"That's right!" Flora shouted. People in the hall gave her husband a warm hand. The only trouble was, making political speeches to an already friendly crowd was like preaching to the choir. These people (except for that handful of noisy Democrats) hadn't turned out to disagree with the president. And his words weren't likely to sway anybody who'd already decided to vote against him. Nothing was. Flora knew as much, even if she hated the knowledge.
Her husband pounded away at the Democrats, at Coolidge, at Coolidge's engineer of a running mate. He got round after round of applause. By the noise in the hall, he would have been swept back into office.
But then, just as Flora's spirits rose and even Hosea Blackford, buoyed by the reception, looked as if he too felt he wasn't just going through the motions, distant explosions made people sit up and look around and ask one another what the noise was. Then, suddenly, some of the explosions weren't so distant. They rattled the windows in the hall. Through them, Flora thought she heard aeroplane engines overhead.
She frowned. That was crazy, to say nothing of impossible… wasn't it? She looked up at her husband. No-she looked up at the president of the United States. "I don't know what's going on, my friends," he told the crowd, "but I think we ought to sit tight here till we find out."
He got his answer sooner than he expected. A man bleeding from a scalp wound burst into the hall and shouted, "The Japs! The goddamn Japs are bombing Los Angeles!" As if to underscore his words, a cannon somewhere in the distance began shooting at the aeroplanes. Flora wondered if it had any chance at all of bringing them down. She had her doubts.
The crowd, the crowd that had been so warm, so full of support, cried out in horror and dismay. A guard tapped Flora on the shoulder. "Come with me, ma'am," he said. "We're going to get the president and you out of here. If the roof comes down…"
Helplessly, she went with him. He and his comrades hustled the Blackfords into the limousine and drove off as fast as they could go. As they zoomed away from the University of Southern California, Flora saw fires flickering in front of the huts and tents of a huge Blackfordburgh in Agricultural Park. And she saw other fires burning farther away, fires Japanese bombs must have set. She put her face in her hands and began to cry. Now, for certain, there was no hope at all.
XVI
Colonel Irving Morrell kissed his wife good-bye and headed in to the U.S. Army base at Kamloops. "Election Day at last," he said. "It can't come any later than this, but it's finally here. November the eighth, 1932-time we throw the rascals out." He checked himself and sighed. "They aren't even rascals. I've met enough of them-I know they aren't. But they aren't what we need, either."
"I should say not!" Indignation filled Agnes' voice. "After what they let the… Japs do to Los Angeles…" By the pause there, she'd almost added some pungent modifier to the enemy's name.
"That was a nice piece of work. We haven't been so humiliated since the end of the Second Mexican War, more than fifty years ago now. It was just a pinprick, but what a pinprick!" Morrell reluctantly gave credit to a very sharp operation. "Two aeroplane carriers, a tanker to keep 'em fueled-and one great big embarrassment for the USA. They got away clean as a whistle, too, except for the one aeroplane we shot down and the two that collided with each other over the beach."
"Disgraceful." Agnes was, if anything, more militant than Morrell himself.
"Well, if President Blackford's goose wasn't cooked before L.A., Hirohito's boys put it in the oven and turned up the fire," he said.
"That's true." His wife brightened. "Maybe some good will come of it after all, then. Calvin Coolidge wouldn't let himself get caught napping like that."
"I hope not," Morrell said, though he didn't know what the governor of Massachusetts could have ordered done that President Blackford hadn't. He kissed Agnes again. As far as he was concerned, that was always worth doing. "I've got to go. I wish I could do something more useful than guarding a Canadian town that isn't likely to rise up, but that's what they say they need me for, so that's what I'll do."
"If they ordered you to do something else, you'd do that, too," Agnes said. "And you'd do a bang-up job at it, too, whatever it happened to be."
"Thanks, sweetie." Morrell would have been happy to stay there and listen to his wife say nice things about him. Instead, he left.
Snow had fallen the week before, but it was gone now. He couldn't ski to the office. Sentries came to attention and saluted as he went past. He returned the salutes with careful courtesy.
When he got in, his adjutant said, "Sir, you have a despatch from the War Department in Philadelphia-from the General Staff, no less."
"You're kidding," Morrell said. Captain Horwitz shook his head. So did Irving Morrell, in bemusement. "What the devil do they want with me? I thought they'd long since forgotten I even existed. I hoped they had, to tell you the truth."
"I just put it on your desk, sir," Horwitz replied. "It got here about fifteen minutes ago. If you like, you can probably catch up with the courier and ask him questions."
"Let's see what the order is first," Morrell said. "One way or another, it'll probably tell me everything I need to know."
He went into his office. As an afterthought, he closed the door behind him. That might miff his adjutant. If it did, too bad. He'd find a way to make amends later. Meanwhile, he wanted privacy. If the General Staff-specifically, if Lieutenant Colonel John Abell-was taking some more vengeance, he wanted to be able to pull himself together before he faced the world.
There lay the envelope, as Horwitz had said. Morrell approached it like a sapper approaching an unexploded bomb. It wouldn't blow up if he opened it. He had to remind himself of that, though, before he could make himself take the folded paper out of the envelope and read the typewritten order.
The more he read, the wider his eyes got. He sank down into his seat. The swivel chair creaked under his weight. When he'd neither come out nor said anything for several minutes, Captain Horwitz cautiously called, "Are you all right, sir?"
"Nine years," Morrell answered.
Horwitz opened the door. "Sir?"
"Nine years," Morrell repeated. He looked down at the order again. "Nine miserable, stinking years thrown away. Wasted. Wiped off the map. Gone."
He could have gone on cranking out synonyms for a long time, but his adjutant broke in: "I don't understand, sir."
Morrell blinked. It was all perfectly clear in his mind. He realized Horwitz hadn't read the order. Feeling foolish, he said, "They're sending me back to Fort Leavenworth, Captain."
"Oh?" For a second, that didn't register with Horwitz. But only for a moment-he was sharp as the business end of a bayonet. Then he leaned forward, like a hunting dog taking the scent. "To work on barrels, sir?"
"That's right. To work on barrels." Morrell didn't even try to hide his bitterness. "The very same project they took me off of-the very same project they closed down-almost nine years ago."
"Well…" His adjutant put the best face on it he could: "It's a good thing they are starting up again, wouldn't you say?"
That was true. Morrell couldn't begin to deny it. But he also couldn't help asking, "Where would we be if we hadn't stopped?"
Nine years before, they'd had a prototype of what a barrel should be. It was a machine much more agile, much less cumbersome, than the lumbering armored behemoths of the Great War. It carried its cannon in a turret that rotated 360 degrees, not in a mount with limited traverse at the front of the vehicle. It had a machine gun in the turret, too, and one at the bow, not half a dozen of them all around the machine. It took a crew of half a dozen, not a dozen and a half. It ran and shot rings around the old models.