Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  —

  Ihor Shevchenko’s sergeant sent him a suspicious stare. Anatoly Prishvin had been doing that ever since Ihor wound up in his section. “I’ve got my eye on you, Ukrainian,” he said for the third time that day.

  Rolling tobacco in a torn chunk of newspaper and lighting it seemed a better idea than answering. Ihor had heard cracks like that during the Great Patriotic War, too. Most of the time, ignoring them was the smartest thing you could do.

  Most of the time, but not always. The sergeant did his best impersonation of a poisonous snake. He hissed angrily. His beady little eyes didn’t even blink. “I’ve got my eye on you,” he said yet again. “You hear what I’m telling you?”

  “Oh, yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor said after a deliberate puff. “I hear you real good.”

  “Then act like it, you worthless fucker,” Prishvin said. “I know your kind. You were the traitors who went out and said hello to the Nazis with bread and salt.”

  Some Ukrainians had done that when the Germans invaded in 1941. There had been a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, though more of its men came from Poland than from the Soviet Union. Glancing at Prishvin out of the corner of his eye, Ihor could see why so many of his people had thought Hitler a better bet than Stalin. Hitler hadn’t starved millions of Ukrainians to death.

  He hadn’t yet. But he started in as soon as he got the chance. Ihor said, “Comrade Sergeant, I fought the Fascists in the partisans and then in the Red Army. I was wounded in the service of the Soviet Union.”

  “Da, da, da,” Prishvin said, by which he meant Nyet, nyet, nyet. “All you cocksuckers who can’t say G talk about what heroes you were. It’s all bullshit, too.”

  “Would you like to see my scar?” Ihor asked, making as if to unroll his puttees and hike up his trouser leg.

  “I don’t give a shit about your scar, on account of it won’t tell me whose gun gave it to you,” the sergeant said. “And you were screwing around in front of our lines just now. For all I know, you were screwing around with the Americans. If I could prove it, I’d shoot you myself. I know how to shoot my own dog.”

  Any son of a bitch would, Ihor thought. He didn’t come out with it. He had no interest in cutting his own throat. All he wanted to do was get through the war in one piece and make it back to Anya at the collective farm outside of smashed Kiev.

  It was funny. He’d been eager to fight the Hitlerites. He’d seen what they’d done to the Ukraine. They’d treated it even worse than Stalin had, and that wasn’t easy. But the Americans? As far as he knew, there were no Americans within a thousand kilometers of the Ukraine. Yes, they’d bombed it. But Stalin had also bombed America.

  Rain started coming down on the field somewhere west of Paderborn. Sergeant Prishvin sent Ihor one more glare, then ambled off to spread joy and good tidings to some of the other soldiers in his charge. Ihor pulled his shelter half out of his pack and stuck his head through the slit. It was an old one, hauled from a storehouse where it had sat since the Great Patriotic War. The rubberized fabric had cracks and bald spots. It still did a better job of keeping the water off him than anything else would have.

  He got a cigarette going, leaning forward so the brim of his helmet shielded the coal from the rain. Another man—a blackass from the Caucasus—also decked out in a rain cape spoke to him in halting Russian: “What you do to make sergeant love you so big, uh, so much?”

  “I don’t know, Aram.” Ihor shrugged. “He likes my face, I guess. Or maybe I’m just lucky.”

  “Ha! Some luck!” Aram Demirchyan snorted. Then he asked, “You got more smokes?”

  “Sure.” Ihor gave him one. He’d taken the pack off a dead German civilian. One thing about the Red Army hadn’t changed a bit since the last war: the higher-ups expected you to do your own scrounging. They’d give you ammo, vodka, and a little food. For everything else, you were on your own.

  “Spasibo.” Demirchyan’s stubbly cheeks hollowed as he took a drag. Some of the stubble was gray; he had to be four or five years older than Ihor. He’d also been through the mill the last time around. After blowing out a gray stream, he muttered, “Something should ought to happening to that cunt.”

  “Who knows? Maybe something will,” Ihor answered. Noncoms and company-grade officers who made their men hate them sometimes had accidents. All the men who served under them said they were accidents, anyhow. Other people sometimes wondered, but war was war. Even good people wound up hurt or dead when they came to the front. Even good people occasionally caught a bullet or a grenade fragment from their own side, too. If that happened to the fuckers a little more often, well, proving such things wasn’t easy.

