The Big Switch twtce-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Some of the Russian prisoners were wounded by flying pottery-mostly the ones close to the burst. The others didn’t seem to have been harmed. The soldiers herded them all into the trucks again. They rolled south, back toward Pingfan.

  They got there in the middle of the night. The prisoners went into the walled-off compound instead of back to the pens. “They won’t come out of there-not alive, they won’t,” Senior Private Hayashi said in a low voice.

  Sergeant Fujita nodded-the other man was bound to be right. “Well, who’ll miss ’em?” Fujita said, and Hayashi’s head went up and down in turn.

  As long as the war dragged on, Sarah Goldman was positive things wouldn’t get any better for Germany’s Jews. Rather more to the point, she was positive things wouldn’t get any better for her or her family. And she was positive she would start screaming about that any minute now.

  Of course, she’d been positive of the same thing ever since the war started. Two years ago! Was that really possible? It was, however much she wished it weren’t: not only possible but true.

  She nodded to remind herself that the war had been going on for so long. Neither the radio nor the newspapers mentioned the anniversary. When she did remark on that, her father said, “The powers that be don’t want you to remember, because then they’ll also remember the fighting hasn’t all gone the way some people promised it would.”

  Samuel Goldman chose his words with care. Sarah feared he wasn’t careful enough, not if the Gestapo really was monitoring what they said in the house. There’d never been any proof of that, not in all the time since Saul killed his labor-gang boss, but the worry never went away.

  Hanna Goldman’s view of things was less political and more pragmatic: “Ever since we really started banging heads with the Russians, rations have gone to the devil. They were bad before, but they’re a lot worse now. When they start taking coupons for potatoes and turnips…”

  “Did they do that even in the last war?” Father asked. “I was at the front, and there was usually enough there. It wasn’t very good, but we got fed. And we took everything we could from the countryside. I’m sure some of the bunnies we stewed meowed, but we weren’t fussy.”

  He’d brought home a rabbit from somebody in his work gang the year before. He’d hoped it was a rabbit then, anyhow. No matter what it was, he’d eaten it without a qualm. So had Sarah and her mother. Sarah’s mouth filled with spit as she remembered the rich, meaty taste. She hadn’t got to enjoy it much since.

  “What happened to that fellow who sold you one here?” she asked. “Could you get more from him?”

  “Gregor?” Regretfully, Father shook his head. “He disappeared not too long after I bought the last one. Well, maybe he disappeared and maybe he was disappeared, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t tell you whether he’s on the lam or in a camp.”

  “I hope…” Sarah paused and thought before she spoke. “I hope he’s in a camp, getting what he deserves.”

  If some bored Gestapo technician did chance to be listening in on her right now, he was probably fighting nausea. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying one thing while more obviously meaning the other. Father’s eyes twinkled. “Aber naturlich,” he said. “So do I. So does any right-thinking person.”

  “That’s the truth,” Mother chimed in. They beamed at one another in companionable hypocrisy.

  To Sarah’s amazement, a few days later Father brought home not a rabbit but half a dozen dressed pigeons wrapped in bloody newspaper. He had to hold one arm pressed against his jacket to keep them from falling out. Together with the limp from his war wound, that made him seem more crippled than he was.

  “Where did you get them?” Mother exclaimed when he set the prize package on the kitchen counter.

  “You’d better not tell the Pigeon-Racers’ Association, but it turns out there’s a sly fellow who traps them,” Father answered. “He lives out on the edge of town, so nobody’s going to catch him at it. If I lived out there, I would, too. It can’t be very hard. Pigeons aren’t the smartest birds God ever made. A few bread crumbs and you can probably get as many as you want.”

  As she had with the rabbit, Mother asked, “What did you pay for them?”

  As he had with the rabbit, Father looked pained and didn’t give her a straight answer. “It’s not as though we’re spending money on nightclubs or Strength through Joy cruises,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” Mother said. “But we are spending money on food and fuel and rent, and we aren’t made of gold. So what did you pay?”

  “We won’t go to the poorhouse tomorrow on account of them,” Samuel Goldman told her.

