The Victorious opposition

XV

Anne Colleton had heard that people danced in the streets in Richmond when Woodrow Wilson declared war on the United States. Now the newsboys here shouted, "Plebiscite!" — and people danced in the street. Maybe that was because they thought there wouldn't be a war now. But maybe-and, odds were, more likely-it was because they thought the Confederate States would finally get back what they'd lost in the war.

She thought as much herself. She felt proud of herself for backing the right horse. Before the Freedom Party came to power, who would have believed the United States would ever even think of turning loose the lands they'd stolen from the CSA? But the stolen states had grown too hot to hold on to; the United States kept burning their fingers. And if that wasn't Jake Featherston's doing, whose was it? The right horse, sure enough, Anne thought smugly.

Celebrations in Capitol Square, across the street from Ford's Hotel, were noisy enough to keep her awake at night. She hadn't thought of that when she checked in. There were, of course, plenty of worse problems to have, even if she needed her sleep more regularly than she had when she was younger.

She was in Richmond to pay a call on the French embassy. Some of the men with whom she'd conferred in Paris years before had risen in prominence since. She could talk with one of them informally but still leave him certain he understood where the Confederate government stood. She hadn't had much chance to speak French lately, but she expected her accent wouldn't be too barbarous.

Across from the French embassy east of Capitol Square stood the much bigger building housing the U.S. embassy. A man-high fence of pointed iron palings protected the neoclassical white marble pile above which flew the Stars and Stripes. Anne understood why the U.S. embassy needed that kind of protection. How many times had her countrymen wanted to give it what they thought it deserved?

But not today. Today people cheered the U.S. military guards in their green-gray uniforms. The guards stood impassive at the entrance to the embassy. Their faces showed nothing of what they were thinking. All the same, Anne wondered what that would be. How happy did the prospect of a plebiscite in the annexed states make them?

Not very, I hope.

Colonel Jean-Henri Jusserand had been French military attachй in the Confederate States since sailing across the Atlantic with Anne aboard the Charles XL "So good to see you again, Mademoiselle Colleton," he said, bowing over her hand. "It has been too long a time."

"Yes, I think so, too," she said. "I hope you are well?"

"I must confess, the weather here in summer is a trial," Jusserand replied. "Other than that, though, yes, thank you. And I must also say that I am full of admiration for the extraordinary achievement of your government. C'est formidable!"

"Merci beaucoup," Anne said. "I hope that France will soon have similar good fortune with respect to Alsace and Lorraine."

Colonel Jusserand's narrow, intelligent face twisted. "Who can say? The Germans delay and delay. They delay endlessly. And we cannot even tax them for it overmuch, for the Kaiser delays dying. He delays and delays, delays- almost-endlessly. And while he is dying, what can be decided? Why, nothing, of course."

"There are ways to make them decide," Anne murmured.

"To go to war, do you mean?" the military attachй asked. Anne nodded. Jusserand sighed. "It is not so simple. I wish it were, but it is not. We have to know what the English will do, and the Russians, and the Italians. Until we are sure, how can we move? The Boches have beaten us twice in a lifetime. If we lose for a third time, we are ruined forever."

"When we came across the Atlantic from France to the Confederate States a few years ago, your country was ahead of mine," Anne said. "You poked and prodded at the Germans, while we could not do much with the United States. Things are different now. C'est dommage."

The Frenchman's eyes flashed. "Yes, it is a pity," he agreed. "You will understand, I hope, that there are those who wish to move faster. And we wish to be certain that if we do move, we shall not move alone. If the United States are not distracted, if they land on our back while we face the German Empire…"

Anne had gone to the French embassy to pass along a message. Now she saw she was getting one in return. "I do not believe, my dear Colonel, that you need concern yourself on that score."

"Ah? Vraiment?" Colonel Jusserand looked alert. "May I pass this interesting news on to my superiors-unofficially, of course?"

"Yes-as long as it is unofficially," Anne answered.

He nodded. They understood each other. After some small talk, she stood to go. He bowed over her hand. He even kissed it. But it was politeness, and politeness only. No spark leaped. Anne could tell. That politeness felt like a little death. Twenty years ago, he would have drunk champagne front my slipper, she thought bitterly as she left the embassy. She hated the calendar, hated the mirror and what it showed her every morning. A handsome woman, that's what you are. She would almost rather have been ugly. Then she wouldn't have to remember the beauty she had been not so long ago.

She had walked to the French embassy. It was only three blocks from her hotel. She thought hard about taking a taxi back. All the heat and humidity had manifested themselves while she talked with Colonel Jusserand. The sun beat down from a sky like enameled brass. The air was thick as porridge. Sweat rivered off her and had nowhere to go. Every step felt enervating.

Stubbornly, she kept on. The hotel bar was air-conditioned. Just then, she would have crawled through broken glass to get out of the heat. Not many whites were on the sidewalks, though plenty drove past. But most of the pedestrians were Negroes.

By their clothes, a lot of them hadn't been in Richmond long. She had no trouble recognizing sharecroppers thrown off the land as farming grew increasingly mechanized. She'd seen plenty of them in St. Matthews. Some of them turned to odd jobs in town, others to petty theft. The big farms, the farms that raised cotton and tobacco and grain, seemed to get on fine without them. Tractors and harvesters could do the work of scores, even hundreds, of men.

" 'Scuse me, ma'am, but could you spare me a quarter?" a gaunt colored man asked, touching the brim of his straw hat. "I's powerful hungry."

Anne walked past him as if he didn't exist. She heard him sigh behind her. How many times had whites pretended not to see him? She didn't care if he thought she was heartless. He'd been old enough to carry a rifle in the uprisings during the war. As far as she was concerned, that meant she couldn't trust him. She was glad a good number of policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts tramped along the streets.

She walked past three or four more black beggars before getting back to Ford's Hotel. One of them cursed softly when she went by without taking notice of him. He couldn't have been in Richmond long, or he would have got used to being ignored. At the hotel, the colored doorman in his magnificent uniform smiled and bowed as he held the door open for her. Before the war, she would have taken that subservience as no less than her due. Now she wondered what lay behind it-wondered and had no trouble coming up with a nasty answer.

When she strode into the bar, she let out a sigh of relief. The cold air gushing from the vents seemed a blessing from on high. She ordered a gin and tonic and took the drink back to a small table. Five minutes later, she was fighting not to shiver. She'd never imagined that air conditioning could be too effective, but it was here. She felt as if she'd gone from subtropical Richmond to somewhere just north of the Arctic Circle.

A bespectacled officer-a colonel, she saw by the three stars on his collar tabs-sitting at the bar picked up his drink and carried it over to her table. "May I join you?" he asked, his accent sounding more like a Yankee's than that of a man from the CSA.

"Clarence!" she said, and sprang to her feet to give him a hug. "Wonderful to see you again-it's been years. I remember when you got your name in the papers at the Olympics, but I'd forgotten they put you back in uniform."

"Had to find something to do with me," Clarence Potter answered lightly, but with a hint of bitterness underneath. "How have you been, Anne? You still look damn good."

