Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “You know, Aaron, that’s what’s always been wrong with you. You won’t think big,” Marvin said.

  “Nu? I’m still here. I’m not broke. My wife loves me. What more do I need?”

  “I was going to ask if you were interested in investing with me, but I can see I’d be wasting my breath.”

  “You can ask. How much would I have to sink into this scheme?”

  “Two, three thousand taler would be good.”

  “I bet it would,” Aaron said. He had that much in the bank, and a bit more besides. He was patiently saving up for the down payment on a house, so he could own instead of renting. He wanted a little more besides before he did any serious shopping. That way, he’d still have some cushion if anything went wrong.

  “I told you you didn’t have the smarts to come in with me,” Marvin said.

  “Save the I-told-you-sos for when you hit it big and you come by in your fancy-shmancy Rolls-Royce to look down your nose at the peasants, okay? Listen, I gotta go. Say hi to Sarah and Olivia for me, will you? ’Bye.” Aaron hung up.

  “What is it this time?” Ruth asked.

  “A chain of hot-dog stands,” Aaron answered. “By the way Marvin talks, he does none of the work and gets all of the rakeoff. How many times have I heard that song before?”

  “Oh, maybe two or three,” his wife said.

  “Two or three dozen, you mean.”

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “If he worked as hard on working hard as he does on the stupid get-rich-quick ideas, I bet he really would be rich by now,” Aaron said, lighting a cigarette. “But no. It has to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

  “He’s not even Irish,” Ruth said.

  “I know, but that’s how—” Aaron broke off. He sneezed, wetly, and coughed several times. When he blew his nose, he was snottier than he should have been.

  “Gesundheit,” Ruth said at the sneeze, and then, “Oh, no! I hope you’re not coming down with whatever Leon’s got.”

  “So do I,” Aaron said. “I’ve got to go to work any which way, but working while you’re sick’s no fun.”

  He kept telling himself he was fine the rest of the day. When he got up Monday morning, he couldn’t lie to himself any more. His throat wasn’t just scratchy; it hurt. His head felt like a balloon. He took a couple of aspirins, and moved more from the bottle into a little pressed-tin pill case he stuck in his pocket. Just before he went out the door, he swallowed some of the Cheracol he’d bought for his son.

  “You all right?” Herschel Weissman asked when he got to the Blue Front warehouse.

  “I’ll live,” Aaron said. His boss nodded and patted him on the back.

  Istvan was more direct: “You’re sick! Why didn’t you stay home?”

  “Because nobody will pay me if I do,” Aaron told him.

  “No sick leave?” Istvan asked in surprise. Aaron shook his head—and coughed again. Istvan went on, “So the Communists weren’t telling all lies about capitalism, then?”

  “Maybe not all. But a lot of them,” Aaron said. “Come on. We’ve got a lot of stuff to take care of today.”

  CADE CURTIS HAD TAKEN more than a month to cross the Pacific in a westbound troopship. He didn’t remember being bored then. He’d been too eager and too excited, or he thought now that he had been then. But he couldn’t say for sure. He’d been different so many ways. He’d believed he was protecting democracy. He’d had two legs. Details, details…

  Coming back took just as long as going over had. Aboard the SS Joe Harris, Cade knew damn well he was bored. The only time he wasn’t bored was when he was going to and from the galley, which was a deck up from his cabin. Then he was scared. Jimmy saved him from breaking his neck on the steep steel stairs more than once—they weren’t made for a man with crutches.

  Jimmy also saved him from going completely out of his skull with boredom. In the trenches, teaching Jimmy as much math as the Korean kid could soak up had been just a daydream. On the wallowing Liberty ship, it was a godsend: it helped make time go by.

  And Jimmy learned way more than Cade thought he would. Multiplication and division naturally followed the addition and subtraction he already had. Fractions were harder. Jimmy’s face lit up like a star shell when he figured out how they worked. Square roots…Cade was mildly surprised he still remembered how to extract them himself. His own trouble made it easier for him to help Jimmy over the rough spots.

  Then they reached negative numbers. “What do you get when you take five away from three?” Cade asked.

  “You mean take three away from five, right?” Jimmy returned.

