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XX

The Sandwich Islands. Home of perfect weather, sugar cane, pineapple, and women of several races wearing no more than the perfect weather required. Home of the ukulele, the instrument the Devil had invented when he was trying for the guitar. Home of romance. That was what the tourist brochures said, anyhow.

George Enos, Jr., didn't have the chance to pay attention to the tourist brochures. He didn't have time to pay attention to the pineapple or the sugar cane or even the women and what they were or weren't wearing. He'd been away from Connie for quite a while. His interest might have been more than theoretical. He didn't get the chance to find out.

As soon as the Townsend pulled into Pearl Harbor, she refueled and steamed northwest toward Midway. Even though the island was lost to the Japanese, the USA seemed determined to defend Oahu as far forward as possible. That would have been farther forward still if the Remembrance hadn't lain at the bottom of the Pacific. As things were, the Americans didn't poke much beyond the distance air cover from the main islands could reach.

Out beyond that distance lay… the Japs. They had carriers in the neighborhood, and they'd proved airplanes could do more to ships than other ships could. The Townsend did have Y-ranging gear, which struck George as something not far from black magic. Black magic or not, though, how much would it help? Airplanes were so much faster than ships-you couldn't run away even if you saw the other guy long before he saw you.

Hydrophone gear listened for Japanese submersibles. Old-timers-the Townsend had a handful-said the gear was greatly improved over what the Navy had used in the last war. It could hear a sub while the destroyer's engines were going. If they hadn't been able to do that in the Great War, George wondered how any surface ships had survived. His mouth tightened. Too many hadn't, including the one with his father aboard.

When he wasn't chipping paint or swabbing the deck or doing one of the nine million other jobs the Navy had to keep all hands from knowing any idle moments, he stuck close to the 40mm mount. If anything came within range of the destroyer, he wanted the best chance to blast it he could get. When the klaxons sounded general quarters, he ran like a man possessed. So did his crewmates. In these waters, it was too likely no drill.

"We're trying to find their subs, and they're trying to find us," Fremont Blaine Dalby said one morning. The gun chief peered out over the blue, blue water, as if expecting to see periscopes lined up like city workers waiting for the trolley. He might not have been so far wrong, either. He went on, "Whoever plays the game better gets to play it again. Whoever screws up…" A shrug. "It's a hell of a long way down in this part of the Pacific."

"Happy day," George said.

"Ain't it?" That was Fritz Gustafson. The loader seldom had a whole lot to say, but he never left any doubt where he stood. He jerked a thumb at Dalby. "Just our luck to have a damn Jonah bossing this gun."

"A Jonah?" Dalby swelled up like a puffer fish. "What do you mean, a Jonah?"

"What I said," Gustafson answered. "Named for Republicans. Phooey! Bunch of goddamn losers."

"Could be worse," George said helpfully. "His mama could have called him Lincoln."

Dalby gave him a more venomous look than the one he'd sent Gustafson. He and the loader had been together for a long time. They'd probably been needling each other just as long, too. George was still a new kid on the block. He was showing some nerve by joining in.

Before Dalby could call him on it, if he was going to, the klaxons began to hoot. Feet clanged on metal decks. George started to laugh. He was already at his battle station. The only thing he did was button up his shirt and roll down his sleeves. Orders were to cover as much of yourself as you could when combat was close. That could be uncomfortable in warm weather, but it could also be a lifesaver. Flash burns from exploding ordnance often killed even when shrapnel didn't turn a man to butcher's work.

The Townsend's engines took on a deeper note. The destroyer sped up and started zigzagging. The men on the gun crew looked at one another. They all said the same thing at the same time: "Uh-oh."

When the klaxons stopped, it wasn't to sound the all-clear. An officer's voice came over the speakers: "Now hear this. We've picked up airplanes heading this way from the northwest. They are unlikely to be friendly. That is all."

"Unlikely to be fucking friendly." Fremont Dalby spat. "Yeah."

With Midway gone, the USA had no bases northwest of where the Townsend steamed. However many Japanese carriers were up there, they had the best of both worlds. They could launch their airplanes at American ships while staying out of range of retaliation from Oahu or Kauai. They might lose fighters or bombers. They wouldn't expose themselves to danger.

Y-ranging gear had a range far beyond that of the Mark One eyeball. It gave the gun crews fifteen or twenty minutes to get as ready for the onslaught as they could. Everyone started toward the northwest. Somebody opened up on a particularly majestic goony bird. The shells screamed past it. The goony bird altered course not a bit.

But then shouts rang out up and down the Townsend. Those dark specks weren't birds, goony or otherwise. They were enemy airplanes.

The Townsend's five-inch guns could fight both ships and airplanes. They opened up first. The blast from them was like the end of the world. George felt it as much as he heard it. Black puffs of smoke appeared among the incoming Japs. None of them tumbled out of the sky, not yet. They didn't even break formation. The Pacific War had proved Japanese pilots knew their stuff. Nothing that had happened in this one made anybody want to change his mind.

"Let's get 'em!" Dalby shouted. The twin 40mm guns started hammering away. George fed shells as fast as he could. Fritz Gustafson might have been a mechanism designed for nothing but loading. The rest of the crew swung the guns toward their targets.

Flame spurted from the gun barrels. Shell casings leaped from the breeches. George passed more ammo. The noise of the twin antiaircraft guns was terrific, but not so overwhelming as the roar of the dual-purpose five-inchers not far away. They kept shooting, too, adding bass notes to the cacophony.

Bombs burst in the sea, much too close to the Townsend's flank. George remembered destroyers were built for speed, and sacrificed all armor plate to get it. He could have done without the thought. Great plumes of white water flew up. Some of it splashed him. He wondered what flying fragments from the casing were doing to the hull. Nothing good.

A fighter streaked for the Townsend, machine guns blazing. Tracers from several guns converged on it. It blew up in midair; the remains splashed into the Pacific. "Scratch one Jap!" George yelled in delight, even if he was far from sure his gun had put the fatal round into the enemy fighter.

But plenty of Japanese airplanes were left unscratched. A dive bomber screamed down on the Townsend. Fritz Gustafson swiveled the antiaircraft gun with desperate haste to bring it to bear on the bomber. Tracers swung toward the hurtling plane, swung into it, and left it a smoking, flaming ruin that crashed into the sea-but not before it loosed the bomb.

George watched it fall. He felt the Townsend heel sharply-but not sharply enough. The bomb struck home at the destroyer's stern. It struck home… but it didn't burst.

"Thank you, Jesus!" George said. He'd nominally turned Catholic to marry Connie, but he didn't feel it. That was too bad. Crossing himself and really meaning it would have felt good just then.

"Fuck me." Fremont Dalby sounded as reverent as George did, even if he'd chosen different words. "A dud!" Those were beautiful words, too.

