Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Forrest hesitated again. Potter had no trouble figuring out why-if he went telling tales to the President, the chief of the General Staff was a dead man. But Forrest must have known that before he asked to meet with Potter. The Intelligence officer gestured impatiently, as if to say, Piss or get off the pot. Unhappily, Forrest said, “Well, things aren’t going as well as we wish they were in Pittsburgh.”

“That makes me unhappy, but it doesn’t make Jake Featherston a candidate for the booby hatch.” Potter’s voice was desert-dry.

“No, of course not.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked down at the ground between his feet. He bent and picked up something: a little chunk of shrapnel from a bomb casing. With a grimace, he tossed it away. “But a few days ago I went and asked him if maybe we wouldn’t do better just wrecking Pittsburgh than throwing away more men and materiel than we can afford.”

“And?” Potter asked. “There’s always an ‘and’ to a story like that.”

“Oh, there is,” Forrest said. “And he damn near threw me out of his office-damn near threw me through the door, matter of fact. We’re going to take Pittsburgh, take it away from the damnyankees, come hell or high water, no matter how many soldiers or barrels or airplanes we lose. He… just wouldn’t listen to me. It was like he couldn’t listen to me. His mind was made up, and nothing anybody could say would change it.”

“And so?” Potter said. “The President’s never been what you’d call good at listening to other people or changing his mind. I don’t suppose he’d be President if he were, because he would have quit trying a long time ago.” Not liking Jake Featherston didn’t mean you could ignore his furious, driving, almost demonic energy.

“This wasn’t like a stubborn man talking,” Forrest said-stubbornly. “This was like-like a crazy man talking.” He looked relieved at finally getting that out. “By God, Potter, it really was.”

“All right. Let’s say it was.” Potter knew he sounded as if he might be humoring a lunatic himself. “If it was, what do you propose to do about it? Bear in mind that we’re in the middle of a small disagreement with our neighbors right now.” His wave encompassed the sandbagged statues, the cratered square, the ruins of the Confederate Capitol.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s eyes followed his hand. Forrest grimaced again, as if he hadn’t noticed how things were till then. Maybe he hadn’t-maybe he hadn’t let himself. “Jesus Christ, if we followed a nut into this war-”

“You didn’t reckon he was a nut as long as things went our way,” Potter said brutally. Forrest flinched. Potter went on, “Do you really think this is the time to start plotting a coup d’etat ? That’s what it would have to be, you know. You’d have to take him down. He’d never leave or change on his own.”

“I do understand that,” Forrest said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You were a red-hot Whig even after it wasn’t safe to be a Whig anymore.” He did know a fair bit about Potter’s past, then. “If anybody could see the need for putting our house in order, I reckoned you’d be the man. For God’s sake, Potter, we can’t afford to lose another war. It would ruin us for good.”

“This one’s a long way from lost. We may get Pittsburgh yet.” Part of Potter wanted to leap at any chance to cast down Jake Featherston. That made him even more careful about what he said than he would have been otherwise. He didn’t think Forrest was trying to entrap him-the other officer sounded too upset for that-but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. When three men plot, one is a fool and two are government spies. What about two men?

I’m already a spy, Potter thought. He laughed inside, though he held his face straight. But he was a spy for the Confederate States. He wasn’t a spy for Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, and he was damned if he’d turn into one. And if he did ever turn into such a debased creature, he doubtless would be damned.

“So we may.” Forrest spoke cautiously, too. “But how likely do you think that is, what with the way things look now?”

“I don’t know,” Potter said: the exact and literal truth. He thought about Henderson FitzBelmont over at Washington University. He thought about 235 and 238, and the trouble FitzBelmont and his fellow physicists were having in separating the one from the other. He had no idea whether Forrest knew about FitzBelmont’s project. He couldn’t ask, either, for fear the chief of the General Staff didn’t.

If the physicists could build their bomb, the CSA would win the war. Drop one of those on Pittsburgh, and it wouldn’t cause problems anymore. Drop one on Philadelphia, one on New York City, one on Boston, one on Pontiac… That would knock the United States flat and kick them in the teeth while they were down.

Then Potter thought about the U.S. project in Washington State. He thought about bombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and Louisville and Birmingham and New Orleans and Dallas off the map. It was a race, a race into the unknown. Whoever first played Prometheus and stole fire from the gods would drop that fire on his enemies’ heads.

He tried to imagine fighting a war where both sides had bombs like that. His mind recoiled like a horse shying at a snake. That wouldn’t be submachine guns at two paces. It would be flamethrowers at two paces.

And what sort of weapons would you use in the war after that one? To his surprise, the answer formed almost as soon as the question did.

You would fight that next war with rocks.

“We’re on the tiger’s back right now, and we’ve got hold of his ears,” he said, not knowing and not much caring whether he was talking about Featherston or about the war. “If you tell me that’s not where we want to be, I won’t argue with you. But if you say we’d do better letting go and jumping off, I have to say I think you’re out of your mind-sir. Do you want Don Partridge trying to run things?” He supposed he’d been talking about Jake after all.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III hissed like a wounded snake himself. “Damn you, Potter, you don’t fight fair.”

“I didn’t know that was part of the requirement,” Potter said. “I thought the only thing you had to do was win.”

“That’s it,” Forrest agreed. “And that’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you think we can win the war with Jake Featherston in charge of things?”

“Do you think we can win without him?” Potter asked in return. “Do you think we can even get out of the war without him?” He didn’t ask about getting out of the war with Featherston still in the Gray House. That wouldn’t happen. Period. Exclamation point, even.

Forrest sat on the bench with a faraway look in his eyes. Potter suspected his own face bore a similar expression. How would the Confederate States do if they had to fight on without that pillar of fire at their heart? No, he didn’t love Featherston-far from it. He did, reluctantly, respect him.

Slowly, the chief of the General Staff got to his feet. “Maybe we’ll talk about this another time,” he said. “I hope we don’t, but maybe we will.” He tipped his hat and walked away.

A starling perched in a shattered tree not far from where Potter sat. It chirped metallically. The shimmering summer gloss was off its feathers; it wore a duller autumn plumage. Potter swore under his breath. The gloss was off the war, too. He thought of one question he hadn’t asked himself before. Could the CSA win even with Jake Featherston at the helm?

Potter had thought so when the barrels charged from the Ohio up to Lake Erie. He hadn’t believed he was guilty of the old Confederate error of underestimating how tough the damnyankees were. He hadn’t believed it, but evidently he was, because the United States refused to fold up. Would even the fall of Pittsburgh knock them out of the fight? Again, he just didn’t know.