Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“ Si, me, too,” Rodriguez agreed. You could drop Baroyeca down in the middle of that camp, and it wouldn’t even make a splash.

Barbed wire surrounded an enormous square of Texas prairie. Machine guns poked their snouts out of guard towers outside the wire perimeter. Barracks halls built of bright yellow pine as yet unbleached by the sun and unstained by the rain and rusty nails rose in the middle distance. There were a lot of them, but the vast acreage inside the barbed wire had room for at least as many more.

Somebody else pointed in a different direction. “Holy Jesus!” the man said. “Will you look at all them trucks?”

There they sat, on an asphalted lot separated from the barracks by more barbed wire. Along with the rest of the guards, Hipolito Rodriguez had become very familiar with those trucks. They looked like ordinary Army machines, except that the rear compartment was enclosed in an iron box-an airtight iron box. Pipe the exhaust in there and people who got into the trucks didn’t come out again… not alive, anyhow.

“They’re gonna get rid of a hell of a lot o’ niggers in this place,” the man next to Rodriguez said. “ Hell of a lot.”

“You want to shut your mouth about that, Roy,” somebody else told him. “We don’t talk about that shit. If we do it amongst ourselves, we’re liable to do it where the coons can hear us, and then we’ll have trouble.” He’d learned his lessons well; the Freedom Party guards who’d trained them at the much smaller camp near Fort Worth had rammed that home again and again. “Far as the niggers know, when they get on those trucks, they’re always going somewhere else.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Roy said impatiently. “Far as I know, they’re all goin’ to hell, and it damn well serves ’em right.”

“Come on, come on.” The bus driver sounded even more impatient than Roy did. “Y’all get your gear and get moving. I got to get moving myself, get the hell outa here and back towards where I live.”

Rodriguez found the gray canvas bag with his last name and first initial stenciled on it in black paint. He slung it over his shoulder and joined the column of guards thumping toward what looked like the main gate, at least on this side of the square. Extra guard towers watched over it. Anyone who tried attacking it without a barrel would get chopped to hamburger.

The camp was already manned. A couple of the men at the gate lowered the muzzles of their submachine guns toward the ground. “New fish,” one of them remarked.

“Don’t look so new to me.” His pal had the heartlessness of a man with all his hair and all his teeth.

“Sonny boy, I learned to mind my own business before you were a hard-on in your old man’s dungarees,” said a man from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade.

“I believe you, Pops,” the guard answered. “Some people need as big a head start as they can get.” He didn’t smile when he said it.

Guards on duty and new arrivals glared at one another. Before anybody could get around to demanding papers and showing them-and before anybody could get around to tossing out more insults like grenades-a man with a deep voice spoke from inside the gate: “What’s going on here? Are these the new guards they’ve been promising us? About goddamn time, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

As soon as the men at the gate heard that voice, they became all business. As soon as Hipolito Rodriguez heard it, he had to look around to remind himself that he wasn’t in a trench somewhere even farther west in Texas, with damnyankee machine-gun bullets cracking by overhead and damnyankee shells screaming in.

Out through the gate came Jefferson Pinkard. He was older now, but so was Rodriguez. He had a good-sized belly and two or three chins and harsh lines on his face that hadn’t been there in 1917. Back when Rodriguez was training, he’d heard that a man named Pinkard was high in the camp hierarchy. He’d wondered if it was the man he’d known. He didn’t wonder anymore.

He took half a step out of line to draw Pinkard’s eye to him, then said, “How are you, Senor Jeff?”

Pinkard eyed him for a moment without recognition. Then the big man’s jaw dropped. “Hip Rodriguez, or I’m a son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, and thundered forward to fold Rodriguez into a bear hug. The two of them pounded each other on the back and cursed each other with the affection a lot of men can show no other way.

“Teacher’s pet,” said one of the guards who’d ridden on the bus with Rodriguez. But he made sure he sounded as if he was joking. If one of his comrades turned out to be a war buddy of the camp commandant’s, he didn’t want to seem to resent that, not if he knew which side his bread was buttered on.

When Pinkard let Rodriguez go, he said, “So you’re here to help us deal with the damn niggers, are you? Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Rodriguez echoed automatically. He was used to saying it in English now instead of going, ?Libertad! the way he had down in Baroyeca. “ Si, Senor Jeff. That is why I have come.”

“Good,” Camp Determination’s commandant told him. “We’re gonna have us a hell of a lot of work to do, and we’re just about ready to do it.”

Since coming to Augusta near the end of the Great War, Scipio hadn’t gone far from his adopted home. For one thing, he hadn’t cared to go anywhere else; he’d made his life there, and hadn’t wanted to wander off. And, for another, travel restrictions on Negroes had started tightening up again even before the Freedom Party came to power. They’d got much worse since.

Just how much worse, he discovered in detail when he went to the train station to buy a ticket for Savannah. The line for whites was much longer than the one for blacks, but it moved much, much faster. Whites just bought tickets and went off to the platforms to board their trains. Blacks…

“Let me see your passbook, Uncle,” said the clerk behind the barred window. Scipio dutifully slid it over to him. The man made sure the picture matched Scipio’s face. “Xerxes,” he muttered, botching the alias the way most people did when they saw it in print. “What’s the purpose of your visit to Savannah, Uncle?”

“See my family there, suh,” Scipio said. He had no family in Savannah, but it was the safest reason to give.

The clerk grunted. “You got permission from your employer to be away from work?”

“Yes, suh.” Scipio produced a letter from Jerry Dover on Huntsman’s Lodge stationery authorizing him to be absent for one week.

Another grunt from the clerk. He jerked a thumb to the left. “Go on over there for search and baggage inspection.”

Scipio went “over there”: to a storeroom now adapted to another purpose. A railroad worker-a weathered fellow who couldn’t have been far from his own age-patted him down with almost obscene thoroughness. Two more white men of similar vintage pawed through his carpetbag.

“How come you do all dis?” Scipio asked the man who was groping him.

“So nobody sneaks a bomb on the train,” the white man answered matter-of-factly. “It’s happened a couple-three times. We’ve had to tighten up.” He turned to the men checking Scipio’s valise. “How’s it look?”

“He’s clean,” one of them said. “Bunch of junk, but it ain’t gonna go boom.”

Stung by that appraisal of his stuff, Scipio said, “Ask you one mo’ thing, suh?”

“Yeah?” The white man who’d searched him spoke with barely contained impatience. Why are you bothering me, nigger? lay at the bottom of it. But Scipio had sounded properly deferential, so the fellow let him go on.

“What you do when a lady come in here?”