Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “Right,” Cade said. “It flies so fast that the year and a half I’ve been here seems like forever.”

  “I believe that.” Now Sturgis’ smile turned crooked. “And how’s democracy coming along, sir?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Cade said. “Hard to imagine how our enemies could like it a whole lot less than our so-called friends do.”

  “Yeah, but if you shoot the Commie gooks our brass pins more medals on you,” Sturgis said. “If you make like you’re gonna shoot the ROK gooks, the brass rakes you over the coals. You already went back to Division once. How come they didn’t bust you down to PFC?”

  “Because they saw I didn’t care if they did.” That was the only explanation that made any sense to Cade.

  He discovered it also made sense to Howard Sturgis. “There you go!” the older man said. “I’d shake their hands and thank ’em if they made me a sergeant again. Trouble is, the fuckers know it, so they never will. You think I want to run a company? Christ!”

  “You might be running one even if you were a sergeant,” Cade said. All the companies save one in his outfit had officers in charge of them, but that one was still under a veteran three-striper. It seemed to run as well as any of the others, which was…interesting, anyhow. Cade wagged a finger at Sturgis. “And don’t call ’em gooks, dammit, especially not where there’s even a little chance they can hear you.”

  “What do you want I should call ’em? Niggers?”

  That opened a different can of worms. As a little kid, Cade had heard the word all the time. Some Southern whites used it to revile people with dark skins, others simply to describe them. It all depended on how you said it, and on how the people who were listening to you took it.

  As World War II wore on, as Americans began to see what the Nazis had done to Jews in lands they ruled, and as people with dark skins began to insist they were people like anybody else, nigger started to be used less and less. Cade had said it only a handful of times, if that, since the war ended.

  Things in the South had gone on the same way, more or less, from the end of Reconstruction to Pearl Harbor. Strange to think that, but for Hitler, they might have kept on that way for another generation or two. They wouldn’t here and now. Cade could see as much.

  With an effort, he wrenched himself away from the American South and back to South Korea. “Gook, to them, is as bad as nigger is to a Negro,” he said. “Even when they don’t savvy any English at all, they know what that means. So just forget you ever heard it, okay?”

  That was an order, though he might not phrase it as one. Sturgis had been in the Army too long to mistake it for anything else. “Okay, sir. I’ll watch it,” he replied. His face told what he thought of the order, but that had nothing to do with anything. This wouldn’t be the first order he’d disliked that he had to follow, or the last.

  “Thanks, Howie.” Cade tried to soften things as much as he could.

  “Sure.” Mischief glinted in Sturgis’ eyes. “How’s about I just call ’em kikes? That’s one they probably won’t know.”

  Cade started to ream him out. Luckily, he saw the glint before he said anything. He made do with a dry chuckle and one word: “Cute.”

  “Phooey on you, sir,” Sturgis said. “You’re taking my fun away.”

  “Besides,” Cade said, “you don’t want to get Jimmy ticked at you, right?”

  “Well, no, there is that,” Howard Sturgis allowed. Jimmy was the ROK private Cade had rescued from Captain Pak Ho-san. Now that he’d been rescued, he was doing his best to turn into a GI. His real name was Chun Won-ung. Americans thought learning Korean was a waste of time. Chun became Jim and Jim became Jimmy, a handle they could wrap their tongues around. Sturgis said, “Only thing is, he’s liable to start calling the ROK chumps gooks himself.”

  He was, too. The more he stuck with the Americans, the more scorn he had for the folk he’d come from. But before Cade could reply, a voice blared perfect English from the Red Chinese loudspeakers: “Happy Valentine’s Day, Yankees!” A POW with a gun at his head? An American Red who’d fled his country one jump ahead of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men? Whoever he was, he went on, “Want to see your squeeze back home? Don’t want to go back in a box, or missing an arm or a leg, or blind? Come on over to the people’s side, the side of the workers’ revolution! We’ll treat you right! We’ll feed you and we’ll send you home as soon as this stupid capitalist war is over. Don’t fight your class allies!”

