The Victorious opposition

XVII

In the officers' mess on the USS Remembrance, Commander Dan Cressy nodded to Sam Carsten. "Well, Lieutenant, you called that one," the exec said.

"Called which one, sir?" Sam asked. The carrier was rolling, but not too badly. He had no trouble staying in his chair.

"There are reports of Confederate soldiers assembling near the borders of Kentucky and Houston," Cressy answered. "What do you want to bet they'll be marching in as soon as we finish pulling out, just the way you said they would?"

"Sir, if you think I'm happy to be right, you're wrong," Sam said. "What happens if they do go in?"

Commander Cressy shrugged. "I don't know. I hope President Smith does. He'd better. Somebody had better, anyhow."

"If they go in, won't it take a war to get them out?" That was Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger, Carsten's superior on the damage-control party.

Nobody in the officers' mess said anything for some little while after that. They knew what war meant. Not many of them besides Sam had served in the Great War, but they'd all been through the inconclusive Pacific War against Japan.

"A lot will depend on what happens in Europe," Commander Cressy said.

"France is starting to whoop and holler about Alsace and Lorraine," Sam said meditatively. "I saw an Action Franзaise riot before those boys came to power. I don't think they'll take no for an answer. They're just as sure they've got God on their side as Jake Featherston is."

"And the Russians are squawking about Poland, and they're starting to squawk about the Ukraine, too," Cressy said. "And the limeys are growling at the micks, and ain't we got fun?"

Sam sighed. He wished for a cigarette, but the smoking lamp was out. "We're going to hell in a handbasket all over again," he said. "Didn't anybody learn anything the last time around?"

"I'll tell you one thing we didn't learn," the Remembrance's exec said. "We didn't learn to make sure the sons of bitches who lost took so many lumps, they couldn't get back up on their feet and have another try. And I'm afraid we're going to have to pay for it."

Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, "They've learned something in South America, anyhow. Argentina and the Empire of Brazil are cuddling up, even if Argentina and Chile are yelling again."

"Sir, that's good news for Britain, not for us," Carsten said. "If there is a war, it means Brazil will let Argentina ship food through its territorial waters and then make the short hop across the Atlantic to French West Africa, same as happened the last time."

"How do you know so much about that?" Commander Cressy asked, as if to say, You're a mustang, so you're not supposed to know much of anything.

"Sir, I was there, in the Dakota," Sam answered. Cressy was a young hotshot. He had more book learning and learned faster than anyone Sam had ever seen. If war did come, he would likely have flag rank by the time it was done, assuming he lived. But he did sometimes forget that people could also learn by good, old-fashioned experience.

The other side of the coin was, Sam had only been a petty officer then. Officers also had the unfortunate habit of believing that men who weren't didn't know anything. (Petty officers, of course, were just as sure that officers' heads either had nothing in them or were full of rocks.)

"We can lick the Confederates," Pottinger said. "We did it before, and this time we won't have to take on Canada, too."

Everyone in the mess nodded. Somebody-Sam didn't see who-said, "Goddamn Japs'll try and sucker punch us in the Pacific when we're busy close to home."

More nods. Sam said, "They did that in the last war-the last big war, I mean. I was there for that, too."

Something in his tone made Commander Cressy's gaze sharpen. "The Dakota was the ship that went on that wild circle through the Battle of the Three Navies, wasn't she?"

"Yes, sir," Carsten said. "One of the hits we took jammed our steering, so all we could do was circle-either that or stand still, and the Japs or the limeys would have blown us out of the water if we had."

"You've had an… interesting career, haven't you?" the exec said.

"Sir, I've been lucky," Sam answered. "Closest I came to buying a plot was from the Spanish influenza after the war. That almost did me in. Otherwise, hardly a scratch."

"They tried taking the Sandwich Islands away from us in the Pacific War." Hiram Pottinger went on with the main argument: "Odds are the bastards will try it again. And if they do, the Pacific coast had better look out."

Nobody argued with him. After the wake-up call the Japanese had given Los Angeles in 1932, nobody could. They'd built their Navy to fight far out into the Pacific, and so had the United States. If the two countries ever went at each other with everything they had…

"If we go at the Japs full bore, instead of doing a half-assed job of it the way we did the last time, we'll lick 'em," Sam said.

Commander Cressy nodded. "If we could do that, we would," he said. "But if we're at war with Japan any time soon, we're also likely to be at war with the Confederate States. And if we're at war with the CSA, we aren't going to be able to hit the Japs with everything we've got. And they've built up a tidy little empire for themselves since the last war."

That was true enough. Japan had owned Chosen, Formosa, and the Philippines going into the Great War. Since then, she'd gained a lot of influence in China and quietly acquired Indochina from France and the oil-rich East Indies from Holland. In the aftermath of defeat, Britain hadn't been able to do anything but grumble and hope she could hold on to Malaya and Singapore if she ever got on Japan's bad side. But, since the limeys and the Japs both worried about the USA, they put up with each other.

"If they hit us again, those sons of bitches are going to put a rock in their fist," somebody predicted gloomily.

"Well, gentlemen, that's why we wear the uniform." Commander Cressy got to his feet. He was always sharply turned out. Sam envied him the knife-edged creases in his trousers. His own clothes were clean, but they weren't what you'd call pressed. Neither were those of anybody else in the officers' mess-except the exec's. Cressy nodded to the other men and left, ignoring the ship's motion with the air of a man who'd known worse.

Sam stayed long enough to drink another cup of coffee. Then he left the mess, too. As often happened, the officers' bull session went aimless and foolish without Cressy's sharp wit to steer it along. The exec also had the rank to make that wit felt. Sam thought he might have done some steering, too, but he was junior in grade, too damn old, and a mustang to boot. Nobody would take him seriously.

More than a little wistfully, he went up to the flight deck. He wished he had more to do with sending airplanes off into battle. That was why he'd wanted to serve on the Remembrance in the first place. He'd done good work, useful work, in damage control since returning to the ship as an officer. He knew that. He was even proud of it. But it still wasn't what he wanted to be doing.

Mechanics in coveralls had the cowl off a fighter's engine. They were puttering with a fuel line, puttering and muttering and now and then swearing like sailors. Funny how that works, Carsten thought, smiling at the bad language that flavored the conversation the way pepper flavored scrambled eggs.

The fighter itself was a far cry from the wire-and-canvas two-deckers that had flown off the Remembrance when Sam first came aboard her. It was a sleek, aluminum-skinned one-decker with folding wings, so the belowdecks hangar could hold more of its kind. Because of the strengthening it needed to cope with being sent forth with a kick from a catapult and landing with an arrester hook, it was a little heavier and a little slower than a top land-based fighter-a little, but not much.