She couldn't remember the last time a man told her something like that and sounded as if he meant it. When she and Clarence had briefly been lovers down in South Carolina, nothing personal drove them apart, but she'd backed the Freedom Party while he despised Jake Featherston. Despite the saying, politics had unmade them as bedfellows.

"I'm-well enough," she said. She and Potter both sat down. She couldn't help asking, "What do you think of the plebiscites?"

"I'm amazed," he said simply. "If you'd told me five years ago that we could annoy the United States into calling elections they're bound to lose, if you'd told me we could get Kentucky back without going to war, I would have said you were out of your ever-loving mind. That's what I would have said, but I would have been wrong."

Not many men, as Anne knew too well, ever admitted they were wrong for any reason. All the same, she couldn't help asking, "And what do you think of the president now? He's sharper than you figured."

"I never figured he wasn't sharp. I figured he was crazy." Potter didn't hold his voice down. He'd never been shy about saying what he thought, and he'd never worried much about what might come after that. After a sip at his own drink-another gin and tonic, Anne saw-he went on, "If he is crazy, though, he's crazy like a fox, so maybe I'm the one who was crazy all along. You can't argue with what he's accomplished."

She noticed he still separated the accomplishments from the man. In the CSA these days, people were encouraged-to put it mildly-to think of Jake Featherston and his accomplishments as going together. No, Clarence had never been one to join the common herd. Anne didn't mind that; neither had she. "What are you doing in the Army these days?" she asked.

"Intelligence, same as before," he answered, and then not another word. Given the four he had used, that wasn't surprising. After a moment, he asked a question of his own: "Why did you come up to Richmond?"

"Parce que je peut parler franзais bien," she said.

It didn't faze him. He nodded as if she'd given him a puzzle piece he needed. He hesitated again, then asked, "How long are you going to be here?"

"Another few days." She looked him in the eye. "Shall we make the most of it?" She'd never been coy, and the older she got, the less point to it she saw.

That didn't faze him, either. He nodded again. "Why not?" he said.

Colonel Irving Morrell didn't think he'd ever seen people dance in the streets before, not outside of a bad musical comedy on the cinema screen. Here in Lubbock, people were dancing in the streets, dancing and singing, "Plebiscite!" and, "Yanks out!" and whatever other lovely lyrics they could make up.

The people of the state of Houston had been his fellow citizens ever since it joined the USA after the Great War. If he'd been carrying a machine gun instead of the.45 on his belt, he would have gunned down every single one of them he saw, and he would have smiled while he did it, too.

Sergeant Michael Pound, who strode down the sidewalk with him, was every bit as appalled as he was. "What are they going to do with us, sir, once we have to get out of this state?" the gunner asked.

"I don't know," Morrell said tightly. He'd tried not to think about that. He couldn't help thinking about it, but he'd done his best not to.

Sergeant Pound, on the other hand, seemed to take a perverse pleasure in analyzing what had just happened. He probably enjoys picking scabs off to watch things bleed, too, Morrell thought. "This is a defeat, sir-nothing but a defeat," Pound said. "How many divisions would those Confederate sons of bitches have needed to run us out of here? More than they've got, by God- I'll tell you that."

"Democracy," Morrell answered. "Will of the people. President Smith says so."

Before Sergeant Pound could reply-could say something that might perhaps have been prejudicial to good discipline-one of the local revelers whirled up to the U.S. soldiers and jeered, "Now you damnyankee bastards can get your asses out of Texas and go to hell where you belong."

Colonel Morrell did not pause to discuss the niceties of the situation with him. He punched him in the nose instead. Sergeant Pound kicked the reveler on the way down. He didn't get up again.

"Anybody else?" Morrell asked. The.45 had left its holster and appeared in his right hand with almost magical speed.

Before President Smith and President Featherston agreed on the plebiscite, the U.S. officer would have touched off a riot by slugging a Houstonian. Now the rest of the dancers left him and Sergeant Pound alone. They'd already got most of what they wanted, and Morrell knew they would get the rest as soon as the votes from the plebiscite were counted. And most of them didn't want to give the U.S. Army big, overt provocations any more. Those could jeopardize what they'd been screaming for.

Sergeant Pound must have been thinking along with Morrell, for he said, "Freedom Party goons will probably thump that big-mouthed son of a bitch harder than we ever did."

"Good," Morrell said, and said no more.

A woman-a genteel-looking, middle-aged woman-said something inflammatory about U.S. soldiers and their affections for their mothers. Morrell still held the.45 in his hand. Ever so slightly, his index finger tightened on the trigger. He willed it to relax. After a few seconds, the rebellious digit obeyed his will.

An Army truck took Morrell and Pound out of Lubbock and back to the Army base outside of town. As far as Morrell could tell, Army bases and colored districts were the only parts of Houston where anybody still gave a damn about the USA.

A young lieutenant waylaid Morrell as soon as he jumped down from the truck. "Sir, Brigadier General MacArthur wants to see you in his office right away."

"Thank you," Morrell said, in lieu of something more pungent. Sergeant Pound went on his way, a free man. Morrell sighed. The guards outside Mac-Arthur's office glowered at him despite his uniform as he approached, but relaxed and passed him through when they recognized him and decided he wasn't an assassin in disguise. He saluted Daniel MacArthur. "Reporting as ordered, sir."

The lantern-jawed U.S. commander in Houston returned the salute, then waved Morrell to a chair. "Easier to fiddle sitting down while Rome burns, eh, Colonel?"

"Sir, I just had the pleasure of coldcocking one of those goddamn Houstonian bastards." Morrell explained exactly what he'd done on the streets of Lubbock, and why. The only thing he didn't do was name Michael Pound. The responsibility was his, not the sergeant's.

MacArthur heard him out. "I have two things to say about that," the general said when he was done. "The first is, by this time tomorrow Jake Featherston's pet wireless stations will be baying about another damnyankee atrocity in the occupied lands."

Morrell's opinion about where the president of the CSA could stick his wireless stations was anatomically improbable, but no less heartfelt on account of that. "Sideways," he added.

"Indeed." Daniel MacArthur stuck a cigarette into the long, long holder he affected. He lit it and blew out a cloud of smoke. "The second thing I have to say, Colonel, is that I'm jealous. You have no idea how jealous I am. You keep managing to hit back, while I've had to turn the other cheek again and again and again. It's enough to make me wonder about Christianity; it truly is."

"Er, yes, sir," Morrell said, not knowing how else to respond to that. "On the whole, though, things have been a lot quieter since President Smith agreed to the plebiscite."

"Of course they have!" Brigadier General MacArthur exploded. "The miserable fool has given the Confederate States exactly what they've always wanted. Is it any wonder that they're willing to take it?"

"No wonder at all," Morrell agreed. "Sir, if Smith had told Featherston to go jump in a lake, do you think the Confederates would have gone to war with us over Houston and Kentucky and Sequoyah?"

"I would have liked to see them try," MacArthur answered with a contemptuous snort. "I don't care how fast they're rearming. There is such a thing as fighting out of your weight. That's what infuriates me so: they'll likely win with the ballot box what they couldn't on the battlefield."

