Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Tatiana Pirogova strode up to her. The blond sniper was several centimeters taller than Ludmila, and glared down at her. “If ever you speak a word of this to anyone-toanyone, do you understand me? — I will kill you,” she hissed. Even in the dimness under the matting, her blue eyes glittered dangerously.

  “Your top tunic button is still undone, dear,” Ludmila answered. Tatiana’s fingers flew to it of themselves Ludmila went on, “I’m not in the habit of gossiping, but if you threaten me, you are making a big mistake.” Tatiana turned her back. Ludmila looked over to Georg Schultz, switching to German as she did so: “Will you please make her believe I’m just as glad to have you with someone else so you’re not pestering me any more? Just thinking of that is more likely to keep me quiet than her bluster.”

  “It’s not bluster,” he answered, also in German.

  That was probably-no, certainly-true. Tatiana with a scope-mounted rifle in her hand was as deadly a soldier as any. And Ludmila had also seen that Schultz was a viciously effective combat soldier even without his panzer wrapped around him. She wondered if that shared delight in war was what had drawn him and Tatiana together. But she’d been in enough combat herself to keep Tatiana or Georg Schultz from intimidating her.

  Schultz spoke to Tatiana in the same sort of mixture of German and Russian he used to talk with Ludmila. Tatiana angrily brushed aside his reassurances. “Oh, go away,” she snapped. Instead, she went away herself, slithering out from under the netting at the shallow end of the trench that hid theKukuruznik. Even in her fury, she carefully smoothed out the net after she got free of it, so as not to damage themaskirovka.

  “You might have waited another minute or two before you jumped down in here,” Schultz said petulantly. He hadn’t finished, then. That set Ludmila laughing yet again. “It isn’t funny,” he growled. It occurred to her then that the two of them were alone under the netting. Had she not had the Tokarev, she would have worried. As things were, she knew she could take care of herself.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, the weight of the pistol reassuring in her hand. “Look, if you want to come down here again, move one of the rocks that holds down the netting so it’s just off the edge instead of just on. I had no idea anyone was down with the aircraft, and when I did hear noise, I thought it was wreckers, not-not lovers.”

  Somewhat mollified, Schultz nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said, adding gloomily, “if there is a next time.”

  “There probably will be.” Ludmila surprised herself at how cynical she sounded. She asked, “Why was Tatiana so upset at the idea of anyone finding out she’s with you? She didn’t care who knew she was sleeping with the Englishman-Jones, his name is.”

  “Ja,”Schultz said. “But he’s an Englishman. That’s all right. Me, I’m a German. You may have noticed.”

  “Ah,” Ludmila said. It did make sense. The fair Tatiana used her sniping talents against the Lizards these days, but she’d honed them against the Nazis. She made no secret of her continued loathing for Germans in general-but not, evidently, for one German in particular. If word got out, she would be compromised in a whole unpleasant variety of ways. “If she hates Germans so much, what does she see in you?”

  “She says we’re both killers.” Georg Schultz shuffled his feet, as if unsure whether he liked the sound of that or not.

  As far as Ludmila was concerned, it not only had a lot of truth in it, it also confirmed her earlier guess, which made her feel clever. She said, “Well,Gospodin Killer-you, a German, would be angry if I called youTovarishch Killer, Comrade instead of Mister-I think we had both better go now.”

  She was nervous as she got out from under the netting. If Schultz wanted to try anything, that was the moment he’d do it. But he just emerged, too, and looked back toward the place where the U-2 was hidden. “Damnation,” he said. “I thought sure nobody would ever bother us there.”

  “You never can tell,” Ludmila said, which would do as a maxim for life in general, not just trying to fornicate with an attractive woman.

  “Ja.”Georg Schultz grunted laughter. After the fact, he’d evidently decided what had happened was funny, too. He hadn’t thought so at the time. Nor had Tatiana. Ludmila didn’t think she would find it funny, not if she lived another seventy-five years.

  Ludmila glanced over at Schultz out of the corner of her eye. She chuckled softly to herself. Though she’d never say it out loud, her opinion was that he and Tatiana deserved each other.