  “I wish those noisy bastards’d stick to leaflets,” Howard Sturgis said.

  “How come?” Cade asked.

  “On account of I can’t wipe my ass with noise from a loudspeaker.”

  “Well, okay.” Cade laughed. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it.

  Getting yelled at by the enemy was better than getting shot at, but it wore thin in a hurry. The Red Chinese kept playing the same message over and over, always at top volume. They probably had a bored corporal standing by the phonograph and smoking a cigarette while he waited for the record to get to the end. Then he’d grab the tone arm, put the needle back at the beginning, and send the lies out one more time.

  When one side’s snipers scored a couple of hits, the other side would deploy more sharpshooters with scope-sighted rifles to pay them back. When one side’s machine gunners kept raking the other’s forward positions, their foes’ machine guns soon made life miserable for their front-line troops. Mortars begat more mortars; artillery, more artillery.

  And a propaganda bombardment quickly brought on a propaganda counterbombardment. The loudspeakers behind the American lines started bellowing at the Red Chinese in their own language. Cade had always thought a Chinese conversation sounded like cats in a sack right after you’d kicked the sack. Listening to it hideously amplified did nothing to improve it.

  There, he found Howard Sturgis in complete agreement with him. “Jesus H. Christ!” Sturgis said, wincing. “That shit’d drive anybody Asiatic. Makes me want to grab a Tommy gun like yours and shoot up those goddamn speakers.”

  Cade held out the PPSh. “Here. Be my guest, man. No court-martial would convict you. Hell, they’d probably promote you.”

  “Don’t tempt me, sir.” Sturgis made pushing-away motions. “Y’know, even if they did convict me, I could probably get out of it on a Section Eight.”

  “A psych discharge? I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cade shook his head. “No, I take it back—I would. You have to be crazy to be in Korea, right? Everybody says so, and when everybody says something it’s gotta be true. So if they gave Section Eights to everyone who deserved it, nobody’d be left to fight the war.”

  “Shit. You’re right. We’re fucked coming and going.” Sturgis lit a fresh cigarette. Loudspeakers roared Chinese at loudspeakers roaring English. Cade began to wish for a Section Eight himself.

  ISTVAN SZOLOVITS PULLED OFF his uniform. The barracks in the POW compound had a stove in it, but it wasn’t what anybody would have called warm. As if to prove he’d lost his mind, he pulled on red socks, white shorts, and a short-sleeved green shirt with the number 3 on the front and back.

  As he was tying on his football boots—they had longer cleats than army boots, although that might not matter much if the pitch was frozen—Miklos told him, “Go get ’em, Jewboy!”

  “You’re fucking crazy, you know that?” Istvan said.

  “Like hell I am,” said the Magyar ornamented with the Arrow Cross and the Turul. “You may be a fucking clipcock, but you’re a clipcock on the Hungarian team. And if you give those Czech dipshits a quarter of what you gave me, they’ll run from you the way they ran in World War I.”

  If Istvan gave anybody on the football pitch a quarter of what he’d given Miklos, the man in black would eject him from the match and probably ban him from playing in any more. Miklos had to know it, too. But center-back wasn’t a position for ballet dancers. As much as you could be in a game, you were in the trenches there.

  Since the war, Hun
garian football had been some of the best in the world. The national team might well be favored at the upcoming World Cup…if the team members stayed alive, and if there was enough of a world left to hold a World Cup when 1954 came around.

  This match wouldn’t be like that. Istvan hadn’t been sure he could make the team when he tried out. He really hadn’t been sure because the coach, a captain named Viktor Czurka, had Colonel Medgyessy’s attitude toward Jews. But the captain cared more about football than he did about Istvan’s missing foreskin. Seeing Istvan could do the job better than the man he had in there, he said, “We’ll see how you play Saturday.”

  Istvan had practiced as much as he could with the other backs. A good back line was a unit. Like an army, they advanced and retreated together. If they didn’t, the other side would get in behind them and then the keeper would be screaming at them as he went to the back of the net to pick up the ball that had just tallied a goal.

