"General Potter," the President's secretary said.
"Hello, Lulu," Potter answered gravely. "Is he all right?"
"He's just fine." She got to her feet. "You stay right there"-as if he were likely to go anywhere. "I'll tell him you're here." The Confederate States of America might be going down the drain, but you couldn't tell from the way Lulu acted. She came back a moment later. "He wants to see you. This way, please."
This way took him through the living room, down a hall, past four more guards-any one of whom looked able to tear him in half without breaking a sweat-and into a bedroom. Jake Featherston was shouting into a telephone: "Don't just sit there with your thumb up your ass, goddammit! Hurry!" He slammed the handset down.
Lulu's cough said she disapproved of the bad language even more than of the man she escorted. "General Potter is here to see you, sir," she said. She still didn't care for Potter, though, not even a little bit.
"Thank you, darling," Jake said. Watching him sweet-talk his secretary never failed to bemuse Potter. He wouldn't have bet Featherston could do it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes again and again. "Come in, Potter. Sit down." He pointed to a chair. "Lulu, hon, please close the door on your way out." Please! Who would have thought it was in the President's vocabulary?
Lulu gave Potter a fishy stare, but she did as Jake Featherston asked. "Reporting as ordered, Mr. President," Potter said, sinking into the overstuffed chair. It was all red velvet and brass nails, and looked like something from a Victorian brothel.
"How close are they to a uranium bomb?" Featherston didn't waste time or politeness on Potter. The President looked like helclass="underline" pale and haggard and skinny, with big dark circles under his eyes. How much did he sleep? Did he sleep at all? Potter wouldn't have bet on it.
"They're getting closer, sir," he answered. "They're talking about months now, not years-if the damnyankees' bombs don't set them back again."
"Months! Jesus Christ! We can't wait months!" Jake howled. "Haven't they noticed? This goddamn country's falling apart around their ears! Atlanta! Richmond! Savannah's going, and God only knows how long Birmingham will last. We need that fucker, and we need it yesterday. Not tomorrow, not today-yesterday! Months!" He rolled his eyes up to the heavens.
"Sir, I'm just telling you what Professor FitzBelmont told me," Potter said. "He also said that if you think you can find someone who'll do it better and faster, you should put him in charge."
Featherston swore. "There isn't anybody like that, is there?"
"If there is, Mr. President, I sure don't know about him," Potter answered. "Shall we try disrupting the U.S. program again?"
"What the fuck difference does it make?" Featherston said bitterly. That alarmed Potter, who'd never before heard him back away from anything. Even more bitterly, the President went on, "Shit, they're licking us without uranium bombs. I never would've reckoned they could, but they damn well are. Makes you wonder if we deserve to live, doesn't it?"
"No, sir. I have to believe that," Potter said. "This is my country. I'll do everything I can for it."
Featherston cocked his head to one side. "Ask you something?"
"You're the President, sir. How can I say no?"
"You sure never had any trouble before. But how come you didn't throw in with Bedford Forrest III and the rest of those bastards?"
"Sir, we're in a war. We need you. We need you bad. Whoever they brought in instead would have been worse. Chances are the Yankees wouldn't have made peace with him, either, not this side of-what do they call it? — unconditional surrender. That kills us. Way it looks to me is, we've got to keep fighting, because all our other choices are worse. Maybe the slide-rule brigade can save us. It's the best hope we've got, anyhow."
He realized he'd just admitted he knew about Forrest's plot, even if he hadn't gone along with it. If Jake wanted his head, he could have it. But that had always been true, ever since the Richmond Olympics. "Well, I get straight answers from you, anyway," the Confederate President said. "Listen, you go back and tell FitzBelmont I don't care what he does or who he kills-we've got to have that bomb, and faster than months. Get his head out of the clouds. Make sure he understands. It's his country, too, what's left of it."
"I'll do my best, sir. I don't know how much I can hurry the physicists, though," Potter said.
"You'd better, that's all I've got to tell you," Featherston said. Clarence Potter nodded. He'd seen the President of the CSA angry before-Jake Featherston ran on anger the way trucks ran on gasoline. He'd seen him gleeful. He'd seen him stubborn and defiant. But never-never till now, anyway-had he seen him desperate.
N ext stop, Birmingham!" Michael Pound said exultantly. It wasn't spring yet, not even here in Alabama, where spring came early. It wasn't spring, no, but something even sweeter than birdsong and flowers filled the air. When Pound sniffed, he didn't just smell exhaust fumes and cordite and unbathed soldiers. He smelled victory.
The Confederates hadn't quit. He didn't think they knew the meaning of the word. Some of their terrifying new barrels came into the front line without so much as a coat of paint-straight from the factories U.S. bombers and now artillery were still trying to knock out. The crews who fought those shiny metal monsters were brave, no doubt about it. But all the courage in the world couldn't make up for missing skill.
And, while the Confederate machines trickled from their battered factories in dribs and drabs, U.S. production went up and up. Maybe a new C.S. barrel was worth two of the best U.S. model. If the USA had four or five times as many barrels where it mattered, how much did that individual superiority matter?
Not enough.
Pound guided his barrel past the guttering corpse of a machine that had tried conclusions with several U.S. barrels at once. That might have been a brave mistake, but a mistake it undoubtedly was. The Confederates had made so many big mistakes, they couldn't afford even small ones any more.
Somebody not far away fired an automatic rifle. Maybe that was a U.S. soldier with a captured weapon. On the other hand, maybe it was a Freedom Party Guard aiming at a barrel commander riding along with head and shoulders out of the cupola. Regretfully, Michael Pound decided not to take the chance. He ducked down into the machine.
"Where the hell are we, sir?" Sergeant Scullard asked. The gunner didn't get nearly so many chances to look around as the barrel commander did.
Despite having those chances, Pound needed to check a map before he answered, "Far as I can tell, we're just outside of Columbiana."
"And where the fuck's Columbiana?"
Unless you were born and raised in central Alabama, that was another reasonable question. "Twenty, maybe thirty miles from Birmingham, south and a little bit east," Pound said. "Town's got a munitions plant in it, run by the C. B. Churchill Company-that's what the map notes say, anyhow."
"Fuck," the gunner repeated, this time as a term of general disapproval. "That means those butternut assholes'll fight like mad bastards to keep us out."
"They've been fighting like mad bastards for almost three years," Pound said. "How much good has it done 'em? We're in the middle of Alabama. We've got 'em cut in half, or near enough so it makes no difference. If they had any brains, they'd quit now, because they can't win."
"Yeah, and then they'd spend the next hundred years bushwhacking us." Scullard was not in a cheerful mood.
Pound grunted. The gunner might have meant that for a sour joke. Even if he did, it made an unfortunate amount of sense. In a standup fight, the Confederacy was losing. But how much fun would it be to occupy a country where everybody hated your guts and wanted you dead? After the Great War, the United States hadn't enjoyed trying to hold on to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah. If the USA tried to hang on to the whole CSA…