In th Balance

by neetha Napew

  Perhaps half a mile away from Bagnall's plane and a little lower in the sky, a bomber heeled over and plunged ground-ward, one wing a sheet of flame. The flight engineer's shiver had nothing to do with the frigid air through which his Lane flew.

  Ken Embry grunted beside him. "We may have flown a thousand bloody bombers to Cologne," the pilot said. "Now we have to see

  how bloody many fly back from it." His voice rang metallically in the intercom earphones.

  "Jerry doesn't seem very pleased with us tonight, does he?" Bagnall answered, not about to let his friend outdo him in cynicism and understatement.

  Below them in the nose, Douglas Bell let out a whoop like a red Indian. "There's the train station! Hold her steady, steady— Now!" the bomb-aimer shouted. The Lancaster shuddered again, in a new way this time, as destruction tumbled down on the German city by the Rhine.

  "That's for Coventry," Embry said quietly. He'd lost a sister in the German raid on the English town a year and a half before.

  "Coventry and then some," Bagnall agreed. "The Germans didn't throw nearly so many aircraft at us, and they don't have a bomber

  that can touch the Lane." He set an affectionate gloved hand on the instrument panel in front of him.

  The pilot grunted again. "They slaughter our civilians and we slaughter theirs. The same with the soldiers in the desert, the same in Russia. The Japanese are still moving against the Yanks in the Pacific, and Jerry is sinking too many ships in the Atlantic. If I didn't know better, I'd say we were losing the bloody war."

  "I wouldn't go that far," Bagnall said after a few seconds of judicious consideration. "But it does rather seem to hang in the balance, doesn't it? Sooner or later, one side or the other will do something monumentally stupid, and that will tell the tale."

  "Good Lord, we're doomed if that's so," Embry exclaimed. "Can you imagine anyone more monumentally stupid than an Englishman with

  his blood up?"

  Bagnall scratched at his cheek below the bottom edge of his goggles; those few square inches were the only ones not covered by one or more— usually more— layers of clothing. They were also quite numb. He flogged his brain for some sort of comeback, but nothing occurred to him; this time he'd have to yield the palm of cynicism to the pilot.

  He had only a few seconds in which to feel rueful. Then shouts from the rear gunner, and the top turret rang in his ears, almost deafening him: "Enemy fighter to starboard and low! Bandit! Bandit! Bloody fucking bandit!" Machine guns began to hammer, although the .303 rounds were not likely to do much good.

  Ken Embry heeled the Lancaster over on its side and dove away from the menace, flying his big, unwieldy aircraft as much like a fighter

  as he could. The frame groaned in protest. Like any sensible pilot, Embry ignored it. The German up there was more likely to kill him than he was to tear off the Lane's wings. He piled power onto the engines of one wing, cut it from those of the other. The Lancaster fell through the air like a stone. Bagnall clapped a hand to his mouth, as if to catch the stomach that was trying to crawl up his throat.

  The shouts from the gunners rose to a crescendo. All at once drenched in sweat despite the icy air outside, Bagnall felt shells slam— one, two, three— into the wing and side of the fuselage. A twin-engine plane roared above the windscreen and vanished into the blackness, pursued by tracers from the Lane's guns.

  "Messerschmitt-110," Bagnall said shakily.

  "Good of you to tell me," Embry answered. "I was rather too occupied to notice." He raised

  his voice. "Everyone present and accounted for?" The seven-man crew's answers came back high and shrill, but they all came back. Embry turned to Bagnall. "And how did our humble chariot fare?"

  Bagnall studied the gauges. "Everything appears— normal," he said, surprised at how surprised he sounded. He rallied gamely: "We might have been a bit more embarrassed had Jerry chosen to shoot us up before we disposed of our cargo."

  "Indeed," the pilot said. "Having disposed of it, I see no urgent reason to tarry over the scene any longer. Mr. Whyte, will you give us a course for home?"

  "With pleasure, sir," Alf Whyte answered from behind the black curtain that protected his night vision. "I thought for a moment there you were trying to fling me over the side. Fly course two-eight-three. I say again two-eight-

  three. That should put us on the ground back at Swinderby in about four and a half hours."

  "Or somewhere in England, at any rate," Embry remarked; long-range navigation at night was anything but an exact science. When Whyte let out an indignant sniff, the pilot added, "Maybe I should have flung you over the side; we'd likely do just as well following a trail of bread crumbs back from Hansel and Gretel Land."

  Despite his ragging, Embry swung the bomber onto the course the navigator had given him. Bagnall kept a close eye on the instrument panel, still worried lest a line had been broken. But all the pointers stayed where they should have; the four Merlins steadily drove the Lancaster through the air at above two hundred miles an hour. The Lane was a tough bird, especially compared to the Blenheims in which he'd started the war. And — they'd been lucky.

  He peered through the windscreen. Other Lancasters, Stirlings, and Manchesters showed up as blacker shapes against the dark sky; engine exhausts glowed red. As burning Cologne receded behind him, he felt the first easing of fear. The worst was over, and he was likely to live to fly another mission — and be terrified again.

