way the one in that Englishman's fable did. I think…' He shook his head. 'What I think doesn't matter. I don't make policy. I just get stuck with carrying it out.' He picked up the petition. It was a hefty one; it had to weigh a couple of pounds. 'I'll take this to General Pershing's office, if you like.'
'Oh, you don't need to do that, sir,' Toricelli said. 'It's not important. I can fetch it next time I go over there.'
'I'm on my way,' Dowling said. 'Better Pershing's adjutant should have it on his desk than you on yours.'
He caught Toricelli's eye. They shared a slightly conspiratorial chuckle. 'Thank you very much, sir,' the young captain said.
'You're welcome,' Abner Dowling answered. 'I've got to go over there and talk with the general about his scheme for mounting better guard on Temple Square. We need to do it; every broken rock from the Temple and the Tabernacle counts for a sacred relic with the more radical Mormons these days.'
'Yes, sir,' Toricelli said. 'But there's a certain problem in shooting anybody who bends to pick up a pebble in the square, too.'
'A certain problem, yes,' Dowling agreed. 'And that's what I've got to talk to General Pershing about. How do we keep the Mormons from getting symbols of revolt without provoking them and ruining what ever bits of goodwill we've managed to build up since the war ended?'
'I'm sure I don't know, sir,' his adjutant replied. 'I hope you and the commanding general can find a way.'
'So do I. Can't hope for much in the way of normalization if they're still picking up broken rocks and dreaming of treason.' Dowling tucked the petition under his arm and strode down the hall to his superior's office. He took no small pleasure in dropping the document on Pershing's adjutant's desk, and in watching the papers already there jump as it thudded home.
'Thank you so much, sir,' Pershing's adjutant, a major named Fred Corson, said with a sickly smile. 'The general is waiting for you.' He sounded reluctant to admit even that much to Dowling.
'Hello, Colonel,' General Pershing said when Dowling walked in. A grin spread across his bulldog features. 'Was that the thump of a normalization petition I heard just then?'
'It certainly was, sir,' Dowling answered.
'Well, I'll forward it to Philadelphia,' the commandant said. 'That's my duty. And there that petition will sit till the end of time, along with all the others.'
'Unless the Socialists decide to grant them all, that is,' Dowling said.
'Yes. Unless. In that case, Colonel, you and I will both need new assignments, because normal states don't have soldiers occupying them. Part of me won't be sorry to get away.' Pershing rose from behind his desk and went over to the window not far away. He looked at his fortified headquarters, and at Salt Lake City beyond. 'Part of me, though, will regret leaving this state, because I'm convinced that, no matter what this administration may believe, Utah isn't ready for normalization. As a matter of fact, here we-'
Abner Dowling heard a distant pop! It might have been a motorcar backfiring, or a firecracker going off. It might have been, but it wasn't. At the same instant as he heard it, or perhaps even a split second before, the window in front of which General Pershing was standing shattered. Pershing made a surprised noise. That was the best way Dowling could have described it. It didn't hold much pain. Before Dowling fully realized what had happened, the military commandant of the state of Utah crumpled to the carpet in front of him.
'General Pershing?' Dowling whispered. He hurried over to the fallen man. He needed a moment to add two and two together. Only when he saw the neat hole and the spreading bloodstain in the middle of Pershing's chest did he fully understand what he was seeing. 'General Pershing!' he said, sharply this time.
He grabbed for Pershing's wrist and felt for a pulse. He found none. Aside from that, the sudden sharp stink in the room told him what he needed to know. Pershing had fouled himself when the bullet struck home.
Thinking of a bullet made Dowling think of the man who'd fired it. He peered out through the shattered window. The U.S. perimeter around the headquarters ran out for several hundred yards. The gunman must have shot from well beyond it, which meant he had to be a brilliant sniper. In war-ravaged Utah, that was anything but impossible, as Colonel Dowling knew all too well.