  “Let’s go get ’em,” said the captain. He was the team’s number 9, the striker. Geza was small and quick and dangerous, like an adder. Off the pitch, he was a lance-corporal, a nobody. On it, he ran the show.

  Footballers and ordinary POWs headed for the pitch. The Czechoslovakians—red shirts, blue shorts, white socks—and their supporters came out of their barracks at the same time. The Poles and East Germans didn’t have a dog in this fight, but they were eager to watch and bet.

  “Arschlochen!” Miklos yelled at the Czechoslovakians.

  “Schweinehunde!” a Czech or Slovak shouted back. Yes, it might still have been the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The only way Magyars and Czechoslovakians could insult one another and make sure they got the message across was to use German. Chances were the Poles could manage in it, too.

  The referee was a French sergeant. He must have come from Alsace, because he spoke German himself, with an accent that made Istvan have a devil of a time following him. Well, he had an accent himself when he spoke German. The guys from Prague and Bratislava had a different one. The way they all talked would have appalled someone from Cologne or Leipzig.

  An aluminum-bronze ten-franc coin spun in the chilly air. Geza won the toss. He chose to play against the breeze in the first half. The Czechoslovakians would kick off to start the game, then.

  And they did, as soon as the referee’s whistle gave the signal. They were big men, mostly beefier of face and feature than the Magyars. The teammates who’d been here long enough to have played them before said that they were also slower, and that they weren’t shy about throwing elbows.

  Well, Istvan wasn’t shy about throwing elbows, either. You couldn’t be, if you were going to play back. And everybody on both sides was a soldier. They’d all seen, and many of them had done, things far worse than any that happened on the pitch.

  Here came one of the Czechoslovakian midfielders, dribbling with decent skill. Istvan moved up to cut off his path. The guy in the red shirt tried a dummy, pretending to go right but then really cutting left. His eyes telegraphed the move. Before he could bring it off, Istvan stole the ball with his left foot.

  He quickly sent it up to a Hungarian midfielder. “Yeah! There you go!” the other center-back called.

  “Thanks, Gyula.” Istvan wanted to do well. Doing well would help him fit in, make him less the man on the outside looking in.

  A halfway-promising Hungarian attack developed. A linesman aborted it, raising his flag to show that a Magyar had been offside.

  “You’re blind, you Dummkopf!” Istvan yelled. He was fifty meters away from the play, but he assumed the referee’s assistant must have got it wrong. He knew how football worked. What were linesmen good for but botching calls when your side was on the move?

  The Czechoslovakian goalkeeper, a mountain of a man, booted the ball down to the Magyars’ end. Istvan sprang into the air to head it away. A foe also leaped, to flick it on toward the goal. They crashed together and knocked each other sprawling. The ball flew over them both.

  “You good?” Istvan asked as he scrambled to his feet. The ground was hard and cold.

  “I’ll live,” the Czechoslovakian said.

  They went back and forth, as evenly matched sides will. The Hungarians scored. Less than two minutes later, the Czechoslovakians equalized. Then they went ahead. Just before halftime, one of the men in red broke through the Magyars’ midfielders and charged toward Istvan. One other man was still behind him, but he took no chances. He leveled the Czechoslovakian.

  As he’d known it would, the referee’s whistled screamed. The man he’d fouled swore at him in German, which he understood, and then in Czech, which he didn’t. When the ref ran up to position the ball for the free kick, he said, “You do that again and I’ll throw your sorry ass out of the match. You hear me?”

  “I hear you.” Istvan did his best to sound sorry. The Frenchman put him in mind of Sergeant Gergely. He wouldn’t listen to excuses or nonsense.

  He grudged a nod. “All right. Once, all right—not twice. That was a professional foul, and this isn’t a professional game.”

  But the Czechoslovakian who tried the free kick put the ball a meter over the crossbar. So the professional foul did what it was supposed to do: it took his team out of danger.

