veteran noncom went on, 'There's just one thing you're lucky about. The other side will have as many fuckups as we do. That may keep some of you alive longer than you deserve. On the other hand, it may not, too. A machine gun isn't awful goddamn choosy about who it picks out.' His face clouded. 'I ought to know.' He wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart, too.
'Question, Sergeant?' somebody called.
'Yeah, go ahead.'
'Is it true the Confederates are giving their soldiers lots and lots of submachine guns?' the youngster asked.
'Yeah, that's supposed to be true,' the sergeant said. 'I don't think all that much of the idea myself. Submachine gun only fires a pistol round. It doesn't have a lot of stopping power, and the effective range is pretty short.' He stopped and rubbed his chin. It was blue with stubble, though he'd surely scraped it smooth that morning. 'Of course, submachine guns do put a hell of a lot of lead in the air. And the goddamn Confederates can hold their breath till they turn blue, but they're never gonna have as many men as we do. I expect that's why they're trying it.'
Another recruit piped up: 'Why hasn't somebody made an automatic rifle, if a submachine gun isn't good enough?'
'The Confederates are supposed to be trying that, too, but there are problems,' the sergeant said. 'Recoil, wear on the mechanism, overheating, having the weapon pull up when you fire it on full automatic, keeping it clean in the field-those are some of the things you've got to worry about. I wouldn't fall over dead with surprise if we start using something like that, too, one of these days, but don't hold your breath, either. And the Springfield is a goddamn good weapon. We won a war with it. We can win another one if we have to.'
He waited. Sure enough, that drew another question: 'Are we going to fight another war with the Confederate States?'
'Beats me,' the drill sergeant answered. 'I've done my share of fighting, and I am plumb satisfied. But if that Featherston son of a bitch isn't… You need two for peace, but one can start a war. If he does start it, it's up to us- it'll be up to you-to finish it.'
Armstrong Grimes had no complaints. If he had to be in the Army, he wanted to be there while it was in action. What point to it otherwise? He didn't think about getting hurt. He especially didn't think about getting killed. That kind of stuff happened to other people. It couldn't possibly happen to him. He was going to live forever.
The sergeant said, 'And if he does start another war, you will finish it, right? You'll kick the CSA's mangy ass around the block, right?'
'Yes, Sergeant!' the young men shouted. They were all as convinced of their own immortality as Armstrong Grimes.
'I can't hear you.' The sergeant cupped a hand behind one ear.
'Yes, Sergeant!' The recruits might have been at a football game. Armstrong yelled as loud as anybody else.
'That's better,' the drill sergeant allowed. 'Not good, but better.' Hardly anything anybody did in basic training was good. You might be perfect, but you still weren't good enough. They wanted you to try till you keeled over. People did, too.
Supper was fried chicken and canned corn and spinach, with apple pie a la mode for dessert. It wasn't great fried chicken, but you could eat as much as you wanted, which made up for a lot. Armstrong used food to pay his body back for the sleep it wasn't getting.
After supper, he had a couple of hours to himself-the only time during the day when he wasn't either unconscious or being run ragged. He could write home-which he didn't do often enough to suit his mother-or read a book or get into a poker game or shoot the breeze with other recruits winding down from an exhausting day or do what he usually did: lie on his cot smoking cigarette after cigarette. People said they were bad for your wind. He didn't care. He got through his three miles without any trouble, and the smokes helped him relax.
'You think there's going to be a war?' somebody asked. The question had been coming up more and more often lately.
'If there is, the goddamn Confederates'll be sorry,' somebody else answered.
'Damn right,' Armstrong said in the midst of a general rumble of agreement.
'We can lick 'em,' someone said, and then added what might have been the young man's creed: 'If our fathers did it, hell, we can do it easy.'
'Damn right,' Armstrong said again. Two hours after he sacked out, they had a simulated night attack. He bounced out of bed to repel imaginary enemies. He didn't miss the sleep. Why would he? He was already too far behind for a little more to matter.
Colonel Clarence Potter imagined a man he had never seen. He didn't know if the man lived in Dallas or Mobile or Nashville or Charleston or Richmond. Wherever he lived, he fit right in. He sounded like the people around him. He looked like them, too, and acted like them. When the time came to shout, 'Freedom!' he yelled as loud as anybody. When he had a few beers in a saloon, he grumbled about what the damnyankee innovation of the forward pass had done to the great game of football.
And when he was by himself, this man Potter had never seen would write innocent-looking letters or send innocent-sounding wires up to the United States. He would be doing business with or for some firm or other based north of the Mason-Dixon line. And some of his messages really would be innocent, and some of them would go straight to the U.S. War Department in Philadelphia.
The man Potter had never met-would never meet-was the mirror image of the spies he ran in the USA. He'd had the idea. He had to assume his opposite number up in the United States had had it, too. He didn't like that, but he had to believe it. He kept wondering how much damage that imaginary U.S. spy could do.
Trouble was, the bastard almost certainly wasn't imaginary. A German had trouble sounding like a Frenchman, and vice versa. But a Yankee and a Confederate were too close to begin with. Differences in accent were small things. If you came from the USA, you had to remember to say things like note or banknote instead of bill. People would follow you if you used your own word, but they'd know you were a foreigner. But if you were careful, you could get by.
Something else worried Clarence Potter. He ran spies. The probable counterpart of one of the fellows he ran would also be a spy. If you had people in place as spies, though, wouldn't you also have them in place as provocateurs? As saboteurs?
He didn't know whether the Confederates had provocateurs and saboteurs lurking in the USA. He didn't know because it was none of his business. What he didn't know, he couldn't tell. In philosophy up at Yale, though, he'd learned about what Plato called true opinions. He was pretty damn sure he had one of those about this question. He also had some strong opinions about where he'd put provocateurs and saboteurs.
He sat down in front of his typewriter to bang out a memorandum. In it he said not a word about spies, provocateurs, and saboteurs in the United States. He did mention the possibility that their U.S. equivalents were operating in the Confederate States. It would be unfortunate, he wrote, if the USA were able to take advantage of similarities between the two countries in language, custom, and dress, and it is to be hoped that steps to prevent such dangerous developments are currently being taken.
When he reread the sentence, the corners of his mouth turned down in distaste. He didn't like writing that way; it set his teeth on edge. He would rather have come straight to the point. But he knew the officers who would see the memorandum. They wrote gobbledygook. They expected to read it, too. Active verbs would only scare them. They were none too active themselves.
As soon as he fired the memorandum up the chain of command, he stopped worrying about it. He judged he probably wouldn't get an answer. If the Army or the Freedom Party or somebody was watching out for suspicious characters, he wouldn't. Nobody would bother patting a busybody colonel on the hand and saying, 'There, there. No need to worry, dear.'
A few days later, he was writing a note when the telephone on his desk rang. His hand jerked a little-just enough to spoil a word. He scratched it out before picking up the handset. 'Clarence Potter.' He didn't say he was in Intelligence. Anyone who didn't already know had the wrong number.
'Hello, Potter. You are a sneaky son of a bitch, aren't you?'
'Hello, Mr. President,' Potter answered cautiously. 'Is that a compliment or not? In my line of work, I'm
