Drive to the East (38 page)

Professor FitzBelmont studied him, perhaps seeing the man instead of the uniform this time. “Maybe,” he said at last.

“
Maybe
isn’t the right answer, Professor,” Clarence Potter said gently. “You can talk to me now, or you can have some less pleasant conversations with some much less pleasant people later on. Your call, either way.”

FitzBelmont didn’t try to misunderstand him. The physics professor did try to get huffy. “This is not the right way to get my cooperation, General. And if I don’t work with you wholeheartedly, how will you go forward?”

Potter’s smile, all sharp teeth, might have been borrowed from a gator. He named four physics profs at universities scattered across the CSA. Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked appalled. Still smiling carnivorously, Potter said, “Give me credit for doing my homework, please. If you were the only fellow in the country who could do this work, we couldn’t compete with the Yankees anyhow, because they have so much more manpower than we do—and that includes trained manpower along with every other kind. You may be important, Professor—you
are
important—but you’re not indispensable, and you’d better get used to it.”

Plainly, FitzBelmont wanted to be indispensable. How many years had he been the next thing to invisible? A lot, no doubt—who paid attention to a bespectacled physics professor? Well, important would damn well have to do. With a sigh, FitzBelmont said, “Tell me what you already know.”

“There are two kinds of uranium. U-235 will go boom. U-238 won’t, but maybe, if you do things to it, it will turn into something else that will go boom. I don’t quite follow that part. It seems like magic. But anyway, most of the uranium is 238, and it’s going to be harder than hell to separate the 235 out of it.” Potter paused. “How am I doing?”

“You’ll never make a physicist,” Professor FitzBelmont said.

“I don’t want to be a physicist. That’s your job,” Potter said. “I want to know enough to be able to do
my
job. Tell me what my people need to look for to tell whether the damnyankees are separating 235 from 238, or if they’re doing this other stuff with 238 to make it go boom.”

He’d asked FitzBelmont the same thing when he first walked into the professor’s office. If FitzBelmont had started talking then, he could have saved both of them some time. Potter approved of saving time wherever he could. Some people, though, had to work up to things by easy stages.

Potter had done more homework than he’d shown the physics professor; he believed in keeping a couple of hole cards hidden. All the same, once FitzBelmont did start talking he had a hard time keeping up. Gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, centrifuges . . .

Those were complicated enough, but what FitzBelmont called an atomic engine was worse. “Wait a minute,” Potter protested. “You really change the U-238 into another element?”

“That’s right.” FitzBelmont nodded.

“When I went to Yale back before the last war, my chemistry professor told us transmutation was impossible,” Potter said.

“So
that’s
why you talk the way you do,” Henderson FitzBelmont murmured. He shrugged narrow shoulders and went on, “Your chemistry professor was right, in a way. You can’t transmute elements chemically. Chemistry only has to do with the electrons around the nucleus. Change the nucleus, though, and you change the atom. And nuclear processes are much more energetic than chemical ones.”

“Do you have any idea how long it will take us or the Yankees to get the 235 for a bomb or to get one of your atomic engines going?” Potter asked. “Can we do it in this war? Can they?”

“Turning theory into engineering is never simple,” FitzBelmont said. “The researchers in the USA must think they can do it fast, or they wouldn’t be putting so much effort into it. And who knows where the Germans are? They were the ones who discovered uranium fission in the first place, after all.”

“Are England and France working on this stuff, too?” Potter asked.

“I’d be amazed if they weren’t. They have some talented people—more than we do, probably.” The parenthetical phrase, while true, plainly made Professor FitzBelmont unhappy. It made Clarence Potter unhappy, too. It was true in more areas than nuclear physics. The Confederacy’s biggest problem had always been doing all the things it needed to do with the number of white men it had to do them. Doing all of them had proved beyond its ability in the Great War. Potter had to hope it wouldn’t this time around.

That one of the things the CSA’s whites had to do was hold down the country’s blacks made things no easier. The Freedom Party’s determination to settle that mess once and for all helped justify its rule in Potter’s eyes. If whites didn’t have to worry about niggers, they could get on with the serious business of building the country they should have had from the beginning.