Carsten looked out to sea. As always, destroyers shepherded the Remembrance on all sides. The way things were these days, you just couldn't tell. If the Confederates or the limeys wanted to use a submersible to get in a quick knee in the nuts, those destroyers were the ones that would have to make sure they couldn't. He'd served aboard a ship not much different from them. Compared to the Remembrance, they were insanely crowded. They were also much more vulnerable to weather and the sea. But they did a job no other kind of vessel could do.

For that matter, so did the Remembrance herself. With her aircraft, she could project U.S. power farther than any battleship's big guns. All by herself, she could make the Royal Navy thoughtful about poking its nose into the western Atlantic. Because of that, Sam was surprised when, half an hour later, the carrier suddenly picked up speed-the flight deck throbbed under his feet as the engines began working harder-and swung toward the west. Like any good sheepdogs, the destroyers stayed with her.

"What's going on, sir?" Sam called to the officer of the deck.

"Beats me," that worthy replied.

She kept on steaming west all the rest of that day and into the night. By the time the sun came up astern of her the next morning, rumor had already declared that she was bound for Boston or Providence or New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore to be scrapped or refitted or to have the captain court-martialed or because she was running low on beans. Sam didn't believe the skipper had done anything to deserve a court-martial. Past that, he kept an open mind.

She turned out to be heading for the Boston Naval Yard. The powers that be admitted as much before she'd been steaming west for a day. They remained close-mouthed about why she'd been called in to port early in her cruise. Maybe she really was running low on beans. Sam couldn't have proved she wasn't. Sailors hoped for shore leave while she stayed in port.

When she came in, a tugboat guided her into Boston harbor. By the way the tug dodged and zigged, Carsten suspected the minelayers had been busy. That saddened him, but didn't surprise him very much.

More tugs nudged the Remembrance up against a quay. It was snowing hard, the temperature down close to zero. That didn't keep a swarm of electrician's mates and machinist's mates led by several officers from coming aboard and going straight to work. By all appearances, the refit rumor had been true. But what were the technicians fitting? Sam couldn't figure it out on his own, and nobody seemed willing to talk. Whatever it was, it involved some funny-looking revolving installations atop the island, and a bunch of new gear inside the armored command center. After a little while, Sam stopped asking questions. Whenever he did, people looked at him as if he were a traitor. He went on about his own business and watched from the corner of his eye. Sooner or later, he figured, he'd find out.

Lucien Galtier stretched uncomfortably as he shooed another hen off the nest to see if she'd laid. She hadn't; his fingers found no new egg. The hen clucked at the indignity. Galtier went on to the next nest. He grunted when he reached into it. The grunt was part satisfaction, for he found an egg there, and part unhappiness, for he still couldn't get rid of the tightness in his chest.

No help for it. Even if he had pulled something in there, the work didn't go away. He finished gathering eggs, fed the animals and mucked out their stalls, and did everything else in the barn that needed doing. Then he picked up the basket of eggs, pulled his hat down on his forehead, lowered the ear-flaps and tied them under his chin, pulled the thick wool muffler Nicole had knitted up to cover his mouth and nose, and left the barn.

That first breath of outside air was as bad as he'd known it would be. He might have inhaled a lungful of daggers. It was cold inside the barn with the animals' body heat and an oil heater warming things up and with the wooden walls keeping out wind and snow. Outside, in the space between the barn and the farmhouse, it was a good deal worse than merely cold.

Snow blew horizontally out of the northwest. It had a good running start by the time it got to his farm. It stung his eyes and tried to freeze them shut. Despite hat and muffler and heavy coat and sweater and stout dungarees and woolen, itchy long johns, the wind started sucking heat from his body the instant it touched him.

In the swirling white, he could hardly see the house ahead. He'd known worse blizzards, but not many. If he missed the house, he'd freeze out here. That happened to a luckless farmer or two every winter in Quebec.

Lucien didn't miss. He staggered up the stairs, opened the kitchen door, lurched inside, and slammed it shut behind him. "Calisse!" he muttered. He shook himself like a dog. Snow flew everywhere. The stove was already hot, but he built up the fire in it and stood in front of it, gratefully soaking up the warmth.

Only after he'd done that did he worry about the clumps of melting snow on the floor. He cleaned up as best he could. Then he went back to the stove and made himself a pot of coffee. He gulped it down as hot as he could stand it. He wanted to be warm inside and out.

Outside, the wind kept howling. He watched the blowing, swirling whiteness and sent it some thoughts that weren't compliments. There was supposed to be a dance tomorrow night. If the blizzard went on roaring, how would anybody get to it?

He turned on the wireless set in the front room. The wireless was a splendid companion for a man who lived by himself. It made interesting noise, and he didn't have to respond unless he wanted to. Music poured out of the speaker. Right now, though, he didn't care for music. He changed the station. He wanted to find out whether they were going to get another foot and a half of snow before tomorrow night.

But the wireless stations blathered on about what they were interested in, not about what he was interested in. That was the drawback of the marvelous machine. He didn't have to respond to it unless he wanted to, but it didn't have to respond to him at all.

He went from station to station for the next twenty minutes, until the top of the hour, and not one of them seemed the least bit interested in the weather outside. For all they cared, it could have been summer out there, with blue sky and warm sun. It could have been, but he knew it wasn't.

At the top of the hour, every station gave forth with five minutes of news. It was as if they suddenly remembered they were part of the wider world after all. Lucien listened impatiently to accounts of riots in the Ukraine and Austria-Hungary and celebrations on the border between the United States and the Confederate States. All he wanted was a simple weather report, and nobody seemed willing to give him one.

Finally, at the very tail end of one of the newscasts, an announcer grudgingly said, "Our storm is expected to blow itself out by this afternoon. Snow will end before nightfall, and tomorrow will be clear and a little warmer." Two sentences, and then the music resumed.

In January in Quebec, a little warmer didn't mean warm. Lucien knew that all too well. He also knew the weather forecasters lied in their teeth about one time in three. Even so, he had reason to hope. Without hope, what was a man? Nothing worth mentioning.

Sure enough, that afternoon the wind dropped and the snow stopped falling. The sun came out and peeped around, as if surprised at everything that had happened since the last time it showed its face. It might have been embarrassed at what it saw, for it set half an hour later.

The night was long and cold, as January nights were. Lucien woke when it was still dark. He threw on his clothes and went out to the outhouse. The sky was brilliantly clear. Ribbons and curtains of aurora blazed in the north. He yawned and nodded, acknowledging that they were there. Then he trudged back to the farmhouse.

He was eating fried eggs when a snowplow grumbled by. The main road would be clear, then. Who could guess whether the little side roads to Йloise Granche's house would be, though, and the ones from there to the dance?

"Well," he said, "I will just have to find out."

Before he could find out, he had to do some shoveling to let his auto get to the main road. That was hard work, and would have been for a man half his age. His heart was pounding before he finished, but finish he did. Under all those layers of warm clothes, sweat ran down his sides. He went back in and heated water for a bath. That helped soak out some of the kinks in his back, though others refused to disappear.

