Guided by a pilot intimately familiar with the local minefields, the USS Dakota made a slow, cautious entrance into New York harbor. Sailors on tugs and freighters waved their caps at the battleship. Steam whistles bellowed and hooted. Fireboats shot streams of water high into the air.
Sam Carsten stood by the port rail, enjoying the show. The late-November day was bleak and gloomy and cold, but that didn't bother the petty officer at all. Anything more clement than clouds and gloom bothered him: he was so blond and pink, he sunburned in less time than he needed to blink. After Brazil entered the war on the side of the USA and Germany and their allies, the Dakota had gone up into the tropical Atlantic after convoys bound for Britain from Argentina. He was only now recovering from what the cruel sun had done to him.
Off to the west, on Bedloe Island, stood the great statue of Remembrance, the sword of vengeance gleaming in her hand. Carsten turned to his bunkmate and said, "Seeing her gives you a whole different feeling now that we've gone and won the war."
"Sure as hell does." Vic Crosetti nodded vigorously. He was as small and swarthy as Carsten was tall and fair. "Every time I seen that statue before, it was like she was saying, 'What the hell you gapin' at me for? Get out there and kick the damn Rebs in the belly.' Now we gone and done it. Can't you see the smile on that bronze broad's kisser?"
Remembrance looked as cold and stern and forbidding as she had since she'd gone up not long after the Second Mexican War. Even so, Carsten said, "Yeah." He and Crosetti grinned at each other. Victory tasted sweet.
"Carsten!" somebody said behind him.
He turned and stiffened to attention. "Sir!"
"As you were," Commander Grady said, and Sam eased out of his brace. The commander of the Dakota's starboard secondary armament was a pretty good fellow; Sam cranked shells into the forwardmost five-inch gun under his charge. Grady said, "Do you recall that matter we were discussing the day the limeys gave up the fight?"
For a moment, Carsten didn't. Then he nodded. "About aeroplanes, you mean, sir?"
"That's right." Grady nodded, too. "Were you serious about what you meant about getting in on the ground floor there?"
"Yes, sir. I sure was, sir," Sam answered. Aeroplanes were the coming thing. Anyone with an eye in his head could see that. Anyone with an eye in his head could also see the Navy wouldn't stay as big as it had been during the war. Since Sam wanted to make sure he didn't end up on the beach, getting involved with aeroplanes looked like a good insurance policy.
Commander Grady said, "All right, then. I have some orders cut for you. If you'd said no, you'd have stayed here. There wouldn't have been any trouble about that. As things are, though, we both catch the train for Boston tomorrow morning. You'll see why when we get there." His smile made him look years younger.
"You're leaving the Dakotal" Vic Crosetti demanded. When Sam nodded, Crosetti clapped a hand to his forehead. "Jesus Christ, who'm I gonna rag on now?"
"I figure you'll find somebody," Carsten said, his voice dry. Crosetti gave him a dirty look that melted into a chuckle, then slapped him on the back. Sam had a gift for getting in digs without making people angry at him.
"Only problem with this is the train ride," Commander Grady said. "This Spanish influenza that's going around is supposed to be pretty nasty. We might be better staying aboard the Dakota?
"Sir, if the limeys couldn't sink us and the Japs couldn't sink us and whoever was flying that damn bombing aeroplane out from Argentina couldn't sink us, I don't figure we need to be afraid of any germs," Sam said.
Grady laughed. "That's the spirit! All right, Carsten. Pick up your new orders, get your paperwork taken care of, and we'll go ashore tomorrow morning—if you can stand an officer for company, that is."
"I'm a tough guy, sir," Carsten answered. "I expect I'll put up with it." Grady laughed and mimed throwing a punch at him, then went on his way.
"What's this about aeroplanes?" Crosetti asked.
"Don't even know, exactly," Sam said. "I joined the Navy five years before the war started, and here I am, buying a pig in a poke. Maybe I need my head examined, but maybe I'm smart, too. Smart, I mean, besides getting away from you. I hope I am, anyway."
