Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “We face a crisis in our system of government,” Truman said. “Neither house of Congress has enough members for a quorum. Governors may appoint Representatives, but Senators must be elected. All of that will take time, time we don’t have in the middle of a war. I’ve spoken by telephone with Chief Justice Vinson, who was in St. Louis when Washington was attacked. He assures me that I may continue carrying out policies I find necessary, both at home and abroad, even without Congressional approval, because of the national emergency. ‘We have to move forward,’ was the way he put it. He’s right—we do. And we will, with God’s help and with the help of the American people.”

  His face disappeared from the TV. Ruth said, “He sounds like he wants to cry but won’t let himself, not where anybody can hear him do it.”

  Aaron nodded. “You’re right. That’s just what he sounds like. I heard something in his voice was odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.” He sent her an admiring glance. “You’re as smart as you are pretty.”

  “Break out the shovels, boys!” Ruth said. “It’s getting pretty deep tonight.” Aaron laughed, very fond of her in that moment.

  Again, though, laughter couldn’t last. The picture cut away to a field—the reporter at the edge of the field said it was five miles west of New Egypt, New Jersey. Aaron had never heard of New Egypt, New Jersey, till that moment.

  “This is the final resting place of the Bull bomber that crashed before it could deliver its cargo of death to Philadelphia, less than thirty miles away,” the reporter said. “None of the eleven Russians who made up the crew survived. Because they perished, all of Philadelphia’s more than two million people still live. America’s third-largest city escaped the tragedy that struck Boston, New York, and Washington.”

  The bomber’s tail had broken off from the rest of the fuselage. It stood upright amidst the grass and bushes, almost like a cross marking a grave. The star on the vertical surface looked the same as the ones on U.S. Air Force planes.

  “Russian Bulls are modeled after American Superfortresses, and look nearly the same,” the reporter said. “The Russians often paint them in our colors to help fool our air defenses.”

  Did B-29s on their way to Moscow or Kiev bear Soviet markings? The reporter said nothing about that. He was a propagandist. If the Reds did it, it was a dirty trick. If the USA did it, it was a ruse of war.

  Men wearing gas masks and what looked like rubberized suits were moving about near the wreckage. The reporter did talk about that: “This Bull was carrying an A-bomb. Obviously, it didn’t explode, or I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you now. But it did release a certain amount of radioactivity because of the crash. The authorities have assured me that I am at a safe distance from the crash scene. The experts in the protective clothing are making sure that the bomb is secure and that the radiation is properly contained.”

  How much were the authorities’ assurances worth? Aaron wouldn’t have wanted to trust somebody who might not know what the dickens he was talking about—or who might be lying through his teeth. The guy with the mike and his camera crew couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards from the Bull’s wreckage.

  They had a job to do. They were doing it. Reporters didn’t face danger as often as soldiers did, but they did face it. Aaron just wanted to do his job, too. So did most of the people in the world. But how could they, if it was going up in radioactive fire around them?

  —

  Rolf Mehlen scratched himself under his left armpit. It was only an itch. Not six weeks after the last war ended, he’d given a doctor two cartons of Old Golds to cut away the blood-group tattoo every Waffen-SS officer carried there. It hurt like a son of a bitch after the novocaine wore off, but the scar was almost invisible now.

  In Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, he’d been a Hauptsturmführer, the SS rank equivalent to captain. In this new, half-assed West German army, he was just a guy named Rolf. A rifleman. A spear carrier. It was better this way. Nobody asked a whole lot of questions about a private. That suited Rolf fine.

  He wrapped some oil-soaked cloth around the end of his cleaning rod and pushed it through the barrel of his Springfield. Except for firing a cartridge of different caliber, the American rifle was as near the same as his old Mauser as made no difference.

  Sitting across the little fire from him, Max Bachman took care of his own Springfield. Bachman had served in the Wehrmacht, not the Waffen-SS. His politics weren’t just soft. They were squishy. When the Führer was running things, the Gestapo would have had a little talk with him, or maybe not such a little one. Back then, though, he would have been smart enough to keep his big yap shut.