When evening came, he used a little more hot water, this time for a shave. He scraped his chin and cheeks with a straight razor he'd been using since before the turn of the century. None of these newfangled safety razors and blades for him. He stropped the razor on a thick, smooth piece of leather before it touched his face. If his shave wasn't smooth, he had only himself to blame, not some factory down in the United States.

He dressed in clothes he might have worn to town: dark trousers, clean white shirt, and his least disreputable hat. The overcoat he put on had seen better days, but overcoats always got a lot of use in Quebec. Whistling a tune he'd heard on the wireless, he went out to the Chevrolet.

"I want no trouble from you," he told the auto, as if it were the horse with which he'd had so many philosophical discussions over the years. The Chevrolet was old, but it knew better than to argue with him. It started right up.

Despite the snowplow and the rock salt it had laid down, the roads would still be icy. Galtier drove with care, and made sure he kept plenty of room between himself and other motorists-not that many others were out and about. He didn't miss the traffic. He knew he wouldn't be able to stop in a hurry.

He left the paved road and bumped along rutted dirt lanes till he came to the farm where Йloise Granche lived. The dim, buttery light of kerosene lamps poured out through her windows; she still had no electricity. He stopped the engine, wagged a finger at the Chevrolet to remind it to start up again, and went up the steps and knocked on the door.

"Hello," she said with a smile. Then she was in his arms and they kissed hungrily for a long time.

Still holding her, he said, "When we do that, I want to forget all about the dance."

"We can, if you want to," she answered. "Would you rather just stay here?"

Regretfully, Galtier shook his head. "That would be a lot of staying for not much staying power, I'm afraid. If I were half my age, I would say yes."

"If you were half your age, I wouldn't want anything to do with you-not for that, anyhow," Йloise said. "We'll go to the dance, then, and we'll come back, and who knows what will happen after that?"

"Who indeed?" Lucien kissed her again, then led her out to the motorcar.

That wagged finger did its job. The auto started up again without any fuss. The dance was at Pierre Turcot's, not far from the little town of St. Modиste. A rowdy sprawl of motorcars and wagons and buggies surrounded Turcot's barn when the Chevrolet pulled up. Lucien handed Йloise out of the motorcar. They went in side by side.

People waved and called their names and hurried up to greet them. By now, they'd been together long enough that all their neighbors took them for granted. They might almost have been a married couple. Lucien's son Georges was already out on the floor dancing. He waved to Lucien and blew Йloise a kiss.

"Georges can be very foolish," Йloise remarked. She eyed Galtier. "I wonder where he gets it."

"I haven't the faintest idea," he answered with such dignity as he could muster.

The fiddlers and drummer and accordion player took a break. Pierre Turcot wound up a phonograph and put a record on it. The dancing went on. The musicians on the record played and sang better than the homegrown talent. Lucien had noticed that before. He wondered if the problem would kill off homegrown talent after a while. But once he started whirling Йloise around the floor, he stopped worrying about it.

They danced. They snacked and drank some of the potent punch Pierre had set out and danced some more. People talked about politics in the city of Quebec and the price of potatoes and who was fooling around with whom. Lucien didn't think he and Йloise were high on the gossip list these days. Why get excited about old news?

Somewhere between ten and eleven, Йloise turned to him and said, "Shall we go?"

He smiled. "Yes, let's."

They went back to her house in companionable silence. When they got there, he got out first so he could open the door on her side. "Such a gentleman," she said. "Would you like to come in for a little while?"

"Why not?"

They drank some applejack. One of Йloise's neighbors had cooked it up. It was a good batch, almost as good as if it weren't bootleg. And then, as they had a good many times before, they went upstairs to her bedroom.

Everything was dark in there, but Lucien knew where the bed was. He sat down on one side of it and got out of his clothes. When he was naked, he reached out. His hand found Йloise's bare, warm flesh.

They kissed and caressed each other. Lucien's heart pounded with excitement. Heart still pounding, he rolled onto his back. Йloise straddled him. She liked riding him, and he found it easier than the other way round.

"Oh, Lucien," she whispered.

He didn't answer. As his delight mounted, so did the thudding in his chest. He could hardly breathe. He'd never felt anything like this, not in all his years, not with Marie, not with Йloise, not with anyone. Pleasure shot through him. So did pain, pain in his chest, pain stabbing up his arm. Pain… He groaned and clutched at Йloise. In an instant, the darkness in the bedroom became darkness absolute.

"Lucien?" Йloise exclaimed. He never heard her scream, or anything else, ever again.

Scipio might have known it would happen one of these days. Hell, he had known it might happen one of these days. The Huntsman's Lodge was the best restaurant in Augusta. No other place even compared. If Anne Colleton ever came to town, this was where she'd have dinner.

And there she sat, at a table against the far wall, talking animatedly with several local big shots. Scipio hadn't seen her for twenty years or so, but he had not the slightest doubt. She'd aged very well, even if he wouldn't have called her beautiful any more. And she still sounded as terrifyingly self-assured as she ever had, maybe even more so.

As befit its status as a fancy place to eat, the Huntsman's Lodge was dimly lit. Scipio didn't think she recognized him. He was just another colored waiter, not one serving her table. He thanked heaven he hadn't let Jerry Dover talk him into taking the headwaiter's post. Then he would have had to escort her party to the table, and she would have been bound to notice him.

Even now, he wasn't sure she hadn't. She always held her cards close to her chest. He didn't want to go anywhere near that table. He didn't want to speak, for fear she would know his voice. He spent as much time as he could in the kitchens. The cooks gave him quizzical looks; he didn't get paid for roasting prime rib or doing exotic things with lobster tails.

His boss knew it, too. "What the hell you doing hiding in there, Xerxes?" Jerry Dover demanded indignantly. "Get your ass out and wait tables."

"I's sorry, suh," Scipio answered. "But I gots to tell you, I's feelin' right poorly tonight."

Dover didn't say anything for a little while. His eyes raked Scipio. "You know," he remarked at last, "there's niggers I'd fire on the spot, they tried to use that kind of line on me."

"Yes, suh," Scipio said stolidly. Firing was the least of his worries right now.

"You ain't one of 'em, though. You never tried shirking on me before," the restaurant manager said. He astonished Scipio by reaching out to put a palm on his forehead. "You don't have a fever. At least it isn't the grippe. You need to go home? Go on, then, if you've a mind to."

"I thanks you kindly, suh." As he had years before with John Oglethorpe, Scipio needed to remind himself that white men could be decent. He found it especially remarkable now, with the Freedom Party in the saddle for the past seven years. Things were set up to give whites every excuse to be bastards, and a lot of them didn't need much excuse. "Somehow or other, I finds a way to pay you back." He felt like the mouse talking to the lion in the fable. But the mouse actually had found a way to do it. How could he?

