Robert Taft sacrificed his handkerchief and his tie. Then he took off his shirt and his undershirt and used a pocket knife to cut them into strips of cloth. “Other people need them worse than I do,” he said, and he wasn’t the only bare-chested man around, either.
“Good for you,” Flora told him. “Let me have some of those, too, please.”
Ambulances roared up, sirens wailing. Philadelphia was good at responding to disasters. And so it should have been-it had had enough practice. “Somebody put a bomb on the bus?” asked a white-coated man from an ambulance.
“Somebody was a bomb on the bus,” a woman answered. The man’s answer was eloquent, heartfelt, and altogether unprintable.
“Well,” Taft said, “looks like we have the answer to my question, and it’s not the one I wish we had.” He was splashed with blood past his elbows. His trousers were bloodstained, too, but Flora didn’t think any of the gore was his.
She glanced down at herself. The cotton print dress she had on would never be the same. Blood also dappled her arms. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked, a question aimed more at the world at large than at Senator Taft. “How do we fight people who’ll kill themselves to hurt us?”
“If we have to, we-” Taft broke off, as if really hearing what he’d been about to say. He shook his head. “Good Lord. I started to sound like Jake Featherston.”
“Yes.” Flora wanted to cry, or to scream. Here, for once, the USA faced a knottier problem than the CSA. Negroes looked like Negroes. Mormons? Mormons looked and talked just like anybody else. Anybody here could be a Mormon, and could have another bomb waiting. How would you know till it went off?
“Good Lord,” Taft said again. “We’re going to have to start searching people before we let them gather. Football games, films, trains, buses, department stores-for all I know, we’ll have to check anybody who goes into the Old Munich.”
“I was thinking how many members of Congress were in there,” Flora said shakily. “If that bomber had walked inside instead of blowing up the bus…” Philadelphia was its usual hot, muggy summer self. That kind of weather wouldn’t last much longer, but it was still here-sweat ran down Flora’s face. She shivered anyhow.
“Auto bombs are bad enough,” Taft said. “People bombs…” Like Flora, he seemed to run out of words. He spread his bloody hands. “What could be worse?”
What were they working on, out in western Washington? Something they thought might win the war. Whatever it was, that all but guaranteed it would be a horror worse than any they’d known up till now. Worse than poison gas? Worse than the camps where the Confederates were systematically doing away with their Negroes? She had trouble imagining such a thing. That didn’t mean the people out in Washington State had any trouble, though.
While horror swelled inside her, rage seemed to fill Taft. “This is no fit way to fight,” the Senator from Ohio ground out. “If they want to meet us like men, that’s one thing. If they want to see how many innocent civilians they can blow up-”
“They used it against soldiers first,” Flora said, remembering Yossel’s narrow escape again. “And we drop bombs on civilians all over the CSA. It’s just that… Who would have expected people to be weapons instead of using weapons?”
“Well, the genie’s out of the bottle now,” Taft said grimly. “Nobody in the world is safe from here on out. Nobody, do you hear me? There isn’t a king or a president or a prime minister somebody doesn’t hate. A man comes up to you in a reception line. Maybe you didn’t appoint him postmaster. Maybe he just hears voices in his head. You reach out to shake his hand. Next thing you know, you’re both dead, and a dozen people around you, too. How do you stop something like that?”
Flora only shrugged helplessly. For thousands of years, war had been based on the notion that you wanted to hurt the other side without getting hurt yourself. Now the rules had shifted under everybody’s feet. How could you stop someone who embraced death instead of fleeing it?
Fresh dread filled her when she thought about how useful a weapon like this might be. Surely the United States could find men willing to die for their country. If you sent them after Jake Featherston and you got him, weren’t you doing more to win the war than you would by smashing a division or two of ordinary soldiers?
But the Confederates would have targets of their own. I might even be one, Flora thought, and ice walked up her back again. Like it or not, it was true. Nobody in the USA had spoken out more ferociously than she had about what the Confederate States and the Freedom Party were doing to their Negroes.
“How many more of these bombs will we see in the next week? In the next month? In the next year?” Taft asked. “We’ve never known anything like this before. Never. That Canadian who kept blowing up American soldiers after the last war, the one who tried to blow up General Custer-he finally blew himself up, but he didn’t want to. If he’d been like these Mormons, he could have gone to a rally and done even worse.” He suddenly laughed, which made Flora stare.
“What could possibly be funny about this?” she demanded.
“I’d like to see Featherston’s face when he hears about it,” Robert Taft answered. “He knows how many people… mm, don’t love him, shall we say? He’s the one who’ll really have reason to be shaking in his boots. Sic semper tyrannis, by God-thus always to tyrants, if your Latin’s rusty.”
It was; Flora hadn’t even thought about those classes in close to forty years. At the time, she hadn’t thought they were good for anything; it wasn’t as if she were likely to train for the Catholic priesthood! Looking back, though, they’d probably improved her English. And, looking back, that had probably been the point. It sure hadn’t occurred to her then.
What Taft said made a certain amount of sense. What he said often did. People who had or should have had bad consciences would worry more about men-or women-with bombs than others would. And yet… “The Mormons are using them against us,” she said bleakly.
“Yes, but the Mormons are a pack of crazy fanatics,” Taft said. But that wouldn’t do, and he realized it wouldn’t. “I see what you’re saying. I wish I didn’t. To them, we look like the tyrants.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Flora agreed. “A lot of it’s like beauty-it’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“God help us,” Taft said.
“Omayn,” Flora said, “or amen, if you’d rather.”
“That doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Taft said. Flora believed him; whatever else he was, he was no anti-Semite. He sadly shook his head. “What are we going to do?”
“I can’t begin to tell you, and I wish I could,” Flora answered. “We might have a better chance now if we’d done something different a lifetime ago, but it’s a little late to worry about that now.”
“Yes-just a little,” Taft said. “We have this pack of people who hate us right there in the middle of the country, and the most we can hope for, as far as I can see, is that they do us as little harm as we can manage.” Taft absently wiped his high forehead with the heel of his hand, and left a red streak on his skin.
“This has gone on for too long,” Flora said. “If we don’t settle it once and for all during the war, we have to try afterwards.” That sounded good, but what did it mean? She listened to her own words with the same sick horror Taft had known before her. What could settling it once and for all during the war mean but killing all the Mormons? If the United States did that, they wouldn’t have to worry about it afterwards-except when the country looked at itself in a mirror. Flora shuddered. All the carnage around her hadn’t nauseated her the way that thought did. “Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. “There’s a little bit of Jake Featherston in me, too.”