Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  And no wonder even those Russians in what they called freedom worked like this. Wasn’t the whole Soviet Union stuck behind barbed wire? It looked that way to Luisa. Stalin’s tyranny might be grayer than Hitler’s, but the only real difference between the MGB and the Gestapo was the name.

  Stalin and his commissars recognized their problem. A couple of the first Russian phrases Luisa had learned were shock worker and Stakhanovite. As the Nazis had, the Communists tried to get people to work harder. By the gales of laughter the bitches went into whenever they heard those phrases, Soviet propaganda didn’t work any better than its German equivalent had. It might have worked worse.

  In Germany, someone who worked hard might possibly get rich doing it. In the workers’ paradise, though? Here, they preached equality and the classless society at the top of their lungs. The idea of getting rich was like picking your nose and eating it or looking at filthy pictures in public.

  The guard turned so he could see Luisa again. Down came the axe. The branch fell away from the trunk of the pine. Snow spurted up as it hit the ground. Luisa moved on a couple of paces and started on the next branch. Satisfied, the guard reached into a trouser pocket for his cigarettes.

  Luisa laughed again, even less happily than before. Not even the gulag was a classless society, or anything close to it. The socially friendly bitches lorded it over the politicals and the Germans, who counted as political, too. The guards backed them up when they did it. You couldn’t win.

  For that matter, what would winning mean? If you won, you wouldn’t be a zek any more. That, Luisa could see. But what would you be instead? If you weren’t a prisoner here, wouldn’t you be something a lot like a guard? What other choice was there?

  She nodded to herself. That was what Russia was like, all right. (And it was also what the Third Reich had been like, even if she didn’t care so much to remember that.) Either you were a tasty sheep or a sheep-eating wolf. There was no middle ground.

  There had been, in the Weimar Republic she remembered with a girl’s memories. There was starting to be again, in the Federal Republic that was growing up from the ruins of the dead Reich like new, hopeful grass after a harsh winter. But the Ivans were taking care of that, not just for her and the others in the gulag, but also for those still in the west but now under Stalin’s heavy yoke.

  “Workings!” the flat-faced guard said. Luisa worked. It seemed to take less effort than thinking.

  Along with the other women in the work gang, she trudged back to the camp when the sun drew near the trees. They gave up their tools outside. The guards counted saws and axes as carefully as they counted zeks. A prisoner with a weapon meant trouble.

  Then the women lined up so they could be counted. Across the barbed wire, the male zeks were doing the same thing. They whistled and hooted at the women, and called to them in half a dozen languages. Their guards frowned, but that was all they did. They were men, too, the bastards.

  Luisa wanted nothing to do with any of them. She was filthy, her hair matted with sweat. She could smell how she stank. They were just as grimy and smelly. How did they think anyone would be interested in them? How? They were men, the bastards.

  All Luisa wanted was for the count to go smoothly and for the cooks to have turned out something almost worth eating. That was what her horizons had narrowed to, that and the chance for sleep Sleep! She couldn’t imagine a word more delicious, in German or in Russian.

  —

  Brigadier Yulian Olminsky glowered at Boris Gribkov. His fierce black eyebrows gave him a good glower in spite of his skinny face; he looked like something that ought to live in a cave under a bridge. Gribkov didn’t much care. He was past being intimidated.

  After all, what could Olminsky do to him? Leave him here to rot? He was already rotting. Send him and his crew out in the Tu-4 on a suicide mission? The way things worked these days, almost any mission a heavy bomber flew could turn suicidal, but at least they’d be doing what the Soviet Union had trained them to do. Feed him to the MGB? That was just another suicide mission.

  Olminsky scowled harder when he saw Boris wasn’t turning to gelatin. “Well?” he rumbled.

  “Well, what, Comrade Brigadier?” Gribkov asked. No, he really didn’t care what happened to him next. That gave him an odd edge over the base commandant. A bully who didn’t scare you wasn’t a bully any more.

  “Are you and your men loyal to the Soviet Union and to the revolution of the proletariat?” Olminsky demanded.

