Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “Good job, Szolovits. Do what you can.” Sergeant Gergely raised his voice: “All you shithouse clowns who aren’t too bad off, help the poor pussies who are.” His laugh was harsh as a file. It still astonished Istvan till the noncom went on, “Well, now we know why the Americans didn’t hit back harder, don’t we?”

  That hadn’t occurred to Istvan. He wanted to admire anyone who could think straight at a time like this. Instead, he found himself wondering—and not for the first time—whether Gergely was human at all.

  His face still hurt. “Anyone have any burn ointment?” he called. A moment later, half a dozen other voices echoed the question.

  Istvan wondered how radioactive the air he breathed was. That, he might actually be able to do something about. He had a gas mask in a metal case hung from his belt, in case the Yanks threw poison around. A lot of the men in his company had “lost” their masks, but he still carried his.

  He put it on. That hurt worse, enough to make him grind his teeth and swear. The air he drew in tasted of rubber. He didn’t know whether the charcoal canisters could filter out the invisible but deadly atoms. He didn’t see how using the mask could leave him any worse off, though.

  Somebody clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a smart fucking Jew!” Sergeant Gergely said. He’d kept his gas mask, too. He would have. Now he donned it, fumbling less than Istvan had. Once it was in place, he yelled for others to follow his lead.

  Istvan did what he could for injured men. In the face of what had happened, it seemed pointless. But you had to try. If you didn’t do much good, it was still better than nothing. Wasn’t it?

  Up ahead—off to the west—American 105s opened fire. We’ll take care of whatever the A-bomb missed, they seemed to be saying. Fresh screams rang out as the shells burst among the Hungarians. Yes, those damned guns were on the job.

  “We will fall back!” a Magyar officer shouted. “We can’t stay where we are, not when we’re stuck between this and—that.” That could only be the still rising, still fading dust cloud that had leveled Wesel—and Lord only know how many Soviet troops in or moving through the town. The officer didn’t say stuck between the Devil and the deep blue sea, but Istvan guessed he would have if only he’d thought of it.

  No one complained about falling back. Maybe the Russians would have, but they’d got hit harder than the Hungarians had. Yet the retreat soon swung south. Moving due east, the shortest route, would have taken them straight back through Wesel, and Wesel…wasn’t there any more. The farther east they went, the more smashed-up the country through which they were traveling looked—which, considering that they were marching closer and closer to the spot where the A-bomb went off, was hardly a surprise.

  How much radiation were they picking up as they marched? Istvan had no idea. He would have bet the men leading the retreat didn’t, either. He wondered if radiation even crossed their minds. His flash burn hurt worse—he knew that.

  He stumbled along with his head down, trying not to trip over whatever wreckage lay right under his feet. It was a black, moonless night. The glass eyepieces on his gas mask were none too clean. They also tended to steam up as he began sweating.

  Here and there, people cried out in German and in Russian. He couldn’t, and didn’t much want to, see what had happened to Wesel. All he wanted to do was get away, to escape to a country where things like this never happened.

  If there was such a country, anywhere on earth.

  “I wonder how many of those bombs the Yankees dropped.” The voice behind that pig-snouted mask could belong only to Sergeant Gergely. “I wonder how many healthy Russian soldiers are left around here.”

  Istvan nodded to himself. Those were interesting questions, weren’t they?

  —

  Konstantin Morozov shoveled shchi and kasha from his mess kit into his chowlock. The cabbage soup was better than usual. The animal that had got chopped up and boiled in it had died recently, and was still pretty fresh. Konstantin suspected the animal was a horse, not, say, a cow or a sheep, but he knew better than to get picky about a field kitchen’s shchi.

  Hell, finding the field kitchen was a stroke of luck. Finding it next to a Red Army supply dump was a double stroke of luck. They could get bombed up and fill the T-54’s thirsty tank with diesel fuel. They could, and Morozov intended to.

  He nodded to Juris Eigims, who was also feeding his face as fast as he could. “I hope we can get topped up all the way,” he said.