Gustafson shook his head. "I bet it isn't. I bet they put an armor-piercing fuse on it, and it didn't hit anything tough enough to make it go off. It would have raised all kinds of hell on a cruiser or a battlewagon."

"Fuck me," Dalby said again, this time much less happily. "I bet you're right. That means we've got a real son of a bitch in there somewhere."

"It'll go off if somebody sneezes on it, too, most likely." Gustafson spoke with a certain somber satisfaction.

Another dive bomber stooped on the destroyer. One of the Townsend's five-inch guns got this one. When that kind of shell struck home, the enemy airplane turned into a fireball. The dive bomber behind it flew past the edge of the fireball, so close that George hoped it would go up in flames, too. It didn't. It released its bomb and zoomed away only a few feet above the waves.

Maybe evading the fireball had spoiled the pilot's aim, because the bomb went into the Pacific, not into the Townsend. It also failed to explode, which suggested all the dive bombers bore badly fused bombs. George expended some more hope on that.

Even if it was so, the Townsend wasn't out of the woods yet. More bombs rained down from the level bombers high overhead. None had hit yet, but they kept kicking up great spouts of water when they splashed into the sea. Nothing was wrong with their fuses. And fighters buzzed around the destroyer like so many malevolent wasps. They strafed the deck again and again. Someone on the Townsend shot down another one, but cries for medics said the fighters' machine guns were doing damage, too.

After what seemed forever but was by the clock eighteen minutes, the Japanese airplanes flew back in the direction from which they'd come. Fritz Gustafson nodded to George. "Well, rookie, you're a veteran now," he said.

George looked around. There were bullet holes and dents much too close for comfort. Blood streaked the deck at the next 40mm mount. That could have been me, he thought, and started to shake.

Gustafson slapped him on the back. "All right to get the jimjams now," the loader said. "You did good when it counted."

"We all did good when it counted," Dalby said. "Damn Japs didn't buy anything cheap today."

"Unless that bomb goes off," Gustafson said. Dalby gave him the finger.

Men from the damage-control party brought the bomb up on deck in a canvas sling. Ever so gently, they lowered it over the side. All the sailors watching cheered as it disappeared into the depths of the Pacific.

"Still here," George breathed. He hardly dared believe it. If that carrier decided to send more airplanes after the Townsend, it might not last. Nothing seemed better, though, than taking the enemy's best shot-and coming through.

Scipio didn't like going through the Terry any more. He especially didn't like going through the northern part, the part that had been emptied out by police and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards. Scavengers prowled it, pawing through what the inhabitants had had to leave behind when they were sent elsewhere. A lot of the houses and apartments there weren't uninhabited any more. They had no electricity, water, or gas, but the people in them didn't seem to care. For some, they turned into homes. For others, they were no more than robbers' dens.

Every time Scipio got into the white part of Augusta, he breathed a sigh of relief. That felt cruelly ironic. Whites were doing horrible things to blacks all over the CSA. No one could deny it. But a white man wouldn't murder him on the street for the fun of it or for whatever he had in his pockets. A black man might. He hated that knowledge, which didn't mean he didn't have it.

He grumbled about it during the waiters' hasty supper at the Huntsman's Lodge. Now that Aurelius was also working there, he had someone to talk to, someone who'd been through a lot of the things he had. Two gray heads, he thought.

"Ain't nothin' to be done about it," Aurelius said. "Things is what they is. Ain't for the likes of us to change 'em. We just got to git through 'em."

"I knows it," Scipio said. "Don't mean I likes it."

"Tell you what the difference is, 'tween niggers and ofays," Aurelius said.

"Go on," Scipio urged him. "Say your say, so's I kin tell you what a damn fool you is." He smiled to show he didn't intend to be taken seriously.

Aurelius ignored the gibe altogether, which showed how seriously he took it. Before he went on, though, he looked around to make sure neither Jerry Dover nor any other white was in earshot. That was serious business. Satisfied, he said, "Difference is, when niggers kill whites, they does it one at a time. When the ofays decide they gonna kill niggers, they does it by city blocks an' by carloads. If I was forty years younger…" He didn't finish that.

What would you do? But Scipio didn't wonder for long. What could the other man have meant but that he would pick up a gun and use it against the whites? Scipio said, "We tries dat, we loses. They gots more guns, an' they gots bigger guns, too. Done seen dat in de las' war."

"Yeah." Aurelius didn't deny it. He couldn't very well; it was self-evident truth. But he did say, "We don't try it, we loses, too. Can't very well turn the other cheek when the ofay jus' hit you there soon as you do."

Scipio grunted. That also held more truth than he wished it did. Before he could say anything, Jerry Dover stuck his head into the room and said, "Eat up, people. We've got customers coming in, and the floor has to be covered." He disappeared again.

The floor has to be covered whether you're done eating or not, he meant. Waiters and busboys could eat, as long as they did it in a way that didn't interfere with their work. If it came to a choice between work and food, work always won.

Gulping down a last bite of chicken breast cooked with brandy, Scipio went out onto the floor. He stood straighter. He walked with dignity. He put on some of the airs he'd shown as Anne Colleton's butler at Marshlands. Assuming all of them would have been laying it on too thick, but customers here expected a certain amount of well-trained servility. Giving them what they wanted put a little extra money in his pocket.

As he took orders and recommended specials, he thought about Marshlands, now a ruined ghost of its former self. Anne Colleton dead… That still amazed him. One of her brothers had died-bravely-at the very start of the black revolt in 1915. The other one, as far as Scipio knew, was still alive.

After the war, Tom Colleton had turned out to be more dangerous and more capable than he'd expected. The white man had crushed what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Till then, Scipio hadn't thought of him as anything but a lightweight. It only went to show, you never could tell.

That was probably true for almost all white men. Scipio laughed, not that it was funny. Whites in the CSA probably said the same thing about blacks. No, they certainly said the same thing about blacks. Hadn't he overheard them often enough, at Marshlands and here at the Huntsman's Lodge and plenty of places between the one and the other whenever they didn't think blacks could listen?

Of course, when whites talked among themselves, they often didn't pay enough attention to whether blacks were in earshot. Why should they, when blacks were hewers of wood and drawers of water? Blacks talking about whites? That was a different story. Blacks had known for hundreds of years that a white man overhearing them could spell disaster or death.

A white man at one of Scipio's tables waved to him. "Hey, uncle, come on over here!" the man called.

"What you need, suh?" Scipio asked, obsequious as usual.

"How long do they need to do up a steak in the kitchen? Have they all died in there? Of old age, maybe?" He was playing to the rest of the whites at the table. His friends or business associates or whatever they were laughed at what passed for his wit.

"It come soon, suh. Dey needs a little extra time, git it well-done de way you wants it."

"Oh. All right. Thanks, uncle. Make sure you bring it out the minute they get it finished." The white man, mollified, forgot about Scipio, even though he was still standing right there.