  “Comrade Brigadier, I’ve been telling you at the top of my lungs that we are ever since we got here,” Boris answered. “If you and the Chekists don’t choose to believe me, how is that any sweat off my nuts?”

  The senior officer turned the color of borscht. “What the devil makes you think you can talk to me like that?”

  “My men have delivered three A-bombs, sir. We’ve flown conventional missions, too,” Gribkov said. “And what thanks did we get for it? We got stuck on the back shelf like a sack of kasha your granny forgot about.”

  “I can have you court-martialed for your big mouth, you know, court-martialed or just put away for real.”

  “Yes, sir. But next to flying the Tu-4, a court-martial is a stroll through the grass,” Gribkov replied. “If you want to kill us off, at least let us go after the Americans. Then we can go out trying to help the rodina.”

  “All right,” Olminsky said heavily. “All right. So you’re ready to deliver the mail, are you?”

  “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Brigadier. I’ve always served the Soviet Union,” Boris said. “What is our next assignment?”

  “You have been cleared by the security services to fly against Antwerp,” the base commandant told him. “The Americans and the English are shipping men and tanks and shit into Europe through there like they’re falling out of the Devil’s asshole.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said one more time. If relief was in his voice, it was also in his heart. He’d feared Olminsky would order his Tu-4 to attack London. Even if they made it there and came back safely after ripping out the heart of England, he didn’t know that he wanted two of the world’s great capitals on his conscience. His grain was coarser than poor Leonid Tsederbaum’s had been, but there were limits to everything.

  “All right,” Yulian Olminsky repeated. “This will be a low-level flight, over the sea as much of the way as you can. Fly so close to the water, the radar will have trouble telling your plane from the waves.”

  “We don’t climb to deliver the bomb? Same kind of flight path as Paris?”

  “That’s right. There’ll be a short delay on the fuse to let you get clear. More fallout that way, but it can’t be helped. The enemy won’t let you climb to eleven thousand meters to drop. We don’t let them get away with that shit any more, either.”

  “I understand, sir,” Gribkov said. “The whole crew will be glad to get airborne again. Only…” His voice trailed off as he visualized a map. “We can’t stay over water the whole route. Denmark’s in the way, and it’s not on our side.”

  “It’s not doing much to help the enemy, either.” Olminsky gestured dismissively. “Just zoom across the peninsula. For a plane with the Tu-4’s performance, not even ten minutes from east to west.”

  Just zoom across the peninsula. Yulian Olminsky made it sound easy. Making missions sound easy was one of the things base commandants were for. True, Denmark wasn’t throwing divisions into the fight in Germany. But there were U.S. fighter bases and U.S. radar stations in the country.

  “We’ll have a better chance if the fighter-bombers hit them before we try the crossing,” Boris said.

  “It will be attended to.” By the way Olminsky spoke, maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. Well, if he wanted to get a plane with an A-bomb in its belly shot down, that was his problem. And the crew’s.

  Most of the men were eager to get back into action. “About time people quit treating us like we’ve got dogshit on our shoes,” Vladim
ir Zorin said.

  Yefim Arzhanov practically jumped up and down. “Comrade Pilot, I will take us to Antwerp! I will bring us home after we succeed in the mission!” the new navigator declared.

  “Good. That’s good.” Gribkov did his best to sound enthusiastic, but half of his mind was figuring angles and ways and means. It might work. Of course, anything might work. If it did, it would hurt the imperialists. He could see that.

  But they’d be alert, damn them. His plane would need new IFF codes to fool the Americans. He and Zorin and Gennady Gamarnik, the flight engineer, went over the Tu-4 from the bombardier’s station to the tail gunner’s to see what else it might need. The engineer found and fixed some engine trouble that might have had them all sweating if it had cropped up while they were on the way.

  Darkness was their best friend. Darkness was always the bomber’s friend. They climbed into the sky after the sun went down. Boris looked right and grinned at Zorin when they did get airborne. The copilot grinned, too.

  “Antwerp,” Zorin said. “It’s only Antwerp.”

