Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  Like the nurse, Eckhardt was still wearing a mask. He sighed, which made the cotton gauze whuffle out. “Son, I’m sorry as hell, but we had to take the leg off below the knee,” he said. “We pumped all the penicillin and erythromycin we could into you, but the circulation from the wound down was just too lousy to let ’em do everything they should. If we didn’t amputate, you would’ve been dead in a week.”

  Cade heard the words. He understood them, after a fashion. But it seemed as if the doctor had to be talking about someone else. “You must have the wrong patient, Doc,” he said. “I’ve still got my leg. How can my toes itch if I don’t have my leg?”

  “That’s called phantom pain,” Dr. Eckhardt answered. “Sometimes it goes away pretty soon; sometimes it lasts for years. But we gave you a good stump, with plenty of flesh. Once you heal and you get your prosthetic fitted, you should be able to move around almost as well as you did before you got hit.”

  “You’re crazy,” Cade said. It wasn’t just coming out from under the anesthetic that made him so loopy. He realized they’d pumped even more morphine than usual into him after surgery. The dope made everything distant and unimportant, including the fine philosophical point of whether you needed to own real toes to have them itch.

  “We’ll get you back to the ward,” Eckhardt told him. “Maybe you’ll go back down into sleep. That may do you some good. And when you wake up again, you’ll be a little more with it.”

  “I’m just fine,” Cade protested, but his eyelids were sliding shut. He remembered the doctor and the nurse starting to move his bed. He even remembered realizing it must have wheels and feeling very clever. But he never remembered getting to the ward.

  He came back to himself some indeterminate time later. Not just his toes hurt then. The whole leg seemed to have been hit by napalm. He must have made some kind of noise because a nurse—not such a pretty one—came over and asked, “You in pain, soldier?”

  “Yes,” Cade whispered. And an A-bomb blast was warm, and the ocean was moist, and….

  She gave him a shot. The pain didn’t disappear, but it drew back to a place where he could deal with it. That seemed miracle enough for the moment. Cade didn’t care if he turned into an addict who prowled the streets looking for a pusher to sell him his next shot. Without morphine, the next shot he would have asked for was one right between the eyes.

  Wait, he said to himself. The doctor—Eckhardt, that was his name—had told him they’d amputated his leg. How was he supposed to prowl around looking for his next fix if he had only one leg?

  Slowly (he couldn’t think any other way with the drug in his veins), he began to wonder about everything else the amputation would do to his life. Call me Stumpy, he thought, but it wasn’t funny. What kind of girl would want to go out with a cripple, much less marry one? The worry felt less urgent than it would have if he weren’t full of morphine, but it was still there.

  And I’m never going to be a general, he realized. It wasn’t likely that an ROTC kid would ever wear stars on his shoulders, but it sure wouldn’t happen now. In spite of everything, it might have if he’d stayed whole. The past two years, war had been all he knew, and he’d shown the brass he was good at it. (He’d also shown them he was a loose cannon, but he didn’t dwell on that.) If he’d stayed in, he could have kept rising.

  Not without half his leg, though. They’d pin a Purple Heart on him to go with his Bronze Star, and then they’d hand him an honorable discharge. They might even promote him to major while they were at it: a pat on the ass to go with the kick out the door. He’d just been demobilized in more ways than one.

  The nurse came back with a glass full of golden liquid and a straw. “Can you drink some apple juice?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” he said. She cranked up the front end of his bed. The straw had a corrugated section up above the juice line that let it bend without closing up. Cade had never seen one like it before. He marveled at how clever it was. He also marveled at how good the cold apple juice tasted. If the nurse hadn’t told him what it was, he might have taken it for the nectar of the gods.

  Now that he’d been elevated, he could look down at himself and see what was what…and what wasn’t. Sure as hell, the shapes of his two legs—or rather, his leg and a half—under the sheets didn’t match. The morphine kept him from getting too upset about it.

  “They really took it off,” he said, more wonder than distress in his voice.

  “I’m afraid so, yes,” the nurse said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too,” Cade said. Then something else crossed his mind. “Hey, what happened to Jimmy? Uh, the Korean soldier who brought me back to the aid station?” He’d had too many worries of his own lately even to think about Jimmy. That shamed him, but there it was.

