Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  He’d seen that the ex-LAH man was still atrocity-prone. It wasn’t as if he had a snowy-white conscience himself. Nobody who’d lived through the war on the Eastern Front came away clean. But he aimed to keep the promise he’d made to those Russians. It might have been more for his own sake than for theirs, but he did. And that meant not letting Rolf have any more to do with them than he could help.

  The quirk of Max’s eyebrows said he got that. He climbed to his feet and hefted his American Springfield. When Gustav picked up his own AK-47, a couple of the Ivans nodded to themselves. They knew they made a good weapon there, one fine enough for even the other side to covet. One of them helpfully took three magazines off his belt and held them out to Gustav. He took them with a nod of thanks.

  Gesturing with the assault rifle, he said, “Come on, you sorry sacks of shit—get moving.” The Russian who spoke a little German translated that for his buddies. By the way some of them tried to keep from grinning, he translated it literally.

  Off the prisoners went. Gustav and Max walked to either side of their column, guiding them through Lippstadt and out to the open country west of it like a couple of herdsmen’s dogs keeping a flock of sheep going the way it was supposed to.

  Pretty soon, three jeeps came up the road toward them. The Ivans stepped off onto the soft shoulder to let them by. Gustav couldn’t tell by looking whether the men in the jeeps were Amis or Germans—they wore the same uniforms he and Max did.

  Instead of passing the Red Army men and their captors, the lead jeep stopped, which meant the others did, too. “Jesus Christ!” the man in the passenger seat said in English. “What the hell have you got here?”

  Gustav understood him the way that Russian POW understood German. He had fragments of English, but only fragments. Max knew a good bit more. He was the one who said, “Gustav, he capture them. Now we take them back.”

  “Goodgodalmightydamn!” the American said, running it together into one word the way a German might with Himmeldonnerwetter! Then he came out with some more English that Gustav couldn’t catch.

  Max translated for him: “He says there are some U.S. intelligence guys a kilometer or two down the road. They can question the Ivans.”

  “That should work out all right.” Gustav wanted to get back to it. The fighting in Lippstadt hadn’t stopped just because he’d cleared the grocery. He nodded to the Americans in the jeeps, then used his Kalashnikov to urge the POWs on again. “Marschen!”

  March they did. The jeeps chugged on toward the town. Gustav opened a new pack of Old Golds and lit a cigarette. Seeing how hopeful the Ivans looked, he tossed one of them the pack. They all took a smoke. With American bounty at his disposal, he knew he could get more. Rolf would have called him a softy. To hell with Rolf, he thought, not for the first time.

  BACK BEFORE SHE MET BILL, Marian Staley had worked as a clerk-typist for Boeing. That was a big company to begin with, and it had swollen like an inflating balloon under the pressure of World War II. The Shasta Lumber Corporation wasn’t in the same league, or even in the one below.

  But Shasta Lumber had hired her, so she wasn’t about to complain. The pay—a buck thirty-five an hour—wouldn’t let her run the Rockefellers out of business any time soon. Along with what she had left from the insurance policy, though, it meant she could get on with her life.

  The local school was full of loggers’ kids. It was full, period. Lots of couples with men back from the war had had babies about the time she’d had Linda. Quite a few of those little kids had littler brothers and sisters who’d fill the classrooms over the next few years. And half the women Marian saw on the streets of Weed seemed to be expecting.

  As soon as she had the job, she moved from the motor court to a rented house close enough to the school so Linda could walk back and forth. It was a small place, only about half the size of the one the A-bomb had wrecked up in Everett. It did seem extra roomy at first, because she had such scanty furnishings. Thanks to that atom bomb and her stay at Camp Nowhere, she was starting from scratch.

  She bought the undowithoutables—beds for her and Linda, a table and a couple of chairs, a dresser—new, and a little fridge and basic kitchen stuff to go with them. The stove was already in place, for which she was duly grateful. Everything else she got secondhand…except for the end table that sat on somebody’s front lawn waiting for the garbage men, which she’d rescued before they could take it away.