  “It would be nice, da.” The gunner’s accent turned the most ordinary thing he said into music. After swallowing, he went on, “You go into action light on ammo and fuel, sooner or later you end up paying for it.”

  “Usually sooner,” Konstantin agreed. When it came to fighting, Eigims was fine. The Balt wanted to live, which meant he didn’t try to undercut his tank commander while his neck was on the line.

  “For now, we’re driving the fucking imperialists hard,” Vladislav Kalyakin said. His accent made Konstantin think of peasant dances and foolishness like that. Byelorussians were hard for Great Russians to take seriously. You didn’t even have to keep an eye on them, the way you did with Ukrainians. They were just there to use, like a handy pair of pliers.

  “About time,” Morozov said. “We should have got to the Atlantic by now, not just to the other side of Germany. Things were different the last time around, I’ll tell you that.”

  Kalyakin, Eigims, and Vazgen Sarkisyan all looked at one another. They did it in a way Konstantin wasn’t supposed to catch, but he did, even if none of them was dumb enough to say anything. He could read their minds. They were thinking something like You tell ’em, Grandpa.

  They hadn’t fought their way through the Great Patriotic War. They didn’t know what that war was like, not firsthand. That had been a fight where the only rule for both sides was to kill the other guy before he killed you. It had been that way from the start. When Konstantin was a new, green loader, the handful of veterans who’d been in it from the start told stories that showed it was always that way, right from the second the Nazis swarmed over the border. Hardly any of those guys lived to see the Hammer and Sickle flying over the Reichstag in Berlin.

  To Konstantin the kid, those old sweats who’d worn the uniform on 22 June 1941 had seemed ancient by 1944. Now it was his turn to be a relic of bygone days. How had that boot ended up on the other foot? He didn’t feel any older…except when he did.

  “We’ll just keep hitting them till they finally fold up and fall over,” he said, in lieu of calling the youngsters he commanded a bunch of pussies. “With any luck, we’ll be in Holland tomorrow.”

  “We luck has.” No, Sarkisyan didn’t speak much Russian. Using what he had, he went on, “We shells gets. We gasoline gets, too.”

  “This tank uses diesel, not gasoline, you dumb blackass,” Eigims said. Konstantin wouldn’t have wanted to call the squat, burly loader that. Juris was taller than Sarkisyan, but a lot skinnier. But the Armenian only laughed, so Eigims must have found the right tone of voice.

  After supper, they dug themselves in under the T-54, the way they did in dry weather on hard ground. The front lay a few kilometers farther west. Konstantin figured they’d move up again tomorrow. If the company hadn’t found the field kitchen and the dump, they might have gone up again before it got dark tonight.

  Red Army guns banged away at the enemy troops in front of them. Not much artillery fire came back. Even with the tank’s thirty-six tonnes of steel to shield him, Morozov wasn’t a bit sorry about that. Every once in a while, a heavy, long-range gun—it had to be at least a 240—would throw a shell back this way. Those big bursts sounded like the end of the world, but none of them came very close.

  The familiar smells of metal and diesel exhaust and hot lubricating oil and tobacco filling his nostrils, Morozov fell asleep as readily as he would have in a barracks. Other, earthier, odors would probably fill his nostrils later; cabbage soup gave everybody gas. That didn’t worry him, though. It
was nothing that hadn’t happened before.

  He wasn’t so used to the screams of jet fighters’ engines. Those pried his eyelids apart, somewhere in the middle of the night. He would have gone straight back to sleep anyway, only he noticed what sounded like every antiaircraft gun in the world going off. Were the Americans coming over? He didn’t let it bother him. Unless a bomb hit right on top of his tank, he was safe. If one did, he’d be dead too fast to get bothered about anything.

  Or so he thought, till the black cave under the T-54 suddenly filled with blinding, overwhelming, impossible light. Even more impossible, the massive tank heaved up on one side before crashing down again. For a mad moment, Konstantin feared it would get blown over like a wooden toy car in a high wind. Then he feared it would squash him coming down.

