Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  Daisy was impatient with patience, and with being a patient. She put it differently: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired all the bloody time.”

  “Language,” the sister clucked. “Thank heaven you’re alive, that’s all. So many poor souls from Fakenham aren’t. I pray they’re in a better place now.” Her conversation abruptly switched from the next world back to this one: “Before I go on to the next bed, do you need the bedpan?”

  “Not right now, thanks.”

  On to the next bed the sister went. The woman there was in worse shape than Daisy. Along with her radiation sickness, she had an arm and a leg encased in plaster. Half her chimney had fallen on her as she was getting out of her smashed house.

  “How are we today, dear?” the sister asked her—again, the delusion that her charges were twins.

  “I’ll tell you how I am,” she answered. “If one of those stones had dashed out my brains, I wouldn’t be in such pain now. And I wish I weren’t.”

  “That’s not a Christian thing to say.”

  “I don’t care. See how Christian you feel when you’re all broken in pieces and your poor carcass doesn’t want to fix itself.”

  The complaint hit too close to home. Though Daisy didn’t have all the broken bones the other woman did, her body didn’t want to get well. That was the radiation sickness, still poisoning her. Not wanting to think about it, she picked up a Penguin mystery and started reading. The small, light paperback was easy to handle even for her.

  Next morning, a different sister watched the room, one who came closer to being a real human being. A messenger stuck his head in, beckoned to her, and whispered something. The sister came back to Daisy’s bed with a smile on her well-scrubbed face. “Your Yank is here to see you again.”

  Daisy nodded. “I’d like to see him. Shame I can’t do any proper primping.”

  “He doesn’t seem to mind. I’ll let Joe know it’s all right.” She hurried over to the messenger.

  My Yank, Daisy thought. Bruce McNulty was that, sure enough. But now Daisy understood just what he did when he climbed into his B-29. He went out and incinerated cities. He killed people like her neighbors. He left others with radiation sickness, like her. And then he flew back to Britain—not to Sculthorpe any more—and got ready to do it all over again.

  And he liked her. He might well love her. She liked him, too, and wondered if she loved him. He made her come alive in a way she hadn’t since she found out Tom was dead.

  But he did…what he did.

  All the same, she thought his smile did more for the way she felt than all the doctors’ fumblings. “How are they treating you, kiddo?” he said. The lower-middle-class accents she heard all the time carried whiffs of familiarity and mediocrity. His sharp American tones? Those put her in mind of Hollywood. He talked the way people in films did.

  “I’m not too bad,” she answered, and smiled back as brightly as she could. “They do keep telling me I’m gaining. Every so often, I even think I believe them.” Mostly when I see you went through her mind. She didn’t say that. She didn’t want him to think she was throwing herself at him, or would have been if she were in any shape to do it.

  “Good. That’s good.” He had to know all the women in the ward were basking in his health, in his good looks, in his simple ability to walk in and walk out whenever he pleased. He went on, “I did some poking around up in Fakenham.”

  “How did you get them to let you anywhere near it?” she exclaimed. Soldiers had turned her away before she got close to hammered Norwich.

  “Remember what my job is,” he said, and his smile stopped reaching his eyes. “I told ’em I wanted a look at what I do on the far side of the Iron Curtain.”

  “And they said you could?” she asked, astonished.

  “They grumbled. They told me I wasn’t supposed to worry about stuff like that. Then they kind of looked the other way while I went ahead.” He chuckled, not in real amusement, not if Daisy was any judge, but trying to make her feel better. The smile fell off his face altogether. “It was…pretty bad. I’ve seen pictures, but it’s not the same as being there. And Fakenham was a miss—a near miss, but a miss. Sculthorpe…The sun stomped all over Sculthorpe.”

  “Now you know,” Daisy said.

  “Yeah. Now I know.” Bruce McNulty’s mouth twisted. “Like I said, I did some poking around. I knew about where your place was. I found this. Is it yours? You said your husband was a tankman.”

