"Wounded?"
"Once-in the arm. It healed up pretty good. I was lucky."
"You sure as hell were," the recruiter agreed soberly. "What have you done since?"
"Steel. Construction. Union organizing." Chester wondered if that would faze the Army man.
It didn't. The fellow just nodded. "If you can command a company, you can run civilians, too. As long as you're not a Freedom Party stalwart or a Mormon, I don't care about your politics. And if you're a loyal Mormon-there are some-and you take the oath, we'll find some kind of place for you. The other stuff? Socialist? Democrat? Republican? Nobody gives a damn. You can argue about it in the field. It helps the time go by."
"Interesting," Chester said, as noncommittally as he could.
The recruiter looked him in the eye. "What have you got to say for yourself? Did you just come here to window shop, or are you serious about helping the country?"
There it was, right out in the open. Chester licked his lips. "If I go back in, can I hold off induction for a month? I'm not a kid any more. I'm going to need to straighten out some things."
"It's a seller's market," the noncom said. "However you want us, we want you." He stuck out his hand. Chester shook it. Rita's gonna kill me, he thought.
Air-raid sirens screamed. Flora Blackford and her son hurried downstairs to the basement of their block of flats. Joshua said, "They haven't come over Philadelphia for a while." He sounded excited, not afraid.
"I'd just as soon they didn't," Flora answered. A very fat man-he was a lobbyist for the meat-packing business-was taking the stairs at a snail's pace, which was as fast as he could go. He filled the stairwell from side to side, so nobody could get around him. Flora felt like giving him a push and going over his back. Bombs were already bursting in the city.
"I'd just as soon they didn't, too," Joshua said. "It means we aren't putting enough pressure on them in Virginia-they think they can use their bombers up here instead of against the troops."
Flora almost asked if she should send him over to the General Staff. The only thing checking her was the certainty that he'd say yes. He'd take it for an invitation, not sarcasm. He studied war with a passionate intensity altogether alien to her-and, she was convinced, understood its permutations in ways she didn't. Maybe he would do some good on the General Staff. You never could tell.
At last, the fat lobbyist came to the bottom of the stairs. People surged around him to either side in the hall. He placidly rolled on at his own pace. If that pace had happened to kill him and a lot of people behind him… But, yet again, it hadn't, so why flabble?
People in the shelter mostly wore flannel pajamas. Some of them had thrown robes over the PJs. Men's-style nightwear was now de rigueur for women in cities likely to be bombed. Filmy peignoirs lost most of their allure when you were liable to be showing off for everyone in your apartment building.
Thump! Thump! Thump! The ground shook under Flora's feet. Several people in the basement groaned. The lights flickered. The sound on the old wireless set faded out for a moment, but then came back to life.
"There is an enemy bomber going down in flames!" the announcer said excitedly. "I don't know whether our antiaircraft guns or a night fighter got him, but he's a goner."
Three or four people clapped their hands. A few more applauded when the Confederate bomber hit the ground. The blast when it did was different from ordinary bomb impacts: larger, more diffuse. Most of the men and women down there just waited to see what would happen next. The CSA lost some bombers whenever it sent them over Philadelphia. The Confederates never lost enough to keep them from sending more.
On and on the pounding went. It always seemed to last an eternity, though the bombers rarely loitered more than an hour. The building, so far, had lived a charmed life. Its windows had lost glass, but not many buildings in Philadelphia kept unshattered glass these days. No bomb had landed on it. That counted most.
The wireless announcer went on giving a blow-by-blow account of the fight against the airplanes from the CSA. Not all of that blow-by-blow account would be the truth, though. The Confederates-both in the air and down in Virginia-would be monitoring the stations broadcasting from cities they bombed. Keeping them guessing about what they actually accomplished struck the U.S. powers that be as a good idea. Flora normally extolled the truth. Here, she could see that telling all of it might not be a good idea.
Twenty minutes after bombs stopped dropping, the warbling all-clear sounded. A man in front of her and a woman in back of her both said the same thing at the same time: "Well, we got through another one." The same thought had been in her mind, too.
Along with everybody else, she wearily trudged up the stairs. She wondered whether she would be able to sleep when she got back to her flat. Joshua seldom had trouble dropping off again, but he lived in the moment much more than she did. She couldn't help brooding on what might have been and what might be.
Brooding or not, she was drifting toward sleep when someone knocked on the door. She looked at the clock on the nightstand. The glowing hands told her it was a quarter to three. Like anyone else with an ounce of sense, she was convinced nothing good ever happened at a quarter to three. But the knocking went on and on.
She got out of bed and went to the door. "Who is it?" she called without opening up. Robbers prowled blacked-out Philadelphia.
"It's Sydney Nesmith, Congresswoman-assistant to the House Sergeant at Arms." And it was; she recognized his voice. He went on, "Please come with me to Congress right away. Someone would have telephoned, but the lines to this building are down, so I came in person."
Flora did open the door then, saying, "Good heavens! What's happened?"
"Everything will be explained once you get there, ma'am," Nesmith answered, which told her nothing-but if it weren't important, he wouldn't have been here.
"Let me change," she said, and started to turn away.
"People aren't bothering," he said.
"What is it, Mom?" Joshua asked from behind her.
"I don't know," she answered, thinking, Nothing good, all right. She nodded to Nesmith. "I'll come."
"Thank you, ma'am. An auto is waiting down below." Nesmith started to turn away, then checked himself. "Beg your pardon, but I've got a couple of more to get up in this building."
"Do what you have to do." Flora closed the door. If he was going to wake others, she had a minute, no matter what he said. She threw on a dress and a topcoat.
"Something terrible has happened, hasn't it?" Joshua said as she did start out into the hallway.
"I'm afraid it has. I'll let you know what it is as soon as I can. Try to go back to sleep in the meantime." That sounded foolish as soon as Flora said it, but what else was her son supposed to do? She hurried downstairs.
The waiting motorcar was an enormous Packard. It had room for the driver, for Sydney Nesmith, and for all the members of Congress from her building. Some of the others had put on clothes, as she had, but a couple were still in pajamas. "Step on it, Fred," Nesmith said as the auto pulled away from the curb.
Stepping on it in a blacked-out city just after an air raid struck Flora as a recipe for suicide. Fortunately, Fred paid no attention to the Sergeant at Arms' assistant. The only lights in Philadelphia were the ones from fires the bombing had started. Their red, flickering glow seemed brighter and carried farther than it would have without pitch darkness for a backdrop.
Flora and the other members of Congress tried to pump Nesmith about why he'd summoned them. He refused to be pumped, saying, "You'll find out everything you need to know when you get there, I promise." By the time the Packard pulled up in front of the big, slightly bomb-battered building that took the place of the Capitol here, he'd said that a great many times.
They all hurried inside. Flora blinked several times at the bright electric lights. They too seemed all the more brilliant because of the darkness from which she'd just emerged.