Dover only shrugged. He wasn't worrying about it. "Get the hell out of here," he said. "You got your reasons, whatever they are. I've known you for a while now. You don't fuck around with me. So get."

Scipio got. He wasn't used to being out on the street so early. He made a beeline for the Terry. The sooner he got into his own part of town, the safer he'd feel.

Then he heard a gunshot down an unlit alleyway, a scream, and the sound of running feet. Maybe he wasn't so safe in the Terry after all. Whites preyed on blacks, but blacks also preyed on one another. He wondered why. His own people had so little. Why not try to rob whites, who enjoyed so much more? Unfortunately, an answer occurred to him almost at once. If a Negro robbed a white, the police moved heaven and earth to catch him. If he robbed another Negro, they yawned and went about their business.

"Hey, nigger!" A woman's voice, all rum and honey, called from the darkness. "You in your fancy clothes, I show you a good time like you ain't never seen." Scipio didn't even turn to look. He just kept walking. "Cocksuckin' faggot!" the woman yelled after him, all the sweetness gone.

Bathsheba stared when Scipio came into the apartment so early. "What you doin' here?" she demanded. "I jus' put the chillun to bed."

He'd been trying to figure out what to tell her ever since he left the Huntsman's Lodge. "Once upon a time, you asked me how I came to be able to speak like this," he answered in soft, precise, educated white man's English. Bathsheba's eyes went wide. The only time he'd ever spoken like that in her hearing was to save their lives in the rioting not long after the Freedom Party took over. Now he had to tell the truth, or some of it. In that same dialect, he went on, "A long time ago, I was in the upper ranks of one of the Socialist Republics we tried to set up. Someone came into the restaurant tonight who knew me in those days. I'm not certain whether she recognized me, but she might have. She's… very sharp." Seeing Anne Colleton forcibly reminded him how sharp she was.

"You learn to talk like dat on account of you was a Red?" Bathsheba asked.

Scipio shook his head. "No. I was useful to the Reds because I could already talk like this. I… I was a butler, a rich person's butler in South Carolina." There. Now she knew-knew enough, anyhow.

He waited for her to shout at him for not telling his secret years before. But she didn't. "If you was a big Red, no wonder you don't say nothin'," she told him. "What we do now?"

"Dunno." He fell back into the slurred speech of the Congaree Negro. Talking in that other voice took him off to a world that had died in fire and blood and hate-but also a world where he'd grown to manhood. The contrasts terrified him. "Mebbe nuttin'. Mebbe run fas' as we kin."

"How?" Bathsheba asked, and he didn't have a good answer for her. Passbooks were checked these days as they'd never been before the war. Any black without a good reason for being where he was-and without the papers to back up that reason-was in trouble. People talked about camps. No one knew much about them, though; they were easy to get into, much harder to leave.

Even so, he said, "Better we takes de chance. They catches me…" He didn't go on. If they caught him and realized who he was, he wouldn't last ten minutes. No trial. No procedure. They'd just shoot him.

Bathsheba was still staring at him. His wife clucked sadly, a sound of reproach: self-reproach, he realized when she said, "I shoulda pussected what you was." He needed a heartbeat or two to figure out that she meant suspected. She went on, "If you was a Red, you had to hide out. And you was smart, gettin' out o' the state where you was at."

"I weren't no Red, not down deep, not for real an' for true," Scipio said. "But dey suck me in. I don't go 'long wid dey, dey shoots me jus' like de buckra shoots me." That was the truth. Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds on the Marshlands plantation had been in deadly earnest. Confidence in their doctrine had sustained them-till rifles and what little else they got from the USA ran up against the whole panoply of modern war, and till they discovered their oppressors wouldn't vanish simply because they were called reactionaries.

Bathsheba's mind went in a different direction. Suddenly, she said, "I bet Xerxes ain't even your right name."

"Is now. Has been fo' years."

"What your mama call you?"

"Scipio," he said, and wondered how long it had been since he'd spoken his own name. More than twenty years; he was sure of that.

"Scipio." Bathsheba tasted it, then slowly shook her head. "Reckon I like Xerxes better. I's used to it." She sent him an anxious look. "You ain't mad?"

"Do Jesus, no!" he exclaimed. "You go an' forget you ever hear de other one. Dat name get around, de buckra after we fo' sure. Dey still remembers me in South Carolina." Was that pride in his voice? After all these years, after all that terror, after being sure at the time that he was walking into a disaster (and after proving righter than even he'd imagined), was that pride? God help him, it was.

His wife gave him a kiss. "Good." She was proud of him, too, proud of him for what had to be the stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life. Madness. It had to be madness. There was no sensible explanation for it. But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Bathsheba said, "Every once in a while-Lord, more'n every once in a while-them white folks deserves a whack in the chops, they truly does."

And that did make sense. When things were bad, you tried your best to make them better. How didn't matter much. "Let's go to bed," he said.

"How you mean dat?" Bathsheba asked.

Now he kissed her. "However you wants, sweetheart."

He went up to the Huntsman's Lodge the next day with a certain amount of apprehension. He checked the autos parked near the restaurant with special care. None of them looked as if it belonged to either the police or Freedom Party goons. He had to go to work. If he didn't, he wouldn't eat, and neither would his family. In he went.

Jerry Dover met him just inside the door. "Go home," the manager said bluntly. "Get the hell out of here. You're still sick. You'll be sick another couple of days, too."

Scipio blinked. "What you say?"

"Go home," Dover repeated. "Damn Freedom Party woman asking all kinds of questions about you."

Ice congealed in Scipio's belly. He might have known Anne Colleton would spot him. Did she ever miss a trick? "What you say to she?" he asked, already hearing hounds baying on his trail.

"I told her you ain't who she thinks you are. I told her you been working here since 1911," Jerry Dover answered. His eyes twinkled.

"God bless you, Mistuh Dover, but when she catch you in de lie-"

"She ain't gonna catch me." Dover grinned at him. "I showed her papers from back then to prove it."

"How you do dat?" Now Scipio was all at sea.

Still grinning, the manager said, " 'Cause a nigger named Xerxes did work here then. He was only here a couple months, but those were the papers I showed her. Bastard stole like a son of a bitch. That's why they canned his ass. I heard one of the owners bitching about it not too long after we hired you. The name stuck in my head, and so I watched you close after that, but old Oglethorpe was right-you're first-rate. Anyway, this here gal like to shit, I'll tell you. You don't ever want to tell that one she's wrong. She ain't got no wedding ring, and I can see why."

That made a perfect thumbnail sketch of the Anne Colleton Scipio had known. She would have thought she had him at last-and then she would have seen her hope snatched away. No, she wouldn't be happy, not even a little bit. "God bless you, Mistuh Dover," Scipio said again.

"Go home," Jerry Dover repeated once more. "She may come back and try to raise some more trouble for you. I don't want that. I need you here too bad. And don't get your bowels in an uproar. I'll pay your wages."