  “How about the day after tomorrow?” Sarah suggested.

  Her father sent her a reproachful look. “Doesn’t the Bible say something about ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’?”

  “I’m not an ungrateful child,” Sarah said. “I’ll never be ungrateful when you bring meat home.” She just hoped her rumbling stomach didn’t embarrass her in front of her parents. If it didn’t, that would only be because theirs were rumbling, too.

  “All right, not ungrateful,” Father said. “Difficult, though. Let’s see you talk your way out of ‘difficult.’ ”

  “Why should she?” Mother said. “Only right that someone in the family should take after you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father replied with dignity.

  But he did. Sarah was sure of that. So did she. Her mother was much more easygoing than her father. Saul was a purely physical being; strength and speed served him the way rational thought did for Father. Sarah was rational, or hoped she was. She was also prickly and impatient with other people’s foolishness. That too marked her as her father’s daughter.

  So did her hunger. Eagerly, she asked her mother, “How are you going to cook them?”

  “Does it matter?” Hanna Goldman said.

  “As long as they’re hot and not too burnt, no,” Father said. Sarah nodded-that summed things up for her, too.

  Her mother stuffed the squab with bread crumbs and roasted them. They were wonderful. “I don’t dare tell Isidor how good that was,” Sarah said after crunching through the smaller bones and sucking all the meat off the larger ones. “Bread may be the staff of life, but meat is the gold crown on the end of the staff.”

  Her father raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t come from the Bible or the Greek philosophers, but it sounds as though it should.”

  “Just out of my own mouth. Sorry,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t be,” Father told her. “Old wisdom gets-well, old. We need new wisdom, too. Here and now, we really need it.”

  “We have new wisdom. It comes from the Fuhrer,” Mother said brightly. “The Fuhrer is always right. That’s what everybody says.”

  “Well, yes, of course. I knew that myself, as a matter of fact.” Father was also playing to the listener who might not be there. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he made as if to gag. The SS might have planted microphones in the house. Putting secret movie cameras in there was beyond the Nazis’ skill. They might want to, but they couldn’t.

  Sarah smiled at her parents. Somehow, the silly games they had to play made her happy. Jews in Munster had no business being happy. The Fuhrer would surely have agreed with that. But, no matter what he wanted to decree, no matter what his minions tried to enforce, happy she was.

  Father winked at her. “It’s the meat,” he said. “It does strange things-especially after so long without.”

  If she was the one most like him, no wonder he could guess what she was thinking. “Maybe it is. Whatever it is, I like it,” she answered. The Fuhrer wouldn’t approve of that, either. Well, too bad for the Fuhrer- that was all there was to it.

  One of the ratings on the U-30’s conning tower jerked as if a horsefly had bitten the back of his neck. He pointed to port. “Mine!” he said. “To hell with me if that’s not a goddamn mine!”

  Julius Lemp’s binocular-enhanced gaze fo
llowed the German sailor’s outthrust index finger. Sure as the devil, the metal horns of a contact mine and part of the sheet-iron sphere itself stuck up out of the cold gray water of the Baltic. “Good job, Sievert,” he said. The mine drifted a few hundred meters away, no great danger to the U-boat now. Still, nobody in his right mind wanted to leave one of those hateful things bobbing in the sea, waiting for a target.

  “Shall we get rid of it, Skipper?” another sailor asked eagerly. What was it about things that went boom that got grown men as excited as a pack of kids at a fireworks show?

  Whatever it was, Lemp had it, too. “You bet we’ll get rid of it,” he answered, and bawled an order down into the pressure hull: “Man the deck gun!”

  The sailors from the gun crew swarmed up the ladder. They hurried to the 88mm cannon on the deck in front of the tower. One of them carefully removed the tompion from the muzzle and let it dangle on its chain. Lemp nodded to himself-he hadn’t even had time to give the order. Nothing would ruin your day like opening fire without uncorking your gun.

