Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  A doctor came by to check on him: an East German man who spoke Russian with the precision of a bright schoolboy. “You are feeling well?” he asked.

  “Not too bad, Doc,” Morozov answered. Then he opened his mouth so the man in the white coat could stick a thermometer under his tongue.

  “Oh, this is excellent!” the Fritz said when he looked at Konstantin’s temperature. “You have no fever now for two days in a row. This shows your immunity to infection is recovering.”

  “Good.” Konstantin supposed it was good. It sounded good, anyway. He asked, “How much can you do for radiation sickness, anyway?”

  “Less than we would like, I am sorry to say,” the fraternal socialist ally replied. (What had he done in the last war? Patched up guys for the Wehrmacht? Morozov wouldn’t have been surprised—he was plenty old enough.) After a moment, he continued, “We treat the symptoms as they develop, to the best of our ability. We give supportive care—we keep patients comfortable and well-nourished, to help them recover from the dose of radiation they have received. But we cannot do anything about the radiation itself. If it is too much…” He let his voice trail off.

  Konstantin held out his right hand, fingers in a fist, thumb pointing down. The German doctor nodded. Konstantin asked, “How close did my crew and me come to getting too much?”

  “No one had a Geiger counter in your tank, so I cannot measure that exactly,” the doctor replied. “I have seen people who were sicker than you men recover. I have not seen people who were much sicker than you recover.”

  “I get you.” That marched pretty well with the way Konstantin had felt right after they brought him here. Then he asked, “How many other people with radiation sickness have you seen?”

  “More than you think, perhaps. Remember, the Americans have used these horrible bombs against the German Democratic Republic. So my colleagues and I have had practice with our fellow citizens.”

  “Ah.” Morozov left it there. As a matter of fact, he’d forgotten the Yankees had dropped A-bombs on this part of Germany. Like most Russians who’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, he had trouble working up much sympathy for Fritzes.

  The doctor produced a lancet and a microscope slide. The slide had a label with Morozov’s name and service number written on it. Well, actually the label said MOROZOW, not МОРОЗОВ, but that was what the Latin alphabet and German language did to it.

  “Give me your finger, please,” the man said. With a small sigh, Konstantin did. He couldn’t begin to remember how many times he’d got stuck since he came here. One more went on the list he wasn’t keeping.

  He’d taken more wounds, real wounds, than he could keep track of in this war and the last one. Gunshots, fragments, burns…He’d known some serious pain. Next to all that, a little poke with the lancet should have been as nothing. But it wasn’t. It hurt, every single time.

  As the doctor smeared his blood onto the slide and put a cover glass over it, Konstantin asked him about that. “Is it my imagination?” he wondered.

  “Nyet,” the doctor said, sounding very Russian indeed for one word. “For one thing, hands have more nerves than other parts of the body. For another, most wounds happen when you do not look for them. You know I shall stick you. You almost feel it before it happens.”

  “What do you know?” Konstantin said thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “That makes sense. Thanks, Doc.” He wasn’t in the habit of thanking Germans, but he did here.

  “It is nothing.” The doctor put the slide with Morozov’s blood on it into the breast pocket of his white coat. One of the things radiation poisoning did to you was give you a fierce anemia. They took all the blood counts to see how people came back from it.

  When the German came to the sick, bald artilleryman in the next bed, the fellow sang out: “Here’s the vampire again!”

  The Red Army soldiers in the ward laughed, Konstantin as loud as any of them. The doctor’s smile was the kind you used when you wanted to clout the guy you were smiling at. “It is necessary so that we may help you regain your health again,” he said primly.

  “Sure, pal, but it’s still no fun,” the artilleryman said, echoing what Konstantin had been thinking.

  Lunch was stewed liver. Liver stew, liver cooked with onions, chopped liver, liver dumplings, liver paste (that one had been a favorite German ration in the last war)…The cooks fed the men with radiation sickness every kind of liver dish they could come up with. They said it helped build blood. About the only things they didn’t do were drip it in with a needle and serve it in suppository form.

