The Victorious Opposition Read Online Free PDF Page A

possibility, either, but not thinking about it wouldn’t make it go away.
    The experimental model easily outdistanced the leftovers from the Great War, though they carried two truck engines apiece and it had only one. It was made from thin, mild steel, enough to give an idea of how it performed but not enough to stand up to bullets. It had plainly outdone everything else in the arsenal, and by a wide margin, too. For more than ten years, nobody’d given a damn. Now . . .
    Now Morrell’s heart beat faster. If he was right, if the powers that be were waking up at last . . . Sergeant Michael Pound said, “Maybe seeing Jake Featherston snorting and stomping the ground down in Richmond put the fear of God into some people, too.”
    “It could be,” Morrell said. “I’ll tell you something, Sergeant: he sure as hell puts the fear of God into me.”
    “He’s a madman.” As usual, everything looked simple to Pound.
    “Maybe. If he is, he’s a clever one,” Morrell said. “And if you put a clever madman in charge of a country that has good reason to hate the United States . . . Well, I don’t like the combination.”
    “If we have to, we’ll squash him.” Pound was confident, too. Morrell wished he shared that confidence.
    Then the experimental model got to the field where the barrels stayed now that they were back in service. Sure enough, a new machine squatted on the track-torn turf. The closer Morrell got, the better it looked. If he’d admired a woman as openly as he ogled that barrel, his wife, Agnes, would have had something sharp to say to him.
    He climbed out through the hatch in the cupola and descended from the experimental model before it stopped moving. Sergeant Pound let out a piteous howl from inside the barrel. “Don’t eat your heart out, Sergeant,” Morrell said. “You can come have a look, too.”
    He didn’t wait for Pound to emerge, though. He hurried over to the new barrel. His leg twinged under him. He’d been shot in the early days of the Great War. He still had a slight limp almost twenty years later. The leg did what he needed, though. If it pained him now and again . . . then it did, that was all.
    “Bully,” he said softly as he came up to the new barrel. That marked him as an old-fashioned man; people who’d grown up after the Great War commonly said
swell
at such times. He knew exactly what he meant, though. He looked from the new machine to the experimental model and back again. A broad grin found room on his narrow face. It was like seeing a child and the man he had become there side by side.
    The experimental model was soft-skinned, thin-skinned. One truck engine powered it, because it wasn’t very heavy. The cannon in its turret was a one-pounder, a popgun that couldn’t damage anything tougher than a truck.
    Here, though, here was the machine of which its predecessor had been the model. Morrell set a hand on its green-gray flank. Armor plate felt no different from mild steel under his palm. He knew the difference was there, though. Up at the bow and on the front of the turret, two inches of hardened steel warded the barrel’s vitals. The armor on the sides and back was thinner, but it was there.
    A long-barreled two-inch gun jutted from the turret, a machine gun beside it. He knew of no barrel anywhere in the world with a better main armament. The suspension was beefed up. So was the engine at the rear. It was supposed to push this barrel along even faster than the experimental model could do.
    Sergeant Pound came up behind him. So did the other crewmen from the experimental model: the loader, the bow machine-gunner, the wireless operator, and the driver. Pound said, “It’s quite something, sir. It’s a good thing we’ve got it. It would have been even better if we’d had it ten years ago.”
    “Yes.” Morrell wished the sergeant hadn’t pointed that out, no matter how obvious a truth it was. “If we’d built this ten years ago, what would we have now?