And he got to Fort Leavenworth ahead of any of the barrel men. As soon as he reached the perimeter of the fort, he realized how worn he was: ridden hard and put away wet was the phrase that came to mind. He'd ridden himself hard, all right, and he was sure as hell wet, but he hadn't been put away yet. He wanted to fall into the mud to save himself the trouble.
Soaking in a steaming tub afterwards did help. So, even more, did the admiring looks he got from his competitors as they came onto the grounds of the fort in his wake. He savored those. Command was more than a matter of superior rank. If the men saw he deserved that rank, they would obey eagerly, not just out of duty.
That evening, he pored over German accounts of meetings with British and French barrels. The Germans had used only a few of the traveling fortresses, fewer than their foes. They'd won anyhow, with England distracted from the Continent because of the fighting in Canada, and with mutinies spreading through the French Army after Russia collapsed. Morrell was familiar with British barrels; the CSA had copied them. He knew less about the machines the French had built.
When he looked at photographs of some of the French barrels- their equivalent of the rhomboids England and the CSA used- he snickered. Their tracks were very short compared to the length of their chassis, which meant they easily got stuck trying to traverse trenches.
Another French machine, though, made him thoughtful. The Germans had only one example of that model: the text said it was a prototype hastily armed and thrown into the fight in a desperate effort to stem the decay of the French Army. It was a little barrel (hardly more than a keg, Morrell thought with a grin) with only a two-man crew, and mounted a single machine gun in a rotating turret like the ones armored cars used.
'Not enough firepower there to do you as much good as you'd like,' Morrell said into the quiet of his barracks room. Still, the design was interesting. It had room for improvement.
He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and started sketching. Whoever designed the first U.S. barrels had thought of nothing past stuffing as many guns as possible inside a steel box and making sure at least one of them could shoot every which way. The price of success was jamming a couple of squads' worth of soldiers into that hellish steel box along with the guns.
If you put the two-inch cannon into that turret instead of a machine gun, you got a gun firing every which way all by itself. You'd still want a machine gun in front. If the cannon were in the turret, the driver would have to go down into the lower front of the machine. Could he handle a machine gun and drive, too?
'Not likely,' Morrell muttered. All right: that meant another gunner or two down there with him.
You wouldn't always want to use the turret cannon, though. Sometimes that would be like swatting a fly with an anvil. Morrell sketched another machine gun alongside the cannon. It would rotate, too, of course, and the gunners who tended the large gun could also serve it.
That cut the crew from eighteen men down to five or six- you'd likely need an engineer, too, but the machine had better have only one engine, and one strong enough to move at a decent clip. Morrell shook his head. 'No, six or seven,' he said. 'Somebody's got to tell everybody else what to do.' A boat without a commander would be like a boat-no, a ship; Navy men would laugh at him-without a captain.
He was forgetting something. He stared at the paper, then at the plain whitewashed plaster of the wall. Forcing it wouldn't work; he had to try to think around it. That was as hard as not thinking about a steak dinner. He'd had practice, though. Soon it would come to him. Soon…
'Wireless telegraph!' he exclaimed, and added an aerial to his sketch. Maybe that would require another crewman, or maybe the engineer could handle it. If it did, it did. He'd wanted one of those gadgets in his barrel during the war just finished. Controlling the mechanical behemoths was too hard without them.
He studied the sketch. He liked it better than the machines in which he'd thundered to victory against the CSA. He wondered what the War Department would think. It was different, and a lot of senior officers prided themselves on not having had a new thought in years. He shrugged. He'd send it in and find out.
II
'Miss Colleton'-the broker in Columbia sounded agitated, even over the telephone wire-'I can do only so much. If you ask the impossible of me, you must not be surprised when I do not hand it to you on a silver platter.'
Anne Colleton glared at the telephone. She could not exert all her considerable force of personality through it. But she could not leave St. Matthews, South Carolina, to visit the state capital, either. And so she would have to forgo the impact her blond good looks had on people of the male persuasion. She'd manage with hardheaded common sense-or, if she didn't, she'd find a new broker. She'd done that before, too.
'Mr. Whitson,' she said, 'are the Confederate dollar, the British pound, and the French franc worth more in terms of gold today, January 16, 1918, than they were yesterday, or are they worth less?'
'Less, of course,' Whitson admitted, 'but even so-'
'Do you expect that these currencies will be worth more in gold tomorrow, or less again?' Anne broke in.
'Less again,' Whitson said, 'but even so, you are gutting your holdings by-'
She interrupted: 'If I convert my holdings in those currencies to gold and U.S. dollars and German marks while the C.S. dollar and the pound and the franc are still worth something, Mr. Whitson, I will have something left when the Confederate States get back on their feet. If I wait any longer, I will have nothing. I've waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?'
'I am trying to save you from yourself, Miss Colleton,' Whit-son said peevishly.
'You are my broker, not my pastor,' Anne said. 'Answer the question I just gave you, if you would be so kind.'
Whitson sighed. 'Very well. On your head be it.' He hung up.
So did Anne, angrily. Her brother, Tom, came into the room. 'You look happy with the world,' he remarked. His words held less in the way of lighthearted humor and more sardonicism than they would have before the war. He'd gone off, as if to a lark, a captain, and come back a lieutenant-colonel who'd been through all the horrors the Roanoke front had to offer.
'Delighted,' Anne returned. She was still sorting out what to make of her brother. In a way, she was pleased he didn't let her do all his thinking for him, as he had before. In another way, that worried her. Having him under her control had been convenient. She went on, 'My idiot broker is convinced I'm the maniac. Everything will be rosy day after tomorrow, if you listen to him.'
'You're right-he's an idiot,' Tom agreed. 'You know what I paid for a pair of shoes yesterday? Twenty-three dollars-in paper, of course. I keep my gold and silver in my pocket. I'm not an idiot.'
'It will get worse,' Anne said. 'If it goes on for another year, people's life savings won't be worth anything. That's when we really have to start worrying.'
'I'll say it is.' Her brother nodded. 'If the Red niggers had waited to rise up till that happened, half the white folks in the country would have grabbed their squirrel guns and joined in.'
'If they hadn't risen up when they did, we might not be in this mess now,' Anne said grimly. 'And they did bad enough when they rose.'
Tom nodded. The Marxist Negroes had killed Jacob, his brother and Anne's, who was at the Marshlands plantation because Yankee poison gas left him an invalid. They'd burned the mansion, too; only in the past few months had their remnants been cleared from the swamps by the Congaree River.
'Hmm,' Tom said. 'We need an idiot to take Marshlands off our hands for us. Maybe we ought to sell it to your broker.'
'As a matter of fact, I think we need an imbecile to take Marshlands off our hands,' Anne said. 'God only knows when anyone will be able to raise a crop of cotton on that land: one fieldhand in three is liable to be a Red, and how could you tell till too late? And the taxes-I haven't seen anyone talking about taking the war taxes off the books, have you?'
'Not likely.' Tom snorted. 'Government needs every dime it can squeeze. Only good thing about that is, the government has to take paper. If they don't take the paper they print, nobody else will, either.'
'Small favors,' Anne said, and her brother nodded again. She went on, 'I'd take just about any kind of offer for
