“How’s that again?” Full of his own gloom, Potter listened to FitzBelmont with half an ear. Jake Featherston was going to come down on him like a thousand-pound bomb. Featherston wouldn’t blame himself for stalling the Confederate project. He never blamed himself for anything. But the Confederacy couldn’t afford the late start. The United States had more scientists and more resources. They had enough left over that they could afford mistakes. Everything had to go right to give the CSA a decent chance to win. For a while, it had. For a while…
“You can delay the U.S. bomb, General,” Henderson V. FitzBelmont said. “If you damage or destroy the facility where the Yankees are working on it, you’ll make them deal with what you’ve done instead of going forward on their own work.”
He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t even slightly wrong. “Son of a bitch,” Potter muttered. The U.S. project was hard for the CSA to reach-way the hell out there in Washington State. Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, he thought bemusedly. The Confederates could figure out how to attack it if they needed to badly enough. The way things looked now, they did.
Potter shook his head. He’d seen the race to the uranium bomb as just that: a race. If the United States started out ahead and ran faster anyhow, what would happen? They’d get to the finish line first. And when they did, Richmond would go up in heat like the center of the sun, and that would be the end of that.
But it wasn’t just a race. It was a war. In a race, you’d get disqualified if you tripped the other guy and threw sand in his eyes. In a war, you might buy yourself the time you needed to catch up and go ahead.
This time, Clarence Potter grabbed FitzBelmont’s hand and pumped it up and down. “Professor, I’m damn glad I called you into Richmond,” he said. “Damn glad!”
“Good,” the physicist said. “As for me, I look forward to returning to my work. As long as I’m here, can I ask you send me, oh, five skilled workers? We’re desperately short of them, and it seems next to impossible to pry the kind of people we need out of war plants.”
“You’ll have ’em, by God,” Potter promised. “Can you tell me who told you no? Whoever it is, he’ll be sorry he was ever born.” Grim anticipation filled his voice.
FitzBelmont reached into the inside pocket of his herringbone jacket. “I have a list right here… No, this is a list of some of the things my wife wants me to shop for while I’m in Richmond.” He frowned, then reached into the other inside pocket. “Ah, here we are.” He handed Potter the list he needed.
“I’ll take care of these folks, Professor. They’ll find out what priority means. You can count on that.” Potter carefully put the list in his wallet. He even more carefully refrained from mentioning, or so much as thinking about, how well FitzBelmont played the role of an absentminded professor.
“Thank you, General. Are we finished?” FitzBelmont asked. When Potter nodded, the physicist got to his feet. He looked around at Capitol Square, sighed, and shook his head. He started off, then stopped and looked back. “Uh, freedom!”
“Freedom!” Potter hated the slogan, but that didn’t matter. In Jake Featherston’s CSA, not responding was inconceivable.
Henderson V. FitzBelmont walked north, toward Ford’s Hotel. Under one name or another, the hotel had stood across the street from Capitol Square since before the War of Secession. Watching the physicist go, Clarence Potter sighed. Anne Colleton always stayed at Ford’s when she came up to Richmond. Potter had stayed there himself, too, but his thoughts were on the South Carolina woman he’d…loved?
He nodded. No other word for it, even if it was a cross-grained, jagged kind of love, and one much marred by politics. She’d backed Jake Featherston when the Freedom Party was only a little cloud on the horizon. Potter laughed. He’d never leaned that way himself. He still didn’t, come to that.
But now Anne was dead, killed in a Yankee air raid on Charleston. One of her brothers got gassed by the Yankees in the Great War, and was murdered at the start of the Red Negro uprising. The other went into Pittsburgh. Tom Colleton wasn’t listed as a POW, so he was probably dead. A whole family destroyed by the USA.
“We need that bomb,” Potter murmured. “Jesus, do we ever.”
“Wow!” George Enos said as the Townsend approached San Diego harbor. “The mainland! I wondered if I’d ever see it again.”
“I’ll kiss the pier when we get off the ship,” Fremont Dalby said. The gun chief added, “Too goddamn many times when I didn’t just wonder if I’d see it again-I was fucking sure I wouldn’t.”
He’d been in the Navy since…Well, not quite since steam replaced sail, but one hell of a long time. He could say something like that without worrying that people might think he was yellow. George couldn’t, which didn’t mean the same thought hadn’t gone through his mind.
Dalby nudged him. “You can hop a train, go on back to Boston, see the wife and kiddies. All you need is a couple-three weeks of liberty, right?” He laughed and laughed.
“Funny,” George said. “Funny like a broken leg.” Nobody was going to get liberty like that. The brass might dole out twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour passes, enough to let sailors from the destroyer sample San Diego’s bars and brothels and tattoo parlors and other dockside attractions. George had never been here in his life, but he was sure they’d be the same as the dives in Boston and Honolulu. Sailors were the same here, weren’t they? As long as they were, the attractions would be, too.
“Hey, nobody’s shooting at us for a little bit,” Fritz Gustafson said. “I’ll take that.” From the loader, it was quite a speech.
“For a while, yeah,” Dalby agreed. “Wonder where we’ll go after they fuel us and get us more ammo and all that good shit? Probably down south against the Mexicans and the Confederates, I guess.”
That sounded like nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work to George. He’d seen enough nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work already. “Maybe they’ll send us up off the Canadian coast, so we can keep the Japs from running guns to the Canucks.”
“Dream on,” Dalby said. “Fuck, if they send us up there, they’ll probably send us to whatever the hell the name of that other place is-you know, with the Russians.”
“Alaska,” Gustafson said.
The CPO nodded. “There you go. That’s it. Nothing but emperors for us. We’ve been messing with the Mikado’s boys for too long. Now we can tangle with the Tsar. And the seas up there are worse than the North Atlantic.”
George started to say that was impossible. He knew the North Atlantic well, and knew how bad it could get. But he’d also rounded Cape Horn. That was worse. Maybe the Pacific was godawful up in the polar-bear country, too.
“Russians hardly give a damn about Alaska anyway,” Fritz Gustafson said.
“Well, Jesus, would you?” Dalby said. “It’s more Siberia. They’ve got enough Siberia already. If somebody ever found gold in it or something, you’d have to remember it was there. Till then? Shit, who cares?”
San Diego wasn’t Honolulu. The weather wasn’t quite perfect. It got cooler at night than it did in the Sandwich Islands. It was just very good. To somebody who’d grown up in Boston, that would do fine.
George sent a telegram to Connie, letting her and the boys know he was all right. The clerk at the Western Union office said, “It may take a while to get there, sir. We still don’t have as many lines as we’d like to carry east-west traffic.” The man, who was more than old enough to be George’s father, held up a hand when he saw him start to get mad. “Don’t blame me, sir. I don’t have anything to do with it. I’m just telling you how things are. You got to blame somebody, go and blame Jake Featherston.”