  At halftime, Captain Czurka smacked Istvan on the back. “That’s how you do it!” he said. “Don’t back away from the bastards. Never back away from the bastards. If they beat us, they beat us. But we’ll still be going forward when that frog fucker blows the whistle to end things.”

  Halfway through the second period, a burly Czechoslovakian knocked Istvan head over heels. He was nowhere near the ball, but that had nothing to do with anything. It was payback for the professional foul. He reassembled himself, got up, and went on with the game. A few minutes later, when the referee was looking somewhere else, he flattened the red-shirt who’d got him.

  “Don’t fuck with me, turdnose,” he said as he trotted away.

  Geza scored twice in the match, once on a header from a corner kick, the other time with a half-volley any professional would have been proud to claim as his own to give the Hungarian side the lead once more. But the Czechoslovakians leveled things again five minutes before full time, and the match ended 3–3.

  The draw left everybody imperfectly satisfied. The weary Hungarian footballers shook hands with their opponents. As Istvan came off the pitch, Miklos folded him into a bear hug. Istvan would have laughed if he hadn’t been so tired. Like a surprising number of Fascists, Miklos had found himself his very own pet Jew.

  —

  Daisy Baxter had her strength back, or most of it. She was getting her hair back. She was out of hospital in East Dereham (Bruce said out of the hospital, as if it were something special, which it surely wasn’t), and living in a furnished room above a chemist’s shop.

  She had the rent covered because of what had happened to Fakenham, and got a couple of quid a week to keep her going. She was on the dole, was what she was. It should have been humiliating, but living through an atom bomb took away a lot of smaller stings.

  She might have dwelt on it more if she hadn’t been happy. Happiness was something she wasn’t used to. It felt faintly illicit, or more than faintly, like a drug that made you think you were God or at least Superman but that could send you to gaol if the coppers caught you with it.

  She’d had happiness wiped off her map the moment she learned Tom was dead. Since then…every day had been gray and cold and drizzly. She’d got used to gray and cold and drizzly; she’d come to think that was the way things were meant to be.

  Now she’d changed her mind. It wasn’t what Bruce made her feel, not in the physical sense of the word. Yes, he knew how to please a woman. But he couldn’t make the lights go on behind her eyes any better than her own hand could. Every so often, after Tom died, her body had felt the need for that. Quietly and without any fuss, she’d taken care of it. Then the need went away…till the next time.

  Your hand could scratch that particular
itch, certainly. What your hand couldn’t do, though, was make you not feel lonely afterwards. More often than not, you felt lonelier then than before, because as the brief pleasure faded you remembered that once upon a time you’d enjoyed it in the company of someone you loved, not all by yourself.

  That was what had gone missing. That was the absence that turned her life drizzly and cold and gray. Now she had it back again. It was like going from Kansas to Oz. Suddenly, the world’s film ran in glorious Technicolor.

  Of course, with a man you always worried that he was just out for whatever he could get, that he cared more about what you were doing to him than about you as you. Till Bruce came along, Daisy’d ignored every would-be ladykiller who walked into the Owl and Unicorn. That worry was the biggest reason why.

  As he’d given her joy, there in the jeep stopped between Yaxham and East Dereham, so she’d returned it. If that was all he’d been after, or if he’d decided she was a slut and he didn’t want anything more to do with her now that he’d had his fun, she never would have heard from him again.

  She also wouldn’t have heard from him if the Russians had shot down his B-29. She had no formal ties to him, not yet. If he’d stopped coming to see her, would she ever have known why? Would some other American flyer have hunted her up to let her know Bruce’s luck had run out? Or would she have spent the rest of her life wondering?

  There was something she didn’t need to worry about. He came to see her as often as duty let him, sometimes in a jeep (she couldn’t look at one now without feeling warmth between her legs), sometimes in a hired car. “Isn’t that terribly dear?” she asked him the first time he showed up in a Vauxhall.

  “You mean expensive, dear?” He grinned at her, and at two countries separated by the same language. “I can spend my money on booze. I can spend it on pretty girls.” He blew her a kiss. “Or I can waste it.”

  She made a face at him. “You’re impossible! I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?”