Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, sir. Of course I understand that,” Marshall said. “One other thing you might take into account is doing whatever makes it less likely for Senator McCarthy to reach the White House.”

  “Why, George!” Truman wagged a finger at him. “For a soldier without politics, seems to me you just came out with something political.”

  “Yes, sir,” Marshall repeated woodenly, and said not another word.

  It wasn’t as if he needed to. Sighing, Truman said, “Yeah, McCarthy scares the crap out of me, too. He doesn’t give a damn about anything but himself, and he doesn’t care how many lies he tells to get to the top.”

  “That last is what concerns me. Give him a toothbrush mustache and a floppy lock of hair—”

  “And he’d be even uglier than he is, which ain’t easy,” Truman broke in. “But Adolf was a teetotaler, and dear Joe pours it down good. Maybe he’ll torpedo himself while he’s loaded.” McCarthy hadn’t yet, though. It was probably too much to hope for.

  —

  SLOW! a new-looking sign by the side of US 97 warned in big black letters. BORDER CHECKPOINT AHEAD!

  “Can you read that, Linda?” Marian Staley asked as she dropped the Studebaker into second.

  And damned if Linda didn’t, even if she had to sound out checkpoint with exaggerated care. The Camp Nowhere kindergarten had taught her something after all.

  “Will this be like the one we went through a couple of days ago?” Linda asked. “With the soldiers?”

  “Probably. We’ll see in a minute,” Marian answered. She hadn’t expected that National Guardsmen from Washington would check the car before it crossed into Oregon, and that National Guardsmen from Oregon would check it again after it crossed from Washington. The two states might as well have been two different countries. The soldiers on each side of the border were as suspicious of those on the other as if they were foreigners.

  So it proved here, on the frontier between Oregon and California. Each state’s National Guard was the main—almost the only—source of order that stretched all the way across it. With civilian authority only a memory, the military ruled the roost and feathered its nest.

  “Show me your papers!” barked a gray-haired man with corporal’s stripes and a Model 1903 Springfield. He might have been a plumber before the Guard called him up, but what did that have to do with anything? Now he could give people orders, and shoot them for not obeying. He knew it, too. It was all over his face.

  “Here.” Marian produced her Washington driver’s license, her discharge paper from Camp Nowhere, and the document the Oregon National Guard had stamped and given her when she drove into the state.

  Mr. Two Stripes examined those. “You’ve got a Washington exit permit, too, right?” he said, his tone suggesting she’d be heading for the calaboose if she didn’t.

  But she did. After rummaging in her handbag, she pulled out the permit and gave it to him. She had everything but a passport with a visa affixed. She didn’t need that…yet.

  “Hrmp.” The National Guard corporal was visibly disappointed. “Lemme take this stuff to the lieutenant, have him check and see if it’s legit.”

  “It is,” Marian said, but she was talking to his Eisenhower-jacketed back.

  The lieutenant examined the papers, added another one, and gave them back to the corporal. That worthy returned them to Marian. “I guess you’re okay to pass on,” he said, as if suspecting she had an A-bomb in the trunk rather than the couple of duffels of stuff that represented all her worldly goods.

  Two privates swung the bar across the road parallel to it so she could head south. As soon as she did, she had to go through the same rigmarole with the California National Guard. They really did have her open the trunk so they could inspect her chattels.

  “No contraband, no contagion—that’s our motto,” said the noncom who pawed through her dirty dungarees and the Saturday Evening Post she’d bought in Klamath Falls.

  Marian kept her mouth shut. You couldn’t tell these people off, no matter how much they deserved it. But if you didn’t, wouldn’t they just keep running things? What if somebody had told the Nazis where to go when they were just a bunch of barroom toughs? No Hitler?

  Trouble was, if you just told people like that off with words, they’d give you a right to the chops or hit you over the head with a board. You needed to tell them off with machine guns. And doing that…Doing that was the reason Marian was a widow and a refugee.

  Someone had once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings. By the way things looked, they still had a long way to go.

