard of people bombs and auto bombs, but a boat bomb? The son of a bitch who thought of that one had more imagination than he knew what to do with. George hoped he'd been on the boat and pressed the button that blew it up. If he had, maybe the scheme would die with him.

Or was that too much to hope for?

"Hell of a note if we've got to inspect every boat that brings us supplies," a CPO said. "Sure looks like we will, though."

When George got down to sick bay this time, he noticed a group of badly hurt men nobody was helping. They had to be the ones the doctors thought wouldn't get better no matter what. No time to waste effort on them, then. That was cruel logic, but it made sense.

The Oregon, he learned later, lost 31 dead and more than 150 wounded. In response, the U.S. Army seized 1,500 Miamians. Some of the attempted seizures turned into gun battles, too. The locals knew what the soldiers were coming for, and weren't inclined to give themselves up without a fight. Because of the casualties the Army took rounding up the hostages, it rounded up more hostages still.

Guns aimed toward the city, the Oregon sailed close inshore. The sharp, dry crack!s of rifle volleys came across the water, one after another after another. They got the message across: if you messed with the USA, you paid. And paid. And paid.

Some of the sailors weren't satisfied even so. "We ought to blast the shit out of that place," Wally Fodor said. "Those assholes fucked with us, not with the Army. We ought to give them a fourteen-inch lesson."

"Sure works for me," George said. All right, so battleships were shore-bombardment vessels these days. There was a shore that needed bombarding, and it was lying there naked and undefended in front of them.

But the order didn't come. The men pissed and moaned. That was all they could do. They couldn't open up on Miami without orders. Oh, maybe they could-the men on the smaller guns, anyhow-but they were looking at courts-martial and long terms if they did. Nobody had the gall to try it.

Discipline tightened up amazingly. They'd taken it easy after the Confederate surrender. They didn't any more. You never could tell what might happen now. George would have bet skippers and execs all around the fleet were preaching sermons about the battleship. That was just what he wanted, all right: to serve aboard the USS Object Lesson.

"Isn't it great?" he said to Fodor. "All those guys are going, 'See? You better not be a bunch of jerkoffs like the clowns on the Oregon. Otherwise, the Confederates'll blow your nuts off, too.'"

"Yeah, that's about the size of it, all right," the gun chief agreed. "They can fix up the scar on the side of the ship and slap fresh paint all over the place, but the scar on our reputation ain't gonna go away so fast. Goddamn Confederate cockknockers took care of that in spades."

"Fuck it," George said. "I just want to get back to Boston in one piece. Goddamn war was supposed to be over months ago."

"You think we were down here for no reason?" Fodor patted the gun mount. "I wish they would've lined up the hostages right there on the beach. Then we coulda opened up on 'em with the 40mms. Boy, we would've gone through 'em in a hurry."

"Yeah." George hadn't thought of the antiaircraft guns as weapons that could substitute for a firing squad. But Wally Fodor wasn't wrong. "You turn these babies on people, you know what you've got? You've got Grim Reapers, that's what."

"I like it," Fodor said, and damned if he didn't show up the next day with a can of white paint and some stencils. GRIM REAPER 1 went on the right-hand gun barrel, GRIM REAPER 2 on the gun on the left. "Way to go, Enos. Now they've got names."

"Oh, boy." George tried not to sound too gloomy. He was stuck on the Oregon, though, and he wished to God he weren't.

A fter so long in the war zone, Cincinnatus found Des Moines strange. Sleeping in his own bed, sleeping with his own wife-that was mighty good. Getting used to a peacetime world wasn't so easy.

He flinched whenever an auto backfired or a firecracker went off. He automatically looked for somewhere to hide. He noticed white men half his age doing the same thing. They noticed him, too. "You go through the mill, Pop?" one of them called when they both ducked walking down the street after something went boom.

"Drove a truck all the way through Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia," Cincinnatus answered. "Wasn't right at the front, but I got bushwhacked a couple-three times."

"Oughta do it," the white man agreed. "I was in Virginia, and I got shot. Then they sent me to Alabama. I don't think I'll ever stop being jumpy."

"Man, I know what you mean," Cincinnatus said with feeling. They gave each other waves that weren't quite salutes as they passed.

Cincinnatus knew just where he was going: to the recruiting station where he'd signed up to drive a truck. It was right where it had been. UNCLE SAM STILL NEEDS YOU! said the sign out front. He went inside.

Damned if the same recruiting sergeant wasn't sitting in there, doing paperwork with a pen held in a hook. The man looked up when the door opened. "Well, well," he said, smiling. "I know you, and your name will come to me in a second if I let it. You're Mr.-Driver."

