Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  He scowled. You’re a bunch of fucking Fritzes, he thought. We flattened you once. Now we’ll do it again. After everything he’d seen in his own country during the last war, he wasn’t about to waste sympathy on Germans.

  “I’m just out of the aid station,” he said to the corporal next to him. “Can you give me a smoke?”

  “Sure thing, Comrade Sergeant.” The other guy let him have a papiros. He smoked one himself, too. They started talking. The corporal’s name was Igor Pechnikov. He added, “My father really did make brick stoves. How’s that for a kick in the head?”

  “Funny,” Konstantin said. Pechnikov was a son of a stovemaker both by surname and for real. Names built from trades and the trades themselves hardly ever matched these days, but they did with him. Morozov asked, “What do you do in the army?”

  “I’m an RPG man,” the other guy answered. “A 155 took out most of my squad, so they’re putting me in a new unit. How about you?”

  “We probably shouldn’t be friends. I’m in a tank, and you go around blowing them up,” Morozov said.

  “Not ours. The enemy’s,” the corporal said.

  “I do understand that, yes.” Konstantin was about to say more, but the one-eyed clerk chose that moment to shout his name. He thumped Pechnikov on the shoulder, shouted “I serve the Soviet Union!”, and hurried over to the clerk’s little table. His legs hurt more than he wished they did; he could have used those extra couple of days on his back.

  A captain stood there. He eyed Morozov the way a hungry man would eye pork sausages in a butcher’s shop. “A tank commander, are you?” he said.

  “That’s right, Comrade Captain,” Morozov replied.

  “Are you fit?”

  “Sir, they wouldn’t have let me leave the aid station if I wasn’t.” That was nonsense, and the captain had to know it as well as Konstantin did. Aid stations were for getting people back into the fight fast.

  The officer didn’t complain, though. He just said, “I’m Arkady Lapshin. Come along with me.”

  Konstantin came. A jeep waited outside: Lend-Lease from the last war or captured in this one. The lance-corporal behind the wheel saluted Lapshin, nodded to Konstantin, and zoomed away as soon as they got in.

  Sometimes he stayed on the road, sometimes not. The going was often better away from it. Much of the toughest fighting had been along the highways, and they showed it. The jeep went wherever the driver wanted it to. For a vehicle with tires, not tracks, it got around.

  Artillery began to fire as they neared the front. Lapshin took it in stride. Morozov tried not to fidget, there on the jeep’s hard back seat. He was used to armor between himself and shell fragments. These were Soviet shells going out, but American shells were liable to start coming in to answer them.

  He thought the driver would take him into a tank park, the way they’d done things the last time he needed a new machine. But he’d had three crewmen out of four then. Now he was the sole survivor. If he hadn’t been head and shoulders out of the T-54 when it got hit, he’d be as dead as the rest of them. Luck. All luck. Or God, if you could take God seriously.

  No tank park this time. A tank under some fruit trees. Three men were working on the engine: a corporal, a lance-corporal, and a private. The jeep stopped. Lapshin hopped out. “This way,” he said, so Konstantin followed him.

  The three soldiers—especially the corporal—eyed Morozov with what could only be disdain. He knew what that had to mean. Their old commander must have stopped one, maybe when he stood up in his cupola. The corporal had to be the gunner. He would have wanted command—and the promotion likely to go with it—for himself. How big a pain in the neck would he be now that he hadn’t got them?

  Captain Lapshin was, or affected to be, oblivious to the sour looks. “Here’s your new commander, boys,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Morozov did it in the last war, too. He’s just over a wound. Morozov, here’s your crew: Juris Eigims, Gennady Kalyakin, and Vazgen Sarkisyan.” He introduced them in order of rank, and almost surely in the order gunner-driver-loader.

  Great, Morozov thought. Only one other Slav. Sarkisyan was squat and swarthy, with a beard he’d need to shave twice a day. He looked like the Armenian he was, in other words. Kalyakin had a Byelorussian accent. Eigims…Yes, Eigims would be trouble.