"Good luck. I think you're crazy, but good luck." Crosetti shook Sam's hand, then walked off shaking his own head.
Getting orders was the easy part of getting off the Dakota. Carsten filled out endless separation forms. Only after the last of them was signed would the paymaster grudgingly give him greenbacks. With money in his billfold and a duffel bag on his shoulder, he walked down the gangplank from the Dakota to the pier with Commander Grady.
Even at the edge of the harbor, New York boiled with life. When Grady flagged a cab for the ride to the New York Central Railroad Depot, three different automobiles almost ran him and Sam down in the zeal for a fare. The drivers hopped out and screamed abuse at one another in both English and a language that seemed entirely compounded of gutturals.
Grady knew his way through the crowded old depot, which was fortunate, because Sam didn't. He had to step smartly to keep from being separated from the officer; the only place where he'd felt more crowded was the triple-decked bunkroom of the Dakota. Everyone here was moving, intent on his own business. About every third man, woman, and child was sneezing or sniffling or coughing. Some of them were likely to have influenza. Carsten tried not to inhale. That didn't work very well.
He and Grady got a couple of seats in a second-class car; the Navy saved money on train fares that way. They were the only Navy men there, though soldiers in green-gray occupied a fair number of seats. The civilians ranged from drummers in cheap, flashy suits to little old ladies who might still have been in Russia.
Once Grady and Carsten pulled into Boston, the officer paid for another cab ride, this one over the Charlestown Bridge to the Navy Yard on the north side of the Charles River. Seeing the battleships and cruisers and submersibles and tenders tied up there made Sam's heart swell with pride. A few ships from the Western Squadron of Germany's High Seas Fleet stood out from their American allies because of their less familiar lines and light gray paint jobs.
Sam followed Commander Grady, each of them with duffel bag bouncing on his back. Then, all at once, Sam stopped in his tracks and stared and stared. Grady walked on for a couple of steps before he noticed he didn't have company any more. He turned and looked back, a grin on his rabbity features. "What's the matter, Carsten?" he asked, sounding like a man trying hard not to laugh out loud.
"Sir," Sam said plaintively, "I've seen every type of ship in the U.S. Navy, and I reckon damn near every type of ship in the High Seas Fleet, too." He pointed ahead. "In all my born days, though, I've never seen anything that looked like that, and I hope to God I never do again. What the hell is it supposed to be?"
Now Grady did laugh out loud. "That's the Remembrance, Carsten. That's what you signed up for."
"Jesus," Sam said. "I must have been out of my goddamn mind."
The Remembrance looked as if somebody had decided to build a battleship and then, about a third of the way through the job, got sick of it and decided to flatten out most of the deck to hurry things along. An aeroplane sat on the deck aft of the bridge: not a seaplane that would land in the water and be picked up by the ship's crane but a Wright two-decker fighting scout—a U.S. copy of a German Albatros—with utterly ordinary landing gear and not a trace of a float anywhere. Sam shook his head in disbelief.
Laughing still, Commander Grady clapped him on the back. "Cheer up. It won't be so bad. You'll still mess forward and bunk aft. And a five-inch gun is a five-inch gun." He pointed to the sponson under that unbelievably long, unbelievably level deck. "You'll do your job, and the flyboys will do theirs, and everybody will be happy except the poor enemy bastards who bump into us."
"Yes, sir," Sam said dubiously. "What the devil did she start out to be, anyway? And why didn't she turn out to be whatever that was?"
"They started to build her as a fast, light-armored battle cruiser, to slide in close to the Confederate coast, blast hell out of it, and then scoot before the Rebs could do anything about it—a monitor with legs, you might say," Grady answered. "But that idea never went anywhere. Some bright boy got to thinking how handy it would be to take aeroplanes along wherever you needed them, and. .. there's the Remembrancer
"I thought of that myself, after the Dakota got bombed off Argentina," Carsten said, "but I never imagined—this." He wondered if he'd get into fights because sailors on ordinary, respectable vessels would call the Remembrance the ugliest ship in the Navy. Dammit, she was the ugliest ship in the Navy.