  He did give the order that swung the cannon toward the floating mine. The gun crew banged away with great enthusiasm and no great skill. The 88 was really an anachronism left over from the days of more gentlemanly warfare. It couldn’t fight any kind of surface warship. The idea behind it was that a surfaced U-boat could stop a freighter, pause while the crew took to the lifeboats, and then sink the vessel with gunfire, saving valuable torpedoes.

  But that didn’t work in an age of escorted convoys and radio sets. If an enemy destroyer wasn’t bearing down on you at top speed, the freighter was calling in bombers to blow you out of the water. Antiaircraft guns gave you a chance against those, and the U-30 did carry one aft of the conning tower. And it had the 88, too, as much from the designers’ force of habit as for any other reason.

  Blam! Blam! Blam! Flame burst from the gun’s muzzle as each round went off. Brass cartridge cases clanged on the deck. Columns of seawater leaped into the air as shells burst all around the mine. But the damned thing went right on bobbing in the sea. Lemp waited for a hit with rapidly mounting impatience.

  At last, when he was about to shout something sharp to the gunners, he got one. It yielded a much bigger Blam!-one that rocked him and the submarine even though the mine wasn’t close. The gout of water that rose on high was much bigger and much less tidy than the ones the shells had produced.

  At the 88, the ratings shouted and pumped fists in the air and capered like lunatics. “We killed it!” one of them yelled. A couple of others dug fingers into their ears. They’d be ringing, all right. Lemp’s rang even though he stood up on the conning tower. That was part of the chance you took when you played with things that went boom.

  “Very good, heroes,” he called to the gunners. “You can go below now.”

  They pretended not to hear him. Or maybe, since they’d been playing with explosives, they weren’t pretending. Lemp figured they were. Coming topside was a rare treat for a lot of the men cooped up inside his steel cigar. They could breathe fresh air. They could focus their eyes on something farther away than their outstretched hands. Why would they want to go down into the dim red light, the humid air, and the symphony of stinks that characterized any working U-boat? Wasn’t it like descending into hell? Wasn’t it much too much like that?

  Lemp had to give the order again before the gun crew obeyed it. They resealed the 88 and climbed from the deck to the conning tower once more: climbed far more slowly than they’d rushed down to start shooting. The fun was over now, and their dragging steps said as much.

  They were even glummer about climbing down the hatch and into the U-30. One of them wrinkled his nose. “I wish they could make a U-boat that didn’t smell like a polecat three days dead,” he remarked.

  “Well, Martin, if you don’t fancy it, you should have stayed in the surface navy,” Lemp said sweetly.

  That did the trick. Martin-bearded, grimy, in a uniform that hadn’t been washed any time lately-vehemently shook his head, as if the skipper had suggested that he engage in some unnatural vice. “Not me, by God,” he declared. “The surface pukes, they fuss about every little thing like they’re on the rag or something.” And he vanished into the U-boat’s fetid bowels. His buddies followed without another word of complaint.

  Julius Lemp smiled. It wasn’t that he thought the sailor was wrong. On the contrary. He was a U-boat man himself, after all, not a surface puke. He remembered how horribly out of place he’d felt when Captain Patzig summoned him to the bridge of the Admiral Scheer. Aboard the U-30, he was lord of all he surveyed. On the pocket battleship, he felt like a poor relation, and a damn scruffy poor relation at that, even if he’d put on his best clothes for the visit.

  “Skipper?” said the man who’d spotted the mine.

  “Eh?” Lemp came back to the here-and-now. “What is it, Sievert?”

  “Was that a Russian mine, or one of ours?”

  “I don’t know,” Lemp replied after a moment’s thought. “Considering where we are, it could be either. I sure couldn’t tell through field glasses. And I’ve heard the Ivans just copied our model when they started making their own mines, so there might not have been much to tell from.”

  “You couldn’t read the ‘Made in Moscow’ plate bolted to the shell, eh?” Sievert asked with a grin.

  “Er-no.” Lemp managed a chuckle of his own, even if it took some effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but the poor thing did suffer from lack of exercise.

  “Well, it won’t take us out, and it won’t take any of our surface ships out, and we’ll do for any Russian ships we come across,” the rating said.

