Return Engagement (34 page)

“I wish we had it here,” his wife said.

He tried to imagine it: going from the back oven of a summer to winter just by opening and closing a door. It was supposed to be true, but he had trouble believing it. He said, “Electricity is one thing. This air conditioning is something else. It’s very fancy and very expensive, or so they say.”

“I can still wish,” Magdalena said. “I wished for electricity for years before we got it. I wished and I wished, and here it is. Maybe if I do enough wishing, we will have this air conditioning, too, one of these years. Or if we don’t, maybe our children will. With all the changes we’ve seen, you never can tell.”

“You never can tell,” Rodriguez agreed gravely. “As for me, what I wish for is an automobile.”

“An automobile,” his wife breathed. She might have been speaking of something as distant and unlikely as air conditioning. But then her eyes narrowed. “Do you know, Hipolito, we could almost buy one if we wanted to badly enough.”

“Yes, that occurred to me, too,” he answered. The motorcar they could get for what they could afford to spend wouldn’t be anything fancy: a beat-up old Ford or some Confederate make of similar vintage. But even a beat-up old auto offered freedom of a sort nothing else could match. Rodriguez went on, “The only times I was ever out of the valley were to fight in the last war and to go to Hermosillo to help get President Featherston a second term. It’s not enough.”

In a small voice, Magdalena Rodriguez said, “I’ve never been outside this valley at all. I never really thought about what was going on anywhere else till we got the wireless set. But now . . . If I can hear about the world outside, why can’t I see it?”

For years, even trains had stopped coming to Baroyeca. They were back again, now that the silver (and, perhaps not so incidentally, lead) mines in the hills above the little town had reopened. But traveling by train was different from hopping into an auto and just going. Trains stuck to schedules, and they stuck to the rails. In a motorcar, you could go where and when you wanted to go, do whatever you wanted to do. . . .

You could—if they let you. Rodriguez said, “I think this would be something for after the war. We might buy a motorcar now,
sí.
But whether we could buy any gasoline for it is a different question.”

Rationing hadn’t meant much to him. It still didn’t, not really. He’d even stopped worrying about kerosene. With electricity in the house, the old lamps were all packed up and stored in the barn. But gasoline, these days, was for machines that killed people, not for those that made life easier and more pleasant.

“If we had an automobile to go with electricity . . . Ten years ago, only the
patrones
had such things, and not all of them,” Magdalena said.

“That was before the Freedom Party took over,” Rodriguez answered. “Now ordinary people can have the good things, too. But even if I had a motorcar, I wouldn’t be a
patrón.
I would never want to do that. To be a
patrón,
you have to like telling others what to do. That has never been for me.”

“No, of course not.” Magdalena’s voice had a certain edge to it. She might have been warning that if he thought he could tell
her
what to do, he had better think again.

Since he didn’t have an automobile, he walked into Baroyeca for the next Freedom Party meeting. He would have grumbled if he’d had to walk because his motorcar was in the garage. Because he’d never done anything but walk, he didn’t grumble at all. He took the journey for granted.

A drunken miner staggered out of
La Culebra Verde
as Rodriguez came up the street toward Freedom Party headquarters. The man gave him a vacant grin, then sat down hard in the middle of the dirt road. Rodriguez wondered how many drunks had come out of the cantina and done the exact same thing. He’d done it himself, but no more than once or twice. Miners drank harder than farmers did. They might have worked harder than farmers did, too. Rodriguez couldn’t think of anyone else for whom that might be true. But to go down underground all day, never to see the sun or feel the breeze from one end of your shift to the other . . . That was no way for a man to live.

He walked past Diaz’s general store. A storekeeper, now, had it easy. If Diaz wasn’t sitting in the lap of luxury, who in Baroyeca was? Nobody, not that Rodriguez could see. And yet Jaime Diaz complained about the way things went almost as if he tilled the soil. He wasn’t too proud to act like anybody else.

“Good evening,
Señor
Rodriguez,” Robert Quinn said in Spanish when the farmer came into the headquarters. “Good to see you.”

