Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  The Weimar Republic might have taken lesbianism in stride, along with so much else. But by the time Luisa was old enough to notice such things and to have such feelings herself, Germany had turned away from the Weimar Republic—about as far away as it could turn. Hitler and the Nazis? To them, anything that had to do with homosexuality was degenerate and disgusting. Homosexuals didn’t reproduce, after all, and that made them unnatural and not worth keeping alive (unless, she’d heard, they happened to belong to the SS).

  Teachings from the Third Reich might still linger inside her. Or her natural bent might simply be the more common one. Whatever it was, past wishing she had Gustav back she seemed immune to the lure of romance here.

  Nadezhda Chukovskaya might have seen as much in her eyes. They sat side by side on Luisa’s bunk in the brief, tired interlude between supper and lights-out. Nadezhda laughed once more, this time more nastily than the first two put together.

  “You want a man so much?” she said. “You want a dick in you? Go to the fence between our half of the camp and theirs. Bend over and stick your ass in the air like a washerwoman. You’ll get a dick in you, all right, dog-fashion. And nobody breaks a rule because you both stay on your own side of the wire.”

  “No!” Luisa had seen that happen once or twice. She thought it was unimaginably depraved. She’d looked away as soon as she realized what was going on. Most of the time, so did other people. Once, guards had whooped and hollered and cheered the couplers on.

  “Why not? You’d sooner have a man than me? That’s how you get a man here.”

  That might have been one of the ways. It wasn’t the only one. She remembered all too well the barber groping her while he trimmed her bush. If she’d said yes to him, she could have had soft work inside the barbed wire, not hard labor out in the taiga. But she wanted him no more than she wanted Nadezhda. Less, if anything.

  “It’s not about a man. It’s about my man,” she said.

  “Your man is in Germany.” Nadezhda spoke as if to an idiot child. “Germany is I don’t know how many thousand kilometers away. Lots of thousands—I know that. You’ll never see him again. Might as well grab what fun you can here.”

  Luisa only shrugged again. She had no idea whether her husband was alive or dead, either. She hadn’t told that to Nadezhda, though the Russian woman might already know it. The reason the MGB had seized so many German women in this camp was no secret. It would just have strengthened the other woman’s argument.

  Nadezhda stood up, her face set in angry lines. She strode away. Her stiff back and long strides made her more mannish than ever. That didn’t add to her attractiveness, not so far as Luisa was concerned.

  She would have had things easier if she’d given in to the barber. She was sure she would have things easier if she gave in to Nadezhda, too. But her body was the only thing in the camp that still belonged to her. Other zeks had slept in this bunk before her. She was sure others would after her, too. Even her clothes, with Г963 replacing some older number, were hand-me-downs that belonged to the Soviet state.

  She lay down on the hard, lumpy mattress. Maybe she could claim the bedbugs that bit her as her own, too. Other bugs also called the camp home. Sometimes Luisa felt more like a stray schnauzer than a human being.

  Right this minute, she felt like a worn-out stray schnauzer. As soon as she lay flat, her eyes closed. She couldn’t have stayed awake more than a minute after that. As she often did, she dreamt she was back in Fulda.

  No matter what she’d been talking about with Nadezhda, her dreams had nothing to do with Gustav. They revolved around food. A chocolate cake smothered in whipped cream her mother had made when she was small. A roast duck with cherry sauce. Goose-liver sausages. A giant pork roast she’d fixed for Christmas one year, with potatoes and sauerkraut on the side. Malty beer, its foam thick enough to give you a white mustache.

  You could live without a man, and even without taking a woman as a substitute for him. You couldn’t live without food. When you did hard work without enough of it, your body reminded you of that every chance it got. When you slept, it played pictures—and tastes, and smells! oh, smells!—inside your head of all the good things it wanted.

  Luisa was just bringing a spoonful of fragrant beef-and-barley soup to her mouth when the raucous clang of hammer on shell casing thrust her eyes open and rudely dropped her back into the real world. Her stomach growled in anger and frustration. Whenever she listened to it, that was all it ever reported.

