Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  He wouldn’t be bringing a war bride back from England. He just had to provide for himself. The big airlines did have waiting lists. He could get his name on them, so if something turned up there….

  After putting his name on Continental’s list, and United’s, and a few more, he took the ferry back across the bay and a bus to San Francisco’s central library. If he was going to find out-of-town phone books anywhere, that was the place. Sure enough, the library had books for places like Firebaugh and Gilroy and Fresno and Bakersfield. He took notes.

  Then he went back to the little studio apartment he’d rented and started talking with long-distance operators. He didn’t want to think what this month’s phone bill would look like, but that would wait. There were more cropdusting outfits than he’d guessed.

  A guy in Fresno said, “What the dickens are you doing talking to me, man? How come the airlines don’t want you, if you’ve done half the stuff you say you’ve done?”

  “Because guys who’ve done the kinds of things I’ve done are a dime a dozen, Mr. Agajanian,” Bruce answered. That wasn’t strictly true. But the airlines probably didn’t expect him to drop an A-bomb from a DC-6’s cargo bay. He added, “And you know what else? I’m not all that broken up about it. Cropdusting sounds like about the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

  Krikor Agajanian laughed. “I don’t know about that, but you won’t feel like a bus driver, the way you would steering an airliner all over the place. ’Course, you won’t get paid like you would in an airliner, either. What I’ll pay you is—” He named a figure that wasn’t even within shouting distance of what an airline pilot got.

  Bruce sighed. He wouldn’t be able to sock away a nice piece of change dusting fields around Fresno. But he wouldn’t starve, either. “Come up twenty-five bucks a week and I’m your man,” he said.

  “I’ll come up fifteen.” Agajanian sounded as if every word pained him. Bruce had no trouble getting what that meant. The boss of Consolidated Cropdusting wanted him, but was in the habit of squeezing every penny till he ground flour from the wheat ears on the back.

  “Deal,” Bruce said.

  “Can you get down here by noon tomorrow?” Krikor Agajanian asked. “I’ll show you around, show you the planes we fly, see what’s what. How’s that sound?”

  “I’ll be there,” Bruce promised. See what’s what had to mean see if you’re bullshitting me. Bruce didn’t mind. Only a fool bought a pig in a poke.

  He got himself a car that afternoon: a 1947 Ford the color of a lime. He wasn’t broke; he hadn’t spent that much of his service pay. But he did want to have money keep coming in, not just go out all the time.

  He took US 101 down to Gilroy the next morning. Gilroy billed itself as the garlic capital of the world; the smell lived up to the name. State Route 152 went east over the hills into the Central Valley. He drove southeast on US 99 to Fresno. It was November, but it felt like August there.

  Since he’d never been in Fresno before, he stopped at a Flying-A station and got a road map along with his fillup. Armed with that, he pulled into the graveled lot in front of Consolidated Cropdusting twenty minutes early. A burly man with slicked-back gray hair and a big hooked nose came out to greet him. “You McNulty?” he asked.

  “Call me Bruce,” Bruce said, holding out his hand.

  “Then I’m Greg. That’s what Krikor is in Armenian—Gregory.” Agajanian had a bear trap of a grip. “Come around behind and take a look at what you’ll be going up in.”

  A big grin spread across Bruce’s face when he saw the four biplanes. “Kaydets!” he said in delight. “I learned to fly in these babies.” So had a million other guys; Boeing Stearman Kaydets were the first planes American and Canadian military pilots flew during the last war. These all still bore the bright yellow paint job the U.S. military slapped on its trainers.

  Agajanian grinned, too, slyly. “Think you remember how?”

  “Oh, I just might,” Bruce said.

  “How about taking me up for a little hop, then?” Agajanian pointed to the closest Kaydet. “I know that one’s gassed up—I did it myself. C’mon.”

  Bruce followed him to the plane. A leather helmet with attached goggles, straight out of World War I, sat on the pilot’s seat. Feeling like the Red Baron, Bruce put it on. “This is gonna be fun!” he said as Krikor Agajanian spun the prop and the Kaydet’s little engine buzzed to life.