  This particular uniformed anthropoid didn’t find anything illegal or contagious in Marian’s trunk. He slammed down the lid harder than he might have. He also plied a rubber stamp with might and main. “You are authorized to precede,” he said as he handed her the papers.

  Don’t you mean proceed? she thought. Luckily, she didn’t say it. Remind a lug he was a lug and he’d make you sorry.

  “Enjoy your stay in California,” he went on. Oh, sure! Marian swallowed that thought unvoiced, too. The National Guardsman went on, “What is your intended purpose here?”

  None of your beeswax. No, that wouldn’t work, either, not unless you had a machine gun to back it up. Since Marian didn’t, she answered, “I want to find a place to settle down with my little girl.”

  “I see.” The soldier didn’t say It’s got to be cover for setting out course markers for the Reds’ bombers, but his attitude suggested it. Grudgingly, he added, “Well, I told you you could precede, so go ahead.”

  “Thanks.” Marian put the Studebaker in gear and drove south down US 97. She’d rarely been so happy as when the border checkpoint vanished behind her.

  “Mommy?” Linda asked.

  “What is it, honey? You need to go potty?” Marian said. Her daughter hadn’t since well before they went through the third degree from both sets of National Guardsmen.

  But Linda shook her head. “I can wait. What I want to know is, how will you find a good place to stop?”

  “I don’t know.” Marian had hardly even thought about it. “When we come to a place that seems all right, we’ll see how it is. If we like it, we’ll stay. If we don’t, after we decide we don’t we’ll go on. Does that sound okay?”

  Linda considered with a gravity that didn’t seem childlike. “I guess that’s okay, yeah,” she said, so seriously that she might have come out with a different answer.

  They drove on down US 97. The two-lane blacktop ran south and a little west. Ahead, a mountain began to swell on the horizon. “That’s Mount Shasta,” Marian said. Her right index finger brushed the inside of the windshield as she pointed. “It’s a volcano like Mount Rainier.”

  “That’s good,” Linda said. You couldn’t always see Mt. Rainier from Everett; the way Washington weather worked, sometimes you couldn’t see across the street. Mt. Shasta was still at least fifty miles away, but it seemed clearer than Mt. Rainier did except on the best and brightest of summer days.

  US 97 and US 99 joined at Weed, a small town almost in Mt. Shasta’s shadow. Marian stopped for lunch there. The diner she walked into was a step up from a greasy spoon. Both the cook behind the counter and the brassy, henna-haired waitress seemed friendly. Marian’s chicken plate was pretty good. Linda made her kid-sized burger disappear.

  “What are the chances of getting work around here?” Marian asked the waitress.

  “You type and take shorthand?”

  “Yeah.” Type she could. Her Gregg was rusty as hell. People asked about it more than they made you use it. But if somebody did make her, she figured it would come back.

  “Lumber companies need people for office work sometimes,” the waitress aid. “You can try your luck with them.”

  “Maybe I will. Is there a motor court in town where the roaches and bedbugs won’t jump us?”

  “Try Roland’s, right by the highway junction. Tell him Babs sent you, and he might give you a break on
the rate.”

  Or give you a rakeoff, Marian thought. But she thanked Babs and left a fifty-cent tip. Roland’s turned out to be okay. After Camp Nowhere, any halfway decent motor court was okay. Roland himself did knock six bits a day off the tab when she mentioned Babs’ name—and when she said she’d stay awhile if she could land a job.

  Weed itself…A small town in the middle of nowhere. That suited Marian fine. Better than fine, in fact. Nothing in the whole wide world could make the Russians want to drop an atom bomb on a no-account place like this.

  KONSTANTIN MOROZOV RUBBED his chin. Whiskers rasped faintly under his fingertips. He’d got used to having skin as smooth as that of a boy who didn’t need to shave yet.

  No more. He’d grown some fine brown fuzz on top of his head, too. It wasn’t enough yet for a Red Army barber to clip it down into a soldier’s crop—a lot like a zek’s, when you got right down to it—but it was there. He could see it in the mirror every morning.