  If you wanted wild living, Weed wasn’t the place to come. Well, there was one kind of wild living, but not one that appealed to Marian. After the loggers got paid, they filled the bars and drank and brawled and chased the kind of women who didn’t need much chasing till they ran out of money. That seldom took long.

  Marian quickly learned to stay away from the small downtown on those days. Having to do that annoyed her when she wanted to bring Linda to a cartoon at the one local movie house, but you had to take a place as you found it, not as you wished it were.

  One of the secondhand purchases was a tinny Philco radio with a dark brown Bakelite case. Or maybe the radio wasn’t so very tinny; maybe it was just that all the stations she could pick up came from far away, and she heard them through veils of static.

  At night, she could get KFI all the way from Los Angeles. It reached Weed as clearly, or as fuzzily, as the smaller stations in places like Redding and Red Bluff and Klamath Falls. She missed television, but the nearest station was down in Sacramento, too far away for even the tallest antenna to bring in a signal. TV might come to Weed one of these days, but it wouldn’t be tomorrow.

  Work was…work. She filed papers and typed letters and reports and inventories and whatever else the people who paid her put on her desk when they emerged from their fancy offices far down the hall. She ran a mimeograph machine, cranking out copies of forms. She did all the other things they told her to do.

  Since she was the newest hire, she also inherited the percolator that sat on a hot plate all day long. The gal who had been in charge of it turned it over to her with nothing but relief. Marian didn’t mind. It gave her an excuse to stand up and stretch and take a short break every so often. Nobody groused about the coffee she turned out.

  Like the other office workers, she brown-bagged lunch most of the time. It was cheaper. Once or twice a week, though, she would visit the diner where she’d stopped when she first came into Weed. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, Babs had taken a shine to her.

  “You see? This ain’t such a bad place,” the waitress said, setting a bowl of beef stew in front of Marian. “You find yourself a fella here, you’ll have all the comforts of home.” She winked. Her heavily mascaraed eyelashes flapped like a crow’s wing.

  “You may be right,” said Marian, for whom the thought of a fella was the last thing on her mind.

  “Oh, you bet I am,” Babs said. “A man keeps you warm better’n a hot-water bottle every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. Twice on Sundays if he’s young enough, anyways.” She leered and laughed a filthy laugh.

  “You’re awful,” Marian said.

  “You can say whatever you want, sweetie. He told me I was pretty darn good.” Babs laughed again. This time, so did Marian. If you couldn’t lick ’em, you might as well join ’em.

  A couple of days later, after picking up Linda from the school playground where she hung around till her mother got off work, Marian drove to the Rexall that was Weed’s one and only drugstore. She bought Band-Aids and Kotex. As she was getting ready to pay the druggist, she plucked a color postcard of Mt. Shasta from a little revolving rack on the counter and bought that, too.

  “What do you need that for, Mommy?” Linda asked. “All you have to do is go outside and you can see the mountain.”

  “I know,” Marian said. “But if I send the card to somebody who doesn’t live here, that person can see it, too.”

  “Who would you send it to?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think of somebody. Or if I don’t, I’ll just keep it.” Mar
ian gave the druggist a five-dollar bill. She put the change in her wallet and coin purse, stuck them back in her handbag, and went out to the car with her daughter.

  Dinner that night was liver and onions. Marian liked it. She would have made it more often, but Linda didn’t. She’d got pickier after their stretch—and that was what it felt like: a jail term—in Camp Nowhere. The food there was as bland as the cooks could make it, when it wasn’t military rations that were born bland. Now strong flavors seemed all the stronger.

  After pushing her share around her plate for a while, Linda said, “May I be excused, Mommy?”

  Marian told herself she should make her daughter eat more. No matter what she told herself, tonight she didn’t have the energy. “Yes, go ahead,” she said. “You can play for a while, then we’ll get you ready for bed.”

  “Okay!” Linda escaped while the escaping was good.

  Moving more slowly, Marian cleaned off the table and the stovetop. She washed the dishes and put them in the drainer. She looked at the dish towels, then looked away. She didn’t have the energy to use them, either. The dishes would be dry in the morning any which way.

