Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Oh, yes. I’m sure you’re worried about that,” Mary said. They didn’t answer her. Why should they? They’d won.

When she got outside, she saw two more Yanks holding her mother back. They’d slapped a gag on her so she couldn’t scream and warn Mary. Two motorcars were parked by the side of the house. She thought one was the auto she’d seen driving along the dirt road. They must have been keeping an eye on her all along, then.

“Leave my mother alone,” she said dully. “She never had anything to do with this. It was all me.”

“We’ll see about that,” one of the Yanks said. But he turned to the men holding Maude McGregor. “Take the gag off her, Jack. She can yell her head off now. It won’t make any difference.”

As soon as Jack removed the gag, Mary’s mother said, “She’s lying to save me. I was the one who set the bombs.”

“That isn’t so!” Mary exclaimed. “How about that one the other side of Coulee, Ma? You don’t even drive.”

“I took the wagon,” her mother said with stubborn, hopeless defiance.

“And that’s how come we caught your daughter in there with dynamite in her lap, right?” said the Yank who seemed to be in charge of things. He waved to his men. “Get her into the auto. We’ll take her up to Winnipeg and tend to business there.”

As the other Americans obeyed, one of them asked, “How about the old broad?” Both Mary and her mother squawked irately. The Yanks ignored them.

“Leave her alone for now,” their boss said. “Looks to me like we’ve got the one we want.” They shoved Mary into a Chevrolet. As it sped off down the dirt road, she knew how right he was.

Chester Martin had known rejoining the U.S. Army would make his wife furious. He hadn’t known how furious. Rita had lost her first husband in the Great War, and seemed sure she would lose her second in this one. When Chester reupped, he’d asked for a month to get his affairs in order before he went in. The Army gave it to him; they weren’t conscripting middle-aged retreads, even if they were glad to have them, and so they’d acted accommodating as all get-out.

Now he wished he hadn’t asked for so long. It was the longest month of his life. “You said they’d shot you last time, and that was plenty for you!” Rita said over and over again. “You lied!” She might have accused him of falling off the wagon-or maybe falling into the arms of an old girlfriend came closer to the mark.

And maybe he was. He had no romantic illusions about war. Nobody who’d been a noncom in the trenches all the way through the Great War could possibly have any illusions about it. But he kept saying, “The country needs me,” and that was no illusion. The United States needed all the help they could get from anywhere.

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” Rita would ask. That stung, not least because he had. His hair, once sandy-brown, was graying and thinning at the temples. There were lines on his forehead, and more beside his pointed nose. He had a double chin and something of a belly. He still had muscles, though; nobody could hold a construction job without them.

His son, Carl, who was six, didn’t know whether to be proud of him or worried about him. Carl knew people could get shot. “You won’t let that happen to you, will you, Dad?” he would ask.

“Not me,” Chester would answer gravely. “That kind of stuff always happens to the other guy.” Carl accepted that. Chester knew better, but didn’t want to burden the boy with worries he couldn’t do anything about. Rita knew better, too, and wasted no time pointing out to Chester what a liar he was.

With all that going on, then, he wasn’t altogether unhappy escaping the little rented house in East Los Angeles and heading to the recruiting station a few blocks away when the time finally came. He took the oath there, which officially put him back in uniform. They gave him just enough of a physical to make sure he had a pulse and could see out of both eyes. If he’d flunked the second half, he suspected they would have worked something out.

They gave him a uniform, too. The tunic was too tight and the trousers were baggy; the tailoring hadn’t changed a bit since the Great War. They gave him a first sergeant’s stripes on his left sleeve. He knew what that meant. “You’re going to have me nursemaid some officer who was still spitting up sour milk when the Confederates tossed in the sponge the last time.”

He got exactly no sympathy, which was exactly what he’d expected. The sergeant who’d talked him into rejoining said, “Well, Martin? What about it? Are you going to tell me you’re not qualified for the job? I’ll say bullshit to your face if you’ve got the brass to try it.”

Martin didn’t have that kind of brass. Maybe he could keep a kid from getting some good men killed. He might even save the kid’s neck-and, with luck, his own in the process.

His orders were to report to a replacement depot in Virginia. Accompanying them was a travel voucher for rail transportation from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. He asked the noncom who gave him the voucher, “How the devil do I get from Milwaukee to where I’m supposed to go? Stick out my thumb?”

“Beats me,” that worthy said cheerfully. “For all I know, hitching’s faster than any other way. Once you get to Milwaukee, I promise they’ll tell you what to do next.”

“I hope so.” Martin didn’t trust Army bureaucracy. While the people in Wisconsin were figuring out how to get him past the Confederate corridor that split the USA in two, the people in Virginia were liable to decide he was AWOL if he didn’t show up on time and throw him in the guardhouse when he finally did. He knew that was unreasonable. He also knew the Army had some strange notions about what was reasonable and what wasn’t.

He had a brand-new green-gray duffel bag slung over his shoulder when he went to Remembrance Station, the big new railroad depot in downtown Los Angeles. Rita and Carl came along to say good-bye. If Rita cried, she wasn’t the only wife with a husband in uniform who did. He squeezed her and kissed her one last time, kissed Carl on the forehead, and climbed into a second-class car. Maybe officers got Pullman berths. Sergeants, or at least one sergeant in particular, didn’t.

More than half the men in the car were soldiers, either coming back from leave or reporting to duty for the first time. Chester listened. The chatter sounded much like what he remembered from the last go-round. Nobody seemed to want to talk to him. That didn’t surprise him. He had a lot of stripes on his sleeve, and he was at least twice the age of most of the men in green-gray.

When night came, the train slowed down to a crawl. He hadn’t thought about how the blackout applied to trains. He realized he should have. If locomotives went tearing along at full speed behind the beam of a big, bright light, they shouted, Hey, come shoot me up! at whatever enemy airplanes happened to be in the neighborhood. That made perfect sense-once you worked it out.

Conductors went through the cars making sure blackout curtains were in place on every window. Light leaking out the sides was as bad as any other kind. Chester wondered how likely an attack was. He shrugged. If it could happen at all, you didn’t want to take needless chances.

About half an hour after the blackout curtains came down, Chester went back to the dining car. The featured entree was something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland. He looked at the private at the table next to his and said, “I’m not back on duty yet, but now I feel like I’m back in the Army, by God.”

“Yeah.” The kid was pushing the gravy-smeared meat around with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “This is pretty lousy, isn’t it?” He eyed Martin’s heavily striped sleeve. “Have you, uh, been in the Army all along?”