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IX

Chester Martin sat with Rita and Carl in the dark of a Los Angeles movie theater, waiting for the night's feature to come on. The war hadn't laid a glove on California. No Confederate bombers had flown this far from Texas or Sonora. No Confederate or Japanese ships had appeared off the West Coast. If you wanted to, you could just go on about your business and pretend things weren't going to hell in a handbasket back East.

People all around crunched popcorn and slurped sodas. The Martins were crunching and slurping, too. That was what you did when you came to one of these places. Somebody behind them bit down on a jawbreaker. It sounded as if he were chewing a bunch of rocks.

The newsreel came on after the cartoon. Carl enjoyed it. He liked watching things blow up, and wasn't fussy about whose things they were. But Chester and Rita got very quiet. Watching Ohio torn to pieces hurt them all the more because they'd lived most of their lives there. Rita reached out and squeezed Chester's hand when the newsreel showed bomb damage in Toledo.

They didn't cheer up much at seeing the wreckage of Confederate bombers, either. "We are fighting back," the announcer declared. "Every day, the vicious enemy has a harder time going forward. We will stop him, and we will beat him back."

Was he whistling in the dark? It sure seemed that way to Chester. So far, U.S. forces had done nothing but retreat. Could they do anything else? If they could, when? When would it be too late? What would happen if the Confederates cut the United States in half? The resolutely cheerful announcer not only didn't answer any of those questions, he didn't acknowledge that they existed.

Then the newsreel camera cut away to somewhere behind the lines, as the card at the head of the feature declared. Soldiers sat on the ground watching four men with long beards cavort on a makeshift stage with a pathetically dignified woman. "The Engels Brothers entertain the troops," the announcer said. "Their mad hijinks help our brave men forget the dangers of battle."

Sure enough, the soldiers were laughing. Chester remained dubious. He'd laughed, too, when he escaped from the trenches for a little while. But he'd never forgotten the dangers. How could he? He still woke up screaming every so often, though now it was once every two or three years, not once every two or three weeks.

After the Engels Brothers left the stage, bathing beauties paraded across it. The soldiers liked them even better, even if they could only look and not touch. The girls were wearing much less than they would have in a Great War entertainment. Chester approved of that. He was sure the young soldiers enjoyed it even more.

Al Smith appeared on the screen. Some people in the theater cheered the President. Others booed. By Smith's ravaged face, he was hearing those boos-and the roar of the guns-even in his sleep. He looked out at the audience he would never see in the flesh. "Our cause is just," he insisted, as if someone had denied it. "We will prevail. No matter how fierce and vicious our enemy may be, he will only destroy himself with his wickedness. Stand together, stand shoulder to shoulder, and nothing can hold you back."

That sounded good. Chester wondered if it was true. So far, the evidence looked to be against it. But then the newsreel cut from President Smith to the Stars and Stripes flying in front of a summer sky. "The Star-Spangled Banner" swelled on the soundtrack. People sang along in the theater. For a couple of minutes, Socialists, Democrats, and the handful of remaining Republicans did stand shoulder to shoulder.

The film started. It was a story of intrigue set in Kentucky between the wars. All the villains had Confederate drawls. The hero and heroine sounded as if they came from New York and Boston, respectively. They foiled the villains' plot to touch off a rebellion and fell in love, both at the same time.

"Kentucky will be ours forever," he said, gazing into her eyes.

"Kentucky will be free forever," she replied, gazing into his. They kissed. The music went up. The credits rolled. The film had to have been made in a tearing hurry-certainly since the plebiscite early in the year. Did it help? Or did it only make people feel worse by reminding them that Kentucky was lost?

"Is there another picture after this one?" Carl asked.

"The cartoons and the newsreel and the movie weren't enough for you?" Chester asked.

Carl shook his head. "Nope." But he betrayed himself by yawning.

"Well, it doesn't matter, because there isn't another picture," Rita said. "And you're up way past your bedtime."

"Am not," Carl said around another yawn.

Since there wasn't another picture, though, arguments for staying out later had no visible means of support. They walked back to the apartment where they'd lived since moving from Toledo. It was only a few blocks, but they had to go slowly and carefully through the blacked-out streets. Cars honked to warn other cars they were there as they came to intersections. That no doubt cut down on accidents, but it didn't do much for people who were trying to get to sleep.

To Chester's relief, Carl went to bed without much fuss. Chester knew he wouldn't sleep well himself, and the honks out in the street had nothing to do with anything. "Things are lousy back East," he said heavily.

"Looks that way," Rita agreed. "Doesn't sound like they're telling everything that's going on, either."

"Oh, good," Chester said, and his wife looked at him in surprise. He explained: "I didn't want to think I was the only one who was thinking something like that."

"Well, you're not," his wife said. "We've both been through this before. If we can't see past most of the pap, we're not very smart, are we?"

"I guess not," Chester said unhappily. He lit a cigarette. The tobacco was already going downhill. The Confederate States grew more and better than the United States. He hoped losing foreign exchange would hurt them. Blowing a moody cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, he went on, "Got to do something about it."

"Who's got to do something about what?" Rita's voice was sharp with fear. She'd been married once before. Her first husband hadn't come home from the Great War. Had he talked like this before joining the Army? Chester wouldn't have been surprised. Everybody'd been openly patriotic in 1914. Machine guns hadn't yet proved heroism more expensive than it was often worth.

Chester sucked in more smoke. It didn't calm him as much as he wished it would. He said, "Doesn't hardly feel right, being out here all this way away from the fighting."

"Why not? Isn't one Purple Heart enough for you?"

He remembered the wound, of course. How not, when he would take its mark to the grave with him? He remembered hitting a man in butternut in the face with an entrenching tool, and feeling bone give beneath the iron blade. He remembered cowering in trenches as shells came down all around him. He remembered his balls crawling up into his belly in terror as he went forward in the face of machine-gun fire. He remembered poison gas. He remembered lice and flies and the endless stench of death.

But, toward the end, he also remembered the feeling that everything he'd gone through was somehow worthwhile. That wasn't just his looking back from almost a quarter of a century's distance; he'd felt it in 1917. Only one thing explained it-victory. He and so many like him had suffered so much, but they'd suffered for a reason: so the USA could get out from under the CSA's thumb.

That was why the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston had disturbed him so much. They returned to the Confederates for nothing what the United States had spent so much blood to win. What was the point of everything he and so many millions like him had gone through if it was thrown away now?

Slowly, he said, "If they lick us in Ohio, they'll turn the clock back to the way it was before 1914."

"So what?" Rita said. "So what, Chester? What difference will that make to you? You'll still be right here where you've been for years. You'll be doing the same things you've done. Your hair is going gray now. You're not a kid any more. You've given the country everything it could want from you. Enough is enough."

Every word of that made good, solid sense. But how much sense did good, solid sense make when the United States were in trouble? "I don't feel right standing on the sidelines and watching things go down the drain," he said.

"And how much difference do you think you're going to make if you do put the uniform back on?" his wife demanded. "You're not General Custer, you know. The most they'd do is give you your sergeant's stripes back. How many thousands of sergeants are there? Why would you be better than any of the others?"

