Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “It’s an interesting question, sir.” Kennan, who probably looked thoughtful all the time, looked more thoughtful now. “It would depend on who took power after he, ah, died, of course.”

  “Well, sure.” The President nodded. “With luck, some of his higher-ups would go to the Devil along with him. I’m talking about landing an A-bomb on his head, you understand.”

  “Yes, I thought you had to be,” Kennan replied. “I assume you haven’t tried to do this before—”

  “Oh, we did, when we hit Moscow,” Truman broke in. “It didn’t work, but not for lack of effort.”

  “I see. I wondered if that might be so. I might have tried harder to find out if some of my acquaintances in the Defense Department hadn’t got nervous about talking to me.” Kennan brought out the implied accusation with no particular rancor.

  “I never told anyone not to talk to you,” Truman said truthfully.

  “I didn’t say you did, sir. People there did understand, though, that I was no longer in good odor here or at the State Department.” Kennan had got on fine with George Marshall when Marshall was Secretary of State. He and Dean Acheson, though, struck sparks off each other.

  Marshall, of course, was one of the few men perhaps even smarter than Kennan. Acheson, while nobody’s dope, wasn’t in that lofty league. Chances were he’d disliked being looked down upon from on high, as it were. Few human beings didn’t. Truman himself had the unpleasant suspicion that he was being measured by Kennan’s mental calipers.

  “Suppose we do send some of Stalin’s button men to hell with him,” Truman said. “Will the ones who’re left make peace?”

  “If they see that their national survival, or maybe their personal survival, is at stake, I think they will,” Kennan said. “But I gather that finding where Stalin is isn’t easy. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t sleep in the same bed twice in a row.”

  “We’re working on that,” the President said. It was, in fact, something of an understatement. The less he said, the better the chance nothing would leak. No one had told him about the atom bomb till he moved into the White house, and he’d been Vice President. He’d been mad about that at first, but only at first. Till the weight of the world landed on his shoulders, he hadn’t needed to know.

  George Kennan was only—only!—a diplomat out of work at the moment. There were plenty of things he didn’t need to know. Truman was no Joe McCarthy, to distrust an out-of-work diplomat’s loyalty. But he understood that the fewer chances you took, the better off you were likely to end up.

  “I do thank you very much for your help,” the President said.

  That was dismissal. George Kennan recognized it as such. He rose from his chair. Truman also stood. As they shook hands again, Kennan said, “I’m pleased to do whatever I can, sir, as I told you before. But I shouldn’t be the only man whose views you seek. Get as many opinions as you can, judge the value of the people who give them, and make your own choices accordingly.”

  “I’m trying to do that, yes,” Truman said. “I called you in because I wanted to hear from someone who wasn’t connected to the State Department.”

  “Oh, I’m still connected to it,” Kennan said. “It doesn’t pay my salary any more, but I’ll always bear its mark.”

  “Its scars,” Truman suggested with a grin.

  “Well, yes, there is that,” Kennan agreed with a wry grin. “We all have them here and there, don’t we? At least I know where those came from.”

  “True enough.” In his late sixties, Truman had plenty of scars of his own. But he also had the satisfaction of knowing he’d dealt out even more of them than he’d taken.

  —

  Bruce McNulty swept off his officer’s cap and bowed from the waist. “Madame, your humble chariot awaits,” he said in what an American fondly imagined to be an English accent.

  The accent wasn’t what gave Daisy Baxter a fit of the giggles. Neither was the humble chariot: a jeep from some U.S. Air Force motor pool. The uncovering and the bow, though…“You act like somebody out of a movie about Henry VIII or Shakespeare or something,” Daisy said.

  He took off the cap again and looked at it with regret. “No feather, darn it,” he said in his usual American tones. “But I can buckle a mean swash without one. What’s Errol Flynn got that I don’t? I mean, besides money, looks, and talent?”

  “I like the way you look just fine,” Daisy said.

  “That’s nice,” he answered blandly. “I notice you didn’t talk about the other two.”

  “You’re impossible,” she said, wagging her finger at him.