  By his name, he was a Latvian, or maybe a Lithuanian. Either way, he would have been a kid when the USSR annexed his homeland. Some of the Balts were still pissy over that, not that they could do anything about it. Pissy or not, he’d have to shoot straight if he wanted to keep breathing. But how many other ways would he try to undercut his new superior? By the scowl on his blue-eyed face, as many as he could.

  “What were you guys doing with the engine?” Morozov asked.

  “Just trying to get it running smoother,” Eigims answered. His Russian held a musical lilt. He seemed fluent enough, which was good. Sarkisyan didn’t talk much, but a loader didn’t need a whole lot of Russian. As long as he got the difference between AP and HE, they’d do fine. A gunner, though, had to be able to talk and to understand.

  “How’s the fuel? How much water in it? How are the filters?” Konstantin asked the basic questions. Water in the fuel was worse than in a gasoline engine. And diesel fuel, being thicker than gasoline, carried more dirt and impurities along with it. With bad filters, crud could mess up your machinery in nothing flat.

  “All seem all right. Check for yourself if you care to, Comrade Sergeant.” By the way Eigims said it, Konstantin realized they’d gummed up the engine on purpose somewhere. Where? That was for him to find.

  And he did, too: clogged injectors on two of the engine’s cylinders. He cleaned them out. “Fire it up now,” he said. “You should be able to hear a difference.” Juris Eigims kicked at the dirt. If he’d disliked Konstantin before, he hated him now.

  —

  As things went, Luisa Hozzel was lucky. The Russians who’d swept into Fulda hadn’t raped her. They seemed to be behaving better than they had in the last war. The house had lost its windows, but it hadn’t taken any direct shell hits. Now she had plywood or cardboard over all of them.

  And she’d taken Gustav’s Third Reich medals up into the attic and out of sight before any Red Army soldiers came in. Most of the men around here had served in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, and most of the ones who had served fought on the Eastern Front. The Russians hadn’t dragged anybody out of his house and shot him in the town square for what he’d done then. A couple of men on the block had gone missing, though, and their families with them. Maybe they’d died in the first hours of the invasion. Maybe they’d fled. Luisa didn’t believe it, though.

  She stayed indoors as much as she could. Almost all the women in Fulda seemed to do that. The Russians might show better manners than they’d had before, but how far could you trust them? People still whispered horror stories about everything they’d done in eastern Germany.

  She couldn’t stay in all the time, though. She had to get food. Whenever she headed for the grocer’s, she put on her oldest, frumpiest clothes. She messed up her hair so it looked more like a stork’s nest than anything else. She scrubbed her face with harsh laundry soap. She did her best to look as if she were in her late forties, not her late twenties.

  So far, it had worked. The Americans who’d held Fulda before had whistled and howled at her when she walked by. She’d always ignored them, which made them laugh. They went no further than laughing and whistling and howling, though. Plenty of other German girls didn’t ignore them. If you were out for what you could get, you could get plenty from the Amis.

  By contrast, the Russians now in Fulda ignored her. Or they had so far, though every time she left the house her heart jumped into her mouth till she got inside again.

  Another trip today. She stuck a stringbag inside her purse, fortified herself with a knock of straight schnapps, and stepped out into the big, dangerous world. Sunlight, even the watery sunlight Fulda usually got, made her blink
and squint. She didn’t mind. With her face screwed up, she’d look older and homelier yet.

  Fulda had changed since the Russians drove the Americans out. Part of that was battle damage; the Amis and the German emergency militia had fought hard to hold the town, but they’d got overwhelmed. (She had no idea what had happened to Gustav after he and Max and some others went off to play soldiers again. She prayed he was all right. She didn’t know what else she could do.)

  And part of it was the different flavor of propaganda she had to put up with. When Fulda was part of the U.S. occupation zone, posters had said things like It goes forward with the Marshall plan! It had seemed to go forward, too. Now…

  Now she stared at Joseph Stalin and his bushy mustache—more impressive than Hitler’s, she had to admit—everywhere she went. For a free, socialist Germany! the message under his portrait said. Other posters showed the Russian hammer and sickle and the East German hammer and compass side by side. Together to victory! that one shouted. Still others showed Russian tanks and soldiers going forward. They declared The proletariat on the march is invincible!

