As he neared Philadelphia's second river, he saw buildings brutally pushed down and vehicles flipped onto their sides or upside down. Some men stopped to help the injured. Others pressed on.
And then Morrell got a chance to look across the Schuylkill. That part of the city was almost as heavily built up as downtown. Or rather, it had been. Next to Morrell, a skinny woman crossed herself. He felt like doing the same thing. Almost everything over there was knocked flat. A few buildings that must have been uncommonly strong still stood up from the rubble, but only a few.
A bridge across the Schuylkill survived, though it leaned drunkenly to one side. How long it would stay up, God only knew. People staggered across it from the west. Some had had the clothes burned off of them. Morrell saw several with one side of their face badly seared and the other fine: they must have stood in profile to the bomb when it went off.
'His shadow!' a dreadfully burned man babbled. 'I saw his shadow on the sidewalk, all printed like, but not a thing left of George!' He slumped down and mercifully passed out. Morrell wondered whether he would ever wake. He might be luckier not to.
A loudspeaker started to blare: 'All military personnel! Report at once to your duty stations! All military personnel! Report at once to-'
Morrell didn't exactly have a duty station. He headed back to the War Department. The catastrophe across the river was bigger than any one man. And he had a better chance of finding out what was going on at the military's nerve center.
So he thought, anyway. But one of the guards who patted him down asked, 'What the hell happened, sir? Do you know?'
'Not exactly,' Morrell answered. 'I was hoping people here did.'
Before a private took him down to John Abell's office, he paused in a men's room and washed off as much of the filthy rainwater as he could. 'Why are you doing that, sir?' asked the kid, who went in with him.
'Just in case,' Morrell answered. Getting rid of the horrible stuff wouldn't hurt. He was sure of that.
Abell always looked pale. He seemed damn near transparent now. He might have aged ten years in the few days since Morrell last saw him. 'My God!' he said. 'They beat us to the punch. I didn't think they could, but they did.'
'Have you been up top?' Morrell asked. 'Did you see it with your own eyes?'
'No.' Abell had always wanted to deal with things from a distance. Was that a strength or a weakness? Probably both at once, Morrell thought. The General Staff officer went on, 'How did they get it here? They couldn't have used an airplane-I swear to God they don't have a machine that can carry it. And our Y-ranging gear didn't spot a thing coming up from the south.'
'They must have sneaked it in, God damn them,' Morrell said. 'Remember how they broke through in eastern Ohio? They had a whole battalion of guys in our uniforms, in our vehicles, who could talk like us. What do you want to bet they did the same damn thing again-and made it work?' He'd made it work himself, getting over the Tennessee River in front of Chattanooga.
Abell managed a shaky nod. Then he reached for a telephone. 'With a little luck, they won't get away. We can shoot every last one of them if we catch them in our uniforms.'
Morrell nodded. That was what the laws of war said. Whether the USA would want to shoot those Confederates if it caught them might be a different story. How much could they tell interrogators about their uranium-bomb project?
'We'd better catch them,' Abell said as he slammed down the telephone after barking into it with unaccustomed heat. 'They can't get away with that. How many thousands of people did they just murder?'
Would it have been better had the enemy dropped the bomb out of an airplane and then flown away? Would it have been better had he dropped ton after ton of ordinary bombs instead, or machine-gunned as many people as he'd killed in this one blast? Morrell found himself shaking his head. It wouldn't have been any better, but it would have been more familiar. That mattered, too. The uranium bomb was something brand new. Poison gas had carried some of that same whiff of horror during the last war. People took it for granted now.
Would they come to take uranium bombs for granted, too? How could they, when each one could devastate a city? And these were just the early ones. Would next year's model level a whole county, or maybe a state?
'My God,' Abell said again. 'Those stinking crackers…and they beat us. There won't be one stone left on top of another one by the time our bombers get through with Lexington-I'll tell you that.'
The last time he and Morrell talked about uranium bombs, he'd waltzed around the name of the town where the CSA was working on them. This time, he'd slipped. He was human after all, and would probably have to do penance before the altar of Security the Almighty.
He realized as much a few seconds too late. 'You didn't hear that from me,' he said in some embarrassment.
'Hear what?' Morrell asked innocently.
'I wonder if we could drive down the Shenandoah Valley and take that place away from them,' Abell said. Even though he was embarrassed, now that the cat was out of the bag he was letting it run around.
'Wouldn't take long to pull an assault force together.' Morrell spoke with the assurance of a veteran field commander. 'Don't know how hard the Confederates would fight back-hard as they can, I bet. Now that they've used one bomb, how long do they need to build another one?'
'That I can't tell you, because I don't know. I wouldn't tell you even if I did, but I don't,' Abell said. 'Days? Weeks? Months? Twenty minutes? I just have no idea.'
'All right,' Morrell said. The General Staff officer was liable to lie about something like that, but Morrell didn't think he was, not this time. He went on, 'This would have been a lot worse if they'd brought it here by the government buildings instead of blowing it up across the river.'
'I don't think they could have-it wouldn't have been easy, anyhow,' Abell said. 'We search autos and trucks before we let them in here. Auto bombs are bad enough, but put a couple of tons of high explosive in a truck…' He didn't finish, or need to. 'One of those was plenty to make us clamp down.'
'Good for you, then. You just saved the President and Congress and us. I mean, I hope you did.' Morrell told him about the black rain. 'Exactly how dangerous is that stuff, anyway?'
'We'll all find out. I don't know the details. I'm not sure anybody does.' Abell looked down at his own soft, immaculately tended hands. 'I do believe you were wise to wash off as much as you could. It's like X-rays: you want to keep the exposure to a minimum.'
Morrell looked at his own hands and at his uniform, which still bore the marks of those unnatural drops. Were there little X-ray machines in them? Something like that, he supposed. Maybe there were more in the dust in the air. 'We sure never learned any of this stuff at West Point,' he said.
'Who knew back then?' John Abell said. 'Nobody, that's who. Half of what we learned just went obsolete.'
'More than half,' Morrell said. 'New rules from now on.'
'If we live long enough,' Abell said.
'Yeah. If.' Morrell looked at his splotched uniform again. 'I think the new Rule Number One is, Don't get in a war with anybody who's got this damn bomb.'
'A little too late for that now,' the General Staff officer pointed out.
'Don't remind me,' Morrell said.
I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth.'
This wasn't the familiar studio in Richmond, from which Jake Featherston had bellowed defiance at the world since the days when he was a discredited rabble-rouser at the head of a withering Freedom Party. He had no idea whether that wireless studio still stood. He would have bet against it. Richmond had fallen, but the Confederates put up a hell of a fight before they finally pulled out.
Portsmouth, Virginia, then. It wasn't where Featherston wanted to be-he'd always wanted to broadcast in triumph from Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. And I will yet, goddammit, he thought savagely. But Portsmouth would have to do for now. The station had a strong signal, and somehow or other Saul Goldman had patched together a web to send Jake's words all over the CSA-and up into Yankeeland, too. If Saul wasn't a wizard, he'd do till a real one showed up.
The speech. 'Truth is, we just showed the damnyankees what we can do. Just like the Kaiser-one bomb, and boom! A city's gone. Philadelphia will never be the same.' He didn't exactly say the uranium bomb (no, from the