  Her nostrils flared. “You can’t expect me to know anything about one gook or another.” Her expression showed that, if she hadn’t been brought up so well, she would have said one goddamn gook or another.

  “Jimmy’s no gook!” Even doped silly, Cade was sure of that. “He’s a better American than most of the Americans I know. Can you find out what’s up with him? Please?”

  “Don’t worry about it right now. Just worry about getting better.” The nurse might have been soothing a six-year-old with a cold.

  Trouble was, it worked, at least for the moment. Cade didn’t have the energy to keep up the argument. He was both too fresh from the operating room and too doped up to have the energy for much of anything. Holding his eyes open seemed as hard as lifting heavy barbells.

  But he didn’t forget. Jimmy was his obligation. He wouldn’t have abandoned a kitten he rescued from a cruel master. He owed Jimmy at least that much. The powers that be wouldn’t think so. Cade didn’t give a damn about the powers that be.

  —

  Casimir the Polish bandit chieftain—he called himself a major, but he wasn’t exactly, not in the military sense—scowled at Vasili Yasevich. “Yes, you’ve persuaded me,” he said in his odd Russian. Every so often, when he couldn’t find the word he wanted, he’d drop in the Polish equivalent. Sometimes Vasili would get it, sometimes not. He went on, “You really talk Chinese, and read it, and write it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Vasili said. Casimir had only to say the word and his men would kill Vasili. Getting in bad with him was idiotic.

  “Now,” Casimir said, “what the fuck can you do that might actually be worth something to us?”

  “I’ve told you before, sir—I’m a druggist, or trained as one, anyway,” Vasili answered. “I know the Chinese style, but I know the Western one, too. My father made sure I did.”

  “That would be great if we had any drugs,” Casimir said. “What we get, though, we have to take from the Red Army.”

  “You ought to see if you can hit an aid station, then. Good medicines will keep your men going when they fall over without ’em.”

  “I know that,” Casimir said impatiently. “What I really want is ether or chloroform. We have doctors, but there’s so much shit they can’t do if they can’t knock out somebody who’s hurt. Do you know how to make anesthetics?”

  “No. Sorry, sir.” Vasili would have said yes if he’d thought he had the least chance of succeeding. But he knew he didn’t have enough chemistry.

  Casimir’s grunt made ice run up his back. It was the kind of grunt that preceded orders like Knock him over the head—he’s useless. But Casimir tried a different kind of question: “What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?”

  “Settle down somewhere. Be a druggist or do odd jobs. Try like hell to stay out of trouble.” Vasili meant it. The way things looked to him, trouble had found him in Harbin and then in Smidovich. He hadn’t gone looking for it. Grigory Papanin might have had a different opinion, but Papanin was still back in Smidovich…if the Red Army hadn’t conscripted him by now, too.

  “Odd jobs? What kind?”

  “Carpentry. Masonry. You name it, pretty much.”

  Casimir grunted
again, this time on a different note: one that showed interest. “How are you with field fortifications? Russians are usually good at that kind of shit, aren’t they?”

  “I know how to dig foxholes and trenches. The way things worked was, they conscripted me, stuck a uniform on me and gave me a machine pistol, and then they put me on the train for Poland. As soon as I got here, they dropped me into the line against you guys.”

  “They really are scraping the bottom of the barrel, then,” Casimir said. Vasili didn’t try to argue with him. The Pole went on, “Either you’ve got some idea of what you’re doing or you’re lucky. Otherwise, you would have got killed by now. So let’s see what you can manage. You see that stretch of high ground over there?”

  Vasili hadn’t paid much attention to it, but it was there, all right. He wasn’t quite a field engineer, but yes, he could read ground. It was a knack whose acquisition helped keep him alive.

  “I see it,” he answered.

  “Get us dug in just at the crest, so we can hit the Russians and then slip back when they hit us. You know the kind of thing I mean, right? You’ll have seen it in the Red Army.”