Morrell wondered about that. Hadn't Houston and Kentucky and Sequoyah been battlefields for the past several years? That was the way it seemed to him. The Confederates' sympathizers had taken a lot more casualties than they'd inflicted on the U.S. Army and U.S. sympathizers in the disputed states, but they hadn't cared. They'd thought it was all worthwhile. The United States hadn't held the same opinion about the losses they'd suffered. In the end, that made all the difference.

Daniel MacArthur saw things the same way. "We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat," he said. Michael Pound had said the same thing, without the fancy adjectives. Being a general entitled MacArthur to use them. In fine rhetorical fettle, he went on, "Do not let us blind ourselves. The road to the Ohio, the road that points to Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes, has been broken. Throughout these days, the president has believed in addressing Mr. Featherston with the language of sweet reasonableness. I have always believed he was more open to the language of the mailed fist."

"Yes, sir," Morrell said. "I wish I could have punched him instead of that fanatic a little while ago."

"Punched whom?" MacArthur asked. "Smith or Featherston?"

That was an interesting question-to say nothing of inflammatory. It was so interesting, Morrell pretended he hadn't heard it. He asked a question of his own: "If things really have quieted down around here, sir, what do we do till they finally hold the plebiscite?"

"We get ready to leave," MacArthur said bluntly. "Or do you think the USA will win the vote?"

"If we were going to win this vote, sir, they wouldn't need the Army to hold the lid on here," Morrell said.

MacArthur nodded. "That's how I see it, too. The other thing we'll do is make sure all the eligible niggers in Houston come out and vote in the plebiscite."

"It won't help," Morrell said. "We'll still lose."

"I am aware of that, thank you." Daniel MacArthur might have been talking to the village idiot. Colonel Morrell's ears heated. His superior went on, "Nevertheless, the more independence those people show, the more trouble they'll cause the Confederate State after we lose the election."

"Well, yes, sir," Morrell allowed. "But they won't cause all that much trouble, on account of there aren't enough of them in Houston. And the Confederates have never been shy about shooting Negroes whenever they thought they needed to. With Featherston in the saddle, they don't even think twice."

"Have you any other observations to make?" MacArthur asked icily.

"No, sir." Morrell knew he couldn't very well observe that Brigadier General MacArthur had a thin skin and couldn't stand having anybody disagree with him. It was true enough-MacArthur's chagrin just now showed how true it was-but the other officer would only get angrier if he said so.

Sure enough, MacArthur imperiously-and imperially-pointed toward the door with the cigarette holder. "In that case, Colonel, you are dismissed."

Morrell gave him a salute extravagant in its adoration. His about-face would have won praise from a drill sergeant on a West Point parade ground. As he marched out of the brigadier general's office, though, he reflected that he was probably wasting irony. MacArthur would accept the gestures as no less than his due. Back during the war, General Custer had shown the same sort of blindness.

Come to think of it, MacArthur had served under Custer during the war. Had he learned that sort of arrogance from the past master? Possible, Morrell decided, but not likely. Odds were MacArthur would have been a cocksure son of a bitch even if he'd never met George Armstrong Custer.

The guards outside the office saluted Morrell. He returned their salutes in proper casual style. They hadn't done anything to raise his blood pressure. No, that distinction belonged to the U.S. commandant in Houston-and to all the Houstonians who didn't want to belong to the United States. He blamed them less than he blamed Daniel MacArthur. He and MacArthur were supposed to be on the same side.

Instead of going back to BOQ and getting drunk at the bar or brooding in his hot, airless little cubicle, Morrell headed over to the barrel park. The big, lumbering machines were always breaking down. Even when they weren't broken down, they needed constant maintenance to keep running the way they were supposed to. Getting his hands and his uniform dirty was at least as good a way of blowing off steam as getting a snootful of whiskey-and he wouldn't have a thick head in the morning, either.

He wasn't surprised to find Michael Pound in the barrel park fiddling with a carburetor. "Hello, sir," the sergeant said. "And how is the Grand High Panjandrum today?"

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Morrell said, sternly suppressing the urge to snicker. "And you're goddamn lucky I'm going to pretend I didn't hear it, too."

"Yes, sir," Sergeant Pound said innocently. "Well, in that case, how is Brigadier General MacArthur?" He sounded no more respectful than he had a moment earlier.

Since Irving Morrell wasn't feeling particularly respectful toward the commandant, he overlooked the sergeant's tone this time. "Brigadier General MacArthur doubts that the USA can win the upcoming plebiscite," Morrell said. "He is unhappy about returning Houston to the CSA." That was like canned rations-it kept the substance and lost the flavor. And was there any U.S. soldier in Houston happy about returning Houston to the Confederacy? If there was, Morrell hadn't met him.

Sergeant Pound asked, "Does he suggest anything we can actually do about it?"

"Such as?" Morrell said. "President Smith has the right to do what he wants here. If he thinks a plebiscite is a good idea, he can order one."

"If he thinks a plebiscite is a good idea, he's an idiot," Pound said. "We'll pay for it down the road. Probably not very far down the road, either."

Once more, Morrell wished he thought the sergeant was wrong.

Colonel Clarence Potter was about as happy as a naturally dour man could be. Part of his somber joy came from the upcoming plebiscite. For more than twenty years, he'd wanted to see the stolen states brought back into the Confederacy, and now it seemed they would be. He gave Jake Featherston all the credit in the world for that. He gave it reluctantly, but not insincerely. He'd thought Jake was out of his mind. Maybe Jake was, but he'd read Al Smith like a book.

And part of Potter's present happiness had very little to do with Jake Featherston-at least directly. He'd never been a man who had extraordinary luck with women. He'd never married, and he'd never come particularly close to marrying. Like a fisherman, he had sometimes talked about the one that got away. For him, that had been Anne Colleton.

They'd always got on well down in South Carolina. But he hadn't been able to stand the Freedom Party, and she'd ended up backing it. That had been plenty to keep the two of them from staying together. Potter had thought he would never see her again, except possibly over gunsights-and he hadn't been sure which of them would be aiming the gun.

Now… Now, lazy in the afterglow, he sprawled on the bed in Ford's Hotel. "You see?" he said. "You just wanted me to tell you I was wrong."

"Well, of course," Anne answered, and poked him in the ribs. "What else does a woman want to hear from a man?"

"How about, 'I love you'? How about, 'You're beautiful'?" Potter suggested.

"Those are nice, too," she agreed with a smile. "As far as I'm concerned, though, nothing's better than, 'You were right.' "

He believed her. He didn't tell her so. She was too likely to take it the wrong way, to think he meant she was tough and bossy. And, as a matter of fact, he did think she was tough and bossy. To his way of thinking, though, that was a compliment. He had as little use for a woman who couldn't take care of herself as for a man who couldn't take care of himself.

"You are beautiful, you know," he said.

The smile didn't just fade. It blew out like a candle flame. "I used to be," she said bleakly. "You don't need to butter me up, Clarence. I know what's there when I look in the mirror."

"You're not young any more. So what?" Potter shrugged. The motion made the mattress shake beneath him. "I'm no spring chicken these days, either. And have you looked at all of you in a mirror lately?" He ran a hand along the length of her. "You've got nothing to worry about."

"Like hell I don't," Anne said. "My tits sag, I'm thick in the middle, and I'm spread in the butt."