  The crew's chatter, full of the same relief he knew himself, rang in his earphones. "Bloody good hiding we gave Jerry," somebody said. Bagnall found himself nodding. There had been flak and there had been fighters (that Me-110 filled his mind's eye for a moment), but he'd seen worse with both— the massive bomber force had half paralyzed Cologne's defenses. Most of his friends— with a little luck, all his friends— would be coming home to Swinderby. He wriggled in his seat, trying to get more comfortable. Downhill now, he thought.

  Ludmila Gorbunova bounced through the air less than a hundred meters off the ground. Her U-2 biplane seemed hardly more than a toy; any fighter from the last two years of the previous war could have hacked the Kukuruznik from the sky with ease. But the Wheatcutter was not just a trainer— it had proved itself as a military plane since the first days of the Great Patriotic War. Tiny and quiet, it was made for slipping undetected past German lines.

  She pulled the stick back to gain more altitude. It failed to help. No flashes of artillery came from what had been first the Russian assault position, then the Russian defensive position, and finally, humiliatingly, the Russian pocket trapped inside a fascist ring.

  No one had reported artillery fire from within the pocket the night before, or the night before

  that. Sixth Army was surely dead. But, as if unwilling to believe it, Frontal Aviation kept sending out planes in the hope the corpse might somehow miraculously revive.

  Ludmila went gladly. Behind her goggles, tears stung her eyes. The offensive had begun with such promise. Even the fascist radio admitted fear that the Soviets would retake Kharkov. But then— Ludmila was vague on what had happened then, although she'd flown reconnaissance all through the campaign. The Germans managed to pinch off the salient the Soviet forces had driven into their position, and then the battle became one of annihilation.

  Her gloved hand tightened on the stick as if it were a fascist invader's neck, she'd got out of Kiev with her mother bare days before the Germans surrounded the city. Both of her brothers and her father were in the army; no letters had come from any of them for months.

  Sometimes, though it was no proper thought for a Soviet woman born five years after the October Revolution, she wished she knew how to pray. A fire glowed, off in the distance. She turned the plane toward it. From all she had seen, anyone showing lights in the night had to be German. Whatever Soviet troops were still unbagged within the pocket would not dare draw attention to themselves. She brought the Kukuruznik down to treetop height. Time to remind the fascists they di
d not belong here.

  As the fire brightened ahead of her, her gut clenched. She bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip, using pain to fight fear. "I am not afraid, I am not afraid, I am not afraid," she said. But she was afraid, every time she flew.

  No time for the luxury of fear, not any more. The men lounging in the circle of light round the fire swelled in a moment from ant-sized to big as life. Germans sure enough, in dirty field-

  gray with coal-scuttle helmets. They started to scatter an instant before she thumbed the firing button mounted on top of her stick.

  The two ShVAK machine guns attached under the lower wing of the biplane added their roar to the racket of the five-cylinder radial engine. Ludmila let the guns chatter as she zoomed low above the fire. As it dimmed behind her, she looked back over her shoulder to see what she had accomplished.

  A couple of Germans lay sprawled in the dirt, one motionless, the other writhing like a fence lizard in the grasp of a cat. "Khorosho" Ludmila said softly. Triumph drowned terror. "Ochen khorosho." It was very good. Every blow against the fascists helped drive them back— or at least hindered them from coming farther forward.

  Flashes from out of the darkness, from two places, then three— not fire, firearms. Terror

  came roaring back. Ludmila gave the Kukuruznik all the meager power it had. A rifle bullet cracked past her head, horridly close. The muzzle flashes continued behind her, but after a few seconds she was out of range.

  She let the biplane climb so she could look for another target. The breeze that whistled in over the windscreen of the open cockpit dried the stinking, fear-filled sweat on her forehead and under her arms. The trouble with the Germans was that they were too good at their trade of murder and destruction. They could have had only a few seconds' warning before her plane swooped on them out of the night, but instead of running and hiding, they'd run and then fought back— and almost killed her. She shuddered again, though they were kilometers behind her now.

  When they'd first betrayed the treaty of peace and friendship and invaded the Soviet Union, she'd been confident the Red Army would

  quickly throw them back. But defeat and retreat followed retreat and defeat. Bombers appeared over Kiev, broad-winged Heinkels, Dorniers skinny as flying pencils, graceful Junkers-88s, Stukas that screamed like damned souls as they stooped, hawklike, on their targets. They roamed as they would. No Soviet fighters came up to challenge them.

  Once in Rossosh, out of the German grasp, Ludmila happened to mention to a harried clerk that she'd gone through Osoaviakhim flight training. Two days later, she found herself enrolled in the Soviet Air Force. She still wondered whether the man did it for the sake of the country or to save himself the trouble of finding her someplace to sleep.

  Too late to worry about that now. Whole regiments of women pilots flew night-harassment missions against the fascist invaders. One day. Ludmila thought, I will

  graduate to a real fighter instead of my U-2. Several women had become aces, downing more than five German planes apiece.

  For now, though, the reliable old Wheatcutter would do well enough. She spotted another fire, off in the distance. The Kukuruznik banked, swung toward it.

