If Jake Featherston said he believed in God, it would be the best argument Flora could think of for either atheism or worshipping Satan, depending. She nodded to herself and wrote that down on a notepad. It would make a good line in a speech.
One thing Featherston had said even before the U.S. uranium bomb went off did seem to be true, worse luck: the United States hadn't caught the Confederate raiders who'd brought the bomb north. Flora supposed those raiders wore U.S. uniforms and could sound as if they came from the USA. All the same, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have to look into the Army's failure to hunt them down.
But the Joint Committee had something else on the agenda this morning. They were going across the Schuylkill for a firsthand look at what the explosion of a uranium bomb was really like.
As she took a cab to Congressional Hall to meet with her colleagues, she couldn't help noticing that a lot of west-facing buildings had their paint scorched or seared off. On some, the paint had come through intact only in patterns: taller structures closer to the blast had shielded part of the paint but not all.
"They say we blew that Featherston item right off the map," the driver remarked. He seemed healthy enough, but he was at least ten years older than Flora, which put him in his mid-sixties at the youngest.
"It isn't true," she answered. "I just heard him on the wireless."
"Oh," the cabby said. "Well, that's a…darn shame. Don't hardly see how we'll get anywhere till we smoke his bacon."
"Neither do I," Flora said sadly. "I wish I did."
When the cab pulled up in front of Congressional Hall, she gave him a quarter tip, which pleased him almost as much as seeing Jake Featherston stuffed and mounted would have. "Much obliged, ma'am," he said, touching a forefinger to the patent-leather brim of his cap. He was grinning as he zoomed away.
Flora wasn't surprised to find Franklin Roosevelt there with the members of the Joint Committee. "First we'll see what one of these damn things can do," he said. "Then you'll rake me over the coals for not getting ours first and for not keeping the Confederates from finishing theirs."
"Did you think they could beat us to it?" she asked.
He shook his big head. "No. I didn't think they had a prayer, to tell you the truth. They're formidable people. All the more reason for squashing them flat and making sure they never get up again."
"Sounds good to me," Flora said.
They went to the Schuylkill in a bus. Two Army officers helped Roosevelt out of his wheelchair and into a seat, then manhandled the chair aboard. "Considering some of the terrain we'll be crossing, maybe I should have brought a tracked model," he said, sounding a lot more cheerful than Flora could have under the same circumstances.
The bus didn't cross at the closest bridge. Some of the steel supporting towers on that one had sagged a bit, and Army engineers were still trying to figure out whether it would stay up. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had to chug north to find one that was sound. Then the bus went back south and west till wrecked buildings and rubble in the road made the driver stop.
"We're not quite a mile from the center of the blast," one of the officers said. "It gets worse from here."
He wasn't wrong. It got worse, and worse, and worse again. Before long, only what had been the stoutest, sturdiest buildings had any walls standing at all. Even they weren't just scorched but half melted in a way Flora had never imagined, much less seen.
One of the Army officers pushed Franklin Roosevelt forward. When the rubble got too thick to let the man advance with the Assistant Secretary of War, his colleague would bend and grab the front of the wheelchair. Together, the two would get Roosevelt over the latest obstacle and push him on toward the next.
Steel and even granite lampposts sagged like candles in the hot sun. How hot had it been when the bomb went off? Flora had no idea-some physicists might know. Hot enough, plainly. Hot enough and then some.
Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble underfoot. Everything had been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora's feet, too.
"My God," she said over and over. She wasn't the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn't a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?
"Can the Confederates do this to us again?" someone asked Roosevelt.
"Dear Lord, I hope not!" he exclaimed, which struck Flora as an honest, unguarded response. He went on, "To tell you the truth, I didn't think they could do it once. But they've got an infiltrator-his name's Potter-who's so good, he's scary. We think he led their team. And so…they surprised us, damn them."
"Again," Flora said.
Roosevelt nodded. "That's right. They surprised us again. They almost ruined us when they went up into Ohio, and then they did…this. But do you know what? They're going to lose the war anyway, even if we didn't fry Jake Featherston like an egg the way he deserves."
"Why didn't we?" a Senator asked.
"Well, we had intelligence he was in the Hampton Roads area, and I still believe he was," Roosevelt replied. "But he wasn't right where we thought he was, which is a shame."
"Why didn't we catch the people who did this?" Flora said. "The ones who brought the bomb up here, I mean. The wireless has been saying we haven't, and I want to know why not. They can't play chameleon that well…can they?"
"It seems they can," Roosevelt said morosely. "Just before I joined you at Congressional Hall, I had a report that Confederate wireless is claiming the bombers got out of the United States. I can't confirm that, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to, but I do know we don't have them."
"Yes, I've heard the Confederates making the same claim." Flora kicked at the sintered stuff under her feet. "We don't have any witnesses, do we?"
"None who've come forward," Franklin Roosevelt said. "I'm sure there were some, but when a bomb like this goes off…" He didn't finish. Flora nodded anyhow. When a bomb like this went off, it took a whole neighborhood with it. Anyone who saw the truck-she supposed it was a truck-the bomb arrived in and wondered about it died in the blast.
"From now on, they'll be calling the police and the bomb squad any time anything bigger than a bicycle breaks down," a Congressman said.
"That's already happened," Roosevelt said. "It's got cops all over the country jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, but I don't know what we can do about it. People are nervous. And I'm afraid they've got a right to be."
"Anyone need to see anything else?" the Army officer behind him asked. When nobody said yes, the man started pushing Roosevelt back toward the bus.
The members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War went back, too. The bus took them east over the Schuylkill to Philadelphia General Hospital, the closest one to survive the blast. The Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, only a couple of blocks from ground zero, was now as one with Nineveh and Tyre: a tallish lump in the melted glass, no more.
"I think you people are a bunch of ghouls to rubberneck here," a harried doctor said. "And I think you were crazy or stupid or both at once to rubberneck over there. Don't you know that goddamn bomb left some kind of poison behind? We've had plenty of people who weren't too bad, and then their hair falls out and they start bleeding internally-and out their noses and eyeballs and fingernails and, uh, rectums, too-and they just up and die. You want that?"