  He did exactly the same thing as the other three men under the tank: he screamed and started gabbling prayers. His, like Kalyakin’s, were in Old Church Slavonic. Eigims called on God in Latin, Sarkisyan in throaty Armenian. Jesus’ name sounded very much alike in all three languages.

  The blast that almost tipped the tank had been hot. How close was the A-bomb? That question translated into another one faster than Morozov would have wished. Am I already dead? he wondered.

  If he was, if the radiation would roast him like a pork butt in the oven, he couldn’t do anything about it. If he wasn’t, he had to do everything he could to live. “Everybody into the tank!” he ordered. “Quick as we can. We’ll close all the hatches and turn on the filtered blower.”

  The system hadn’t been designed with radioactivity in mind. It was like a gas mask for the T-54. If the enemy started using poison gas on the battlefield, the tank could close down and keep going. It might protect the crew from fallout, too. Konstantin couldn’t see how it would leave them any worse off, no matter what.

  Warm rain spattered them as they scrambled into the T-54. A nearby tank was on fire. Maybe its paint had caught. What was left of a nearby wooden shed was burning, too. How many men are burning? flashed through Konstantin’s mind. How many are all burnt up?

  He slammed the cupola hatch behind him and dogged it tight. The other hatches clanged shut. Vladislav Kalyakin fired up the reliable V-54 engine. Then he hit the blower. The fan started sucking air—with luck, air cleansed of radioactivity—through the filters and into the fighting compartment.

  As soon as Morozov got his helmet hooked up to the radio circuit, he heard Captain Lapshin shouting in his earphones: “All tanks, report in! All tanks, report in!”

  “Morozov here. Over,” Konstantin said, remembering to hit the SEND button.

  “Good to hear from you, Kosta,” the company commander said. “We have orders—I just now got them—to pull back for medical care and decontamination.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Captain!” Morozov said. Things were as lousy as he’d feared, then. If the brass thought they were likely to last even a little while, it would have sent them forward against the Americans. If they had to go back so the quacks could mess with them, they were really and truly fucked. He spoke to the driver: “You hear that, Genya?”

  “Da, Comrade Sergeant,” Kalyakin said. “How bad is it?”

  “Well, it isn’t good.” Konstantin didn’t know much about radiation sickness. Except that there was such a thing, he knew next to nothing, in fact. Now he knew next to nothing. He had the bad feeling he’d find out more than he’d ever wanted to learn.

  —

  The makeup girl clucked reproachfully. “Please turn your head more to the right, Mr. President!” she said: an order phrased as a request. A captain bossing a corporal couldn’t have done it any better.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Harry Truman said. Making him look as good as he was ever likely to was her job. He let her get on with it. She smacked him with a powder puff, then, frowning in concentration, did some fine work with a skinny little brush.

  None of the touches was unpleasant—if anything, the reverse. Truman hated the whole process anyway. For one thing, he felt like a counterfeit sawbuck. And, for another, the process left his face smelling like makeup. He couldn’t get away from the odor by moving away from it; it moved with him. And it drove him crazy. The first thing he did whenever he escaped the TV cameras was hop in the shower to wash it off.

  When the girl drew back to survey her work, Truman asked her, “Will the bathing suit be green or orange this time, dear?”

  She giggled. “You’re a card, Mr. President!”

  “I don’t know about that, but people have been telling me for a long time I ought to be dealt with,” Truman said, not without pride. When the makeup girl got it—she needed a couple of seconds—she made a horrible face. The President grinned.

  An assistant director or director’s assistant or whatever they called him said, “You’re on in two minutes, sir!”

  Getting ready for a speech or a press conference was always frantic. Truman gave a thumbs-up to show he’d heard. The makeup girl smacked him with the powder puff one more time. She studied her handiwork and nodded to show she was satisfied.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” Truman told her. He took his bifocals off the makeup table and set them on his nose. He didn’t like the way his sight had lengthened after he turned fifty, but what could you do if you wanted to go on reading? You could wear glasses, that was what.

  He looked through the mild, upper portion as he walked into the press room. A young forest of mikes sprouted from the front of his lectern. Radio and television were carrying this speech. Reporters waited for him to finish reading it so they could grill him afterwards.

