The Big Switch twtce-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Theo, as usual, couldn’t see out. He believed Witt, though. The engine labored to push the panzer through the mud. The tracks dug in hard. Even through the panzer’s steel sides, Theo could hear the squelching.

  And the going only got worse. Theirs wasn’t the only panzer trying to use the road. The more traffic it took, the more ruts filled with water and turned to soup. “I wonder if we’d do better in the fields,” Adi said.

  “Try it if you want to,” Witt told him.

  “Damned if I won’t,” the driver said, and he did. The panzer picked up speed-for a little while. Then it came to a stretch that German or Russian artillery had already chewed up. Rainwater had soaked into the shell holes, producing little gluey puddles. Adi carefully picked his way between them. “We’re using more gas than we have been, too,” he grumbled.

  Again, Theo believed him. The engine was working much harder than it had when the road was dry. How anyone was supposed to fight in weather like this… He consoled himself by remembering that the Russians would have just as much trouble seeing enemies and moving as his own side did.

  That turned out not to be quite true. The Panzer II was fighting to get out of a mudhole when Witt let out a horrified squawk and all but fell back into the turret. He frantically traversed it to the left. “Goddamn Russian panzer!” he explained. “Fucker’s plowing through the mud like it isn’t even there.”

  How fast were the Ivans turning their turret this way? Theo’s gut knotted. A 45mm shell slamming through the thin side armor might answer the question any second now. Witt started shooting: one 20mm round after another, as fast as the toy cannon would fire. Then he switched to the coaxial machine gun, and Theo breathed again.

  “Bastard’s burning,” the panzer commander said. “I think the machine gun got one of the crew, but the rest are still on the loose.” He laughed shakily. “Never a dull moment, is there?… How are we doing, Adi?”

  “We’re fucking stuck, that’s how,” Stoss answered. “We need a tow.”

  “Right,” Witt said. “Theo, get on the radio. Let ’em know.”

  “I’m doing it,” Theo said. He hoped whatever recovery vehicle the regiment sent out wouldn’t bog down before it got here. And he hoped-he really, really hoped-no more Russian panzers would come along first.

  Rasputitsa. Russian had a word for the season of mud that came along every spring and fall. The spring rasputitsa was worse, because it didn’t mark rain alone: the accumulated winter snow melted, making the mud deeper and gooier yet. But the fall mud time was bad enough.

  No planes flew. During the winter, fighters and even bombers landed with skis in place of wheels. Even that didn’t work during the rasputitsa. To get airborne and come down again, a plane had to use a paved runway. As far as Sergei Yaroslavsky knew, the Soviet Union didn’t have any.

  The Germans were grounded, too. Poland had a few all-weather airstrips, but the front had moved too far east for them to matter. Sergei chuckled sourly. Advantages to everything, even defeat.

  For the next few weeks, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around, play cards, and drink. A Red Air Force man sober through the rasputitsa probably had something wrong with his liver. When the hard freezes came, when planes could take off and land again, that would be time enough to get your nose out of the vodka jug.

  Now… Now Sergei ate and slept and drank and argued and listened to the radio and argued some more. Even drunk, he was careful about what he said. NKVD men got drunk too, but they had an ugly habit of remembering what they’d heard then even after they sobered up.

  The war ground on even while Sergei and the rest of the Red Air Force men perforce vegetated. That was why he listened to the radio: to find out what was going on while he couldn’t do anything about it. He pored over the copies of Pravda and Izvestia and Red Star that came to the airstrip, even if they commonly got there a week after they were printed, their cheap paper already starting to yellow.

  No one wanted to come straight out and say so, but the Germans and Poles were still pushing forward-not so fast as before, but they were. The first sighting of French troops raised a fine fury on the radio and then, after the usual delays, in the papers, too. The Party line raised echoes of the civil war after the October Revolution when the capitalist powers allied with the reactionary Whites to try to murder the Soviet Union at birth. They’d failed then, and they would fail now… if you listened to Stalin’s propagandists, at any rate.