  Demirchyan did some more muttering, this time in his own throaty language. Ihor thought he heard Sergeant Prishvin’s name in there. He didn’t think the Armenian was reciting love poetry.

  “He give you a hard time, too?” Ihor asked.

  Aram Demirchyan’s big, heavy-featured head bobbed up and down. “He give everybody hards times,” he said. “Even Russians. Russians don’t act Russian enough to happy him.”

  A machine gun stuttered out a burst, a few hundred meters to the south. That was a Red Army Maxim. Ihor knew the sound as well as he knew that of his own voice. He was still getting used to the reports and deadly rhythms of the Yankees’ automatic weapons.

  But the machine gun that replied wasn’t American at all. The rounds came back one after another, so close together that the shots merged into a single, horrible ripping roar.

  “Ah, fuck ’em!” he exclaimed. “They’ve yanked one of Hitler’s saws out of storage.”

  “MG-42 scare shit out of I,” Demirchyan said matter-of-factly.

  “They scare the shit out of everybody on the wrong end of them,” Ihor said. The German machine gun with the ridiculous rate of fire and the quick-change barrel was still the finest piece of its kind, and kilometers ahead of whatever ran second. It had turned Wehrmacht squads into machine-gun crews and a few other guys to protect them with rifles and Schmeissers.

  The Nazis made a fair number of weapons that were better than anything their foes used. In the end, they didn’t make enough of them, or have enough bastards in Feldgrau to use them. A T-34/85 might not be so fine a tank as a Panther, but when there were six or eight or ten Soviet machines for every German one….

  In that case, you waited five or six years and then you fought another war.

  “Listen to me! Listen hard, you drippy pricks!” Sergeant Prishvin yelled. “We’re going forward! We’re going to push back the men north of that fucking Nazi gun, we’re going to fire on it from a flanking position, and we’re going to put it out of action or make it retreat. Forward! Za rodina!”

  Whether it was for the motherland or not, Ihor didn’t want to go forward. The machine gun might get him. Other enemy weapons might, too. Of course, the MGB would give him a bullet in the nape of the neck if he hung back. Out of his hole he came, chambering a round in his Kalashnikov.

  The Red Army men moved by groups and rushes, each attack party covering the other’s advance. They’d learned from the Great Patriotic War’s suicidal charges. The ones who lived had, anyhow.

  Anatoly Prishvin was a dickhead, but a brave dickhead. He led from the front, cursing his section on. Somebody in an American helmet popped up and aimed a rifle at him. Ihor shot the enemy soldier before he realized what he was doing.

  “Wasting of good bullets,” Aram Demirchyan said when they flopped down behind a fallen chimney.

  “I know,” Ihor agreed mournfully. To his surprise, they did make the machine-gun crew fall back. Prishvin didn’t thank him for dropping the American. That suited Ihor. The less he had to do with the sergeant, the better.

  —

  “Bedtime, Leon,” Aaron Finch said.

  “No,” Leon told him. He wasn’t saying that because he said no all the time. He was getting over that. He was saying it because he didn’t want to go to bed. Uncle Marvin and Aunt Sarah and Cousin Olivia we
re over, which made the living room even more interesting than usual.

  “Bedtime,” Aaron repeated, a little more firmly this time, so Leon could see he wasn’t kidding.

  “Bounce is waiting,” Ruth added. The kid loved the bear so much, Aaron wondered if it was normal. Ruth and Dr. Spock assured him it was, so he let it go. Two-year-old and bear had all kinds of imaginary adventures. They were often noisy, so Aaron hoped like blazes they were imaginary, anyhow.

  His wife’s ploy worked. Leon’s face lit up. “Bounce!” he said.

  “Give everybody a good-night kiss,” Aaron said. Usually, that just meant him and Ruth, but now Leon had a whole round to make. Aaron’s younger brother took the pipe out of his mouth so his kiss would work better. Sarah moved her drink to keep Leon from knocking it off the coffee table. Olivia, who was fourteen, gave her cousin a big, smacking smooch. Leon squealed laughter.