  His grin was pure impudence. “Hey, I do my best. C’mon, toots—hop in. You’ve got yourself a pass from the hospital. I’ve got one from my base. Let’s go cut a rug. Tomorrow morning it’ll be 1952.”

  Daisy was glad to slide into the jeep’s passenger seat—which, since it was on the right, to her way of thinking should have been the driving seat (or, if you were a Yank, the driver’s seat). Even though it hadn’t been built for comfort, sitting down was a relief. She still didn’t have all her strength, or all her hair, back. But they’d let her go out on New Year’s Eve once she promised not to get too crazy or wild.

  Bruce got in beside her. “You warm enough?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I won’t break if you look at me sidewise.” She was also bundled into a thick lamb’s-fleece coat one of the sisters had lent her. It would have kept a giraffe cozy at the South Pole.

  “Okey-doke.” He turned the key and put the jeep in gear.

  “Are you all right driving on the left?” She had frets of her own.

  “I’ve done it enough by now that I’ve got the hang of it,” he answered. “I have to remember not to look the wrong way, that’s all. But nobody’s going to be moving real fast even if we do bump fenders.”

  “Mudguards,” Daisy corrected automatically.

  “Yeah, mudguards.” Bruce’s agreement was sarcastic. “And the boot, and a spanner to change the tyres—you don’t say those funny, you just spell ’em wrong—and the hood is the bonnet. Can you imagine a jeep with a bonnet? Makes me think it ought to have curly hair.”

  “Impossible,” she said again, but she couldn’t help laughing.

  He did drive slowly and carefully. The blackout was as stern as it had been during the Blitz. Starlight was what he had to steer by, and the clouds scudding across the sky robbed him of much of that.

  The dance was in Yaxham, a tiny village a few miles south of East Dereham. Daisy wondered how Bruce had heard about it, and how he intended to find the hall where it was being held once he managed to find Yaxham.

  That, she turned out not to need to worry about. Once they got into Yaxham, they could play it by ear. The hall might be blacked out, but music spilled into the street even if light didn’t.

  “Let’s see if I can park this critter without leaving it in the middle of the road,” Bruce said.

  “That would be good.” Daisy nodded, though he might not be able to see her.

  He did a splendid job, possibly by Braille. Then he said, “Shall we go make fools of ourselves?”

  “Let’s,” she replied. She wasn’t sure how much dancing she was up for, not when she’d spent so long flat on her back. Even a little would be fun, though. She reached for his hand in the darkness as he was reaching for hers. They squeezed each other. The firm pressure felt good.

  Two sets of blackout curtains kept lights in the dance hall from leaking out. Daisy wore a cloche straight out of the Roaring Twenties to hide as best she could how much hair she’d lost. As best she could wasn’t all that good; she’d been nervous about showing herself in public. She needn’t have been. Several other men and women were about as bald as she was. She recognized a man who lived only a few blocks from the Owl and Unicorn. They smiled and waved to each other.

  Bruce didn’t get jealous, the way he had once before. He just asked, “Somebody you know?”

  “Stuart? Only my whol
e life. I went through school with his kid sister,” Daisy answered. She looked around. “I don’t see Kitty here. I hope she’s all right.”

  “Me, too,” Bruce said. “Well, if old Stuart cuts in on me, you can ask him. C’mon.”

  Out on the dance floor they went. The combo on the bandstand played hot jazz, or what a provincial combo imagined hot jazz to be. Their front man had a trumpet, a sloping belly, and a balding pate with nothing to do with radiation sickness. Other than that, he resembled Louis Armstrong much less than he wished he did.

  “He’d better be careful with that thing,” Bruce said, nodding toward the trumpet. “He’s liable to hurt somebody with it.”

  “You’re a horrible man,” Daisy told him.

  “Yeah, but I have fun. I try, anyway,” the American answered. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, people would also be gathering for New Year’s. They’d also be looking around to see who was there and who had died under atomic fire. And he would have been the one who’d visited it upon them.

  Daisy wondered if he thought about that. How could you help it? Then again, how could you live with yourself if you did?