  “You should go on the stage. You’ve got a terrific mind-reading act there,” Boris answered. In the last war, the Germans had hung on to Antwerp tooth and toenail. After they got driven out, they clung to the Scheldt estuary weeks longer so shipping couldn’t get into or out of the port. After the Anglo-Americans pushed them back there, too, Hitler had pounded it with V-2s. He had no A-bombs to put it out of action. Had he had A-bombs, he would have used them against the USSR first. There was a scary thought.

  They flew north across Czechoslovakia and East Germany to the Baltic. Running out of sea and having to cross Denmark was another scary thought. All too soon, the low, flat land loomed up ahead of them. They were still flying close enough to the deck to scrape church steeples. The roar from the four big Shvetsov radials would wake the dead for kilometers around. But no one opened up on them. The radar operator didn’t start screaming about fighters. Maybe the Soviet air raid had gone in after all. Maybe luck was still running their way.

  And maybe some American at a radar screen was phoning units farther west, saying Be ready—something juicy’s heading your way! Gribkov couldn’t do anything about that…but worry.

  Past the Danish peninsula. Out over the North Sea. Yefim Arzhanov told Boris to swing farther south. He obeyed, hoping Arzhanov knew what he was talking about. With Tsederbaum, he would have been sure. But Tsederbaum had chosen a longer road than this one.

  “Everything ready for the drop, Sasha?” Boris asked the bombardier.

  “Comrade Pilot, it is,” Alexander Lavrov replied.

  More ships sailed the North Sea than the Baltic. What would their crews think when a bomber without lights zoomed past just above the waves? To whom would they report those thoughts?

  “Getting close. Swing another couple of degrees south,” Arzhanov said. Boris did. You had to trust your people. Land loomed up ahead. They’d fly over Holland for a little while before they let the city in northern Belgium have it.

  Why wasn’t flak going off like fireworks on Victory Day? Whatever the reason, here came the estuary of the Scheldt. “Let it go!” Boris told the bombardier. As soon as Lavrov pulled the lever and the bomb fell, the Tu-4 got lighter and friskier. Gribkov wheeled it out to sea, running the engines at the red line. He had to get clear before…

  Hellfire seared the night behind. Blast tried to swat the bomber into the water. It didn’t…quite. Now to get back to the rodina, Boris thought. He could paint another city on the Tu-4’s flank after he did. His mouth twisted when that crossed his mind. Poor, damned Leonid!

  —

  “Antwerp? Antwerp!” Harry Truman didn’t so much say the name as spit it. “How in holy hell did they get Antwerp?”

  George Marshall looked unhappy, too. But then, as far as Truman could tell, the Secretary of Defense never looked happy. He sure had nothing to look happy about this morning. “As best we can piece together, sir, it was a great piece of flying. The only way they could have come in lower would have been to take their bomber through the moles’ tunnels.”

  “Heh,” Truman said. Every once in a while, Marshall showed that a dry wit did lurk beneath his somber exterior. He was almost as much a great stone face as Molotov or Gromyko, though Truman would never have insulted him by saying so. Dry wit or not, right this minute the President himself was more not amused than Queen Victoria had ever been.

  “What really irks me is that we have no claims that anyone shot down that—that confounded Bull,” Marshall said, using the NATO reporting name for the Russian B-29 copy. “It surprised us getting in? Okay. But how could our air defenses not catch it once they knew it was there?”

  “Talent,” Truman said bitterly. “Now I’ve got the Belgian Prime Minister and his Dutch opposite number screeching at me, one for each ear. Why can’t we keep them safe? Well, why can’t we, dammit?”

  “Because war is like that, as you know perfectly well, sir,” Marshall answered. “Things go wrong. Or the other fellow does something very well, or does something you didn’t expect, and he hurts you. When he starts throwing atom bombs around, he can hurt you badly.”

  “Can’t he, though?” Truman said. “Two in Korea, and now the one in Antwerp. What’s next? New York City?”

  “I don’t believe so, Mr. President,” Marshall said. “Bulls can’t reach it from anywhere Stalin holds. If the Russians were to take Iceland away from us, that would be a different story, but there’s a worry from a thriller writer’s novel. It’s nothing to lose sleep over in the real world. They don’t have the navy to try it, let alone bring it off.”