  “Nope. What do you get when you take five away from three?”

  “You get nothing. Is nothing left. Less than nothing.” Jimmy laughed to show how ridiculous the idea was.

  But it was less ridiculous than he thought. Cade drew a number line on a sheet of paper. He numbered backwards from ten down to one. Then he added zero. He looked at Jimmy. Jimmy nodded—okay so far. Cade put another mark to the left of the zero. Above it, he wrote -1. Then he wrote -2, -3, and so on down to -10. “You see? You get it?” he asked. He touched his pencil point to the three on the number line, then moved it five spaces to the left. “So three minus five is…?”

  Jimmy put his finger on the -2. “How you say it?”

  “Minus two or negative two,” Cade answered. Jimmy exclaimed in Korean. He’d just seen something he’d never dreamt of before, and it excited him.

  He was doing simple algebra by the time the Joe Harris neared the San Francisco Bay. A small boat came out to guide the freighter into the bay. Jimmy helped Cade up on deck so he could watch the ship enter the famous harbor. He’d been a little boy when the Golden Gate Bridge opened. Now…

  Now he knew that the Russians had A-bombed San Francisco, but he hadn’t thought about what that meant. They’d collapsed the bridge, making it impossible for ships to get in or out. Engineers had finally opened a narrow path through the wreckage. The little boat led the Joe Harris through the cleared channel.

  Staring at the countless tons of steel all melted and knocked askew, Cade felt tears sting his eyes. One flash, and the Golden Gate Bridge went from wonder of the world to scrap metal. And how many cars, how many people, had been on it when the bomb went off?

  Of course, the bridge was far from the only thing the A-bomb had wrecked. The northern rim of the city of San Francisco was all ruin and devastation, too. The smashed cityscape seemed to impress Jimmy even more than the toppled bridge did. “This is what happens with A-bomb?” he asked Cade.

  “This is what happens, all right,” Cade said somberly. He was a little better prepared for the sight than Jimmy was. He’d seen the burning outskirts of Pusan right after the Russians hit it. But Pusan was a foreign place, a city he’d never heard of till the Korean War broke out. Everybody in America knew about San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. The difference was between a murdered stranger and a murdered loved one.

  “They should never use those things,” Jimmy declared.

  “If you think I’m gonna argue with you, you got another think coming,” Cade said.

  His eye went to the little island in the bay, not far east of the ravaged bridge. That had to be Alcatraz, he realized. The worst bad guys went to prison there. Or they had gone to prison there. By the way the place looked, none of those bad guys remained among the living.

  The Bay Bridge that linked San Francisco and Oakland still stood. The A-bomb hadn’t been strong enough to take it down with the Golden Gate Bridge. Need an H-bomb to get both at once, Cade thought. His shiver had nothing to do with the wet, chilly air. An H-bomb would have incinerated the whole city, not just the part near the sea.

  The Joe Harris docked at Pier 46, on one side of what a sign called China Basin. Gulls wheeled overhead, hoping for garbage. Plump seals swimming in the basin and lolling on the pier said the gulls didn’t get it all. Jimmy’s face was a study. “America,” he whispe
red, more to himself than to anyone else. “I am in America.”

  A handful of people waited at the landward end of the dock to meet the passengers the Liberty ship carried. Cade paid no attention to them till somebody down there called his name. Since he wore an uncommon one, he didn’t doubt the call was aimed at him. There were his father and mother and older brother, all waving as if they were practicing semaphore.

  He waved back with more restraint. If you started flailing around while you were using crutches, you’d land on your butt. “Who they?” Jimmy asked.

  “My mom. My dad. My brother Jerry.”

  “Ah. Mother and father.” Jimmy sounded very serious. Koreans had an almost reflexive respect for their elders.

  Before Cade could meet his family, he and Jimmy had to go through customs. Their worldly goods were not a problem; they had next to none. The paperwork that let Jimmy enter the United States, though…There was a lot of it, and it was complicated. Patiently, Cade said, “This is my adopted son. His Korean name is Chun Won-ung. His American name is Jimmy Curtis.” He said it several times.

  “Jimmy Curtis—that’s me,” Jimmy agreed.