Only while Dowling was shouting for Pershing's adjutant did he pause to wonder whether the sniper was still out there, peering through a telescope on his Springfield and waiting for another shot. He was, at the moment, too shocked, too stunned, to worry about it.
Major Corson hurried in. In his outer office, he hadn't even heard the gunshot. Dowling's shouts were what drew him. 'Oh, Jesus Christ!' he said, which summed it up as well as anything. 'Is he-?' He couldn't bring himself to say the word.
Dowling did: 'He's dead, all right. He dropped down like somebody let all the air out of him. He was dead before he hit the rug-never knew what hit him.'
Out on the perimeter, soldiers had started shouting and pointing. A couple of them started running. Dowling noted all that as if from a very great distance. In one sense, whether they caught the sniper mattered a great deal. In another sense, it hardly mattered at all. The damage was done, and more than done.
Pershing's adjutant saw the same thing. He got the truth into four words: 'So much for normalization.'
'Yeah,' Dowling said. 'We just went back to square one.'
'Sir, you're senior officer in the state right now,' Corson said. Dowling nodded; the city commandants in both Provo and Ogden were lieutenant colonels. Pershing's adjutant looked to him with desperate appeal in his eyes. 'What are your orders?'
You're in charge of Utah. God help you, you poor, sorry bastard. Dowling tried to pull himself together. 'Fetch a doctor. It won't do any good, but fetch him. Send men after that sniper.' He feared that wouldn't do any good, either, but he had to try. 'Call the president and the War Department, in that order. Let them know what's happened. After that, we close Salt Lake City down. We take hostages. We do whatever we have to do to let the Mormons know that if they want to play rough, we're going to play ten times rougher. Have you got that?'
'Yes, sir,' Major Corson answered. He saluted and hurried away, leaving Dowling alone with General Pershing's body.
If the Mormons want to play rough, we'll play ten times rougher? Dear God in heaven, had he really said that? He nodded. He had. And, in saying it, he'd sounded a great deal like General George Armstrong Custer. He hadn't wanted to. He hadn't intended to. But he had, all the same. Custer had rubbed off on him after all. And if that wasn't a chilling thought…
If that wasn't a chilling thought, maybe it was a reminder that Custer, for all his enormous flaws-and nobody knew them better than Dowling; a general had no more secrets from his adjutant than a man from his valet-had ended up the most successful soldier in the history of the United States.
I won't keep this command long, Dowling thought. They'll bring in someone with stars on his shoulder straps as fast as they can. Meanwhile, though, it was his. He had to do the best job he could while it remained his.
A doctor dashed into Pershing's office, little black bag in hand. 'What do you need, Colonel?' he asked.
'Not me, Major,' Dowling answered. 'It's General Pershing who's dead.' Along with any hope for peace in Utah for God only knows how long.
Jake Featherston strode through the streets of Richmond, his bodyguards surrounding him front and back, left and right. He moved swiftly and confidently, and with such abrupt decision that his turns would sometimes take even the alert guards by surprise, so they'd have to scramble to stay with him.
Richmond was not the city it had been before the war. By now, ten years after the Confederate States had yielded to the United States, almost all the damage from U.S. bombing aeroplanes had been repaired. Even so, something was missing from the city's heart. Before the Great War, everybody in Richmond had known the CSA sat on top of the world.
Nowadays… Nowadays, Richmond felt poor and shabby. Everything looked gray. It all needed cleaning up, hosing down, painting. Nobody bothered to give it any such thing. And the people seemed as gray and grimy and defeated as the town in which they lived. Jake had thought the same thing even before the stock market submerged, but it was much more noticeable now.
He hurried past a man with shoulders slumped from lugging heavy sample cases to firms that weren't buying, that wouldn't have been buying if he'd been selling gold for the price of lead. That luckless drummer was a dead man walking-till he saw Jake. He straightened up. His eyes got back their spark. 'Freedom, Mr. Featherston!' he