  He pulled a photo out of his pocket. It was creased and torn and the worse for rain and weather, but there were Tom and his crewmates grinning in front of their Cromwell. None of them got out when the Germans brewed it up a few weeks later. Tears stung her eyes. “Yes, that’s mine. Thanks. I thought it was gone forever.”

  “Hang on to it, then.” He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “And hang in there. I’ll be back.” He nodded. Then he was gone.

  —

  “You’re wiggling again, Mr. President,” the new makeup girl said.

  “Well, what do you expect me to do when you keep whacking me in the chops with that stupid powder puff?” Harry Truman said.

  That might not have been the only reason he was fidgeting. The girl who’d made him presentable for television before had been cute. This one was drop-dead gorgeous, with a shape to match. He was very married to Bess, but nobody’d ever accused him of being blind. It wasn’t fair to imagine such things with a girl almost young enough to be your granddaughter. The only excuse he could find for himself was that most other men who got to his age found themselves with similar imaginings. As long as he didn’t do anything about them, he was okay.

  And as long as he didn’t tell Bess.

  “If you hold still, it’ll be over sooner,” the makeup girl said. Truman did his best. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to keep staring at her from close range. It didn’t help. His memory was too good. After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been longer than a minute, she told him, “We’re all through, sir. Do you want to see?”

  “Sure.” Truman opened his eyes. The girl held up a mirror so he could admire her handiwork. “Doggone!” he said. “It still looks like me. I thought I’d end up with Clark Gable’s mug there.”

  As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he hoped he hadn’t hurt her feelings. She was too pretty for him to want to do that. But she sassed him right back: “The mustache and the ears take a while to grow in.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “I bet they do!” Then he had to fight his features back to sobriety. One thing he hadn’t expected was going in front of the cameras with a case of the giggles.

  That assistant director stuck his head into the dressing room. “Two minutes, Mr. President! You just about ready?”

  “You betcha, Eddie,” Truman answered, and the makeup girl nodded. Eddie stared at her, too, so Truman wasn’t the only one with an active imagination. She took it all in stride. Her manner said she was used to it, and might even be offended if you didn’t notice her.

  Into the press room Truman went. There were the cameras. There was the lectern, with mikes for TV and for radio as well. Here was the typescript for the speech, in a manila folder in his left hand. He knew what he was going to say. So did Bess, and their daughter Margaret. So did George Marshall and Dean Acheson. The Secretaries of Defense and State needed to be apprised ahead of time.

  As far as the President could tell, no one else knew. Well, Marshall wouldn’t have told his mother his own name if she hadn’t tagged him with it. And Dean Acheson was also pretty good at keeping his mouth shut. People in the press wondered why Truman had asked for radio and television time, but no enterprising reporter had put the substance of his speech in the paper before he could deliver it. In Washington’s incestuous world, that was right security.

  He took his place behind the lectern and opened the manila folder. The lectern would hide his turning pages. He looked into the cameras and waited for the red lights to go
on. Bit by bit, he was getting used to the rituals of television.

  There they were! Most of the United States could see him. In a moment, the whole world would hear him. Maybe his crack about Clark Gable wasn’t altogether silly. He had an audience even a movie star would envy.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I am sorry to have to tell you that the war goes on. Our offer to our foes of peace with the borders in place before North Korea invaded South Korea has been ignored. The United States cannot and will not accept anything less than that.

  “Now, some have claimed that I am fighting the war the way I am to make my chances for reelection look better. For a long time, I thought that notion was too stupid for anyone with an ounce of sense, or even for Senator McCarthy, to take seriously. But we are getting close to 1952, and 1952, like it or not, is an election year.

  “Since it is, I aim to make my political plans for the coming year as clear as I possibly can. I can do no better than General Sherman did in 1884, and so I will repeat what he had to say: ‘I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.’ That is what he really said. You usually hear it as ‘If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.’ They mean the same thing.

