He felt more alert now than he had since the very last days of the war. He didn't want to get hurt just when he was about to head home. Well, he didn't want to get hurt any old time, but he especially didn't want to get hurt now. And he knew too well that he could. Cheraw was no more reconciled to the Stars and Stripes than any other part of the dead but still writhing CSA. Locals probed every day to see how much they could get away with. U.S. authorities clamped down hard. That only gave the locals more reasons to hate damnyankees-as if they needed them.
At last, his discharge orders came. So did a travel voucher that would send him up to Philadelphia and then across the country through U.S. territory. He couldn't have been happier: the sooner he left the Confederacy forever, the happier he'd be.
He was painfully hung over when he boarded the northbound train-but not too hung over to notice the machine guns it carried. He hoped it wouldn't have to use them; they might make his head explode. Captain Rhodes and a bunch of guys from his platoon-a lot of them the worse for wear, too-saw him off. Lieutenant Lavochkin didn't. Chester didn't miss him.
Rhodes and the soldiers waved and shouted as the whistle screeched and the train pulled out of Cheraw. 'Lucky stiff!' somebody called. Yeah, Chester thought, gulping three aspirins. He was going home.
A bner Dowling knew more about uranium than he'd ever imagined he would. Before the war, he wasn't sure he'd ever heard of the stuff. Oh, maybe in chemistry, back in the dark ages around the turn of the century. Yes, it was an element. So what? You didn't do experiments with it, the way you did with copper and sulfur and things like that.
And he knew about saturnium and jovium, which was what the Confederate physicists called elements 93 and 94. Just to confuse the issue, U.S. scientists had named the same elements neptunium and plutonium. He gathered they had different handles in every country that had found them. Back in the vanished days when he was at West Point, no one had dreamt they existed.
'Boy, I didn't know how obsolete I was till I got here,' he complained to Angelo Toricelli. 'Most of what I thought I knew turns out not to be so, and stuff I never imagined is what really counts. You can't win.'
'Sir, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't learn this stuff in school, either,' his adjutant answered.
That did make Dowling feel better. Misery, or at least confusion, loved company. 'After they reassign us, you know, they'll have to put permanent bloodhounds on us, to make sure nobody knocks us over the head and hijacks us on account of what we know,' he said.
'Maybe, but maybe not,' Toricelli said. 'I mean, you can bet your bottom dollar that everybody who wants a superbomb either has one by now or is already working on one as hard as he can. What do those people need with us?'
'Go ahead. Be that way!' Dowling said. 'But if I catch you talking to a Jap in glasses or a beautiful Russian piano player, you'll be in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, and you'd better believe it.'
'I'd like to talk to a beautiful Russian piano player,' Toricelli said wistfully. 'Hell, I'd like to talk to a beautiful piano player from Seattle.'
If you were a career officer, you often didn't have time to find a wife. Dowling never had, and he was far from alone in the fraternity of war. George Custer had made it work-although Dowling often thought George was the steed Libbie rode to glory. Irving Morrell was married, too, and by all accounts happily. It could happen. Odds against it were longer than they were in a lot of trades, though.
'Just as long as you don't say too much to a beautiful piano player from Lexington,' Abner Dowling warned.
'I wouldn't do that, sir.' His adjutant sounded hurt. 'Besides, I haven't seen a gal here I'd want to give the time of day to.'
Dowling nodded. 'I know what you mean.' He didn't suppose Confederates were uglier or handsomer than U.S. citizens, taken all in all. But the war had hit hard here, especially in the last few months, when the USA tried to blast Lexington flat to keep the CSA from building a superbomb. It didn't work, but it did take its toll on the locals. People hereabouts still looked haggard and hungry. The Shenandoah Valley was some of the richest farmland in the world, but it got hit, too…and not so many folks were left to raise crops, either.
'And even if I did find a woman I liked here, well, I might want to lay her, but I don't think I'd ever marry a Confederate,' Toricelli said. 'I'd wonder why she wanted to marry me, and all my superiors would wonder whether I'd gone out of my mind.'
He wasn't wrong. A marriage like that could blight his hopes for promotion. It could also blight his life if it didn't work, and it was much too likely not to. Even so…Dowling said, 'You wouldn't be the first, you know. We've already had a couple of petitions from enlisted men to let them marry local girls.'
'I'd better know, sir,' his adjutant said. 'That paperwork crosses my desk before it lands on yours.'
'Yes, yes.' Dowling didn't want the younger man to think he was forgetting things like that. As soon as they started believing you were past it, you were, whether you knew it or not. Hastily, Dowling went on, 'I'm the one who has to decide, though. That's one more thing they didn't teach at West Point. Does this PFC really have good reason to marry a Virginia woman? Should I ship him back to the USA instead? Or should I just hose him down with cold water till he comes to his senses?'
'Cold water would put a lot of these proposals or propositions or whatever they are on ice,' Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said gravely.
Dowling sent him a severe look. Toricelli bore up under it like the soldier he was. Dowling said, 'If I do let them get married and things go sour, they'll blame me. Plenty of perfectly normal marriages go bad, God knows. Usually it's nobody's fault but the bride and groom's. Figure anybody would remember that?'
'Fat chance,' Toricelli said. 'Sir.'
'I know. But the one where the guy knocked the gal up…I am going to approve that one, hell with me if I'm not. If I say no, her father's liable to use a shotgun on our soldier, and then we'll have to take hostages, and it'll just be a goddamn mess. I'll pay for an unhappy marriage to stay away from firing squads.'
'That makes sense, sir,' Toricelli said. 'Kind of a cold-blooded way to look at things, but it makes sense.'
'You get as old as I am, if you're hot-blooded you're either dead or you're George Custer, one,' Dowling said. 'I know damn well I'm not Custer-thank God! — and I wasn't dead last time I looked. So…I try not to blow my cork unless my cork really needs blowing.'
His adjutant returned a sly stare. 'Like with General MacArthur, right?'
'I won't waste my time answering that, even if it is true.' Dowling stood on his dignity, a shaky position for a man of his bulk.
Before his adjutant could call him on it, a noncom stuck his head into the office and said, 'Sir, that professor guy wants to see you.'
'FitzBelmont?' Dowling asked.
The sergeant nodded. 'That's him.'
Dowling didn't want to see the physicist. He said, 'Send him in,' anyway. Sometimes what you wanted was different from what you needed. If this wasn't one of those times, he could have the pleasure of throwing Henderson FitzBelmont out on his ear.
When FitzBelmont came in, he looked as angry and as determined as a professorial man could. 'General, when am I going to get my life back?' he demanded. 'It is now almost four months after the surrender, but your interrogators continue to hound me. To be frank, sir, I am tired of it.'
'To be frank, sir, I don't give a flying fuck.' Abner Dowling didn't blow his cork, but he didn't need to waste politeness on FitzBelmont, either. 'When you went to work for Jake Featherston, you sold your soul to the Devil. Now you've got to buy it back, one nickel at a time. If the boys aren't finished with you, too bad. You have a train to catch, or what?'
'I would like to be a normal human being in a normal country, not a…a bug under a microscope.' The professor didn't have the force of personality to hold anger together very long. His voice went high and shrill and petulant.
'Sorry, but that's what you are. Get used to it,' Dowling said. 'You're going to be under the microscope for the rest of your life. You're too dangerous for us not to keep tabs on you. If you don't believe me, ask what's left of Philadelphia.'
'I can't do that again. You've made very sure I can't,' FitzBelmont said. 'And some of your interrogators are nothing but idiots. You know more about the physics of fission than they do.'
