Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

"Amen," said somebody behind her. Half a dozen other people rumbled agreement.

She guessed they were damning him for bombing Philadelphia and routing them out of bed again. She damned Featherston for that, too. But she had bigger reasons. She damned the President of the CSA for murdering hope. In the time the Socialists held the Presidency of the USA after the Great War, they'd been reluctant to spend money on weapons. They'd thought the world had learned its lesson, and that nobody would try to kill anybody any more any time soon. Better to set things to rights inside the United States than to flabble about the Confederate States.

After all, the CSA had suffered even more than the USA in the Great War. The Confederates wouldn't want to risk that again, would they? Of course not! You'd have to be a madman to want to put your country through another round of torment.

As long as the Whigs ruled in Richmond, cool heads prevailed. The Whigs did what they could to rebuild. The Confederate States enjoyed a modest prosperity. The United States weren't sorry to see that prosperity-or its modesty. The Freedom Party howled outside the door, but who was mad enough to invite it in?

Then came the worldwide collapse. Where cool heads had failed, hotheads prevailed. No one in the USA had imagined Featherston could actually win an election. Flora knew she hadn't. The very idea had struck her as meshuggeh.

But, crazy or not, Featherston had gone about doing what he'd promised all along he would: getting even. If anyone in power in the USA had believed he would be giving orders one day, War Department budgets would have looked different through the 1920s.

A few Democrats had screamed bloody murder about the way the budgets looked. They'd proved right, even if some of their own party reckoned them reactionaries at the time. They had been reactionaries. Some of them, crowing on the floor of Congress now, were still reactionaries, and proud of it. But even reactionaries could be right once in a while. After all, a stopped clock was right twice a day.

Those Democrats, damn them, had picked something important to be right about. Flora hated admitting they had been right all the more because she thought them wrong about so many other things.

She'd been wrong here. She hated admitting that, too. She'd done it, though. It hadn't won her much respect from the Democrats. She hadn't expected it to.

"I think the AA is hotter than it was when the war started," Joshua said, bringing her back to the here and now.

"Maybe you're right," she said. "I hope you are."

"I'm not sure I hope I am," her son answered. "If the Confederates get shot at more, they won't hit their targets so much."

"That's good, isn't it?" Flora said.

Joshua shrugged. "Well, maybe. But if they don't hit their targets, they'd want to hit something before they get out of here. That means they're liable to drop their bombs any old place."

"Oh, joy," Flora said.

Not far away, a man muttered, "Oh, shit," which amounted to the same thing.

Flora had already accused her son of belonging to the General Staff. He got proved right here with alarming speed. A stick of bombs came down right in the neighborhood. Flora didn't know all that much about earthquakes, but this felt the way she imagined an earthquake would. She cast a frightened eye at the ceiling, wondering if it would stay up.

It did. The lights went out for a couple of minutes, but then they came back on. Everybody in the cellar let out a sigh of relief when they returned. "Isn't this fun?" a woman said. Several people laughed. With a choice between laughing and shrieking, laughing was better.

After that, the bombs hit farther away. The Confederate bombers lingered over Philadelphia for more than an hour. Their bases weren't far away. Antiaircraft guns and searchlights and fighters hunting through the black skies of night were not enough to drive them off or even to slow them down very much. Every so often, one or two of them would crash in flames. What was that, though, but the cost of doing business?

The all-clear sounded. Yawning and sleepily cursing the Confederates, people went up to their flats. The air in the stairwell smelled of sweat and smoke.

Fire-engine sirens wailed, some nearer, some farther away. Flora had just opened the door to the flat she shared with Joshua when a big boom only a few blocks away made things shake all over again. "That was a bomb!" she said indignantly. "But the Confederates went away."

"Time fuse." Her son's voice was wise. "That way, people and stuff come close, and then it blows up." He did his teenaged best to sound reassuring: "Don't worry, Mom. We've got 'em, too."

"Oh, joy," Flora said again, in the same tone and with the same meaning as she'd used down in the cellar. Wasn't that a lovely piece of human ingenuity? It lay there quietly to lure more victims into the neighborhood, then slaughtered them. And the USA and CSA both used such things. Whoever had invented them had probably got a bonus for his talents.

She would have liked to give him what he really deserved. The Geneva Convention probably outlawed that, though.

Lying down, she looked at the alarm clock's luminous dial, the only light in the bedroom. Half past three. She said something more pungent than Oh, joy under her breath. It could have been worse. She knew that. It could have been better, too.

She yawned and stretched and tried to get comfortable and also tried to free her mind from the fear she'd known. That wasn't easy. She looked at the alarm clock again-3:35 now. Why did the dots by the numbers and the lines on the hour and minute hands glow? Radium-she knew that. But why did radium glow? Because it did; that was all she knew. Somewhere, there were probably scientists who could give a better explanation. She hoped so, anyhow.

She yawned again. Somewhat to her surprise, she did fall back to sleep. More often than not, she couldn't. She wasn't the only one doing without, either. Half the people in Philadelphia seemed to be stumbling around with bags under their eyes these days. If the Confederates cut off coffee imports, the city would be in a bad way.

When the alarm went off not quite three hours later, she felt as if another bomb had exploded beside her head. The first time she tried to make it shut up, she missed. The second time, she succeeded. Yawning blearily, she got out of bed.

Coffee, for the time being, she had. She made herself a pot. Joshua's snores punctuated the wet blup-blup of the percolator. He didn't have school and he didn't have a job. He could sleep as long as he wanted. Flora marveled at that as she fried eggs to go with the coffee. Sleep as long as you wanted? Till Joshua, no one in her family had ever been able to do that. What else could more clearly mark an escape from the proletariat?

She dressed, went downstairs, and hailed a cab. The driver was a man with a gray mustache and only two fingers on his left hand. "Congress," she told him.

"Yes, ma'am," he answered, and put the elderly Buick in gear. "You a Congressman's wife, ma'am?"

"No," Flora said. "I'm a Congresswoman."

"Oh." The cabby drove on for a little while. Then he said, "Guess I just killed my tip." Flora said neither yes nor no, though the same thought had crossed her mind. The driver went on, "Any way you can make 'em pass a law to get me back into the Army? I can still shoot in spite of this." He held up his mutilated hand. "Stinking recruiting sergeants just laugh at me, though."

"I'm sorry," Flora told him. "I can't do much about that. The Army knows what it needs." There was something strange for a Socialist to say. It was true all the same, though. They rode the rest of the way into downtown Philadelphia in glum silence.

Every day, Flora saw more damage to the city where she'd lived the second half of her life. A woman sat on the sidewalk with three little children and a dog. The children clung to odds and ends of property-shoes, framed pictures, and, ridiculously, a fancy china teapot. Flora knew what that meant: they'd lost everything else. They weren't the only ones, or anything close to it.