The Victorious Opposition (39 page)

“I take it back. Let me have another drink,” Morrell said suddenly.

Aristotle fixed it for him. “On the house, suh,” he said. “You done set my mind at ease, and I’m right grateful.”

“Thanks.” Morrell felt guilty about taking the free drink, but couldn’t insist on paying without making the barkeep worry again. Morrell was worried himself. If the northern border of the Confederate States returned to the Ohio River, why had so many soldiers from the United States died to push that frontier south? What had they died for? Anything at all? Morrell couldn’t see it.

But if President Smith let a plebiscite go forward, Houston, Sequoyah, and Kentucky would all vote to return to the CSA. Morrell was sure of that. And if Smith didn’t let the plebiscite go forward, Jake Featherston could cuss him up one side and down the other for trampling on those wonderful things, democracy and self-determination.

Featherston had done some trampling on them himself, but not that much. He might well have won a completely honest election, and Morrell was painfully aware of it. (That Featherston had triumphed in elections with a third of his country’s population disenfranchised never once crossed Morrell’s mind. Negroes were politically invisible to him, as they were to most whites in the USA.)

Morrell swallowed his guilt and his worries along with the free drink. Then he left the officers’ club. Fences and sandbags guarded against snipers as he made his way to Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He was sick of BOQ, but he didn’t intend to bring Agnes and Mildred down from Fort Leavenworth. He got paid to risk his life for his country. The people he loved didn’t.

More sandbags and barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements protected the barrels outside of Lubbock. Morrell went out to them early the next morning. A few enthusiastic Houstonians had tried to sneak in and sabotage them in spite of the defenses. The locals’ next of kin were surely most unhappy. The would-be saboteurs themselves no longer cared one way or the other. But no one had ever caught the enterprising fellows who’d lobbed mortar rounds into the U.S. encampment from somewhere inside Lubbock. Large rewards for their capture had been highly publicized, but nobody in Houston seemed interested in collecting that kind of reward.

Crewmen started showing up only a couple of minutes after Morrell got to the barrel park. “Good morning, sir,” Sergeant Michael Pound said. “I thought I’d beat you here.”

Sometimes he did, which annoyed Morrell. “Not today,” he answered. “I spent too much of last night thinking about the way things look.”

Pound shook his head. “You’re braver than I am, sir. That’s a dangerous thing to do these days.”

“What would you do if you were king?” Morrell asked, interested to see what the sergeant would come up with.

“Abdicate,” Pound said at once, which jerked a laugh out of him. The underofficer went on, “It’s a lousy time to be a king, sir. All these damned democrats around—small-
d
, of course. But if I had my druthers, I’d smash the Confederate States now, before Jake Featherston uses our own better instincts to steal territory from us that we really ought to keep . . . and before he starts building barrels the way he’s building tractors these days.”

That marched much too well with what Morrell was thinking—right down to the remark about tractors. A factory that turned out engines or caterpillar treads for one type of vehicle wouldn’t have much trouble converting to make parts for another type.

Before long, a squad of three barrels was rumbling through the streets of Lubbock.
YANKEES GO HOME!
was amongst the mildest of the graffiti on the walls these days. So was
FREEDOM!
A lot of messages told what the scribblers wanted to do with everyone in the state government of Houston who didn’t belong to the Freedom Party. Morrell had seen a good deal in his time. Some of those suggestions sickened him.

Freedom Party banners flew everywhere. The reversed-color C.S. battle flag was legal, being the symbol of a political party like the Socialists’ red flag and the Democrats’ donkey. Morrell thought Socialist Al Smith was a donkey to let that inflammatory flag fly here, but Smith did.
Featherston uses our own better instincts to steal from us.
Michael Pound’s words came back uncomfortably.

And then a middle-aged man on the street pulled out a pistol and fired at Morrell, who as usual rode with his head and shoulders and upper torso out of the cupola so he could get a better look at what was going on. The bullet clanged off the barrel’s armor plate. Morrell ducked. The turret machine gun of the barrel behind him chattered. When Morrell stood straight again a moment later, he had his own .45 out and ready.

No need. The shooter was down in a pool of blood, the pistol still in his outstretched hand. A man and a woman who’d been near him were down, too, the man writhing and howling, the woman very still, her skirt flipped up carelessly over one gartered thigh. Plainly, she wouldn’t rise again.