  The postcard sat on the kitchen counter. She had the feeling it was eyeing her. She picked it up, found a pen, and started to write. This is where we’ve ended up, she said, and added her newly memorized address. It’s not too bad. It’s a long way from anything big. Times like this, that’s good. Hope you and your friends are doing well.

  After she signed her name, she wrote out the address where the card needed to go: Fayvl Tabakman, Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three. She could have written Camp Nowhere, but for all she knew half the refugee camps in the country carried the same nickname.

  She found a three-cent stamp and stuck it on the card. That was wasting a penny, but she couldn’t lay her hand on two one-centers. To help raise money to fight the war, the penny postcard was now a thing of the past.

  Next morning, she tossed the card into the wire basket for outgoing mail at Shasta Lumber. That was easier than using some of her lunch hour to find a mailbox or to walk to the post office. It was right by the bars and the pawnshop where she’d picked up some of the small things for the house.

  Having got rid of the card, she forgot about it. She had a financial statement to type up, and those were always a nuisance: lots of tabs, complicated centering, and everything had to be perfect. She was still new enough in the job that she took special care to make sure it was.

  —

  Boris Gribkov didn’t think he’d ever seen Brigadier Olminsky smile. The man was either scowling or looking as if his stomach pained him. Right now, he combined the two expressions. “Comrade Pilot, a problem has presented itself,” he said.

  “I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Gribkov said.

  “Good. Excellent, in fact. That is what I wanted to hear,” Yulian Olminsky said, and Boris wondered what he’d just bigmouthed his way into. The senior officer wasted no time letting him know: “There has been a reactionary uprising in the Slovak region of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”

  “Has there?” Gribkov said tonelessly. Czechoslovakia had been the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for only about three years. It was the last satellite to fall into orbit around the USSR. There were probably still some people left who didn’t care for their country’s new orientation.

  Sure enough, Olminsky said, “Elements believed to be affiliated with Father Tiso’s Slovak Fascist regime have seized Bratislava. A disloyal military clique is cooperating with them. If they succeed in detaching Slovakia from its affiliation to the cause of class struggle and world revolution, it will damage Red Army logistics and worldwide socialist solidarity.”

  “I see,” Gribkov said. Father Tiso had run Slovakia as a Nazi puppet state after the Germans grabbed Bohemia and Moravia in the aftermath of the Munich sellout. Even before committing to Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, Czechoslovakia executed him and a good many of his henchmen and tagged more of them with corrective-labor or jail terms.

  As if plucking that thought from his ear, the brigadier said, “The regime here in Prague must have been too soft, or we wouldn’t have to put up with this pestilential nonsense now. They should have done a better job of eliminating that faction. Now we have to pay the price for it.”

  “What does this have to do with me, sir?” Boris asked.

  Olminsky’s frown said he was slower on the uptake than the senior man had hoped. “We can’t let the fucking Slovaks get away with this horseshit,” he answered. “Do you want the Hungarians and the Poles to start playing games, too? That would screw us in the mouth for real. And so we are going to wipe Bratislava off the face of the earth.”

  “With an A-bomb?” Gribkov’s heart sank. Leonid Tsederbaum might have known what he was doing, all right.

  But, reluctantly, Olminsky shook his head. “We have none to spare for the Slovaks, I’m sorry to say. So instead we will send many Tu-4s against the reactionaries with conventional bombs. Bratislava will still be destroyed.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gribkov knew better than to show how relieved he was. The ten tonnes of bombs his plane carried might still kill hundreds of people. All the Tu-4s the USSR could afford to despatch would drop a couple of hundred tonnes of bombs and might kill thousands. One A-bomb was worth fifteen or twenty thousand tonnes of high explosives, and would surely kill tens of thousands.

  This was war. It wasn’t quite wholesale slaughter. Boris wouldn’t want to add Bratislava to the nose art of murdered cities that the bomber in his mind carried.