"Come on, let's go aboard," Grady said. "She won't look anywhere near so strange from the inside."
Even that didn't turn out to be true. The hangars that held nearly three dozen fighting scouts and the supply and maintenance areas that went with them took up an ungodly amount of space, leaving the bunkrooms cramped and feeling like afterthoughts. As a petty officer, Carsten did get a bottom bunk, but the middle one in the three-tier metal structure was only a few inches above him. He could stand it, but he didn't love it.
The only place in which he did feel at home was the sponson. The five-inch gun was the same model he'd served on the Dakota^ and the sponson itself might have been transferred bodily from the battleship. The chief gunner's mate in charge of the crew, a burly veteran named Willie Moore, wore a splendid gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He wasn't half brother to his counterpart from the Dakota^ Hiram Kidde, but Sam couldn't have proved it by the way he acted.
He turned out to know Kidde, which surprised Sam not at all. "If you served with the 'Cap'n,' reckon you'll do for me," he rumbled when Carsten mentioned the name of his former gun commander a couple of days after coming aboard.
"Thanks, Chief. Hope so," Sam said, and punctuated that with a sneeze. "Damn. I'm coming down with a cold."
He was off his feed at supper that evening, which surprised him: the Remembrance, however ugly she was, boasted a first-class galley. Everything was fresh, too—an advantage of sitting in port. But Sam didn't realize how sick he was till the next morning, when he almost fell out of his bunk. He stood, swaying, in front of it.
"You all right?" asked George Moerlein, who slept just above him. Sam didn't answer; he had trouble figuring out what the words meant. Moerlein peered at him, touched his forehead, and then jerked back his hand as if he'd tried picking up a live coal. "We better get this guy to sick bay," he said. "I think he's got the influenza." Sam didn't argue, either. He couldn't. He let them lead him away.
Arthur McGregor took a certain somber satisfaction in listening to the wind howl around his farmhouse. That was just as well; the wind in Manitoba was going to howl through the winter whether he took any satisfaction in it or not.
"One thing," he said to his wife. "In weather like this, the Yanks stay indoors."
"I wish to heaven they'd stayed in their own country," Maude answered. She was short and redheaded, a contrast to his rangy inches and dark hair that was beginning to show frost as he edged into his forties.
Her eyes went to the photograph of their son, Alexander, that hung on the wall of the front room. The photograph was all they had of him; the U.S. troops who occupied Manitoba had executed him for plotting sabotage a year and a half before.
McGregor's eyes went there, too. He was still paying the Americans back for what they'd done to Alexander. He would never be done paying them back, as long as he lived. If they ever found out he made bombs, he wouldn't live long. He couldn't drive the Yanks out of Canada singlehanded. If they were going to try to rule his country, though, he could make their lives miserable.
Julia came in from the kitchen. She also looked toward Alexander; these days, the family almost made a ritual of it. McGregor looked at his daughter in what was as close to wonderment as his solid, stolid nature could produce. Some time while he wasn't looking, Julia had turned into a woman. She'd been eleven when the Americans invaded, and hardly even coltish. She was fourteen now, and not coltish any more. She looked like her mother, but taller and leaner, as McGregor himself was.
"What are you going to do about that school order, Pa?" she asked.
The wind gusted louder. McGregor could have pretended not to hear her. His own sigh was gusty, too. "I'm going to pretend I don't know the first thing about it for as long as I can," he answered.
He'd pulled Julia and her younger sister, Mary, out of school a couple of years before. The Americans were using it to teach Canadian children their lies about the way the world worked. Since then, McGregor and Maude had taught reading and ciphering at home.
Now, though, the occupying authorities had sent out an edict requiring all children between the ages of six and sixteen to attend school at least six months out of the year. They didn't intend to miss any chances to tell their stories to people they wanted to grow up to be Americans, not Canadians.
"It'll be all right, Pa," Julia said. "I really think it will. You can send Mary and me, and we won't end up Yanks, truly we won't." She looked toward Alexander's photograph again.