  David Goldfarb sat up in the hay wagon that was taking him north through the English Midlands toward Nottingham. To either side, a couple of other men in tattered, dirty uniforms of RAF blue sprawled in the hay. They were all blissfully asleep, some of them snoring enough to give a creditable impression of a Merlin fighter engine.

  Goldfarb wished he could lie back and start sawing wood, too. He’d tried, but sleep eluded him. Besides, looking at countryside that hadn’t been pounded to bits was a pleasant novelty. He hadn’t seen much of that sort, not lately.

  The only thing he had in common with his companions was the grubby uniforms they all wore. When the Lizards invaded England, nobody had thought past fighting them by whatever means came to hand. After Bruntingthorpe got smashed up, he’d been made into a foot soldier, and he’d done his best without a word of complaint.

  Now that the northern pocket was empty of aliens and the southern one shrinking, though, the Powers That Be were once more beginning to think in terms longer than those of the moment. Whenever officers spied an RAF man who’d been dragooned into the army, they pulled him out and sent him off for reassignment. Thus Goldfarb’s present situation.

  Night was coming. As summer passed into autumn, the hours of daylight shrank with dizzying speed. Even Double Summer Time couldn’t disguise that. In the fields, women and old men labored with horses, donkeys, and oxen to bring in the harvest, as they might have during the wars against Napoleon, or against William the Conqueror, or against the Emperor Claudius. People would be hungry now, too, as they had been then.

  The wagon rattled past a burnt-out farmhouse, the ground around it cratered with bombs. The war had not ignored the lands north of Leicester, it merely had not been all-consuming here. For a moment, a pile of wreckage made the landscape seem familiar to Goldfarb. He angrily shook his head when he realized that. Finding a landscape familiar because the Lizards had bombed it was like finding a husband familiar because he beat you. Some women were supposed to be downtrodden enough to do just that. He thought it madness himself.

  “How long till we get to Watnall?” he called to the driver: softly, so he wouldn’t wake his comrades.

  “Sometime tonight, Ah reckon,” the fellow answered. He was a little old wizened chap who worked his jaws even when he wasn’t talking. Goldfarb had seen that before. Usually it meant the chap who did it was used to chewing tobacco and couldn’t stop chewing even when tobacco was no longer to be had.

  Goldfarb’s stomach rumbled. “Will you stop off to feed us any time before then?” he asked.

  “Nay, no more’n Ah will to feed mahself,” the driver said. When he put it that way, Goldfarb didn’t have the crust to argue further.

  He rummaged in his pockets and came up with half a scone he’d forgotten he had. It was so stale, he worried about breaking teeth on it; he devoured it more by abrasion than mastication. It was just enough to make his stomach growl all the more fiercely but not nearly enough to satisfy him, not even after he licked the crumbs from his fingers.

  He pointed to a cow grazing in a field. “Why don’t you stop for a bit so we can shoot that one and worry off some steaks?”

  “Think you’re a funny bloke, do you?” the driver said. “You try lookin’ at that cow too long and some old man like me back there in the bushes, he’ll blow your head off for you, mark mah words. He hasn’t kept his cow so long bein’ sweet and dainty, Ah tell you that.”

  Since the driver was very likely right, Goldfarb shut up.

  Night fell with an al
most audible thud. It got cold fast. He started to bury himself in the hay with his mates, then had a second thought and asked the driver, “Besides the Fighter Command Group HQ, wot’n ‘ell’s in Watnall?” By sounding like a Cockney for three words, he made a fair pun of it.

  If the driver noticed, he wasn’t impressed. “There’s nobbut the group headquarters there,” he answered, and spat into the roadway. “ ‘Twasn’t even a village before the war.”

  “How extremely depressing,” Goldfarb said, going from one accent to another: for a moment there, he sounded like a Cambridge undergraduate. He wondered how Jerome Jones was faring these days, and then whether his fellow radarman was still alive.

  “Watnall’s not far from Nottingham,” the driver said, the first time since he’d stepped up onto his raised seat that he’d actually volunteered anything. “Nobbut a few miles.”

  The consolation Goldfarb had felt at the first sentence-Nottingham was a good-sized city, with the promise of pubs, cinemas when the power was on, and people of the female persuasion-was tempered by the second. If he couldn’t lay hands on a bicycle, a few miles in wartime with winter approaching might as well have been the far side of the moon.

