The Victorious opposition

A few days later, he ran into Papineau in a grocery. As usual, the man moved in a gingerly way, but he greeted O'Doull with a smile. "That was a wonderful prescription you gave me, Doctor," he said. "Wonderful!"

"Well, I'm glad it did you some good," O'Doull said. Papineau nodded enthusiastically. O'Doull was pleased at helping him, and his pleasure diminished only a little when he reflected that Hippocrates could have given the same advice. Yes, medicine still had a long way to go.

The ground unrolled beneath Jonathan Moss. His fighter dove like a falcon- dove, in fact, far faster than any falcon could dream of diving. He was coming out of the sun. The young hotshot calmly tooling along in the other fighter had no idea he was there-till he zoomed past. Had it been a dogfight, his opponent never would have known what hit him.

His wireless set let out a burst of static, and then a startled squawk: "Son of a bitch! How the hell did you do that? Uh, over."

Moss started to make a joke, to say something like, Clean living. But the smile and the words died unspoken. He thumbed his own wireless and answered, "Son, I did that because I wanted it more than you." He thought he'd stopped, but his mouth kept going: "I want it more than anybody does." A long, long pause followed before he remembered to add, "Over."

Wasn't all that the Lord's bitter truth? He did want it more than anybody else, and what he'd known since the war was over. Ever since he got his law degree, he'd done everything he could to make things better, make them more tolerable, for Canadians. He'd married a Canadian patriot. He'd had himself a half-Canadian little girl.

And what thanks had he got? Some other Canadian, someone who no doubt thought of himself as a patriot, had blown up everything in the world that mattered to him. Wherever that other Canadian lived, he was bound to be laughing and cheering these days. He'd settled his score with a Yank, all right. He sure had.

I wasted twenty years of my life. The only thing Moss wanted more than sitting in this fighter was to be able to pilot the biggest bomber the United States had. He wanted to fly it at random over some good-sized Canadian town, open the bomb-bay doors, and pour out a couple of tons of death, the way that Canadian had sent Laura and Dorothy death through the mail. He wanted that so badly, he could all but taste it. He could practically feel the bomber jump and get livelier as its heavy load of explosives fell away. Hallucination? Of course. It seemed very real just the same.

Maybe the bombs had been meant for him. Maybe, but he didn't think so. People in his family didn't open mail unless it was addressed to them. Had the bomb had his name on it, his wife and daughter would have left it alone. And they might still be alive, and I wouldn't. He'd had that thought the day the bomb went off.

Why would anyone want to kill a woman and a little girl? That ate at Moss. Could somebody have been angry enough at Laura for marrying an American to want to see her dead? Moss knew some of the people who wanted Canada free once more were a fanatical lot, but that fanatical? It seemed excessive, even for them. And most of them were willing to admit he'd done a few useful things in his time there. He'd had some threats, but they'd never amounted to anything-not till now.

What he'd done here didn't matter any more. He'd had his life rearranged for him. The sooner he got out of Canada now, the happier he'd be.

The wireless crackled again. The other fighter pilot said, "I'm going back to the airstrip now, Major. Over."

"I'll follow you," Moss answered. "Over and out." He'd put the uniform back on as soon as he'd buried Laura and Dorothy. He hadn't asked for the promotion from the rank he'd held in the Great War. They'd seemed eager to give it to him, though, and acted afraid he wouldn't come back to flying. The way things were looking along the border with the CSA and out in the Pacific, they were anxious to grab all the warm bodies they could.

He wondered what he would have done had Laura lived. Chucking his practice to fly for the USA might have meant chucking his marriage, too. Well, he didn't have to worry about that now.

There was the airstrip, with the snow bulldozed off it. Some airplanes here landed on skis instead of wheels during the winter, but his didn't have them. He lowered his landing gear and bumped to a stop.

Groundcrew men came up to take charge of the fighter. Wearily, Moss pushed back the canopy and got out. The fur and leather of his flying gear kept him warm on the ground in wintertime. He remembered the way that had worked from the days of the Great War. Ever since he'd lost Laura and Dorothy, those days seemed more real, more vivid, more present in his mind than much of what had happened since.

A young lieutenant emerged from one of the buildings flanking the airstrip and struggled through the snow till he got to the cleared runway. Then he could hurry, as young lieutenants were supposed to do. Saluting, he told Moss, "The base commandant's compliments, sir, and he'd like to see you in his office right away."

"Well, then, I'd better get over there, hadn't I?" Moss said.

Ambiguity permeated his relations with Captain Oscar Trotter. He'd got on fine with Major Finley, Trotter's predecessor. They'd both been Great War veterans, and understood each other. The new commandant was a younger man. He'd never seen combat, never drunk himself blind three or four nights in a row so he wouldn't have to think about friends going down in flames three or four dreadful days in a row, never drunk himself blind so he wouldn't have to think about going down in flames himself. And, of course, Trotter was only a captain. Even though he was in charge of the field outside of London, he had trouble giving Moss orders now that Moss had put the uniform back on and wore golden oak leaves on his shoulder straps.

Moss saw no point in making things worse than they were already. "Reporting as ordered," he said when he walked into Trotter's office. That let the commandant know he was willing to take his orders, even if he didn't call him sir or salute first.

Trotter nodded. He didn't salute, either. "Have a seat, Major," he said, acknowledging Moss' rank that way so he also didn't have to say sir. He waved the older man into the chair in front of his desk. It creaked when Moss sat down in it. It always did.

"What's up?" Moss asked.

Trotter lit a cigarette before he answered. He shoved the pack of Raleighs across the desk so Moss could have one, too. As Moss lit up, the commandant pushed a sheet of paper across the desk after the Raleighs. "Your orders have come through."

Was that relief in his voice? Moss wouldn't have been surprised. Base commandants didn't like ambiguity, and with reason: it weakened their authority. If Trotter got Moss out of his hair, he could go back to being senior officer here in every sense of the term.

The cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, Moss reached for the paper. It bore the embossed eagle in front of crossed swords that had symbolized the USA since the revival after the Second Mexican War. He read through the orders, then looked up at Captain Trotter. "You have an atlas of the United States here, sir? Where the hell is Mount Vernon, Illinois?"

"I thought you were from Illinois," Trotter answered, pulling a book off a shelf behind his chair.

"I'm from Chicago," Moss replied with dignity. "Downstate is all the back of beyond, as far as I'm concerned." He might have been talking about darkest Africa.

Captain Trotter opened the atlas, then pointed. "Here it is." He turned the book around so Moss could see, too. "Right in the middle of the pointy end that goes down to where the Ohio and the Mississippi meet."

"Uh-huh," Moss said. "Hell of a nice place to fly missions into Kentucky from, looks like to me."