  “I’ve never seen papers like these before,” the inspector said doubtfully. “I don’t know if you can do that. I better get Mr. Ledesma.”

  When Mr. Ledesma—a plump little man with a lounge-lizard mustache—arrived, Cade went through the whole rigmarole again. The inspector’s boss scratched his jowls with carefully manicured fingernails. “I’ve never seen an arrangement like this before,” he said. “Usually, our policy is to exclude Asiatics, not invite them in.”

  Jimmy bristled. “Easy,” Cade murmured. To Mr. Ledesma, he said, “Jimmy’s no Asiatic now. He’s my kid. That’s what the paperwork is all about.”

  “Yes, so I see,” the senior customs man replied. “Everything looks to be in order, and it’s backed up by the signatures and stamps of some mighty high-ranking people. I don’t know how you did it.” He eyed the service ribbons and medals on Cade’s chest, and his pinned-up trouser leg. “Mm, maybe I do. You did your country some favors. So what if you got one back?” He plied his rubber stamp with might and main. “Welcome to the USA, Mr. Curtis…both Mr. Curtises, I should say.”

  “Thank you,” Cade and Jimmy said together.

  Out they went, into the cool, watery San Francisco sunshine. Ralph, Myrna, and Jerry Curtis greeted them with whoops. Like their father, Jerry Curtis was shorter and stockier than Cade. He’d fought in France in the last war. He was an engineer himself, and hadn’t got Uncle Sam’s Greetings! letter this time around. Everybody was polite to Jimmy, though Jerry said, “Usually it’s the girls who have a child out of wedlock.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Cade answered sweetly.

  Jimmy couldn’t have been more formal with Cade’s folks if he were playing a butler in an English movie. “My grandfather. My grandmother,” he said. They might not have looked exactly thrilled about that, but they didn’t call him on it. Cade was relieved. What he’d told them had been brief.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” Ralph said. “Long as we’re here on the coast, we can eat seafood.” He grinned crookedly. “Bound to be fresher here than it is in Knoxville. And then we’ll see about getting us all home and about what we can do for that leg of yours.”

  “Okay, Dad.” Cade nodded. His father wasn’t a man who beat around the bush. He wouldn’t pretend nothing had happened to Cade. And his all plainly included Jimmy. A weight of worry dropped from Cade’s shoulders.

  —

  Konstantin Morozov wished he had eyes in the back of his head. In Lithuania, the enemy was all around him. Anyone at all might pull out a machine pistol and bang away at him when his tank went by. That was the chance he took, sticking his head out of the cupola for a better view. Man? Woman? Child? It didn’t matter. You couldn’t trust anybody. And if you stayed buttoned up inside the turret, you might not spot the mine waiting to blow off a track.

  All things considered, Konstantin would rather have been fighting the Americans back in Germany. They had better weapons than the bandits here, but you never had any doubts about who was a soldier and who a civilian. For that matter, Konstantin would sooner have gone up against the Wehrmacht than the Lithuanians. The Germans had been tough, but their hatred for the Red Army was different from the locals’. They fought like devils, but they didn’t want to die. The Lithuanians didn’t seem to care, as long as they could take Russians with them.

  The other thing that bothered him was, he had no one in the crew with whom he could share his worries. He’d been able to talk with Juris Eigims. The gunner had been able to talk with him, too, but that hadn’t stopped Eigims from going over the hill the second he saw the chance. Maybe he was in a T-34/85 himself. Maybe he was even commanding one at last, and rolling into action against the Red Army.

  These guys, though…Konstantin still loathed Pyotr Polikarpov, Eigims’ replacement. Maybe Nodar Gachechiladze was smart, maybe not. He still didn’t know enough Russian for Morozov to tell, let alone to talk with him. Alexei Yakovlev was too young to have any idea what was what.

  That left Avram Lipshitz. The driver was no dope; Konstantin hadn’t needed long to see that. But he had his own worries, which seemed worse than the tank commander’s. Pretty plainly, he was scared all the time. It didn’t keep him from doing whatever Konstantin told him to do. Konstantin gave him credit for coping, but not for having the fear in the first place. It didn’t help. You could get killed just as easily with it as without it.