"That's right, Sergeant." Cincinnatus smiled, too. "I first came in here, I called you suh."

"You didn't know the ropes then. I see you do now," the noncom answered. "I'm glad you came through in one piece. I bet you cussed the day you stuck your nose in here plenty of times."

"Best believe I did," Cincinnatus said. "You mind if I sit down?"

"Not even a little bit. I remember you had a bad leg. And you can see I'm busy as hell right now, right?" The sergeant got to his feet. "Can I grab you a cup of coffee?"

"I'd thank you if you did," Cincinnatus replied. "Stuff 's startin' to taste good again."

"We're getting real coffee beans for a change, not whatever kind of crap we were using instead," the recruiting sergeant said. "You take cream and sugar?"

"Both, please." Cincinnatus hesitated. "You know, I never learned your name the las' time I was here."

"I'm Dick Konstam-a damn Dutchman, but at your service. You've got a fancy handle. I remember that, but you'd better remind me what it is."

"Cincinnatus-that's me… Thank you kindly." Cincinnatus sipped from the paper cup. The coffee was strong, but it hadn't been sitting on the hot plate long enough to get bitter yet. He took another sip. Then he asked the question he'd come here to ask: "Sergeant Konstam-uh, Dick-how the hell do I get myself to fit back into things? Wasn't near so hard the last time around."

Konstam paused to light a cigarette. It was a Niagara. He made a sour face. "Tobacco still sucks." He blew out smoke. "You sure you want to talk about that with me, Cincinnatus? What makes you think I've got any answers?"

"You done it yourself. And you've seen plenty of other fellows come and go through here," Cincinnatus said. "If you don't know, who's likely to?"

"Well, I hated everything and everybody when I caught this." Sergeant Konstam held up the hook. Cincinnatus nodded; he could see how that might be so. The white man took another drag-he handled a cigarette as deftly as a pen. After he exhaled a gray stream of smoke, he went on, "But life is too short, you know? Whatever you've got, you better make the most of it, you know?"

"Oh, yeah. I hear that real good," Cincinnatus said.

"Figured you did. You're a guy who busts his hump. You made something out of yourself, and that's pretty goddamn tough for somebody your color. Probably a lot easier to be a shiftless, no-account nigger the way most people expect."

"Know somethin'?" Cincinnatus said. The sergeant raised a questioning eyebrow. Cincinnatus explained: "Think maybe this is the first time I ever heard a white man say nigger an' I didn't want to punch him in the nose."

"Yeah, well, some colored guys are niggers. It's a shame, but it's true. And some Jews are kikes, and some Dutchmen are goddamn fuckin' squareheads-not me, of course." Konstam flashed a wry grin. "We got rid of all those assholes, we'd be better off. Good fuckin' luck, that's all I got to tell you. We're stuck with 'em, and we just have to deal with 'em the best way we know how."

"Like them Freedom Party goons," Cincinnatus said.

Sergeant Konstam nodded. "They fill the bill, all right. Only good thing about them is, we can shoot the fuckers if they step out of line. Nobody's gonna miss 'em when we do, either."

"Amen," Cincinnatus said. "If I was whole myself…" He didn't want to go on and on about his physical shortcomings, not when he was talking to a mutilated man. "My work was messed up after I got back from Covington. Ain't gonna get no better now."

"Remind me what line you were in."

"Had me a hauling business. Had it, yeah, till before the war. Damned if I know how to put it back on its feet now. Ain't got the money to buy me a new truck. Even if I did, I need somebody to give me a hand with loadin' an' unloadin' now."

"Got a son?" Konstam asked.

"Sure do," Cincinnatus said, not without pride. "Achilles, he graduated high school, an' he's clerking for an insurance company. He don't want to get all sore and sweaty and dirty like his old man. And you know what else? I'm damn glad he don't."

"Fair enough. Good for him, and good for you, too. Insurance company, huh? He must take after his old man, then-wants to make things better for himself any way he can. Maybe his kids'll run a company like that instead of working for it."

"That'd be somethin'. Don't reckon it'd be against the law up here, the way it would in the CSA. Don't reckon it'd be easy, neither. Achilles' babies, they're half Chinese."

Konstam laughed out loud. "Ain't that a kick in the head! Who flabbled more when they got hitched, you and your wife or your son's new in-laws?"

"Nobody was what you'd call happy about it," Cincinnatus said. "But Achilles and Grace, they get on good, and it ain't easy stayin' mad at people when there's grandbabies. Things are easier than they were a while ago, I got to say that."