"You're not young any more. So what?" he said again. "You still look damn good. I might lie, but do you think he would? He's either sincere or he doesn't work at all, especially at my age."

Anne laughed. A moment later, though, she rolled over onto her stomach and started sobbing into her pillow. Startled, Potter put a hand on her shoulder. She shook it off.

"What's the matter?" he asked, honestly bewildered.

"You son of a bitch," she said, her voice muffled. "I don't remember the last time a man made me cry. I didn't think anybody could any more. And then you went and did it."

"I didn't mean to," he said.

"I know." She sat up, a wry smile on her tear-streaked face. "If you'd been trying, you couldn't have done it in a million years. You caught me off-guard-and look what happened."

"No, no, no." Potter shook his head. "That's what the United States are supposed to say to us one of these days."

Anne laughed, but she nodded, too. "Oh, yes." She leaned forward. He'd caught her interest in a different way-which was probably just as well, since he wasn't good for more than one round a day himself any more. She asked, "How likely is it? How soon?"

He shrugged again. "All I know is what I read in the newspapers, like that comic from Sequoyah says."

Anne Colleton laughed again, this time at him. "Tell me another one, Colonel Potter. If you can't tell me, who can?"

"The president, most likely," Potter answered. "But believe me, he doesn't confide in colonels." That wasn't altogether true. From things Potter had heard, and from others that had crossed his desk, he could make what he thought were some pretty good guesses about how things might go. He didn't tell her what they were. With another woman, he would have been joking about the president. But Anne knew Jake Featherston. Could Jake put her up to finding out whether one Clarence Potter, colonel in Intelligence, ran off at the mouth? Potter didn't think so, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure.

She pointed an accusing, red-tipped fingernail at him. "So you won't talk, eh?"

"Not me. Not a word. Nothing but name, rank, and pay number." He rattled them off. "Wild horses couldn't pull more out of me."

"Who said anything about wild horses?" Anne's voice went soft and breathy. A mischievous glint sparked in her eyes. "Wild horses went out with the covered wagons. What we do these days is…" She started doing it.

After a while, Potter discovered there were still days when he was good for more than one round-with sufficient encouragement, that is. Panting, his heart pounding, he said, "My goodness. Torture's certainly come up in the world since the last time I ran into it."

"I should hope so. This is a high-class outfit here." As if to prove as much, Anne pulled up the sheet and daintily dabbed at her chin. Then she assumed what she fondly imagined to be a U.S. accent and said, "So tell me the score, Colonel."

"If it's all the same to you, I think I'd rather hold out for more torture," he said.

She poked him in the ribs again, hard enough to come closer to torture than he'd looked for. "Monster!" she said. He made as if to salute. She made as if to poke him one more time. Instead, she aimed that forefinger at him once more, this time as if it were the barrel of a Tredegar. "All right, you… you impossible person. Be that way. Don't tell me what you know. Tell me what you think. You can't get in trouble for thinking."

As seriously as he could, Potter answered, "I think that, if I tell you what I think, I'll get in trouble for telling you what I think." She started to get angry. So did he. He went on, "Dammit, Anne, what do you think my job is? Finding out secrets and keeping them, that's what. How long do you think I could do it if I ran my mouth like a heavy freight tearing downhill with the brakes gone?"

Every once in a while, when she heard the plain truth, it would disarm her completely. Clarence remembered that from the days of their unhappy affair in South Carolina. It was one of the things he'd liked most about her then. Now he saw it again. "I hadn't looked at it like that," she admitted in a small voice. "Never mind."

He sat up in bed, put on his glasses, and swung his feet down to the carpet, still wondering whether he'd passed his own test, hers, or Jake Featherston's. Through the gauzy curtains on the window, he could see people bustling along the paths in Capitol Square and others lying on the grass in the shade of the trees, doing their best to fight the oppressive weather.

On the sidewalk down below the window, a Negro said, "Spare some change for a hungry man?… Spare some change for a hungry man?… Spare some change for-? Oh, God bless you, ma'am!"

"I wouldn't give a nigger a dime," Anne said coldly. "I wouldn't give a nigger a penny, by God. If they can't find work, to hell with them. Let 'em starve."

Clarence judiciously pursed his lips. "A lot more of them looking for work these days, you know, with tractors and farm machinery driving sharecroppers off the land."

"Yes, I've seen that. So what?" she said. "If they can't figure out some way or another to make themselves useful, who needs them? The whole country would be better off without them."

"Would it? I wonder. Who'd do the nigger work without niggers?"

"Machines could do a lot of it, the way they do on a farm," Anne answered.

"Some of it, anyway," Clarence admitted. "But where are you going to get a machine that waits on tables or cuts somebody's hair? If we didn't have niggers, whites would need to do things like that." He started getting dressed.

"It could happen," Anne said stubbornly. "I do all sorts of things for myself I used to have servants do back before the war."

"I suppose so," Potter said. "Nigger work must get done in the USA, too, and they don't have that many niggers to do it. But things are different here. An awful lots of whites here say, 'I may be poor and stupid, but by God I'm white, and I'm better off than those niggers, and I don't have to do the things they do.' " Slyly, he added, "An awful lot of them vote Freedom, too."

Anne Colleton didn't rise to the bait. She just nodded. "I know they do. But if they didn't have any choice, they'd do what needs doing. If we had another war, we could even make them feel patriotic about doing what needs doing."

At first, Potter thought that was one of the most monstrously cynical things he'd ever heard, and he'd heard some doozies. Then he realized that, no matter how cynical it was, it probably wasn't wrong. He leaned over and kissed her. "Do you want to write that down and pass it on to the president, or do you want me to do it?" he asked.

"Whichever you please," she answered. "But what do you want to bet he's already thought of it himself?"

Clarence thought it over. He didn't need to think very long. "I won't touch that one," he said. "You're bound to be right." Featherston was plenty cynical enough to use patriotism to get people to do what he wanted-and plenty good enough at leading to get them to follow.

"One of us ought to do it," Anne said, "just on the off chance it hasn't occurred to him."

"I'll take care of it, then," Potter said, knotting his butternut tie. "Unless you really want to, I mean."

"No, it's all right. Go ahead." Anne laughed. "The funny thing is, here we are, both trying to give him good advice, and he doesn't trust either one of us as far as he can throw us."

"We've known him too long, and we've known him too well, and at one point or another we've both stood up and told him no," Potter said. "That doesn't happen to him very often, and he doesn't much like it."

"True." Anne laughed again, on a lower, less amused, note. "And now we're both following his orders even so. Everybody follows his orders these days."

"He's the president." Potter set his shiny-peaked officer's cap on his head. "He's the president, and he's been right. How do you lick a combination like that? As far as I can see, you're better off joining him."

Would he have said that before Jake Featherston brought him back into the Army? He knew he wouldn't. But that was almost four years ago now. And in serving Featherston, he also served his country. His country counted most. So he told himself, and told himself, and…

George Enos carefully coiled the last line that had held Sweet Sue to T Wharf. The fishing boat's diesel rumbled under his feet. Pungent exhaust poured from the stack. The Sweet Sue began to move, although for the first few seconds it seemed more as if the boat were standing still and the wharf sliding away from it. But then there could be no doubt. The fishing boat was leaving Boston and Boston harbor behind. George let out a slightly hung-over sigh of relief.