Screams filled the air after the gunfire stopped. People who’d thrown themselves flat when it started now cautiously got to their feet. A woman looked from the corpse of the man who’d tried to plug Morrell to him, then back again. She pointed a red-nailed finger at the U.S. officer in the barrel and shrieked one word: “Murderer!”

J
onathan Moss pushed the stick forward. The nose of the Wright 27 went down. He opened the throttle. The fighter dove like a stooping hawk—dove faster than any hawk dreamt of flying. Acceleration shoved him back in the seat. He eyed the airspeed indicator with something like awe—320, now 330! That was easily three times as fast as a Great War fighting scout could have flown, and he wasn’t giving the aeroplane everything it had.

He watched the altimeter unwind at an awesome rate, too.
If I don’t pull up pretty soon, I’m going to make a big hole in the ground. Major Finley won’t be very happy with me if I do that. Neither will Laura.

Reluctantly, he pulled back on the stick. He did it a little at a time, not all at once. He had a good notion of the fighter’s limits. Even so, the wings groaned at the force they had to withstand. Pulling out of a dive like this would have torn the wings right off a machine built of wood and canvas. His vision grayed for a couple of seconds as blood poured down out of his brain, but then color returned.

“Jesus!” he said hoarsely when he was flying level once more. He caressed the curved side of the cockpit as if it were the curve of a lover. He’d never known, never imagined, an aeroplane that could do things like this.

He looked around, wondering where the hell he was. Puffy cloud shadows dappled the green and gold geometry of Ontario fields and woodlots. Then he spotted the Thames. The river naturally led his eye back to London. The Labatt’s brewery was much the biggest building in town. Once he spied it, he also knew where the airfield outside would be.

As he flew back toward the field, the wireless set in the cockpit crackled to life: “A-47, this is A-49. Do you read me? Over.”

A-49 was another fighter. Moss peered here and there till he spotted him at ten o’clock high. “I read you loud and clear, A-49. Go ahead. Over.” He had to make himself remember to thumb the transmit button. He’d never had to worry about wireless chatter in the Great War.

“Up for a dogfight, old-timer?” the pilot of A-49 asked.
Punk kid,
Moss thought scornfully. The younger man went on, “Loser buys the beer at the officers’ club. Over.”

“You’re on, sonny boy. Over and out,” Moss snapped. With altitude, the other pilot had the edge. Moss pulled back on the stick to climb. He gave the fighter all the gas he had so he wouldn’t lose too much airspeed. His opponent zoomed toward him. He spun away, heading for one of those pretty little clouds. He beat the other fighter to it, then snapped sharply to his left, still climbing for all the Wright was worth.

A moment later, he whooped like a wild man. The guy in A-49 had done just what Moss thought he would: flown straight through the cloud and looked around for him. That wasn’t good enough, not anywhere close. Moss dove on his foe from behind. Of itself, his thumb went to the firing button atop the stick. He pulled his nose up and fired past the other aeroplane.

A startled squawk came from the wireless set at the sight of tracer rounds streaking by. Laughing exultantly, Moss said, “Sonny boy, you are dead as shoe leather. That beer’s going to taste mighty good. Over.”

“How did you do that?” The pilot of A-49 had to remember to say, “Over.”

“I was playing these games when you were a gleam in your old man’s eye,” Moss answered. “The aeroplanes change. The tricks don’t, or not much. Shall we go on in now?”

“Yeah.” The young fighter pilot, like any good flier, had thought he was the hottest thing in the sky. Chagrin filled his voice when he discovered he wasn’t, or at least not today.

Moss had to find the Thames and London and the airstrip all over again. He was slower doing that than the kid in A-49, and wasn’t ashamed to follow the other fighter in. He had to remind himself to lower his landing gear, too; that was one more thing he hadn’t had to worry about during the Great War.

He jounced the landing, hard enough to make his teeth click. But A-47 came to a stop before the end of the runway. The prop spun down to immobility. Moss pulled back the canopy and got out of the fighter. Only then, with the breeze on him, did he realize he was drenched in sweat. The dogfight had squeezed it out of him.
He’d
known it wasn’t real, but his body hadn’t.