  “Oh, sure.” Vasili nodded, as if in wisdom. If the Pole was trusting him to have superior military knowledge…it meant Poland had lost a lot of wars to Russia. Russians had that same nervous regard for Germans. Vasili asked, “The men will do what I tell them?”

  “Bet your balls they will,” Casimir said. “They want to keep breathing like anybody else. Most of ’em know enough Russian so that shouldn’t be a problem. Point if you have to, or get one of the fluent guys to translate for you.”

  “I’ll do it.” In his Red Army uniform, Vasili felt like a Nazi in Feldgrau working with a bunch of Russians. But, here, he was just uncommonly consistent. The bandits wore a motley mix of Soviet, Polish, and old German uniforms, along with civilian dungarees, wool shirts, jackets, boots, and hats. One of them called the band a carnival from Vienna. Vasili didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it sounded good.

  And Casimir had it right: they did what he told them to do. It wasn’t the slavish obedience the Red Army demanded, but it turned the trick. They dug in along the swell of ground, and used bushes and junk to conceal their foxholes and entrenchments. Zigzag trenches ran back from the main position, so they could get away if they had to.

  Surveying the half-kilometer of work from the front as the sun sank in the west, Casimir nodded. “That’s not half bad,” he said. “Better than I expected, to tell you the truth.”

  “I want the line to be good,” Vasili answered. “I’m going to be in it, aren’t I? I want the Reds to have trouble blowing me up.”

  Casimir chuckled. “The Reds, huh? What does that make you?”

  “A conscript—I already told you that. My folks were Whites. Why do you think they wound up in Harbin?”

  “Why does anybody do anything?” Casimir returned.

  Vasili found no ready answer for that. A bandit leader with a taste for philosophy? What could be stranger than that? Instead of an answer, Vasili came out with a question of his own: “You don’t mind my asking, what did you do before you picked up a rifle?”

  “I studied for the priesthood till I decided I wouldn’t make a good one. That didn’t take as long as I wish it would have. Then I taught Latin and Greek, mostly to kids who didn’t want to learn them. But I’ve been carrying a gun for a long time now. An awful lot of people in Europe have.”

  “I guess so.” Vasili hadn’t thought about it much. But plenty of the people who hadn’t wanted Hitler running their country for them wouldn’t have wanted Stalin running it for them, either. The Red Army would have seemed too big and too strong to take on for a while, and the governments Russia imposed would have featured a string of baby Stalins. But when the satellites saw that the USSR had taken a beating…

  A scout came back to Casimir and said something in Polish. Vasili could make out words here and there, but not sentences. Casimir spelled out what he’d suspected: “The Russians are on the way. Now you get to find out how good your fieldworks are.”

  “Do I get a piece of my own?” Vasili asked.

  “If you do, there’s no going back. If they catch you in arms against them, they’ll kill you as soon as they hear you speaking Russian,” Casimir warned.

  “I understand that,” Vasili said. “I’m a Russian. I can’t help being a Russian. But I’m not a Soviet Russian, and I don’t want to be one.”

  “The oath we swear is to the Black Virgin of Czestochowa. That wouldn’t mean much to you, would it?”

  “Afraid not.” Vasili thought of himself as indifferently Orthodox. Catholic rites didn’t matter to him. “But I’ll fight for you any which way.”

  He got a Mauser. It could reach farther than his lost PPD, but not nearly so fast. He practiced working the bolt a few times without a magazine on the rifle. It wasn’t hard. They put him in the trenches with a minder. The big guy didn’t speak much Russian, or need it to make clear to Vasili what would happen to him if he tried to take a powder.

  He didn’t mind shooting at men he might have served with. What the hell? The Red Army soldiers were shooting at him. They tapped at the defenses he’d designed, then pulled back when they saw the Poles wouldn’t flee in terror. They might have been ready to fight for the rodina against the Americans. But what Russian wanted to get killed by a bunch of Poles? Vasili sure hadn’t, and the way his ex-buddies made that halfhearted poke at his line said they didn’t, either.

  —

  Rolf Mehlen advanced into the portion of West Germany the Ivans had occupied armed with a rifle and a mine detector. The rifle stayed slung on his shoulder; the ceasefire seemed to be holding. He’d got the mine detector because…He supposed he’d got it because his superiors understood perfectly well that he didn’t give a shit.