Home Scipio went, in a happy daze. Safe-really safe-from Anne Colleton at last! He was back in the Terry before he realized this wonderful silver lining had a cloud. Maybe he was free of Anne Colleton. But now Jerry Dover had a hold on him. Miss Anne had been far away. Dover was right here in town. If he ever decided to go to the police… Scipio shivered, but he kept on walking.

"I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth," the president of the Confederate States said into the microphone as soon as the engineer behind the glass wall gave him the high sign. "And the truth is, folks, that Kentucky is ours again and Texas is whole again and our country is a long way back towards being what it's supposed to be again.

"The people spoke, and the Yankees had to listen. The people said they were sick and tired of being stuck in the USA. They came back where they belonged. The Stars and Bars are flying in Lubbock and San Antonio and Frankfort and Louisville. We took back what was ours, because that was how the people wanted it."

He didn't say anything about losing the plebiscite in Sequoyah. The papers and the wireless in the CSA hadn't said much about it, either. People got the news he wanted them to have, slanted the way he wanted it to go. Oh, his coverage wasn't perfect. By the nature of things, it couldn't be. Too many people could also pick up wireless stations from across the U.S. border. But not a lot of them did. Confederates and Yankees had disliked and distrusted one another for a long time now.

"Here and there along the border, the Yankees are still holding on to what's ours: in Sonora, in Arizona, in Arkansas, and right here in Virginia," Jake continued. "Al Smith tried to make me promise I wouldn't talk about those things if we had the elections last month, but I don't call that an honest kind of promise. No, sir, folks, I don't call it honest at all, not even a little bit. He was saying, 'I'll give you back some of what's yours if you forget about the rest of what's yours.' Now you tell me, friends-is that fair? Is that right?"

Bang! He slammed his fist down on the table, a favorite trick of his. "I tell you it's not fair! I tell you it's not right! And I tell you that the Confederate States of America deserve to be whole again! The CSA will be whole again! This here that we've done now is only the beginning. We don't want trouble with the United States. We don't want trouble with anybody. But we want what's ours, and we're going to get it!"

He ended just as the light went red. This wasn't one of his long speeches, only a little one to remind people that he'd got back two of the states the Whigs had lost. He stood up, stretched, and left the studio.

As always, Saul Goldman waited for him outside in the hallway. "Good speech, Mr. President," the director of communications said. "I don't think you can make a bad one."

"Thanks, Saul," Featherston answered. "We have a lot of things to take care of over the next few weeks. You've got the incident simmering?"

"Oh, yes." The little Jew nodded. "We'll have something worked up if they don't take care of things for us. They're liable to, you know."

Jake nodded. "Hell, of course I know. But we'll be able to get the story out the way we want it if it's our incident to begin with."

Bodyguards came up alongside of Saul Goldman. Goldman nodded to them in an absent-minded way. He didn't take security as seriously as he should have. Of course, nobody was gunning for him, either. Featherston didn't have the luxury of making that assumption. He nodded to the men in the butternut uniforms. They carried submachine guns at an identical angle. Their expressions were also identical: tough and watchful. Jake was watchful, too, though he tried not to let it show. Party stalwarts had tried to bump him off once. Could he really trust Party guards? If he couldn't, could he trust anybody in the whole wide world?

The guards led him out into the street. They spread out before he got into his new armored limousine. With Virgil Joyner shot dead, his driver was new, too. He missed Virgil. He missed anybody who'd known him in the old days and stuck with him through thick and thin. Harold Stowe, the new man, was probably a better driver than Joyner had been. Jake didn't care. The man was-and acted like-a servant, not a drinking buddy.

"Back to the Gray House, Harold," Featherston said. Harold. He sighed to himself. Stowe didn't even go by Hal or Hank or anything interesting.

"Right, Mr. President," the driver said, and put the limousine in gear. Jake sighed again, a little louder this time. Virgil Joyner had called him Sarge. He'd had the right, too. Not many people did, not any more.

Climbing Shockoe Hill was hard work for the heavy limousine. There'd been an ice storm the night before. Despite rock salt on the road, the going was still slippery. They crawled to the top in first gear.

When he strode back into the presidential residence, his secretary met him just inside the door. "You know you're scheduled to meet with Lieutenant General Forrest in ten minutes, don't you, sir?" she said, as if sure he'd forgotten.

"Yes, Lulu, I do know that," he said. "Let me go to the office and look at a couple of things, and I'll be ready for him."

An officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest III should have raised Featherston's hackles. He'd campaigned against all the Juniors and IIIs and even VIs who clung to power in the CSA by virtue of what their ancestors had done, and who hadn't done anything much on their own. But, for one thing, the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had been as much of a self-made son of a bitch as Jake was, and he'd been proud of it, too. And, for another, his great-grandson wasn't a Great War General Staff relic. He'd been too young even to fight in the trenches from 1914 to 1917. He was a hell of a soldier now, though, with notions of how to use barrels as radical as his illustrious ancestor's ideas about horses. Featherston liked the way he thought.

At the moment, though, Forrest looked worried. "Sir, if the Yankees decide to jump us for moving troops into Kentucky and west Texas"-he wouldn't call it Houston, refusing to recognize the validity of the name-"they'll whip us. They can do it. If you don't see that, you'll land the country in a hell of a mess."

"I never said they couldn't," Featherston answered. "But they won't."

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked exasperated. The first officer to bear the name had been a rawboned man who looked a bit like Jake Featherston. His descendant had a rounder face, though he kept his great-grandfather's dangerous eyes. They looked all the more dangerous when he glowered. "Why won't they? You've promised to keep those states demilitarized, and you're going back on your solemn word. What better excuse do they need?"

"If they attack me for moving my men into my states, they've got a war on their hands," Jake said calmly. "I'm telling you, General, they don't have the stomach for it."

"And I'm telling you, Mr. President, you'll take the country down in ruins if you're wrong." The first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had a reputation for speaking his mind. His great-grandson took after him.

"To hell with the country," Featherston said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III gasped. Jake went on, "I've got twenty dollars of my own money against twenty dollars of yours, General. The damnyankees won't move."

Forrest frowned. "You sound mighty damn sure of yourself, Mr. President."

"I am mighty damn sure of myself," Jake Featherston answered. "That's my job. Suppose you let me tend to it while you tend to yours."

"I am tending to my job," Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. "If I didn't point out to you that we're liable to have a problem here, I wouldn't be tending to it. The damnyankees outweigh us. They're always going to outweigh us. Remember how much trouble the Germans had against the Tsar's armies in the Great War? That wasn't because one Russian was as good a soldier as one German. It was because there were a hell of a lot of Russians. There are a hell of a lot of soldiers in the USA, too."

Jake Featherston nodded. "They'll be able to outnumber us, like you said. That means we'll just have to outquick 'em. You going to tell me we can't do that?" His voice developed a hard and ugly rasp. If General Forrest was going to tell him something along those lines, he'd be sorry.