  Konstantin liked liver. Or rather, he had liked liver. He’d taken plenty of those tinfoil tubes of liver paste off dead Fritzes. He’d enjoyed them, too. They’d tasted like victory. Now…If they ever let him out of here, he didn’t think he’d ever touch the stuff again. He’d had it up to there, and then some.

  But at least he could think about escaping this place. Compared to how he’d felt when he got here, that was progress with a capital P.

  —

  Advancing! Gustav Hozzel wasn’t used to advancing against the Russians. Last time around, he’d started fighting in the east just about when the Germans began their long, bitter, grinding withdrawal toward and then into the Vaterland. He’d lived through his first couple of scrapes as much by luck as anything else. After that, he’d started to see what he needed to do.

  By the time the war ended, he was one of the hard-bitten veterans who kept the Reich on its feet for a year, maybe even a year and a half, after it should have fallen over. He’d retreated from somewhere near Rostov-on-Don to Germany, almost every centimeter of the way on foot.

  He’d hardly ever gone forward. Oh, local counterattacks sometimes took back a few square kilometers of lost ground, but never for long. Things had worked the same way in this new war, too. There were just too many Russians. There were always too many Russians.

  But if you blew a swarm of them to hell at once…Of course, the drawback to that was that the Amis had also blown a swarm of Gustav’s countrymen to hell. They hadn’t done that as long as they saw any chance of hanging on to West Germany. Once they didn’t see that chance any more, they didn’t hesitate, either.

  Gustav’s regiment moved east through the wreckage of Wesel two days after the bomb fell there. He had no idea whether that was safe. All his time in Russia had taught him not to ask inconvenient questions.

  It was even worse than he’d expected. He knew what bombs did. He’d seen plenty of cities smashed flat from the air, and from the ground. He’d helped scorch Russian earth himself.

  But the center of Wesel wasn’t just knocked into ruins, the way ordinary bombs did. It wasn’t just scorched, either, or even baked. It was incinerated, melted. The stump of the cathedral spire left after Russian guns bit off the top and the observers up there had flowed like candle wax. Stone wasn’t supposed to do that, dammit.

  In his pocket, Gustav carried a little piece of greenish glass—melted rock and concrete—he’d picked up near the doubly destroyed spire. He wanted something to remember Wesel by, and that seemed to fit. It was probably radioactive, but he hoped it wasn’t too radioactive.

  To his surprise, Rolf was all for the atom bombs. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” said the ex-LAH man, who wasn’t long on original thoughts. “As long as we kill Russians, what else matters?”

  “You don’t have any relatives in Wesel, do you?” Max Bachman asked, beating Gustav to the punch.

  “If I did, I’d rather see them dead than living under the Bolsheviks,” Rolf said. The really scary thing was, Gustav believed him.

  Right under where the bomb went off, they found no dead at all. The A-bomb had simply erased them, as it had erased much of Wesel. As they moved farther east, they did come across corpses, but so charred and shrunken that Gustav had no idea whether they were men or women, Germans or Russians.

  A little farther on yet, the bodies were burned and melted, but still recog
nizable as human beings. As far as Gustav was concerned, that was worse. A flamethrower might do such things, but to a few people at a time, not to hundreds or thousands at once. The smell was more of roasted meat than dead meat, though the latter was starting to gain.

  They went past Russian tanks that could have blasted them to hell had anyone inside them remained alive. But the men in there were dead, and so were the tanks. The ones closer to the A-bomb had cannons that drooped like limp dicks. Farther away, they looked ready to go—but they weren’t.

  Then the advancing Germans came across people who weren’t dead but who wished they were. Atomic fire could do things to bodies not even flamethrowers matched. Eyes seared and welded to cheeks…Several soldiers gave the coup de grâce to horribly burned men and women who thanked them for it.

  Gustav had done that in Russia. He’d always hoped someone would do it for him if he needed it. This was worse, somehow. That line from the Poe story wouldn’t get out of his mind. And the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

  “If this is what winning looks like, I’m not sure I want anything to do with it,” he said, hoping the last rations he’d eaten would stay down.