"I know you won't, chick," he said. "But I don't know that Mary would be able to keep from telling the teacher what she really thinks."
At nine, Mary wore her heart on her sleeve, even more than Alexander had. She also hated Americans with a pure, clear hatred that made even her father's pale beside it. Letting the Yanks know how she felt struck McGregor as most unwise.
Julia had washed the supper dishes; Mary was drying them. After the last one clattered into the cupboard, she came out to join the rest of the family. She was sprouting up, too, like wheat after planting. She would, McGregor judged, make a tall woman. But she still kept some of the feline grace she'd had since she was very small, and also some of a cat's self-containment. McGregor hadn't needed to teach her much about conspiracy. She understood it as if by instinct.
Now he said, "Mary, if you have to, do you suppose you can put up with listening to the Yanks' lies in school without telling them off?"
"Why would I have to do that, Pa?" she answered. "Maybe they can make me go to school, but—" She caught herself. Her gray eyes, so like those of her father and her dead brother, widened. "Oh. You mean put up with them so I wouldn't get in trouble—so we wouldn't get in trouble."
"That's right." Arthur McGregor nodded. No, no one needed to teach Mary about conspiracy.
She thought it over. "If I have to, I suppose I could," she said at last. "But telling lies is a sin on their heads, isn't it?"
"So it is." McGregor smiled to hear that, but not too much: he'd passed his own stern Presbyterian ethic down to the new generation. "The Yanks have so many other sins on the book against them, though, that lying doesn't look like so much to them."
"Well, it should," Mary said. "It should all count against them, every bit of it. And it will. God counts everything" She spoke with great assurance.
McGregor wished he felt so sure himself. He believed, yes, but he'd lost that simple certainty. If he'd had any left, Alexander's death would have burned it out of him, leaving ashes behind. He said, "You will go to school, then, and be a good little parrot, so we can show the Americans we're obeying their law?"
His younger daughter sighed. "If I have to," she said again.
"Good," McGregor said. "The more we look like we're doing what they want us to, the more we can do what we want to when they aren't looking."
Julia said, "That's good, Pa. That's very good. That's just what we'll do."
"That's what we'll have to do," Maude said. "That's what everyone will have to do, for however long it takes till we're free again."
"Or till we turn into Americans," Arthur McGregor said bleakly. He held up a work-roughened hand. "No, I don't mean us. Some of our neighbors will turn into Americans, but not us."
"Some of our neighbors have already turned into Americans," Julia said. "They don't care about what they were, so they don't care what they are. We know better. We're Canadians. We'll always be Canadians. Always."
McGregor wondered if, with the strongest will in the world, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would remember they were Canadians. And then, perhaps wondering the same thing, Maude spoke as if to reassure herself: "Germany took Alsace and Lorraine away from France almost fifty years ago, but the people there still remember they're Frenchmen."
Canadians had heard a great deal about their ally's grievances against the Kaiser and his henchmen (till the Americans overran them, after which they'd had to endure lies about Germany's grievances against France). Now France had more reasons to grieve, for the Germans were biting off more of her land. And McGregor, still in his bleak mood, said, "The Germans settled a lot of their own people in Alsace and Lorraine to help hold them down. If the Americans did that. .."
His wife and daughters stared at him in horror. Mary spoke first: "I wouldn't live next to Americans, Pa! I wouldn't. If they came here, I'd ... I don't know what I'd do, but it'd be pretty bad."
"We won't have to worry about that till next spring at the earliest," McGregor said. "Won't be any Yanks settling down to farm in the middle of winter, not here in Manitoba there won't." His chuckle was grim. "And the ones who come in the spring, if any do, they're liable to turn up their toes when they find out what winters are like. We've seen that the Americans don't fancy our weather."
"Too bad for them," Julia said.
After the children had gone to sleep, McGregor lay awake beside his wife in the bed the two of them shared. "What am I going to do, Maude?" he whispered, his voice barely audible through the whistling wind. "By myself, I can hurt the Americans, but that's all I can do. They won't leave on account of me."
