Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  Boris’ bomber took on several hundred liters of fuel in fifteen minutes. The milch cow had a pump to speed things along. Early Soviet efforts at in-flight refueling had used gravity feed. It worked well enough to show the brass that the idea was possible, not well enough to make the possible practical. The pump made an enormous difference.

  As the milch cow refueled the other Tu-4, the pilot flew in a wide circle. Part of the practice session was to get Boris used to keeping station with the milch cow. Bombers didn’t usually fly in such close formation, for obvious reasons. It turned out not to be difficult, only to require constant close attention. The milch cow’s pilot was as smooth as his voice and manner suggested he might be. He made no sudden, jerky, or unlooked-for maneuvers.

  When the fueling was done, he said, “Release the nozzle.”

  “I am releasing the nozzle,” Lev Vaksman replied, and then, a moment later, “The nozzle is released. I say again, the nozzle is released.”

  “Thank you. I see that the nozzle is released.” The milch cow’s pilot, or more likely his engineer, reeled in the refueling cable. Vaksman did the same with the catching cable. The two big planes separated. A different pilot would come up to have a go with the milch cow. Boris’ next chance would come tomorrow afternoon.

  —

  A lieutenant handed Ihor Shevchenko new shoulder boards. Instead of being plain khaki like the ones on his tunic now, these had a dull-red horizontal stripe. “Congratulations, Shevchenko! You’re a corporal now. You’ve done well, and we’ve noticed,” he said, speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent not much different from Ihor’s own.

  Ihor saluted stiffly. “Thank you, Lieutenant Kosior, sir! I serve the Soviet Union!”

  “We all serve the Soviet Union, and the great Stalin,” Stanislav Kosior replied. He might come from the Ukraine, but he talked like the New Soviet Man you always heard about on the radio but hardly ever met. “We will drive back the forces of reaction, imperialism, and capitalism. True Communism will come to the entire world, I expect even in our lifetimes. It will be wonderful!”

  “It will, Comrade Lieutenant!” Ihor sounded as enthusiastic as he could. He knew how to mask what went through his head. You didn’t dare let people like this know you thought they’d been putting hashish in their papirosi. They’d make you sorry if you slipped like that.

  “Carry on, then, Corporal, and congratulations again!” Kosior looked like a New Soviet Man, too. He kept himself clean and well groomed, even in the field during winter. He was taller and slimmer and handsomer than most. If you wanted to get rude about it, he looked the way a Russian who’d turned halfway into a German might.

  No matter what he looked like, he wasn’t so smart as he thought he was. Had he been, he wouldn’t have promoted a man who’d just scragged a sergeant from his own side. If I’d known it would get me promoted, I’d’ve started shooting the bastards a long time ago, Ihor thought. He remembered plenty of noncoms and junior officers from the Great Patriotic War whom nobody would have missed.

  The promotion also convinced him none of his squadmates had seen him shoot Sergeant Prishvin. Or, if someone had, he also thought the son of a bitch had it coming. That would do.

  Ihor unbuttoned his plain shoulder boards and replaced them with the striped ones. He was still a corporal even if he didn’t; he’d seen majors wearing a second lieutenant’s rank markings because no one had bothered to issue them new ones. In the fight against the Nazis, things often got too busy to worry about details like that.

  Now he wouldn’t have to chop firewood or fill canteens at a stream or dig latrine trenches any more—well, not so much, anyhow. The Russian word for corporal, yefreitor, was borrowed from the German Gefreiter, a junior noncom who was freed from fatigue duties.

  One of the other veterans in Ihor’s section, Pyotr Boky, clapped a hand to his forehead when he saw the new shoulder boards. “They promoted you?” he exclaimed in mock, or maybe not so very mock, horror. “Christ have mercy! The Red Army’s going to pot!”

  “Fuck you, too, Petya, right up the poop chute,” Ihor answered sweetly. “I can order you out on forward guard duty for the next hundred years.”

  “Sure you can, if you’re the right kind of prick,” Pyotr said. “Everybody knows you’re a prick, yeah, but I thought you were a different kind of prick.”

