Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Do you have any idea how the U.S. project is proceeding? FitzBelmont wrote. Potter didn’t. He wished he did. He didn’t think anyone in the Confederate States did. If someone did, the report would have come through him… wouldn’t it? If it didn’t, it would have gone only one place: straight to Jake Featherston. The President knew Potter was loyal to the CSA-otherwise, he wouldn’t have got involved in this uranium business in the first place. So everyone else in the country was probably as ignorant as he was about Yankee progress, if any.

Featherston didn’t seem to have found out he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had met, there in Capitol Square. If the President did know, neither man would still be free. Potter’s first thought was that neither would still be alive. After a moment, he realized that wasn’t necessarily so. Some of the people Ferd Koenig bossed could keep a man alive and hurting for a long, long time before they finally gave him peace-or maybe just made a mistake and hit him too hard or once too often.

Potter rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter on his desk and started an answer to Professor FitzBelmont. If he worked on something important, he wouldn’t have to think about some of the people who took the Attorney General’s orders. Dear Professor, he typed, I hope you and your fmaily are well. The error in the first sentence assured FitzBelmont the letter really came from him: a simple code, but an effective one. Thank you for your recent letter, which I have just received. I wish I were more familiar with the Japanese project you mention, but I am afraid I cannot tell you how close they are to invading the Sandwich Islands.

That, of course, was also code. It might be obvious to anyone who intercepted the letter that Potter wasn’t talking about Japan. What he was talking about wouldn’t be so obvious, though. He wondered if the Japanese were working on nuclear fission. They weren’t white men, but they’d proved they could play the white man’s game. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. It was probably the USA’s nightmare. If one bomb could wreck Pearl Harbor or Honolulu, how did you defend them?

Back to what was his problem. He clacked away at the big upright machine. It had a stiff action, but that didn’t matter; he was a two-fingered typist with a touch like a tap-dancing rhinoceros. You did not state when we could expect success from your own work. Its early completion could result in a major increase in efficiency. Hoping to hear from you soon on this point, I have the honor to remain… He finished the flowery closing phrases on automatic pilot, took out the sheet of paper, and signed the squiggle that might have been his name.

He put the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Professor FitzBelmont’s name and Washington University on the outside. Then he took it down the hall to the couriers’ office, first carefully locking the door to his own office behind him. He nodded to the major in charge of the War Department’s secret couriers. “Morning, Dick,” he said. “I need one of your boys to take this out of the city.”

“Yes, sir. We can do that.” The dispatching officer took the envelope, glanced at the address, and nodded. “Do you want someone who’s been there before, or a new man?” That was the only question he asked. Who Henderson V. FitzBelmont was and what the professor was working on were none of his business, and he knew it.

“Either way will do,” Potter answered. FitzBelmont might recognize a courier he’d seen before. Then again, he might not. He wasn’t quite the absentminded professor people made jokes about, but he wasn’t far removed, either. Potter got the feeling subatomic particles and differential equations were more real to him than most of the human race.

“We’ll take care of it, then,” the major said. “You’ll want the courier to report delivery, I expect?”

“Orally, when he gets back here,” Potter said.

The major raised an eyebrow. Potter looked back as if across a poker table. He held the high cards, and he knew it. So did the major. “Whatever you say, sir.”

“Thanks, Dick.” Potter went back to his own office. Whatever you say, sir. He liked the sound of that. As a general, he heard it a lot. The more he heard it, the more he liked it.

How long had it been since Jake Featherston heard anything but, Whatever you say, sir? Since he took the oath of office in 1934, certainly. In most things, nobody’d tried arguing with him for years before that. And he was a man who’d liked getting his own way even when he was only an artillery sergeant.

If somebody had tried telling the President more often, the country might be in better shape right now. Or it might not-Featherston might just have ordered naysayers shot or sent to camps. He’d done a lot of that.

Potter lit a cigarette and blew a meditative cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling. Two questions: was Jake Featherston leading the Confederate States to ruin, and could anybody else do a better job if Featherston came down with a sudden case of loss of life?

With the building disaster in Pittsburgh, with Featherston’s stubborn refusal to cut his losses and pull out (which looked worse now than it had when Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Potter sat on the park bench), the answer to the first had gone from unlikely through maybe and on toward probably, even if it hadn’t got there yet.

As for the second… Potter blew out more smoke. That wasn’t nearly so obvious. Nobody could wear Jake Featherston’s shoes. The Vice President? Don Partridge was a cipher, a placeholder, somebody to fill a slot because the Confederate Constitution said you needed to fill it. His only virtue was knowing he was a lightweight. Ferdinand Koenig? The Attorney General would have the Freedom Party behind him if the long knives came out. He was able enough, in a gray, bureaucratic way, but about as inspiring as a mudflat. As a leader…? Potter shuddered. Ferd Koenig was one of those people who made a terrific number two but a terrible number one. Unlike some of them, he had the sense to realize it.

Which left-who? Congress was a Freedom Party rubber stamp. Potter couldn’t think of any governor worth a pitcher of warm spit. Besides, most people outside a governor’s home state had never heard of him.

What about Forrest? Clarence Potter blinked, there in the privacy of his office. He was surprised the idea had taken so long to occur to him. He laughed at himself. “You old Whig, you,” he murmured. If the armed forces were going to overthrow the President-and it wouldn’t happen any other way-who better to take over the government than the chief of the General Staff? The Freedom Party had danced on the spirit of the Constitution while holding on to most of the letter. Throwing it out the window altogether seemed not just unnatural but wicked. But Forrest just might do.

Losing the war is wicked. Anything else? Next to losing this war to the USA, anything else looks good. Anything at all. Potter nodded decisively. About that, he had no doubts at all. The United States had forced a harsh peace on the Confederate States in 1917, but hadn’t kept it going for very long. Terms would be even worse this time, and the United States would make sure the Confederates never got off their knees again.

The next time Potter saw Nathan Bedford Forrest III in the cafeteria, he nodded casually and said, “Something I’d like to talk to you about when we have the chance.”

“Really?” Forrest said, as casually. “Can we do it here?”

Potter shook his head. “No, sir,” he answered. “Needs privacy.” From one general to another, that wasn’t a surprising thing to say. For a split second, Forrest’s eyes widened. Then he nodded and put some silverware on his tray.