Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “If living means fucking one of these filthy pigdogs, I’d sooner die,” Luisa said.

  Her husband’s boss’ wife—how strange to recall that that was what Trudl had been back in far-off, longed-for Fulda—only sighed. “Well, I can’t make you,” she said. “But we aren’t going home. That’s the long and short of it. We aren’t. We’ve got to make the best of things here.”

  Luisa shook her head. She turned and walked back to her own bunk, not looking over her shoulder even once.

  —

  Bruce McNulty had leave. Getting a weekend pass was the easiest thing in the world for B-29 pilots these days. They weren’t flying missions against the Russians now that this uneasy peace seemed to have taken hold. That being so, they were about as useful around the base as baby buggies in a steel mill.

  He took the train down to London. His neat blue U.S. Air Force uniform made him stand out among the Englishmen with whom he rode. That wasn’t because it was American; it was because it was nearly new. The limeys wore a motley assortment of threadbare tweeds and houndstooths and checks, many carefully patched and darned. Hardly any of their clothes dated from after 1939: cut and wear testified to that. They hadn’t eased up on rationing after the last war ended. They hadn’t been able to. They’d bankrupted themselves beating Hitler. Afterwards, they’d stayed busy trying to hold on to their empire. They hadn’t had much luck there.

  A tall, skinny fellow with bad teeth sitting across the compartment nodded to Bruce and said, “ ’Ere, Yank, are those a pilot’s wings you’ve got on?”

  “That’s right.” Bruce nodded.

  “What d’you fly, you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Superfort.” Bruce wondered if the Englishman would lay into him as a wholesaler of death. He laid into himself that way sometimes, usually after he’d had a pint or two too many.

  But the fellow grinned, showing off more brown and pitted enamel. “Ah, one o’ the big ’uns,” he said. Bruce had to work to follow his northern accent. “Last go, I were a Lanc mechanic meself.”

  “They were good planes.” Bruce meant it. Lancashires had carried the load for the RAF’s night-bombing campaign against Germany. But they were even more comprehensively obsolete than B-29s these days. So were the Lincolns that had succeeded them.

  When Bruce got off the train, he went to the tube station that was part of the same building. He was no Londoner, to know which route he needed before he stepped into the Underground. But he had a map of the system. It was a hell of a lot simpler than the maps he’d read planning flights over Germany in the last war and Russia and the satellites this time again.

  Twenty minutes later, he walked into the British Museum. London had been basically the capital of the world for a couple of hundred years; its greatness was only just now passing. British explorers and archeologists and collectors of all sorts had brought back the best of what they found. And here it was, on organized display.

  Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Egyptian art from the dawn of civilization. Greek pots with shapes of breathtaking purity. The Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon (Greece wanted them back, but the British Museum didn’t have to pay any attention to Greece). Roman statues that had inspired countless inept imitations back in the States. Coins and helmets and swords and even a ship from the Dark Ages. He wandered and stared and wandered and stared some more. You could lose yourself, or lose days, here.

  He wound up in the Reading Room. Scholars and crackpots studied one volume or another at the polished tables. How were you supposed to tell which was which, though? Karl Marx did a lot of his research in this domed chamber. Which had he been? Opinions varied to this day. They’d fought over the variation with atom bombs, too.

  Bruce shivered, though the Reading Room was warm by English standards. He’d brooded now and again about all the human lives he’d blown to radioactive dust. But here he was imagining some Soviet counterpart of his destroying, disintegrating, the Elgin Marbles and everything else this miracle of a building held. That would have been a bigger crime against humanity than taking out a whole ordinary city, wouldn’t it?

  He shivered again. What treasures had he blasted to hell and gone himself? He had no idea. Till this moment, the question had never once crossed his mind. Now it would haunt him along with all the unquiet ghosts of those he’d killed. He wondered how he ever got to sleep without phenobarbital.

  If you took enough of that crap, of course, or if you took it after you’d done some heavy drinking, you might not wake up the next morning. And would that be such a bad thing? he wondered. Unless you owned a mechanism that let you turn off your conscience, did you have any business dropping A-bombs?