  —

  Armorers wheeled bombs out to the Tu-4 on carts made of steel tubing with rubber tires. Watching them, Boris Gribkov remembered that the groundcrew men at airstrips during the Great Patriotic War hadn’t had such elegant transportation for their high explosives and incendiaries. They’d used whatever they could, sometimes panje wagons, sometimes raw muscle, to get bombs to the bombers.

  Anton Presnyakov was thinking along with him. “I’ve seen pictures of carts like that at American airstrips in England,” the copilot said.

  “Now that you mention it, so have I,” Boris replied. “Well, if we can borrow the design for the bomber, no reason we can’t borrow the design for the cart that feeds it, eh?”

  “We didn’t borrow. We invented,” Lev Vaksman said. “Comrade Reguspatoff is a very clever fellow.”

  “Reguspatoff?” Boris echoed, puzzled. It sounded as if it ought to be a Russian name, but it wasn’t one he’d ever heard before.

  “Of course.” The flight engineer’s eyes twinkled. “It’s the abbreviation the Americans put on things they make. It stands for Registered—U.S. Patent Office.”

  “Does it?” Boris said tonelessly. He shook his head. “Where in the regulations does it say every crew’s got to have one crazy Zhid?”

  “That’s Chapter 47, Article 16, Section 3, Subsection 8…sir.” Vaksman sounded so convincing, Boris was tempted to believe him.

  Chains and hooks lifted the ordnance into the big bomber’s belly. The armorers worked with care Boris knew he couldn’t hope for from mechanics or signalmen. No one on this crew was drunk. He’d checked them, but these fellows tended to it for themselves. If you made a stupid, brainless mistake with a wrench or a wigwag flag, you might hurt the plane and its crew, but you wouldn’t do yourself any harm. If you made a stupid, brainless mistake with a 500-kilo bomb, there wouldn’t be enough of you or your friends left to bury.

  “Warsaw tonight,” Presnyakov said. “We’ve finally got troops inside the city. Looks like the damn Poles are running out of steam at last. Took ’em long enough, the sons of bitches.”

  “Da,” Boris said. “We’ll have to be careful not to drop our presents on our own men’s heads.” Soldiers hated nothing worse than getting hit by their own comrades, and who could blame them? He knew a pilot who’d got punched in the nose for bombing the wrong side’s trenches west of Kiev at the end of 1943.

  He was sick of bombing anyone for any reason, even if the Tu-4 carried only—only!—conventional weapons. He would have been much happier spraying insecticide over fields in an ancient Po-2, the wind blowing over the windscreen and into his face. But the state didn’t care about that. It had a job for him to do, and do it he would, or else.

  They went off on time. Boris had his usual moment of fear when he pulled back on the yoke. Would the bomber’s nose go up? Would the beast get off the ground? If it came back to earth all at once, the crater it left would beggar any mere armorer’s mistake. He kept a close eye on the throttles, and on the engines’ revs. You didn’t want to push them too hard, no matter how much you felt you should.

  Once the landing gear went up, he breathed easier. In the right-hand seat, Presnyakov said, “Now all we’ve got to worry about are the goddamn Poles.”

  “Nobody’s thrown any fighters at us since we stopped fighting the USA. Not the Poles, not the Hungarians, not the Czechs.” Boris knocked his head in lieu of the wood he didn’t have. “Let’s hope the Poles won’t tonight, either.”

  On they flew. Every so often, the navigator would suggest a small course correction:
two degrees this way, four degrees that. Radar made navigation, especially navigation by night, far easier than it had been before. When you could “see” the terrain below, you didn’t need to steer by the stars and by dead reckoning.

  “We should be entering Polish territory now,” Svyatoslav Filevich reported.

  Looking out through the Plexiglas cockpit windows, Boris couldn’t see any difference between Byelorussia and Poland. Then he did: several large fires down below. Soviet manufacturers weren’t so good with Plexiglas as they might have been. The flames on the ground seemed to ripple. It wasn’t too much vodka; it was windows that could have been better.

