So he could stay in the Air Force and train up on one of the new planes. But haven’t I already killed upwards of a million people? Isn’t that enough? he thought. If he did leave the service, what would he do then?
“I’ll keep flying, one way or another,” he said, there in the solitude of the little cockpit. Didn’t airlines grab pilots with Air Force experience? The pay would be a hell of a lot better. He wouldn’t have to drop any more bombs, thank God.
He wouldn’t have to retrain so hard, either, at least not right away. The old workhorses like the DC-3 and DC-4 were simpler than the Superfortress. Even the DC-6 wasn’t any more advanced.
Yes, Air Forces were converting from piston-engined planes to jets. How long till airlines started doing the same? A few years, but probably not much longer than that. How slick would it be to fly from New York to London or Los Angeles in six or seven hours, not ten or twelve?
That might be worth doing. It would certainly keep money in his pocket. But wouldn’t it be about as exciting as driving a bus? The Grasshopper reminded him how much fun flying could be. What if he hopped in a cropduster, an open-cockpit biplane that sprayed DDT on melons or corn to make the bugs leave them alone?
He imagined himself zooming along thirty feet off the ground, the wind blasting in his face, maybe with a pair of World War I-style goggles so his eyes wouldn’t tear up. That was the real deal! Helping farmers at the same time seemed pretty good, too.
Then again, what did cropdusters make? He didn’t know for sure, but nowhere near as much as airline pilots seemed a good guess. What would Daisy have said if he’d brought her back to the States and gone to work dusting crops in California’s Central Valley? Once more, he didn’t know for sure, but goodbye looked like the most probable answer.
“Fucking Russians,” he muttered. If they hadn’t sent that Beagle bomber over Norfolk, if the night fighter hadn’t shot it down so a chunk of blazing wreckage landed on her…
Then it might have landed on my head, he thought with a different kind of shiver. She’d be mourning me, not the other way around.
What made that chunk of wreckage fall the way it did? Luck? Wind currents? The way it flew off the rest of the stricken Russian jet? If it had fallen in an ever so slightly different way, no one would have got hurt.
The whole world was made up of chains and webs of might-have-beens like that. It was the way it was, but was it the way it had to be? If that aluminum had come down only a few feet from where it did, Daisy would still be alive and I’d be a happy man today.
On the world’s scale, that was a small thing. If the chains and webs of cause and chance could change small things, though, why not large things with them? What would the world look like if the Nazis had won the last war? If the South had won the Civil War? If the American Revolution had failed? Or the French? Or the Russian? One thing sure—it wouldn’t look the same.
“Hell, why think small?” Bruce said, there in the solitude of the cockpit. Why indeed? No one else had to pay any attention to his mental maunderings. If his imagination wanted to run wild, all he had to do was let it.
What if the Roman Empire never fell? What if Jesus never lived? Or Moses? Or Mohammed? What if Alexander the Great didn’t die in his early thirties, but lived out his threescore and ten? What would the present world look like after any of those might-have-beens?
Was that more mist over the channel, or did thinking about all the myriad ways the world might change stretch the fabric of what was “really” here too tight? Could the Grasshopper squirt out of this world and try to land in one where nobody’d ever dreamt of airplanes? Would they burn him for a wizard as soon as he stepped out of the cockpit?
Out of the mist came the English coast. Bruce flew low: lower than he’d planned to. Yes, there were roads with cars on them. There were railroad tracks. There was a train, the locomotive sending up a plume of coal smoke. There was a town, and there was an airstrip—not the one he’d set out from, but a promise he’d find it soon. He flew on.
—
Konstantin Morozov and his tank crew rode their T-54 back to the east. The tank didn’t make the trip under its own power. It was a rugged, reliable vehicle…as far as tanks went. Tanks, unfortunately, didn’t go very far in that direction. He couldn’t guess how many breakdowns he would have had on the road from West Germany to the rodina. He could be sure the number wouldn’t have been small.
