American Front

Kemmel and Schoonhoven and a couple of other regular Navy men aboard the Spray nodded. It didn't matter to them. One job, another job -so what? They were little rivets on a big machine. They'd fit wherever someone put them.

Now Patrick O'Do

"I know you did," the lieutenant commander said. "Another towing couple sank one off the western coast of the Empire of Mexico, too. Both, though, came in the very earliest days of the program, and both, unfortu nately, received wide publicity. Now our enemies are suspicious of targets that look too tempting to be true, and towed submersibles are operating with a far smaller range than would be the case if they were cruising on their own. And so -" He spread his hands.

"What do we do now, sir, in that case?" O'Do

"You'll be reassigned, of course," the lieutenant commander answered crisply. "Orders have already been cut for all of you, and transportation arranged for those being moved out of the area." He pushed back his chair; the legs scraped against the floor. "I have them in my office. I'll distribute them to you. Wait here."

He left the room, returning a moment later with a manila folder from which he drew envelopes with names typed on them. He handed O'Do

George Enos' fingers fumbled with the flap of the envelope, as if they didn't want to find out what lay inside. No, not as if: he had no desire whatever to learn that the faceless red-tape twisters in Philadelphia had sent him to New York or San Diego or San Francisco or Want to or not, he pulled out the papers folded into the fat envelope. The name leaped out at him at once: " St. Louis," he said, his voice a raw hiss of pain. Report at once to the river monitor USS Punishment, St. Louis, Missouri. A train ticket fell out of the mass of other papers. He stared at it in horrified dismay. "Sir, this says I'm supposed to leave this afternoon!"

"That's correct," the lieutenant commander agreed. "We expected the Spray in three or four days ago, and made arrangements accordingly. Your family will be notified, I assure you."

Your family will be notified. A bloodless way to say it, a gutless way to do it. Sylvia would be at the ca

Charlie White said, " San Diego," in that same wounded, disbelieving voice. They looked at each other. Despite the difference in the color of their skins, they were, in that moment, very much alike.

Marshlands had two wheelchairs now, the old one for upstairs and a new one with bigger wheels, one also easier to maneuver outside, for downstairs. A

Getting Jacob Colleton downstairs without having to bring his chair along certainly made matters easier for Scipio. He wheeled the mistress' brother to the top of the staircase, helped him rise, draped one of Jacob's arms over his own shoulder, let the gassed man hang onto the banister with the other hand, and walked down more or less normally. Then he eased Jacob Colleton down into the other wheelchair. "My gun," Colleton rasped.

"Are you certain that is what you require, sir?" Scipio asked tonelessly. As usual, Jacob reeked of whiskey. He'd also given himself an injection of morphia not long before. The butler did not think well of a drunk, drugged man's prospects for straight shooting.

Jacob Colleton glared at him. His body was wrecked, his eyes red-tracked and blurry, but the hate and rage that poured out from them made Scipio back up half a step in alarm. They weren't aimed at him in particular, but at the world as a whole, the world that had done what it had done to Jacob. That made them more frightening, not less. "Bring me my gun," Colleton hissed. He paused to draw a painful breath, then added, "If you're lucky, I'll give you a ru

Scipio's laugh was dutiful. He might have found that fu

"Push me over by that stand of trees," he told Scipio. "You know, the one by the nigger cottages."

"Yes, sir," Scipio said.

"See what kind of varmints I can get," Colleton went on. What a. 303 caliber bullet meant for knocking over men at five hundred yards did to a squirrel at fifty wasn't pretty, but Jacob Colleton didn't seem to care much about that. He was a good shot -a far better shot than he had been before he went off to war. He looked up at Scipio, those pale eyes blazing. "I keep wish ing it was damnyankees in my sights. Do you have any idea what I'm telling you? No, you wouldn't. How could you?"

But Scipio did. As he opened the front door so he could push Jacob Colleton out of Marshlands, he thought of the Negro revolutionary cell to which he'd so unwillingly become attached, and of their endless, hungry murmurs of Come de revolution. Come the revolution, they'd take aim at Jacob Colleton with exactly the same loving hate he lavished on the men of the USA.

A couple of Negro children broke off their games to stare at Jacob and Scipio as they went by. Colleton made as if to lift his rifle. "You better run fast, you damn little pickani

Scipio maintained a prudent silence. Again, he thought Colleton was mak ing a joke. Again, he wasn't sure enough to be comfortable.

Some of the trees by the Negro cabins bore fruit or nuts. The plantation hands shared out what they got from them. Some of the trees and bushes were just there, and had been there since before the War of Secession, maybe before the American Revolution.

Colleton clicked a magazine into the Tredegar and chambered the first round. Scipio stood behind the wheelchair. He had other things he needed to be doing, plenty of them. Unless Miss A

A crow flapped by and landed in a pecan tree. Fast as a striking snake, Jacob Colleton slapped the rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The report, as always, made Scipio jump and his heart start to pound. He wondered what war sounded like. Every time he tried to imagine it, his imagination rebelled.

The crow lost its perch and fell to the ground with a plop. It lay, a black puddle, on the grass and moss and leaves below the tree. With a click, Jacob Colleton worked the bolt and brought a fresh cartridge into the chamber. The brass casing he'd ejected glittered by the wheelchair.

"Good shot, sir," Scipio said. "Shall I recover the bird?"

"Don't bother," Colleton wheezed. "Crow isn't worth eating. No kind of crow is worth eating."

You say that, to a Negro? Scipio wanted to snatch the rifle out of his hand and smash in his skull. When whites came out with witless cracks like that, it did more than Cassius' Red rhetoric to make Scipio think the black revolution was not only needed but might succeed. No matter how sharp Jacob Col- leton's eyes were, he was blind.