  To give him his due, he knew what he was up to when he fought. Anybody who’d lived through a stretch on the Eastern Front had the soldier’s trade burned into him, whether he made social-democratic noises or not. If you didn’t know how, you died. It was that simple.

  You might well die even if you did know how. Especially toward the end, there’d just been too goddamn many Russians. Skill gave some defense against numbers, but only some. The way the Ivans used their guns and rockets, you needed luck on your side, too.

  Rolf oiled the bolt and checked the Springfield’s action once he had it reassembled. When he was happy, he lit an American Lucky to celebrate.

  “Let me have one of those, will you?” Max said.

  “Knock yourself out.” Rolf tossed him the pack.

  “Thanks.” Max eyed the red circle on the pack with Lucky Strike in black on it. He took a cigarette and got it going. Then he said, “I know some English. ‘Lucky’ is glücklich. From what they’re saying, the Amis’ luck has run out.”

  “Just like Gustav’s,” Rolf said.

  “Uh-huh. Just like Gustav’s.” Max’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. “He was a good guy, Gustav was. Had a nice wife, too. Pretty gal. I hope Luisa’s all right, and my Trudl. Fulda’s been Russian too long now.”

  “Everything west of Russia’s been Russian too goddamn long now,” Rolf said. “And so the Americans had some cities hit? Big deal. They’re—what? Ten times as big as we are? Twenty times? Maybe more, I don’t know. They had some places nailed last year, and some more now. They bombed us harder than that themselves a little while ago, and we’re supposed to be on their side.”

  Bachman blew a stream of smoke up into the darkness. “You love everybody, don’t you, Rolf?” he said.

  “Just like I love you,” Rolf answered sweetly.

  Max chuckled. “Christ have mercy on the rest of the poor buggers, then!”

  “Let Him worry about that. I sure don’t.” But Rolf got more serious after a moment. “I love Germany. I love the Reich. The rest of the world? I don’t give a shit about the rest of the world. It can goddamn well take care of itself.”

  “It can take care of us, too. It can, and it has. This is three times in less than forty years it’s jumped all over us with hobnailed boots,” Max said. “We would’ve been better off if the Kaiser and the Führer never started their wars.”

  “How about this last one?” Rolf said. “You gonna blame this one on us, too?”

  “Nah. We were just in the way this time,” Bachman replied. “The first two World Wars, we were a great power. This time, we’re chopped in half and the real powers bump into each other where we are. Ever wonder if that ought to tell you something?”

  “It tells me we should have won before,” Rolf said.

  “If it tells you how we should have, I’m all ears,” Max said. “After Stalingrad, after Kursk, after the Anglo-Americans made it into France, anybody with his eyes open could see we were fucked. But we kept fighting anyway, you and me and all the other fools.”

  “What were we going to do? Surrender unconditionally? I don’t think so!” Rolf said irately.

  “Well, we wound up doing it whether we wanted to or not. How many more soldiers got killed on account of that? How many more towns got leveled? How many more women got gang-banged?”


  Rolf only shrugged. He ground out the cigarette on half a brick. “We didn’t know that would happen. We thought we’d step on the Ivans. They’re like cockroaches. That’s all they deserve.”

  As if to say the Red Army had a different opinion, Soviet guns thundered to life. Rolf cocked his head to one side, gauging the reports and the howl of the shells through the air. He had a foxhole only a jump from the fire, in case he needed it. Max had dug one, too. No wonder he’d made it through the last scrap and into this new one. One of the things that helped you get to be an old soldier was digging a hole wherever you were first chance you saw.

  He was listening, too. “Those are 155s. They’ve got more of them and fewer 105s than they did before, I think.”

  “I think maybe you’re right. More of them self-propelled, too.” Rolf let out a sour laugh. “Guys who’d gone through the Kaiser’s war would have talked the same way, except with them it would have been 105s taking over for 77s or 75s, depending on which side they were on.”