"Glad to hear it." Dick Konstam whistled through his teeth. "I wasn't exactly thrilled when one of my girls married a Jewish guy. Ben hasn't turned out too bad, though. And you're sure as hell right about grandchildren." His face softened. "Want to see photos?"

"If I can show you mine."

They pulled out their wallets and went through a ritual as old as snapshots. If people had carried around little paintings before cameras got cheap and easy, they would have shown those off, too. Cincinnatus and the sergeant praised the obvious beauty and brilliance of each other's descendants. Cincinnatus didn't think he was lying too hard. He hoped Dick Konstam wasn't, either.

The sergeant stuck his billfold back in his hip pocket. "Any other problems I can solve for you today, Mr. Driver?"

He hadn't solved Cincinnatus' problem. He had to know it, too. But he had helped-and he sounded like a man who wanted to get back to work. "One more thing," Cincinnatus said. "Then I get out of your hair. How can I keep from wantin' to hide behind somethin' every goddamn time I hear a loud noise?"

"Boy, you ask the tough ones, don't you?" Konstam said. "All I can tell you is, don't hold your breath. That took me years to get over. Some guys never do. Poor bastards stay nervous as cats the rest of their days."

"Don't want to do that." But it might have more to do with luck than with what he wanted. Slowly and painfully, he got to his feet. "I thank you for your time, Sergeant, an' for lettin' me bend your ear."

"Your tax dollars in action," Konstam replied. "Take care of yourself, buddy. I wish you luck. You haven't been back all that long, remember. Give yourself a chance to get used to things again."

"I reckon that's good advice," Cincinnatus said. "Thank you one more time."

"My pleasure," the sergeant said. "Take care, now."

"Yeah." Cincinnatus headed for home. A work gang with paste pots were putting up red, white, and blue posters of Tom Dewey on anything that didn't move. HE'LL TELL YOU WHAT'S WHAT, they said.

They were covering up as many of Charlie La Follette's Socialist red posters as they could. Those shouted a one-word message: VICTORY!

Cincinnatus still hadn't decided which way he'd vote. Yes, the Socialists were in the saddle when the USA won the war. But they also helped spark it when they gave Kentucky and the state of Houston back to the CSA after their dumb plebiscite. The promise of that vote helped get Al Smith reelected in 1940.

The colored quarter in Covington was empty because of the plebiscite. If Cincinnatus wanted to, he could blame the auto that hit him on the plebiscite. Oh, he might have had an accident like that here in Des Moines chasing after his senile mother. He might have, yeah. But he did have it down in Covington.

How much did that count? He laughed at himself. It counted as much as he wanted it to, no more and no less. Nobody could make him vote for the Socialists if it mattered a lot in his own mind. Nobody could make him vote for the Democrats if it didn't. "Freedom," he murmured-in the real sense of the word, not the way Jake Featherston used it. Cincinnatus grinned and nodded to himself. "I'm here to tell you the truth." The truth was, he was free.

When he got back to the apartment, he found his wife about ready to jump out of her skin with excitement. Half a dozen words explained why: "Amanda's fella done popped the question!"

"Do Jesus!" Cincinnatus sank into a chair. When he left Des Moines not quite two years earlier, his daughter hadn't had a boyfriend. She did now. Calvin Washington was a junior butcher, a young man serious to the point of solemnity. He didn't have much flash-hell, he didn't have any flash-but Cincinnatus thought he was solid all the way through. "She said yes?"

Elizabeth nodded. "She sure did, fast as she could. She thinks she done invented Calvin, you know what I mean?"

"Expect I do." Thoughtfully, Cincinnatus added, "He's about the same color she is."

"Uh-huh." His wife nodded again. "It don't matter as much here as it did down in Kentucky, but it matters."

"It does," Cincinnatus agreed. That an American Negro's color did matter was one more measure of growing up in a white-dominated world, which made it no less real. Had Calvin been inky black, Cincinnatus would have felt his daughter was marrying beneath herself. He didn't know whether Amanda, a modern girl, would have felt that way, but he would have. Were Calvin high yellow, on the other hand, he might have felt he was marrying beneath himself. Since they were both about the same shade of brown, the question didn't arise. "When do they want to get hitched?" Cincinnatus asked.

"Pretty soon." Elizabeth's eyes sparkled. "They're young folks, sweetheart. They can't hardly wait."

"Huh," Cincinnatus said. It wasn't as if his wife were wrong. Whether he was ready or not, the world kept right on going all around him.

The first thing Irving Morrell said when he got into Philadelphia was, "This is a damned nuisance."