“
Gracias, señor.
The same to you,” Rodriguez answered gravely. He nodded to Carlos Ruiz and some of his other friends as he sat down on a second-row folding chair. The first row of chairs, as usual, was almost empty. Not many men were bold enough to call attention to themselves by sitting up front.

Freedom Party headquarters filled up with men from Baroyeca and peasants from the surrounding countryside. Some of them had walked much farther to come to town than Rodriguez had. “Freedom!” they would say as they came in and sat down—or, more often,
“¡Libertad!”

Quinn waited till almost everyone he expected was there. Then, still in Spanish, he said, “Well, my friends, let’s get on with it.” When no one objected, he continued, “This meeting of the Freedom Party, Baroyeca chapter, is now in session.”

He went through the minutes and old business in a hurry. Hipolito Rodriguez yawned a little anyhow. He hadn’t joined the Freedom Party for the sake of its parliamentary procedure. He’d become a member because Jake Featherston promised to do things—and kept his promises.

As quickly as Quinn could, he turned to new business. “I know we’ll all pray for Eduardo Molina,” he said. “He can’t be here tonight—he just got word his son, Ricardo, has been wounded in Ohio. I am very sorry, but I hear it may be a serious wound. I am going to pass the hat for the Molinas. Please be generous.”

When the hat came to him, Rodriguez put in half a dollar. He crossed himself as he passed it along. He could have got bad news about Pedro as easily as Eduardo Molina had about Ricardo. What happened in war was largely a matter of luck. So many bullets flew. Every so often, one of them was bound to find soft, young flesh.

A man at the back of the room brought the hat up to Robert Quinn. It jingled as the Freedom Party organizer set it down beside him.
“Gracias,”
he said. “Thank you all. I know this is something you would rather not have to do. I know it is something some of you have trouble affording. Times are not as hard as they were ten years ago, before we came to power, but they are still not easy. But all of you understand—but for the grace of God, we could have been taking up a collection for
your
family.”

Rodriguez started. Then he nodded. It really wasn’t that surprising to have
Señor
Quinn understand what was in his mind. Quinn knew how many men here had sons or brothers in the Army, and what could happen to those men.

“On to happier news,” the Freedom Party man said. “Our guns are now pounding Sandusky, Ohio. Let me show you on the map where Sandusky is.” He walked over to a campaign map pinned to the wall of Freedom Party headquarters. When he pointed to the city on the shore of Lake Erie, a low murmur ran through the men who crowded the room. Quinn nodded. “
Sí, señores, es verdad
—we have cut all the way through Ohio and reached the water. Soon our men and machines will be on the lake. The United States cannot send anything through the middle of their country. It is cut in half. And do you know what this means?”

“It means victory!” Carlos Ruiz exclaimed.

Quinn nodded. “That is just what it means. If
los Estados Unidos
cannot send the raw materials from the West to the factories in the East, how are they going to make what they need to go on fighting?” He beamed. “The answer is simple—they cannot. And if they cannot make what they need, they cannot go on with the fight.”

Could it be as simple as that? It certainly seemed to make good sense. Rodriguez hoped it did. A short, victorious war . . . The North American continent hadn’t seen one like that for sixty years. Maybe this wouldn’t be a fight to the finish, the way the Great War had been. He could hope not, anyhow.

“War news elsewhere is mostly good,” Quinn said. “There is no more U.S. resistance in the Bahamas. Some raiding does go on, but it is by black guerrillas. The
mallates
may be a nuisance, but they will not keep
los Estados Confederados
from occupying these important islands.”

As far as Rodriguez was concerned,
mallates
were always a nuisance—a deadly nuisance. He’d got his baptism of fire against black rebels in Georgia. That fight had been worse than any against U.S. troops. The blacks had known they couldn’t surrender, and fought to the end.

Well, the Freedom Party was putting them in their place in the CSA. And if it was doing the same thing in the Bahamas, too . . . good.

“
S
andusky.” Jake Featherston spoke the ugly name as if it belonged to the woman he loved. When the thrust up into Ohio began, he hadn’t known where the Confederates would reach Lake Erie—whether at Toledo or Sandusky or even Cleveland. From the beginning, that had depended as much on what the damnyankees did and how they fought back as on his own forces.