"I wouldn't," Chester admitted. "But the Army needs sergeants as much as it needs generals. It needs more of them, but it can't get along without them." He thought the Army could get along without lieutenants much more easily than it could without sergeants. Lieutenants, no doubt, would disagree with him-but what the hell did lieutenants know? If they knew anything, they wouldn't have been lieutenants.

Rita glared at him. "You're going to do this, aren't you? Sooner or later, you are. I can see it in your face. You're going to put the uniform back on, and you'll be all proud of yourself, and you won't care two cents' worth what happens to Carl and me after you… after you get shot." She burst into tears.

Chester couldn't even say he wouldn't get shot. He'd been a young man during the Great War, young enough to be confident nothing could kill him. Where had that confidence gone? He didn't own it any more. He knew he could die. He'd known it even in brawls with union-busting Pinkertons. If he went back to where they were throwing lead around with reckless abandon… Well, anything could happen. He understood that.

He started to tell Rita something reassuring, but gave it up with the words unspoken. He couldn't be reassuring, not knowing what he knew, understanding what he understood. All he could do was change the subject. He got up and turned on the wireless. A little music might help calm Rita down-and it would make him feel better, too.

He had to wait for the tubes to warm up. Once they did, it wasn't music that came out of the speaker, but an announcer's excited voice: "-tial law has been declared in Utah," the man said. "At present, it is not clear how much support the insurrection commands. There are reports of fighting from Ogden down to Provo. Governor Young has appealed for calm and restraint on all sides. Whether anyone will listen to him may be a different question. Further bulletins as they break."

"Oh, Jesus Christ!" Chester exclaimed, and turned off the wireless with a vicious click. The Mormons had caused the USA endless grief by rising in the last war. If they were trying it again, they might do even more harm this time.

"I wish you hadn't heard that," Rita said in a low voice.

"Why? Are you afraid I'll run right out to the nearest recruiting station?"

Chester had intended that for sarcasm, but his wife nodded. "Yes! That's exactly what I'm afraid of," she said. "Every time you go out the door, I'm afraid I'll never see you again. You've got that look in your eye. Ed had it, too, before he joined the Army." She didn't mention her first husband very often, and hardly ever by name. More than anything else, that told Chester how worried she was.

He said, "I'm not going anywhere right now." He'd hoped to make her feel better. The fright on her face told him that right now had only made things worse. He started to say everything would be fine and he'd stay where he was. He kept quiet instead, though, for he realized he might be lying.

Summer lay heavy on Baroyeca. The sun was a white-hot blaze in the blue dome of the sky. Vultures circled overhead, riding the invisible streams of hot air that shot up from the ground. Every so often, when a deer or a mule fell over dead, the big black birds would spiral down, down, down and feast. And if a man fell over dead under that savage sun, the vultures wouldn't complain about turning his carcass into bones, either.

Hipolito Rodriguez worked in his fields regardless of the weather. Who would do it for him if he didn't? No one, and he knew it. But he always wore a sombrero to shield his head from the worst of the sun. And he worked at a pace a man who forgot the weather might have called lazy. If he cocked his head skyward, he could see the vultures. He didn't want them picking his bones.

When the weather was less brutal, he worried about meeting snakes in the middle of the day. Not now. They might come out in the early morning or late afternoon, but they stayed in their holes in the ground the rest of the time. They knew they would die if they crawled very far along the baking ground. Even the scorpions and centipedes were less trouble than usual.

Rodriguez had one advantage the animals didn't. It was an edge he hadn't had for very long. He sometimes had to remind himself to use it. When he felt worst, he could go back to the house, open the refrigerator, and pour himself a big glass of cold, cold water. The luxury of that seemed more precious than rubies to him. He wouldn't drink the water right away. Instead, he would press the chilly, sweating glass against his cheek, savoring its icy feel. And when he did drink, it was as if the water exorcised the demons of heat and thirst at the very first swallow.

He made sure he filled the pitcher up again, too. He could go out to the fields again, come back in a couple of hours, and find more deliciously chilly water waiting for him. It wasn't heaven-if it were heaven, he wouldn't have had to go out to the fields in the first place. But the refrigerator made life on earth much more bearable.

Magdalena enjoyed the cold water no less than he did. Once they both paused for a drink at the same time. "Is it true," she asked him, "that in parts of los Estados Confederados they have machines that can make the air cold the same way as the refrigerator makes water cold?"

"I think it is," Rodriguez answered cautiously. "I think that's what they call air conditioning. Even in the rich parts of the country, they don't have it everywhere, or even very many places."

"I wish we had it here," his wife said.

He tried to imagine it: going from the back oven of a summer to winter just by opening and closing a door. It was supposed to be true, but he had trouble believing it. He said, "Electricity is one thing. This air conditioning is something else. It's very fancy and very expensive, or so they say."

"I can still wish," Magdalena said. "I wished for electricity for years before we got it. I wished and I wished, and here it is. Maybe if I do enough wishing, we will have this air conditioning, too, one of these years. Or if we don't, maybe our children will. With all the changes we've seen, you never can tell."

"You never can tell," Rodriguez agreed gravely. "As for me, what I wish for is an automobile."

"An automobile," his wife breathed. She might have been speaking of something as distant and unlikely as air conditioning. But then her eyes narrowed. "Do you know, Hipolito, we could almost buy one if we wanted to badly enough."

"Yes, that occurred to me, too," he answered. The motorcar they could get for what they could afford to spend wouldn't be anything fancy: a beat-up old Ford or some Confederate make of similar vintage. But even a beat-up old auto offered freedom of a sort nothing else could match. Rodriguez went on, "The only times I was ever out of the valley were to fight in the last war and to go to Hermosillo to help get President Featherston a second term. It's not enough."

In a small voice, Magdalena Rodriguez said, "I've never been outside this valley at all. I never really thought about what was going on anywhere else till we got the wireless set. But now… If I can hear about the world outside, why can't I see it?"

For years, even trains had stopped coming to Baroyeca. They were back again, now that the silver (and, perhaps not so incidentally, lead) mines in the hills above the little town had reopened. But traveling by train was different from hopping into an auto and just going. Trains stuck to schedules, and they stuck to the rails. In a motorcar, you could go where and when you wanted to go, do whatever you wanted to do…

You could-if they let you. Rodriguez said, "I think this would be something for after the war. We might buy a motorcar now, si. But whether we could buy any gasoline for it is a different question."

Rationing hadn't meant much to him. It still didn't, not really. He'd even stopped worrying about kerosene. With electricity in the house, the old lamps were all packed up and stored in the barn. But gasoline, these days, was for machines that killed people, not for those that made life easier and more pleasant.

"If we had an automobile to go with electricity… Ten years ago, only the patrones had such things, and not all of them," Magdalena said.

"That was before the Freedom Party took over," Rodriguez answered. "Now ordinary people can have the good things, too. But even if I had a motorcar, I wouldn't be a patron. I would never want to do that. To be a patron, you have to like telling others what to do. That has never been for me."

"No, of course not." Magdalena's voice had a certain edge to it. She might have been warning that if he thought he could tell her what to do, he had better think again.

Since he didn't have an automobile, he walked into Baroyeca for the next Freedom Party meeting. He would have grumbled if he'd had to walk because his motorcar was in the garage. Because he'd never done anything but walk, he didn't grumble at all. He took the journey for granted.