  Rolf snorted. “Oh, come off it, man! Do you think the Ivans haven’t done the same thing wherever they could?” Gustav couldn’t answer that. He knew they had.

  Here and there, Red Army men and units kept trying to fight back. But so much of what they’d had at the front was gone, gone forever. Also gone was the illusion they’d carried that atom bombs wouldn’t come down on them but were just for cities behind the lines.

  Along with the holdouts were plenty of Russians not just willing but eager to surrender. Some of them had doses of radiation sickness; the prevailing winds carried fallout from the bomb blasts into territory the Soviet Union occupied. Others had simply had enough fighting to last them for the rest of their lives.

  Most of the Ivans in their late twenties and early thirties knew bits and pieces—sometimes more than bits and pieces—of German. They would have been the ones who’d fought their way into the Reich in 1945 and then settled down to occupy it after Hitler blew his brains out and everything he’d struggled for was kaput.

  Gustav didn’t think much about that one way or the other. To him, a prisoner who could understand what he said was easier to handle than one who couldn’t, and that was about it.

  Rolf had other notions. Whenever a Russian who spoke fair German gave himself up, the Waffen-SS veteran would ask, “And what did you do in the last war, you fucking Arschloch?”

  One Ivan still had his pride. “Walloped the snot out of you Fritzes, that’s what,” he answered.

  Two seconds later, he lay twitching on the grass, a bullet hole in his forehead, the back of his head blown out. “Any sack of shit who thinks he can give me sauce, it’s the last stupid thing he’ll ever do,” Rolf said, chambering a fresh round in his rifle.

  “No,” Gustav told him. “Don’t do that. It isn’t 1945 any more. You can’t get away with killing prisoners this time around.”

  “Says who?” Rolf’s gray stare measured him for a coffin.

  Gustav didn’t care. If he hadn’t long since quit worrying about his own neck, he wouldn’t have picked up a gun when the new fighting started. “Says me, dickface. You don’t like it, we can settle things right now.”

  “It won’t be a fair fight, either,” Max Bachman added.

  Rolf glared at him, too. But the ex-LAH man tried to defuse things with a joke: “Who’s been feeding you two raw meat?”

  “Not funny, Rolf,” Gustav said. “They take war crimes a lot more seriously than they ever did in your old unit. And if you think the guys here won’t squeal on you, you’re the one who’s Scheissevoll.”

  “Kiss the Amis’ asshole,” Rolf jeered. “Go ahead.”

  “Crap,” Max said. “War’s bad enough any which way. But we fought cleaner against the Amis than we did against the Ivans last go-round. The Russians haven’t murdered POWs for the fun of it this time around. We won’t give them the excuse to start, either.”

  “Christ, I never figured I joined the motherfucking Salvation Army,” Rolf said. “I supposed you clowns never found one of your buddies with his dick cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”

  “Who didn’t?” Gustav said stonily. “But Max is right. They aren’t doing that shit this time. We’re not going to, either.”

  The finger Rolf gave him was borrowed from the Yanks he despised. Gustav ignored it. But he didn’t like having friends who might be more dangerous than the enemy.

  —

  Cold rain drummed down on the tent where Daisy Baxter lay in a cot. She felt like hell. She had about as much hair left as a ninety-year-old granny, and more came out every time she dragged a comb across her scalp. She didn’t do that as often as she should have; she didn’t have the energy.

  Seven other women from Fakenham lay in the tent with her. It was one from the British Army, made to hold eight cots. Some of the other ladies had burns, others had had things fall down on them when the A-bomb hit Sculthorpe. All of them had radiation sickness, some cases worse than Daisy’s, one or two from the east end of town not quite so bad.

  Most of the survivors were here, in this tent city that had sprouted on the sheep meadows like toadstools coming up after a rain. Toadstools would be coming up after this rain. Daisy languidly wondered if she’d ever get the chance to see them.

  One of the women held up her hand. A harried-looking sister got up off the folding chair where she’d been reading an Agatha Christie and came over to her. “Yes, Mrs. Simpkins? What is it?” What is it now? was what her tone said.