  Ruth took him back to the bathroom—he was getting potty-trained, but he hadn’t got all the way there yet—and to his bedroom.

  “He’s a good kid,” Marvin said. “Must come from his mother’s side of the family.”

  “Heh,” Aaron said. All the Finches had barbed wits. The barbs on Marvin’s were longer and more rebarbative than most. That crack would have been nothing in some tones of voice. Not in the one Marvin used.

  Aaron glanced over at Sarah Finch. Is it her fault that Olivia’s a good kid? he wondered. But, though he did wonder, he didn’t come out and say it. That showed at least some of the difference between himself and his brother.

  Ruth walked back into the living room. “He’s in there talking with Bounce,” she reported. “I think he’ll settle down.”

  “It’s when the bear starts answering that you’ve got to worry,” Marvin said.

  Sarah and Olivia laughed. Even Aaron chuckled. But Ruth said, “The bear does answer sometimes. Leon starts with this high, squeaky voice, and it’s Bounce talking. Leon’s smart. I just hope like anything he’s smart enough to stay out of trouble.”

  “He’d better take after you, in that case. His father wasn’t.” Marvin pointed to the letter from Harry Truman that Aaron had framed.

  “Do I have to get tsuris about that from you, too?” Aaron said. “Roxane and Howard already told me I should have bought that Russian a ticket to Vladivostok. First class, too.”

  “Why don’t you get me another scotch, Aaron?” Sarah did her best to defuse things when Marvin started sniping. The trouble was, her best wasn’t good enough. Marvin didn’t pay attention to her most of the time.

  If Aaron had been in her shoes, he would have bopped Marvin in the nose. But Sarah seemed resigned to being Marvin’s punching bag. Or maybe she even liked it. Some people did. How could you know for sure?

  You couldn’t. He could fix Sarah another scotch. He got out of the rocking chair, plucked her glass from the coffee table, and took it into the kitchen, where he built her a reload. He took another Burgie out of the icebox for himself, too. Sometimes Marvin was easier to stand after a couple of beers.

  By that logic, Sarah would never draw a sober breath if she had any sense. But if she was a lush, she was a quiet, discreet lush. Plenty of people went on like that for years and years.

  Ruth raised an eyebrow when she saw him come back with the fresh beer as well as the scotch. To his relief, that was all she did.

  Not at all to his relief, Marvin pointed to the letter again. “You know, you never should have got that,” he said.

  “Daddy!” Olivia could sound indignant where Sarah didn’t dare. “Uncle Aaron did a brave thing, catching that Russian.”

  “I suppose.” Marvin sounded as if he didn’t believe it for a minute. “But if Truman wasn’t a dumb shmo, there wouldn’t have been any Russians parachuting down into Glendale.”

  “If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas.” Aaron didn’t feel like getting into it with his brother tonight. He lit a cigarette, even though he’d stubbed one out just a few minutes earlier. Tobacco lent a little calm—not a lot, but a little.

  Or so people said. Marvin’s pipe didn’t seem to lend him any. “Truman never should have dropped those A-bombs on Red China,” he declared, as if Aaron claimed Truman should have done exactly that. “Stalin couldn’t just sit there after he did that. So of course he started dropping bombs of his own.”

  “You may be right,” Aaron said. Ruth blinked—he seldom came even so close to agreeing with his brother. He didn’t intend to come that close tonight, either. He went on, “But don’t you think it’s close to a year too late to kvetch about it now? He did what he did, not what he might have done. We have to roll with the punches, not say he shouldn’t have thrown that left hook.”

  “But anybody with the sense God gave a camel could have seen it had to mean trouble.” Marvin stuck out his chin. Yes, he was always ready to argue.

  “I didn’t hear you complaining about it then,” Aaron said.

  “That’s because you weren’t listening.” Marvin didn’t like it when anyone called him on anything. He never had. And he’d skated on thin ice often enough that he’d been called more often than he should have.

  “No, it’s because you weren’t talking—for once,” Aaron retorted. His younger brother turned red. Once they got going, they might have been back in their folks’ home in Portland during the First World War. The years since then fell away like magic. Aaron added, “Hindsight makes you look smarter now than you did then.”