  “And, because I will not run for reelection next year, I am free to carry on the war for freedom as seems best to me until my successor, whoever he may be, takes the oath of office. I do not want my own political career to become an obstacle to victory or to peace. Thank you, and good night.”

  The red lights went out. No reporters tonight to shout questions. He’d wanted to speak directly to the people who’d sent him back to the White House after he had to set up shop here when Roosevelt died. Now that he’d done it, he felt…He tried to decide what he felt.

  It was over. That was all there was to it. He’d worked very hard for a very long time. Everyone, without exception, had to step aside sooner or later. Better to do it on your own terms than to get tossed out on your ear. Much better to do it that way than to have the Grim Reaper set the terms for you.

  Wasn’t it?

  Part of him, and not such a small part, wanted to stay in the saddle as long as he could. A very big part of him wanted to stay in the saddle till he mounted Joe Stalin’s head on the Oval Office wall, with Mao’s on one side and Kim Il-sung’s on the other to keep it company. Well, he still might manage that. He’d be here till January 1953.

  If he couldn’t do it by then…Maybe Uncle Joe would have nailed his head to the Kremlin wall instead. Except there were no Kremlin walls any more. American B-29s had taken care of that.

  His press secretary burst into the press room. Joseph Short bore an astonished, goggle-eyed expression, as if someone had slapped him in the chops with a big dead salmon. “You’re— You’re not going to run?” he choked out.

  “Nope. I’m not gonna run.” Saying it again made it seem realer to Truman.

  “You could have told me,” Short said reproachfully. “You should have told me.”

  “Sorry, Joe.” Truman more or less meant it. He would have told Charlie Ross, who’d died the year before. But then, he’d gone to high school with Charlie, while Joe Short was a longtime Washington press-man. Charlie, characteristically, had had a heart attack or a stroke while holding a press conference, and from what the docs said was gone before he hit the floor.

  Truman hadn’t told Joe Short because he didn’t trust him the way he’d trusted poor Charlie. It was that simple. Most of the time, you wanted somebody like him for your press secretary. But a press secretary naturally spent much of his time chinning with the press. Truman wasn’t a hundred percent sure Short wouldn’t blab, the way he had been with Charlie Ross.

  “What will the country do without you?” Short exclaimed.

  “The country will do fine. If it did okay after FDR died, it won’t miss me even one little bit,” Truman said. “I’m not Stalin, thank God, and this isn’t Russia. We have a government here, not a dictator.”

  “That may not last if the Republicans pick McCarthy,” Short said.

  He’d hit Truman’s biggest fear, too, but the President said, “If they’re dumb enough to pick him, and if the people are dumb enough to elect him, they almost deserve what happens to them after that. I don’t think it’ll happen.” He didn’t tell Short he worried that McCarthy was likelier to beat him than some other Democrat.

  “It’s the end of an era,” the press secretary said.

  “Eras end. That’s what makes them eras,” Truman said. “Pretty damn quick, whoever comes after me will start looking like a dinosaur, too.”

  —

  As usual, the speaker in Smidovich’s sorry little square blared out reports from Radio Moscow. Vasili Yasevich paused to listen. Snow crunched under his felt boots. He’d already seen that it got colder here than it did in Harbin, which was really saying something.

  “American President Truman has taken the coward’s way out by refusing to stand behind his war of capitalist aggression,” Roman Amfiteatrov declared in his cowlike southern accent. “By contrast, the great and beloved Stalin will persevere until victory is won and true Communism established, as the historical dialectic assures us it must be.”

  Vasili nodded. He wanted to be seen to nod, so people believed he believed all the nonsense that came out of that speaker. Three or four others were also nodding. For the same reason? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Someone set a hand on his shoulder. He spun around, ready for anything. If it was Papanin or one of the pricks who followed him…But it wasn’t. It was one of the handful of town militiamen. The guy looked startled and alarmed at the speed of Vasili’s reaction.