"You've made them pay," Maude said. He'd never admitted making bombs, not in so many words. She'd never asked, not in so many words. She knew. He knew she knew. But they formally kept the secret, even from each other.
"Not enough," he said now. "Nothing could ever be enough except driving them out of Canada. But no one man can do that."
"No one man can," Maude said in a musing tone of voice.
He understood where she was going, and shook his head. "One man can keep a secret. Maybe two can. And maybe three can, but only if two of them are dead." That came from the pen of Benjamin Franklin, an American, but McGregor had forgotten where he'd first run across it.
"I suppose you're right," Maude said. "It seems a pity, though."
"If Alexander hadn't hung around with a pack of damnfool kids who didn't have anything better to do than run their mouths and make foolish plots, he'd still be alive today," McGregor said harshly.
Maude caught her breath. "I see what you're saying," she answered after a long pause.
"And the strange thing is, if he was still alive, we wouldn't hate the Yanks the way we do," McGregor said. "They caused themselves more harm shooting him than he ever would have given them if they'd let him go."
"They're fools," Maude said. That McGregor agreed with wholeheartedly. But the American fools ruled Canada today. God must have loved them, for He'd made so very many.
The notion of God loving Americans was so unlikely, McGregor snorted and fell asleep bemused by it. When he woke up, it was still dark; December nights fifty miles south of Winnipeg were long. He groped for a match, scraped it alight, and lit the kerosene lamp on the nightstand.
He didn't want to get out from under the thick wool blankets: he could see his own breath inside the bedroom. He threw a shirt and overalls over his long Johns and was still shivering. Maude got out of bed, too. She carried the lamp downstairs as soon as she was dressed. He followed her.
She built up the fire in the stove and started a pot of coffee. It wasn't good coffee; if the Americans had any good coffee, they kept it for themselves. But it was hot. He stood by the stove, too, soaking in the warmth radiating from the black iron. Maude melted butter in a frying pan and put in three eggs. McGregor ate them along with bread and butter. Then he shrugged on a long, heavy coat and donned mittens. Reluctantly, he opened the door and went outside.
It had been cold in the bedroom. As he slogged his way to the barn, he wondered if he would turn into an icicle before he got there. A wry chuckle made a fogbank swirl around his face for a moment, till the fierce wind blew it away. People said there wasn't so much work on a farm in winter. In a way, they were right, for he didn't have to go out to the fields.
In spring and summer, though, he didn't have to work in weather like this. The body heat of the livestock kept the barn warmer than the weather outside, but warmer wasn't warm. He fed the horse and cow and pigs and chickens and cleaned up their filth. By the time he was done with that, he was warmer, too.
His eye fell on an old wagon wheel, the sort of junk any barn accumulated. Under it, hidden in a hole beneath a board beneath dirt, lay dynamite and fuses and blasting caps and crimpers and other tools of the bomb-maker's art. McGregor nodded to them. They would come out again.
Rain, some of it freezing, poured down out of a bleak gray sky. A barrel rumbled across the muddy Kansas prairie toward Colonel Irving Morrell. The cannon projecting from its slightly projecting prow was aimed straight at him. Two machine guns projected from each side of the riveted steel hull; two more covered the rear. A pair of White truck engines powered the traveling fortress. Stinking, steaming exhaust belched from the twin pipes.
The charge would have been more impressive had it been at something brisker than a walking pace. It would have been much more impressive had the barrel not bogged down in a mud puddle that aspired to be a pond when it grew up. The machine's tracks were not very wide, and it weighed almost thirty-three tons. It could have bogged on ground better than that it was traveling.
Morrell snapped his fingers in annoyance at himself for not having brought out a slate and a grease pencil with which he could have taken notes here in the field. He was a lean man, nearing thirty, with a long face, weathered features that bespoke a lot of time out in the sun and wind, and close-cropped sandy hair at the moment hidden under a wool cap and the hood of a rain slicker.