  He vanished into the hay like a dormouse curling up in its nest to hibernate. One of his traveling companions, still sleeping, promptly stuck an elbow in his ribs. He didn’t care. He huddled closer to the other RAF man, who, however fractious he might have been in his sleep, was also warm. He fell asleep himself a few minutes later, even as he was telling himself he wouldn’t.

  When he woke again, something had changed. In his muzziness, he needed a moment to figure out what: they weren’t moving. He sat up, brushing straw from his hair. “What’s happened?” he asked.

  One of the other RAF men, a Liverpudlian whom Goldfarb knew only as Henry, answered before the driver could: “We’re in Nottingham, we are. They’re going t’give us some grub after all.” His clotted accent said he was a factory worker from a long line of factory workers.

  “Jolly good!” Goldfarb brushed at himself again, trying to get as close to presentable as he could. It was wasted effort, because of his own disheveled state and because the night was too dark to let anyone see anything much. Stars glittered in a black, black sky, but shed little light, and the moon, some days past full, hadn’t yet risen.

  “We’ve soup for you, lads,” a woman’s voice said out of the gloom; Goldfarb could make out her silhouette, but no more. “Here, come take your panikins. Have a care-they’re hot.”

  Hot the soup was, and full of cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. Goldfarb didn’t find any meat in his tin bowl, but the broth tasted as if it had been somewhere within shouting distance of a chicken in the not too distant past.

  “Sticks to your ribs, that does,” Henry said happily. The other RAF men made wordless noises of agreement. So did the driver, who was also getting outside a bowl of soup.

  “Pass me back your bowls when you’re done, lads, and we’ll serve ’em out again to the next lot who come through hungry, or maybe to some of our own,” the woman said. Goldfarb couldn’t see her, couldn’t tell if she was young or old, ugly or beautiful. Food-and, even more, kindness-made him feel halfway in love with her just the same.

  When all the bowls and spoons had been returned, the driver said, “Getalong there,” and the horses ambled on. Goldfarb called thanks back to the woman who’d given them the soup.

  As the driver had said, they got into Watnall in the middle of the night. The transition was abrupt: one minute they were rolling through open country, the next in among Nissen huts and Maycrete buildings that seemed to have sprung from the middle of nowhere-which made a pretty fair description of Watnall, now that Goldfarb thought on it. They rattled by a couple of ack-ack guns, whose crews jeered at them: “Coming back to work are you at last, dearies? Did you have a pleasant holiday?”

  “Bugger off,” Goldfarb said, which summed up his comrades’ responses pretty well, too. The ack-ack gunners laughed.

  Henry said, “What they were shootin’ at, it were up in the sky, and they weren’t in range of the bleedin’ Lizards every minute of every bleedin’ day. ‘Ad it right soft, they did, you ask me.”

  “Amen to that,” Goldfarb said, and the other RAF men on the wagon added not only agreement but profane embellishment. If you weren’t a pilot, you were probably safer in the RAF than as an infantryman. You certainly lived softer in the RAF than in the poor bloody infantry, as you learned if you found yourself at the thin end of the wedge on the ground, the way Goldfarb had.

  The driver pulled back on the reins. His two-horse team stopped. One of the animals bent its head and began pulling up grass. “Taxi ride’s done, lads,” the driver said. He pointed, “You go over there now.”

  “Over there” was a Nissen hut, its semicylindrical bulk black against the slightly lighter sky. Goldfarb scrambled down from the wagon. He led the way toward the hut. Several of the other RAF men hung back, grumbling. He was glad he’d be returning to a job that could use his special skills. Any bloke could make an infantryman.

  He opened the door and pushed his way through two blackout curtains. The light inside came from candles and lanterns, not electric fixtures, but still seemed bright to his night-accustomed eyes. A tired-looking flight sergeant waved him over to a desk piled high with forms. “All right, let’s see what we can do with you,” he said. He examined Goldfarb’s draggled uniform. “You’ve not had the easiest time of it, seems like.”

  Goldfarb shrugged. “You do what you have to do.”