  She didn’t want to think about it. She danced two quick numbers and a slow one, then felt herself drooping. Bruce noticed as soon as she did. “Want to take a break and grab a pint?” he asked.

  “That sounds marvelous,” she said. They had to queue up for the beer. Standing wasn’t too bad. Bruce shoved money across the bar. The red-faced man behind it returned two pint mugs. One sip told Daisy she’d served better bitter. She wasn’t about to complain, though.

  Bruce liked what they had here. From the things Daisy had heard about American beer, this was bound to improve on that.

  They danced some more, then took another break. She did get to talk to Stuart. Kitty had come through the bombing. She was up in Wells-next-the-Sea, waiting tables at a café. That was good news.

  The trumpeter with delusions of Satchmo counted down the seconds to midnight on his wristwatch. “Happy New Year!” he shouted when there were no seconds left to count. “Happy 1952!”

  Everyone cheered. Men and women embraced. Bruce bent his head to kiss Daisy. She clutched at him greedily.

  Not too much later, they slipped out of the hall. Bruce found the jeep without even lighting a match. There was more starlight now. It had cleared up, though it was colder than before.

  “That was wonderful!” Daisy said as he started the motor. “Thank you so much! I had the best time.”

  “It was fun, yeah.” She could just about see him nod. “Now…Can I work out how to make it back to good old East Dereham?”

  “If you need to stop along the way to get your bearings, I won’t mind,” Daisy said. She felt flame on her face. Had she really been that brazen?

  She must have been, because somewhere north of Yaxham he pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as the jeep stopped. They were as much alone as if they’d booked a hotel room.

  “I don’t want to worry about a baby,” Daisy said, somewhere in the midst of the kisses and caresses. Not just her cheeks were on fire now. She burned all over.

  “Then we’ll try some other things instead,” Bruce answered. And they did. The jeep’s seats were awkward. So was the steering wheel. They managed. His fingers and tongue were knowing and skilled.

  She discovered he was circumcised, which Tom hadn’t been. He came before she quite expected him to, so she choked a little. She managed to laugh about it when she pulled away. She was still laughing as he started the jeep again.

  BORIS GRIBKOV GAVE the Tu-4 more throttle. The air base lay between Odessa and the Romanian border. It was winter here, as it was winter everywhere in the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t the kind of winter that piled snow in drifts a couple of meters high. You could fly here without worrying about clearing the runway first. Most of the time, anyhow.

  “Everything all right?” he asked the copilot.

  “All my instruments are where they’re supposed to be, sir,” First Lieutenant Anton Presnyakov replied. He was short and blond and seemed bright.

  Seemed! Boris was having to get used to a whole new flight crew. He didn’t know how many men had got out of the Tu-4 that was hit above Bratislava. He did know he was the only one back in Soviet service.

  He sent the engineer the same question over the intercom. “All good,” First Lieutenant Lev Vaksman said. Having another Jew in the crew faintly unnerved Gribkov, but what could you do? They were smart fellows—sometimes too smart for their own good—and often wound up in slots that took technical knowledge and skill.

  “Khorosho. Up we go, then.” Boris pulled back on the yoke. The Tu-4 left the runway and climbed for the sky. It was an easy takeoff, not nearly so nervous-making as a lot of them. The bomb bays were empty, and the plane carried only half a load of fuel. All that meant the Shvetsov radials didn’t have to strain nearly so hard as usual to get airborne.

  Presnyakov must have felt the same relief, for he said, “They should all be this smooth.”

  “Da,” Boris agreed through the clunking noises of the retracting landing gear. He flipped on the intercom again to ask the radioman, “Are you in touch with the milch cow?”

  “Comrade Pilot, I am,” First Lieutenant Faizulla Ikramov answered. He was an Uzbek, from somewhere beyond the Urals. His Russian held a slight hissing accent, but it was fluent enough. It would have to be, for him to sit in the seat he had. Not many from his folk reached officer’s rank. He was uncommonly able, he had connections, or more likely both.

  “Milch cow,” Presnyakov echoed as they droned up toward their assigned altitude of 9,000 meters. “That’s funny, if you like.”