John Abell met him at the Broad Street station, as he had so many times before. "If you want to get it quashed, sir, I'm sure we can arrange that."

"No, no." Regretfully, Morrell shook his head. "The man's a cold-blooded son of a bitch, but even a cold-blooded son of a bitch is entitled to the truth."

"Indeed," the General Staff officer murmured. Abell was a cold-blooded son of a bitch, too, but one of a rather different flavor. He had two virtues, as far as Morrell could see: they were on the same side, and Abell didn't go around telling the world how goddamn right he was all the time. Right now, he asked, "Shall I take you over to BOQ and let you freshen up before you go on?"

Morrell looked down at himself. He was rumpled, but only a little. He ran a hand over his chin. Not perfectly smooth, but he didn't think he looked like a Skid Row bum, either. He shook his head. "No, let's get it over with. The sooner it's done, the sooner I can head west and see my wife and daughter."

"However you please," Abell said, which meant he would have showered and shaved and changed his uniform first. But he left the editorializing right there. "My driver is at your disposal."

"Thanks." Morrell followed him off the platform.

They didn't have far to go. Morrell didn't have to look at the slagged wreckage on the other side of the Schuylkill, which didn't mean he didn't know it was there. Its being there, in fact, was a big part of why he was here.

There was no fresh damage in Philadelphia now that the war was over. Some of the wrecked buildings had been bulldozed, and the rubble hauled away. Repairmen swarmed everywhere. Glass was beginning to reappear in windows. "Looks…neater than it did before," Morrell remarked. "We're starting to come back."

"Some," Abell said. "It won't be the way it was for a long time. As a matter of fact, it will never be the way it was."

"Well, no. You can't step into the same river twice." Some Greek had said that a couple of thousand years before Morrell. He didn't remember who; John Abell probably did. Morrell, no great lover of cities, didn't much care how Philadelphia rose again. As long as it had peace in which to rise, that suited him.

The War Department had set up a Tribunal for Accused Confederate War Criminals in a rented office building not far from the government buildings that dominated the center of town. Despite the stars on Morrell's shoulder straps and those on John Abell's, getting in wasn't easy. Security was tight, and no doubt needed to be.

A neatly lettered sign outside a meeting room turned courtroom said UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VS. CLARENCE POTTER, BRIGADIER GENERAL, CSA. "I would never tell you to perjure yourself," Abell said as they paused outside the door, "but I wouldn't hate you if you did, either."

"I'm Irving Morrell, and I'm here to tell you the truth," Morrell said. Abell winced. Morrell went on in.

Inside the makeshift courtroom, everyone except a few reporters and the defendant wore green-gray. The reporters were in civvies; Clarence Potter had on a butternut uniform that, even without insignia, singled him out at a glance. Morrell knew of him, but had never seen him before. He was a little older and more studious-looking than the U.S. officer expected, which didn't mean he wasn't dangerous. He'd already proved he was.

His defense attorney, a U.S. major, got to his feet. "Since General Morrell has chosen not to contest our subpoena, I request permission to get his remarks on the record while he is here."

He faced a panel of five judges-a brigadier general sitting in the center, three bird colonels, and a lieutenant colonel. The general looked over to the light colonel who seemed to be the prosecutor. "Any objections?"

"No, sir," that officer replied. I'm stuck with it, his expression said.

"Very well," the chief judge said. "Come forward and be sworn, General Morrell, and then take your seat."

When Morrell had taken the oath and sat down, Potter's defense counsel said, "You are aware that General Potter is on trial for conveying the Confederate superbomb to Philadelphia while wearing the U.S. uniform for purposes of disguise?"

"Yes, I know that," Morrell said.

"This is considered contrary to the laws of war as set down in the 1907 Hague Convention?"

"That's right."

"Had the Confederates ever used soldiers in U.S. uniform before?"

"Yes, they had. Their men in our uniforms helped get a breakthrough in eastern Ohio in 1942. They even picked men who had U.S. accents. It hurt us."

"I see." The defense attorney looked at some papers. "Were the Confederates alone in using this tactic?"

"No," Morrell said.

"Tell the court about some instances when U.S. soldiers under your command used it."

"Well, the most important was probably the 133rd Special Reconnaissance Company," Morrell replied. "We took a page from the CSA's book. We recruited men who could sound like Confederates. We armed them with Confederate weapons, and put them into Confederate uniform."

"Where did you get the uniforms?" asked the major defending Potter.

"Some from prisoners, others off casualties," Morrell said.

"I see. And the 133rd Special Reconnaissance Company was effective?"