A drunken miner staggered out of La Culebra Verde as Rodriguez came up the street toward Freedom Party headquarters. The man gave him a vacant grin, then sat down hard in the middle of the dirt road. Rodriguez wondered how many drunks had come out of the cantina and done the exact same thing. He'd done it himself, but no more than once or twice. Miners drank harder than farmers did. They might have worked harder than farmers did, too. Rodriguez couldn't think of anyone else for whom that might be true. But to go down underground all day, never to see the sun or feel the breeze from one end of your shift to the other… That was no way for a man to live.

He walked past Diaz's general store. A storekeeper, now, had it easy. If Diaz wasn't sitting in the lap of luxury, who in Baroyeca was? Nobody, not that Rodriguez could see. And yet Jaime Diaz complained about the way things went almost as if he tilled the soil. He wasn't too proud to act like anybody else.

"Good evening, Senor Rodriguez," Robert Quinn said in Spanish when the farmer came into the headquarters. "Good to see you."

"Gracias, senor. The same to you," Rodriguez answered gravely. He nodded to Carlos Ruiz and some of his other friends as he sat down on a second-row folding chair. The first row of chairs, as usual, was almost empty. Not many men were bold enough to call attention to themselves by sitting up front.

Freedom Party headquarters filled up with men from Baroyeca and peasants from the surrounding countryside. Some of them had walked much farther to come to town than Rodriguez had. "Freedom!" they would say as they came in and sat down-or, more often, "?Libertad!"

Quinn waited till almost everyone he expected was there. Then, still in Spanish, he said, "Well, my friends, let's get on with it." When no one objected, he continued, "This meeting of the Freedom Party, Baroyeca chapter, is now in session."

He went through the minutes and old business in a hurry. Hipolito Rodriguez yawned a little anyhow. He hadn't joined the Freedom Party for the sake of its parliamentary procedure. He'd become a member because Jake Featherston promised to do things-and kept his promises.

As quickly as Quinn could, he turned to new business. "I know we'll all pray for Eduardo Molina," he said. "He can't be here tonight-he just got word his son, Ricardo, has been wounded in Ohio. I am very sorry, but I hear it may be a serious wound. I am going to pass the hat for the Molinas. Please be generous."

When the hat came to him, Rodriguez put in half a dollar. He crossed himself as he passed it along. He could have got bad news about Pedro as easily as Eduardo Molina had about Ricardo. What happened in war was largely a matter of luck. So many bullets flew. Every so often, one of them was bound to find soft, young flesh.

A man at the back of the room brought the hat up to Robert Quinn. It jingled as the Freedom Party organizer set it down beside him. "Gracias," he said. "Thank you all. I know this is something you would rather not have to do. I know it is something some of you have trouble affording. Times are not as hard as they were ten years ago, before we came to power, but they are still not easy. But all of you understand-but for the grace of God, we could have been taking up a collection for your family."

Rodriguez started. Then he nodded. It really wasn't that surprising to have Senor Quinn understand what was in his mind. Quinn knew how many men here had sons or brothers in the Army, and what could happen to those men.

"On to happier news," the Freedom Party man said. "Our guns are now pounding Sandusky, Ohio. Let me show you on the map where Sandusky is." He walked over to a campaign map pinned to the wall of Freedom Party headquarters. When he pointed to the city on the shore of Lake Erie, a low murmur ran through the men who crowded the room. Quinn nodded. "Si, senores, es verdad-we have cut all the way through Ohio and reached the water. Soon our men and machines will be on the lake. The United States cannot send anything through the middle of their country. It is cut in half. And do you know what this means?"

"It means victory!" Carlos Ruiz exclaimed.

Quinn nodded. "That is just what it means. If los Estados Unidos cannot send the raw materials from the West to the factories in the East, how are they going to make what they need to go on fighting?" He beamed. "The answer is simple-they cannot. And if they cannot make what they need, they cannot go on with the fight."

Could it be as simple as that? It certainly seemed to make good sense. Rodriguez hoped it did. A short, victorious war… The North American continent hadn't seen one like that for sixty years. Maybe this wouldn't be a fight to the finish, the way the Great War had been. He could hope not, anyhow.

"War news elsewhere is mostly good," Quinn said. "There is no more U.S. resistance in the Bahamas. Some raiding does go on, but it is by black guerrillas. The mallates may be a nuisance, but they will not keep los Estados Confederados from occupying these important islands."

As far as Rodriguez was concerned, mallates were always a nuisance-a deadly nuisance. He'd got his baptism of fire against black rebels in Georgia. That fight had been worse than any against U.S. troops. The blacks had known they couldn't surrender, and fought to the end.

Well, the Freedom Party was putting them in their place in the CSA. And if it was doing the same thing in the Bahamas, too… good.

"Sandusky." Jake Featherston spoke the ugly name as if it belonged to the woman he loved. When the thrust up into Ohio began, he hadn't known where the Confederates would reach Lake Erie-whether at Toledo or Sandusky or even Cleveland. From the beginning, that had depended as much on what the damnyankees did and how they fought back as on his own forces.

"Sandusky." He said it again, eyeing the map on the wall of his office as avidly as if it were the woman he loved slipping out of a negligee. Where Confederate troops reached Lake Erie didn't matter so much. That they reached it… That they reached it mattered immensely. He'd seen as much before the fighting started. The United States were only starting to realize it now.

"Sandusky." Featherston said it one more time. Getting to Sandusky-or anywhere else along the shores of Lake Erie-didn't mean victory. He had a hell of a lot of work to do yet. But if his barrels had been stopped in front of Columbus, that would have meant defeat. He'd done what he had to do in the opening weeks of his war: he'd made victory possible, perhaps even likely.

Lulu knocked on the door. Without waiting for his reply, she stuck her head in the office and said, "Professor FitzBelmont is here to see you, Mr. President."

"Send him in," Jake said resignedly, wondering why he'd given the man an appointment in the first place. "I promised him, what-ten minutes?"

"Fifteen, Mr. President." Lulu spoke in mild reproof, as if Featherston should have remembered. And so he should have, and so he had-but he'd done his best to get out of what he'd already agreed to. Lulu was better at holding him to the straight and narrow path than Al Smith dreamt of being. She ducked out, then returned with a formal announcement: "Mr. President, here is Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont of Washington University."

Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked like a professor. He wore rumpled tweeds and gold-framed eyeglasses. He had a long, horsey face and a shock of gray hair that resisted both oil and combing. When he said, "Very pleased to meet you, Mr. President," he didn't tack on a ringing, "Freedom!" the way anybody with an ounce of political sense would have done.

"Pleased to meet you, too." Jake stuck out his hand. FitzBelmont took it. To the President's surprise, the other man had a respectable grip. His hand didn't jellyfish under Featherston's squeeze. Obscurely pleased, Featherston waved him to the chair in front of his desk. "Why don't you take a seat? Now, then-you're a professor of physics, isn't that right?"

"Yes, sir. That is correct." FitzBelmont talked like a professor, too. His voice had the almost-damnyankee intonation so many educated men seemed proud of, and a fussy precision to go with it, too.