And so the T-54 was chained to a freight car, one piece of a long train bringing this chunk of the Red Army home. As long as the train stayed in the Soviet occupation zone, everything was fine. Well, the landscape through which it passed wasn’t. Much of the damage from the last war had yet to be repaired. Air strikes had added more. Konstantin, however, didn’t waste much sympathy on Germans.
The train stopped just west of the Polish border. “Take the tarp off your tank,” Major Zhuk told Konstantin. “Put HE in your main armament and have your machine gun ready to fire at anything that looks like trouble. We’ll try to pass through Poland peacefully, but the Poles may not let us.”
“You want me to run the motor, then, sir, so we can traverse the turret in a hurry if we have to?” Morozov asked.
“Da. Do it,” the officer said. “The bandits are supposed to know we’re on our way back to the motherland and won’t come off the train to fight them unless we’re fired upon. What they’re supposed to know, though…Who the devil knows if they really do?”
“I understand,” Konstantin said. “I serve the Soviet Union!”
“I believe you. Nice to know someone still does,” Zhuk said, and went on to the next flatcar-mounted tank.
Konstantin told Pyotr Polikarpov, “Have the machine gun ready. Load the main armament with high explosive. Don’t open fire without my order or you’ll bring a world of hurt down on us from the Poles. Have you got that?”
“Naturally, Comrade Sergeant.” The new gunner sounded offended at the question.
“Repeat it back, then.” Morozov’s distrust for his reluctant crewmate knew no bounds.
Polikarpov made a hash of it the first time he tried. Konstantin swore at him in weary disgust. He repeated the orders twice more, then told the gunner again to give them back. Polikarpov got them more or less right this time.
Slowly, slowly, the train started rolling forward once more. Something that big and heavy—about the size of Pyotr’s stupidity, Morozov thought sourly—needed a while to build momentum. Western Poland looked the same as eastern Germany. And well it might. Up till 1945, what was now western Poland had been eastern Germany.
They’d gone no farther than a few kilometers when a rifle bullet clattered off the T-54’s side armor. “Anybody see where that came from?” Konstantin asked.
No one said anything for a few seconds. Then Polikarpov asked, “Can I fire, Comrade Sergeant?”
“Have you got a target?”
“No, but if I smash up the landscape those fuckers’ll think twice before they try shitting on us again.”
“If you fire without an order, I’ll tear off your stupid, worthless, empty head and piss down the hole in your neck,” Konstantin said. “Do you need me to explain that to you again, or was it plain enough the first time?”
“You don’t want me to shoot, Comrade Sergeant.” Polikarpov sounded sulky, even wounded. Konstantin couldn’t have cared less.
On they rolled, there in their buttoned-up tank. Every so often, Morozov stuck his head out of the cupola and looked around. There wasn’t much to see. Most of the Polish countryside was as flat as if a steamroller had leveled it for a football pitch. A lot of the buildings had been leveled, too, in the last war or this one. A lot that hadn’t been leveled had been smashed.
Not much traffic used the roads: horse-drawn wagons, a tractor or two, and military vehicles. Konstantin made sure those wore his country’s red star, not the two-by-two red-and-white checkerboard the Poles used.
Poles hidden where he couldn’t spot them kept taking potshots at t
he train full of Soviet armor. Nobody shot back, though Pyotr Polikarpov got gloomier than ever. You couldn’t say the train was under anything like an organized attack. The Poles were just giving the Russians passing through their unhappy land some harassing fire.
They halted for the evening somewhere north of Warsaw. Konstantin didn’t know why they weren’t passing through the Polish capital. Maybe the populace there was even more hostile than it was in the countryside. Or maybe an A-bomb made the direct route impassable. Morozov couldn’t remember whether the Americans had dropped one there.
He did ask Major Zhuk, “Sir, why are we stopping at all? Why not run on through the night?”
“The engine driver says in the dark he can’t spot a mine on the tracks in time to stop,” Zhuk answered.
“Oh.” Konstantin chewed on that for a while. He found he didn’t care for the taste. “No wonder we weren’t going very fast, then, even in the daytime.”
