Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Probably didn’t want to get you all upset, sir,” his driver answered.

Probably didn’t want to make you blow a gasket, that meant. The driver was probably right, too. Jake had succeeded in making people afraid of him. Men who would tell him what they thought, men like Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Clarence Potter, were rare. The rest said what they thought he wanted to hear-either that or they hunkered down and didn’t tell him anything. That last looked to be what had happened here.

“Is Lulu all right?” he demanded when he got inside. If his secretary wasn’t and they’d kept that from him, they’d be sorry, and pretty damn quick, too.

But the flunky he’d asked nodded. “She sure is, Mr. President. Just about everybody got down to the shelter before the bombs started falling.”

“Well, that’s good, anyway,” Featherston said. The bomb shelter below the Gray House was as elaborate as the one under the Confederate War Department. No doubt the shelter under Powel House in Philadelphia was just as fancy, but it hadn’t done Al Smith one damn bit of good. Jake preferred not to dwell on that.

When he got to his office, Lulu greeted him with a nod. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said, as calmly as if nothing had happened while he was away.

“Hello, sweetie,” he said, and gave her a hug. She was one of the tiny handful of people he cared about as people and not as things to order around or otherwise manipulate. If he’d lost her… He didn’t know what he would have done.

Her sallow cheeks turned pink. “You worry about running the country, sir,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me.” In such things, she could give him orders, or thought she could.

“I’ll worry about whatever I… darn well want to,” he said. He swore like the old soldier he was around everyone else, but tried not to around her. Her disapproving sniffs were too much for him to take. He went on, “Can I still work at my desk, or did it get blown to, uh, smithereens?”

“I’m afraid it did, sir,” Lulu answered. “But everything down below came through just fine.”

Jake made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. He didn’t want to run the war from down in the bomb shelter, even if its air conditioning made it a comfortable place in the hot weather that lay ahead. It felt like being cooped up inside a submarine. Actually, Jake had never been inside a sub, so he couldn’t prove that, but it felt like what he thought being cooped up in one would feel like. And what he wanted to do wasn’t always the same as what he needed to do. The shelter bristled with telephone and wireless links. He could run the war from it. If he didn’t like it-well, too bad. This was war, and people all over the continent were putting up with things they didn’t like.

A young man in a State Department uniform came up to him, waited to be noticed, and then said, “Sir, may I speak to you for a moment?”

“You’re doing it,” Jake told him.

“Er-yes.” For some reason, that flustered the State Department fellow. He needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, “Sir, we’ve heard from the Emperor of Mexico. His Majesty will provide the three divisions you requested.”

“Good. That’s good.” Featherston tried to make his smile benign instead of tigerish. Maximilian hadn’t wanted to cough up the men. Jake had been blunt about what would happen to his miserable gimcrack country-and to him-if he didn’t. Evidently the message had got through. The President went on, “We’ve saved the greasers’ bacon a few times. Only fitting and proper they pay us back.”

“Yes, sir,” the State Department man said. He looked as if he would have been more comfortable in striped trousers and cutaway coat. Too damn bad for him.

“Anything else, sonny?” Jake asked. The puppy shook his head. Featherston jerked a thumb toward the front door, which hadn’t been damaged. “All right, then. Get lost.”

The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department.

Whether he was getting old or not, he still had a war to run. He could do that better than anybody else in the CSA. Better than anybody else in the USA, too, by God, he thought. And those three Mexican divisions would help, especially since, now that Maximilian had agreed once, he’d have a harder time saying no if Jake asked again. And Jake intended to do just that.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull wondered what was going on when he and his aid station got pulled out of their position across the Rapidan from the Wilderness and shifted east. Now he knew: they’d left the frying pan and gone straight into the fire.

Most of the frying was getting done on the other side of the Rappahannock, in and just beyond Fredericksburg. The U.S. Army had battered out a foothold there, as it had in the Wilderness. It was trying to feed in enough men and machines to make the foothold mean something. Whether it could was very much up in the air.

Whether the kid on the table in front of O’Doull would make it was also up in the air. A piece of shrapnel had torn the hell out of his chest. He was bleeding faster than O’Doull could patch him. “Keep pouring in the plasma!” O’Doull barked to Granville McDougald. “Gotta keep his blood pressure up.”

“Pretty soon there won’t be any blood in the pressure,” McDougald said. That exaggerated, but not by much. An awful lot of blood had come out, and an awful lot of plasma had gone in. “Shit!” McDougald exclaimed. “We haven’t got any pressure now!”

“Yeah.” O’Doull had no trouble figuring out why, either-the kid’s heart had stopped. He grabbed it and started cardiac massage. Once in a blue moon, that worked. Most of the time, a heart that stopped would never start again. This was one of those times. After a few minutes, he let it go and shook his head. “We’ve lost him.”

McDougald nodded. “Afraid you’re right. That was a nasty wound. We did everything we could.” He beckoned to a corpsman. “Get him off the table, Eddie. He’s Graves Registrations’ business now.”

“Right, Granny,” Eddie said. “One more Deeply Regrets telegram. One more time when everybody hopes the Western Union delivery boy stops next door.”

The corpse was hardly out of the tent before a groaning sergeant with a shattered knee came in on a stretcher. “Granny, you do this one and I’ll pass gas,” O’Doull said. “You’re neater at orthopedic stuff than I am.”

“I’ve had more practice, Doc, that’s all.” But McDougald sounded pleased. He wasn’t an M.D. despite his vast experience; to have a real doctor defer to him had to make him feel good.

“Gas!” the sergeant said when O’Doull pressed the ether cone down over his nose and mouth. O’Doull had seen that before. He and Eddie kept the wounded man from yanking off the cone till the anesthetic took hold.

Eddie shook his head as the sergeant’s hands finally went limp. “That’s always so much fun,” he said.

“Yeah,” O’Doull agreed. “How’s he look, Granny?”

“It’s a mess in there. Kneecap’s smashed, medial collateral’s cut,” McDougald answered. “Can you get him down a little deeper? I want those leg muscles as relaxed as I can get ’em.”

“Will do.” O’Doull opened the valve on the ether cylinder a little more.

After a minute or so, McDougald gave him a thumbs-up. The medic worked quickly and skillfully, repairing what he could and removing what he couldn’t repair. When he was through, he said, “He’ll never run the mile, but I think he’ll walk… pretty well.”