  “Here’s one for you,” Max said. “I wonder if we’ve got anybody who’s been in all three World Wars. A kid in the trenches in 1918, a captain in 1939 who somehow managed to live through it, maybe a colonel or a Generalmajor now.”

  “It could be,” Rolf said. “Getting through the second one if you really fought, that’s the hard part. Somebody who was on garrison duty in Norway or Holland would have a better chance.” He hawked and spat. Anyone who didn’t see the Ostfront hardly counted as a soldier to him.

  “The Tommies didn’t have as tough a war as we did,” Max said. “They’re bound to have people like that—maybe even a top noncom or two.”

  Rolf only grunted. He’d come up through the ranks himself. But the men who stuck at senior sergeant were the ones who didn’t have any imagination. All armies needed people like that. They steadied the show and kept junior officers from doing anything too spectacularly stupid. But routine had a way of ruling what passed for their souls.

  American guns fired back at the Russian artillery. Rolf had had to learn their reports during this war, whereas the Red Army’s artillery pieces were almost old friends. He’d known German guns even better, of course, but those hadn’t come to this party.

  “It’s a bitch,” he said, “when we turn into a football pitch for two other sides to play on.”

  “I told you—that’s what we get for losing twice before.” Max took out a fresh Lucky. “See? I’m stealing another smoke from you. Can I ask you something while I do it?”

  “You can always ask. If I want to, I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  “And that’s supposed to surprise me? What I want to know is, what are you doing here? This isn’t the Germany you fought for last time. It never will be, either. You know that, right?”

  “Ja, I know it.” And I hate it, Rolf thought. But that was for him to know and for Max to guess at. He held out his hand for the cigarettes. Max flipped them back. After he’d started one, he continued, “No, it’s not the Führer’s Germany. All that matters these days is getting by and making money. We want to be America, but we can’t. You know what, though? I don’t care. It’s still Germany, and I still love it.”

  “Deutschland bleibt Deutschland,” Max said, and Rolf nodded—Germany did stay Germany. Max sketched a salute. “Well, we aren’t so far apart after all, are we?”

  “Not on that,” Rolf said. Now Max nodded. Yes, there were a few—million—other things.

  ALONG WITH DOLORES and the rest of the women who typed and filed and answered the phones in the Shasta Lumber Company’s front office, Marian Staley walked down the long hallway to Mahogany Row. Each of them carried a copy of the ambulance petition from the Weed Press-Herald. Taking all the petitions together, they had several hundred signatures.

  Dolores looked at the others. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said, and knocked on Carl Cummings’ door.

  “What is it?” the executive said, his voice muffled by the barrier. Thus encouraged, Dolores opened the door. Seeing the crowd in the hall, Cummings raised an eyebrow. “Looks like Grand Central Station out there,” he remarked. “What’s going on?”

  “Mr. Cummings, sir, you’ll have seen the petitions for an ambulance in the paper,” Marian said, hoping she sounded less scared than she felt. “We need—uh, Weed needs—ambulances for when bad things happen, so they won’t be as horrible as they were with poor Leroy van Zandt. We’ve all gathered signatures for these petitions, and we wanted to give them to you so you can see how the whole town feels about it.”

  “That’s right,” Dolores said. The other four women nodded.

  “If Shasta Lumber joins up with the other outfits in town, it won’t cost any of you too much money, and it’ll save lives for years,” Marian finished. “Who knows, Mr. Cummings, sir? One of them might even be yours.”

  “So that’s what we’re here for,” Dolores put in. “We want to give you these here petitions, like Marian said. Just so you know, sir, I’ve got Doc Toohey’s John Hancock on mine. He thinks it’s a great idea, Doc Toohey does.”

  She walked into the paneled office. The rest of the clerical workers followed her. One by one, they set the petitions on Cummings’ desk. That was also of mahogany, unlike the cheap painted-steel desks at the other end of the hall.

  “I did know about the petition drive, yes. I couldn’t very well not know about it, could I?” Cummings paused to glance at some of the sheets of newsprint. Marian’s petition had, among other people’s, Dale Dropo’s signature, and Fayvl Tabakman’s, and Babs’ from the diner, and that of Miss Hamilton, who was Linda’s teacher.