He'd been putting to sea for his entire adult life, almost half of his thirty years, but he'd never been so glad to watch his home town slide below the horizon as he had this past year and a little more. If he didn't have to look at Boston, he didn't have to be reminded-so much-of the place where that writer son of a bitch had shot his mother and then shot himself. He'd told her Ernie was no goddamn good for her, told her and told her. His sister had told her the same thing. Fat lot of good it did.

I shouldn't have just talked, he thought for the thousandth time. I should have kicked the crap out of that bastard. His fists clenched, his jaw knotted. His teeth ground. He hadn't done it, and it was too late now. It would always be too late.

He was so lost in his own gloom, he jumped when somebody clapped him on the back. "How you doin' Junior?" Johnny O'Shea asked.

"I'm all right, Johnny," George answered. It wasn't really true, but the older man couldn't do anything about what ailed him. Nobody could, not even himself.

"You looked a little green there," O'Shea said, fiddling with one upturned end of his old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He was a wiry little fellow whose strength and endurance belied his sixty years. He and a few other old-timers who'd known George's father were the only ones who called him Junior. George didn't mind. Anything that helped him connect to his old man was welcome. George had only vague memories of him. He'd been just seven when that Confederate submersible sank the USS Ericsson. Before that, his father had been in the Navy or on a fishing boat most of the time.

If the Sweet Sue sinks tomorrow, my kids won't remember me at all. They're too little. That was a hell of a cheerful thought with which to put to sea.

He realized he hadn't answered Johnny. "A little too much beer last night, that's all," he said. "I'll be all right." Talking about the other would have shown weakness. He refused.

O'Shea's laugh showed missing teeth, a few stubs stained almost the color of tobacco juice, and a plug of chewing tobacco big enough to choke a Clydesdale. "A little too much beer?" he said. "A little? Sweet Jesus Christ, what a milk-and-cookies lot we've raised up to take our places when we're gone. When I was your age and I'd be going out to sea the next morning, I'd drink till I couldn't see and fuck till I couldn't get it up for a month afterwards and let the skipper worry about having me on board when we got going. If you're gonna do these things, for God's sake do 'em right."

George had made sure Connie had something to remember him by, too. That was one of the reasons he hadn't drunk too much to excess. If you didn't know who you were, your John Henry wouldn't know who he was, either.

He was damned if he felt like talking about what he'd done in the bedroom, though. Instead, his voice sly, he asked, "How about last night for you, then?"

"Oh, I got drunk," O'Shea said. "Take enough aspirins, drink enough coffee, and that ain't so bad the next day. And I found me a girl, too. But I'll tell you something, Junior, and it's a goddamn fact. Enough fucking so you can't get it up for the next month is a hell of a lot less when you're my age than it is when you're yours." He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sea.

A lot of men would have sounded bitter saying something like that. Johnny O'Shea thought it was funny. He slapped George on the back and went off to chin with one of the other fishermen.

He got even less in the way of response from Carlo Lombardi than he had from George. Aspirins and coffee might have been enough to beat Johnny's hangover, but Carlo looked as if he'd been ridden hard and put away wet. Under his perennial five-o'-clock shadow, his face was fishbelly pale. He had a hat jammed down low over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and they were nothing but bloodshot slits. He answered O'Shea in monosyllables, and then stopped answering him at all. Johnny thought that was funny, too. George didn't. He'd been where Carlo was a few times-well, maybe more than a few times-and he hadn't enjoyed it a bit.

A couple of the other fishermen looked as much the worse for wear as Lombardi. By the time they got out to the Grand Bank, they'd be sober enough. The only liquor aboard the Sweet Sue was a bottle of medicinal brandy under lock and key in the galley. Every so often, Captain Albert would dole out a nip as a reward for a job well done. Davey Hatton, whose territory the galley was, had also been known to pour out a little brandy every now and then, but that was unofficial, even if the skipper winked at it.

Back in George's father's day, most fishing boats leaving T Wharf had made for Georges Bank, about five hundred miles offshore. Some still did, but Georges Bank had been fished so hard for so long, it didn't yield what it had. The Grand Bank, though, out by Newfoundland, seemed inexhaustible. Some people said Basque fishermen had been taking cod and tuna there since before Columbus discovered America. George Enos didn't know anything about that one way or the other. He did know there were a hell of a lot of fish left.

Boston sank below the edge of the sea. He wasn't sorry to see it go, or all the little islands that marked the way into the harbor. A couple of miles off to port, a U.S. Navy minesweeper-not a very big warship, but a giant when measured against fishing boats-opened up with its guns. A few seconds later, a big column of water rose from the Atlantic. The flat, harsh crack of the explosion took ten or twelve seconds to reach the Sweet Sue. When it did, Carlo Lombardi looked as if he wished his head would fall off, or maybe as if it just had.

George felt the blast in his teeth and sinuses, too. Even so, he nodded in satisfaction. "There's one mine we won't have to worry about any more," he muttered. During the war, the USA had mined the approaches to Boston harbor to a faretheewell, to make sure Confederate and British raiders and submarines couldn't sneak in and raise hell. And the Confederates had sown mines to give U.S. shipping a hard time.

Some of those mines still floated in place. Some of the ones that had been moored came loose with the passage of years and drifted free, a menace to navigation. Fishing boats and the occasional freighter blew up and sank with all hands. Finding mines and disposing of them had kept the Navy hopping since the end of the war.

And how long would it be before the Navy stopped sweeping for mines and started laying them again? George didn't like the headlines coming out of the states that had changed hands between the CSA and the USA. President Smith was loudly declaring he'd removed the last reasons for war on the North American continent. George hoped he was right. As far as he could see, everybody hoped the president was right.

Gulls glided along overhead. They always followed fishing boats, hoping for handouts from the garbage and offal that went over the side. They did better when the boats were farther out to sea and actually fishing, but that didn't keep them from being optimistic whenever they saw fishermen.

George stopped in the cramped little galley for a mug of coffee. He took it up to the Sweet Sue's bow and drank it there. The hot, sweet, creamy brew and the fresh breeze from the fishing boat's passage helped submerge the last of his headache. His cure wasn't so drastic as Johnny O'Shea's, but he hadn't hurt himself so badly the night before, either.

Going out to the Grand Bank was a long haul. Once the ocean surrounded the Sweet Sue on all sides, she might not have been moving at all. No landscape changed to prove she was. Every so often, she would pass an inbound fishing boat. Captain Albert would get on the wireless then, doing his best to find out exactly where the fish were biting best.

When my old man went to sea, his boat didn't even have wireless, George thought. He remembered his mother saying his father hadn't know that crazy Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke till he got back to T Wharf after a fishing trip. And when a Confederate commerce raider captured him and sank his boat, his skipper back then hadn't been able to yell for help. He'd been interned in North Carolina for months before the Confederates finally let him go.

On George's first night in the tiny, cramped bunk up at the bow, he tossed and turned and slept very badly. He always did his first night at sea. He'd got used to a bed that didn't shift under him, to one where he could roll over without falling out, to one where he could sit up suddenly without banging his head-hell, to one with Connie in it, sweet and warm and mostly willing. He knew he'd be all right tomorrow, but tonight was tough.