“No wonder at all,” the regimental commander agreed. “We just want to get back inside the Soviet Union, that’s all. And then—” He broke off, shaking his head like a bear bedeviled by bees.
“What, sir?” Morozov asked.
“Then they’ll probably send us into action against bandits,” Zhuk said. “We’ll be doing the same things inside the Soviet Union we’d be doing here if we’d got different orders.”
“Well, sir, remember Eigims. Remember Gamsakhurdia. They aren’t the only ones who bailed out, either, are they?”
“There are only a couple more in my regiment. I’ve worked my balls off trying to stop that kind of assholery. But the division’s lost a lot of tankmen, yes.” The major looked troubled. “Odds are we’ll be facing some of them when we get to wherever they send us.”
“That crossed my mind, too. We trained them, and now they use the training to try and kill us. Doesn’t seem right.” Konstantin muttered darkly to himself. Juris Eigims had been a fine gunner—a hell of a lot better than the lazy son of a bitch warming that seat now, no matter how Russian Polikarpov was. And, if the bandits up by the Baltic had managed to get their hands on a few runners, he’d be in the turret of one, doing his best to give the Red Army an armor-piercing shot in the teeth.
His best wouldn’t be good enough. Or rather, there weren’t enough Balts to stop the Red Army once it got going. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia would fly the hammer and sickle for as long as the Soviet Union wanted them to fly it. If they didn’t understand that, the hammer and sickle would fly over piles of ruins. The USSR had incorporated the Baltic Soviet Socialist Republics in 1940. The Nazis overran them the next year. Stalin’s men reclaimed them in 1944. Whatever still stood after all that would get wrecked now.
“Sir,” Konstantin asked, “do we know we’re ordered north? Or will they send us down to the Caucasus to give the blackasses what-for?”
“Nobody’s told me yet,” Zhuk said. “I’d guess we’re heading for the Baltics. We’re a lot closer to them. But that’s only a guess. Whatever they tell us to do, we’ll do it, that’s all. We serve the Soviet Union!”
All along the fringes of the USSR, people didn’t want to serve the Soviet Union any more. They wanted their own leaders to tell them what to do, not gray apparatchiks from Moscow or wherever the USSR’s apparatchiks based themselves these days.
Some of the bandits were ready to die for the sake of that vision. For his part, Konstantin Morozov was ready to kill them.
WHEN FAYVL TABAKMAN SET ABOUT doing something, he didn’t do it by halves. The engagement ring he got Marian Staley was of eighteen-carat gold, and sparkled with diamonds. “I think it is from Old Country,” Fayvl told her. “Americans, you mostly use fourteen-carat.”
“It’s beautiful.” Marian spread her fingers and moved her hand a little. The diamonds in the setting caught the light and threw it back in flashes of coruscating flame.
“That is important thing,” Fayvl said. “Maybe next weekend we go over to justice of peace, get license, and make things official?”
“If that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it.” Marian had had something more elaborate in mind, with Linda costarring in the role of the flower girl.
Fayvl only shrugged. “A big wedding first time around, that’s nice, long as someone’s got gelt to pay for it. But this? This is first time for neither one of us. We had what we had. It was good, but it got busted up. Now we try and pick up pieces from two broken lives and see if we can make ’em fit.”
“ ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—’ ” Marian began. The phrase had been in the news lately.
Fayvl waved it away. “I hear that too much. Maybe is true for country. Can’t fix country up like before. But for us? Why not? Plenty people, they lose somebody, they end up happy with somebody else. Why not us?”
“When you put it like that, I can’t think of any reason,” Marian said. Linda liked him and respected him. Marian herself liked him and admired him. She’d already found out he made her happy in bed. And if she didn’t please him, his acting deserved an Oscar. Maybe not a movie definition of love, but it worked for her.
“Hokay,” Fayvl said, as if it were all very simple. “Then we do.”
It wasn’t quite that simple. He’d forgotten or hadn’t known that getting a California marriage license required both people involved to have a negative Wassermann. Fayvl and Marian went to Doc Toohey’s on her lunch hour to get stuck. “Congratulations to you both,” the doctor said. “Mazel tov! Is that how you say it?”