"Well, then…" Jake also sat, and leaned back in his chair. "Suppose you tell me what a professor of physics reckons I ought to know." He didn't quite come out and say that a professor of physics couldn't tell him anything he needed to know, but that was in his own voice and manner.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont didn't seem to notice. That didn't surprise Featherston, and did amuse him. The professor said, "I was wondering, Mr. President, if you were familiar with some of the recent work in atomic physics coming out of the German Empire."

Jake didn't laugh in his face, though for the life of him he couldn't have told why not. All he said was, "Sorry, Professor, but I can't say that I am." Or that I ever wanted to be, either. He looked at his watch. Damned if he would give this fellow a minute more than his allotted time.

"The Germans have produced some quite extraordinary energy releases through the bombardment of uranium nuclei with neutrons. Quite extraordinary," Professor FitzBelmont said.

"That's nice," Jake said blandly. "What does it mean? What does it mean to somebody who's not a professor of physics, I ought to say?"

He didn't know how he expected FitzBelmont to answer. The tweedy academic made an unimpressive fist. "It means you could take this much uranium-the right kind of uranium, I should say-and make a blast big enough to blow a city off the map."

"Wait a minute," Jake said sharply. "You could do that with one bomb?"

"One bomb," Professor FitzBelmont agreed. "If the theoretical calculations are anywhere close to accurate."

Featherston scratched his head. He'd heard things like that before. Theory promised the moon, and usually didn't even deliver moonshine. "What do you mean, the right kind of uranium? Up till now, I never heard of uranium at all, and I sure as hell never heard of two kinds of it."

"As you say, sir, there are two main kinds-isotopes, we call them," the professor answered. "One has a weight of 238. That kind is not explosive. The other isotope only weighs 235. That kind is, or seems to be. The trick is separating the uranium-235 from the uranium-238."

"All right." Featherston nodded. "I'm with you so far-I think. The 235 is the good stuff, and the 238 isn't. How much 235 is there? Is it a fifty-fifty split? One part in three? One part in four? What?"

Henderson V. FitzBelmont coughed. "In fact, Mr. President, it's about one part in a hundred and forty."

"Oh." Now Jake frowned. "That doesn't sound so real good. How do you go about separating it out, then?"

The professor also frowned, unhappily. "There is, as yet, no proven method. We cannot do it chemically; we know that. Chemically, the two isotopes are identical, as any isotopes are. We need to find some physical way to capitalize on their difference in weight. A centrifuge might do part of the job. Gaseous diffusion might, too, if we can find the right kind of gas. The only candidate that seems to be available at present is uranium hexafluoride. It is, ah, difficult to work with."

"How do you mean?" Featherston inquired.

"It is highly corrosive and highly toxic."

"Oh," Jake said again. "So you'd need to do a lot of experimenting before you even have a prayer of making this work?" Professor FitzBelmont nodded. Jake went on, "How much would it cost? How much manpower would it take? There's a war on, in case you hadn't noticed."

"I had, Mr. President. I had indeed," FitzBelmont said. "I confess, it would not be cheap. It would not be easy. It would not be quick. It would require a very considerable industrial effort. I do not minimize the difficulties. They are formidable. But if they can be overcome, you have a weapon that will win the war."

Jake Featherston had heard that song before. Crackpot inventors sang it every day. Professor FitzBelmont didn't seem like the worst kind of crackpot, the kind with an obviously unworkable scheme for which he wanted millions of dollars-all of them in his own personal bank account. That kind of crackpot always said things would be easy as pie. Sometimes he knew he was lying, sometimes he didn't.

Because FitzBelmont seemed basically honest, Jake let him down as easy as he could. "If you'd come to me with this here idea six years ago, Professor, I might have been able to do something for you."

"Six years ago, sir, no one in the world had the slightest idea this was possible," FitzBelmont said. "Word of the essential experiment was published in a German journal about eighteen months ago."

"Fine. Have it your way. But you don't see the point," Featherston said. "The point is, right now we are in the middle of a war. We're stretched thin. We're stretched thin as can be, matter of fact. I can't take away God knows how much manpower and God knows how much money and throw all that down a rathole that won't pay off for years and may not pay off at all. You see what I'm saying?"

Professor FitzBelmont nodded stiffly. "Yes, sir, I do understand that. But I remain convinced the benefits of success would outweigh all these costs."

Of course you do. You wouldn't be here bending my ear if you didn't, Jake thought. But that doesn't mean you're right. He stayed polite. One of the drawbacks of being President, he'd discovered, was that you couldn't always call a damn fool a damn fool to his face. Sometimes, no matter how big a damn fool he was, you knew you might need him again one of these days.

After he'd shown Professor FitzBelmont the door, Jake let out a sigh. For a moment, the man had had him going. If you could take out a whole city with just one bomb, that would really be something. It sure would-if you could. But odds were you couldn't, and never would be able to. Odds were the professor wanted the Confederate government to pay for a research project he couldn't afford any other way. Odds were nothing but a few papers with FitzBelmont's name on them would ever come out of the research project. Since becoming President, Jake had become wise in the ways of professors. He'd had to.

He lit a cigarette, sucked in smoke, and blew a wistful cloud at the ceiling. It was too goddamn bad, though.

Distant thunder muttered, off to the north. Jake's lips tightened on the cigarette. The day was fine and clear. Oh, it was hot and muggy, but it was always going to be hot and muggy in Richmond this time of year. It wasn't thunder. It was the artillery duel that went on between Yankee and Confederate forces. If the United States had wanted to drive for Richmond the way the Confederates had driven for Lake Erie, the Confederate defenders would have had a bastard of a time holding them back.

It hadn't happened, though, and defenses at the river lines grew stronger every day. A thrust the damnyankees could have easily made a month before would cost them dear now. In another few weeks, it would-Jake hoped-be impossible.

He walked over to his desk and stubbed out the cigarette. Somewhere in the pile of papers was one Clarence Potter had sent him. Where the devil had that disappeared to? He reached into the stack and, like Little Jack Horner pulling out a plum, came up with the document he needed. The desk always looked like hell. It was Lulu's despair. But he could find things when he needed to.

From what Potter said-and, Featherston remembered, General Patton agreed-the USA's most aggressive officer who was worth anything was a barrel commander named Morrell. Jake grinned. He thought he'd remembered the name, and he was right. If the fellow had been in charge in northern Virginia, he could have raised all kinds of Cain. But he was busy over in Ohio, playing defense instead of getting the chance to attack. That suited Featherston-to say nothing of the Confederate cause-down to the ground.

The United States made most of their barrels in Michigan. It made sense that they should. That was where their motorcar industry had grown up. But with a corridor from the Ohio River to Lake Erie in Confederate hands, how were they going to get those barrels to the East? And if they couldn't, what would happen when the Confederate States hit them again?

"Yeah," Jake said softly. "What will happen then?" His grin got wider. He had his own ideas about that. Al Smith probably wouldn't like them very much, but Jake didn't give a damn about what Al Smith liked or didn't like. He'd pried the plebiscite out of the President of the USA. He would have fought without it, but the odds wouldn't have been so good. Getting what the Yankees called Houston back was nice. Getting Kentucky back was essential. Kentucky was the key to everything.

And he had it, and the key was turning in the lock.