  Back then, Japan had joined with England, France, America, and the Whites against the USSR. For a long time, the radio had made this war with Japan seem more of the same thing. We’re attacked on all sides, so we need to fight and work twice as hard, was the message.

  That had been the message, anyhow. But a two-paragraph item in Izvestia that Sergei almost ignored said Foreign Commissar Litvinov was on a diplomatic mission to Khabarovsk. It didn’t say what kind of diplomatic mission or with whom he was conducting his diplomacy. But still… Khabarovsk!

  You had to know where Khabarovsk was for the story to make any sense. As it happened, Sergei did. When he was a little kid, some school lesson had praised Khabarovsk, the jewel of eastern Siberia. The so-called jewel was probably one more Soviet industrial town, a quarter of the way around the world from where he sat now. That wasn’t the point.

  The point was, why would Maxim Litvinov be conducting diplomacy in Khabarovsk if not to talk some more with the Japanese? He wouldn’t meet British or French officials there-that was for sure. But Khabarovsk was pretty close to Japan-and even closer to Japan’s recent Siberian conquests. Nothing else made sense.

  Which proved… what, exactly? Not a damned thing, as Sergei also knew. He was only a flyer, making guesses from what the government deigned to tell the people. What the men who ran things knew that they weren’t telling… He could guess about that, too, but he was much too likely to be wrong.

  Only he wasn’t wrong, not this time. One very wet, very muddy, very hung-over morning, the radio newsreader followed “Moscow speaking” with “I have the honor to present an important announcement from General Secretary Stalin concerning the course of the struggle against imperialism.”

  Sergei went over to the samovar and got himself a glass of hot, strong, sweet tea. Then he poured a hefty slug of vodka into it. Put that all together and it might take the edge off his headache. He wasn’t the only flyer medicating himself that way, either-nowhere close. Some skipped the tea.

  Then the newsreader said, “A definitive and lasting peace has been reached between the Empire of Japan and the workers and peasants of the USSR. The two nations, recognizing their common interests, have decided to make permanent the cease-fire to which they agreed when Foreign Commissar Litvinov traveled to Japan this summer. They will end their conflict on the basis of current positions. The new borders will be demilitarized on both sides to a distance of twenty-five kilometers. Each nation also pledges neutrality in the other’s current and future conflicts. The Foreign Commissar has expressed great satisfaction as a result of the formal termination of hostilities.”

  “Good. That’s good,” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko said. “In fact, very good. Ochen khorosho. ” He repeated the last two words with somber satisfaction as he stubbed out one papiros and lit another. He seemed to be one of those people who thought nicotine eased a pain in the hair-a term Sergei’d heard from a fellow flyer who’d served in Spain. It fit, all right. He’d smoked a couple of cigarettes himself, but just because he smoked, not because he thought they made much difference to his morning-afters.

  Several flyers nodded. Even under Socialism, you couldn’t go far wrong agreeing with your squadron commander-and, more to the point, being seen to agree with him. Sergei only wished he could. But the newsreader had left too much out. He hadn’t said where the new borders were, for instance. That argued that Japan had seized more of southeastern Siberia than anyone cared to admit in public. The announcer hadn’t said anything about returning prisoners of war, either.<
br />
  Maybe none of that mattered. With the Soviet Union officially able to concentrate on the west, Stalin probably planned to hang on here and renew the fight in the Far East when he saw the chance. He couldn’t let Japan hold on to Vladivostok… could he?

  And what would Japan do now? She could put more soldiers into China. She plainly thought of the vast, disorderly country the way England thought of India: a place to exploit, with plenty of natives to do the hard work for her.

  Come to think of it, Hitler thought of Russia that way. What else was he doing here but grabbing land and slaves? If he won this war, he would get his way. The thing to do, then, was make sure he didn’t.

  Sergei took another swig of vodka-laced tea. His headache was backing off-some, anyhow. He couldn’t fight the Nazis now, not with the best will in the world. The rasputitsa made sure of that. It left him feeling more than commonly useless.