  But Stalin had insisted that everything on the Tu-4 should exactly copy the equivalent feature on the B-29 that served as its model. The American plane had Plexiglas cockpit windows. Tupolev’s design bureau didn’t dare do anything but follow the orders it got. Tupolev himself had served a stretch in the gulag. Stalin let him out when the Great Patriotic War started, and he went back to creating new models as if nothing had happened.

  Fyodor Ostrovsky had an even more panoramic view than Boris did. “They’re shooting at us, Comrade Pilot,” the bombardier said.

  “If they want to waste ammo, that’s their lookout,” Gribkov said. The Tu-4 was up near 10,000 meters. You needed some serious flak guns to throw shells that high. Sure enough, tracer rounds petered out far below the bomber. Bursts from ordinary shells also failed to trouble it.

  More fires on the ground showed where Soviet forces and the Polish bandits clashed. When Filevich announced that they were approaching Warsaw, Boris saw lots of fires ahead. “Do you think the incendiaries will have anything to burn by the time we drop them?” he asked.

  Anton Presnyakov shrugged. “I’m not going to worry about it. We’re supposed to drop them, that’s all. As long as we do, and we don’t drop them on our own people, our dicks aren’t on the block. What happens after they hit isn’t our department.”

  “You’ve got a good way of looking at things,” Boris said, less sarcastically than he’d intended. That was a good way for a soldier to look at things. You did what your superiors told you to do and hoped they had a better grip on the big picture than you did.

  Sometimes they really did. Sometimes Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, confident of another blitzkrieg victim’s scalp to hang on his wall. Sometimes Stalin tried trading A-bombs with the United States, only to discover the Americans had more to trade and more ways to get them home than he did.

  Things like that made you wonder about leaders in general. Unless you were a leader yourself, the smartest thing you could do was not let anyone know you were wondering. As soon as the leaders and their minions got wind of your doubts, they stamped them out with jackboots or billy clubs or labor camps or bullets.

  “Nearing the target, Comrade Pilot,” Ostrovsky said.

  The bomb-bay doors opened. The bombs fell free. The plane bobbed in the air as they did. The doors hissed closed. Boris gave the Tu-4 more throttle and swung in a slow turn to see what he’d done to Warsaw. It wasn’t full emergency power to get away from an A-bomb’s blast waves. These were smaller explosions, ones that couldn’t smash his airplane like a man hitting a fly with a rolled-up Pravda.

  Big flashes of light were the 500-kilo bombs going off. The smaller, more persistent ones, the ones that looked like matches struck a hundred meters away at night, were the incendiaries. Some of those hot red dots winked out: they didn’t land on anything that would burn. Others grew and spread.

  What kind of fire department did the bandits have? Whatever they had, it would be tested—or perhaps broken—tonight. More flashes and sparks lit in the Polish capital. Boris’ wasn’t the only bomber punishing the uprising, then. A plane here, a few planes there, the USSR could still scrape together enough loyalists to do the leaders’ bidding.

  Was that good or bad? Boris had no idea. He suspected Molotov didn’t, either. You did what you did and you saw what happened. Neither Hitler nor Stalin had dreamt he would fail. The same uncertainty applied to lesser men’s deeds, too. People like me don’t get into history books, though, Boris thought, and a good thing we don’t.

  —

  Aaron Finch and Istvan Szolovits pulled into the Blue Front parking lot one in front of the other. They parked next to each other. When Aaron got out of his car and said, “Morning Istvan. How you doing?”, he spoke English, not Yiddish.

  “I am fine. How are you?” Istvan replied in the same language. His accent, though still heavy, wasn’t nearly so strong as it had been when he started at Blue Front. He’d always have it, but it wouldn’t stay thick enough to slice.

  “I’m doing all right. And you’re studying hard. I can tell,” Aaron said.

  Istvan still switched to Yiddish when he needed to talk about anything complicated. He did that now, saying, “English grammar is simple enough. But English spelling…Gevalt! It makes me want to cross myself, and Catholic I’m not. Why is it like that?”

  “What are you asking me for? I drive a truck, remember?” Aaron said.

  “You know things,” Istvan said seriously. “You’re another one of those people who’re too smart for their own good.”