Like anyone else who got a halfway decent education in the Confederate States before the Great War, Tom Colleton had fought his way through several years of ancient Greek. He didn't remember a hell of a lot of it any more, but one passage had stuck in his head forever. In Xenophon's Anabasis, the Greek mercenaries who'd backed the wrong candidate in a Persian civil war had had to fight their way out of the Persian Empire. They'd come up over a rise, looked north, and started yelling, "Thalatta! Thalatta!"-"The sea! The sea!" Once they reached the sea, they knew they could get home again.

Looking north toward the gray-blue waters of Lake Erie, Tom felt like shouting, "Thalatta! Thalatta!" himself. As Xenophon's Greeks had more than 2,300 years earlier, he'd come in sight of his goal. He still intended to jump in the lake when he got the chance.

Now he had to get there, and to get there without throwing away too many of his men. Sandusky sprawled along the southern shore of Lake Erie. It was about five miles wide and two miles deep. Not far from the water was Roosevelt Park-it had been Washington Park till the United States decided they would rather not remember a man from Virginia. The factories and foundries lay south of town. The business district-brick buildings that had gone up between the War of Secession and the turn of the century-lay to the north. The whole damn town crawled with U.S. soldiers. Trains were still trying to get through, even though Confederate gunners had the tracks in their sights.

As Tom watched, a steam engine hauled a long train toward the town from the west. What was it carrying? Men? Barrels? Ammunition? All three? Artillery opened up on it right away. The engineer had nerve-either that or an officer was standing behind him with a gun to his head. He kept coming.

He kept coming, in fact, after two or three shells hit the passenger cars and flatcars he was hauling. Not till an antibarrel round of armor-piercing shot went right through his boiler did he stop, and that halt wasn't voluntary on his part.

Sure as hell, soldiers in green-gray started spilling out of the passenger cars. Artillery bursts and machine-gun fire took their toll among them, but the Yankees mostly got away. By how the survivors dove for whatever cover they could find, they'd been under fire before. Tom Colleton felt a certain abstract sympathy for them. It wasn't as if he hadn't been under fire himself.

Then the damnyankees did something he thought was downright brilliant. He would have admired it even more if it hadn't almost cost him his neck. Despite bullets striking home close by, the U.S. soldiers managed to get a handful of barrels off the train and send them rattling and clanking against the advancing Confederates.

All by themselves, those barrels almost turned advance into retreat for the CSA. One driver plainly knew what he was doing; either he was a real barrel man or he'd driven a bulldozer or a big harvester in civilian life. The others were far more erratic, learning as they went along. The Yankees at the machine guns and cannon had more enthusiasm than precision. As long as they kept shooting, they made it almost impossible for Confederate infantry to get anywhere near them. And they shot up the crews of some of the guns that had been punishing the U.S. soldiers from the train.

An antibarrel round set one of the snorting horrors on fire. A brave Confederate flung a grenade into an open hatch on another-the U.S. soldiers manning the barrel hadn't known enough to slam it shut. That machine blew up; Tom didn't think anybody got out of it. A third barrel bogged down in an enormous bomb crater. The amateur driver couldn't figure out how to escape. That limited the damage that machine could do.

But the last one, the one with the driver who wasn't an amateur, kept on coming. The antibarrel cannon that had put paid to the first U.S. machine scored a hit, but a hit at a bad angle-the round glanced off instead of penetrating. Then machine-gun fire from the mechanical monster drove off the cannon's crew. And then, in an act of bravado that made Tom Colleton clap his hands in startled admiration, the barrel drove right over the gun. Nobody would use that weapon again soon.

Without infantry support, though, a lone barrel was vulnerable. Confederate soldiers sneaked around behind it and flung grenades at the engine decking till-after what seemed like forever-the barrel finally caught fire. They showed their respect for the men who'd formed the makeshift crew by taking them prisoner instead of shooting them down when they bailed out of the burning barrel.

Tom Colleton looked at his wristwatch. To his amazement, that hour's worth of action had been crammed into fifteen minutes of real life. He turned to a man standing close by him. "Well," he said brightly, "that was fun."

"Uh, yes, sir," the young lieutenant answered.

"Now we have to make up for lost time." Tom pointed toward downtown Sandusky. "Any bright ideas?"

The lieutenant considered, then asked what had become the inevitable question in the Ohio campaign: "Where are our barrels?"

"I think I'd better find out," Tom said. He didn't want to send infantry forward without armor-he was sure of that. If U.S. soldiers felt like fighting house-to-house, his regiment would melt like snow in springtime. He looked for outflanking routes, and didn't see any the damnyankees hadn't covered. With a sigh, he shouted for the man with a wireless set on his back.

Ten minutes of shouting into the mouthpiece at a colonel of barrels named Lee Castle showed him the armor wasn't that eager to get involved in house-to-house fighting, either. "That's not what we do," Castle said. "Place like that, they could tear us a new asshole, and for what? Sorry, pal, but it's not worth the price."

"What are you good for, then?" Tom knew that wasn't fair, but his frustration had to come out somewhere.

"I'm doing this the way I'm doing it on orders from General Patton," Colonel Castle said, and he might have been quoting Holy Writ. "You don't like it, take it up with him-either that, or bend the flyboys' ears."

Tom doubted Patton would bend. He could see why the commander of armor would want to keep his machines from being devoured while clearing a few blocks of houses and factories. He didn't like it, but he could see it. Calling in the bombers to soften up Sandusky was a happier thought. It wasn't as if the town hadn't been hit before. But now it would get hit with a purpose.

A couple of hours later, bombs rained down on Sandusky from a flight of Razorback bombers that droned along a couple of miles up in the sky. Their bombsights were supposed to be so fancy, they were military secrets. That didn't particularly impress Tom, not when some of the bombs came down on his men instead of inside enemy lines. He lost two dead and five wounded, and shook his fist at the sky as the bombers flew south toward the field from which they'd taken off.

But then the Mules started hammering Sandusky. The dive bombers screamed down to what seemed just above rooftop height before releasing their bombs and pulling up again. Their machine guns blazed; their sirens made them sound even more demoralizing than they would have otherwise. What they hit stayed hit. No wonder the soldiers on the ground called them Asskickers.

No matter how hard they hit, though, they couldn't work miracles. When Confederate troops poked forward after the Mules flew away, machine guns and mortars and rifles greeted them. Bombers could change a town from houses to ruins, but that didn't mean stubborn soldiers wouldn't keep fighting in those ruins. And ruins, as Tom had discovered, sometimes offered better cover than houses did.

Try as they would, his men couldn't clear the U.S. soldiers from one factory. By the sign painted on the side of its dingy brick walls, it had manufactured crayons. Now it turned out trouble, and in carload lots, too. It was too big and too well sited to bypass; it had to fall before the rest of Sandusky could.

Tom almost got shot reconnoitering the place. A bullet tugged at his shirtsleeve without hitting his arm. He drew back, figuring he'd tempted fate far enough for the moment. Then he got on the wireless and summoned the Mules again. They wouldn't get rid of all the enemy soldiers in the place, but they were the best doorknockers the Confederate Army had.

Back came the dive bombers. They blew the factory to hell and gone. The walls fell in. A great cloud of dust and smoke thickened the pall that had already turned a blue sky brownish gray. This time, though, the Mules didn't get away scot-free. U.S. fighters knocked two of them out of the sky. The Asskickers seemed impressively fast diving on ground targets, but they couldn't measure up against fighters. And the airplanes with eagles on their sides shot up Confederate soldiers on the ground, too, before streaking off towards Indiana.