  Something else occurred to the pilot. “Excuse me, Comrade Brigadier, but will these revolting reactionaries—”

  “That’s just what they are, damn them,” Olminsky broke in.

  “Yes, sir,” Gribkov said patiently. “Do they have any air defenses? Flak? Fighters? What are we getting into?” He didn’t remind Yulian Olminsky that the Tu-4 was easy meat even for the leftover Soviet fighters the Czechoslovakian Air Force flew. Olminsky had to know it already. Or if he didn’t, he didn’t deserve the stars on his shoulder boards.

  “There may be some flak under their control,” he answered now, sounding as if he didn’t like to admit it. “As far as we know, socially friendly forces are still in charge of the warplanes in Czechoslovakia. No one’s attacked the airstrip here, you’ll notice. Any more questions?” The way his eyebrows drew down and came together warned Boris had better not have any.

  “No, sir!” he said, and saluted crisply. “I serve the Soviet Union!”

  “Khorosho,” Olminsky said. “Now beat it. You’ll fly tonight.”

  Gribkov tried not to let his face show what he was thinking as he walked back to brief his crew. That was a good idea for any Soviet citizen at any time, and all the more so when trying to digest news like this. He supposed the satellites were going to try to get out of the war their tutor had dragged them into. Germany’s less than eager allies had done their best to escape when things stopped going Hitler’s way.

  As he told the men what the next mission would be, he watched their expressions freeze up the way his had when Olminsky told him. Dropping bombs on the enemy was one thing. Dropping them where a lot of people were your friends was another…wasn’t it?

  Vladimir Zorin went through a cigarette in a few quick, harsh, deep puffs. “Well, this is something different, isn’t it?” he said. Not many questions could pack more possible meanings into them.

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Gribkov answered: another handful of words with more than a handful of meanings.

  The copilot ground the butt under his boot and lit a new smoke. “Shame Leonid isn’t here,” he said. “He could read the angles better than anybody else I ever knew.” Boris feared that Zorin was right. And what did that say about what the former navigator had done?

  “We’ll deal with the rebels’ treason the way it deserves,” Yefim Arzhanov declared. The quick navigator, unlike the dead one, didn’t seem afflicted by doubts. Did that make hi
m a lucky man or a fool? How much difference was there, when you got down to it?

  They took off a little before midnight. Boris’ grip on the yoke eased off when he was sure the Tu-4 would stay airborne. Full of high-octane avgas and TNT, the bomber was itself a bomb that, if not quite of atomic proportions, would take out a big chunk of the landscape if one—or two—of the overstrained engines failed trying to lift it off the ground.

  The plane circled up to bombing altitude while still over the Czech half of Czechoslovakia. Then it flew southeast. Gribkov wasn’t used to going in that direction on the way to a mission. It was the kind of route he might have to fly if unrest ever broke out inside the rodina. He didn’t even want to think about such a thing, much less do it.

  As Olminsky had promised, no fighters rose up inside Czechoslovakia to assail the Tu-4 and its companions. Radar made finding Bratislava in the darkness far easier than it would have been during the last war. Then, on a long-range flight (which this, of course, wasn’t), you were lucky if your bombs came down within ten kilometers of their intended target. Destruction was more efficient now.

  So was flak. The Slovak rebels did have guns down there on the ground. For all Boris knew, they were 88s the Nazis had given to Tiso’s men. Whatever they were, they had excellent direction. Shells started bursting below the incoming bombers, and then among them. A Tu-4 spun out of the sky, fire all up and down the wings.

  “Drop the bombs!” Gribkov called to Alexander Lavrov as near misses buffeted the plane.

  Away they went. Not thirty seconds later, a direct hit knocked out both starboard engines and killed the bomber’s pressurization. Gribkov had an oxygen mask on, or he would have slid straight into unconsciousness and death.

  “Get out!” he screamed over the intercom. “Get out while you can!”

  The hatch was by the main engineer’s station. The engineer and radio operator were already gone before Boris got back there. He jumped into the blackness. When he yanked the rip cord, his parachute opened. Shivering, he slid down, down, down toward whatever waited on the ground.