  He was regrowing hair on the rest of his body, too. He itched in places where he hadn’t even known he had places: the backs of his thighs, for instance. He scratched all the time. Sometimes he did it without even noticing. And sometimes he scratched himself raw.

  Even so, the doctors seemed pleased. “This is a good recovery,” one of them told him.

  “I’m glad to hear it, Comrade Physician,” Konstantin said. Like a lot of Soviet quacks, this one was a woman. Unlike a lot of the female doctors, she wasn’t old or homely. He noticed that she wasn’t, which seemed as novel to him as the fuzz on his scalp. When he was egg-bald, he wouldn’t have cared if a gorgeous, naked nineteen-year-old plopped herself down on his cot. If that didn’t say all that needed saying about how hard the radiation had bitten him, nothing ever would.

  “Khorosho,” she said once more, sounding…amused? Something of what he’d been thinking must have shown in his voice.

  “How are my crewmates?” He realized she wouldn’t remember offhand who they were, so he named them: “Eigims and Kalyakin and Sarkisyan.”

  “Kalyakin…still struggles.” She picked her words with care. “He has needed blood transfusions, because his anemia persists in spite of everything we can do to combat it.”

  You don’t know how to combat it. Morozov had no trouble reading between the lines. “The others?” he asked. Poor Vladislav would pull through on his own, or he wouldn’t.

  “They’re in about the same shape you are,” the doctor said. “You should all be ready to return to duty in ten days to two weeks. All of you but Kalyakin, I mean. He’ll have to stay behind a bit longer.”

  “I hope it will be sooner,” Konstantin said. “From what the radio says, the front’s gone back since those damned bombs fell.”

  “Da,” she agreed. “But we will not release you too soon. You’re weaker than you think—and we’ve had bad results with radiation-sickness victims we sent back to duty before they could handle it.”

  What did bad results mean? He decided he didn’t want to know badly enough to find out. He did say, “I’m tired of sitting on the shelf like a jar of pickled cabbage.”

  That got a smile out of her. But she said, “You’re not sitting on the shelf, Comrade Sergeant. You’re getting over a wound, a bad wound. Just because you don’t have a hole in you and eighty stitches, that doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt. Radiation sickness is nothing to sneeze at. You’re lucky you didn’t get an infection, for instance. You might not have been able to fight it off.”

  One more cheerful thought. They hadn’t said much about that when he was sickest. Probably they hadn’t wanted to give him anything more to fret about. There was kindness, or as much as a Soviet military hospital was likely to show.

  The doctor went on to the next patient. An orderly—by his bandaged left arm, one of the walking wounded—brought Konstantin a bowl of liver stewed with turnips and cabbage. He realized how sick of liver he was getting. It built blood, though. He remembered the East German doc talking about that.

  How much liver were they feeding poor Vladislav? They might really be giving it to him up the other end, too. Transfusions? Konstantin shivered. He remembered the SS guys in the last war, with their blood group tattooed under one armpit. If they got captured, that tattoo usually bought them a bullet in the nape of the neck. But if they got hurt, it could keep them alive. They thought it was worth the risk.

  In the last war, Morozov had never heard of Soviet doctors transfusing wounded men. They could do it now, plainly. Stalin had warned that the USSR had to catch up with Western Europe and America or go under. It had survived the Hitlerites—barely, but it had.

  Now it was trading shattered atoms with the USA. America was rich and strong. Russia’d hit back hard, though. The rodina was still in there punching. Sometimes you’d win if you refused to admit you were beaten.

  Sometimes.

  He listened to Roman Amfiteatrov on Radio Moscow, going on about the victories the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were winning over the forces of imperialism, capitalism, and reaction. Someone had brought a radio into the ward. The only way he could not listen was by jamming his fingers into his ears. The MGB would be curious about why he’d want to do something like that. And when the Chekists got curious, your story didn’t have a happy ending.