  She had no time to listen to it now. She had to get outside as soon as she could, to stand out there in the predawn cold for the morning count. The guards had to be satisfied before the zeks ate.

  Outside she went, still yawning. Cold slapped her in the face. Electric lights blazed, making the assembly area noontime bright. A bright star—would that be Venus?—shone in the east. The lights drowned out the rest of those feeble little gleams.

  “Line up!” the guard shouted. “Line up, you dumb cunts!” Across the wire, the Chekists who kept an eye on the men greeted them with the same insults.

  Trudl Bachman slid into place next to Luisa. “Another wonderful day here in paradise,” she murmured out of the side of her mouth, her lips scarcely moving. Talking during the count was verboten, which didn’t mean people didn’t do it anyhow.

  “Aber natürlich,” Luisa answered the same way. The two women smiled at each other. If you didn’t smile, if you didn’t joke, wouldn’t you start screaming instead?

  Up and down the ranks prowled the guards. Counting the women should have been easy. It would have been easy, if the men with the machine pistols had had the brains God gave a tsetse fly. As things were, they needed four tries before they were sure that the number they got matched the number they thought they were supposed to have.

  Only then could the women head for breakfast, which they did at a dead run. To be so eager, so desperate, for thin cabbage soup, a lump of black bread, and weak tea only went to show what the camp was like. It would have been a starvation ration even in the worst days of the war. When it was all you had, though…

  Luisa ate with an animal intensity that left her frightened. So did her fellow zeks. She was surprised when Trudl asked her, “Was that Leckschwester after you again?” Talk at breakfast seemed a rare luxury.

  She managed a nod. “Nadezhda? Ja. I told her again I wasn’t interested, but she doesn’t want to listen.”

  Then they hurried to the stinking latrines: a necessary part of the day, but Luisa’s least favorite. And then it was out into the snow, out into the woods, once more.

  —

  Gustav Hozzel turned over a Russian’s corpse. The stink that came from the dead Ivan said he’d lain there for a while. So did the way he’d swollen enough to split his tunic and his trouser legs. Normally, Gustav wouldn’t have wanted to come within a hundred meters of him.

  Normally, here, meant before he’d taken that AK-47 from the other dead Russian, the one in Wesel—before the American A-bomb flattened and melted Wesel and all the Ivans in it. Now he checked every Russian’s body he came across. He had to, if he was going to keep the assault rifle in cartridges. The enemy was the only source for them. They weren’t like 7.62mm and 9mm pistol rounds, the standard calibers for machine pistols, which were made all over the world.

  He made sure he turned the dead soldier by the tunic, not by his bare skin. The corpse made horrible squashing noises just the same.

  Rolf laughed. “Ain’t you got fun? That piece is more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “They said the same thing about your last girlfriend, right?” Gustav returned. By the way Rolf scowled, maybe they had said something like that about his latest flame. Gustav didn’t care. He pointed happily. “Will you look at that?” The Ivan had several of the distinctive curved magazine pouches for the Kalashnikov hooked to his belt. Gustav took the magazines out of them. One went into a pouch he’d lifted from another Russian. The rest he stowed in his pockets and pack.

&
nbsp; Max Bachman pointed to a roadside sign that tilted but hadn’t got knocked flat. “Look. Next stop is outer space.”

  “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” Rolf jeered.

  “I think it’s funny,” Gustav told Max. The sign announced that Marsberg was five kilometers away. The Germans were somewhere south of Paderborn, trying to take as much land back from the Russians as they could before the Red Army recovered from getting atom-bombed…if it did, if it could.

  “Of course you two laugh at the same shit,” the ex-LAH veteran said. “You’ve been asshole buddies for God knows how long.”

  “Only Arschloch I see around here is you, Rolf,” Gustav said. He figured he and Rolf would have it out one of these days. One of them would knock the crap out of the other, and they’d go on from there. Or maybe they’d rack each other up, and then they’d both get some time off from the war.

  But a sputter of gunfire broke out from the direction of Marsberg. Whatever he and Rolf did to each other would have to wait. They both trotted toward the trouble, as did Max.