  They jawed back and forth, neither man taking any of it seriously. It was the kind of thing soldiers did when there was a lull in the fighting. Ihor didn’t think the lull would last long. Not only had the Red Army failed to break into Paderborn, the enemy had pushed several kilometers east of the city. Something had to give. Either the Americans were going to try to move up again or his own side would mount another drive to the west.

  When Soviet tanks clattered up under cover of darkness, Ihor realized which of those was about to happen. The chemical-factory stink of diesel exhaust made him cough.

  And the armored vehicles made him stare. They were a motley mix of T-54s, modern as day after tomorrow; SU-100s, hard-hitting assault guns that still packed a punch; and T-34/85s, which, as far as he was concerned, might just as well have stayed in the tank parks where they’d gathered cobwebs since the Nazis surrendered.

  Pointing to one of those familiar silhouettes—more angular than the turtle-topped T-54—Ihor said, “They’re sweeping out the antiques shop pretty hard, aren’t they?”

  “We both know too damn well they are,” Pyotr Boky replied. “Why else d’you think they made you corporal?”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Ihor replied, more amiably than not. He knew full well that Boky had at least part of a point. It wasn’t just in throwing the T-34/85s into the fight that the Soviet Union was sweeping out the antiques shop. He wouldn’t have been hauled back into the Red Army, much less promoted corporal, unless the commissars were desperate for whatever they could lay their hands on. Like the obsolescent tanks, he and most of the men in his regiment were at least better than nothing.

  Lieutenant Kosior summoned his noncoms to discuss what the company would do in the upcoming attack. This was Ihor’s first such gathering. If he’d expected strategy that would make Marshal Zhukov jealous, he would have been doomed to disappointment. Since he had enough experience of the Red Army to expect very little, he wasn’t.

  “We go in before dawn tomorrow,” Kosior sad, “as soon as our shelling lets up. Keep the men moving. Keep them close to the armor. They’ll stay safer that way, and they’ll take out the Yankees with bazookas and keep the tanks safer, too. Any questions?” He waited. None of the corporals and sergeants said anything. He nodded. “All right. Good luck to all of you. We serve the Soviet Union!”

  “We serve the Soviet Union!” the noncoms echoed, Ihor loud among them.

  As soon as the guns left off pounding the enemy positions ahead, the tanks and assault guns rolled forward through mud and chilly rain. Along with everybody else, Ihor gulped his hundred-gram vodka ration. It was enough to make you not care so much about what might happen to you, not enough to leave you too stupid or clumsy to fight.

  Stanislav Kosior blew a loud blast on his brass officer’s whistle. “Forward! Forward for the Soviet Union and the great Stalin!”

  He believed it, or he’d acted well enough to convince Ihor he did. “For the great Stalin!” Ihor roared at the top of his lungs. If you were going to be a liar, best to be a loud liar.

  He didn’t need long to decide it wouldn’t be the Red Army’s day. The artillerymen hadn’t done enough to stun the Americans or knock out their machine-gun positions. Red tracers spat through the predawn gloom, red foretelling blood and pain.

  And the shelling hadn’t taken out the enemy’s rockets, either. A lance of fire slammed into a T-34/85. The tank twisted sideways and stopped. Flames burst from every hatch. A T-54’s armor might have deflected the bazooka round. No way to know for sure. The only thing Ihor knew for sure was that the bazooka killed the older tank. More to the point, it killed the tank’s five-man crew. Al
l he could hope was that they died before they suffered.

  The tanks and self-propelled guns tried to do what the artillery hadn’t. They poured HE rounds into what they could see of the Yanks’ defenses. They couldn’t see enough. More bazookas struck at them. The machine guns went on chewing up the infantry. And U.S. artillery shells started screaming down on the Red Army soldiers.

  “Dig in!” Ihor yelled—the first order he’d given as a noncom that might actually mean something. He followed it himself. One of the things he’d learned in the Great Patriotic War was how to dig in while lying flat as a crushed serpent. Like riding a bicycle, it was a skill that never went away. Unlike riding a bicycle, it could save his neck.