  “So it is,” Boris said. It might be funny in ways the copilot, who was a youngster, didn’t suspect. During the last war, the Hitlerites had sent special submarines out into the North Atlantic loaded with food and fuel and fresh torpedoes for the U-boats that were trying to sever the lifeline between England and America. They’d called those supply subs milch cows. The Germans failed, but it was still a clever idea.

  It was also an idea that tied in with what Gribkov and the men in the bomber with him were doing on this training flight. Some Soviet higher-up must have thought so, too, or he wouldn’t have tagged the other plane with the handle he’d given it.

  Boris stared through the not quite perfect Plexiglas of the Tu-4, looking for the circling milch cow. He also kept an eye peeled for fighters. He didn’t really expect any—it was a long haul from even the closest American bases. But P-51s with drop tanks could come this far, and the Tu-4 would be in a world of trouble if a few did.

  Anton Presnyakov pointed ahead and to the right. “There it is, Comrade Pilot!”

  “You’re right.” Gribkov nodded. “That’s very good. Now we can just finish our climb and take station with it.” He asked the radioman, “Can you patch me through to them?”

  “Hold on one moment, Comrade Pilot,” Lieutenant Ikramov said. Boris listened to him talk with the other Tu-4’s radio operator for a few seconds. Then Ikramov came back to him: “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Milch Cow, this is Calf One. Milch Cow, this is Calf One. Do you read me, Milch Cow?” Gribkov said.

  “Calf One, this is Milch Cow. Reading you loud and clear. How do you read me, Calf One?” The new voice in Boris’ earphones was calm and unflustered. The other pilot made him think he was dealing with someone experienced, someone who wouldn’t panic if anything unexpected happened.

  “Also reading you loud and clear, Milch Cow,” Gribkov said. “Do you have us visually? We are climbing up to take our position.”

  “I see you, yes,” the other pilot replied. “I will continue to cruise at 330—I say again, three-three-oh—kilometers an hour.”

  “I understand. As I approach, I will also slow to 330—I say again, three-three-oh.”

  “I hear you, Calf One,” Milch Cow’s pilot said. “We’ll talk some more when you get into position. Out for now.”

/>   “Out,” Boris echoed.

  Up he climbed, and took his place behind the milch cow. The other bomber’s pilot came back on the radio: “Deploy your cable. I am deploying ours.”

  “Deploy the cable,” Gribkov told Lev Vaksman.

  “I am deploying the cable, Comrade Pilot,” the engineer replied.

  That other cable descended from the milch cow. It met the one from Gribkov’s calf, which guided the nozzle at the end to a fitting at the end of Gribkov’s Tu-4’s right wing. From his station on the starboard side of the fuselage, Vaksman could see when contact was made.

  “We have a join, sir!” he said, his voice rising in excitement.

  “Milch Cow, this is Calf One. We have a join.” Boris relayed the news.

  “I see it, Calf One. I was waiting for you to confirm,” Milch Cow’s pilot said. “Shall I commence fueling?”

  “Yes, Milch Cow. Commence fueling.” Gribkov went through all the repetition without the least fuss. Everything had to be right.

  The Soviet Union had started working on in-flight refueling as early as 1948. It was the obvious way to extend the Tu-4’s range and let the heavy bomber hit targets it couldn’t reach with what it carried in its own tanks. Till the war started, not much progress got made. Now…Now they had to learn how to do it right. American planes could reach most of the important places within the USSR. Without in-flight refueling, Soviet bombers couldn’t do the same to the USA. America’s heavily populated, highly productive East had been safe, shielded by distance.

  Just because it had been, though, didn’t mean it would stay that way.

  “I see the fuel gauge moving,” Gribkov said to Vaksman. “We are taking in fuel?”

  “Comrade Pilot, that’s what the instruments show. This is really something, isn’t it?” the engineer said. “It’s like long-distance screwing.”

  One more Zhid with a half-baked sense of humor, Boris thought. But the milch cow’s pilot guffawed when he passed along the comment. “I’ve got a long dick, all right,” the man said.