His boots made squelching noises as he slogged through the ooze toward the barrel. The commander of the machine stuck his head out of the central cupola that gave him and his driver a place to perch and a better view than the machine gunners and artillerymen enjoyed (the engineers who tended the two motors had no view, being stuck in the bowels of the barrel).
"Sorry, sir," he said. "Couldn't spot that one till too late ."
"One of the hazards of the game, Jenkins," Morrell answered. "You can't go forward; that's as plain as the nose on my face. See if you can back out."
"Yes, sir." Lieutenant Jenkins ducked down into the cupola, clanging the hatch shut after himself. The engines changed note as the driver put the barrel into reverse. The barrel moved back a few inches, then bogged down again. Jenkins had spunk. Having shifted position, he tried to charge forward once more and escape the grip of the mud. All he succeeded in doing was getting deeper into it.
Morrell waved for him to stop and called, "You keep going that way, you'll need a periscope to see out, just like a submersible."
He doubted Jenkins heard him; with the engines hammering away, nobody inside a barrel could hear the man next to him screaming in his ear. Even so, the engines fell silent a few seconds later. The traveling fortress' commander could see for himself that he wasn't going anywhere.
When the young lieutenant popped out through the hatch again, he was grinning. "Well, sir, you said you wanted to test the machine under extreme conditions. I'd say you've got your wish."
"I'd say you're right," Morrell answered. "I'd also say these critters need wider tracks, to carry their weight better."
Lieutenant Jenkins nodded emphatically. "Yes, sir! They could use stronger engines, too, to help us get out of this kind of trouble if we do get into it."
"That's a point." Morrell also nodded. "We used what we had when we designed them: it would have taken forever to make a new engine and work all the teething pains out of it, and we had a war to fight. With the new model, though, we've got the chance to do things right, not just fast."
That was his job: to figure out what right would be. He would have a lot to say about what the next generation of barrels looked like. It was a great opportunity. It was also a great responsibility.
More than anything else, barrels had broken two years of stalemated struggle in the trenches and made possible the U.S. victory over the CSA. Having the best machines and knowing what to do with them would be vital if—no, when, he thought—the United States and Confederate States squared off again.
For the moment, his concerns were more immediate. "You and your men may as well come out," he told Jenkins. "We've got a couple of miles of muck to go before we get back to Fort Leavenworth"
"Leave the barrel here for now, sir?" the young officer asked.
"It's not going anywhere by itself, that's for sure," Morrell answered, with which Jenkins could hardly disagree. "Rebs aren't about to steal it, either. We'll need a recovery vehicle to pull it loose, but we can't bring one out now because it would bog too." Recovery vehicles mounted no machine guns or cannon, but were equipped with stout towing chains, and sometimes with bulldozer blades.
More hatches opened up as the engineers and machine gunners and artillerymen emerged from their steel shell. Even in a Kansas December, it was warm in there. It had been hotter than hell in summertime Tennessee, as Morrell vividly remembered. It had been hot outside there, too. It wasn't hot here. All eighteen men in the barrel crew, Jenkins included, started shivering and complaining. They hadn't brought rain gear—-what point, in the belly of the machine?
Morrell sympathized, but he couldn't do anything about it. "Come on," he said. "You won't melt."
"Listen to him," one of the machine gunners said to his pal. "He's got a raincoat, so what the devil has he got to worry about?"
"Here," Morrell said sharply. The machine gunner looked alarmed; he hadn't intended to be overheard. Morrell stripped off the slicker and threw it at him. "Now you've got the raincoat. Feel better?"
"No, sir." The machine gunner let the coat fall in the mud. "Not fair for me to have it either, sir. Now nobody does." That was a better answer than Morrell had expected from him.
Lieutenant Jenkins said, "Let's get moving, so we stay as warm as we can. We're all asking for the Spanish influenza."
"That's true," Morrell said. "First thing we do when we get in is soak in hot water, to get the mud off and to warm us up inside. And if thinking about that isn't enough to start you moving, I'll give two dollars to any man who gets back to the fort ahead of me."