"Yes, suh. I do dat." Scipio could have laughed in the man's face. He could have, but he didn't. It wouldn't have been polite. But he knew the kitchen was glad to get well-done orders. They let it dispose of meat too nasty to serve before searing it thoroughly enough to destroy all the flavor. They also let it get rid of meat too tough to be worth eating; once cooked well-done, almost all meat was too tough to be worth eating. If the customer couldn't tell the difference-and the customer never could-the kitchen only smiled.

After Scipio brought that dinner and the rest of the food to that table, he got a better tip than he'd expected. He thought that was pretty funny, too. No matter what he thought, his face never showed a thing.

It had looked like rain when he came to work, but the clouds had blown through by the time he left the restaurant. A big yellow moon hung in the sky; its mellow light went a long way toward making up for the street lamps that shone no more. Farther north, they would have called it a bombers' moon, but no bombers had come to Augusta.

Scipio and Aurelius walked along side by side. Scipio was glad to have company on the way back to the Terry. Neither of them said much. They just walked in companionable silence, both of them puffing on cigarettes. Then, about a block and a half from the edge of the colored part of town, Aurelius stopped. So did Scipio, half a step later. Aurelius pointed ahead. "Somethin' goin'on up there, Xerxes."

"I sees it." Scipio squinted. The moonlight wasn't enough to let him make out what it was. It seemed as if it ought to be that bright, but it wasn't. Moonlight had a way of letting you down when you needed it most. Suddenly, absurdly, Scipio remembered a girl from more than fifty years before, not long after he was manumitted. She'd seemed pretty enough by moonlight. Come the day… Come the day, he wondered what he'd been thinking the night before. He hadn't been thinking the night before, which was exactly the point.

Aurelius had similar doubts. "Reckon we ought to find out what it is?" he asked.

"Can't stay here," Scipio said. "The buckra find we here in de mornin', we gwine wish we was dead."

"Uh-huh." Aurelius took a couple of steps forward, then stopped again. "We go on, maybe we be dead."

"We gots to go on," Scipio said. "They catches we in de white folks' part o' town, we be dead then, too. Either that or they puts we in jail, and only one place a nigger go from jail dese days-to one o' dem camps."

Aurelius plainly wanted to argue. No matter what he wanted to do, he couldn't. With dragging feet, he and Scipio approached. "Halt! Who goes there?" a white man barked at them, and then, "Advance and be recognized."

Even more hesitantly, the two Negroes obeyed. As Scipio drew near, he saw that uniformed white men were surrounding the Terry with barbed wire. There were gateways; he and Aurelius were coming up to one. Trying to keep his voice from shaking, he asked, "What you do?"

"Too many troublemakers getting in and out," the white man answered briskly. "High time we kept a closer eye on things, by God. And what the hell are you coons doing out after curfew anyways?"

"We works at the Huntsman's Lodge, suh. Dey closes late," Scipio answered.

"Yeah? If that's so, you'll have fancy dress on under those topcoats. Let's have a look," the white-a Freedom Party stalwart-said. Scipio and Aurelius hastily unbuttoned their coats to display the tuxedos beneath.

"I know them two niggers, Jerry," an Augusta cop told the stalwart. "They are what they say they are. They don't give anybody trouble." He pointed at Scipio and Aurelius with his nightstick. "Ain't that right, boys?"

"Yes, suh!" the waiters chorused.

"Any nigger'll give trouble if he gets the chance." Jerry spoke with great conviction. But then he shrugged. "All right-have it your way, Rusty. Pass on, you two."

"Yes, suh!" Scipio and Aurelius said again. The gates were barbed wire, too, strung on wooden frames instead of fastened to metal posts. Scipio doubted the barrier would stop all unsupervised traffic between the Terry and the outside, but it was bound to slow that traffic to a trickle.

Once they got on their own side of the barbed wire, he and Aurelius let out identical exhalations: half sigh, half groan. "Do Jesus!" Scipio said. "We is caged in."

"Sure enough," Aurelius agreed. "They kin feed us through the bars-if they want to. An' if they want to, they kin poke us through the bars, too."

"Or they kin take we out an' git rid o' we if they wants to." Scipio paused. "But why dey bodder? Dey done made de whole Terry a camp."

Aurelius' jaw worked, as if he were literally chewing on that. "We're in trouble," he said in a low voice. "All the niggers in Augusta is in trouble."

"In Augusta?" Scipio's fears reached wider than that. "You reckon dis here the onliest place in the country where dey runs up de barbed wire?"

Now Aurelius was the one who whispered, "Do Jesus!" That bright, cheerful moon showed how wide his eyes went. "You suppose they doin' this everywhere?"

"You got a wireless?" Scipio asked. The other Negro nodded. Scipio went on, "Reckon the news say one way or de other. If they do it all over everywhere, they won't hide it. They brag an' be proud."

Slowly, Aurelius nodded. Scipio shivered, there in the night. He'd finally found something he feared more than the regime's hatred of blacks. Its grim certainty that it was doing right frightened him far worse.

The move from Ohio to Virginia had changed life very little for Dr. Leonard O'Doull. He still worked in an aid station not far behind the line. The wounds he and his crew faced changed not at all. The weather was a little milder, but he had scant leisure to notice it. Going outside the aid tent for a quick cigarette every now and then hardly counted.

Repair, stabilize, send the successes back out of harm's way, send the failures back for burial… Sometimes he thought the wounded were war's mistakes-if everything had gone just the way the enemy planned, they would be dead. Or would they? In his more cynical moments, he reminded himself that a wounded soldier made the USA spend more resources on him than an easily replaceable dead one did.

When he mentioned that to Granville McDougald, the medic only nodded. "Same thing's occurred to me, Doc-you bet it has," he said. "Take a look at mustard gas, for instance. That shit hardly ever kills outright. It just makes casualties."

O'Doull hadn't even thought about mustard gas. "Tabernac!" he said.

McDougald laughed at him. "When you get excited, you start talking like a Frenchy."

"I know. I spoke French every day for almost twenty-five years, remember. I wasn't sure my English would come back as well as it has." O'Doull paused, then said, "Son of a bitch! There. You feel better now, Granny?"

He got another laugh out of McDougald. "Sure. Much better. I'll take two aspirins and you can see me in the morning."

"What I'd like to see in the morning is home," O'Doull said. His longing for Riviere-du-Loup suddenly pierced like an arrow. "I feel like nothing but a goddamn butcher down here."

"That's not right," McDougald said. "The butchers are the ones with the stars on their shoulder straps-and that maniac down in Richmond. If it weren't for Featherston, you'd be in Quebec and I wouldn't be worrying about anything more urgent than shortarm inspections."

"With the new drugs, we can even do something about a dose of the clap." O'Doull preferred thinking of gonorrhea to mustard gas. "Who would have figured that ten years ago?"

