Harry Turtledove - Breakthroughs

Enos picked up the chisel he’d set down when the exercise began. He went back to work-chip, chip, chip. He spotted no rust under the paint he was removing, only bright metal. That meant his work was essentially wasted effort, but he’d had no way of knowing as much in advance. He went right on chipping. He couldn’t get in trouble for doing as he was told.

A chief petty officer swaggered by. He had less rank than any officer but more authority than most. For a moment, he beamed around his cigar at George’s diligence. Then, as if angry at letting himself be seen in a good mood, he growled, “You will police up those paint scraps from the deck, sailor.” His gravelly voice said he’d been smoking cigars for a lot of years.

“Oh, yes, Chief, of course,” Enos answered, his own voice dripping virtue. Since he really had intended to sweep up the paint chips, he wasn’t even acting. Propitiated, the petty officer went on his way. George thought about making a face behind his back, then thought better of it. Long tours aboard fishing boats even more cramped than the Ericsson had taught him he was always likely to be under somebody’s eyes, whether he thought so or not.

Another strip of gray paint curled against the blade of his chisel and fell to the deck. It crunched under his shoes as he took half a step down the corridor. His hands did their job with automatic competence, letting his mind wander where it would.

It wandered, inevitably, back to his family. He smiled at imagining his son seven years old. That was halfway to man-sized, by God. And Mary Jane would be turning four. He wondered what sort of fits she was giving Sylvia these days. She’d hardly been more than a toddler when he went into the Navy.

And, of course, he thought about Sylvia. Some of his thoughts about his wife were much more interesting than chipping paint. He’d been at sea a long time. But he didn’t just imagine her naked in the dark with him, making the mattress in their upstairs flat creak. She’d been different, distant, the last time he’d got leave in Boston. He knew he never should have got drunk enough to tell her about being on the point of going with that colored whore when his monitor got blown out of the water. But it wasn’t just that; Sylvia had been different ever since she’d got a job in the fish-packing plant: more on her own, less his wife .

He frowned as he tapped the chisel yet again. He wished she hadn’t had to go to work, but the allotment she took from his salary wasn’t enough to keep body and soul together, especially not with the Coal Board and the Ration Board and all the other government bureaus tightening the screws on civilians harder every day to support the war.

Then he frowned again, in a different way. The throb of the engines changed. He not only heard it, he felt it through his shoes. The Ericsson picked up speed and swung through a long, smooth turn.

A few minutes later, the chief petty officer came back down the corridor. “Why’d we change course?” Enos asked him. “Which way are we heading now?”

“Why? Damned if I know.” The chief sounded as if the admission pained him. “But I know which way we’re heading, by Jesus. We’re heading south.”

Private First Class Jefferson Pinkard sat in the muddy bottom of a trench east of Lubbock, Texas, staring longingly at the tin coffeepot above the little fire burning there. The wood that made the fire had been part of somebody’s fence or somebody’s house not so long before. Pinkard didn’t give a damn about that. He just wanted the coffee to boil so he could drink it.

A few hundred yards to the south, a couple of Yankee three-inch field guns opened up and started hitting the Confederate lines opposite them. “God damn those sons of bitches to hell and gone,” Pinkard said to anybody who would listen. “What the hell good do they think they’re going to do? They’ll just kill a few of us and maim a few more, and that’ll be that. They’re not going to break through. Shitfire, they’re not even trying to break through. Nothin’ but throwin’ a little death around for the fun of it, is all.”

The nearest soldier happened to be Hipolito Rodriguez. The stocky little farmer from the state of Sonora was darning socks, a useful soldierly skill not taught in basic training. He looked up from his work and said, “This whole war, it don’t make no sense to me. Why you think any one part of it is supposed to make sense when the whole thing don’t?”

“Damn good question, Hip,” Pinkard said. “Wish I had me a damn good answer.” He overtopped Rodriguez by nearly a head and could have broken him in half; he’d been a steelworker in Birmingham till conscription pulled him into the Army, and had the frame to prove it. Not only that, he was a white man, while Hip Rodriguez, like other Sonorans and Chihuahuans and Cubans, didn’t fit neatly into the Confederate States’ scheme of things. Rodriguez wasn’t quite black, but he wasn’t quite white, either-his skin was just about the color of his butternut uniform. What he was, Pinkard had discovered, was a fine soldier.

The coffee did boil then, and Jeff poured some into his tin cup. He drank. It was hotter than the devil’s front porch in July and strong enough to grow hair on a little old lady’s chest, but that suited him fine. Winter in Texas was worse than anything he’d known in Alabama, and he’d never tried passing an Alabama winter in a soggy trench, either.

Rodriguez came over and filled his cup, too. Sergeant Albert Cross paused on his way down the trench line. He squatted down by the fire and rolled himself a cigarette. “Don’t know where the dickens this war is getting to,” he remarked as he held the cigarette to the flames.

Pinkard and Rodriguez looked at each other. Sergeant Cross was a veteran, one of the trained cadre around whom the regiment had been formed. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart to show he’d been wounded in action. That was about all that kept the other two men from braining him with the coffeepot. Pinkard couldn’t begin to remember how many times over the past few weeks Cross had made the same weary joke.

Wearily, Pinkard pointed north and east. “Town of Dickens is over that way, Sarge,” he said. “Christ, I wish we’d run the damnyankees back toward Lubbock a ways, just to get us the hell out of Dickens County and make you come up with somethin’ new to say.”

“Godalmightydamn,” Cross said. “Put a stripe on somebody’s sleeve and listen to how big his mouth gets.” But he was chuckling as he sipped his coffee. He knew how often he said the same thing. He just couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

And then, with flat, harsh, unemphatic bangs, U.S. artillery began shelling the stretch of trench where Pinkard and his comrades sheltered. His coffee went flying as he dove for the nearest dugout. The shells screamed in. They burst all around. Blast tried to tear the air out of Pinkard’s lungs and hammered his ears. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing scythed by.

Lying next to him in the hole scraped under the forward wall of the trench, Sergeant Cross shouted, “Leastways it ain’t gas.”

“Yeah,” Pinkard said. He hadn’t heard any of the characteristic duller explosions of gas shells, and no one was screaming out warnings or pounding on a shell casing with a rifle butt to get men to put on their masks. “Ain’t seen gas but once or twice here.”

Even as they were being shelled, Cross managed a chuckle with real amusement in it. “Sonny boy, this front ain’t important enough to waste a lot of gas on it. And you know what else? I ain’t a bit sorry, neither.”

Before Pinkard could answer, rifles and machine guns opened up all along the line. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Up! Get up and fight, damn it! Everybody to the firing steps, or the damnyankees’ll roll right over us.”