"Could be worse," O'Doull said. "Long as we don't start having lots of guys who guerrillas shot, I won't kick."
"Amen to that," the medic said.
"Can I go now?" Betsy asked, much as her boyfriend in green-gray had.
"Yes, you can go," O'Doull answered. "If you don't come back for your next shot, remember, we'll make you sorry you didn't."
"I won't forget," she said sullenly. "My pa, he'll kill me if he finds out." By the way she scurried away from the aid tent, she meant that literally.
"Wonder how many round-heeled broads we'll give the needle to," Lord said.
"Quite a few, I bet," O'Doull said. "And if it's going to be that kind of practice, you can handle it as well as I can." He was thinking about home again. He wasn't a career soldier; he had a life away from the Army. He had it, and he wanted to go back to it.
Goodson Lord gave him a shrewd look. "Won't be too long before they start figuring out how to turn people loose, I bet. You paid your dues and then some."
"Yeah." O'Doull nodded. And once I get back into the Republic of Quebec, they'll never pry me out again. There had been times when his practice in Riviиre-du-Loup bored him. He hadn't been bored the past three years. Scared out of his mind? Astonished? Appalled? All of those, and often, but never bored. He was amazed at how wonderful ennui seemed.
A bner Dowling stared at Lexington, Virginia, with nothing less than amazement. He turned to his adjutant and said, "Damned if it doesn't look like they used a superbomb on this place."
Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli nodded. "Yes, sir. The fun we had getting here should have given us a hint, I suppose."
"Fun? Heh. That's one word for it, I guess," Dowling said. As the crow flew, Lexington was only about 110 miles from Richmond. Dowling wished he'd flown from the capital-the former capital?-of the CSA. He'd gone by command car instead, and the roads were disastrously bad…which said nothing about the wrecked bridges and the places where mines were still being cleared. What might have been a two-and-a-half-hour drive ended up taking a day and a half.
Something moved in the rubble. At first he thought it was a stray dog. Then he realized what it really was: a possum. It looked like a cat-sized rat that had got its nose stuck in a pencil sharpener. The long, bare pinkish tail seemed vaguely obscene. Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli was looking in the same direction. "If that's not the ugliest thing God ever made, damned if I know what is," he said.
"Now that Jake Featherston's dead, I agree with you," Dowling said, which jerked a laugh from the younger man.
Washington University lay on the north side of town. U.S. soldiers who'd come down from the north right after the surrender were already thick on the ground there. The only way you could tell the university grounds from the rest of Lexington these days was that they'd taken an even heavier pounding from the skies.
It didn't do enough, dammit, Dowling thought. In spite of everything that came down on their heads, the Confederate physicists managed to put together a superbomb. Abstractly, Dowling admired the achievement. Staying abstract when they'd blown a big chunk of Philadelphia off the map wasn't so easy, though.
The surviving physicists were housed in tents surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun nests. A U.S. colonel named Benjamin Frankheimer was in charge of them. Before he let Dowling in to talk with the prisoners, he checked with the War Department.
"Weren't you told to expect me?" Dowling asked.
"Yes, sir," Frankheimer replied. "But we haven't met, and I wanted to make sure they confirmed that a man of your description went with your name."
"You're…a careful man, Colonel."
"Taking care of people who know this kind of stuff, I need to be, sir." Frankheimer scratched his nose. It was much the most prominent feature on his face: he was little and skinny and looked very, very Jewish. Dowling guessed he'd got this job because he was a scientist himself…till he noticed the fruit salad on the colonel's chest. It showed he'd won a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star with oak-leaf cluster, and a Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster. Frankheimer had had himself a busy war.
"Well?" Dowling said. "Am I who I say I am?"
"Oh, yes, sir. No doubt about it," Frankheimer answered. "You're free to go in and do whatever you need to do-now."
"Thanks." Dowling sounded less sarcastic than he might have. The men inside this heavily guarded compound weren't just dynamite-they were a hell of a lot more explosive than that, and they'd proved it.
He wasn't astonished when he and Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli had to surrender their sidearms before going in, either. He didn't think of physicists as tough guys, but you never knew. If the fellows with the white lab coats and the slide rules didn't have the chance to grab any weapons, they wouldn't be tempted.
The first man he saw inside the compound sure didn't look like a tough guy. The fellow was about fifty, on the skinny side, and walked with a limp and a cane. "Can you tell me where Professor FitzBelmont is?" Dowling called to him.
"That tent there." The middle-aged man pointed.
"Thanks." Dowling ducked inside.
He recognized FitzBelmont right away; the photos he'd studied were good likenesses. Tall, tweedy, bespectacled: he looked like a physicist, all right. He gave Dowling a grudging nod. "Pleased to meet you," he said, and then, "I've already met a lot of U.S. officers"-so he probably wasn't very pleased.
"Come outside with me, Professor," Dowling said. "We've got some talking to do."
"If you like," FitzBelmont said. "But anything you say to me, my colleagues can also hear. What are you going to do with us, anyway?"
"Well, that's one of the things I'm here to talk about," Dowling answered. "More than a few people in Philadelphia who want to string you up by the thumbs, paint you with gasoline, and light a match. Then there are the ones who think that's too good for you."
Some of the scientists and technicians in there with FitzBelmont flinched. He didn't. "I don't understand why," he said. "We were serving our country in the same way that your scientists were serving the United States. If your service is permitted, even heroic, why shouldn't ours be, as well?"
He had a scientist's detachment-or maybe he was just a natural-born cold fish. "There is a difference, Professor," Dowling said.
"I fail to see it," Henderson FitzBelmont said.
"Why am I not surprised?" Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli murmured.
"Hush," Dowling said, and then, to FitzBelmont, "It's simple. I'll spell it out for you. We won. You lost. There. Is that plain enough?"
"To the victors go the spoils?" FitzBelmont said. "Is that what this war was about?"
"That's part of it. If you don't believe me, ask Jake Featherston," Dowling answered. FitzBelmont turned red, so maybe at one point or another he had asked the late, unlamented President of the CSA. Dowling continued, "The other part is, now you can't go on murdering your own smokes any more."
FitzBelmont got redder. "I didn't know anything about that."
"I ought to kick your scrawny ass for lying, you miserable son of a bitch," Dowling said with weary revulsion. "If I had a dime for every Confederate shithead who told me the same thing, I'd be too rich to wear this uniform-you'd best believe I would. Where the hell did you think all the coons in fucking Lexington disappeared to? You think somebody swept 'em under the goddamn rug?"
"I never even considered the issue," Professor FitzBelmont said.
Dowling almost did haul off and belt him. But the way FitzBelmont said it gave him pause. Unlike most of his countrymen, the physicist might have been telling the truth. From the reports the USA had on FitzBelmont, he had trouble noticing anything bigger than an atomic nucleus.