"Oh, irrigation with permanganate would cure some of the time," McDougald said. "Of course, most of the guys who went through it would sooner have had the disease."

"It wasn't pleasant," O'Doull agreed. He'd had to administer that treatment a good many times himself. Quebecois civilians were no fonder of it than U.S. soldiers. "A few pills or shots are a lot easier-and they work a lot better, too."

"And what's that going to do, Doc?" McDougald asked. "If we can screw as much as we want without worrying about coming down with VD, don't a lot of the old rules fly right out the window?"

"You come up with the most… interesting questions," O'Doull said admiringly. "I don't think the rules go till women don't have to worry about getting knocked up whenever they sleep with a guy. Rubbers aren't reliable enough for that, and a lot of men don't want to use 'em."

"Makes sense." Granville McDougald started to nod, then caught himself. He pointed a finger at O'Doull. "You're a Catholic, Doc. Won't you get in trouble with the Church for saying stuff like that?"

"In trouble? I doubt it. The Church isn't the Freedom Party, and the Pope isn't Jake Featherston. Nobody's going to come and burn me at the stake for having a mind of my own. The Spanish Inquisition went out of style a long time ago, even in Spain."

"Well, all right." McDougald seemed happy enough to return to the point: "You think we can do that? Make really good contraceptives, I mean?"

"Sure we can," O'Doull said. "It's just a matter of putting our minds to it and doing the research. It'll happen. I don't know when, but it will. And the world will be a different place."

Far above the tent with the Red Cross on each side, shells flew back and forth. O'Doull gauged how the fighting was going by the quality of those sounds. If more came in from the Confederate side of the line than went out at the C.S. forces, he might have to pull back in a hurry. If U.S. gunfire was outdoing the enemy's, he might have to move up quickly, which could be almost as big a nuisance. Right now, things seemed pretty even.

McDougald was listening, too, but in a different way. "Goddamn gurglers," he said. "I hate those goddamn gurglers. They're throwing gas around again. You'd think we had more sense than that. Hell, you'd think the Confederates had more sense than that."

"No such luck," O'Doull said sadly.

"I don't know what the hell good gas is." McDougald sounded bitter. "It kills people and it ruins people, and that's about it. You can't win a battle with it, not when both sides use it. It's only one more torment for the poor damned fools with guns in their hands."

"Every word you say is true," O'Doull answered. "Every single word. But saying it, no matter how true it is, doesn't make anybody on either side change his mind."

"Don't I know it? Haven't we seen it? Christ!" The way McDougald took the name of the Lord in vain wasn't so far removed from the Quebecois habit of swearing by the host and the chalice. He went on, "At least we have an antidote that does some good against nerve gas, as long as the casualties get here before it's too late. But mustard gas? Once you've got mustard gas on you or in your lungs, it will do what it does, and that's that."

A shell landed a couple of hundred yards away: not close enough to be dangerous-though O'Doull wouldn't have believed that when he first put on a uniform again-but plenty close enough to be alarming. "Was that a short round of theirs or a short round of ours?" O'Doull wondered.

"What difference does it make?" McDougald asked. "Whoever it comes down on is screwed either way."

O'Doull sighed. "Well, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're right. How many have we treated where our own guns did the damage?"

"I don't have the slightest idea, and neither do you," McDougald said. "The only thing I can tell you is, it's too goddamn many."

He was right again. Accidents of all sorts were only too common in war. Some of them made O'Doull think God had a nasty sense of humor. Two U.S. companies would attack the same bit of high ground from different directions. Maybe neither would know the other was in the neighborhood. Maybe somebody in one or the other-or both-would see soldiers moving toward him and open up regardless of what uniform they wore. In a split second, dozens of soldiers would be blazing away at one another, trained reflex overriding thought… and adding to the casualty lists.

Artillery wasn't always the infantryman's friend, either. Very often, U.S. and C.S. lines would lie close together. Rounds didn't have to fall short by much to come down on soldiers in green-gray rather than those in butternut. Some of the fault, no doubt, lay in mismanufactured shells and in powder that didn't do everything it was supposed to. And some, just as surely, lay in the calculations artillerymen botched when they were in a hurry-and sometimes when they weren't. All those blunders bloated the butcher's bill.

"One thing," O'Doull said.

"What's that?" Granville McDougald inquired.

"Over on the other side of the line, there are bound to be a couple of Confederate medics bitching about the same thing."

"Oh, yeah." McDougald nodded. "But does that make it better or worse?"

That was another of those… interesting questions. How you answered it depended on how you looked at war. It was better for the USA if the Confederates also killed and maimed their own. It was better for the USA, yes, but much worse for a good-sized group of men who would either die too young or go through life with puckered scars and perhaps without fingers or a foot or their eyesight or testicles.

O'Doull answered with a question of his own: "Are you asking me as an American or as a doctor?"

"That's for you to figure out, wouldn't you say?" McDougald was enormously helpful when dealing with the wounded, much less so when he and O'Doull were making the time pass by.

Another round burst closer than it should have. O'Doull swore in English and in Quebecois French. Somebody on one side of the line or the other didn't know his ass from the end zone. No one set out to shell an aid station, but that was also one of the accidents that happened.

"I think we'd better-" O'Doull began.

Granville McDougald was already doing it. O'Doull followed him out of the tent. Both men jumped into a zigzagging trench not far away. O'Doull was glad they had no wounded lying in the tent right that minute. Getting them out would have been a nightmare. The doctor thought he would sooner have stayed in the tent himself and taken his chances.

"Cigarette?" McDougald held out a pack.

"Thanks." O'Doull took one. They were Niagaras, a U.S. brand, and tasted as if they were made of hay and horseshit. Even bad tobacco, though, was better than no tobacco at all. O'Doull sucked in smoke. "Yeah, thanks, Granny. I needed one there."

Another shell screamed in. A man who listened closely could tell which rounds were long, which short, and which right on the money. O'Doull ducked and threw his hands up over his head. So did McDougald, who'd judged the incoming round the same way he had.

The shell burst between the trench and the aid tent. Shrapnel whined through the air not far enough over their heads; dirt pattered down on them. Some slid down the back of O'Doull's neck. He knew that would drive him crazy later. Nothing he could do about it now.

Cautiously, he stuck his head up above the rim of the trench. The explosion had shredded the green-gray canvas of the aid tent; the Red Cross on the side was ventilated with several rips and tears. And what the fragments would have done to them had they stayed in the tent… "You know something? I'm not what you'd call sorry we vacated the premises."

"Now that you mention it, neither am I." McDougald looked up to survey the damage, too. He whistled mournfully. "No, that wouldn't have been a hell of a lot of fun, would it?"

"No. Looks to me like we could have practiced sewing each other up," O'Doull said.