Incorporating blacks into the pool of trained manpower would also have reduced the drain on whites and on the CSA generally, but it never once crossed Clarence Potter’s mind—or those of any other whites in the Confederate States. They’d experimented with colored soldiers in the Great War . . . and some of those men, who’d learned what fighting was about, remained in arms against the CSA even now. No one in authority would make that mistake again.

Potter pulled his thoughts back to the business at hand. “You don’t know for a fact what the British and French are up to?”

“I’m afraid not.” FitzBelmont shook his head. “Whatever it is, they’ll be keeping it secret, too.”

“I suppose so.” Potter hesitated, then asked, “Are they likely to be ahead of us? If we get hold of them about it, will they be able to give us information that would help us move faster?”

“It’s possible, certainly. I don’t know how probable it is.”

“Have to find out.” Potter wrote himself a note. He wondered whether the British and French
would
help the Confederacy. They’d always looked on the CSA as a poor relation, a tool to keep the United States weak but never more than a local power. But if the Confederate States had this superbomb, they wouldn’t be a local power anymore. “One more question, Professor: do you think the Germans are helping the United States?”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked at him over the tops of those gold-framed spectacles. “You are the Intelligence officer, General. Surely you would know better than I.”

So there,
Potter thought. The truth was, he had no idea. He didn’t think anyone in the CSA did. You couldn’t find an answer if you didn’t know you should be asking the question.

Glancing at his watch, FitzBelmont said, “Is there anything else? I have to go to class in a few minutes. Some of the people I’m teaching will probably be working with me when we start real work on this—if we do.”

“Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that, Professor,” Potter said. “If the damnyankees are going full speed ahead on this, we will be, too. We can’t afford not to, can we?” He imagined superbombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans off the map. Then he imagined them coming down on Philadelphia and New York City and Boston instead. He liked that
much
better.

C
leveland was a mess. Tom Colleton had been sure it would be a mess before his regiment got into the city. Built-up terrain was bad for barrels—too many places to ambush them. Machine-gun nests cut into the firepower edge his men had over their U.S. opponents. This was Great War fighting: block to block and house to house. It wasn’t the way the Confederates had wanted to fight this war.

Sometimes, though, you had no choice. Leaving Cleveland and its harbor untaken would have asked for worse trouble than slugging it out in the wreckage. A U.S. landing and a thrust south from the city would have played merry hell with supply lines. Meanwhile, though, a lot of good men were dying.

The only good news was that the damnyankees didn’t have as many men in the city as they might have. They’d weakened their defenses to put as much as they could into Virginia, and not all the men who’d gone were back. That let the Confederates keep pushing forward despite casualties. A lot of the big steel mills and refineries on the Flats by the lake, structures that could have turned into formidable fortresses, had already fallen. The Confederate advance had touched the Cuyahoga in a couple of places, but the men in butternut didn’t yet own bridgeheads on the east bank of the river.

Above the city, Confederate Hound Dogs and U.S. Wright fighters wrestled in the sky. When the Hound Dogs had the edge, Mule dive bombers screamed down to pound U.S. ground positions. When the Wrights gained the upper hand, they shot down the Asskickers before the bombers could deliver the goods.

Right now, the Confederates were on top in the air war. Maybe C.S. bombers had hit airstrips farther east, so U.S. fighters had trouble getting off the ground. Whatever the reason, Asskickers smashed U.S. positions that even barrels couldn’t take out. Antiaircraft fire was heavy, but antiaircraft fire was only a nuisance. Fighters were a Mule pilot’s great fear.

All the bridges over the Cuyahoga were down. Tom Colleton wondered if any bridges in the USA and the CSA
didn’t
have demolition charges, ready to go up at a moment’s notice. He wouldn’t have bet on it.

“Sir!” A runner came back from the line, a couple of hundred yards ahead. “Sir, looks like the damnyankees are pulling back. That machine gun that was givin’ us hell—it ain’t there no more.”

“No?” Tom’s suspicions roused before his eagerness. That was natural in anyone who’d seen more than a little war. “All right,” he said at last. “Send a patrol forward.
Only
a patrol, you hear me? They’re liable to be setting up to bushwhack us if we get too happy.”

