The ones who had lived through everything wandered around like lost souls. Chester couldn't blame them. How could they rebuild their shattered lives in towns and countrysides where whites had shown they hated them? Chester wouldn't have wanted to try it himself, and he was a middle-aged man with a decent education and a considerable sense of his own worth. What chance did an illiterate sharecropper or his barefoot, maybe pregnant wife have?
While he was wondering about that, a white man in a snappy suit approached him and Hubert Rhodes and said, "Talk to you, Captain?"
"You're doing it," Rhodes said. "What's on your mind?"
"My name is Walker, Nigel R. Walker," the man said. "Up until the surrender, I was mayor of Cheraw. Now there's some foolish difficulty about letting me go back to my proper function in the community."
Rhodes looked at him-looked through him, really. "You were a Party member, weren't you, Mr. Nigel R. Walker?"
"Well, sure," Walker said. "Membership for officials was encouraged-strongly encouraged."
"Then you're out." Rhodes' voice was hard and flat. "No Freedom Party members are going to run things down here any more, and you can take that to the bank. Those are my orders, and I'm going to follow them."
"But you're being unreasonable," Walker protested. "I know of several towns in this state where men with much stronger Party ties than mine are very actively involved in affairs."
Chester knew of towns like that, too. Some occupying officials wanted to put things back together as fast as they could. They grabbed the people who were most likely to be able to do the job. If some of those people had screamed, "Freedom!" for a while, they didn't care. They thought of themselves as efficiency experts. What Chester thought of them wasn't fit to repeat in polite company.
"I know some U.S. officers are skirting those orders," said Captain Rhodes, who felt the same way he did. "And if they can do that with a clear conscience, then they can. I can't. I can't come close. As far as I'm concerned, you disqualified yourself when you joined that pack of murderous goons. Is that plain enough, Mr. Nigel R. Walker, sir, or shall I tell you what I really think of you?"
"I'm going to take my objections to your superiors, Captain." Walker strutted off, his stiff back radiating anger.
Rhodes sighed. "He should have asked Lavochkin-Boris would have plugged him. You see, Chester? He is good for something."
"Damned if you're not right," Martin said. "The nerve of this asshole, though!"
"He was a big fish in a little pond," Rhodes said, and Chester nodded-nothing except possibly the Apocalypse would ever make Cheraw a big pond. Rhodes went on, "He thinks he has the right to go on being a big fish."
"Ought to ship him to one of those camps. That'd teach him more about rights than he ever dreamt of, the fucker," Chester said savagely.
"Yeah." The company commander sighed again. "He may even be a decent guy. For all I know, he is. Plenty of people did join the Party because it was a meal ticket. I've never heard any Negroes claim he was especially bad. But I've never heard 'em say he was especially good, either. To me, that means he's tarred with the Party brush. He might not have done anything much, but he didn't try to stop anything, either. So screw him."
"No, thanks-too damn ugly," Chester said. Rhodes laughed. Chester started thinking of Rita. He'd been a good boy ever since he put the uniform back on, and he knew his right hand better than he'd ever wanted to.
One day followed another. The weather started turning cool and nasty. That was what Chester thought at first, anyhow. Then he realized that, compared to what he would have had to put up with in Toledo, it was pretty damn good. He'd lived in Los Angeles long enough to get spoiled.
He felt more alert now than he had since the very last days of the war. He didn't want to get hurt just when he was about to head home. Well, he didn't want to get hurt any old time, but he especially didn't want to get hurt now. And he knew too well that he could. Cheraw was no more reconciled to the Stars and Stripes than any other part of the dead but still writhing CSA. Locals probed every day to see how much they could get away with. U.S. authorities clamped down hard. That only gave the locals more reasons to hate damnyankees-as if they needed them.
At last, his discharge orders came. So did a travel voucher that would send him up to Philadelphia and then across the country through U.S. territory. He couldn't have been happier: the sooner he left the Confederacy forever, the happier he'd be.
He was painfully hung over when he boarded the northbound train-but not too hung over to notice the machine guns it carried. He hoped it wouldn't have to use them; they might make his head explode. Captain Rhodes and a bunch of guys from his platoon-a lot of them the worse for wear, too-saw him off. Lieutenant Lavochkin didn't. Chester didn't miss him.
Rhodes and the soldiers waved and shouted as the whistle screeched and the train pulled out of Cheraw. "Lucky stiff!" somebody called. Yeah, Chester thought, gulping three aspirins. He was going home.
A bner Dowling knew more about uranium than he'd ever imagined he would. Before the war, he wasn't sure he'd ever heard of the stuff. Oh, maybe in chemistry, back in the dark ages around the turn of the century. Yes, it was an element. So what? You didn't do experiments with it, the way you did with copper and sulfur and things like that.
And he knew about saturnium and jovium, which was what the Confederate physicists called elements 93 and 94. Just to confuse the issue, U.S. scientists had named the same elements neptunium and plutonium. He gathered they had different handles in every country that had found them. Back in the vanished days when he was at West Point, no one had dreamt they existed.
"Boy, I didn't know how obsolete I was till I got here," he complained to Angelo Toricelli. "Most of what I thought I knew turns out not to be so, and stuff I never imagined is what really counts. You can't win."
"Sir, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't learn this stuff in school, either," his adjutant answered.
That did make Dowling feel better. Misery, or at least confusion, loved company. "After they reassign us, you know, they'll have to put permanent bloodhounds on us, to make sure nobody knocks us over the head and hijacks us on account of what we know," he said.
"Maybe, but maybe not," Toricelli said. "I mean, you can bet your bottom dollar that everybody who wants a superbomb either has one by now or is already working on one as hard as he can. What do those people need with us?"
"Go ahead. Be that way!" Dowling said. "But if I catch you talking to a Jap in glasses or a beautiful Russian piano player, you'll be in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, and you'd better believe it."
"I'd like to talk to a beautiful Russian piano player," Toricelli said wistfully. "Hell, I'd like to talk to a beautiful piano player from Seattle."
If you were a career officer, you often didn't have time to find a wife. Dowling never had, and he was far from alone in the fraternity of war. George Custer had made it work-although Dowling often thought George was the steed Libbie rode to glory. Irving Morrell was married, too, and by all accounts happily. It could happen. Odds against it were longer than they were in a lot of trades, though.
"Just as long as you don't say too much to a beautiful piano player from Lexington," Abner Dowling warned.
"I wouldn't do that, sir." His adjutant sounded hurt. "Besides, I haven't seen a gal here I'd want to give the time of day to."
Dowling nodded. "I know what you mean." He didn't suppose Confederates were uglier or handsomer than U.S. citizens, taken all in all. But the war had hit hard here, especially in the last few months, when the USA tried to blast Lexington flat to keep the CSA from building a superbomb. It didn't work, but it did take its toll on the locals. People hereabouts still looked haggard and hungry. The Shenandoah Valley was some of the richest farmland in the world, but it got hit, too…and not so many folks were left to raise crops, either.