  Walls, fences, lampposts, telephone poles—they’d all got a thick layer of those posters. She hadn’t yet seen a dog with one of them pasted to its side, but that had to be only a matter of time.

  Three Russian soldiers came up the street toward her. They reeled instead of walking—they were drunk. Everything people said about how Russians poured it down seemed to be true. Luisa got out of their way and ducked into a shop that sold secondhand clothes. With Russians, as with her own people, drunks were dangerous. They didn’t care about what they did, and they forgot rules they respected sober.

  Ice ran up her back when one of the Ivans peered in after her. But then he staggered after his friends. She breathed again.

  “Can I show you anything?” asked the shopkeeper, a woman—probably—too old to need to worry about Russian attentions.

  “Thank you, no,” Luisa said. “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to get away from those…people.” She didn’t know the woman wouldn’t report her, so she used a neutral word.

  “Oh.” The shopkeeper nodded. “Well, it’s not as if you’re the first one. They’ve made me worry about them a couple of times. Me!” She laughed. She knew she was no spring chicken. Lowering her voice, she went on, “The Führer was right, you know. They really are Untermenschen.”

  Didn’t she remember anything from the Nazi days about keeping her mouth shut? She’d just put her life in Luisa’s hands. “I think I’d better go,” Luisa said. “I want to see what the grocery has left.” She didn’t say I want to see if the grocery has anything left. Whether this foolish woman did or not, she knew better than to come out with anything so suicidal.

  “Auf wiedersehen,” the shopkeeper said wistfully as Luisa left. She couldn’t have got much business even before the Russians came. She was bound to have even less now.

  The grocer’s was another two and a half blocks along the street. Several more Red Army men passed Luisa as she walked. They were all more or less sober, and none of them bothered her. Maybe her hideous disguise was working. Maybe they just had orders not to fraternize.

  No, it couldn’t be just that. The first couple of years after the last round of fighting stopped, the Amis had orders like those. Orders or not, they’d done their best to pick up anything in a skirt.

  “Guten Tag, Frau Hozzel,” the grocer said when she walked in.

  “Guten Tag, Horst,” Luisa answered. “Wie geht’s?”

  He shrugged and waved at the half-empty shelves. “It goes like this, that’s how. Whatever I can get, I put out.”

  “It’s not as bad as it was in ’44 or ’45,” Luisa said. There’d been nothing on the shelves then. People got by with turnips and cabbages. And older folks, the ones from her parents’ generation, claimed even those bad times were nothing next to 1917 and 1918.

  She picked up a tin of pickled beets. The label was in German, but it was no brand she’d ever seen before. It was no brand at all, in fact: it said Canned at State Canning Plant Number Fourteen. “Where did this come from?” she asked.

  “Somewhere in the east,” the grocer answered. “It’s not very good, but the Russians want to get rid of them, so I have lots.”

  “It’s food.” Luisa put three tins in the stringbag. She walked along till she came upon sardines in smaller, flatter tins. Their label said they’d come from State Canning Plant Number Three. “How about these?”

  “I won’t lie to you. They’re pretty bad,” Horst said.

  “Well…” Luisa hadn’t seen anything like them since the invasion. “How bad is pretty bad?”

  “My cat wouldn’t touch them—that’s how bad,” the grocer told her. “You might want to use them if you’re fertilizing a garden in your yard. Otherwise? Not a chance.”

  “They’re expensive for fertilizer. We’ll see.” She put one tin in the stringbag. She chose some potatoes that didn’t seem too wretched. Horst’s spinach actually looked good. Up and down the aisles, doing the best she could.

  When she came to the counter to pay, he took a box out from under it. “Want some of these? I save them for my good customers.” The box held strawberries.

  “You bet I do! How much?” She winced when he told her, but nodded.

  He wrapped them in brown paper and string so no one could see what they were. She paid him and walked out the door happier than she’d dreamt she would be. Strawberries! Something nice when you didn’t expect it made even life under the Russians worth living.