  Planes roared low overhead. The red suns under their wings and on the sides of their fuselages might have been painted from blood. Machine guns spat flame. The bullets kicked up dust and splashed in the water like the first big drops of a rainstorm.

  Liu Han had been swimming and bathing when she heard the Japanese fighters. With a moan of terror, she thrust herself all the way under, until her toes sank deep into the slimy mud bottom of the stream. She held her

  breath until the need for air drove her to the surface once more, gasped in a quick breath, sank

  When she had to come up again, she tossed her head to get the long, straight black hair out of her eyes, then quickly looked around. The fighters had vanished as quickly as they appeared. But she knew the Japanese soldiers would not be far behind. Chinese troops had retreated through her village the day before, falling back toward Hankow.

  A few swift strokes and she was at the bank of the stream. She scrambled up, dried herself with a few quick strokes of a rough cotton towel, put on her robe and sandals, and took a couple of steps away from the water.

  Another drone of motors, this one higher and farther away than the fighters, a whistle in the air that belonged to no bird... The bomb exploded less than a hundred yards from Liu.

  The blast lifted her like a toy and flung her back into the stream.

  Stunned, half-deafened, she thrashed in the water. She breathed in a great gulp of it. Coughing, choking, retching, she thrust her head up into the precious air, gasped out a prayer to the Buddha: "Amituofo, help me!"

  More bombs fell all around. Earth leapt into the air in fountains so perfect and beautiful and transient, they almost made her forget the destruction they represented. The noise of each explosion slapped her in the face, more like a blow, physically felt, than a sound. Metal fragments of bomb casing squealed wildly as they flew. A couple of them splashed into the stream not far from Liu. She moaned again. The year before, a bomb fragment had torn her father in two.

  The explosions moved farther away, on toward the village. Awkwardly, robe clinging

  to, her arms and legs and hindering her every motion, she swam back to the bank, staggered out onto land once more. No point drying herself now, not when her damp towel was covered with earth. She automatically picked it up and started home, praying again to the Amida Buddha that her home still stood.

  Bomb craters pocked the fields. Here and there, men and women lay beside them, torn and twisted in death. The dirt road, Liu saw, was untouched; the bombers had left it intact for the Japanese army to use.

  She wished for a cigarette, she'd had a pack of Babies in her pocket, but they were soaked now. Water dripped from her hair into her eyes. When she saw columns of smoke rising into the sky, she, began to run. Her sandals went flap-squelch, flap-squelch against her feet. Ahead, in the direction of the village, she heard shouts and screams, but with her ears still ringing she could not make out words.

  People stared as she ran up. Even in the midst of disaster, her first thought was embarrassment at the way the wet cloth of her robe molded itself to her body. Even the small swellings of her nipples were plainly visible. "Paying to see a woman's body" was a euphemism for visiting a whore. No one so much as had to pay to see Liu's.

  But in the chaos that followed the Japanese air attack, a mere woman's body proved a small concern. Absurdly, some of the people in the village, instead of being terrified and filled with dread like Liu, capered about as if in celebration. She called, "Has everyone here gone crazy, Old Sun?"

  "No, no," the tailor shouted back. "Do you know what the eastern devils' bombs did? Can you guess?" An enormous grin showed his almost-toothless gums.

  "I would say they missed everything, but..." Liu

  paused, gestured at the rising smoke. "I see that cannot be so."

  "Almost as good." Old Sun hugged himself with glee. "No, even better— nearly all their bombs fell right on the yamen."

  "The yamen?" Liu gaped, then started to laugh herself. "Oh, what a pity!" The walled enclosure of the yamen housed the county head's residence, his audience hail, the jail, the court that sent people there, the treasury, and other government departments. Tang Wen Lan, the county head, was notoriously corrupt, as were most of his clerks, secretaries, and servants.

  "Isn't it sad. I think I'll go home and put on white for Tang's funeral," Old Sun said.

  "He's dead?" Liu exclaimed. "I thought a man as wicked as that would live forever."

  "He's dead," Old Sun said positively. "The ghost Life-ls-Transient is taking him to the next world right now— if death's messenger can find enough pieces to carry. One bomb landed square on the office where he was taking bribes. No one will squeeze us any more. How sad, how terrible!" His elastic features twisted into a mask of mirthful mourning that belonged i
n a pantomime show.

  Yi Min, the local apothecary, was less sanguine than Old Sun. "Wait until the eastern dwarfs come. The Japanese will make stupid dead Tang Wen Lan seem like a prince of generosity. He had to leave us enough rice to get through to next year so he could squeeze us again. The Japanese will keep it all for themselves. They don't care whether we live or die."

  Too much of China had learned that, to its sorrow. However rapacious and inept the government of Chiang Kai-shek had proved

  itself, places under Japanese rule suffered worse. For one thing, as Yi Min had said, the invaders took for themselves first and left only what they did not want to the Chinese they con-trolled. For another, while they were rapacious, they were not inept. Like locusts, when they swept a province clean of rice, they swept it clean.

  Liu said, "Shall we run away, then?"

  "A peasant without his plot is nothing," Old Sun said. "If I am to starve, I would sooner starve at home than somewhere on the road far from my ancestors' graves."