"No, sir." Forrest didn't try. "We've got the airplanes, and we've got the barrels, and we've got the trucks, too. We'll run 'em ragged." Like Jake, like most of the Confederates who were really involved with them, he called barrels by the name they had in the USA. Some of the men who'd done their service well away from the trenches still used the British name instead: tanks. Featherston found that a useless affectation. But the general wasn't through, for he added, "If there is a war, sir, we'd better win it pretty damn fast. If we don't, we've got troubles. They're bigger than we are, like I say, and they can take more punishment. We don't want to get into a slugging match with them. Do you hear what I'm saying?"

"I hear you," Jake said coldly. "You make yourself very plain."

"Good. That's good. I want you to understand me," Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. "If I have a choice, I'd just as soon see us not have a war at all. Three years of the last one should have been enough to satisfy us for the rest of our days."

Three years of war hadn't been enough to satisfy Jake Featherston. He'd fought with undiminished hatred from beginning to end. Some of that hatred had been aimed at the Yankees, the rest at his own side. He'd had plenty to go around. He still did. "General, I don't need to explain my policies to you. I just need you to carry them out," he said. "Is that plain enough for you, or shall I draw you a picture?"

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked back at him. "Oh, that's plain enough," he answered. "But if you're being a damn fool, sir, don't you think somebody has the duty to come out and tell you so?"

"People told me that before I got Kentucky and Houston back," Jake said in a low, furious voice. "Was I right, or were they? People told me that when I brought dams and electricity into the Tennessee Valley. Was I right, or were they? People told me that when I made damn sure the farms in this country had the mechanical gear they needed, so we wouldn't get stuck relying on niggers we can't trust. Was I right, or were they?"

"Damned if I know about that last one," Forrest said. "Now we've got those niggers robbing houses in town instead." Featherston waited. The general nodded. "All right, sir. I get your point. But you'd better be able to take my twenty dollars. That's all I've got to say."

"Look here, General-I hope there won't be a war, too," Featherston said. "But one way or the other, the Confederate States are going to get what we want. We deserve it, it's our right to have it, and we're going to get it. Is that plain enough for you? Thanks to the Whigs, we've been waiting for almost twenty-five years. That's too damn long. We can't wait forever."

"Yes, sir. Whatever you decide needs doing, we'll try our best to give it to you," Forrest said. "Doing that is our job. Figuring out what we need-that's yours." He got to his feet, saluted, and left.

Jake looked after him. As the door closed, he said, "I know what needs doing," though Nathan Bedford Forrest III could not hear him. "And by God, I aim to do it."

Mary Pomeroy paused with a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to her mouth. "It's not fair!" she said. "The Yanks let Kentucky and Houston vote on where they wanted to go, and now they're back in the CSA. It they let us vote, the Americans would be gone from here so fast, it would make your head swim."

Mort Pomeroy chewed up a mouthful of bacon-Canadian bacon, not the skinny strips that went by the name in the USA-before saying, "They let that Sequoyah place vote, too, and it voted to stay in the United States."

Red curls flew as Mary tossed her head. "At least it had a choice. The Yanks don't give us any."

"I can't do anything about that." Mort ate another chunk of bacon. He might have been chewing on his words, too. After swallowing the bacon, he spat out the words: "And neither can you."

She bridled. The Yanks had shot her brother for trying to do something about the occupation. Her father had fought a one-man war against the USA till his own bomb blew him up instead of General Custer, for whom it was intended. Mort braced himself, regretting what he'd said and getting ready for an argument. Before she could answer him, Alec spoke from his high chair: "More bacon?" He was wild for bacon and ham and sausage-anything salty, in fact.

"Sure, sweetheart," Mary told him, and gave him some. While she cut it up for him, she wondered what to say to her husband. In the end, all that came out was, "Maybe you're right. Maybe I can't."

Mort blinked, plainly thinking he'd got off easy. He waited for her to come out with something else. When she didn't, he decided to count his blessings. He finished his bacon and eggs, his toast and jam, and his tea. Then he got into his overcoat, hat, and earmuffs for the trip across the street to the diner. It was warmer today than it had been lately; the high might get up into double digits. On the other hand, it might not, too.

Mary also finished her breakfast. Then she let Alec chase little pieces of bacon around his plate with his fork as long as he ate one every so often. When it stopped being breakfast and turned into playtime, she extracted him from the high chair and carried him over to the sink so she could wash his greasy face. He liked that no better than he ever did, and he was getting big enough to put up a pretty good fight. But she was still bigger, and so, whether he liked it or not, the grease came off.

She read to him for a while. He liked Queen Zixi of Ix, even if a Yank had written it. She didn't suppose L. Frank Baum had particularly disliked Canada. The book gave no sign that he'd ever heard of it-or of the United States, either. Hard to go wrong with a world so thoroughly imaginary.

When Alec started to fidget in her lap, she let him down to play. She didn't have to watch him quite every second these days; he was old enough not to stick everything into his mouth the instant he saw it. That let Mary go into the kitchen and play with something of her own.

Alec wandered in to watch. "Whatcha doing?" he asked.

"Fixing something," Mary answered.

"Is it busted?" he asked. "It don't look busted."

"Doesn't," Mary said. "It doesn't look busted."

"If it doesn't look busted, how come you're fixing it?"

Conversations with children could be surreal. By now, Mary had got used to that, or as used to the unpredictable as you could get. She said, "I'm not fixing it like that. I'm fixing it up."

"Are you making it fancy-like?"

She shook her head. "No, I'm just taking care of what needs taking care of." That didn't mean much to Alec. It didn't mean much to her, either. She didn't care. It kept him from asking too many more questions, which was what she'd had in mind. She worked on it for a while, then put it away. Before too long, it would be done.

"Can we go out and play?" Alec asked.

"No. It's too cold."

"Can we throw snowballs? I'll bop you in the nose with one."

"No. It's even too cold to throw snowballs."

"How can it be too cold to throw snowballs?" Alec was disbelieving. "It's not too cold to snow."

"It's too cold for people to go out there unless they have to."

"Daddy went out there."

"He just went across the street to the diner. And he didn't stop to throw snowballs at anybody." Mary still wondered how Mort had come to be daddy to Alec. Her own father had always been pa to her. She hadn't looked for anything like that to change. But change it had.

"Sometimes Daddy throws snowballs," Alec said.

Mary couldn't very well deny that. They'd had a memorable snowball fight only a few weeks before. But she said, "He doesn't do it on days like this. On days like this, he stays inside where it's warm as much as he can."

Alec went to a window and looked out. "There's people out there."

"I know there are people out there. Sometimes you have to go to the general store or to the dentist. Sometimes you have to deliver letters and things, the way the postman does." The Yanks called him the mailman. Mary refused to. She'd been calling him the postman since she learned to talk, and she wasn't about to change now. She still called the last letter of the alphabet zed, too. She wondered if Alec would after he started going to school. Yanks said zee, which struck her as insufferably… American.

