Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

The obvious. And maybe, maybe, the not so obvious. Instead of sitting down at his desk, Pinkard started pacing around it. After half a dozen revolutions, he paused, an unaccustomed look of wonder spreading across his fleshy face. "Well, fuck me!" he exclaimed. "Maybe I am a genius."

If he was, he needed something to prove his genius on. He hurried out of the office again. To his relief, not all the trucks had left. He kept one of them and sent the driver back with a pal. When the man squawked, Pinkard said, "You tell your boss to give me a call. I'll square it with him-you bet I will." The driver grumbled some more, but Jeff had the bulge to get away with it.

"What's going on?" Mercer Scott asked, attracted by the argument.

"Need me a truck," Jeff answered.

Scott scratched his head. "How come?"

"You'll see," was all Pinkard said. If this worked, it was his baby. If it didn't work, he'd have to fix it up with the fellow from whose bailiwick he'd lifted the truck. He figured he could. One truck and one miffed driver were small change in the bureaucratic skirmishes that ate so much of his life these days. He clapped Scott on the back. "I'm going into town for a little while. Try not to let the niggers steal this place or burn it down while I'm gone, all right?"

Scott staring after him, he drove the truck into Alexandria. He was glad traffic was light. He'd never tried handling anything so big, and he wasn't used to a gearshift with five forward speeds instead of the usual three. But he didn't hit anything, and he wasn't grinding the gears when he shifted nearly so much by the time he got where he was going: a garage named Halliday's, on the outskirts of town.

Stuart Halliday was a compact man with battered, clever hands. "What can I do for you, buddy?" he asked when Jeff descended from the truck.

Jeff told him what he wanted, finishing, "Can you handle it?"

The mechanic rubbed his chin. "Sheet metal all the way around there… Gasketing on the doors…"

"Gotta be sturdy sheet metal," Pinkard said.

"Yeah, I heard you." Halliday thought for a little while, then nodded. "Yeah, I can do it. Set you back two hundred and fifty bucks."

"I'll give you one seventy-five," Jeff said. They haggled good-naturedly for a little while before settling on two and a quarter. Jeff asked, "How soon can you let me have it?"

"Be about a week." Halliday sent Pinkard a curious look. "What the hell you want it like that for?"

"Camp business," Jeff answered. If the snoopy garage man couldn't work it out for himself, that was all to the good. Then Pinkard coughed. In all of this, he hadn't figured in one thing. "Uh-you give me a lift back to camp?"

Halliday carefully didn't smile. "Why, sure."

When Jeff came back without the truck, Mercer Scott sent him a stare full of hard suspicion. He didn't care. He knew what he was doing, or thought he did. Over the week, while Halliday was overhauling the truck, he made a few preparations of his own. Till he saw how this would go, he intended to play his cards close to his chest.

He paid Halliday when the mechanic delivered the revised and edited machine. He used camp money. If the thing didn't work, he'd pay it back out of his own pocket. Halliday stuffed brown banknotes into his coveralls. "I left that one hole, like you said," he told Jeff. "I don't understand it, not when the rest is pretty much airtight, but I did it."

"You got paid for doin' the work," Jeff answered. "You didn't get paid for understanding."

One of Halliday's kids drove him away from Camp Dependable. Unlike Jeff, he'd thought ahead. After he was gone, Jeff did some of his own work on the truck. He drew a small crowd of guards. Most of them hung around for a while, then went off shrugging and shaking their heads.

Mercer Scott watched like a hawk. Suddenly, he exclaimed, "You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! You reckon it'll work?"

Pinkard looked up from fitting a length of pipe to the hole that had puzzled Stuart Halliday. "I don't know," he said, "but I aim to find out."

"Chick Blades ought to get a promotion for giving you the idea," Scott said. "Goddamn shame he's too dead to appreciate it."

"Yeah." Jeff examined his handiwork. Slowly, he nodded to himself. "That ought to do it. Now I'll just announce a transfer to another camp…"

Getting Negroes to volunteer to hop into the truck was so easy, it almost embarrassed him. The hardest part was picking and choosing among them. They knew that when they got shackled together and marched out into the swamp, they weren't coming back. But a transfer to another camp had to be an improvement. Maybe there wouldn't be population reductions somewhere else.

Pinkard drove the truck himself that first time. It was his baby. He wanted to see how it went. He closed the gasketed doors behind the Negroes who'd got in. The lock and bar to keep those doors closed were good and solid. Halliday hadn't skimped. Jeff would have skinned the mechanic alive if he had.

He started up the engine and drove out of camp. It wasn't long before the Negroes realized exhaust fumes were filling their compartment. They started shouting-screaming-and pounding on the metal walls. Jeff drove and drove. After a while, the screams subsided and the pounding stopped. He drove a little longer after that, just to be on the safe side.

When he was satisfied things had worked out the way he'd hoped, he took a road that the prisoners had built into the swamp. Mercer Scott and half a dozen guards waited at the end of it. Jeff got out of the cab and walked around to the back of the truck. "Well, let's see what we've got," he said, and opened the rear doors.

"By God, you did it," Scott said.

The Negroes inside were dead, asphyxiated. All the guards had to do was take them out and throw them in a hole in the ground. Well, almost all. One of the men held his nose and said, "Have to hose it down in there before you use it again."

"Reckon you're right," Jeff said. But he was just about happy enough to dance a jig. No fuss, no muss-well, not too much-no bother. Guards wouldn't have to pull the trigger again and again and again. They wouldn't have to see what they were doing at all. They'd just have to… drive.

And, best of all, the Negroes inside Camp Dependable wouldn't know what was happening. Their pals who got in the truck were going to another camp, weren't they? Sure they were. Nobody expected them to come back.

Mercer Scott came up and set a hand on Pinkard's shoulder. "You know how jealous I am of you? You got any idea? Christ, I'd've given my left nut to come up with something so fine."

"It really did work, didn't it?" Jeff said. "You know what? I reckon maybe I will try and bump poor Chick up a grade or two. It'd make his missus' pension a little bigger."

Scott gave him a sly look. "She'd be right grateful for that. Not a bad-lookin' woman, not a bit. Maybe I oughta be jealous of you twice."

Jeff hadn't thought of it like that. Now that he did, he found himself nodding. She'd been haggard and in shock at the funeral, but still… Business first, though. "Other thing I'm gonna do," he said, "is I'm gonna call Richmond, let 'em know about this. They been tellin' me stuff all along. By God, it's my turn now."

Ferdinand Koenig strode into Jake Featherston's office in the Gray House. The Attorney General was a big, bald, burly man with a surprisingly light, high voice. "Good to see you, Ferd. Always good to see you," Jake said, and stuck out his hand. Koenig squeezed it. They went back to the very beginnings of the Freedom Party. Koenig had backed Jake at the crucial meeting that turned it into his party. He came as close to being a friend as any man breathing; Jake had meant every word of his greeting. Now he asked, "What's on your mind?"

"Head of one of the camps out in Louisiana, fellow named Pinkard, had himself a hell of a good idea," Koenig said.