  Russian generals spent men the way a drunk tycoon spent money on dancing girls. They kept throwing them into the fight, on the notion that whatever they were facing was bound to fall over sooner or later. It had worked for them against the Wehrmacht. They thought it would again.

  “Urra!” the Red Army men shouted. The war cry always made the hair at the back of Gustav’s neck stand up in alarm. To him, it meant a swarm of drunken Ivans rolling forward like the tide, careless of whether they lived or died, and no King Canute anywhere to hold them back.

  Gustav skidded down behind a jeep that would never go anywhere again. He rose to one knee and started banging away with the Kalashnikov. He could hit what he aimed at out to three or four hundred meters, twice as far as he would have been able to with the PPSh. The bullets had more stopping power when they hit something—somebody—too.

  This Russian steamroller had less steam behind it than attacks Gustav had faced in bygone days. When the Ivans saw they wouldn’t smash the forces in front of them, they didn’t keep trying to break through in spite of casualties. They went to earth and started digging scrapes, the way any sensible soldiers would have.

  Back in Marsberg, some potbellied Soviet lieutenant colonel had to be on the brink of apoplexy. How could you fight a proper war if soldiers kept trying to stay alive? Mortar bombs started whistling down on German and Russian positions with little discrimination between the two.

  Blasts, screaming fragments…Gustav tried to scramble under the dead jeep. But its tires had burned, and on the iron wheels it sat too low to let him. A clang announced that a fragment had ripped into the back fender. A few centimeters farther to the right and it would have ripped into him instead. You went into a stupid little fight like this, you rolled dice with your life as the stake.

  And if you went into enough stupid little fights like this, you would crap out. The odds made it a certainty.

  Lieutenant Fiebig got up and dashed toward the Russians, firing his U.S.-issue grease gun from the hip as he ran. “Come on, boys!” the company CO shouted. “Follow me!”

  Those had been the magic words in the last war, and they still were. Officers and sergeants who led from the front got better results than the ones who just ordered their men forward while they stayed safe in the rear, the way so many World War I commanders had. Of course, officers and sergeants who led from the front also took more casualties than the other kind. Bravery could be its own punishment.

  Gustav got up, too. He slapped a full magazine onto the AK-47 and ran after the lieutenant. Fire and rush, fire and rush…No one needed to tell the Germans how to advance. It wasn’t as if most of them hadn’t learned in a school that buried you if you flunked an exam.

  Some of the Russians knew how to fall back the same way. But they had more kids in their ranks than Gustav’s countrymen did. The Germans in this fight were all volunteers. The Ivans put any warm bodies they could find into uniform. Even in the last war, Gustav had been fighting sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Hitler kept screaming how Stalin was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Stalin was, too. But Hitler’s barrel had no bottom left to scrape after a while.

  A terrified guy with a broad Slavic face threw down his rifle and threw his hands in the air. “Kamerad!” he bleated. “Freund!”

  Gustav pulled the ammo pouches and grenades off the Russian’s belt so he couldn’t change his mind, then gestured with the Soviet assault rifle. “Go on back,” he said. “Somebody’ll take care of you.”

  Blubbering palatal gratitude that Gustav couldn’t understand, the Red Army man headed west, hands still high above his head. And maybe some German would get him off to a POW camp, or maybe somebody like Rolf would decide he wasn’t worth wasting time over and plug him. Surrendering could be the riskiest thing you tried on the battlefield.

  Marsberg was another town whose church had a tall steeple. The Russians didn’t put an artillery spotter up there—they had a couple of snipers banging away at the advancing German soldiers. But the Red Army wasn’t the only force that issued its men mortars. Bombs began bursting around the church. Then two in a row slammed into the steeple and sent it crashing down.

  If the Ivans had tanks in town, taking it wouldn’t be easy and might be impossible. As Gustav knew too well, any tank, no matter how old-fashioned, was death on infantry without armor support. The Germans still relied on the Amis for that. Memories of panzers and blitzkrieg left the USA skittish even yet about a West German army with tanks and planes of its own.