Gunfire still blazed from the crayon factory when the Confederates attacked again. Colleton swore. The Yankees weren't making things easy or simple. Tom decided to try a trick that had worked for Nathan Bedford Forrest in the War of Secession. He showed a flag of truce till firing on both sides died away, then sent in a man calling on the Yankees to surrender. "Tell 'em we can't answer for what happens if they keep fighting," he told the young officer.

The man came back through the eerie silence a few minutes later. "Sir, a captain in there says,, 'And the horse you rode in on,' " he reported.

"Does he?" Tom said. The officer nodded. Tom sighed. Forrest must have been facing a different breed of Yankee. With another sigh, Tom pointed toward the factory. "All right, then. We'll just have to do it the hard way." He shouted for a wireless man, then shouted into the set.

Artillery fire rained down on the crayon factory. A lot of shells gurgled through the air as they flew: gas rounds. By the time the Confederate gunners were done pounding the place, nothing without a mask could have survived for more than a breath. Even though the wind was with them, Tom's men had to don gas gear, too.

He gave the order to attack again. Submachine guns and automatic rifles blazing, his men obeyed. By then, the crayon factory was nothing but a poison-filled pile of rubble. Not all the U.S. soldiers inside were dead, though. Machine guns and rifles in the ruins greeted the Confederates. This time, though, the men in butternut gained a toehold inside the factory.

It was still an ugly business. Here and there, the fighting came down to bayonets and entrenching tools, as it had in trench raids during the Great War. The damnyankees had to be cleared from what was left of the building one stubborn knot at a time. The Confederates took very few prisoners. That wasn't deliberate brutality. Their foes were in no mood to give up while they could still hit back.

At last, not long before sunset, the fight for the factory ebbed. A handful of damnyankees fell back to the north. Tom's men let them go. They couldn't do much else. They'd been chewed to red rags themselves. He looked at the prize they'd won. By itself, the crayon factory wasn't worth having. How many more stands like that did U.S. soldiers have in them?

Tom recalled his classical education. It wasn't Xenophon this time; it was Plutarch. King Pyrrhus of Epirus had won his first battle against the Romans. Then he looked at his battered army and exclaimed, "One more such victory and we're ruined!" If he'd seen the fight for the crayon factory, he would have understood.

Jonathan Moss enjoyed hunting Mules. U.S. foot soldiers hated and feared the Confederate dive bombers-he knew that. Asskickers could pound ground positions to a fare-thee-well… if they got the chance. When U.S. fighters caught them in the air, they often didn't. Their pilots and rear gunners were more than brave enough. But the machines weren't fast enough to run away or maneuverable enough to fight back. They got hacked out of the sky in large numbers.

The Confederates didn't take long to figure out they had a problem. In the fight for Sandusky, they quickly took to sending in swarms of Hound Dogs along with the Mules. The fighter escorts tried to keep U.S. fighters away from the dive bombers till they'd done their dirty work and headed back for where they came from.

Unlike the Asskickers, Hound Dogs were a match for the Wrights U.S. pilots flew. Moss had discovered that the hard way not long before. He found out again in a heated encounter above the embattled lakeside city. The Confederate pilot couldn't bring him down, but he couldn't get rid of the enemy, either. The flak bursting all around could have knocked down either one of them. He didn't think the gunners on the ground could tell them apart-or much cared who was who.

After ten or fifteen nerve-wracking minutes, he and the Confederate pilot broke off by what felt like mutual consent. Moss hoped he never saw that particular Confederate again. The fellow was altogether too likely to win their next encounter. He hoped the Confederate felt the same way about him.

His fuel gauge showed he was getting low. He wasn't sorry to have an excuse to leave. His flight suit was drenched in sweat despite the chill of altitude. He knew nothing but relief when the enemy pilot seemed willing to break off the duel, too. Maybe they'd managed to put the fear of God in each other.

The latest airstrip from which he was flying lay near Defiance, Ohio, in the northwestern corner of the state. Once upon a time, it had been all but impenetrable forest. These days, it was corn country, and the airstrip had been carved out of a luckless farmer's field. When Mad Anthony Wayne first ran up a fort at the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers, he'd said, "I defy the English, the Indians, and all the devils in hell to take it." The English and Indians were no longer worries in Ohio. From what Moss had seen, the devils in hell were busy in Sandusky.

He bumped to a landing. The strip had been cleared in a tearing hurry, and was a long way from smooth. As soon as he got out of his fighter, groundcrew men pushed it off towards a camouflaged revetment. If a bomb hit it, fire wouldn't spread to any other aircraft.

Camouflage netting also concealed the tents where pilots slept and ate and drank, not necessarily in that order. The heavy leather clothes that had kept him warm three miles up in the sky were stifling in August on the ground. He unfastened toggles and unzipped zippers as fast as he could. (He remembered from the Great War that he would be glad to have such gear when winter rolled around, assuming he was still alive by then.)

Twilight seemed to close in around him when he ducked under the netting. He trudged wearily to the headquarters tent. It was even gloomier inside there, which perfectly suited his mood. Another major, a knobby-cheeked Irishman named Joe Kennedy, Jr.-he insisted on the Junior-was doing paperwork by the light of a kerosene lamp. He was a boy wonder, half Moss' age, the son of a Boston politico. That went a long way towards accounting for his rank, but he could fly. He'd already shot down three Confederate airplanes-and, as the bandages on his left arm showed, been shot down himself. Till the burns healed, he was grounded.

He looked up and nodded to Moss. "How'd it go?" he asked, a New England accent broadening his vowels.

"Got myself a Mule," Moss answered. "Our own antiaircraft was doing its goddamnedest to shoot me down. So was a Hound Dog. We were a match-neither one of us could get the drop on the other. Finally we both gave up and went home. How about you, Joe? How's the arm?"

"Hurts a little," Kennedy admitted. He dry-swallowed a couple of small white pills. They were codeine, not aspirin; he hadn't graduated to aspirin yet. Moss suspected his arm hurt more than a little, but he didn't bitch about it. No matter how he'd got his rank, he seemed to be doing his best to deserve it. After the pills went down, he asked, "How's Sandusky look?"

"Kicked flat and then stomped on," Moss said. "It's not going to hold, and life gets a hell of a lot more complicated when it falls."

"Yeah." Joe Kennedy, Jr., nodded. "You should hear my old man go on about Al Smith. Two Irishmen, two Catholics-but it doesn't matter a hill of beans, not as far as Dad's concerned. He's a Democrat and Smith's a Socialist, and that's what really counts."

Moss only grunted. "Far as I can see, how we got into this mess stopped mattering as soon as the shooting started. Now we've got to get out of it the best way we can."

"Makes sense to me," Kennedy said mildly; even though his father was at least a medium-sized wheel back in Boston, he didn't try to ram his own politics down anybody else's throat.

Come to that, Moss wasn't precisely sure what the younger Kennedy's politics were. He didn't ask now, either. Instead, he said, "What's new out of Utah?"