  It was hard to remember, but across the sea lay a country where none of this mattered. The United States was the greatest capitalist nation in the world, and it was at peace with everybody. That struck Sergei as most unfair-all the more so when he was hung over. The Americans just sat there watching the rest of the world tear itself to pieces. As far as the pilot could tell, they didn’t care. Why should they? No matter who won, they got rich selling grain and guns.

  Something should happen to them. It would serve them right, he thought. Then he laughed at himself. What could happen to the United States? The Americans had beaten their natives far more completely than the English had won in India or the Japanese in China. The Atlantic and Pacific shielded them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They even seemed immune to the inexorable working of the historical dialectic.

  He brought himself up sharply. The Americans might seem immune, but they weren’t. Nobody was. The revolution would come to the United States, too. The big capitalists and exploiters would go to the wall, as they had in the USSR. It would happen in England and France, too-and in Germany, no matter what the Hitlerites thought or how little they liked it.

  But when? The dialectic didn’t speak to that. For the USSR’s sake, Sergei hoped it would be soon. ome of the Russian prisoners at the camp south of Harbin were quick to learn bits of Japanese. They spoke without much grammar, but they made themselves understood. One skinny, hairy fellow bowed to get Hideki Fujita’s attention-they learned Japanese customs, too-and said, “Peace now Russia, Japan-yes, Sergeant- san?”

  “Hai,” Fujita agreed. He couldn’t very well deny it, not when the peace had at last been officially announced.

  “We go home?” the maruta asked.

  To that, the Japanese sergeant only shrugged. “I have no orders one way or the other,” he answered. It was harder to think of the prisoners as logs when they became talking logs: not impossible, but harder.

  “So sorry-don’t understand,” this Russian said.

  “No orders,” Fujita repeated. They might be talking logs now, but no, they didn’t talk well. You had to keep things as simple as you could, as if you were talking to a retarded three-year-old.

  The maruta got it this time. “Arigato,” he said. “When orders? Soon?”

  Fujita shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said again, and walked away. He didn’t expect the orders the Russian wanted to come quickly, but he could see that admitting as much would only cause trouble. The Soviet government seemed to care about the men Japan had captured almost as little as the imperial government would have worried about Japanese prisoners. These Russians had lost Vladivostok, and so they were in disgrace.

  It made perfect sense to Fujita. It made much more sense than most of the things the Russians did. It was, in fact, a very Japanese attitude. And if the Russians didn’t care what happened to their prisoners, how could anyone expect Japan to care? Simple: nobody could. And nobody did. The prisoners became maruta, became logs, and whatever happened to them was their hard luck.

  Muttering, Fujita rubbed his arm and his backside. He’d had more shots since coming to Pingfan than ever in his life before. So it seemed now, anyhow. He was inoculated against everything from smallpox (they’d poked him again, even though he’d been vaccinated not too long before) to housemaid’s knee. Again, so it seemed to him.

  But there were no inoculations against some of the diseases they used here. If you came down with the plague, odds were you would die. He’d never seen people so nervous about fleas as they were at this place. If you found one on yourself, you had to catch it and kill it and give it to one of the people from the inner compound so he could examine its guts under the microscope or whatever the devil they did in there.

  Another maruta said, “Food? More food?”

  That, Fujita could and did ignore. The prisoners got as much food as the officers in charge of such things said they should. He had nothing to do with it either way. If the officers wanted them plump and healthy, plump and healthy they would be. It happened. Sometimes the scientists needed to see what germs did to people who had nothing wrong with them but a particular disease. More often, though, the POWs went hungry, as POWs deserved to do.

  “Why treat us like this?” yet another Russian asked. “Us people, too. What we do to you?”

  How many Red Army soldiers had tried to kill Fujita? More than he could count-he was sure of that. But it wasn’t the point. Japan would have treated-did treat-Chinese prisoners the same way. And she would have treated other Japanese who surrendered to their enemies the same way, too. Thousands of years of history proved that, too. Soldiers who gave up weren’t people any more, not in the eyes of their captors they weren’t.