More coffee persuaded his eyes they really did want to stay open the next morning. He poured in the cream as if there were no tomorrow. So did everybody else. Even on ice, it wouldn't stay fresh through the cruise, so they enjoyed it while they could. By the same token, Davey Hatton did up enormous plates of scrambled eggs for the fishermen.

"By God, Cookie, yesterday I'd've puked these up," Johnny O'Shea said. "This morning, they're goddamn good." He shoveled another forkful into his face.

Hatton was a round, red-faced man with a barbed wit. "If somebody'd lit a match under your nose yesterday, he could've used your breath for a blowtorch," he replied. "Today you're on your way to remembering your name."

"Fuck you," Johnny said sweetly.

The cook nodded. "There-you see? I knew that was it." The men in the crowded galley laughed. Even Johnny laughed-he knew he'd lost that round.

When the Sweet Sue finally got out to the Grand Bank, there was little more time for laughter. Boats from the USA, the CSA, the Republic of Quebec, occupied Canada and Newfoundland, Britain, Ireland, France, and Portugal bobbed here and there on the ocean. Captain Albert found a place at the edge of one pack of boats and started fishing.

George lost track of how many big hooks he baited with frozen squid. The process was as automatic as breathing for him. If he'd thought about it, he probably would have stuck himself. Every so often, somebody did. Then it was the nasty business of pushing the barb through and snipping it off, the even nastier business of iodine, and, if a man hadn't had one in a while, a tetanus shot from the first-aid kit. And, with his hand bandaged, he'd go back to fixing hooks.

But when the lines came in… when the lines came in, work really started. Gaffing a wriggling tuna that weighed as much as a man, gutting it, kicking the offal over the side, and getting the fish into the ice in the hold went on hour after hour. Sometimes it wouldn't be a tuna-it would be a tuna head, proof that a shark had found the fish first. Off the hook, over the side. Sometimes a shark would be on the hook. Gaff him, gut him so he stayed dead, and pitch him overboard.

The endless fishing went on for the next three weeks. By then, the Sweet Sue had more than twenty tons of tuna in her hold and rode noticeably lower in the water than she had when she set out from T Wharf. George still didn't know how good a trip it was. He wouldn't till the skipper sold the tuna. But he knew he was finally ready to head back to Boston. After all, he had to remind his kids who he was.

Brigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. He felt betrayed not only by the War Department-which would have been nothing tremendously unusual-but also by the entire government of the United States. Having the whole government gang up on him didn't happen every day.

But Dowling certainly felt it had happened here. He'd come to Covington to help keep Kentucky in the United States. He'd got a good start on doing just that, too. And then Al Smith had jerked the rug out from under him by going to Richmond and agreeing to a plebiscite. The only way the USA could win that plebiscite would be for Jesus Christ to appear in Louisville and curse Jake Featherston with words that glowed like burning coals-and even then it would be close.

Now, ironically, what Dowling was watching over was the presidential election campaign. Up till Al Smith said there would be a plebiscite after all, he couldn't have got elected dog catcher in Kentucky. Now Red Socialist posters were everywhere in Covington. They showed Smith's face and the slogan, the happy warrior-he's kept us out of war. More went up all the time, too.

The Democrats were running Senator Bob Taft-son of longtime Congressman William Howard Taft-from across the river in Ohio. In a normal year, he would have scored well in conservative Kentucky. This wasn't a normal year, nor was Kentucky a normal state. The Freedom Party had ambushed the local Democrats from the right, and the Freedom Party, taking its cue from Richmond, was loudly for Smith.

Besides, Taft had denounced the plebiscite. Like most Democrats, he remained in favor of holding on to the gains the USA had made in the Great War. That would have doomed him here anyway.

"Isn't it grand?" Dowling said at supper one evening. "Kentucky will vote Socialist in February, and then it'll vote Freedom in January. Tell me how that makes sense."

All the officers with whom he was eating were junior to him, of course. None of them ventured to claim that it didn't make sense, or that he was worrying too much. A major did say, "At least the Freedom Party is on its best behavior from now until January."

"Bully!" Dowling exploded, which made the younger officers look at one another. He caught the looks, and knew why they made them. They didn't say bully, and they thought only dinosaurs-anyone who remembered the nineteenth century certainly qualified-did. Dowling was too exercised to care. He went on, "Of course those bastards will be on their best behavior. They don't have to blow things up any more to get what they want. All they have to do is wait. Wouldn't you be on your best behavior, too?"

"Uh, yes, sir," the major replied. "The only trouble is, their being quiet goes a long way toward making our presence here irrelevant, wouldn't you say?"

"Like hell I would," Dowling growled. "If we weren't here, if we weren't doing the job we're supposed to do, how much worse would things be?"

The major, being only a major, did not presume to contradict. That helped ease Dowling's mind-a little. He kept up a bold front not least for the sake of the men he commanded. He wasn't about to admit he thought his presence in Kentucky was irrelevant. He wouldn't admit it to anyone but himself, anyhow.

When he looked at the name of the man with whom he had his first appointment the next morning, it rang a bell. He went through some files and nodded to himself. The homework he'd done before taking command in Covington had paid off. "Good morning, Mr. Wood," he said when the man strode into his office. "And what can I do for you today?"

Lucullus Wood held out his hand. Dowling reached out and shook it with, he hoped, no noticeable hesitation, even if he wasn't used to treating a Negro as his social equal. Wood was in his early or mid-thirties: a wide-shouldered man, blocky rather than fat, with high cheekbones and an arched nose that argued he might have a little Indian blood in him. Without preamble, he said, "Kentucky got troubles, General."

"Yes, indeed." Dowling's voice was dry. "Do you aim to stop them or cause more?"

Before answering, Wood sat down across from Dowling. Dowling hadn't invited him to, but he didn't say anything. When the black man smiled, he looked like a predatory beast. "Depends on for who you mean," he answered, adding, "Reckon you know who I am, then."

"When I got here, they told me you made the best barbecue in town," Dowling said. "I've tried it. They were right."

"Hell they was." Lucullus Wood sounded affronted. "I make the best barbecue in the whole goddamn state. So did my old man."

Dowling looked down at the notes he'd taken. "Your father was… Apicius Wood. I hope I'm saying that right." He waited for the Negro to nod, then went on, "And one after the other, you and he have been the two biggest Reds in town. Or are you the two biggest Reds in the whole goddamn state?"

Woods blinked at that. After a moment, he decided to laugh. "Maybe he was. Maybe I is. Maybe we ain't never been," he said. "Folks who talk about that stuff, they don't always do it. Folks who do it, they don't always talk about it."

"Well, if you don't do it, if you've never done it, why am I wasting my time talking to you?" Dowling asked. "Tell me what you've got on your mind, and we'll see if we can do some business."

Lucullus Wood blinked again. "You ain't what I reckoned you would be," he said slowly.

Abner Dowling's shrug made his chins quiver. "Life is full of surprises. Now come on, Mr. Wood. Piss or get off the pot."