  But no tracked behemoths started flinging murder at the advancing foot soldiers. Nor did the Red Army men in Marsberg seem determined to fight to the death to hold every laundry and secondhand bookstore. A couple of machine guns slowed the Germans, but not for long. The Russians pulled back, leaving behind a stench of strong tobacco and sour sweat.

  Cautiously, locals started coming out of their cellars and looking around their battered town. A woman burst into tears at seeing the shattered church. “What are you blaming us for, you stupid bitch? It’s Stalin’s fault!” Rolf shouted at her. For some reason, that didn’t make her stop crying.

  —

  It was over, but then again it wasn’t. In thirteen months, Harry Truman wouldn’t be President of the United States any more. He and Bess would go home to Independence. The reporters would write about him. Then, as soon as he’d settled into the obscurity that was all an ex-President merited, they’d forget about him. After that, the historians would get their licks.

  In the meantime, though, he had a war to fight, and with luck to win. He didn’t want to burden his successor, whether Donkey or Elephant, with cleaning up the mess he’d made. He was a proud man, and a tidy one. He wanted to clean up his own messes.

  The Oval Office telephone rang. He picked it up. “Truman here. Yes?”

  “Mr. Kennan is here to see you, sir,” Rose Conway said.

  “Send him in,” Truman answered.

  That he was conferring with George Kennan showed how much he wanted to clean up his own messes. Kennan was a Soviet expert. He’d been assistant chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Moscow till after the end of the last war. He’d helped shape the policy of containing the Russians that Truman had carried out. As the Russians blockaded Berlin, set off their own first atom bomb, and let their stooges start the fight in Korea, containing them didn’t seem such a hot idea any more. Pushing them back looked ever more necessary.

  Kennan had opposed letting Douglas MacArthur take American troops north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea. He’d said it was dangerous. No one else had thought so. MacArthur sure hadn’t. Neither had Truman himself. And neither had Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East. And they’d all proved wrong, and George Kennan much too right.

  In he came. He was in his late forties, with a patrician bearing, or maybe just one that said he was used to being the smartest man in the room. He was tall and slim and dresse
d well. His strong-chinned face probably wowed the ladies even if his hairline was in full retreat.

  “Mr. President,” he said, and held out his hand. Something in his voice shouted Ivy League.

  Truman shook with him. Kennan had a good, firm grip. “Thanks for coming in,” the President said, more conscious than usual of his own Missouri twang. He waved the diplomat to a chair. A colored steward followed Kennan in with coffee.

  After the steward disappeared again, Kennan remarked, “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk to me any more after our earlier…disagreements, sir.”

  “I’m not fool enough to think I’m right all the damn time,” Truman said. “That’s for Hitler and Stalin and Mao and people of their stripe. When I sit down on the pot, I know what comes out, and it ain’t angels.”

  He got a thin smile from Kennan, who said, “That’s a healthy attitude.”

  “Well, I hope so. Healthy or not, it’s my attitude. And you were right, much too right, about what would come of MacArthur’s push north,” Truman said. “So now I want to pick your brain about something else.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can for you, Mr. President,” Kennan said, “but I know that, even if I happened to be right the last time, that doesn’t necessarily mean I will be this time.”

  “Fair enough,” Truman said. “Don’t worry. Whatever happens, you won’t get the blame. I will. That comes with sitting on this side of the desk.”

  “Oh, yes.” George Kennan nodded. “I wouldn’t trade places with you for all the money in the world.”

  “I don’t particularly like this seat myself, but I’ve got it. I have to do the best I can in it,” Truman said. “Stalin has made it plain as day that he won’t settle for the status quo ante bellum. Do you think the other Russian Communists will show better sense if he isn’t there any more to stop them?”

  “If he’s deceased, do you mean?”

  Truman nodded. “That’s just what I mean. As long as Hitler stayed alive, the Germans wouldn’t surrender. He scared them worse than we did. Christ, he scared ’em worse than the Russians did, and that’s really saying something. But it wasn’t much more than a week after he blew his brains out that they decided to throw in the towel.”