  —

  One of the big wheels at the Shasta Lumber Company emerged from Mahogany Row—no plebeian pine for him—and set three checks on Marian Staley’s desk. “Make out a deposit slip for these and bring them back to me with it,” he said. “I’ll endorse them and sign the slip, and you can take them to the bank.”

  “Sure, Mr. Cummings,” she said. What else was she going to say? She was a flunky and he was a boss, so Sure was the only sensible thing. But why didn’t he endorse them beforehand? Why didn’t he sign the deposit slip beforehand? God forbid he should try to add the three numbers himself, but the other steps would have saved time and weren’t beyond even a boss’ abilities.

  She supposed Carl Cummings had no idea where the peons who worked for him kept the Bank of America deposit slips. Asking someone would have been beneath his dignity. Let her take care of it.

  Take care of it she did. She walked down the hallway and knocked on the closed door before entering his wood-paneled sanctum. The door was so thick and solid, she barely heard him bid her come in. He affixed his John Hancock to the checks and the slip. He didn’t tell her not to goof off on the way to and from the bank. He assumed she’d never dare do anything so wicked on company time.

  The biggest thing he had going for him was that Weed, California, didn’t offer even the most dedicated goof-off many chances to waste time. The shops weren’t interesting enough to attract her.

  She did light a cigarette as soon as she stepped outside. She’d largely lost the habit while she was stuck in Camp Nowhere. Now she had it back. A cigarette was one of the best excuses for wasting a little time God ever invented. She even had to stop and fiddle to get this one going. It was chilly and breezy and drizzly: wonderful weather for a boss to send a flunky out in. Let her walk the four blocks to the bank. He’d stay right where he was, where it was warm and dry.

  It was Tuesday, not Friday, so the bank wasn’t full of loggers cashing their checks. She went in, did what she had to do, and walked out again. “To hell with you, Mr. Cummings, sir,” she muttered, pausing to light another Pall Mall. If he didn’t like it, too damn bad.

  After blowing out smoke, she started back to the office as slowly and reluctantly as Linda headed for school. Her eyes traveled up the street. They traveled down the street. If she saw anything even the least little bit interesting in one of the shop windows, she intended to walk in and have a look around. And if his High and Mightiness Mr. Carl Cummings didn’t like it, too goddamn bad.

  There was something interesting. A storefront that had been dark and empty behind a plate-glass window since before she came to Weed now had a light on inside. The new place, whatever it was, must have opened in the past few days. Otherwise, she would have noticed it earlier. She was sure she would have noticed, too; any changes in downtown Weed stood out.

  She walked half a block to the new business. She hoped it would be a place that sold children’s clothes and not, say, another gun shop. Weed already had two of those. The business they did was so brisk, the town might have room for a third. If Russian invaders ever came as far as Weed, local hunters and plinkers might be able to drive them back without waiting for help from the U.S. Army.

  It turned out to be neither. Large Old English gold letters on the plate glass proclaimed Shoes Repaired. Smaller ones said Half Soles, Heels, Steel Toes, Ripped Uppers. Another line added Custom shoes made to order.

  Marian nodded to herself. Weed hadn’t had a cobbler’s shop. With all the loggers who lived in and around the little town, she could see that one might well make good money. Someone else must have seen the same thing. That thought had just crossed her mind when she reached the last, smallest, and most modest line of gold lettering. It said Fayvl Tabakman, proprietor.

  She blinked. She rubbed her eyes. The lettering still said the same thing, even if it was hard to read. See what happens when you send a postcard? she thought dizzily. She hadn’t heard back from Tabakman after she mailed the photo of Mt. Shasta. She hadn’t even been sure it got to him. The postal service at all the refugee camps ranged from erratic to worse.

  But she couldn’t imagine any other reason Fayvl Tabakman would suddenly wind up in Weed. She’d been looking for an excuse to waste a little time. Now she had a better one than she’d dreamt of finding.

  She looked in the window. There he stood, behind the counter, in his old-fashioned cloth cap. He didn’t look up at her; he was tapping away at a shoe on a last with a little cobbler’s hammer. His face was a mask of concentration. Back in Everett, back before the world turned upside down and inside out, she’d appreciated the fine, precise work he did. That plainly hadn’t changed.