"Come January, a lot of colored folks is gonna want to git the hell out of Kentucky," Wood said. "Reckon you got some notion why."

"We won't stop them," Dowling answered. "They're U.S. citizens. We will respect that. Some whites will want to leave the state, too."

"Some. A few." Wood spoke with dismissive scorn. "Some colored folks, though, some colored folks is gonna stay. Dunno how many, but some will. Some damn fools in every crowd, I suppose."

"If I were a Negro, I wouldn't stay in Kentucky," Dowling said.

Wood's eyes went to the shiny silver star on the right shoulderboard of Dowling's green-gray uniform. "Don't suppose they lets no damn fools turn into generals," he remarked.

As far as Dowling was concerned, that only proved the colored man didn't know as much about the U.S. Army as he thought he did. Custer, for instance, had worn four stars, not just one. But Custer, while doubtless often a fool, had been a very peculiar kind of fool, and so… With an effort, Dowling tore his thoughts away from the man he'd served for so long. "Fair enough," he said to Lucullus Wood. "I'm sure you're right about what will happen. Some Negroes will stay here. Some people don't know to get out of a burning building till too late, either. But if the U.S. Army has to leave Kentucky after the plebiscite, what concern to us are they?"

"If we was white folks, you wouldn't talk like that about us." Wood didn't try to hide his scorn. Dowling wondered if a Negro had ever reproached him like that before. He didn't think so. He hadn't dealt with a whole lot of Negroes-not many people in the USA had-and the ones he had dealt with were all in subordinate positions. After a deep, angry exhalation, Wood went on, "You reckon the niggers in Kentucky gonna like all them damn white bastards runnin' around yellin', 'Freedom!' all the goddamn time?"

"I wouldn't," Dowling answered. If he'd called Negroes niggers, Lucullus Wood might have tried to murder him. Being one himself, Wood could use the label. But then that thought slipped away and another took its place: "What do you suppose they'll want to do about it?"

Anger dropped away from Wood like a discarded cloak. "No, General, you ain't no damn fool. You got to understand, I ain't in love with the USA. Revolution comin' to y'all, too. But we gots to make a popular front with whoever's on our side even a little when it comes to them Freedom Party cocksuckers."

"How much of a nuisance do you think your people can be, and how much help do you want from the United States?" Dowling asked. "The more we can set up before the plebiscite, the better off we'll be."

"More we kin set up before the plebiscite, better off the USA'll be," Wood said cynically. "Ain't gonna be no more good times for the niggers here after that. But I figure we kin raise some kind of trouble for the Confederates when they comes marchin' back in here."

"It would be nice if you could arrange as much for them as the Freedom Party fanatics did for us here and in Houston," Dowling said.

"Be nice for y'all, yeah, but don't hold your breath, on account of it ain't gonna happen," Wood said. "Lots mo' white folks here and down there than there is niggers. Revolutionary, he got to swim like a fish in the school of the people. Us blackfish, we is a smaller school."

He didn't sound like an educated man. But when it came to the business of revolution, he spoke with an expert's authority. Abner Dowling found himself nodding. "I suppose you're right," he said regretfully. "But if you people just happened to find some wireless sets and rifles and explosives lying around, you might figure out what to do with them, eh?"

"We might." Lucullus Wood nodded, too. "Yes, suh, General, we just might cipher out what they's for."

I ought to get War Department authorization for this, Dowling thought. He rejected the notion the minute it occurred to him. The War Department might not want to get officially involved in resisting Confederate occupation. Then again, some of the people in the War Department might just get cold feet. I'm here. They put me in charge. I'll take care of things, God damn it.

"All right, then," he said. "We'll see to that. And I know you're not doing us any special favors. But what works against the CSA works for the USA. That's how things are."

Wood nodded again. "That's how things is," he agreed. "We is fellow travelers on this here road for a while, even if we's goin' different places."

"Fellow travelers." Brigadier General Dowling tasted the phrase. "Yes, I can live with that."

"You been fair to me, General, so I be fair to you," Wood said. "Come the revolution, we go different ways. Come the revolution, I reckon I try an' kill you. Nothin' personal, you understand, but you is one o' the 'pressors, and you got to go to the wall."

"Fair is fair," Dowling said, "so I'll tell you something, too. You want to be careful about threatening a man with a weapon in his hand. He has a nasty habit of shooting back." With a sour smile, he too added, "Nothing personal."

"Sure enough," the Negro said imperturbably. "Them Freedom Party fellas, they done found that out down further south. Reckon mebbe we teach 'em some new lessons here in Kentucky. Is that a bargain?"

"That's a bargain." Dowling heaved himself to his feet and held out his right hand once more. Lucullus Wood took it. The Negro dipped his head and sauntered out of Dowling's office. Dowling looked down at his own right palm. Had he ever shaken a colored man's hand before today? He didn't think so. Kentucky was proving educational in all sorts of ways.

"Sorry, kid." The man who shook his head at Armstrong Grimes didn't sound sorry at all. He sounded as if he'd said the same thing a million times before. He doubtless sounded that way because he had. "I can't use you. I want somebody with experience."

Armstrong had heard that a million times since finally escaping high school. His temper, which had never been long, snapped. "How the hell am I supposed to get experience if nobody'll hire me on account of I don't have any?"

"Life's tough," the man in the hiring office answered, which meant, To hell with you, Jack. I've got mine. He lit a cigarette, but didn't quite blow smoke in Armstrong's face. Maybe his first long drag made him feel a little more like a human being, because he unbent enough to say, "One way to do it is to odd-job for a while. Sometimes you can get hired by the day even if somebody doesn't want you for keeps."

"Yeah, I've tried some of that," Armstrong said. "But it's a day on and a week off. It'll take me forever to do enough of anything to get the experience to make anybody want to take me on for good, and I'll starve to death in the meantime."

The man looked him over. "Other thing you could do is join the Army. You're a big, strong fellow. They'll take you unless you just got out of jail- maybe even if you just got out of jail, the way things are nowadays. You can sure as hell learn a trade in there."

"Maybe," Armstrong said. His father had made the same suggestion- made it loudly and pointedly, in fact. That would have prejudiced him against the idea even if he'd liked it to begin with. "They don't pay you anything much in the Army, and you're stuck there for three years if you volunteer."

"Have it your way, pal. You think I give a rat's ass about what you do, you've got another think coming." The clerk behind the desk looked up at the line of poor, hungry men desperate for work. "Next!"

Seething, Armstrong stormed out of the hiring office. If he hadn't thought the clerk would sic the cops on him, he would have whaled the stuffing out of the bastard. Sitting there like a little tin Jesus, who the hell did he think he was? But the answer to that was mournfully obvious. He thinks he's a man who's got a job, and the son of a bitch is right.

Armstrong inquired at a furniture factory, a trucking company, and a joint that made Polish sausages before heading for home. No luck anywhere. His old man wanted him out there trying-insisted on it, as a matter of fact. If he didn't pound the pavement, he wouldn't get fed. Merle Grimes had been most painfully clear about that. Armstrong wished he thought his father were bluffing. Since he didn't…

When he got home, he found his mother in tears. He hadn't seen that since Granny died. "What happened?" he exclaimed.