  He remembered when mine detectors were brand new and wonderful, halfway through the last war. Before that, the pioneers found mines by crawling up to and through the minefields, probing with bayonets or sharp sticks. When you went after mines like that, sooner or later one of them would find you first.

  With a detector, you didn’t have to probe. When the gadget found a mine’s metal case, it would play a tone in your earphones. You could dig the mine out yourself or mark it for later disposal. It was great.

  In theory, it was great. The Russians didn’t take long to figure out that the detectors searched for metal in the ground. They started manufacturing mines where the explosive charge lived in a varnished wooden box. The only metal those had was in the fuse mechanism. Sometimes, if you were lucky, the detector would pick that up. More often than not, it wouldn’t, and you got a pioneer splashed all over the landscape. The survivors went back to hunting with sticks and bayonets.

  Rolf had a new-model American detector. It was said to pick up the wooden-cased mines the Ivans still used better than the old German marks had. Whether what was said had anything to do with what was true…Rolf was out there to find out for himself.

  There was a tone, from a third of a meter in front of his right boot. He didn’t take the next step, the one his brain had already started to order. Instead, he crouched very carefully. He dug toward the mine with his bayonet. After he found the edge of it, he could also locate the center. He tied a strip of red cloth to a little bush growing above it so the people behind him could get rid of it. Then he rose, moved around the place the detector had warned him of, and went on.

  He found two more mines in quick succession, one of them a sneaky wooden job. Maybe the American detector lived up to what they claimed for it after all. He could hope so.

  He wished he had the Russian who’d come up with the wooden mine in front of him. That was what a rifle was for, by God! The evil bastard was probably a Jew, too. (That Germany had quickly adopted wooden mines itself never entered his thoughts.) Rolf hated Russians and Jews in more or less equal measure. They’d combined to brew up Bolshevism, hadn’t they? They’d combined to rob good
, decent Aryans of the Lebensraum they deserved, too.

  Had things gone the way they should have, he would have been raising a family on a farm in the Ukraine somewhere. The only Slavs within kilometers would be a few slave laborers. Jews? There wouldn’t be any Jews at all, not above the ground.

  But things hadn’t gone that way. Instead, here he was, hunting for Russian mines deep inside his own country. God must have been looking the other way when the Reich had to lay down its arms in 1945. If the Amis and Tommies had only followed Germany east against the hordes of Untermenschen…

  They were too stupid. They paid for their foolishness. They paid for it, yes, but how much more did the Vaterland pay? Who could calculate that? Rolf knew how far beyond him it was.

  Something moved, out beyond the edge of the minefield. Rolf flopped flat before he was consciously aware he’d done it. His Springfield got off his back and into his hands the same way. He already had a round chambered. He flicked off the safety. If he needed to fight, he was ready.

  He didn’t think he’d need to. Reflex responded to anything that made its alarms jangle. The motion of a stray cat or a farm dog or a cow tripped his circuits the same way a man’s movement would. You stayed alive by responding even when you didn’t have to. Not responding when you should have was what cost you your neck.

  But that was a man out there, a man in Red Army khaki. Rolf drew a bead on him. He wasn’t supposed to be there. The Ivans had pulled out of these parts—except this Ivan hadn’t. If Rolf potted him, nobody would say boo.

  He didn’t fire right away. The enemy soldier had no idea he was there. After a moment, Rolf realized the Russian wasn’t a soldier, not in the strict sense of the word. He was a deserter, a very different beast.

  After watching him a little while longer, Rolf realized he was also drunk as a lord. He lurched. He staggered. He wobbled along like a crumpled-up sheet of wastepaper blowing on the breeze. His irregular progress took him closer and closer to the mines.

  Rolf thought about shouting a warning. Max Bachman surely would have. But Rolf had thought Max was a sponge-soft pussy from the moment he’d met him. Max wasn’t yellow; in a fight, he was fine. But as far as Rolf was concerned, the printer was damn lucky he’d gone into the Wehrmacht and not into one of the SS’s concentration camps.