  Daisy’d known what he did, but she hadn’t known what he did till the Russians leveled Fakenham when they took out the air base at nearby Sculthorpe. After that, she understood because she was holding on to the shitty end of the stick. And Bruce understood because he saw how the kind of thing he did made someone he loved suffer.

  Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise. Somewhere not far from here, Shakespeare had inked a goose-quill pen and put those words on paper. Or was it Shakespeare? Somebody more recent? Bruce couldn’t bring up enough English Lit to remember. Whoever it was, he’d had a pretty good notion of what he was talking about, all right, and a Russian bomb would have sent wherever he’d written up in fire and smoke along with the museum.

  Right around the corner from the British Museum stood a fish-and-chips shop, as homely as the museum was grand. The place might have been homely, but it was good. Bruce doused his food in malt vinegar and dug in. “Wasn’t sure if you’d know to do that, you bein’ from the States an’ all,” the counterman said.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve been here a while,” Bruce answered with his mouth full. A couple of the chips had ink stains from their newspaper wrapping. He ate them anyway. The English did it all the time. If it didn’t hurt them, chances were he’d also live through it.

  He looked at his map again. The Tower of London wasn’t far away—only a few tube stops. Off he went. When he emerged from the Underground and walked into the Tower, he felt as if he’d fallen back into the sixteenth century. Gaudily uniformed Beefeaters carrying halberds patrolled the grounds.

  Bruce was tempted to laugh at their ridiculous getup. A second glance made him change his mind. The men in those silly clothes looked hard and capable; several of them wore nasty scars along with their silks and brocade. They were combat veterans for sure. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they came out of the elite SAS. If they did, they would be very bad news even with only those overgrown tin openers in their hands.

  One of their number fed some of the half-tame ravens that strutted and flapped as if they owned the place. They probably thought they did. A raven with a bit of meat still dangling from its big, sharp beak cocked its head to one side and stared at Bruce with a disconcertingly knowing black eye. The beak opened and closed. The scrap of meat disappeared.

  When Bruce looked at his wristwatch, he muttered under his breath. How had it got to be three o’clock already? He headed back to the tube station. The hotel where he’d booked a room for the night was close to Piccadilly Circus. He wanted to make sure everything was okay there before he figured out where to eat and what to do tonight.

  If he wanted company for the evening, he wouldn’t have any trouble finding it. Piccadilly Circus swarmed with women of easy virtue. Some were bold as brass; others, you had to look at two or three times to be sure. His American uniform drew them the way a magnet drew iron filings. During the last war, Englishmen had complained that Yanks were overpaid, oversexed, and over here. It was only too plainly the overpaid part that drew the girls now.

  He said “No thanks” several times. Then he shortened it to “No.” Pretty soon, it was “Go away.” By the time he found the hotel, he was yelling “Get lost!” One gal tried to follow him into the lobby anyway.

  The doorman discouraged her. She swore at him. He made as i
f to swat her on the backside. She flounced off. The doorman touched the brim of his cap to Bruce. “Popular, sir, are you?”

  “Christ, I hope not!” Bruce blurted. The doorman laughed. Bruce wasn’t so sure it was funny.

  MARIAN STALEY DUMPED CHEERIOS into a bowl. She poured in milk. It was real milk, straight from the cow (well, pasteurized, but that made it safer), not the horrible powdered crap they’d used all the time at Camp Nowhere. Slices of bananas finished breakfast.

  “Come on, eat up,” she told Linda. “I’ve got to take you over to Betsy’s and then head for work.” Having Betsy watch Linda all day during summer ate up too much of her paycheck, but her daughter was too little to leave her in the house by herself.

  Linda spooned up a couple of bites. Then she stopped and said, “Mommy?”

  “What is it?” Marian asked impatiently. “Why are you wasting time?”

  “Mommy, is Mr. Tabakman gonna be my new daddy?”

