Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Some of the papers Featherston plowed through were damage reports from the western part of the Confederacy. The damnyankees were trying to knock out the dams he’d built on the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers. That infuriated him. It alarmed him, too. The Confederate States needed the electricity those dams produced. It kept factories going. And it changed millions of people’s lives. He was as proud of those dams and what they did as of almost anything else his administration had accomplished.

Almost was the key word there. Ferd Koenig came in a couple of hours later. “Good to see you, by God,” Jake said. “Have a seat.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of fine Tennessee sipping whiskey. “Have a snort.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Koenig took the bottle from him, raised it, swallowed, and passed it back. “Virgin’s milk. The corn that went in there died happy.”

“You better believe it.” Jake swigged, too. Velvet fire ran down his throat. He set the bottle on the desk after one knock. He wanted the taste. He didn’t want to get smashed. “So how’s relocation coming?”

“Tolerable. Better than tolerable, matter of fact,” Koenig answered. “One neighborhood at a time, one town at a time, we clean ’em out. Off they go. They reckon they’re going to camps, and they are. What they don’t reckon on is, they don’t come out again.”

“Towns are all very well. Towns are better than all very well, matter of fact,” Jake said. “But there’s still the core of the cotton country-from South Carolina through Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana. We thinned that out some when we brought in harvesters-got a bunch of niggers off the farms and into towns where we could deal with ’em easier.”

“Got a bunch of ’em with rifles in their hands, too,” Ferdinand Koenig said dryly. “They didn’t have work anymore, so they reckoned they might as well go out and start shooting white folks.”

He wasn’t wrong, but Featherston said, “We had trouble with ’em before that, too,” which was also true. He went on, “That whole goddamn Black Belt’s been up in arms ever since the Great War. Damn Whigs never were able to put it down all the way, and we’ve had our own fun and games with it. Plenty of places down there where it’s never been safe for a white man to go around by himself in broad daylight, let alone after the sun goes down.”

“That’s only part of the problem,” Koenig said. “In towns, you can put barbed wire around the nigger district, and after that you can go in and clean it out one chunk at a time, however you want to. The niggers in the countryside, you can’t cordon ’em off so easy. They just slip away. It’s like trying to scoop up water with a sieve.”

“Gotta keep working on it,” Jake said.

The Attorney General’s jowls wobbled as he nodded. “Oh, hell, I know that,” he said. “But the real trouble is, it takes a lot of manpower, and we haven’t got a lot of people to spare, not the way things are going.”

“I know, I know.” Featherston reached for the whiskey bottle again. More heat trickled down his throat. He’d been so certain he could knock the USA out of the war in a hurry. He’d been so certain-and he’d been so wrong. Soldiers at the front were more important than anything else, even people to help round up the niggers. After yet another swig, he added, “Those trucks that Pinkard came up with can’t handle all the volume we need for this operation, either.”

“They’re the best we’ve got,” Koenig said. “And we don’t have guards eating their guns all the goddamn time anymore, either, the way we did before we started using them.”

“I know that, too, dammit,” Jake said impatiently. “We need something better, though-and no, I don’t know what it is any more than you do. But something. We’ve got to get rid of those niggers in great big old lots.”

“You can figure out damn near anything if you throw enough money and enough smart people at it,” Ferd Koenig observed. “Is this worth throwing ’em at it? Or do we need the people and the money more somewhere else?”

“This is what we spent all that time wandering in the wilderness for,” Jake said, as if he were Moses leading the CSA to the Promised Land. That was exactly how he felt, too. “If we don’t do this, we’re letting the country down.”

“Well, all right.” Koenig nodded again. “I feel the same way, but I needed to make sure you did. We can do that-you know we can. But it’ll likely mean pulling those people and that money away from the war effort.”

“This is the war effort,” Jake Featherston declared. “What else would you call it? This is what counts.” Even as he spoke, he heard the rumble of U.S. artillery fire, not nearly far enough to the north. He nodded anyway. “We clean out the coons, we’ll do something for this country that’ll last till the end of time.”

“All right, then. We’ll tend to it.” Koenig sighed. “I wish we had as many people as the Yankees do. They can afford to keep more balls in the air at the same time than we can.”

“I don’t care about their balls in the air. Those aren’t the ones I aim to kick,” Jake said.

“Heh,” Ferd Koenig said. “Well, I hope we can do it, that’s all.” He was listening to the gunfire from the north, too. He didn’t brush it aside the way Jake did. It worried him, and he made no secret about that, not even to Featherston.

Showing what he thought took nerve. Lesser men had ended up in camps for lesser offenses. But regardless of whether Koenig agreed with Jake’s policies, his personal loyalty was unshakable. Jake could count the people he fully trusted on his fingers-sometimes, on a bad day, on his thumbs-but Ferd always had been, was, and always would be one of them.

“We will.” Featherston retained his conviction in his own destiny. “The show will be starting soon, and we’ll squash ’em flat. You’ll see.”

“Expect I will.” Koenig didn’t say one way or the other. He didn’t even leave it hanging in the air. He believed in Jake’s destiny, too. He’d gone on believing in it through the black years in the middle twenties, when so many others wrote Jake and the Freedom Party off. He asked, “You need me for anything else?”

“Don’t think so,” Jake answered. “But we do need some kind of way to get rid of more niggers faster. You put some bright boys on that and see what they can come up with.”

“Right.” Ferdinand Koenig heaved himself out of his chair and headed for the door. Jake had no idea what he would come up with or even if he would come up with anything, but had no doubt he would look, and look hard. If you looked hard enough, you generally found something.

Muttering, Jake went back to looking through his paperwork. He wished he thought he would find anything else important, or even something interesting, in there. “Fat chance,” he muttered. “Fat fucking chance.” He made sure he kept his voice down; Lulu didn’t like to hear him swear. That didn’t always stop him, but it did a good part of the time.

And then he turned up a report from an outfit called the Huntsville Rocket Society. He wondered how the hell anything that bizarre had made it onto his desk. Then he saw why. The brigadier general in charge of air defense of Alabama and Mississippi endorsed it, writing, However startling these claims sound, I believe they can be made real soon enough to prove useful in the present conflict.

">That made Jake read it more carefully than he would have otherwise. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured halfway through. “ Son of a bitch. Wouldn’t that be something if they could?”