  “That’s right.” Lemp nodded. No jokes lurking in the underbrush there. He felt relieved.

  The watchers on the conning tower had gone on scanning sea and sky even while the gun crew played with its big, loud toy. Lemp would have been furious had they let the fireworks distract them. In the Baltic’s close confines, trouble was never far away. It could land on you all too fast even when you were lucky enough to spot it before it showed up. If you didn’t… If you didn’t, some flying-boat crew would go home to paint a U-boat silhouette on the side of their fuselage and then fly off to look for more unwary Germans.

  I should have paid more attention, too, Lemp thought. He made a quick scan himself, first with the naked eye and then sweeping his binoculars through a quadrant of the sky. Nothing. His breath smoked as he sighed with gratitude aimed at a God Who didn’t listen enough. He remembered the horror that had coursed through him when he’d spotted a small silver speck in the sky not too long before. He’d been about to shout for a crash dive before he realized the planet Venus probably wouldn’t strafe the U-30.

  He made a more careful scan of the sea, looking for periscopes. No matter how much the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe harried them, Red Fleet U-boats did get out into the Baltic. Ending up on the wrong end of one of their eels would be embarrassing, to say the least.

  Again, nothing. His boat might have had the sea all to itself. He was master of everything he surveyed: gray water and gray sky. A gull winging its way south didn’t acknowledge his supremacy. Gulls never did. They were an ill-bred lot, scroungers and scavengers and ne’er-do-wells. They were quite a bit like submariners, in other words.

  His nose flinched when he had to lay below after his watch ended. He logged the incident with the mine. His script was tiny, cramped, and precise. Things could have been better: he might have sunk a Russian battleship. But they could also have been worse: nothing at all might have happened on his watch. Or no one might have spotted an approaching enemy U-boat. He wouldn’t have had to log anything then: he would have been a trifle too dead. The one small detail aside, he couldn’t see anything to like about that.

  FDR was coming to Philadelphia. The election was only a few days away. Four more years? Peggy Druce hoped so. At least, she supposed she hoped so. Everything in the world seemed to have turned inside out and upsi
de down since England and France did their spectacular back-flip with Germany.

  Before the big switch, Roosevelt had sent England and France as many planes and guns as American factories could crank out, along with a whole fleet of destroyers he said the United States didn’t need any more. Wendell Willkie, the latest Republican to try to boot FDR out of the White House, hadn’t yelled at him for that. He’d yelled at the President for not doing more and not doing it faster. A bunch of Republicans were isolationists, but not Willkie.

  Trouble was, all of a sudden isolationism looked a lot better than it had even a few weeks earlier. If England and France were on Hitler’s side against Russia, they weren’t using the American guns and planes and ships against the Fuhrer, the way FDR had had in mind. Nobody in Washington was (or, at least, admitted to being) in love with Stalin, but nobody much wanted to see all those weapons turned against him, either.

  Willkie’s trouble was, he agreed too much with Roosevelt. He was Tweedledum complaining about Tweedledee. After the big switch, some Republicans tried to boot him off the ticket and run somebody more in line with how they figured the party ought to think. Their only problem was, they settled on Alf Landon again: a man only a diehard isolationist Republican could love. (And even then, remembering how FDR had trounced him in 1936, it wasn’t easy.) Landon’s campaign mostly amounted to I told you so. He himself had no hope of winning. The more votes he stole from Willkie, the easier the time FDR would have.

  “You ready?” Herb called to Peggy. “The rally starts at half past seven.”

  “Just about.” Peggy patted each cheek with a powder puff one more time. Looking in the mirror made her sigh. It would have to do, but it was a long way from perfect. Well, too goddamn bad, she thought. She was a long way from perfect. Perfect would have been twenty-five-twenty-nine, tops.

  They drove down into the city. Blazing street lamps and headlights and neon signs reminded Peggy she wasn’t in Europe any more. She supposed they’d lifted the blackout in London and Paris. People there were probably happy as could be. You could buy happiness, all right-as long as you didn’t care what you paid for it.