"Do you have to go to the general store, Mommy?" Alec asked hopefully.

"No. I've got everything I need right here," Mary answered. She wasn't ma, either. She wondered why not. How had the language changed while she wasn't looking? She couldn't have said, but it had.

Cleaning and dusting here took only a fraction of the time they would have back on the farm. She didn't have any livestock to worry about, either. How many times had she gone out to the barn no matter what the weather was like, to feed the animals and collect eggs and muck out? She didn't have a number, but she knew it would have been a large one. Animals needed tending, rain or shine or blizzard. Back on the farm, if she had a moment to relax, it probably meant she'd forgotten something that needed doing. Here, she could sit down and smoke a cigarette and read a book or listen to the wireless without feeling guilty about leaving work undone.

Except for electric lights, the wireless was the best thing about electricity she'd found. And there were replacements of sorts for electric lights: gas lamps, or even the kerosene lanterns her mother still used out on the farm. What could replace the wireless, for immediacy or for entertainment? Nothing she could imagine.

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind, though, than she remembered a story the Rosenfeld Register had run not so long before. People were starting to figure out how to send moving pictures the same way they sent wireless signals. Apparently they'd broadcast pictures of a football game in New York City. But the sets cost more than a thousand dollars. Mary didn't suppose they'd ever come down to where an ordinary person could afford them.

During the middle of the afternoon, she started boiling a beef tongue in a big iron pot. Tongue was one of her favorite foods. Alec liked it, too. So did Mort, but he preferred it with cloves stuck in it. Back on the farm, they'd always done it simply with carrots and onions and potatoes and whatever other vegetables they happened to have. Today she made it the way her husband liked.

He sniffed when he got back from the diner. "I know what that is!" he exclaimed.

"That's nice," Mary said with a smile.

"That's very nice," Mort said. "We don't serve tongue at the diner. We can't get enough of it, and not enough people would order it if we did."

"Well, here it is," Mary told him. "Sit down, make yourself at home, and it'll be ready in a minute." The way things turned out, making himself at home kept him from sitting down for a while, because Alec tried to tackle him. Any football referee would have thrown a penalty flag. Mort only laughed.

"And Mommy fixed something up in the kitchen," Alec said, trying to tell Mort about the day.

"I know she did, sport," his father answered. "And now we're going to have it for supper."

"No, something else. Something this morning," Alec insisted. Mary wondered if Mort would ask more questions. He didn't. Instead, he got Alec in a half nelson and tickled him with his free hand. Alec squealed and wiggled and kicked. Mary hoped he wouldn't have an accident. That sort of treatment was asking for trouble.

But Alec didn't. He was growing up. He'd start school pretty soon. Part of Mary reacted to that with surprise and horror, and not just because school would teach what the Yanks wanted taught. Where had the time gone? But part of her looked forward to getting him out of the apartment during the day. He really was starting to notice too much of what went on around him.

"Yum," Mort said when he dug into dinner. Mary liked it, too, although she would have preferred the tender meat without cloves. To her, they distracted from the flavor; they didn't improve it. And Alec made supper exciting when he bit into one and yelled that it was burning his tongue off. A swig of milk helped put out the fire.

The next morning, the sun shone brilliantly. The mercury shot all the way up into the twenties. Mary wrapped the box she'd been working on in brown paper and binder twine. "Come on," she told Alec. "Let's get you dressed up nice and warm. We have to take this to the post office."

"What is it?"

"Something for your cousins, over in Ontario."

Getting to the post office took a while, even if it was only three blocks away. Alec threw snowballs and made snow angels and generally had more fun than should have been legal. He had snow all over his front when they went in. It promptly started to melt, because "Wilf Rokeby always kept his potbellied stove well fed with coal. The smell of his hair oil was part of the smell of the post office. He wore his hair parted right down the middle, the way he had when Mary was a little girl. It had been dark then. It was white now.

"What have we got here?" he asked when Mary set the box on the counter.

"Present for my cousins," she answered, as she had with Alec.

Like any small-town postmaster, Rokeby knew a lot about what went on in his customers' lives. "You don't have a lot to do with 'em," he remarked, "nor the rest of your family, either. Been years since I sent anything from you folks to Ontario."

"I got a wire from them," Mary said. "Laura had a baby."

His face softened. "A baby. That's nice." He put the package on the scale, then looked at a chart. "Well, you owe me sixty-one cents for this." She gave him three quarters, got her change, and took Alec back out into the snow.

Jonathan Moss got up from the table. He put on his overcoat and hat. "I'm going to head for the office," he said.

Laura nodded. "I thought you would." She gave him a quick, perfunctory kiss. "Do you really have to go in on a Saturday morning, though?"

"I've got to be in court Monday morning, and I'm not ready," Moss answered. "If I don't want to get slaughtered, I'd better know what I'm doing. Say good morning to Dorothy for me when she finally gets up."

"I will." A faint smile crossed Laura's face. "I wonder where she gets it." Their daughter loved to sleep late, a habit neither of them had.

"Don't know. Wherever it comes from, I wish I could catch it. Well, I'm off." Out the door Moss went. As soon as he closed it behind him, he dropped his right hand into the coat pocket where he carried his pistol. He didn't do that where Laura could see him. It made her nervous. But not doing it once he was out in the hallway made him nervous.

No one lay in wait there. No one troubled Jonathan on the stairs. No one bothered him on the way to his Ford, which he didn't park right in front of the apartment building. He examined the auto before getting in. It looked all right. Nothing blew up when he started the engine.

Maybe this is all so much moonshine, he thought as he drove to the office. But he couldn't afford to take the chance. What had happened to occupation headquarters in Berlin proved that. He might have laughed off threatening letters. Nobody but an idiot laughed off a bomb.

As usual, he chose a route to the office different from the one he'd used the day before. He didn't park right in front of the building where he worked, either: he used the guarded lot nearby. All the same, the ends of his daily trips to and from work made him nervous. If anyone was gunning for him, those were the places where danger was worst, because he always had to be there. So far, he'd had no trouble. Maybe all his precautions were snapping his fingers to keep the elephants away. Then again, maybe they weren't. The only way to find out was to stop taking them, and even that might not prove anything. He preferred not to run the risk.

Up the steps and into the building. No assassin lurking in the lobby. Up the stairs to his office, wary every time he turned. No crazed Canuck stalking the stairway. He opened the door, flipped on the light switch, and peered inside. Everything was exactly as he'd left it.

He closed and locked the door. Then he took care of the morning housekeeping: he made a pot of coffee and put it on the hot plate. Even though he'd had a cup with breakfast, waiting for it to get ready was a lonely vigil.