  Could he explain that to a blond gaijin with shaggy cheeks? He not only couldn’t, he didn’t feel like wasting his time trying. He grudged the Russian two words: “You lost.” He felt the man’s pale eyes boring into him as he walked away, but so what? Those eyes only further separated the prisoner from him. They should have belonged to a cat, not to a human being.

  A few days later, some of the white-coated men from the inner sanctum came forth. They needed fifty Russians to test something or other they’d developed. And, of course, they needed guards to make sure none of the Russians got unruly or got away. A lieutenant, a sergeant, ten ordinary soldiers… Fujita was the sergeant.

  “What do we do, sir?” he asked the lieutenant-a chunky man named Ozawa-who’d been at Pingfan when he got there.

  “Whatever the scientists tell us to do, we do that,” Ozawa answered. “They’re the ones who run this place. We’re here to make sure that whatever they need to have happen, happens. Got it?”

  “Hai,” Fujita said quickly. He’d already figured out that much for himself. He was hoping the officer would tell him more. But if not, not. As long as a sergeant followed orders, he couldn’t go too far wrong.

  They let Fujita choose the soldiers who would come along to keep an eye on the Russians. One of the first men he grabbed was Superior Private Shinjiro Hayashi. “Yes, Sergeant- san, I’ll do it,” Hayashi said, as he had to. If he was pleased about the assignment, his face didn’t show it. Neither did his voice.

  Fujita could have just whacked him in the side of the head and told him to do his job. But they’d served together for a long time. To his own surprise, the sergeant found himself explaining why he’d chosen the junior man: “I need you. You’ve got good sense.”

  That was part of it, but not all. He needed Hayashi’s education, too, because he came off a farm himself. But there were things you could say and things you couldn’t. He said as much as he could. If Hayashi was so goddamn smart, he could figure out the rest for himself.

  He nodded now, accepting if still less than thrilled. “All right, Sergeant- san. We’ll see what happens.”

  Trucks growled up to haul the Russians, the guards, and the bacteriologists away from Pingfan. A rail spur… Motor transport laid on whenever they needed it… The people who ran things here had it good. They had it better than most of the ordinary units in the Kwantung Army, t
hat was for sure. Fujita thought about all the shoe leather he’d gone through because nobody could be bothered with sending out a truck to pick him up.

  Well, he was riding now, north through Harbin and then into the forests beyond the city. One of the things that had always struck him about Manchukuo was all the space here. To someone who came from crowded Japan, it was especially noticeable. These were woods where no one had ever logged. They might have stood here, untouched, since the beginning of time.

  Or so he thought till the trucks stopped in a clearing gouged out of the woods a couple of hundred kilometers north and east of Harbin: not far from what had been the Siberian border, in other words. Wind whistled cold through the trees. Fujita had unhappy memories of fighting in country like this. So, no doubt, did Hayashi, and several other common soldiers. For all he knew, so did the Red Army men. Winter was on the way, all right.

  The bacteriologists had memories of their own. They’d used this place before. Poles had been driven into the ground in rough circles around a central open space. One of the white-coated men spoke to Lieutenant Ozawa, who nodded and relayed orders to the other ranks: “We tie a Russian to each pole, facing toward the middle there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fujita said. He didn’t have to do the tying himself. He just supervised: the advantage of being a sergeant. One of the maruta tried to run away. A soldier shot him in the back, then walked over and bayoneted him. The men in white coats scribbled in their notebooks: they would be working with forty-nine, not fifty.

  They set up something that looked like a bomb casing made of pottery in the central open area. Then they put on gauze masks and handed one to each of the soldiers. At their orders, all the Japanese retreated to the edge of the woods. The scientists got behind trees. So did the soldiers, a beat or two later.

  The bomb, or whatever it was, went off. It sounded louder than a hand grenade, softer than a bursting shell. “Now we take the prisoners back and await developments,” one of the bacteriologists said. No one asked him what the developments would be. He did condescend to add, “You would be wise to leave your masks on. Yes-very wise.”