  “You’re Yasevich, right?” The militiaman’s voice shook as he asked the question.

  “What if I am?” Vasili answered cautiously. “Who wants to know, and how come?”

  “Gleb Sukhanov, that’s who.” The militiaman straightened his fur cap. The motion seemed to lend him courage. “And he’s the one who asks you things. You don’t ask him. So come along with me, hey?”

  After a long pause, Vasili nodded. “All right.” He could have plugged the militiaman with the pistol he’d taken from Grigory Papanin. But then what? He’d have to run off into the taiga. Either they’d catch him or he’d starve. He didn’t want anything to do with Sukhanov or any other Chekist, but you didn’t always get what you wanted. Sometimes you got what you got, and you had to make the best of it.

  The militiaman took him into the log-walled town hall. By himself, the man was nothing. He had the Soviet state behind him, though, and his strut said he knew it.

  “Here’s the Yasevich item, Comrade,” he said to Gleb Sukhanov.

  “Thanks.” The MGB man eyed Vasili with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger air. “What did I tell you when I gave you your replacement documents?”

  “You told me to keep my nose clean, Comrade Sukhanov.” Vasili made sure he didn’t come out with Gospodin again. He didn’t want to piss off the Chekist. His tone still quiet, he went on, “That’s what I’ve done.”

  “You say so, but I’ve heard different,” Sukhanov said.

  “From who?” A split second later, Vasili saw the answer to what he’d said: “From Grigory Papanin? What kind of lies did that motherfucker tell about me?”

  “He said you were a violent hooligan. The way he looks these days doesn’t make him seem like a liar.”

  “You can say that again!” The militiaman eyed Vasili as if he were a Siberian tiger.

  “You know what that was about, Comrade?” Vasili said to Sukhanov. “He didn’t like it that I work harder than he does. He and his punks tried to shake me down. A little while later, I got him by himself and I made him see that that wasn’t such a hot idea.”

  “I’m not sure he can see anything out of one eye,” Gleb Sukhanov murmured. “He’s been here for years. Why should I believe somebody the wind blew in with the fallout?”

  “Comrade, if Papanin’s been in Smidovich for years, then for
years you’ve known what kind of a son of a bitch he is. Am I right or am I wrong?” Vasili knew he was rolling the dice, but he thought the odds were with him. He couldn’t imagine Papanin being smart enough to play the choirboy.

  Sukhanov pursed his lips and blew air out through them. The militiaman looked up at the roughly trimmed boards of the ceiling. That told Vasili everything he needed to know.

  “Well,” the Chekist began. Then he stopped, as if he’d come out with a complete sentence. He tried again: “That is…” Vasili waited, doing his best to play the respectful subject. At last, the official managed, “His behavior may not always be exemplary, but he is a socially friendly element.”

  Vasili had been in the Soviet Union long enough to understand what that meant. Papanin was a thief, with connections to other thieves. “I’m no political myself, Comrade!” Vasili said. “I’m not a zek at all!”

  “Yes, we know that,” Gleb Sukhanov replied. “After you…dealt with Papanin, we made inquiries. The corrective-labor system has no record of you.”

  “You see?” Vasili said happily.

  But Sukhanov held up a hand to show he hadn’t finished. “As far as I can tell, the Red Army has no record of you, either. Given your age, that seems, well, unusual.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth to show how unusual it seemed.

  All of a sudden, Vasili wasn’t so happy any more. “I served the Soviet Union,” he said. “My records would be in Khabarovsk.”

  “Some of them would. Most of them would, probably. But not all of them,” the MGB man said. “A copy of your service record ought to be on file in Moscow.” He shrugged. “If it is, they haven’t found it.”

  “Comrade, I don’t know what to tell you,” Vasili said, fearing anything he did tell Sukhanov would only get him in deeper. He went on, “I’ve done my part ever since I washed up here after the bomb fell. I haven’t had trouble with anybody but that Papanin turd, and he started it.”