  The second hand on the wall clock was sweeping up toward eleven on the dot. The red lights under the TV camera lenses glowed, so they were filming or broadcasting or whatever the right word was. Truman took his place behind the lectern and glanced down at the papers. Yes, they said what they were supposed to say. If they hadn’t, he could have given the gist without them. The gist was, the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and he’d just thrown some more gasoline on the fire.

  “My fellow Americans, I come to you today with a heavy heart,” he said. “To keep the Red Army from overrunning all of Western Europe and bringing it under Stalin’s tyranny, we have had to use more atomic bombs in the fight. To destroy as many front-line Russian troops as we could, we dropped them on the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

  Not it has become necessary that we. Truman said we have had to. He’d watched nonsense and bureaucratic drivel start to swallow the English language. He knew he’d never be a speaker in FDR’s or Churchill’s class—hell, nobody was in Churchill’s class—but by God he said what he meant without beating around the bush.

  “I did not want to do this. The West German people are our allies in the fight against Communist oppression,” he went on. “But with almost all West German territory under Russian occupation, and with the Low Countries and France threatened with invasion, I saw no other choice.

  “We have also struck at Soviet troop concentrations deeper inside West Germany, and in Austria. And we have hit the Russian satellite nations in Eastern Europe. We will not let Russian soldiers cross their territory unpunished, and we will not let the petty tyrants who run them help Joseph Stalin snuff out freedom all across Europe.

  “If Stalin wants peace, he can have it. I will not fight him as long as he is not fighting me. Let him pull his troops back behind the borders they held before the war started, let the North Koreans and Red Chinese move back north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, and there will be no more reason to fight as far as I’m concerned. They’ve hurt us, and we’ve hurt them. The scales balance, near enough.

  “But I warn the Russian leader: if he doubts our resolve, he’s making a bigger mistake than the one he made by trusting Hitler. His puppets started the fight in Korea. He started the fight in Europe. We will finish them. On that, he has my solemn word.”

  He looked up again to show he’d finished his prepared remarks. The re
porters all started yelling his name and waving. He pointed at one of them. “If we’ve used more A-bombs in Europe, Mr. President, how do we keep the Russians from doing the same thing?” the man asked.

  “Chet, we will do the best we can with planes and radar and antiaircraft guns,” Truman answered. “We will give their bombers the hottest time we know how to give them.”

  “Some of them will get through, though, won’t they?” Chet persisted. “If enough do, won’t the European countries grab at whatever kind of peace Stalin will give them?”

  “They haven’t shown any signs of that so far,” said Truman, who had no idea what he and the United States would do if they did. He went on, “As a matter of fact, the French Committee of National Salvation seems more eager to get on with the war than the Fourth Republic did.” There! He’d said something good about Charles de Gaulle! Who would have believed it? He pointed to another reporter. “Yes, Eric?”

  “Mr. President, this set of bombs didn’t hit Soviet territory?” Eric held his pipe in his left hand while he talked; smoke curled up from the bowl toward the press-room ceiling.

  “That’s right.” Truman nodded.

  “What will we do if they strike at us again, sir?”

  Suffer. Bleed. Burn, the President thought. But, blunt-spoken as he was, he couldn’t say that to a reporter. Sighing, he answered, “If that happens—and may God forbid it—I promise that we’ll hurt the Russians much worse than they can hurt us.”

  Hitler’d made the same promise after English bombs started falling on Germany in reply to the ones the Luftwaffe’d dropped on London. The difference was, the Führer hadn’t been able to make good on his promise. Truman knew damn well he could.

  He aimed his left index finger at another reporter. “Walter?”

  “Mr. President, what I want to know—what I think every American wants to know—is, will anything be left of the country and of the world by the time this war ends?”

  “I think there will. I hope—I pray—there will. But I’m not the only one who has something to say about that. You also have to ask Joe Stalin. I’m sorry, Walter, but that’s the way it is.” He chose another gentleman of the Fourth Estate. “Yes, Howard?”