In spite of himself, in spite of his ambassadorial position, Jerry Franklin began yelling. All of a sudden it was too much. It was one thing to shrug your shoulders unhappily back home in the blunted ruins of New York, but here on the spot where the process was actually taking place—no, it was too much.
“What else can we afford to give up? Where else can we retire to? There’s nothing left of the United States of America but a handful of square miles, and still we’re supposed to move back! In the time of my forefathers, we were a great nation, we stretched from ocean to ocean, so say the legends of my people, and now we are huddled in a miserable corner of our land, starving, filthy, sick, dying, and ashamed. In the North, we are oppressed by the Ojibway and the Cree, we are pushed southward relentlessly by the Montaignais; in the South, the Seminole climb up our land yard by yard; and in the West, the Sioux take a piece more of New Jersey, and the Cheyenne come up and nibble yet another slice out of Elmira and Buffalo. When will it stop—where are we to go?”
The old man shifted uncomfortably at the agony in his voice. “It is hard; mind you, I don’t deny that it is hard. But facts are facts, and weaker peoples always go to the wall…Now, as to the rest of your mission. If we don’t retire as you request, you’re supposed to ask for the return of your hostage. Sounds reasonable to me. You ought to get something out of it. However, I can’t for the life of me remember a hostage. Do we have a hostage from you people?”
His head hanging, his body exhausted, Jerry muttered in misery, “Yes. All the Indian nations on our borders have hostages. As earnests of our good will and peaceful intentions.”
Bright Book Jacket snapped his fingers. “That girl. Sarah Cameron—Canton—what’s-her-name.”
Jerry looked up. “Calvin?” he asked. “Could it be Calvin? Sarah Calvin? The Daughter of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court?”
“Sarah Calvin. That’s the one. Been with us for five, six years. You remember, chief? The girl your son’s been playing around with?”
Three Hydrogen Bombs looked amazed. “Is she the hostage? I thought she was some paleface female he had imported from his plantations in southern Ohio. Well, well, well. Makes Much Radiation is just a chip off the old block, no doubt about it.” He became suddenly serious. “But that girl will never go back. She rather goes for Indian loving. Goes for it all the way. And she has the idea that my son will eventually marry her. Or some such.”
He looked Jerry Franklin over. “Tell you what, my boy. Why don’t you wait outside while we talk this over? And take the saber. Take it back with you. My son doesn’t seem to want it.”
Jerry wearily picked up the saber and trudged out of the wigwam.
Dully, uninterestedly, he noticed the band of Sioux warriors around Sam Rutherford and his horses. Then the group parted for a moment, and he saw Sam with a bottle in his hand. Tequila! The damned fool had let the Indians give him tequila—he was drunk as a pig.
Didn’t he know that white men couldn’t drink, didn’t dare drink? With every inch of their unthreatened arable land under cultivation for foodstuffs, they were all still on the edge of starvation. There was absolutely no room in their economy for such luxuries as intoxicating beverages—and no white man in the usual course of a lifetime got close to so much as a glassful of the stuff. Give him a whole bottle of tequila and he was a stinking mess.
As Sam was now. He staggered back and forth in dipping semicircles, holding the bottle by its neck and waving it idiotically. The Sioux chuckled, dug each other in the ribs and pointed. Sam vomited loosely down the rags upon his chest and belly, tried to take one more drink, and fell over backwards. The bottle continued to pour over his face until it was empty. He was snoring loudly. The Sioux shook their heads, made grimaces of distaste, and walked away.
Jerry looked on and nursed the pain in his heart. Where could they go? What could they do? And what difference did it make? Might as well be as drunk as Sammy there. At least you wouldn’t be able to feel.
He looked at the saber in one hand, the bright new pistol in the other. Logically, he should throw them away. Wasn’t it ridiculous when you came right down to it, wasn’t it pathetic—a white man carrying weapons?
Sylvester Thomas came out of the tent. “Get your horses ready, my dear sir,” he whispered. “Be prepared to ride as soon as I come back. Hurry!”
The young man slouched over to the horses and followed instructions—might as well do that as anything else. Ride where? Do what?
He lifted Sam Rutherford up and tied him upon his horse. Go back home? Back to the great, the powerful, the respected capital of what had once been the United States of America?
Thomas came back with a bound and gagged girl in his grasp. She wriggled madly. Her eyes crackled with anger and rebellion. She kept trying to kick the Confederate Ambassador.
She wore the rich robes of an Indian princess. Her hair was braided in the style currently fashionable among Sioux women. And her face had been stained carefully with some darkish dye.
Sarah Calvin. The daughter of the Chief Justice. They tied her to the pack horse.
“Chief Three Hydrogen Bombs,” the Negro explained. “He feels his son plays around too much with paleface females. He wants this one out of the way. The boy has to settle down, prepare for the responsibilities of chieftainship. This may help. And listen, the old man likes you. He told me to tell you something.”
“I’m grateful. I’m grateful for every favor, no matter how small, how humiliating.”
Sylvester Thomas shook his head decisively. “Don’t be bitter, young sir. If you want to go on living you have to be alert. And you can’t be alert and bitter at the same time. The Chief wants you to know there’s no point in your going home. He couldn’t say it openly in council, but the reason the Sioux moved in on Trenton has nothing to do with the Seminole on the other side. It has to do with the Ojibway-Cree-Montaignais situation in the North. They’ve decided to take over the Eastern Seaboard—that includes what’s left of your country. By this time, they’re probably in Yonkers or the Bronx, somewhere inside New York City. In a matter of hours, your government will no longer be in existence. The Chief had advance word of this and felt it necessary for the Sioux to establish some sort of bridgehead on the coast before matters were permanently stabilized. By occupying New Jersey, he is preventing an Ojibway-Seminole junction. But he likes you, as I said, and wants you warned against going home.”
“Fine, but where do I go? Up a rain cloud? Down a well?”
“No,” Thomas admitted without smiling. He hoisted Jerry up on his horse. “You might come back with me to the Confederacy—” He paused, and when Jerry’s sullen expression did not change, he went on, “Well, then, may I suggest—and mind you, this is my advice, not the Chief’s—head straight out to Asbury Park. It’s not far away—you can make it in reasonable time if you ride hard. According to reports I’ve overheard, there should be units of the United States Navy there, the Tenth Fleet, to be exact.”
“Tell me,” Jerry asked, bending down. “Have you heard any other news? Anything about the rest of the world? How has it been with those people—the Russkies, the Sovietskis, whatever they were called—the ones the United States had so much to do with years and years ago?”