"Suture self, Doc," McDougald said. O'Doull sent him a reproachful stare. The other man didn't seem to notice he'd been reproached. Anyone who'd say something like that probably wouldn't notice such a thing.

Then O'Doull threw himself flat in the trench again. Two more shells came down, one on the tent, the other close by it. He and McDougald would have been in no position to do any sewing after that. Light a candle for me, Nicole, he thought, and wondered if he'd ever see Riviere-du-Loup again.

Mary Pomeroy hugged her mother. "So good to see you, Ma," she said.

"You, too, dear," Maude McGregor answered. "It was a nice visit, wasn't it?"

"I sure thought so," Mary answered. "Easier to get out of town now that Alec's in kindergarten." She made a sour face. "Even so, I wish I didn't have to send him. The Yanks make teachers fill up the children's heads with the most fantastic lies you ever heard."

"You don't want to get in trouble for leaving him out, though," her mother said. "You don't want to get in trouble at all, especially after all the lies Wilf Rokeby told about you."

"I know, Ma," Mary said, and said no more. She knew Wilf Rokeby hadn't told lies. She knew her mother knew, too. Maude McGregor never would have said so, though, even if you put her on the rack. There were things she carefully didn't see. She hadn't seen them when her husband was alive, and she didn't see them when she looked in her daughter's direction, either.

She'd never asked, for instance, why Mary spent half an hour or an hour or an hour and a half of each recent visit to the farm out in the barn by herself. She never came out to see what her daughter was doing there. She didn't want to know-or rather, to know officially.

All she said now was, "Whatever you're doing, be careful about it."

Gently, Mary answered, "I'm always careful, Ma," and her mother nodded. Mary knew she hadn't been careful enough with Wilf. She'd dodged the immediate danger, but the postmaster had brought her to the occupiers' notice.

The Yanks suspected Pa, but he kept on going, Mary thought fiercely. I can, too. As long as they only suspected, what could they do? They'd never found any evidence against her. They'd never found any evidence against her father, either, till things went wrong when he threw the bomb at General Custer. And if Custer hadn't been more alert than an old man had any business being, Pa might have got away with that, too.

"I'll see you before too long," Mary said. Her mother nodded. The two women embraced. Mary went out to the Oldsmobile. She started the auto and drove away from the farm where she'd grown up.

What went through her mind was, I have to be extra careful now. If the Frenchies caught her with a bomb in the Olds, everything was over. They had no particular reason to search it, but…

Even when she used the bomb, she had to be extra careful. If it went off somewhere too close to Rosenfeld, that would make the occupiers wonder. She muttered to herself as she drove across the vast, wintry Manitoba prairie. The Olds was almost the only motorcar on the road. What she didn't know was how active the overall resistance against the Yanks was. How many things happened that never got into the newspapers or on the wireless? If the Americans were smart-and they were, damn them; they were-they would keep most of those things quiet.

If she wasn't the only one fighting the Yanks in this part of the province, though, then one more bomb wouldn't mean so much. It wouldn't necessarily make the occupiers look toward her. If nobody else was giving them trouble, that was a different story.

She sighed. She hadn't heard anyone else's bombs blow up in Rosenfeld. A lot of the farmers in these parts were Mennonites who went along with the central authority, whatever it happened to be. But there had been that pamphlet, the one she'd turned against Rokeby. Somebody had put it out.

About ten miles west of Rosenfeld lay Coulee, an even smaller town. Like Rosenfeld, Coulee would have had no reason to exist if not for the railroad. It was a place where people loaded grain; Mary had trouble imagining anyone getting off the train in Coulee without the immediate, intense desire to get right back on again. People in Rosenfeld hardly ever thought about Coulee; when they did, it was usually with a condescending smile. Even in Rosenfeld, people needed someone to feel superior to.

The paved road to Coulee paralleled the train tracks. It went on right through the town. Mary got off the paved road before Coulee, went around the place on lesser tracks like the one that led to her family's farm, and then got back on to drive for another couple of miles.

She stopped the auto there and pulled off to the side of the road. When she got out of the Olds, she looked both east and west. Nobody coming in either direction-that was what she'd wanted to see. She remembered the Quebecois soldiers who'd appeared out of nowhere while her family was picnicking. Having a patrol show up now wouldn't do at all.

No patrol. There were too many miles of railroad, not enough soldiers to keep an eye on all of them all the time. Mary opened the trunk. She carried the box in it over to the railroad tracks, then came back. As she returned, she scuffed and kicked the footprints she'd made in the snow till they were unidentifiable. She drove the auto back onto the road and did the same thing to the tire tracks. The occupiers would be able to figure out where she'd planted the bomb. The explosion itself would tell them that. Who she was, or even that she was a she? No. Not if she could help it.

Mary drove back to Rosenfeld the same way as she'd come west, skirting Coulee. Nobody in the town would see the Oldsmobile. She tried to use different little country roads heading east. She didn't want a farmer remembering he'd seen the same auto coming and going in a short stretch of time.

She got back to her apartment less than an hour later than she would have if she'd come straight from the farm. Who was to say when she'd broken off her visit with her mother? Mort might notice that the gas gauge on the motorcar was down a little farther than it should have been. But so what? Even if he did, would he turn her in to the occupiers? Not likely!

All the way back to Rosenfeld, she'd listened for an explosion. She hadn't heard one. Maybe no train had gone through during her drive. Maybe she'd got too far away for the sound to carry. Or maybe the bomb had failed. That was an unwelcome possibility, but one she couldn't ignore.

As soon as she got into the apartment, she used a nail file to get rid of the dirt from the barn and washed her hands. Drying them, she felt a little like Lady Macbeth-another stubborn Scotswoman advancing her cause no matter what.

Music blared from the wireless when she turned it on. It was twenty minutes to the hour, so she had a while to wait before she could hear the news. She used the time to good advantage, making herself a cup of coffee and sitting down with a mystery story set in Toronto before the Great War. She knew what she was doing-pretending things hadn't changed since. Again, so what?

When the news came on, it talked about an American submersible torpedoing a Japanese cruiser somewhere in the Sandwich Islands. It talked about U.S. bombing raids on Confederate cities, and about Confederate terror attacks on U.S. cities. Mary sneered. She knew propaganda when she heard it. The wireless talked about U.S. progress in Utah. It talked about an Austro-German counterattack against the Tsar's armies in the Ukraine, and about a German counterattack against the British near Hamburg.

It talked about cuts in the coal ration for Canada, and about reductions in civilian seat allocations on the railroads here. Bombs on the tracks? Not a word.

Mary said a word-a rude one. Maybe it was too soon to get the news on the air. Maybe no train had gone along that stretch of track, which didn't strike her as very likely. Or maybe something had gone wrong. Could a patrol have found the bomb before a train went over it? Worry settled over her like the clouds that presaged a snowstorm.