  “Geh kak afen yam!” Marvin said furiously. When he—or Aaron—dropped into Yiddish like that, they were well and truly steamed. “You were an ass then, and you’re still an ass now.”

  “Ass? I’ll tell you about ass! Tukhus means ass, and I’ll kick yours for you if you want!”

  Both men jumped to their feet. Before they could go for each other, Ruth and Sarah and even Olivia jumped between them. It didn’t come to punches. It hadn’t for years, even if the potential was always there. Sarah said, “I think we’d better head for home,” which would do for an understatement till a bigger one burst like an atom bomb.

  Ruth said most of the good-byes. Aaron managed a nod or two. The urge to smash in his brother’s capped front teeth ebbed even faster than it had swelled. And the emptiness it left behind made him feel stupid, almost sick.

  “The two of you!” Ruth said after Marvin’s De Soto purred away. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am ashamed of myself—now.” Aaron might have been a hung-over drunk mourning his fall from the wagon. “But he always gets my goat.”

  “You had nothing to do with getting his, of course,” his wife said.

  “Who, me?” Aaron sounded more innocent than he knew he was. “Marvin gets everybody’s goat, though. Did I ever tell you he came to our older brother Sam’s wedding in blackface?”

  “Vey iz mir, no!” Ruth said. “How old was he?”

  “Thirteen, maybe fourteen,” Aaron answered. “He’s always been a piece of work. Sam’s wife still hasn’t forgiven him, not to this day.”

  “And you have?” Ruth said—fondly, Aaron hoped. In another week or two, they’d see Marvin again. Things might go pow again, or they might not. How could you know till you knew?

  “OH, THAT’S EXCELLENT!” The sister beamed at Daisy Baxter. “We’ve eaten all of our custard, haven’t we?”

  Daisy didn’t beam back. She glared. “It’s bad enough, getting treated like a three-year-old. When people start treating me like two three-year-olds, that’s a bit much.”

  “I’m sorry.” The sister didn’t mean it; Daisy could hear that. Why should she mean it? She hadn’t been at Fakenham when the A-bomb leveled the airfield at Sculthorpe next door. She still had all the health she’d been born with. Daisy knew too well the same didn’t apply to her.

  She was still here to glare at obnoxious, well-meaning fools. Too many people from Fakenham couldn’t any more. Some of the women who’d been in the tent with her had their last plot of earth these days, six feet
by three feet by six deep.

  That she didn’t meant she wasn’t on the road to recovery. So the overworked doctors assured her whenever they stole a moment to spend on reassurances during the gallop that did duty for their rounds. Sometimes she believed them. At least as often, when she was feeling about as sturdy as the custard she’d just spooned up, she thought wasting away seemed more likely.

  Sometimes she felt as if it would be a relief, too. Her hair had fallen out—all of it. It was trying to grow back, but it wasn’t trying very hard. She had no appetite and no strength.

  The one thing she could say was that she wasn’t in a tent any more. As the weather worsened, the survivors from Fakenham who weren’t able to return to the outside world got hauled down to East Dereham. This building had been a school. Where the pupils were these days, Daisy had no idea. The classrooms made fair wards. The sisters even used the blackboards to write notes to themselves and to one another.

  “I feel like I should be working,” Daisy said fretfully. “I’ve worked hard my whole life. I’m not supposed to be lying on my backside all the time.”

  “You don’t lie on your backside all the time.” The sister radiated prim disapproval. “You’d get bedsores if you did. We make sure you turn onto your side and stomach.”

  They rotated her like a set of tyres, was what they did. Daisy didn’t say that; she knew too well the sister wouldn’t think it was funny. She did say, “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, dear, of course,” the sister answered.

  That might have been the most insincere dear Daisy had ever heard. She asked, “When will I be well enough to get out of here and do…something?” She didn’t know what she’d do, or what she’d be able to do. Did the Owl and Unicorn’s insurance policy cover damage from an atom bomb? If she ever got back on her feet again, she’d have to find out.

  “When you are, dear,” the sister said. “You are getting better. You’re doing better than some of the other patients I see, not quite so well as others. It’s all a matter of time, and you need to be patient.”