Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

"Can't," Kennedy answered.

"Why the hell not?"

"On account of they put a couple of 250-pounders right in the middle of the strip," Kennedy said. "We aren't going anywhere till the 'dozers fill in the holes."

"Oh, for the love of Mike!" Moss said, too disgusted even to swear.

Major Kennedy only shrugged. "Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good. Maybe some of the guys from other fields'll get after their asses."

"Hope somebody's home," Moss said. Most U.S. fighters spent as much time as they could over the corridor the Confederates had carved up through Ohio and Indiana. They'd done all they could to keep the CSA from reaching Lake Erie. They'd done all they could-and it hadn't been enough.

What were they going to do now? Huddled in the trench, Moss had no idea.

Flora Blackford's secretary looked into the office. "Mr. Caesar is here to see you, ma'am," she said, and let out a distinct sniff.

"Send him in, Bertha," Flora answered.

Bertha sniffed again. Flora understood why. It saddened her, but she couldn't do much about it. In came the man who'd waited in the outer office. He was tall and scrawny, and wore a cheap suit that didn't fit him very well. He was also black as the ace of spades, which accounted for Bertha's unhappiness.

"Please to meet you, Mr. Caesar," Flora said. She waved the Negro to a chair. "Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I gather you had quite a time getting to Philadelphia."

"Caesar's not my last name, ma'am, so I don't hardly go by Mister," he said. "It's not my first name, neither. It's just… my name. That's how things is for black folks down in the CSA." He folded himself into the chair. "Gettin' here…? Yes, ma'am. Quite a time is right. Confederate soldiers almost shot me, and then Yankee soldiers almost shot me. But I got captured instead, like I wanted to, and they sent me up here. When they did, I knew you was the one I wanted to see."

"Why?" Flora asked.

"On account of I heard tell of you down in Virginia. You're the one they call, 'the conscience of the Congress,' ain't that right?"

A flush warmed Flora's cheeks. "I don't know that I deserve the name-" she began.

Caesar waved that aside. "You got it. It's yours." He was plainly intelligent, even if his accent tried to obscure that. "Figured if anybody would take me serious, you're the one."

"Take you seriously about what?" Flora asked.

"Ma'am, they are massacrin' us," Caesar answered solemnly. "They got camps in the pinewoods and in the swamps, and black folks goes into 'em by the trainload, and nobody never comes out."

"People have been telling stories like that about the Freedom Party since before it came to power," Flora said. "What proof have you got? Without proof, those stories are worse than useless, because the Confederates can just call us a pack of liars."

"I know that, ma'am. That's how come I had to git myself up here-so I could give you the proof." Caesar set a manila envelope on her desk. "Here."

She opened the envelope. It held fifteen or twenty photographs of varying size and quality. Some showed blacks in rags and in manacles lined up before pits. Others showed piles of corpses in the pits. One or two showed smiling uniformed white men holding guns as they stood on top of the piles of dead bodies. She knew she would remember those small, grainy, cheerful smiles the rest of her life.

She both did and didn't want to look all the way through the photos. They were the most dreadful things she'd ever seen, but they also exerted a horrid, almost magnetic, fascination. Before she saw them, she hadn't dreamt humanity was still capable of such things. This was a sort of education she would rather not have had.

At last, after she didn't know how long, she looked up into Caesar's dark, somber features. "Where did you get these?" she asked, and she could hear how shaken her voice was. "Who took them?"

"I got 'em on account of some folks-colored folks-knew I wanted to prove what people was sayin'," Caesar answered. "We had to do it on the sly. If we didn't, if the Freedom Party found out what we was up to, I reckon somebody else'd take a photo with me in one o' them piles."

"Who did take these?" Flora asked again.

"Some of 'em was took by niggers who snuck out after the shootin' was done," Caesar said. "Some of 'em, though, the guards took their ownselves. Reckon you can cipher out which. Some of the guards down at them places ain't always happy about what they're doin'. Some of 'em, though, they reckon it's the best sport in the world. They bring their cameras along so they can show their wives an' kiddies what big men they are."

He wasn't joking. No one who'd had a look at those photographs could possibly be in any mood to joke. Flora made herself examine them once more. Those white faces kept smiling out of the prints at her. Yes, those men had had a good time doing what they did. How much blood was on their boots? How much was on their hands?

"How did your friends get hold of pictures like this?" she asked.

"Stole 'em," he answered matter-of-factly. "One o' them ofays goes out with a box Brownie every time there's a population reduction, folks notice. Plenty o' niggers cook and clean for the guards. They wouldn't do nigger work their ownselves, after all. They got to be ready to take care o'-that." He pointed to the photos on the desk.

Ofays. Population reduction. Neither was hard to figure out, but neither was part of the English language as it was spoken in the United States. The one, Flora guessed, was part of Confederate Negro slang. The other… The other was more frightening. Even though she heard it in Caesar's mouth, it had to have sprung from some bureaucrat's brain. If you call a thing by a name that doesn't seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic-except it wasn't sympathetic to those who fell victim to it.

Flora shook herself, as if coming out of cold, cold water. "May I keep these?" she asked. "I'm not the only one who'll need to see them, you know."

"Yes, ma'am. I understand that," Caesar said. "You can have 'em, all right. They ain't the only ones there is."

"Thank you," Flora said, though she wished with all her heart that such photographs did not, could not, exist. "Thank you for your courage. I'll do what I can with them."

"That's what I brung 'em for." Caesar got to his feet. "Much obliged. Good luck to you." He dipped his head in an awkward half bow and hurried out of her office with no more farewell than that.

If Flora put the photos back in the manila envelope, her eyes wouldn't keep returning to them. She told her secretary, "Cancel the rest of my appointments for this morning. I have to get over to Powel House right away."

Bertha nodded, but she also let out another sniff. "I don't know why you're getting yourself in an uproar over whatever that… that person told you."

"That's my worry," Flora said crisply. She went outside to flag a cab. Fifteen minutes later, she was at the President's Philadelphia residence. Antiaircraft guns poked their long snouts skyward on the crowded front lawn. They were new. She walked between them on the way to the door.

She was a Congresswoman. She was a former First Lady. She'd known Al Smith for more than twenty-five years, since before she was either. Put that all together, and it got her fifteen minutes with the President after half an hour's wait. When a flunky escorted her into his office, she had to work hard to keep her face from showing shock. Smith hadn't looked well the last time she came here. He looked worse now, much worse. He looked like hell.

He'll never live through this term, Flora thought. She bit her tongue, even though she hadn't said anything at all. "Are you… getting enough sleep, Mr. President?" she asked carefully.