“Sandusky.” He said it again, eyeing the map on the wall of his office as avidly as if it were the woman he loved slipping out of a negligee. Where Confederate troops reached Lake Erie didn’t matter so much.
That
they reached it . . . That they reached it mattered immensely. He’d seen as much before the fighting started. The United States were only starting to realize it now.

“Sandusky.” Featherston said it one more time. Getting to Sandusky—or anywhere else along the shores of Lake Erie—didn’t mean victory. He had a hell of a lot of work to do yet. But if his barrels had been stopped in front of Columbus, that would have meant defeat. He’d done what he had to do in the opening weeks of his war: he’d made victory possible, perhaps even likely.

Lulu knocked on the door. Without waiting for his reply, she stuck her head in the office and said, “Professor FitzBelmont is here to see you, Mr. President.”

“Send him in,” Jake said resignedly, wondering why he’d given the man an appointment in the first place. “I promised him, what—ten minutes?”

“Fifteen, Mr. President.” Lulu spoke in mild reproof, as if Featherston should have remembered. And so he should have, and so he had—but he’d done his best to get out of what he’d already agreed to. Lulu was better at holding him to the straight and narrow path than Al Smith dreamt of being. She ducked out, then returned with a formal announcement: “Mr. President, here is Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont of Washington University.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked like a professor. He wore rumpled tweeds and gold-framed eyeglasses. He had a long, horsey face and a shock of gray hair that resisted both oil and combing. When he said, “Very pleased to meet you, Mr. President,” he didn’t tack on a ringing, “Freedom!” the way anybody with an ounce of political sense would have done.

“Pleased to meet you, too.” Jake stuck out his hand. FitzBelmont took it. To the President’s surprise, the other man had a respectable grip. His hand didn’t jellyfish under Featherston’s squeeze. Obscurely pleased, Featherston waved him to the chair in front of his desk. “Why don’t you take a seat? Now, then—you’re a professor of physics, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir. That is correct.” FitzBelmont talked like a professor, too. His voice had the almost-damnyankee intonation so many educated men seemed proud of, and a fussy precision to go with it, too.

“Well, then . . .” Jake also sat, and leaned back in his chair. “Suppose you tell me what a professor of physics reckons I ought to know.” He didn’t quite come out and say that a professor of physics couldn’t tell him anything he needed to know, but that was in his own voice and manner.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont didn’t seem to notice. That didn’t surprise Featherston, and did amuse him. The professor said, “I was wondering, Mr. President, if you were familiar with some of the recent work in atomic physics coming out of the German Empire.”

Jake didn’t laugh in his face, though for the life of him he couldn’t have told why not. All he said was, “Sorry, Professor, but I can’t say that I am.”
Or that I ever wanted to be, either.
He looked at his watch. Damned if he would give this fellow a minute more than his allotted time.

“The Germans have produced some quite extraordinary energy releases through the bombardment of uranium nuclei with neutrons.
Quite
extraordinary,” Professor FitzBelmont said.

“That’s nice,” Jake said blandly. “What does it mean? What does it mean to somebody who’s not a professor of physics, I ought to say?”

He didn’t know how he expected FitzBelmont to answer. The tweedy academic made an unimpressive fist. “It means you could take this much uranium—the right kind of uranium, I should say—and make a blast big enough to blow a city off the map.”

“Wait a minute,” Jake said sharply. “You could do that with one bomb?”

“One bomb,” Professor FitzBelmont agreed. “If the theoretical calculations are anywhere close to accurate.”

Featherston scratched his head. He’d heard things like that before. Theory promised the moon, and usually didn’t even deliver moonshine. “What do you mean, the right kind of uranium? Up till now, I never heard of uranium at all, and I sure as hell never heard of two kinds of it.”

“As you say, sir, there are two main kinds—isotopes, we call them,” the professor answered. “One has a weight of 238. That kind is not explosive. The other isotope only weighs 235. That kind is, or seems to be. The trick is separating the uranium-235 from the uranium-238.”

“All right.” Featherston nodded. “I’m with you so far—I think. The 235 is the good stuff, and the 238 isn’t. How much 235 is there? Is it a fifty-fifty split? One part in three? One part in four? What?”