After Alec got back from kindergarten, even worry had to stand in line. He rampaged through the apartment. Mouser had been asleep under a chair. Alec blew a horn right by him, which horrified him and Mary both. He fled, squalling. "Leave the cat alone!" Mary shouted at Alec, who wanted to do no such thing.

She kept the wireless on, wondering whether she would get news from it or a knock on the door. At last, three hours after that first newscast, the announcer started inveighing against saboteurs who tried to put a spike in the American war effort. "These evildoers hurt their Canadian brethren by further decreasing the number of seats available in the railway system as a whole. Southern Manitoba is particularly afflicted, but authorities have every confidence they will soon hunt down the murderers and depraved individuals responsible for these dastardly acts of terrorism." The man sounded ready to flop down on the floor and start chewing up the carpet.

Hearing that report took the nervous edge off Mary's temper. Alec kept after the cat. Before long, Mouser had had enough and scratched him. He ran to Mary, crying. She managed to be sympathetic, and painted the wounds with Mercurochrome, which didn't sting, and not with Merthiolate, which did.

"He's a bad kitty," Alec declared, glowering at the orange-red blotches on his arm.

"He is not. If you tease him, he's going to scratch." Mouser rarely bit, thank heaven. Mary and Mort had trained him out of that when he was a kitten. "How would you like somebody blowing a horn in your ear when you were asleep and chasing you all over everywhere?"

Alec looked as if he thought that might be fun. Mary might have realized he would. And then, all at once, an amazingly knowing expression passed over his face-he saw he shouldn't have let her notice that. He's growing up, she thought, and couldn't decide whether to laugh or to cry.

When Mort came home from the diner that evening, he was oddly subdued. She wondered if he'd had a row with his father. She didn't want to ask him about it till after Alec went to bed. Then her husband beat her to the punch: "They say a train got bombed, other side of Coulee."

Uh-oh, Mary thought. Voice somewhere between casual and savage, she answered, "I heard something about it on the wireless. They didn't say much, though. I hope it gave the Yanks a good kick in the slats."

Mort made a small production out of lighting a cigarette. He said, "When the Frenchies turned this place upside down, they didn't find anything."

"Of course they didn't. There wasn't anything to find." I made damn sure of that, Mary added, but only to herself.

"They never found any of the stuff your father used, either," he said.

That rocked her again; she didn't think he'd ever come right out and talked about Arthur McGregor and what he'd done before. She made herself nod. "No, they never did."

"Mary…" Mort paused, maybe not quite sure how to go on. He drew on the cigarette till the coal glowed tomato red. "For God's sake watch yourself, Mary. This isn't a game. They'll kill you if they catch you. I don't think I could stand that. I know Alec couldn't."

How long had he known and kept quiet? If he could add two and two, how many other people in Rosenfeld could do the same thing? "I always watch myself, Mort," Mary said, but she knew she would have to be more watchful yet.

A corner drugstore not far from Chester Martin's house in East L.A. had gone belly-up a few months before the war started. Times were still hard; the building had stood vacant ever since, the door padlocked, the going out of business! sign painted on the window slowly fading in the harsh California sun.

And then, quite suddenly, the place wasn't vacant any more. Off came going out of business! A new sign went up on the window: a fierce-looking bald eagle in left profile in front of crossed swords, and below it, in red, white, and blue, the legend u.s. army recruiting station.

Chester eyed that with thoughtful interest. He smiled a little when he thought about the men who'd be working there. They had a tough job, didn't they? Talking other people into carrying rifles and going off to shoot Confederates was a hell of a lot safer than carrying a rifle and going off to shoot Confederates yourself.

His wife couldn't have been more horrified if a bordello had opened up in that building. By the hard, set expression on Rita's face, she would rather have seen a bordello there. Chester knew why, too-she was afraid the recruiting station would take him away from her.

He knew what she was waiting for: for him to laugh and joke and tell her she was worrying over nothing. Then she would have relaxed. For the sake of family peace, he wished he could have. But the eagle's hard golden stare reproached him every time he saw it. He knew what he could do for the country; he'd been through the mill. He just hadn't decided whether the country truly needed him to do it.

"You haven't been in there, have you?" she anxiously asked him one Sunday afternoon, as if it were a house of ill repute.

All he wanted to do was drink a bottle of beer, eat a corned-beef sandwich, and listen to the football game on the wireless. President Smith had decreed that football was essential to U.S. morale, so some leagues had resumed play. Some of their stars had joined the armed forces, and some of the players they were using wouldn't have had a chance of making their squads before the shooting started. But the Dons were still the Dons, no matter who wore their black and gold. Today they were in Portland, squaring off against the Columbias.

"Well?" Rita said when he didn't answer right away. "Have you?"

He washed down a bite of the sandwich with a swig of Lucky Lager. "No, I haven't been in there," he said. "I am curious-"

"Why?" Rita broke in, her voice sharp with fear. "Don't you already know everything you ever wanted to about getting shot?"

"You bet I do." Chester wore a long-sleeved shirt, so the scars on his arm didn't show. That didn't mean he'd forgotten them. You couldn't forget something like that, not ever. After another pull at the Lucky, he went on, "No, what I'm curious about is who's doing things in there. Have they got real soldiers, or are they cripples or Great War retreads? You'd think they'd want every able-bodied man up at the front."

"What difference does it make?" Rita wouldn't see reason on this. She'd made that very plain. "You don't need an oak-leaf cluster on your Purple Heart. I don't need a Western Union boy knocking on my door. I've already done that once."

Most of the time, the kids who delivered telegrams were welcome visitors. Not when the USA and CSA grappled with each other. Then they were all too likely to bring bad news, a dreaded Deeply Regret message from the War Department. Their uniforms were a little darker than U.S. green-gray. People watched them go by on their bikes and prayed they wouldn't stop. One of those kids had rung Rita's doorbell in 1916.

Chester said, "I haven't been in there. I-" He stopped. The Portland crowd was yelling its head off. The Dons had just fumbled. Having Rita in the same room with him inhibited his choice of language.

"You what?" she asked suspiciously.

"I wish we could find a halfback who can hold on to the darn ball, that's what."

"That isn't what you were going to say, and we both know it." Rita spoke ex cathedra, as the Pope or an upset wife had the right to do.

He sighed. "Like I said before, the only thing I'm curious about is who they've got in there."

Rita rolled her eyes. "Like I said before, what the devil difference does it make? Whoever they are, what are they selling? The chance to get killed. They already gave you that once. Are you dumb enough to want it again?"

"No," he said, but even he heard the doubt in his own voice.

"Don't you want to live to see Carl grow up? Don't you want to live to see your grandchildren?" His wife had no more compunction about fighting dirty than did the officers on both sides of this war who fired poison gas at their foes.