“That’s how you say it,” Tabakman agreed.
“I’d rather do something like this than patch up loggers and drunks, which is where I get a big part of my business. It reminds me life has a good side, too,” Toohey said.
“How soon till we get the results?” Marian asked.
“First part of next week, chances are,” Toohey said. “Thing is, I can’t do the test myself. I don’t have the reagents I’d need. I have to take the samples down to the hospital lab in Redding. I’ll do it after I close up shop tonight.”
“But it’s eighty miles to Redding! I’m so sorry to have to put you to the trouble,” Marian said.
“Me, too,” Fayvl Tabakman said gravely.
Doc Toohey shrugged. “A lot of ways, living in a little town like this wallops the kapok out of city life. You’ve got to take the bad with the good, though. Some things that’d be easy in a city, you can’t hardly do at all here. You never can tell, folks. Maybe this afternoon a tree’ll try and drive a logger into the ground. Then I’ll get to hop in the ambulance and haul him down to Redding to see what they can do for him there. If I do, I promise I’ll take your test tubes along, too.”
“Nobody should ought to get hurt to make things easy on us,” Fayvl said. Marian nodded.
“I didn’t say anyone should,” Toohey replied. “But it happens every couple of weeks. Loggers do work that’s dangerous to begin with, and a lot of them aren’t the most careful people the good Lord ever put on earth.”
Marian found herself nodding again. Loggers had accidents because the work was hard and rough, as Toohey said. And they had accidents because they often drove like maniacs, both in their own cars and in the big, snorting company trucks that brought timber down to Weed for processing and distribution. And they had accidents because they weren’t always sober on the job.
They were often drunk when off work. Then they brawled in Weed’s bars. Taking care of those battle wounds kept Doc Toohey hopping, too.
Tuesday morning, the good doctor called Marian at Shasta Lumber. “Everything’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he said. “You can go ahead with the Health Department’s blessing.”
“Did you think there was any doubt?” Marian asked indignantly.
“Ma’am, a positive would have surprised me, but it wouldn’t have amazed me, if you know what I mean,” the doctor said. “You spend some time dealing with people, after a while you get to where nothing amazes you. So long.” He hung up.
; If you poured a few stiff bourbons down his throat, what kind of stories could he tell? Juicy ones, for sure. What kind would he tell, though? She’d never known him to get drunk. Unlike so much of his clientele, he was a cautious, sensible soul.
“You’re supposed to have the certificates with you,” the town clerk complained when Marian and Fayvl appeared before him again.
“Call Doc Toohey,” Marian answered. “I’ll bet you the fee, double or nothing, he calls you eighteen different kinds of idiot. Go on, call him.” The clerk didn’t bet. He also didn’t call. He issued the license for the customary fee.
When Marian walked down Mahogany Row and asked her boss for the following afternoon off, Carl Cummings frowned. “Why do you need it?”
“I want to get married then, sir,” she said.
His face cleared. “Oh, that’s right. You and the fellow with the shoe-repair shop. Well, all right, go ahead. Can’t very well say no to anything like that, can I? We’ll pay you for the time, too.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Cummings!” Marian said in glad surprise. She hadn’t intended to ask for that; she hadn’t thought she had a chance of getting it.
But Cummings actually smiled. “The company won’t go broke. We don’t have people getting married every afternoon.” Marian thanked him again and got out of there while the getting was good. The rest of the office girls out front were as amazed as she’d been at the boss’ generosity.
For the afternoon the next day, she put on a gray silk dress and had Linda wear a pink one good enough for church. They met Fayvl at the little city hall. He wore baggy tweeds that were plenty formal enough but seemed to belong more to 1932 Warsaw than 1952 Weed. Marian said not a word. That might have been where and when he got married the first time.
The justice of the peace (who made most of his money as a real-estate agent) was a bulky fellow named Harlow Foote. “Good to see you, good to see you,” he wheezed. Several chins wobbled as he spoke. He peered over his half-glasses at Linda. “Whose little girl are you?”
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