Kennedy's face twisted with a pain that had nothing to do with his injury. "It's as bad as it was in the last war," he said, swallowing that final consonant. "The Mormons are up in arms, all right. Governor Young's run for Colorado." More r's vanished, while one appeared at the end of the state's name.

"What are we going to do about those bastards?" Moss aimed the question at least as much at himself, or perhaps God, as at Joe Kennedy, Jr.

But Kennedy had an answer. His face went hard and ruthless as he said, "Bomb them, shoot them, blow them up, and hang the ones that are left. Smith was nice to them, same as he was nice to Featherston. He thought that was all it took. Just be nice, and everybody'd love you and do what you wanted. It's really worked out great, hasn't it?"

"I think it's a little more complicated than that, at least with the Mormons," Moss said. "Utah's been a mess longer than I've been alive. It didn't start with the Great War."

"They got one bite then." Kennedy waved complications away with his good arm; he didn't want to hear about them. "That's what you give a mean dog-one bite. If it bites you again, you get rid of it."

"Shall we do the same for the Confederates?" Moss' voice was dryly ironic. He had no more use for simplicity than Kennedy did for complexity.

The younger man refused to acknowledge the sarcasm. "We'd better, don't you think? They'd get rid of us if they had the chance. The way things are going, they think they do. I happen to think they're full of shit. I don't suppose you'd be wearing the uniform if you didn't feel the same way. But if we can beat them, they'd better not get another chance to do this to us. If they do, we deserve whatever happens to us afterwards, wouldn't you say?"

"If you think occupying Canada's been expensive, occupying the CSA'd be ten times worse," Moss said.

"Maybe." Kennedy shrugged, then bit his lip; the pain pills must not have kicked in. "Maybe you're right. But if occupying the Confederate States will be expensive, how expensive will not occupying them be?"

He had no give in him. He wanted the United States to have no give in them, either. Moss said, ", 'They make a desert and call it peace,' eh?"

Kennedy recognized the quotation. Moss had figured his education included Latin. Kennedy said, "Tacitus was a stiff-necked prig who didn't like anything the Roman government did. The Romans might have made a desert out of Britain, but they hung on to it for the next four hundred years after that."

"Have it your way." Moss was too weary to argue with him. "What I could use right now is a drink"-or three, he added to himself-"and then some sack time."

"Go ahead." Kennedy jerked his thumb toward the tent that held what passed for the officers' club. "I've got to finish this crap first." He attacked the paperwork.

In the Great War, pilots had drunk as if there were no tomorrow. For a lot of them, there hadn't been. This time around, men seemed a little more sober. Maybe they were thinking more about what they were doing. Moss' chuckle came sour. If people really thought about what they were doing, would they have started wars in the first place?

Instead of bar stools, the officers' club had metal folding chairs that looked as if they'd been liberated from an Odd Fellows' hall in Defiance. Moss wasn't inclined to be unduly critical. He sat down in one of them and called for a whiskey sour.

"Coming right up, sir," answered the soldier behind the bar, which was as much a makeshift as the seating arrangements. He brought the drink, then took fresh beers to a couple of fliers who already had a lot of dead soldiers in front of them.

Moss poured down half his drink. He hardly knew anybody else who flew out of this airstrip. He'd got acquainted with Joe Kennedy, Jr., in a hurry, because Kennedy liked to hear himself talk. Most of the others remained ciphers, strangers. Squadron organization hadn't held up well under the relentless pressure of the Confederate onslaught. Moss hoped victory had disrupted the enemy as much as defeat had disorganized the USA, but he wouldn't have bet on it.

He finished the whiskey sour and held up the glass to show he wanted another one. Two stiff drinks started to counter the adrenaline still coursing through him after his inconclusive duel with the Confederate fighter pilot. He got up and headed for his cot. Sleep seemed the most wonderful thing in the world.

He was deep underwater when C.S. bombers paid a call on Defiance. The roar of the antiaircraft guns around the field didn't wake him. When bombs started falling, though, he sat up and blearily looked around. He thought about going back to sleep again, but didn't. He got up and ran for a trench carrying his shoes; he was still wearing the rest of his clothes.

The airplanes overhead were Razorbacks, not Mules. They dropped their bombs from three miles up in the sky. That meant they mostly couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Bombs fell on and around the airstrip almost at random. "We ought to scramble some of our fighters and shoot those bastards down," Moss called to Joe Kennedy, Jr., who sprawled in the trench about ten feet away.

"Can't," Kennedy answered.

"Why the hell not?"

"On account of they put a couple of 250-pounders right in the middle of the strip," Kennedy said. "We aren't going anywhere till the 'dozers fill in the holes."

"Oh, for the love of Mike!" Moss said, too disgusted even to swear.

Major Kennedy only shrugged. "Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good. Maybe some of the guys from other fields'll get after their asses."

"Hope somebody's home," Moss said. Most U.S. fighters spent as much time as they could over the corridor the Confederates had carved up through Ohio and Indiana. They'd done all they could to keep the CSA from reaching Lake Erie. They'd done all they could-and it hadn't been enough.

What were they going to do now? Huddled in the trench, Moss had no idea.

Flora Blackford's secretary looked into the office. "Mr. Caesar is here to see you, ma'am," she said, and let out a distinct sniff.

"Send him in, Bertha," Flora answered.

Bertha sniffed again. Flora understood why. It saddened her, but she couldn't do much about it. In came the man who'd waited in the outer office. He was tall and scrawny, and wore a cheap suit that didn't fit him very well. He was also black as the ace of spades, which accounted for Bertha's unhappiness.

"Please to meet you, Mr. Caesar," Flora said. She waved the Negro to a chair. "Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I gather you had quite a time getting to Philadelphia."

"Caesar's not my last name, ma'am, so I don't hardly go by Mister," he said. "It's not my first name, neither. It's just… my name. That's how things is for black folks down in the CSA." He folded himself into the chair. "Gettin' here…? Yes, ma'am. Quite a time is right. Confederate soldiers almost shot me, and then Yankee soldiers almost shot me. But I got captured instead, like I wanted to, and they sent me up here. When they did, I knew you was the one I wanted to see."

"Why?" Flora asked.

"On account of I heard tell of you down in Virginia. You're the one they call, 'the conscience of the Congress,' ain't that right?"

A flush warmed Flora's cheeks. "I don't know that I deserve the name-" she began.

Caesar waved that aside. "You got it. It's yours." He was plainly intelligent, even if his accent tried to obscure that. "Figured if anybody would take me serious, you're the one."

"Take you seriously about what?" Flora asked.

"Ma'am, they are massacrin' us," Caesar answered solemnly. "They got camps in the pinewoods and in the swamps, and black folks goes into 'em by the trainload, and nobody never comes out."

"People have been telling stories like that about the Freedom Party since before it came to power," Flora said. "What proof have you got? Without proof, those stories are worse than useless, because the Confederates can just call us a pack of liars."

"I know that, ma'am. That's how come I had to git myself up here-so I could give you the proof." Caesar set a manila envelope on her desk. "Here."

She opened the envelope. It held fifteen or twenty photographs of varying size and quality. Some showed blacks in rags and in manacles lined up before pits. Others showed piles of corpses in the pits. One or two showed smiling uniformed white men holding guns as they stood on top of the piles of dead bodies. She knew she would remember those small, grainy, cheerful smiles the rest of her life.