"That's not fair," Chester protested, a complaint that did him no more good with Rita than it did an ordinary soldier on the battlefield.

She got the last word, as wives have a way of doing: "All you care about is how sharp you'll look in the uniform, even if they have to use it to lay you in a coffin. What the hell makes you think there'll be enough of you left to bury?" She stormed out of the living room in tears.

Chester swore mournfully. How the deuce was he supposed to enjoy a football game-or even a corned-beef sandwich and a bottle of beer-after that?

Rita eased up on him during the week, but turned up the heat on the weekends. To her, that no doubt seemed perfectly logical. During the week, he was busy working, so he wasn't likely to have the time to do anything she disapproved of. On the weekend, he could run loose. He could-but she didn't aim to let him.

He didn't always vote the straight Socialist ticket the way she did, but he understood the way the dialectic worked. A thesis created an antithesis that reacted against it. The more Rita told him to stay away from the recruiting station, the more he wanted to go inside. He almost wished it were a whorehouse. He could have had more fun if he did.

The clash of thesis and antithesis generated a synthesis. Chester never wondered what that might be. A more thoroughgoing Socialist might have.

He hoped Rita believed him when he said he was going out to get a haircut two Sundays after their big argument. It wasn't that he was lying; he did visit the barbershop. He got a shave, too-an unusual luxury for him, because he took care of that himself most mornings. But it was also camouflage of a sort. If he came back to the house smelling of bay rum, Rita couldn't doubt where he'd been.

No bell chimed when he walked into the recruiting station. He'd half expected a carillon to play "The Star-Spangled Banner." Inside, a first sergeant with row after row of fruit salad on the chest of his dress uniform was talking earnestly with a man in his mid-thirties. Chester had expected to see kids here. He needed only a moment to figure out why he didn't, though. Kids would get conscripted anyhow. The Army didn't need to recruit them. This place was geared to persuading people like him to put on the uniform again.

Another noncom in a fancy uniform nodded to him. "Hello, sir," the man said in friendly tones. "What can I do for you today?"

"I don't know that you can do anything for me," Chester answered. "I just came in for a look around."

"Well, you can do that," the recruiter said easily. "Want a cup of coffee while you're doing it?"

"Thanks. I wouldn't mind one a bit," Chester said, even though he was thinking, Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…

"We've got a hot plate back here. You take cream and sugar?" the noncom asked. He walked over to the pot on the hot plate with a peculiar rolling gait. Chester had seen that before; it meant the man had an above-the-knee amputation. He wouldn't be any good in combat. He had to be a smooth talker, though, or they wouldn't have let him keep wearing the uniform.

Once he'd doctored the coffee to Chester's taste, he brought it back. "Thanks," Chester said again.

The recruiter eyed him. "You saw the elephant the last time around, I'd say," he remarked.

"Oh, yeah." Chester sipped the coffee. It tasted about the way coffee that had sat on a hot plate since early morning usually tastes: like battery acid diluted with cream and sugar.

"What did you top out at, you don't mind my asking?"

Chester didn't answer. The guy in his thirties got up and left. The sergeant to whom he'd been talking pushed back his chair-and Chester saw it was a wheelchair. He had legs, but they evidently weren't any good to him. "Are you sure you guys are recruiting?" Chester blurted.

He wondered if the noncom who'd brought him coffee would deliberately misunderstand. The man didn't. He didn't even blink. "Yes, we are," he said. "If you went through it, you already know what can happen. We don't need to be able to run and jump to do this job. In the field, we would. Here, we can still help the country. So… You were in the last one, you said."

"Yeah, from start to finish. I ended up a sergeant. I was in charge of a company for a while, till they scraped up an officer for it."

"Wounded?"

"Once-in the arm. It healed up pretty good. I was lucky."

"You sure as hell were," the recruiter agreed soberly. "What have you done since?"

"Steel. Construction. Union organizing." Chester wondered if that would faze the Army man.

It didn't. The fellow just nodded. "If you can command a company, you can run civilians, too. As long as you're not a Freedom Party stalwart or a Mormon, I don't care about your politics. And if you're a loyal Mormon-there are some-and you take the oath, we'll find some kind of place for you. The other stuff? Socialist? Democrat? Republican? Nobody gives a damn. You can argue about it in the field. It helps the time go by."

"Interesting," Chester said, as noncommittally as he could.

The recruiter looked him in the eye. "What have you got to say for yourself? Did you just come here to window shop, or are you serious about helping the country?"

There it was, right out in the open. Chester licked his lips. "If I go back in, can I hold off induction for a month? I'm not a kid any more. I'm going to need to straighten out some things."

"It's a seller's market," the noncom said. "However you want us, we want you." He stuck out his hand. Chester shook it. Rita's gonna kill me, he thought.

Air-raid sirens screamed. Flora Blackford and her son hurried downstairs to the basement of their block of flats. Joshua said, "They haven't come over Philadelphia for a while." He sounded excited, not afraid.

"I'd just as soon they didn't," Flora answered. A very fat man-he was a lobbyist for the meat-packing business-was taking the stairs at a snail's pace, which was as fast as he could go. He filled the stairwell from side to side, so nobody could get around him. Flora felt like giving him a push and going over his back. Bombs were already bursting in the city.

"I'd just as soon they didn't, too," Joshua said. "It means we aren't putting enough pressure on them in Virginia-they think they can use their bombers up here instead of against the troops."

Flora almost asked if she should send him over to the General Staff. The only thing checking her was the certainty that he'd say yes. He'd take it for an invitation, not sarcasm. He studied war with a passionate intensity altogether alien to her-and, she was convinced, understood its permutations in ways she didn't. Maybe he would do some good on the General Staff. You never could tell.

At last, the fat lobbyist came to the bottom of the stairs. People surged around him to either side in the hall. He placidly rolled on at his own pace. If that pace had happened to kill him and a lot of people behind him… But, yet again, it hadn't, so why flabble?

People in the shelter mostly wore flannel pajamas. Some of them had thrown robes over the PJs. Men's-style nightwear was now de rigueur for women in cities likely to be bombed. Filmy peignoirs lost most of their allure when you were liable to be showing off for everyone in your apartment building.

Thump! Thump! Thump! The ground shook under Flora's feet. Several people in the basement groaned. The lights flickered. The sound on the old wireless set faded out for a moment, but then came back to life.

"There is an enemy bomber going down in flames!" the announcer said excitedly. "I don't know whether our antiaircraft guns or a night fighter got him, but he's a goner."

Three or four people clapped their hands. A few more applauded when the Confederate bomber hit the ground. The blast when it did was different from ordinary bomb impacts: larger, more diffuse. Most of the men and women down there just waited to see what would happen next. The CSA lost some bombers whenever it sent them over Philadelphia. The Confederates never lost enough to keep them from sending more.