  Whatever Marian expected, that wasn’t it. “Where did you get that idea?” she asked after a pause longer than she would have liked.

  “Betsy asked me about it,” Linda said as she started to eat again. “Is he gonna be, Mommy? I’d like to have a daddy again, and Mr. Tabakman’s a nice man, isn’t he?”

  “He is a nice man,” Marian agreed. “I like him very much. He likes me, too—”

  “I know that,” Linda broke in, as if her mother had lost points for coming out with the obvious.

  Bravely, Marian went on, “And he likes you, too.”

  “Well, then.” By the way Linda said it, nothing else needed saying. Things looked real simple when you were six.

  But Marian wasn’t six any more. Neither was Fayvl Tabakman. Marian picked her words with care: “Fayvl and I, we’ll see how much we like each other, and we’ll see how we get along, and then we’ll decide if we want to get married. And if we do, he will be your new daddy. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Linda dug into her Cheerios again, this time in earnest. She stopped only once, to say, “I hope so.”

  Well, I hope so, too, Marian thought. She’d hoped so for a while now, or she wouldn’t have slept with Fayvl. She’d hardly admitted it to herself, though. And I hope Betsy just shuts the hell up from here on out. The teenage babysitter couldn’t very well not see that she and the cobbler were going together. She couldn’t very well keep from jumping to conclusions about what that meant, either. But did she have to start grilling Linda to see if she was right?

  Marian sighed. Betsy probably did. Weed wasn’t the kind of place where a lot of big things happened. The campaign to get an ambulance for the town had gone on for years, not months. When little things were all you had to wonder and gossip about, of course you made the most of them.

  She took Linda over to the babysitter’s house. She didn’t say anything to Betsy about keeping quiet. She knew too well that would only make Betsy jump to more conclusions and blab more. Sometimes the best thing you could do was pretend you hadn’t had a nerve hit.

  Linda gave Marian a dutiful kiss. Marian walked back to her yellow Studebaker. She slid in, pulled out the choke, and started the engine. Then it was off to another exciting, fun-filled day at the Shasta Lumber Company.

  Typing, filing, preparing invoices, answering the telephone, gabbing with the other clerks in the office…None of it, except the gabbing, was anything Marian would have done for fun. But she wasn’t doing it for fun. She was getting paid. Now that she’d been there a while, they’d bumped her up to a buck and a half an hour. All of the raise, of course, went straight into Betsy’s pocket.

  Thanks to Betsy, Marian brought her lunch more often and ate at the diner less. Sometimes she would take her brown bag over to Fayvl’s shop and eat with him. That made the other girls—one of them had to be sixty, but they were all girls—smile and even giggle. It doubtless made them gossip about her while she wasn’t there, but she couldn’t do anything about that.

  She hadn’t planned to have lunch with Fayvl today, but she decided to a few minutes before noon rolled around. His face lit up when she walked in. She liked that. He turned the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. “What’s new with you?” he asked. His own lunch was a salami-and-pickle sandwich on rye bread, an orange, and a banana. Hers was ham-and-cheese on the Wonder Bread Linda liked, with a banana and an apple.

  She didn’t beat around the bush: “This morning, Linda asked me if you were going to be her new daddy.”

  “Did she?” Tabakman said. Marian nodded. He took a bite from his sandwich. After he swallowed, he asked, “Nu? What you told her?”

  “I said we hadn’t decided yet, but that if we kept on liking each other the way we have so far, you might. You probably would, in fact.”

  “Thanks. That sounds pretty good.” He nodded.

  “She likes you. She said so. But you already knew that, right?”

  Fayvl nodded again. “Oh, yes. I always like her, even before the bomb falls. She has—what you say?—she has grit, that one.”

  Marian just thought of Linda as her little girl. But maybe Fayvl saw something she hadn’t. Linda had come through the horror of the A-bomb attack and the different, slower horror of Camp Nowhere and the loss of a father, and here she was, a reasonably happy little girl in spite of it all. If that didn’t take grit, Marian couldn’t see what would.