She both did and didn't want to look all the way through the photos. They were the most dreadful things she'd ever seen, but they also exerted a horrid, almost magnetic, fascination. Before she saw them, she hadn't dreamt humanity was still capable of such things. This was a sort of education she would rather not have had.

At last, after she didn't know how long, she looked up into Caesar's dark, somber features. "Where did you get these?" she asked, and she could hear how shaken her voice was. "Who took them?"

"I got 'em on account of some folks-colored folks-knew I wanted to prove what people was sayin'," Caesar answered. "We had to do it on the sly. If we didn't, if the Freedom Party found out what we was up to, I reckon somebody else'd take a photo with me in one o' them piles."

"Who did take these?" Flora asked again.

"Some of 'em was took by niggers who snuck out after the shootin' was done," Caesar said. "Some of 'em, though, the guards took their ownselves. Reckon you can cipher out which. Some of the guards down at them places ain't always happy about what they're doin'. Some of 'em, though, they reckon it's the best sport in the world. They bring their cameras along so they can show their wives an' kiddies what big men they are."

He wasn't joking. No one who'd had a look at those photographs could possibly be in any mood to joke. Flora made herself examine them once more. Those white faces kept smiling out of the prints at her. Yes, those men had had a good time doing what they did. How much blood was on their boots? How much was on their hands?

"How did your friends get hold of pictures like this?" she asked.

"Stole 'em," he answered matter-of-factly. "One o' them ofays goes out with a box Brownie every time there's a population reduction, folks notice. Plenty o' niggers cook and clean for the guards. They wouldn't do nigger work their ownselves, after all. They got to be ready to take care o'-that." He pointed to the photos on the desk.

Ofays. Population reduction. Neither was hard to figure out, but neither was part of the English language as it was spoken in the United States. The one, Flora guessed, was part of Confederate Negro slang. The other… The other was more frightening. Even though she heard it in Caesar's mouth, it had to have sprung from some bureaucrat's brain. If you call a thing by a name that doesn't seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic-except it wasn't sympathetic to those who fell victim to it.

Flora shook herself, as if coming out of cold, cold water. "May I keep these?" she asked. "I'm not the only one who'll need to see them, you know."

"Yes, ma'am. I understand that," Caesar said. "You can have 'em, all right. They ain't the only ones there is."

"Thank you," Flora said, though she wished with all her heart that such photographs did not, could not, exist. "Thank you for your courage. I'll do what I can with them."

"That's what I brung 'em for." Caesar got to his feet. "Much obliged. Good luck to you." He dipped his head in an awkward half bow and hurried out of her office with no more farewell than that.

If Flora put the photos back in the manila envelope, her eyes wouldn't keep returning to them. She told her secretary, "Cancel the rest of my appointments for this morning. I have to get over to Powel House right away."

Bertha nodded, but she also let out another sniff. "I don't know why you're getting yourself in an uproar over whatever that… that person told you."

"That's my worry," Flora said crisply. She went outside to flag a cab. Fifteen minutes later, she was at the President's Philadelphia residence. Antiaircraft guns poked their long snouts skyward on the crowded front lawn. They were new. She walked between them on the way to the door.

She was a Congresswoman. She was a former First Lady. She'd known Al Smith for more than twenty-five years, since before she was either. Put that all together, and it got her fifteen minutes with the President after half an hour's wait. When a flunky escorted her into his office, she had to work hard to keep her face from showing shock. Smith hadn't looked well the last time she came here. He looked worse now, much worse. He looked like hell.

He'll never live through this term, Flora thought. She bit her tongue, even though she hadn't said anything at all. "Are you… getting enough sleep, Mr. President?" she asked carefully.

"I get a little every night, whether I need it or not." His grin came from the other side of the grave, but his voice, though weaker than before, was still the cheerful New York bray it had always been, the voice that had made people call him the Happy Warrior. Maybe he didn't want anyone else to know his job was killing him. Maybe he didn't know himself. "What have you got for me, Flora? Malcolm said you said it was important."

"It is, sir. A colored man escaped from Virginia gave me these…" She set the manila envelope on the desk between them. "I hope you have a strong stomach. This is proof the Confederates aren't just mistreating their Negroes, the way they always have. They're slaughtering them."

"Let's see." He set reading glasses on his nose, which only made him look like a learned skeleton. He went through the photos one by one, nodding every now and then. When he was through, he eyed Flora over the tops of the glasses. "All right. Here they are. What do you want me to do about it?"

"Shout it from the housetops!" she exclaimed. "When the world knows they're doing this, they'll have to stop."

"Will they?" Smith said. "Remember when the Ottomans started killing Armenians?" He waited. When Flora didn't answer, he prodded her: "Remember?"

"I remember," she said, a sudden sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach.

"We protested to the Sultan," the President said. "You'd know about that-Hosea was Vice President then, wasn't he? We protested. Even the Kaiser said something, I think. And the USA and Germany had fought on the same side as Turkey during the Great War. How much attention did anybody in Constantinople pay?"

Again, he stopped. Again, she had to answer. Miserably, she did: "Not much."

"Not any, you mean," Al Smith said. "They went on killing Armenians till there weren't a whole lot of Armenians left to kill. We're not the Confederates' allies. We're enemies. They'll say we're making it up. Britain and France will believe them, or pretend to. Japan won't care. And people here won't much care, either. Come on, Flora-who gives a damn about shvartzers?" Of course a New York Irish politician knew the Yiddish word for Negroes.

"They're slaughtering them, Mr. President," Flora said stubbornly. "People can't ignore that."

"Who says they can't?" Smith retorted. "Most people in the USA don't care what happens to Negroes in the CSA. They're just glad they don't have to worry about very many Negroes here at home. You can like that or not like it, but you can't tell me it isn't true." He waited once more. This time, Flora had nothing to say. But even saying nothing admitted Smith was right. Nodding as if she had admitted it, the President continued, "And besides, Sandusky's fallen."

"Oh… dear," Flora said, in lieu of something stronger. It wasn't that she hadn't expected the news. But it was like a blow in the belly even so.

"Yeah," Smith said, trying to seem as upbeat as he could. He put Caesar's photographs back in the envelope. "So if we start going on about this stuff right now, what will people think? They'll think we're trying to make 'em forget about what we couldn't do on the battlefield. And will they be wrong?"

"But this-this is the worst wickedness the world has ever seen!" The word was old-fashioned, but Flora couldn't find another one that fit.

"We're already in a war full of bombed cities and poison gas," Smith said. "When we're doing that to each other, who's going to get all hot and bothered about what the Confederates are doing to their own people?"

"Mr. President, this isn't war. This is murder. There's a difference," Flora insisted.

"Maybe there is. I suppose there is. If you can make people see it, more power to you," Al Smith said. "I'm very sorry-I'm more sorry than I know how to tell you-but I don't think you can."

Flora wanted to hit him, not least because she feared he was right. Instead, keeping her voice under tight control, she said, "Would you say the same thing if they were Jews and not Negroes?"

"I don't know. Maybe not. People in the USA are more likely to get hot and bothered about Jews than they are about Negroes, don't you think?" Smith sounded horribly reasonable. "If you can make it go, I'll get behind you. But I won't take the lead here. I can't."

"I'm going to try," Flora said.