  That brought Aaron up short. He didn’t need to think about it before he nodded. “Mazel tov. You just summed up the whole Finch family in one sentence. My father, me, my brothers—not my sister so much, I will say—and now my son. The lot of us are smart-alecks.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Istvan said.

  “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t,” Aaron replied. “But talk to your night-school teachers about why English spelling is so messed up. They’ll be able to tell you. All I can do is make dumb guesses.”

  “I don’t have enough English myself yet to ask the things I really want to know,” Istvan said.

  “Ah, okay. I get you now,” Aaron said. When people said You’re somebody I can talk to, most of the time they meant that the person they were talking to was an understanding soul. If Istvan were to say it about Aaron, he’d mean it literally. Same with You speak my language. Aaron didn’t speak Hungarian, but they had Yiddish in common. He set his hand on Istvan’s shoulder. He needed to reach up to do it; Istvan had three inches on him. “C’mon. The work won’t do itself.”

  “Too bad,” Istvan said, but he followed Aaron into the warehouse. He was willing enough; no two ways about that. But he didn’t rather enjoy the job the way Aaron did. Aaron liked coming home tired from physical labor at the end of a day. It showed he’d been doing things…unless he came home exhausted, of course.

  Istvan didn’t have that. He would rather have been adding up columns of numbers, or maybe twisting a slide rule’s tail. As soon as he’d learned enough to do the kinds of things he really wanted to do, he’d leave Blue Front without a backwards glance, the way a snake sloughed off a skin it outgrew.

  For now, though, he was here. Aaron supposed Mr. Weissman reported back to whoever’d asked him to give the kid a job. He hadn’t asked his boss about that, but it sure seemed likely. Did Istvan think of things like that? Probably. He’d lived in Red Hungary. That was the kind of place where everybody’d report on everybody else, or so Aaron imagined.

  They didn’t do things like that in the United States. They never had. They never would. Or so Aaron thought, till he remembered the Air Force officer who’d questioned him after he captured a Soviet flyer instead of beating the Russian to death with a tire iron or something. He’d managed to satisfy the guy that he hadn’t saved the flyer because he was especially fond of Russians or anything. Even so, the idea that they thought he might have been rankled.

  And he might need to look a little differently at Howard Bauman’s interrogation by the Un-American Activities Committee. He’d always figured Howard had it coming, because the actor damn well was a Red. But the Un-American Activities Committee had been Joe McCarthy’s baby, and if McCarthy hadn’t dreamt of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin when he went to bed at night, no one ev
er had.

  Thinking such thoughts, Aaron walked right past the refrigerator he was supposed to take to Westwood this morning. Istvan had looked at the work order, too. He tapped Aaron on the arm. “Isn’t this the one?” he asked.

  It was a Hotpoint. It was a Model 3200. Aaron thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “This is the one, all right. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t stapled to my neck.”

  “I don’t think so,” Istvan said. “We were going on about too smart for our own good a minute ago, weren’t we?”

  “Too dumb for my own good is more like it,” Aaron said. “Let’s get the TV and the washing machine on the truck before we load the icebox, though. They’re going down to Culver City, so we’ll unload them last.”

  Istvan nodded. “Makes sense.” Aaron smiled. Jim Summers never had quite realized the last-on, first-off principle was the way to go at it. Freighters always did it that way; noticing that drilled it into Aaron. But common sense said the same thing. Jim usually wanted to do whatever was easiest right now, even if that cost him more work later.

  Aaron loaded and secured the television and the washing machine. Here came Istvan with the Hotpoint on a heavy dolly. He made sure he kept it as close to vertical as he could. “Turn it around and back it up the ramp,” Aaron said. “I’ll get on the other side and push while you pull.”

  Somewhere there was a two-headed animal called a pushmi-pullyu. Was it in one of the Doctor Dolittle books he’d picked up in a secondhand bookstore? He thought so. Leon wasn’t old enough for those yet, but he would be before too long.

  Istvan draped a padded blanket over the refrigerator and taped it into place. He roped the icebox down so it wouldn’t smack any of the other cargo. “Good job,” Aaron told him. Deadpan, he added, “Anybody’d think you’ve been doing it for years.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Istvan didn’t sound grateful.