Page 6 (2/2)

"Then tell me e do know Or tell me what your Fiddlehead knows, at least"

Lincoln looked down at the pages again, then withdrew a pencil from his satchel He pressed a button to activate his wheeled chair and brought hiside his seat The firelight warhtened thehter than a lampshade

Lincoln circled one column’s worth of inforures froo None of the field doctors reported any lepers, or any drug use a the men"

"I see," Grant said But he didn’t

"The numbers are precisely what you’d expect: Half of the men died from their wounds Of those who remained, approximately half succumbed to known diseases or infection These other men"--he pointed at a secondary line--"were too badly hurt to return to battle, but they did survive Now, look at these figures, over here" He drew another circle "These are numbers from four other skirmishes around the same time Two in northern Tennessee, one on Sand Mountain in Alabama, and one outside of Richain as he read the Tennessee casualty figures Fifty percent dead from injuries Two percent injured beyond further coht percent dead … froely by their fellow soldiers"

"What on earth have those Southerners done?"

"It’s not just the Southerners"

"These are all Southern battlefields!"

"Most of the battlefields are Southern battlefields," Lincoln re with a drunk Grant didn’t care for that tone, but he ignored it He’d heard it from everyone, for years "And the Southern soldiers aren’t the ones chewing up our boys after the fact; these are our figures Ourproblems too--the same problems, almost exactly In fact, the only ti came from, North or South"

"It didn’t know?"

"It didn’t say Gideon says the question shouldn’t have been phrased that way, since itabout contradictory absolutes, he said"

"So where did it coesture that er "The Western territories? The Mexican E’s origin--only that the lepers in the war"

"Balderdash," Grant spit "It’s utter balderdash, and you know I mean no disrespect"

"It’s science"

"The on’t be won by the walking dead, Abe"

"And why not? Before long, we’ll have --and when the dead outnue is theirs"

After a frustrated, uncertain pause, Grant said, "Your machine offers up more questions than answers"

"Its vocabulary is liive it"

"It , but I don’t believe it’s wrong We can’t win, and neither can the CSA"

The president laughed sadly This was almost precisely what he’d told Desest we do?"

"The only thing we can do is stop fighting Declare a cease-fire, call a su and Stephens--they’re reasonabletoo" He sat forith soht played across the sharp-cut angles of his cheeks "You can tell them that we do not ask their surrender, and do not offer our own Explain the greater threat and extend a hand of brotherhood Not North against South, but living against dead"

Grant shook his head "It would never work They’ll never believe us"

"They ht When we asked the Fiddlehead to tell us how the ould end, we had to estiures on the Southern side--we didn’t have the precise nu, dead, sick, or wounded It was funny, really--or, rather, Gideon thought it funny: Theto it"

"How’s that?"

"It rejected our estimates as implausible, and supplied its own calculations But we have every indication that the South suffers from the leper probleet lucky: They may want a way out of the war as badly as we do, and if they’re aware of the threat in their own land, they le" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>