  “That’s the way of it,” the flight sergeant said, nodding. He pulled out a form and a short nub of pencil. “Very good-stand and deliver.” Goldfarb rattled off his name-surname first, Christian name (an irony in his case), middle initial-rank, and service number. The flight sergeant wrote them down, then asked, “And your speciality, uh, Goldfarb?”

  “I’m a radarman, sir.”

  The flight sergeant started to write that down, too, then looked up sharply at Goldfarb. “Radarman? Somebody should have his bloody head examined, turning you into a ground-pounding Tommy. How the devil did that happen?”

  “Sir, I was on duty south of Leicester when the Lizards hit my establishment. We beat them back, but they wrecked the place and scattered us to the four winds. I fell in with some soldiers, and-” He spread his hands. “You know how it is, sir. I was separated from my unit, but I still wanted to fight, and so I did.”

  The flight sergeant sighed. “If I had a farthing for every time I’ve heard that story this past fortnight, I’d be the richest man in England, sure as hell. But a radarman-” His grin suddenly made him look younger than he had. “I’ll get a ‘well done’ for coming up with you, I will. What was your establishment, and what were you doing there?”

  “I don’t like to say, sir,” Goldfarb answered. Radar had been a secret vital to conceal from the Germans when the war was young. The Lizards knew more about radar than any Englishman was likely to learn for the next generation, but old habits died hard.

  “What was your establishment, and what did you do there?” the flight sergeant repeated with the air of a man used to cutting through multiple layers of nonsense. “Don’t waste my time.”

  The rest of the RAF men stood before other desks, giving out their service records. Goldfarb surrendered: “Sir, I was at Bruntingthorpe, working under Group Captain Hipple to fit radar into Meteor jets and to see what we could learn from captured Lizard radars.”

  “Then you bloody well ought to be court-martialed for letting anybody-and I mean up to field-marshal’s rank-take you away from what you were doing,” the flight sergeant said. At Goldfarb’s alarmed expression, he went on, “Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen. But getting yourself shot up would have been a bloody waste.”

  “Sir, Bruntingthorpe had taken a hiding,” Goldfarb said defensively. “I don’t even know if Group Captain Hipple is alive or dead.”

  “If he’s dead, someone else will
be minding that store.” The flight sergeant spoke with conviction. “And if everyone above you has bought his plot, why, then the store is yours.”

  “Mine?” Goldfarb was mortified when his voice rose to a startled squeak, but couldn’t help it. He stammered on: “I’m-I don’t know enough on my own. I-”

  “If you know more about it than anyone else who might do it, it’ll be yours,” the flight sergeant said. He turned to the flying officer at the desk next to his. “Pardon me, sir, but I’ve a chap here who’s not only a radarman but has also been working on a couple of what sound like Most Secret projects.”

  “Just you wait one moment,” the flying officer said to the aircraftman standing in front of him. He grilled Goldfarb for a minute or two, then raised his eyes to the heavens in an expression of theatrical despair. “You were at Bruntingthorpe, you say, and they drafted you into the infantry? Dear God in heaven, I sometimes think we deserve to lose this war as punishment for our own stupidity.”

  “Sir, after the base took a pounding, I wanted to hit back at the Lizards any way I could,” Goldfarb said. “I wasn’t drafted into the infantry-I wanted to fight.”

  “Young man, that only makes you a fool, too.” The flying officer might possibly have been two years older than Goldfarb. “You can do them much more damage fighting with your head than with a rifle. Flight Sergeant, get on the telephone to London. Ask them where the most fitting possible billet for your man is, then see that he gets to it.” He gave his attention back to the patiently waiting aircraftman. “Do carry on. You were saying landing gear was your maintenance speciality?”

  “You come with me,” the flight sergeant told Goldfarb, rising from his desk.

  Goldfarb came. “You can ring up London?” he asked, following the other RAF man out into the night. “I thought all telephone lines were long since wrecked.”

  “All the civilian ones are, and likely to stay so,” the flight sergeant answered. “You want to be careful here; if you step off the path, you’ll be ankle-deep in muck. Can’t very well run a military outfit, though, without being able to talk back and forth, eh?”