  “I’m sorry, dear, but I need to use the bedpan,” the middle-aged woman answered. None of the patients was strong enough to walk to the latrine trenches. Mrs. Simpkins couldn’t have anyway; her left leg was splinted.

  “Well, all right.” The sister’s brisk nod admitted that was an acceptable reason for summoning her. She slid it into place and used a sheet to give Mrs. Simpkins what privacy she could.

  Like the other women in the tent, Daisy looked away. They all pretended nothing was happening. English politeness came as close to being reflexive as made no difference.

  The sister, by contrast, peered into the bedpan as she took it away. “Oh, jolly good!” she said, sounding genuinely pleased. “Hardly any blood in your urine at all.”

  Daisy was pleased for Mrs. Simpkins, too. She hadn’t had much bleeding of that sort herself, but the older woman had. If it was easing off, she might pull through after all.

  An orderly in a rain slicker came by on the hour to take the bedpan away. Then another one fetched lunch for the patients and the sister: U.S. military rations, one more product of America’s endless abundance. However abundant the rations were, they weren’t very good. Daisy didn’t eat much. But she wouldn’t have eaten much if a fancy French chef from the Ritz were doing the cooking here. Her appetite was gone. She had to fight to keep food down.

  It went on raining. The grass under the cots turned to mud. The sister squelched when she walked. There was nothing at all to do but lie there. Daisy wished for a wireless set or, that failing, a wind-up gramophone. Wish was all she could do.

  After a while the raindrops drumming on canvas lulled her into a doze. That was good: she wasn’t bored while she slept. But it was also bad: if she napped in the afternoon, she might lie awake at night.

  Toward evening, a doctor who looked even more worn than the sister came to check on the tentful of women. “How are you feeling?” he asked Daisy.

  “If this is a rest cure, I’d sooner be working,” she said.

  “It’s no holiday, I know. We’re at full stretch, dealing with a disaster like this. The little personal touches are right out, I’m afraid.” But the man used a little personal touch a moment later. Instead of taking her temperature, he laid a hand on her forehead, nodded to himself, and started toward the next bed.

  “It’s all right?” she ask
ed him.

  “Oh, yes. Normal, or near enough.” He nodded. So did she. A mother could gauge temperatures like that, and he was bound to have more practice than any mother in captivity. He added, “No sign of infections, is what that means. You people are vulnerable to them for a while.”

  By you people, he meant you people who had an atom bomb smash your town to pieces. But Daisy was glad she had no infections. One of the first things a doctor had done for her was pick bits of glass out of the cuts on her feet with tongs and then paint the wounds with merthiolate. It hurt like anything.

  She did have trouble sleeping during the night. Lying there in the dark trying to stay quiet so as not to bother the other women snoring around her wasn’t easy. She’d gone to bed alone ever since Tom took ship overseas for the last time. Having company gave her trouble any time. When she’d napped and didn’t particularly need sleep…She passed a bad night.

  Morning cuppas for everybody in the tent came in a big vacuum flask, with milk and sugar on the side. The tea was strong and bitter enough to open her eyes a bit. She wouldn’t have minded American instant coffee that morning. It was foul, but she needed all the caffeine she could get.

  At least the rain had stopped. That was good. The tents were leftovers from the last war, and they’d seen hard use. Daisy thanked heaven the one she was stuck in hadn’t started leaking. She didn’t know what anyone could have done if it had. Stuck a bowl under the drip and forgotten about it, probably.

  Breakfast was more American food. Canned scrambled eggs, even with ham, made her think that, if you had to eat them all the time, you’d let the enemy capture you just to get a change of diet.

  She kept feeling she ought to be dusting or sweeping or putting another cask of best bitter under the tap. The Owl and Unicorn was gone, though. Gone. She had no idea whether the insurance covered atom bombs. One more thing she’d worry about later.

  At half past nine—an unexpected hour—the tent flap opened, showing muddy grass and watery sunshine outside. Daisy noticed them for only the shortest fragment of a split second. Into the tent ducked Bruce McNulty. He looked dashing in his dark blue U.S. Air Force uniform.