Meanwhile, the case ahead. Somebody-under occupation regulations, the military prosecutor didn't have to say who-claimed his client had played an active role in the Canadian uprising in the mid-1920s. Why whoever this was hadn't come forward years earlier was a question Moss intended to raise as loudly as the judge would let him. He'd been trying to find out who had a grudge against Allen Peterhoff. Somebody who stood to gain from Peterhoff's troubles was the likeliest to cause those troubles.

So far, Moss had had no luck finding anyone like that. As far as he could tell, Peterhoff was a pillar of the community. As for what he'd been doing in 1925 and 1926, nobody seemed to have a lot of hard evidence one way or the other. Of course, in cases like this, hard evidence didn't always matter. Hearsay counted for just as much, and often for more.

"Got to be some bastard after his money," Moss muttered to himself. He hadn't seen a case as blatant as this for a long time. It really belonged to the harsh years right after the revolt, not to 1941. But here it was, and the occupying authorities were taking it very seriously indeed. That worried Moss. Why were they flabbling about Peterhoff if they didn't have a case?

Moss had just poured himself his second cup of coffee from the pot when the telephone rang. His hand jerked, but not enough to make him spill the coffee. He set down the cup and picked up the telephone. "Jonathan Moss speaking."

"Hello, Mr. Moss." That cigarette-roughened baritone could only belong to Lou Jamieson. Moss' one-time client was not a pillar of the community, except perhaps for certain disreputable parts of it. He went on, "I think maybe I found what you were looking for."

"Did you, by God?" That perked Moss up better than coffee. "Tell me about it, Mr. Jamieson, if you'd be so kind."

Tell him about it Jamieson did. If the man with dubious connections was telling the truth-always an interesting proposition where he was concerned- then a couple of Peterhoff's business associates stood to make a bundle if he vanished from the scene for ten or twenty years. It wasn't anything showy or obvious, but it was there.

"By God!" Moss said again. His pen raced across a yellow legal pad as he jotted down notes. The more he heard, the happier he got. "Thank you from the bottom of my heart!" he exclaimed when Jamieson finally finished. "You've just saved an innocent man a hell of a lot of trouble. Even a military court will have to sit up and take notice when I use this."

"That's nice, Mr. Moss," Jamieson said affably. "You done me a good turn a while ago with the goddamn Yanks. Figured this was the least I could do for you." He couldn't have cared less whether Allen Peterhoff was guilty or innocent. What mattered was that he owed Moss a favor. If he hadn't, Peterhoff would have been welcome to rot in jail, as far as he was concerned.

His sometime client's amoral cynicism would have bothered Moss much more if Jamieson hadn't proved so valuable. As things were, Moss threw the notes in his briefcase, thanked Jamieson again, and got ready to go home early. Dorothy will be glad to see me, he thought, and I hope Laura will, too.

He made sure he turned off the hot plate. He didn't want to burn down the building by accident. Then he went out to his auto. His hand stayed in the overcoat pocket with the pistol, but he wasn't very worried. Nobody could reasonably expect him to leave at this hour. He might even be back before the mailman got to the apartment building where he lived.

As usual, he parked around the corner from the building. Even though he didn't expect trouble, it was one of those days where he would almost have welcomed it. He felt as if he were trouble's master. He remembered that for a very long time. The thought filled his mind as he turned the corner. That was when the explosion knocked him off his feet.

"Holy Jesus!" he said. Bright shards of glass glittered in the snow, blown out of nearby windows. He picked himself up and ran toward the sound of the blast. If anyone needed help, he'd do what he could.

He hadn't gone more than a few steps before he realized his building was the one that had suffered. The hole in the front wall gaped from his floor. And…

"No," Moss whispered. But that was his apartment. Or rather, that had been his apartment. Not much seemed left of it. Not a whole lot seemed left of the ones to either side, either. Smoke started pouring out of the hole as broken gas lines or wires set things ablaze.

"Call the police!" someone shouted. "Call the fire department!" somebody else yelled. Jonathan Moss heard them as if from very far away. He ran toward the front steps of the building where he'd lived for so long. Try as he would, though, he couldn't go up them, because all the people who'd lived in the apartment building were flooding out. Some of them were bloodied and limping. Others just had panic on their faces.

"Laura!" Moss shouted. "Dorothy!"

He didn't see them anywhere. He hadn't really thought he would. But hope died hard. Hope, sometimes, died harder than people. People, as he knew too well, could be awfully easy to kill.

A man who lived on the same floor as he did pushed him away. "You don't want to try to go in, Mr. Moss," he said. "The whole goddamn building's liable to fall down."

"My wife! My little girl!"

"Wasn't that your place where it happened?" his neighbor asked. Helplessly, he nodded. The other man said, "Then there's nothing you can do for 'em now, and that's the Lord's truth. If they come out, they come out. If they don't…" He spread his hands.

More people pushed out of the building. More bricks fell off it. Some landed in the snow. One hit a man in the shoulder. He howled like a wolf. Moss tried again to go into the building. Again, he failed. People took hold of him and dragged him back by main force.

Sirens screamed in the distance, rapidly drawing closer. Screams bubbled in Moss' throat. Why they didn't burst out, he had no idea. Everything he cared about had been in that flat. Now the flat was gone, and twenty-five years of his dreams and hopes with it.

He tried to think, though his stunned wits made it next to impossible. He'd been getting threats for a long time. He hadn't taken them too seriously till the bomb went off in the occupation center. After that, he realized disaster really could happen to him. And now it had.

"Who?" he muttered. Who would have wanted to blow up a woman and a child? For if this was a bomb, as seemed horribly likely, whoever had sent it must have addressed it to Laura or Dorothy. Had it had his name on it, they would have left it alone. He would have opened it. And it would have blown up in his face.

Fire engines howled to a stop. The police came right behind them. And soldiers in green-gray helped clear people away from the building. "Move it!" they shouted. "The whole thing may collapse!"

"Get out of the way!" the firemen shouted. They began playing streams of water on the spreading flames. A lot of the water splashed down onto the people who had lived in the building. That moved them away faster than the soldiers could have.

A major called, "Whose place was it that went up?"

"Mine," Moss said dully.

"You weren't inside there." The officer stated the obvious. "You'd be hamburger if you were."

"Hamburger." My wife is hamburger. My little girl is hamburger. Moss managed to shake his head. "No. I was doing some work at the office. I had just got out of my auto when… when it happened. Laura… Dorothy…" He began to weep.

"Christ! You're Jonathan Moss." Recognizing him, the major suddenly put two and two together. "This wasn't a gas leak, or anything like that. This was a bomb, or it probably was a bomb, anyway."

Now Moss' head moved up and down as mechanically as it had gone back and forth. "Yes. I think you're right. Somebody killed them." He could say it. It didn't sound as if it meant anything. He was still deep in shock. But part of him knew it would mean something before long. The major seemed to sense it was too soon for questions. He led Moss down the street. Docile as a child, Moss went with him. Behind them, the building fell in on itself.