"Yes. It spearheaded our crossing of the Tennessee in front of Chattanooga."

"Surprise and deception made it more effective than it would have been otherwise?"

"I would certainly think so."

"Thank you, General. No further questions."

The chief judge nodded to the prosecutor. "Your witness, Colonel Altrock."

"Thank you, sir." Altrock got to his feet. "You say you were imitating Confederate examples when you dressed our men in enemy uniform, General?"

"I believe that's true, yes," Morrell said.

"Would you have done it if the enemy hadn't?" Altrock asked.

"Objection-that's a hypothetical," the defense attorney said.

After the judges put their heads together, their chief said, "Overruled. The witness may answer the question."

"Would I? Would we?" Morrell pursed his lips. "Probably. It's too good a move-and too obvious-to ignore."

"No further questions," Altrock said. One had done him enough damage.

"Anything on redirect?" the chief judge asked Potter's lawyer, who shook his head. The judge nodded to Morrell. "You are dismissed, General. We appreciate your testimony."

Clarence Potter spoke for the first time: "If I may say so, I appreciate it very much." His own accent might have inspired him to dress up Yankee-sounding Confederates in U.S. uniforms.

"I don't love you, General, but if they hang you it should be for something you did and we didn't." Morrell got to his feet. He nodded to the judges and left the courtroom.

John Abell wasn't waiting there any more. Morrell hadn't expected him to hang around. The driver was. "Where to, sir?" he said. "Wherever you need to go, I'll take you there."

"Back to the train station, quick, before somebody else here decides he needs me," Morrell answered. "By God, I am going to see my wife and daughter."

The driver grinned. "I know how you feel, sir. Let's go."

Two and a half hours later, Morrell was on a train bound for Kansas City. He traveled through the stretches of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and eastern Indiana that had seen the hardest fighting inside the USA. Looking out the window at the devastation was like falling back in time. Down in the occupied Confederacy, hardly anyone looked out of train windows. What people saw there was too likely to hurt. The United States was luckier, but this one stretch of terrain had suffered as much as any farther south.

Morrell breathed easier when he neared Indianapolis. C.S. bombers had hit the city, but nowhere near as hard as they'd pummeled Washington and Baltimore and Philadelphia. And the only soldiers in butternut who'd made it to Indianapolis went into the POW camps outside of town. Some of them still languished there. Most had gone home by now. Some of the ones who had would make U.S. authorities sorry they'd ever turned them loose. Morrell was as sure of that as he was of the scars on his thigh and shoulder, but what the hell could you do?

St. Louis had taken a beating, and Missouri went up in flames whenever war broke out. Even three generations after the War of Secession, it had some stubborn Confederate sympathizers. Lines were fluid in the West, too; C.S. raiders had little trouble sneaking up from Arkansas and raising hell.

Kansas City and Leavenworth, as well as the fort nearby, had also suffered. But, as the war went on, the Confederates found troubles of their own closer to home. Morrell knew Agnes and Mildred had come through without a scratch. To him, selfishly, that was all that mattered.

They were waiting for him when he got off the train. Agnes was about his age, but her black hair showed not a streak of gray. Maybe that was a miracle; more likely it was dye. Morrell didn't care either way. His wife looked damn good to him, and she had ever since they met at a dance right here in town.

He was amazed at how shapely Mildred had got. She was nineteen now, but the years had gone by in a blur for him. He eyed Agnes in mock severity. "You've been feeding her again," he said sternly. "Didn't I warn you about that? See what happens?"

"I'm sorry, Irv." Agnes sounded as contrite as he was angry-which is to say, not very.

"Daddy!" Mildred was just plain indignant.

He gave her a kiss. "It's good to see you, sweetheart. You've grown up as pretty as your mother." That he meant. Mildred was certainly better off with Agnes' looks than with his own long-faced, long-jawed countenance. He wasn't an ugly man, but a woman with features as harsh as his wouldn't have been lucky.

"How long can you stay?" Agnes asked.

"They promised me a couple of weeks, but you know what Army promises are worth," Morrell answered. The rueful twist to his wife's mouth said she knew much too well. He went on, "We'll just have to make the most of the time, however long it turns out to be."

"Of course we will." Agnes looked at Mildred. "That's good advice any old time." She had her own bitter experience; she'd lost her first husband in the early days of the Great War.

Mildred wasn't impressed. With a toss of the head, she said, "I thought I graduated from high school."

Morrell started to give her a swat on the behind for sass, but checked himself. She was too big these days for a man to spank. He contented himself with asking, "Have you been giving your mother lip all the time I've been gone?"

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

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

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