  —

  When Marian Staley woke up, all she saw was fog. Sleeping in the Studebaker with Linda always made the windows steam up on the inside. She rolled one of them down and looked out. It was foggy on the outside, too. She couldn’t see farther than fifty feet or so. Summer might be only three weeks away, but northern Washington hadn’t got the news.

  Linda was snoring in the front seat. She was getting over a cold she’d probably picked up from one of the other children in her class. Packs of kids produced swarms of germs. Marian remembered that from her own elementary-school days. When somebody came down with chicken pox or measles or mumps or scarlet fever, pretty soon the whole class—sometimes the whole school—did.

  These days, penicillin flattened scarlet fever. The others kept turning up like the bad pennies they were. They were less common than Linda’s ordinary cold, but not enough less.

  Pretty soon, Marian would have to get Linda up, get her breakfast, and take her back to the infectious world of other children. If she thought about things like that, she wouldn’t have to think about the A-bomb crater—and it was exactly that—in her own life.

  She’d known going to war was dangerous. You couldn’t help knowing that, in an intellectual way. When countries fought wars, some people didn’t come home again. You built statues to commemorate them, you felt sorry for their widows and other loved ones, and you thought how lucky you were that such a horrible thing hadn’t happened to you.

  Only this time it had.

  Bill wasn’t coming home again. He’d never take them to a Rainiers game again (not that there’d be any Rainiers games for a while, either). He’d never teach Linda how to tie her shoes. He’d never change a flat tire or install new spark plugs with his usual matter-of-fact competence. He’d never turn off the bedroom light, put his face between her legs, and brazenly flutter his tongue right there, oh God right there….

  Marian shied away from that thought hard, like a skittish horse sidestepping and almost rearing when a piece of paper blew across the path in front of it. She was supposed to miss her dead husband because he’d been a good daddy and a good provider, dammit, not because he’d made her feel things she’d never imagined before the first time he got her girdle down and her panties off.

  Well, wasn’t she?

  She’d been a good girl before she met Bill. Looking back, that felt like a lot of wasted time and wasted fun. It was what they told you to do, though, so you did
it—till one day you got so horny, or somebody got you so horny, that you didn’t any more. She’d never do that with him again. He’d never do that with her, do it to her….

  She puddled up at the same time as she wanted to touch herself. She missed her dead husband almost every conscious moment. She hadn’t missed him quite like this before, though. Till she woke up this morning, she’d blotted out all thoughts about that part of their life together.

  Why? she wondered. Making love, especially making love with somebody you really wanted to make love with you, was the best thing in the world you could do with your time. You couldn’t do it all the time, but didn’t that make the times you could all the sweeter?

  When she looked down at her wristwatch, she let out a loud, long, this-is-the-world-and-I’m-stuck-with-it sigh. Then she leaned over the back of the front seat and shook her daughter. “Linda? Linda, honey? Time to get up, sweetie. It’s a school day.”

  “I don’t wanna,” Linda muttered, still three-quarters asleep. Kindergarten had gone from exciting, different, new fun to boring routine in nothing flat. Linda was a human being, in other words—still on the small side, but unmistakably one of the tribe.

  She eventually did stagger forth from the car. Marian took her to the stinking latrine tent and then to breakfast. The guy behind the counter gave each of them a bowl of cornflakes with reconstituted milk. “Yuck!” Linda said.

  “You’ve got to eat it. So do I,” Marian sad. She had instant coffee with it: a meal without a single natural ingredient anywhere in sight. No, that wasn’t true—she did sweeten the coffee with sugar, not saccharine.

  “Yuck!” Linda said again, but she emptied her little bowl. She wasn’t fussy about food, for which Marian thanked heaven.

  Marian had more trouble choking down her own cereal. As far as she was concerned, powdered milk was as much a chemical weapon as poison gas. It was cheap, and it was much easier to transport than whole milk. That made it ideal for feeding people in refugee camps. It tasted horrible? It was even worse than powdered mashed potatoes (a suppertime unfavorite)? So what? As long as the people stuck in refugee camps got fed at all, the government didn’t care if they hated everything they ate.