He realized with a small shock, or maybe not such a small one, how used he was getting to the rhythms of the sun here, and to the rhythms of encampment life. This was where he’d been, this was what he’d done, for the past five years. He’d served his stretch. It felt that way to him, anyhow. Yeah, the administrative law judge had slapped him with five to ten, but weren’t five years of this enough for anybody?
Some people with stretches like his got out after five. He’d seen it happen. The Jeebies gave them clothes without numbers and twenty bucks, then put them on a bus to Livingston, usually with orders to stay inside the Rocky Mountain and Midwestern states. He didn’t know what would happen if you went back to, say, New Hampshire and they caught you there. You’d probably get another term, a longer one.
They didn’t seem about to turn him loose. John Dennison hadn’t gone anywhere, either. Dennison dealt with the encampment better than anyone else Mike had ever seen, himself included. Whatever happened, it rolled off his back. He had the measure of the place. He didn’t like it-who could? — but he dealt with it.
And just because some people got out, that didn’t mean others didn’t come in. These days, the labor encampments were full of Japanese-American scalps. Joe Steele had ordered everyone of Japanese descent on the U.S. mainland seized. Women had encampments, too. Those were probably also loaded with black-haired, almond-eyed people. The Jeebies here came down extra hard on the Japs. They blamed them for starting the war. Why not? Plainly, Joe Steele did, too. Mike wondered how many Japanese would get turned loose, or if any ever would.
He also wondered if he ever would. Curiosity made him brave the administration building again. He told himself the worst they could do was say no. How was he worse off if they did? (Actually, the worst they could do was beat the crap out of him and stick him in a punishment cell for a few weeks, but he preferred not to dwell on such things.)
A sergeant pulled his file and examined it. “Well, your record’s not too bad, and you put in your enlistment request pretty early,” the man said. “That’s one more point for you. Let’s see what Captain Blair thinks.”
“Okay. Let’s.” Mike figured he hadn’t struck out, anyhow. Whether he was just getting in deeper, he’d have to find out.
Captain Blair had a patch over his right eye socket. Mike guessed that made him a Great War veteran-no, with a new war in town, now they were calling it World War I. He bent low over the papers to examine them, which meant his remaining eye was nearsighted. Then he looked up at Mike.
“Normally, you’d serve your full ten. At least your full ten,” he said. “Sergeant Sanders didn’t notice some of the coding in here. But there is a way for you to get out of the encampment, if you want to.”
“Tell me,” Mike said.
“We can take you to Livingston-straight to the recruiting station there. You can volunteer to serve for the duration of the war. Your service will be in what’s called a punishment brigade. It will have men from the encampments and disgraced officers trying to get their good name back. It will go in wherever things are hottest. It will keep doing that as long as the war lasts. If you live, you’ll be released then. If you don’t, well, so it goes.”
“Oh,” Mike said, and then, “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“You can’t say you didn’t know the score before you played the game,” Blair answered. “You can take your chances-and they aren’t too good.” He touched the patch to emphasize that. “Or you can stay here a long time. You must have ticked off somebody with clout.”
“I ticked off Joe Steele,” Mike said proudly.
“I hear all kinds of bullshit from wreckers. You, I almost believe. So what’ll it be?”
John Dennison would have stayed. Dennison was staying. Mike didn’t want to let another five years go by here, or another ten. He’d look up and find he’d worked here longer than he had for the Post. He wouldn’t be able to imagine a life beyond the barbed wire and the chopping details, let alone live one. They’d try their best to kill him if he joined the Army? They were killing him here, only in slow motion.
“Take me to Livingston,” he said.
“You’ll go in the morning, after roll call and breakfast,” Captain Blair said. “Believe it or not, I wish you the best of luck. I tried to get back on active military duty, but they wouldn’t take me. The limeys used Admiral Nelson even though he was shy an eye and an arm. These are modern times, though. I don’t cut the mustard for the real war. I’m stuck here.”
Making war on Americans instead, Mike thought. But he didn’t say it. Blair had been square with him, as square as anybody could be. What he did say was “Thank you.” It felt as unnatural as it had when he’d said it to Lopatynski the winter before.
* * *
Charlie got a card from Mike announcing he’d joined the Army. The hardest part is, I have to learn a new number for myself, his brother wrote. I’ve been NY24601 a long time. But I’m someone else these days.
He didn’t know whether the card was good news or bad news. Mike hadn’t gone overseas the last time around. He’d worked in a munitions plant instead. At the labor encampment, he was reasonably safe. In the Army, he wouldn’t be. On the other hand, the powers that be were more likely to let him out of the Army than to release him from the encampment.
Out in the wider world, the war ground on. Charlie remembered Admiral Spruance from his days on one of Joe Steele’s military tribunals. He hadn’t been an admiral then. Now, his ships smashed the Japs near Midway: one more place Charlie’d never heard of till it got splashed all over the newspapers.
In Russia, the Germans couldn’t attack along the whole vast front, the way they had the year before. They pushed forward in the south and hung on in the center and north. Plainly, the drive was aimed at the Caucasus and the oilfields there. Oil had always been a problem for the Germans-they didn’t have enough. If they could grab the Russians’ fields, they’d help themselves and hurt the Reds at the same time.
Rostov-on-the-Don fell. The Germans had taken it in 1941, too, but the Red Army drove them out then. Now they hung on to it and even advanced. Trotsky sent his faltering troops an order: not one step back! Order or no order, the Russians kept retreating.
The Nazis couldn’t just roll into the Caucasus. That would leave them with a long, unprotected northern flank. They had to take more of southern Russia. There was a city on the Volga that, in the days before the Revolution, had been called Tsaritsyn. The Reds couldn’t leave it with a reactionary name like that. Now it was Trotskygrad: Trotsky’s town.
Something like 40,000 people died when the Luftwaffe hammered it from the skies. Panzers and foot soldiers stormed across the steppe toward the shattered city. They stormed into it. But the Russians defended Trotskygrad block by block, factory by factory, house by house, room by room. Getting in, Hitler discovered, was much easier than clearing the Reds out.
Hitler had thought he would knock Russia out of the war in a hurry. Well, General Marshall had thought the same thing. Nobody was right all the time. Now the Führer had a much bigger war on his hands than he’d wanted. He had a much bigger war than he could fight by himself, in fact. Romanians and Hungarians and Italians and Slovaks and even a division of Spaniards joined the Wehrmacht in Russia.
Wehrmacht soldiers, though, had better gear and better training than their allies. (That the Hungarians and Romanians hated each other worse than either hated the Russians didn’t help.) That fall, the Red Army sliced through Hitler’s foreign flunkies in two places and cut off the big German force still grinding away in Trotskygrad.