  She wondered if Linda reminded Fayvl of one his own murdered children. He’d hinted at that once or twice back at the camp. She didn’t ask him. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to know as that she didn’t want to hurt him by making him remember what he’d gone through in Poland.

  He said, “I would be proud to be the daddy of a little one like that.”

  “Well, mister, I’d say your chances are getting better by the day,” Marian answered. “Can I scrounge a cigarette from you?” She was only a sometime smoker, but this seemed like a pretty good sometime.

  “Sure.” He gave her his pack of Old Golds, then took one himself after she returned it. He lit hers and his with a Zippo. “This is a fine tool,” he said as he put it back in his pocket. “It does what they say it does. You want a light, you got a light. Every time.”

  “That’s good.” Marian took a drag and coughed. No, she didn’t have the habit the way somebody who went through a pack or two a day did.

  Fayvl smoked with sober intensity. It gave him an excuse for not doing anything else for a little while. When he stubbed out the cigarette, he looked down at his scarred hands. Still eyeing them and not her, he said, “You know—you got to know—I’m going to ask you sooner or later if you want to marry me.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Marian said in a low voice.

  “Didn’t want to be too quick,” Tabakman said. “I know you got tsuris of your own, your poor husband not coming back. You need time to take care of that inside yourself.”

  “Thank you,” she said, more softly still.

  Fayvl shrugged. “You got to understand, I know how this is. If I don’t know, we couldn’t put up with each other, I think.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But now Linda wants to know what’s what, and it ain’t like we haven’t, well, you know.” His Old Country reticence about such things made him sound downright Victorian. “So, nu, I guess I should ought to ask you now, eppis. You want you should marry me, Marian?”

  As he said, the question wasn’t exactly a surprise. It made her gasp just the same. “Yes, I’ll marry you,” she said. “Linda needs a father, and you’ll be a good one.” She realized she needed more than that. “And I love you. You’re a rock of a man, you know?”

  “Some rock!” He snorted. “Smashed to pieces, rolled around, washed up half the world from where I started.”

  “Grit,” Marian said. “That’s what you called it with Linda. Takes one to know one, is what people say in English.”

  “Huh!” He didn’t sound as if he believed that. “I do best I can for you and the girl. I love you, too, you
know.” Marian nodded, because she did know it. It was the biggest reason she’d said yes.

  —

  When Cade Curtis woke up from his latest operation, he thought for a woozy moment that he’d died and gone to heaven. That wasn’t a muddy, smelly, unshaven dogface looking down at him. It was one of the prettier girls he’d ever seen. Only the surgical mask covering her mouth and nose made him realize she was a nurse, not an angel.

  “How’d it go?” he rasped—his throat seemed surfaced with sandpaper.

  “Here.” She put a paper cup to his lips. He opened his mouth. Ice chips spilled into it. They didn’t want to give you water right after you shook off the ether. You might drown or something. But ice chips were okay. He sucked on them and swallowed the melt.

  When he said “How’d it go?” again, his voice was no worse than a ragged parody of the one he usually used.

  “Captain, I wasn’t in the OR,” she said. Her sky-blue eyes went from warm to wary. “Dr. Eckhardt will have to tell you about what they did this time.”

  “My leg feels funny,” Cade said.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Down by the toes,” Cade answered. “They itch. I can’t feel anything up above them, but they itch.” He tried to wiggle them. He couldn’t tell whether he did or not. You are groggy, he thought…groggily.

  “I’ll get Dr. Eckhardt. He can explain everything to you.” The nurse wheeled and hurried away.

  Dr. Eckhardt came over to the bedside a few minutes later, tailed by the nurse. He didn’t look like a doctor. Had Cade tried to guess what he did for a living, defensive tackle would have come a long way ahead of surgeon. He was big as an ox, broad-shouldered and slow-moving. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “My toes itch,” Cade said. “What did you do to me this time?” He’d had four or five operations; he couldn’t remember which. Time flies when you’re having fun ran through his mind.