Without a word, she held out an envelope to him. His name was typed on it. The return address was printed in an old-fashioned, hard-to-read typeface:

Government of the United States, War Department.

Another, smaller line below that said:

Office of Selection for Service.

"Oh," he said. It felt like a punch in the breadbasket. He'd known it was possible, of course, but he hadn't thought it was likely. "Oh, shit."

Edna Grimes nodded. "That's what I said, too, Armstrong, when I saw the damn thing. But there's nothing you can do about it. If they conscript you and you pass the physical, you've got to go."

"Yeah." Armstrong nodded glumly. From some of the things he'd heard, the only way to flunk the physical was not to have a pulse, too. He did his best to look on the bright side of things: "If they conscript me, it's only for two years. That's a year less than I'd spend if I joined up on my own."

"I know. But still…" His mother gave him a hug of the sort he hadn't had from her in years. "You're my baby, Armstrong. I don't want you going off to be a soldier. What if we have another war?"

Being his mother's baby didn't appeal to Armstrong. Fighting a war did- if you were going to be a soldier, what point was there to being one when nothing was happening? None he could see. That he might get hurt or killed never crossed his mind. He was, after all, only eighteen. But he was smart enough to know that, if he told his mother what he really thought, she'd pitch a fit. So, as soothingly as he could, he said, "There won't be any war, Ma. We're giving the Confederates those pleb-whatchamacallits, so they've got nothing left to fight about."

"Jesus, I hope you're right," his mother said. "Some people, though, if you give 'em an inch, they'll want to take a mile. The way the Freedom Party carries on, I'm afraid they're like that."

Armstrong's little sister met the news that he was going to go off and be a soldier with complete equanimity. "So long," Annie said. "When do you leave?"

"Not tonight, you little brat," he said. She stuck out her tongue at him. He wanted to belt her a good one, but he knew he couldn't. She'd just go yelling to their mother, and then he'd end up in trouble. Annie was almost as big a pest as Aunt Clara, who would no doubt hope he never came back when he went off to wherever they'd ship him for training.

When his father got home and found out, though, he slapped Armstrong on the back and poured him a good-sized slug of whiskey, something he'd never done before. "Congratulations, son!" Merle Grimes said. "They'll make a man out of you."

Since Armstrong was already convinced he was a man, that impressed him less than it might have. To show what tough stuff he was, he took a big gulp of the whiskey. He hadn't done a lot of drinking. The hooch felt like battery acid going down the pipe, and exploded like a bomb in his stomach. "That's good," he wheezed in a voice that sounded like a ghost of its former self.

"Glad you like it," his father answered gravely. If he knew that Armstrong had just injured himself, he was polite enough not to let on. That was more discretion than he was in the habit of showing. He took a smaller sip from his own glass and asked, "When do you go in for your preinduction physical?"

"Next Wednesday," Armstrong said. "I can hardly wait."

He meant that ironically, but Merle Grimes took it seriously. "Good," he said. "That's real good. You ought to be eager to do something for your country. It's been taking care of you all along."

"Right," Armstrong said tightly. He could have done without his father sounding like a goddamn recruiting poster.

Next Wednesday, naturally, rain poured down in buckets. Armstrong had to walk three blocks from the trolley stop to the building where the government doctors waited to get their hands on him. He was half soaked by the time he made it inside. Seeing several other guys his own age who were just as bedraggled as he was made him feel a little better. More fellows with wet hair and pimples came in the door after him, too.

A pair of clerks marched into the room. At the same time as one was saying, "Line up in alphabetical order by last name," the other declared, "Line up according to height."

After some confusion, alphabetical order won. Armstrong would have ended up about the same place either way. As a G, he was fairly close to the head of the line but not right at it. He was also taller than most of the young men there for their physicals, but not a real beanpole, either. He had a chance to look things over before the system got to work on him.

First came the paperwork. He would have bet money on that. His old man made a living pushing papers around for the government, and had plenty to do. Armstrong filled out about a million forms and carried them with him to the eye chart, which came next. The fellow in front of him had some trouble. "I can see the little bastards just fine," he told the guy in the white coat in charge of the test. "Only thing is, I can't no way read 'em."

"Let me see your paperwork," the man in the white coat said. Armstrong got a glimpse of a couple of pages, too. Just about everything was blank. The man in charge of the test frowned. "You're illiterate?" Seeing the puzzled look on the young man's face, he tried again: "You can't read and write?"

" 'Fraid not," the youth said. "I can sign my name. That's about the size of it."

"Didn't you go to school?"

"A couple years. I never was much good, though. I been workin' ever since."

"Well, uh, Slaughter, no matter how good a name you've got for a soldier, you need to be able to read and write to enter the Army. You're not even in the right place in line. You'll be excused from conscription. I don't know if your exclusion will be permanent or if they'll class you as fit for service in an emergency. But we won't take you now." He glanced towards Armstrong Grimes. "Next!"

Armstrong thought about pretending he couldn't read, too. Too late, though-he'd already filled out his paperwork and done it right. He stepped up to the line and went down the chart as far as he could, switching eyes when the man in the white coat told him to.

"Give me your papers," the man said, then nodded. "You've passed here. Proceed to the next station."

He saw even more guys in white coats than he had at the Polish sausage works where he'd tried to get a job. They measured and weighed him. One of them listened to his heart. Another one took his blood pressure. Another one- this one with a brand new pair of rubber gloves-told him to drop his pants, turn his head to one side, and cough. As he did, the man grabbed him in some highly intimate places. "No rupture," he said, and wrote on Armstrong's papers. "Now bend over and grab your ankles."

"What?" Armstrong said in alarm. "You're not going to-"

But the man in the white coat was already doing it. That was a lot less pleasant than being told to turn his head and cough. "Prostate gland normal," the man said. He took off the gloves and tossed them into a corrugated-iron trash can. Then he wrote on the papers again. As soon as he gave them back, he started putting on a fresh pair of gloves.

"You must go through a lot of those," Armstrong said. He pulled up his pants in a hurry, still stinging a little.

"You bet I do, sonny," the man in the white coat agreed. "All things considered, would you rather I didn't?" Armstrong hastily shook his head. "Well, neither would I," the man said. "Go on to the next station."

They drew blood there. A big, strapping fellow passed out just as Armstrong arrived. The fellow with the hypodermic syringe put it down in a hurry and managed to keep the big young man from banging his head on the floor. He dragged him off to one side and glared at Armstrong. "You're not going to faint on me, are you? This guy was the third one today. Roll up your sleeve."

"I don't think I am," Armstrong said. "What do you need to do this for, anyway?"

"See if you're anemic. See if you've got a social disease. See what your blood group is for transfusions. Hold still, now." The man swabbed the inside of his elbow with alcohol. The needle bit. Armstrong looked away as the syringe filled with blood. He felt a little queasy, but only a little. The man yanked out the needle, stuck a piece of cotton fluff on the puncture, and slapped adhesive tape over it. He wrote on Armstrong's papers. "That's it. You're done."

"Did I pass?" Armstrong asked.

"Unless you're anemic as hell or you've got syphilis, you did," the man replied. "You're healthy as a horse. You'll make a hell of a soldier."

"Oh, boy," Armstrong said.