  Of itself, her hand closed on the latch. It clicked under the pressure of her thumb. The door opened. A bell above it jingled, just as one had in the now-ruined shop in Everett.

  The bell made him look up from what he was doing. “Hallo, what can I—?” he began automatically. Then he did a double take that would have set the whole country laughing fit to burst had Sid Caesar or Milton Berle pulled it on TV. The smile that followed would have been pretty damn funny, too. “Marian!”

  “Hello, Fayvl,” she said. Here as in Camp Nowhere, a face and a voice she knew were welcome. Was it anything more than that? She’d left the camp before she’d really had to make up her mind. “Welcome to beautiful, scenic Weed.”

  She didn’t say beautiful, romantic Weed. For one thing, Weed was about as romantic as the mashed potatoes from dehydrated spuds the Camp Nowhere cooks turned out by the enormous vat. For another, she hadn’t made up her mind about romantic. Till she did, if she did, careful was better.

  “Scenic it is, yes. The real mountain even more than your card. Beautiful? The town?” He shrugged. “Not so much.”

  “You know what? You’re right,” Marian said. “How did you end up here? I guess the card had something to do with it?” That, she figured, was one of the safer guesses she’d ever made.

  He nodded. “That’s right. I was thinking, it is time I got out of the camp. Your card, it told me where I should ought to go.”

  “You got down here, though,” Marian said. “You have the shop. How…?” Her own access to money had gone up in smoke, along with the bank she and Bill used. She’d assumed the same held true for Fayvl. If it didn’t, why would he have stayed at Camp Nowhere? Why would anybody stay at Camp Nowhere who didn’t have to?

  “I got down here.” The cobbler nodded. “Buses run. Buses, they are cheap. The shop was not such a lot, because the man who owns the building, he wants someone in here. Anyone, almost, will do. And in the camp, there are ways to get money. You stayed in your car with your little Linda. You don’t know what it was like in the big tents.”

  Marian made a questioning noise. She not only didn’t know what it had been like in the big tents, she didn’t know what Tabakman was talking about. The first thing that occurred to her was the world’s oldest profession. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine him prospering in it.

  But he didn’t mean the world’s oldest profession. He meant the world’s oldest pastimes. “Always card games, always dice games, going on,” he said. “If you gamble with your head, not with your heart, you can make money. Not always, but enough. And they played chess for money. Some of them was pretty decent. Me, in Poland I was n
ot too bad. So I got for mineself a stake. You call it in English a stake, yes?”

  “That’s the word,” Marian agreed.

  Me, in Poland I was not too bad. What did he mean? He wouldn’t have been a world champion or anything like that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed to keep on fixing shoes. But he was good enough to win money from players he called pretty decent. As she’d thought before, there was more to him than met the eye.

  “Listen, I have to get back to work,” she said. “But I’ll see you again. I’m—I’m glad you’re here.” She could say that much without lying. How much she meant by it…they’d both find out.

  —

  Cade Curtis clumped through the trenches on the ridge line in front of Kaeryong. His felt overboots crunched on the snow. His breath smoked even when he didn’t have a Camel in his mouth. It was cold—it was bloody cold—but he’d known worse. He wasn’t cut off and a long, long way from anybody friendly, either. He could cope with this.

  He’d done better than deal with it, in fact. They’d given him this regiment and told him to hold the ridge and keep Kaeryong out of Red Chinese hands. And, rather to his own surprise, he’d damn well done it. He was modestly (well, perhaps not so modestly) proud of that.

  Here came Howard Sturgis, who did have a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He gave the barest sketch of a salute and said, “Mornin’.”

  “Good morning, Howie!” Cade threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the second lieutenant. “You can kiss me now.”

  Sturgis recoiled. “I’d sooner kiss a pig,” he said. “Uh, sir.”

  “Is that any way to talk on Valentine’s Day?” Cade sounded much more hurt than he really was.

  “Valentine’s Day? Already?” Sturgis made as if to count off days on his fingers. Since, like Cade, he was wearing thick wool mittens with a slit to let him pull a trigger when he had to, he quickly gave that up as a bad job. Instead, with a sheepish smile, he said, “Time flies when you’re having fun.”