  “Thank God for small favors. He sure hasn’t doled out many big ones lately,” Truman said. “What are we going to have to do to save Korea? More atom bombs? That’s what got us into this mess to begin with.”

  “We’ve punished Stalin. We haven’t really punished Mao yet,” Marshall said in musing tones. “Yes, we bombed Manchuria, but to the Chinese that was an annoyance, something that slowed their move into Korea, not anything that hit home in the country as a whole. Manchuria is the back of beyond to them, the way Wyoming is with us.”

  “Peiping. Shanghai. Nanking. That would get their attention.” The President grimaced. “How many people would we kill? I don’t like blowing up cities and vaporizing civilians just to make Mao sit up and take notice, dammit.”

  “If he were one of the people we vaporized, that might do more than anything else to get Red China to go back to the status quo ante bellum,” Marshall observed.

  “Yes, it might. But what are the chances?” Truman said. “Do we even know where he is?”

  The Secretary of Defense shook his head. “If we did, a strike might be worthwhile. Most of our intelligence on him comes through Chiang in Formosa, you understand. From what the Nationalists hear, Mao moves from one town to the next every day or two to make it harder for us to rub him out like that.”

  “One more trick he picked up from Stalin.” After a moment’s thought, Harry Truman shook his head. “Mm, maybe not. You don’t need to go to Harvard to see you’re safer if you don’t give the people who don’t like you a sitting target.”

  “True enough, sir,” Marshall agreed.

  “I wish we could kill Mao, though,” Truman said. “If we did, I bet Stalin would be willing to go back to the status quo and start picking up pieces. But if Mao wants to keep fighting, Stalin loses face for making peace. Who’s the boss Communist then? It would be like the brawls after the Reformation, with each side saying it was more Christian than the other.”

  “And of course there are no arguments at all here about how we ought to deal with this war,” Marshall said.

  Yes, he was dry, all right. “Uh-huh,” Truman said tightly. “If Joe McCarthy knows what’s good for him, he’d better keep moving like Stalin and Mao. I’d do everybody a favor if I dropped an A-bomb on his big, fat, hard head.”

  “That’s not the kind of thing a sitting President is supposed
to say,” Marshal replied, voice prim as a schoolmarm’s.

  “Tough shit,” Truman said. “It looks more and more like he’ll run next year, and it looks more and more like he’ll flush the Constitution straight down the crapper if he gets elected. Go on—tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Mr. President, one of the advantages of a long career as a soldier is that I let other people worry about politics,” Marshall said.

  “You’re a sandbagger today, aren’t you, Mister ex-Secretary of State?” Truman said. “And you may not worry about Tail Gunner Joe, but you can bet your bacon he worries about you. You’re a Roosevelt crony, after all. Probably a Red in disguise.”

  “I hope that, if I were a Red in disguise, the United States wouldn’t be doing so well in this war.” George Marshall had his pride, sure as hell.

  Maybe the USA was doing better than the USSR. Truman hoped so. But the country as it was reminded him of a battered pug on a stool pointing across the ring and going Y’oughta see the other guy. Better wasn’t the same as good. It didn’t come close to being the same.

  After a moment’s silence, Marshall coughed and said, “Mr. President, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “You can always ask,” Truman said. “If I don’t feel like answering, I won’t, that’s all.”

  “Fair enough, sir.” The Secretary of Defense coughed again. “Whatever you do say, it will be in confidence.”

  Truman would have believed few men who made that claim. George Marshall was one of the few. That he said it made Truman pretty sure he knew what Marshall would ask. He said “Go ahead” anyway.

  “Thank you, sir. Have you, ah, decided on your own political plans for next year?” Yes, that was the question Truman had expected. Marshall couldn’t have phrased it more delicately if he’d been testing clauses in his head the past week. For all Truman knew, he had. Marshall had never struck him as a man who did much off the cuff.

  Most of the time, neither was Truman. Here, though…“I don’t have to make up my mind just yet, so I haven’t,” he said. “What the war situation looks like when I have to will have a lot to do with it.”