On and on the pounding went. It always seemed to last an eternity, though the bombers rarely loitered more than an hour. The building, so far, had lived a charmed life. Its windows had lost glass, but not many buildings in Philadelphia kept unshattered glass these days. No bomb had landed on it. That counted most.

The wireless announcer went on giving a blow-by-blow account of the fight against the airplanes from the CSA. Not all of that blow-by-blow account would be the truth, though. The Confederates-both in the air and down in Virginia-would be monitoring the stations broadcasting from cities they bombed. Keeping them guessing about what they actually accomplished struck the U.S. powers that be as a good idea. Flora normally extolled the truth. Here, she could see that telling all of it might not be a good idea.

Twenty minutes after bombs stopped dropping, the warbling all-clear sounded. A man in front of her and a woman in back of her both said the same thing at the same time: "Well, we got through another one." The same thought had been in her mind, too.

Along with everybody else, she wearily trudged up the stairs. She wondered whether she would be able to sleep when she got back to her flat. Joshua seldom had trouble dropping off again, but he lived in the moment much more than she did. She couldn't help brooding on what might have been and what might be.

Brooding or not, she was drifting toward sleep when someone knocked on the door. She looked at the clock on the nightstand. The glowing hands told her it was a quarter to three. Like anyone else with an ounce of sense, she was convinced nothing good ever happened at a quarter to three. But the knocking went on and on.

She got out of bed and went to the door. "Who is it?" she called without opening up. Robbers prowled blacked-out Philadelphia.

"It's Sydney Nesmith, Congresswoman-assistant to the House Sergeant at Arms." And it was; she recognized his voice. He went on, "Please come with me to Congress right away. Someone would have telephoned, but the lines to this building are down, so I came in person."

Flora did open the door then, saying, "Good heavens! What's happened?"

"Everything will be explained once you get there, ma'am," Nesmith answered, which told her nothing-but if it weren't important, he wouldn't have been here.

"Let me change," she said, and started to turn away.

"People aren't bothering," he said.

"What is it, Mom?" Joshua asked from behind her.

"I don't know," she answered, thinking, Nothing good, all right. She nodded to Nesmith. "I'll come."

"Thank you, ma'am. An auto is waiting down below." Nesmith started to turn away, then checked himself. "Beg your pardon, but I've got a couple of more to get up in this building."

"Do what you have to do." Flora closed the door. If he was going to wake others, she had a minute, no matter what he said. She threw on a dress and a topcoat.

"Something terrible has happened, hasn't it?" Joshua said as she did start out into the hallway.

"I'm afraid it has. I'll let you know what it is as soon as I can. Try to go back to sleep in the meantime." That sounded foolish as soon as Flora said it, but what else was her son supposed to do? She hurried downstairs.

The waiting motorcar was an enormous Packard. It had room for the driver, for Sydney Nesmith, and for all the members of Congress from her building. Some of the others had put on clothes, as she had, but a couple were still in pajamas. "Step on it, Fred," Nesmith said as the auto pulled away from the curb.

Stepping on it in a blacked-out city just after an air raid struck Flora as a recipe for suicide. Fortunately, Fred paid no attention to the Sergeant at Arms' assistant. The only lights in Philadelphia were the ones from fires the bombing had started. Their red, flickering glow seemed brighter and carried farther than it would have without pitch darkness for a backdrop.

Flora and the other members of Congress tried to pump Nesmith about why he'd summoned them. He refused to be pumped, saying, "You'll find out everything you need to know when you get there, I promise." By the time the Packard pulled up in front of the big, slightly bomb-battered building that took the place of the Capitol here, he'd said that a great many times.

They all hurried inside. Flora blinked several times at the bright electric lights. They too seemed all the more brilliant because of the darkness from which she'd just emerged.

Sydney Nesmith shepherded his charges toward the House chamber. Flora would have gone there anyway; it was her natural habitat. She saw Senators as well as Representatives in the large hall. That was nothing too far out of the ordinary. When Congress met in joint session, it met here: the hall had room for everybody.

Vice President La Follette and the Speaker of the House, Joe Guffey of Pennsylvania, sat side by side on the rostrum. Again, that didn't surprise Flora; it was where the two presiding officers belonged. But Charlie La Follette, normally a cheerful man, looked as if a bomb had gone off in front of his face, while the Speaker seemed hardly less stunned. When Flora spotted Chief Justice Cicero Pittman's rotund form in the first row of seats in front of the rostrum, ice ran through her. All at once, she feared she knew why all the Senators and Representatives had been summoned.

"Alevai omayn, let me be wrong," she murmured. At the same time, an Irish Congressman from another New York City district crossed himself. That amounted to about the same thing.

Members of Congress kept crowding in. By the look of things, not everyone had figured out what might be going on. Some people couldn't see the nose in front of their face. Some, perhaps, didn't want to.

At 5:22-Flora would never forget the time-the Speaker nodded to the Sergeant at Arms. He in turn waved to his assistants, who closed the doors to the chamber. The Sergeant at Arms banged his gavel to call Congress to order, then yielded his place to the Speaker.

Guffey approached the microphone like a man approaching the gallows. "Ladies and gentlemen, I would give anything I own not to be where I am right now and not to have to make this announcement," he said heavily. He needed a moment to gather himself, then went on, "The President of the United States-Al Smith-is dead."

Gasps and cries of horror rang through the hall. Yes, some had been caught unawares. Flora gasped, too, but only in dismay to find her fears confirmed. Swallowing a sob, Guffey continued, "He took shelter from the raid as he should have, but three bombs hit the same place in Powel House-a million-to-one shot, the War Department assures me. The first two cleared obstructions from the path of the third, which… which destroyed the shelter under the Presidential residence. There were no survivors."

More cries rose. Men wept as unashamedly as the handful of women in Congress. Speaker Guffey paused to take off his reading glasses and dab at his streaming eyes. "But, while the loss to our nation is incalculable, we must go on-and we shall go on. Here to administer the oath of office to the new President is Chief Justice Pittman."

Flora saw what looked like the collar of bright red pajamas peep out from under the Chief Justice's judicial robes for a moment. She swallowed a tear-filled giggle. Charles La Follette-he wouldn't be Charlie any more, she supposed-towered over Pittman. He set his left hand on a Bible, raised his right hand, and took the oath: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Very solemnly, he shook hands with the Chief Justice, and then with the Speaker of the House. That done, he looked out to the Senators and Representatives staring in at him. "As Speaker Guffey said, all I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. When they told me what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me. Al Smith was the leader this country chose, and he did well to the very last instant of his life. Even when days looked darkest, he never gave up hope. While we are not where we would wish to be in this war, neither are we where the enemy would have us. The road to victory may be long, but we will walk it. With God's help, we will walk it to the end."

Applause thundered through the sobs. Flora clapped till her palms burned. The United States were bigger than any one man. Were the Confederate States? She had her doubts.