  Russian radios received only the frequencies on which the USSR broadcast. That made it harder for people with a counterrevolutionary cast of mind to hear what the BBC and the Voice of America and other lying, anti-Soviet subversive stations were saying about the world situation.

  After you’d listened to Radio Moscow since you were in short pants, you learned what its claims were likely to mean in the real world. Konstantin worked out that the Chinese might still be advancing in Korea, but the Red Army had lost enough front-line forces so the Americans and their friends were moving forward, not back.

  He’d damn near been part of the front-line forces the Red Army had lost. He wondered how radioactive his old T-54 was. He and what was left of his crew wouldn’t get it back when they returned to action. He was sure of that. The men who gave orders would never let a runner sit idle so long. They would have had repair crews hose off the outside and scrub the inside and given it to some healthy foursome.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t have bothered with the hosing and the scrubbing. Maybe they would have just told the unsuspecting new guys Here’s your machine. Go out and smash some Americans for Stalin!

  He had the bad feeling it would have worked that way. You couldn’t see radioactivity, or smell it or hear it or taste it or feel it…unless you got enough to make you sick, of course. If it wasn’t at a level where it would fry a fresh crew right away, why not just slap them in?

  Radiation might make them sick somewhere down the road? Comrade, that’s down the road! They’re a tank crew! We’ve got a war to fight! And chances are they won’t live long enough for the radiation to bother them any which way!

  Yes, that was how Red Army planners would use a tank that hadn’t been quite close enough to an A-bomb for its cannon to sag. To be fair, those men used themselves as hard as any other soldiers they could get their hands on. It had worked against the Nazis. It might work again.

  Konstantin went looking for Juris Eigims. He wasn’t deathly tired all the time, the way he had been when he was sickest. Walking around, though, made him realize the nice-looking lady doctor had a point. He wasn’t up to fighting a tank for a day and a half without sleep, or for keeping it in good running order.

  The Balt looked pretty much the way he did, only with blond fuzz in place of brown. “Still want to shoot for me when we’re good to go?” Morozov asked him.

  “If they don’t give me a beast of my own, yeah,” Eigims answered. “I’ve had some real clowns give me orders just because they’re Russians. You at least know what you’re doing.”

  “Thanks,” Konstantin said dryly. “Thanks a bunch.”

  “Any time.” Eigi
ms was unfazed. “You know what you’re doing so well, we didn’t quite get fried there at the front.” Morozov found himself without a snappy comeback for that.

  —

  New recruits came up to the line. Cade Curtis watched them with more than a little skepticism. They wore American olive drab and U.S. pot helmets, and carried M-1s or grease guns. But their narrow eyes and yellow-brown hides said they were South Koreans, not Yanks.

  “We need some bodies in the trenches,” he said, trying to make the best of things.

  Howard Sturgis, by contrast, eyed the ROK men with contempt if not loathing. “See how long they stay in the goddamn trenches, Captain,” the older man said. “See how soon we send out the HA signal.”

  At the start of the Korean War, the Republic’s soldiers were anything but eager to fight. They fell back from Seoul so fast, some people wondered whether those two divisions were riddled with North Korean fifth columnists. HA was the American radio signal that warned they were retreating again. The letters stood for hauling ass.

  “They aren’t as bad as they used to be,” Cade said.

  “They still ain’t what you’d call good…sir,” Sturgis said. “The North Koreans, say what you want about the fuckers, but they fight like they mean it. These clowns—they’ll fight to the last drop of American blood, is what they’ll do.”

  A South Korean lieutenant shouted at one of the men in his platoon. The soldier answered meekly. He wasn’t meek enough to suit the officer, who hauled off and clouted him. It was no love tap. It might have flattened Ezzard Charles. The soldier staggered and tramped on.

  “That kind of thing doesn’t help,” Cade said.

  “No shit,” Sturgis replied. “That looey, he was probably a corporal in a Jap labor brigade or something during the last war. The Japs, their sergeants and officers knocked the crap out of the ordinary guys for the fun of it, you know?”