That set the crew of the barrel into motion, sure enough. Mor-rell was the oldest man among them by three or four years. They were all veterans. They were all convinced they were in top shape. Every one of them hustled east, in the direction of the fort. They all thought they would have a little extra money jingling in their pockets before the day was through.
Morrell wondered how much his big mouth was going to cost him. As he picked up his own pace, his right leg started to ache. It lacked the chunk of flesh a Confederate bullet had blown from it in the opening weeks of the war. Morrell had almost lost the leg when the wound festered. He still limped a little, but never let the limp slow him down.
And he got to Fort Leavenworth ahead of any of the barrel men. As soon as he reached the perimeter of the fort, he realized how worn he was: ridden hard and put away wet was the phrase that came to mind. He'd ridden himself hard, all right, and he was sure as hell wet, but he hadn't been put away yet. He wanted to fall into the mud to save himself the trouble.
Soaking in a steaming tub afterwards did help. So, even more, did the admiring looks he got from his competitors as they came onto the grounds of the fort in his wake. He savored those. Command was more than a matter of superior rank. If the men saw he deserved that rank, they would obey eagerly, not just out of duty.
That evening, he pored over German accounts of meetings with British and French barrels. The Germans had used only a few of the traveling fortresses, fewer than their foes. They'd won anyhow, with England distracted from the Continent because of the fighting in Canada, and with mutinies spreading through the French Army after Russia collapsed. Morrell was familiar with British barrels; the CSA had copied them. He knew less about the machines the French had built.
When he looked at photographs of some of the French barrels— their equivalent of the rhomboids England and the CSA used— he snickered. Their tracks were very short compared to the length of their chassis, which meant they easily got stuck trying to traverse trenches.
Another French machine, though, made him thoughtful. The Germans had only one example of that model: the text said it was a prototype hastily armed and thrown into the fight in a desperate effort to stem the decay of the French Army. It was a little barrel (hardly more than a keg, Morrell thought with a grin) with only a two-man crew, and mounted a single machine gun in a rotating turret like the ones armored cars used.
"Not enough firepower there to do you as much good as you'd like," Morrell said into the quiet of his barracks room. Still, the design was interesting. It had room for improvement.
He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and started sketching. Whoever designed the first U.S. barrels had thought of nothing past stuffing as many guns as possible inside a steel box and making sure at least one of them could shoot every which way. The price of success was jamming a couple of squads' worth of soldiers into that hellish steel box along with the guns.
If you put the two-inch cannon into that turret instead of a machine gun, you got a gun firing every which way all by itself. You'd still want a machine gun in front. If the cannon were in the turret, the driver would have to go down into the lower front of the machine. Could he handle a machine gun and drive, too?
"Not likely," Morrell muttered. All right: that meant another gunner or two down there with him.
You wouldn't always want to use the turret cannon, though. Sometimes that would be like swatting a fly with an anvil. Morrell sketched another machine gun alongside the cannon. It would rotate, too, of course, and the gunners who tended the large gun could also serve it.
That cut the crew from eighteen men down to five or six— you'd likely need an engineer, too, but the machine had better have only one engine, and one strong enough to move at a decent clip. Morrell shook his head. "No, six or seven," he said. "Somebody's got to tell everybody else what to do." A boat without a commander would be like a boat—no, a ship; Navy men would laugh at him—without a captain.
He was forgetting something. He stared at the paper, then at the plain whitewashed plaster of the wall. Forcing it wouldn't work; he had to try to think around it. That was as hard as not thinking about a steak dinner. He'd had practice, though. Soon it would come to him. Soon. ..
"Wireless telegraph!" he exclaimed, and added an aerial to his sketch. Maybe that would require another crewman, or maybe the engineer could handle it. If it did, it did. He'd wanted one of those gadgets in his barrel during the war just finished. Controlling the mechanical behemoths was too hard without them.
He studied the sketch. He liked it better than the machines in which he'd thundered to victory against the CSA. He wondered what the War Department would think. It was different, and a lot of senior officers prided themselves on not having had a new thought in years. He shrugged. He'd send it in and find out.