“Yes, sir. Send a patrol forward.” The soldier started forward himself. He ran hunched over, dodging from cover to cover. Any runner who lasted more than twenty minutes learned that gait. Odds were it just put off the inevitable. Few runners were likely to last out the war.

Tom waited. He ordered the regimental reserve up closer to the front. If the U.S. soldiers truly had retreated, he wanted to be in position to take advantage of it. If they hadn’t . . . Well, the patrol would find out if they hadn’t.

The runner came back again. “Sir, they’re really gone,” he reported. “We’re moving up till we bump into ’em again.”

“Good. That’s good,” Tom said. His company commanders were up to snuff. They could see what needed doing without his telling them. He would have been angry if they’d waited for orders before advancing. He turned to his wireless man. “Get back to Division—let ’em know we’re up in square Blue-7.”

“Blue-7. Yes, sir,” the wireless man answered. When the next artillery duel started, Tom didn’t want his own side’s shells coming down on his men’s heads. Some would anyway—some always did. But there wouldn’t be so many if the gunners knew where his soldiers were.

Corpsmen wearing white smocks with the Red Cross on chest and back and helmets with the emblem painted in a white circle carried the wounded back to aid stations. “You’ll be fine,” Tom said more than once, and always hoped he wasn’t lying.

One of the injured men wore green-gray, not butternut. The corpsmen had no doubt risked their lives to bring in the Yankee. Nobody was supposed to shoot at them, but accidents—and artillery, which didn’t discriminate—happened. To be fair, U.S. medics did the same for wounded Confederates. The Geneva Convention was worth something, anyhow.

Geneva Convention or not, the smell of death filled Tom Colleton’s nostrils. So did the other stenches of war: cordite and shit and blood and fear. Just getting a whiff of that sharp, sour tang made him want to be afraid, too. It struck at an animal level, far below conscious thought.

Confederate artillery might have spared his men, but gunners in green-gray didn’t. Some of the shells gurgled as they flew through the air. Some of the bursts sounded . . . odd. Colleton swore. He knew what that meant. He’d known since 1915. “Gas!” he shouted, and yanked his mask out of the pouch on his belt. He pulled it on and made sure it fit snugly. “Gas!” he yelled again. This time, the mask muffled the word.

Others, though, were also taking up the cry. Somebody was beating on an empty shell casing with a wrench. The clatter penetrated the din of combat better than most other noises.

It was a hot, sticky summer day in Cleveland. It was, in fact, as hot and sticky as it ever got down in St. Matthews, South Carolina. The damnyankees had nastier winters than the Confederacy ever got, but their summers were no milder. As far as he could see, that meant they got the worst of both worlds.

Even without the mask, he didn’t feel as if he were getting enough air. With it, he might as well have been trying to breathe underwater. One of the gases the Yankees used could kill if a drop of it got on your skin. People were issued rubberized suits to protect them from the menace. Tom had never ordered his men to wear those suits. He didn’t know anybody who had. Especially in this weather, moving around in them steamed you in your own juices. Soldiers preferred risking the gas to dying of heat exhaustion, which more than a few of them had done.

He swore. The mask muffled the curses, too. Trust the high foreheads to come up with protection that made danger seem welcome by comparison. If that wasn’t a metaphor for the futility of war in general . . .

But this war in particular had better not be futile, not for the CSA. “Tell Division we need counterbattery fire, and we need it ten minutes ago!” he shouted to the wireless operator.

For a wonder, the Confederate guns woke up in short order. Some of what they threw at the Yankees was gas, too. Even when the shells flew by far overhead, you could hear the stuff sloshing inside them. Tom laughed. If anything was worse than being an infantryman under gas attack, it was trying to jerk shells with a gas mask on.
Serves you right, you bastards,
he thought savagely.
See how you like it.

The U.S. bombardment slackened but didn’t stop. Then a flight of Mules swooped down on the Yankee gun positions. One of the Asskickers crashed in flames. Maybe it got hit; maybe the pilot didn’t pull out of his dive soon enough. What difference did it make, one way or the other? But the dive bombers did a better job of silencing the artillery than counterbattery fire had.