  And he was a Jew. How loyal was he? Would he bail out the way Eigims had? Probably not—he had nowhere to go. But he wasn’t someone Morozov wanted to open up to. So he didn’t open up to anyone. If his stomach sometimes pained him, that was part of the price he paid for leading the tank crew. So he kept telling himself, anyhow.

  A truck convoy full of munitions and spare parts reached Vilnius from Byelorussia, which was, if not quiet, a lot quieter than Lithuania. Had the convoy stayed in Vilnius, everything would have been fine—and the people who needed the supplies wouldn’t have got them. The long column of trucks had to get to Ukmerge, in central Lithuania. The roads were bad, though few roads outside the USSR’s big cities were good.

  Trucks couldn’t get to Ukmerge by themselves. The Lithuanian bandits would have had themselves a field day, sitting in the bushes with their rifles and machine guns and shooting up the column at their leisure. Red Army brass, in their infinite wisdom, decided a few tanks would be just what the convoy needed to keep the trucks safe.

  Konstantin didn’t believe it even before his T-34/85 got tapped for escort duty. The tanks would give the column more firepower, true. But the bandits had already proved they didn’t worry about such things…hadn’t they? The brass didn’t think so. Nobody asked Konstantin what he thought. Nobody cared. He was a sergeant, there to do what he was told.

  He did make sure his tank had its full load of ammunition. He went heavy on HE, light on AP. He didn’t expect to be fighting many Lithuanian tanks. Tanks weren’t the problem. Stubborn men with small arms and grudges were.

  As they set out, he said, “Polikarpov, don’t fuck off on this one or it’s your nuts. You hear me?”

  “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Sergeant!” the gunner replied. That should have meant Of course I hear you. Morozov had the bad feeling it was more on the order of Shut up and leave me alone.

  The wind was wet and chilly. The fall rasputitsa was on the way. Roads would turn to muck till they froze solid again a few weeks later. The spring mud time was worse, but the fall rasputitsa caught the Germans by surprise and probably kept them from taking Moscow in 1941.

  Vilnius had lain under the Red Army’s steel fist. So would Ukmerge, fifty or sixty kilometers to the north. In between…In between was bandit country. The bandits swam among the rest of the Lithuanians like fish in a school. Rooting them out was next to impossible. No one gave them away. When they weren’t raising hell, they cached their rifles a
nd machine guns in the woods or in a hole in the ground or in a shack wrecked in one war or another.

  Russian soldiers couldn’t prove who took potshots at them and who didn’t. Sometimes, following German practice, they seized hostages when they were fired on, and shot them after no one admitted guilt. That, of course, endeared them even more to the Lithuanians.

  A kilometer and a half outside of Vilnius, a bullet clanged off the T-34/85’s turret a meter below the cupola. It whined away. Konstantin let himself drop down into the fighting compartment. The next one might be aimed better.

  “Anybody see where that came from?” he asked—a hopeless question. Lipshitz and Yakovlev could see straight ahead through their vision slits. So could Polikarpov, with his gunsight. Nodar Gachechiladze couldn’t see out at all.

  “Shall I drop some shells on the countryside?” Polikarpov asked.

  Konstantin surprised himself by answering, “Sure, give ’em a couple of rounds. Won’t hurt.”

  The gun roared. Cordite fumes filled the compartment. Dirt fountained up outside. Whether the shelling did any good, Konstantin doubted. Maybe it would make the bandits thoughtful, anyhow.

  Along with the tanks, a few armored personnel carriers full of soldiers rolled north with the convoy. Their machine guns hosed down the bushes. The infantrymen didn’t get out and attack, though. One carrier came too close to a bandit’s foxhole, as lovingly camouflaged as if the man inside still served in the Red Army. The driver had no idea the bandit was there till he fired his rocket-propelled grenade. The carrier went up in smoke and flame. Konstantin didn’t think anyone got out.

  It was a running fight all the way up to Ukmerge. The bandits had plainly known the truck column was on its way. How? They might just have kept their eyes open and guessed well. They might have intercepted Red Army radio messages; Soviet signals security rarely was what it should have been. Or there might have been spies or traitors inside Vilnius.