  “Have you, um, talked with people from the other lumber companies, sir?” Marian asked, that seeming more polite than barking So what are you going to do about it, you filthy capitalist, you?

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” Carl Cummings said. Marian braced herself for what she feared was coming next. And you’re all fired, for having the gall to try to tell us what to do was what that boiled down to. The executive paused to light a Pall Mall, which only made her want to fidget more. After his first drag, he went on, “And we all think it’s the best idea anybody’s had for years. We know we’ve got a problem here. This lets us take a shot at fixing it without costing anybody too much. We’ve already started talking with an outfit down in Sacramento that sells ambulances. One ought to be here inside of a month.”

  “You do?” Marian hardly believed her ears.

  “You have?” Dolores sounded just as astonished.

  “It will?” So did Claire Hermanson, who ran the switchboard.

  “Absolutely,” Cummings said, and all at once he didn’t seem anywhere near so filthy to Marian. Still a capitalist, yes—who but a capitalist in Weed would have worn such an elegant gray pinstripe suit (or any kind of suit, for that matter: jeans and Pendletons were the usual menswear)? But maybe not one to spark a proletarian uprising. He nodded to Marian. “You know this Tabakman fellow who came up with the notion, don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded, still dizzy at how easy it had turned out to be. “We knew each other up in Washington before the bomb hit, and in the camp there afterwards.”

  “Good for you. Good for him. He’s got a head on his shoulders—not like Dale Dropo.” Carl Cummings rolled his eyes. “That maniac thinks he can say whatever he wants because he runs the Press-Herald. He doesn’t understand that it’s a newspaper, doggone it, not a blackjack.”

  Marian prudently kept her mouth zipped tight. Without the petitions in the Press-Herald, the lumber bosses might well have gone on thinking they could ignore what Weed needed. The blank forms in the paper must have been enough to get them going. They hadn’t waited for the ones full of signatures like those on Cummings’ desk.

  “You’ve given us good news, Mr. Cummings, sir. Thank you.” Dolores still seemed flabbergasted, too. “I guess we’ll go back to work now.”

  “Okay.” The executive nodded briskly. “Why don’t you close the door again
on your way out?” He was already reaching for the telephone as the clerical staff beat a retreat.

  Out in the hall, with the solid door closed behind them, the women clasped hands and hugged. “We did it!” Marian exclaimed. “We really did it! We went and belled the cat!”

  “Yeah!” Claire Hermanson started back to her station. “I’m gonna call Doc Toohey. He’ll shit a brick when he hears, swear he will!” Marian wouldn’t have put it that way, not even after her spell at Camp Nowhere, but that didn’t mean she thought Claire was wrong.

  At lunch, she headed for the diner to tell Babs the news. Babs had already heard, which wasn’t a shock, either. “That skinny Hebe made the big shots act like they weren’t jerks,” the waitress said. “Who woulda thunk anybody could?” She eyed Marian. “Tabakman, he’s sweet on you. You know that?”

  “Who, me?” Marian said. Babs cackled. Marian went on, “Yes, I know. He knows I know. I’m still putting myself back together, though. He understands that. He doesn’t rush me or anything.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” Babs said. “Men ain’t patient critters.” That was bound to be good advice, even if Marian wasn’t ready to take it yet.

  She stopped at the Rexall on the way back to work. As she had in the Shasta Lumber hallway, she said, “We did bell the cat.”

  Heber Stansfield was the one who’d first used that figure of speech. He nodded now. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. They got to do it without looking like they was bending too much. But with the whole world coming to pieces around our ears, who knows how much it’ll matter in the end?”

  A radio behind the counter was giving the news. “What’s the latest?” Marian asked. “Do I want to know?”

  “Murmansk. That Archangel place—somethin’ like that, anyways. Odessa.” Stansfield spoke of death and devastation with sour approval. He could afford to. He’d never known for himself what an atom bomb was like. “And they’re shootin’ looters in Boston and Washington.”