Major Rex Finley came trotting up. “Those were your tracers?” he demanded. Moss nodded. Finley put hands on hips. “I wouldn’t have been very happy if you’d shot Jimmy down. Neither would he, as a matter of fact.”

“Sorry,” said Moss, who was anything but. “He challenged me. He called me an old man. I whipped him, and I wanted to make damn sure he knew it.” He waved to the other pilot, who walked toward him shaking his head. “Who’s buying that beer?”

“Looks like I am,” Jimmy said ruefully. Sweat plastered his dark-blond hair to his head and glistened on his face. His body had thought it was the real thing, too. He caught Major Finley’s eye. “He got me good, sir. He knows what he’s doing up there.”

“Well, we’ve had to scrape some rust off,” Finley remarked. Moss nodded. He couldn’t argue with that. He hadn’t flown for twenty years, and the state of the art had changed. But Finley nodded. “I’ve seen worse.”

“Thanks,” Moss said. “I don’t know why I gave this up. It’s more fun than . . . damn near anything I can think of. I guess when the war ended I just wanted to get back to what I was doing beforehand.”

Major Finley nodded. “A lot of people did.” He’d stayed in uniform himself, of course, doing his job so most people in the USA could get back to what they’d been doing beforehand. Moss knew as much. Finley had to know he knew, but none of that showed in the officer’s voice as he went on, “Of course, having fun isn’t the only reason you’re doing this. Not a whole lot of folks get to have fun with the taxpayer footing the bill.”

“Congressmen—that’s about it,” Moss agreed. Finley and Jimmy both laughed.

Laughing or not, though, Finley said, “That’s about the size of it, yeah. So all right—you’ve proved you can still play on the first team. I’m not talking about conscripting you. But if we run into trouble, can we count on you?”

Jonathan Moss let out a long breath before he answered. “Yes,” he said at last. “But if you try to put me in the air to shoot up Canucks in another rising . . . well, I’m not the best man for that job, and you or whoever else I serve under had better know it ahead of time.”

“The Army knows who your wife is and what you’ve been doing since you moved up to Canada,” Finley said dryly. “We do sometimes have to break parts in our machine. We try not to put parts into places where they’re bound to break.”

Thinking back to his own flying days, Moss decided Finley was probably right. Not certainly—nothing that had to do with the Army was certain—but probably. He said, “How about that beer now? It’ll taste twice as good with somebody else buying.” The grin Jimmy gave him was half sheepish, half
I’ll get you next time
. Jonathan’s grin said only one thing.
Oh, no, you won’t.

But Moss wasn’t grinning when he drove back to Berlin. He understood why Major Finley worried about where his pilots would come from. The USA had been holding Canada down for more than twenty years now. The Canucks showed no sign of wanting to become Americans, none at all, despite a generation’s worth of schooling and propaganda. But the United States couldn’t just turn them loose and wave good-bye. If they did, the British would be back twenty minutes later. And then . . . “Encirclement,” Moss muttered. That had been the U.S. strategic nightmare from the end of the War of Secession to the end of the Great War. With the Confederate States feeling their oats again, encirclement would be a disaster.

The way the world looked wasn’t the only reason Moss’ grin slipped on the way home. “Daddy!” Dorothy squealed when he walked in the door, and did her best to tackle him. That best was pretty good; it would have drawn a penalty on any football field from Edmonton down to Hermosillo.

“Hi, sweetie.” Moss squeezed his daughter, too, though not with intent to maim. “Where’s your mom?”

“I’m here,” Laura called from the kitchen. “Where else would I be?”

After disentangling himself from Dorothy, Moss went into the kitchen and gave his wife a kiss. She kissed him back, but not with any great enthusiasm. “What smells good?” he asked, pretending he didn’t notice.

“Roast pork,” she said, and then, “Did you have a good time shooting up the countryside?”

Her voice had an edge to it. “I didn’t shoot up the countryside,” Moss answered steadily. “I would have shot down one American half my age if this were the real thing.”

He’d hoped the prospect of a Yank going down in flames would cheer Laura, but it didn’t. She said, “If anything really happened, the two of you would fly on the same side—and you’d fly against Canada. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

“They wouldn’t do that to me,” Moss said. “I was talking about it with Major Finley.”