Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  Marian stiffened. Linda had rolled down her window. In spite of all Marian’s warnings about never talking to strangers, she was in animated conversation with a man. Marian broke into a run.

  And then, three steps later, she slowed again. Panic faded. Only one man in town wore an old-fashioned tweed cap, what they called a newsboy cap. And Fayvl Tabakman, while he might be a great many things, wasn’t a stranger to Linda. Except for Marian, she’d known him longer than anybody here.

  The cobbler turned. He touched the brim of the cap in his familiar greeting gesture. “Hallo,” he said. “I saw your little girl, and I thought I would keep an eye on her till you got back.”

  “Thanks.” Marian believed him. She still didn’t know whether she felt anything for him, and what it was if she did, but she was sure she didn’t worry about him near Linda. Weed was a pretty safe place. She wouldn’t have left her daughter alone for even a few minutes if it hadn’t been. But an adult eye didn’t hurt.

  Tabakman pointed at the newspaper in her hand. In the sunlight, Marian saw that his forefinger had more scars than she could count—marks of how he’d learned his trade and of slips after he did. He said, “It’s a terrible thing about that poor van Zandt man.”

  “It is.” Marian nodded. “Mr. Stansfield and I were talking about that in the drugstore just now.”

  “Terrible,” Tabakman repeated: and if anyone here knew about terrible, he was the man. “And it doesn’t got to be this way. A hospital? A hospital, I don’t know about. Is expensive, a hospital.”

  “I know,” Marian said sorrowfully.

  “But an ambulance, an ambulance we could do,” Fayvl Tabakman said—or maybe it was Weed could do. “An ambulance is what? A few t’ousand taler? Can’t be more. We got lots lumber companies here. They split the cost, not so real much for anyone. A few hindert taler, a t’ousand tops. They could. Only they don’t want.”

  “You’re right.” Marian hadn’t looked at it from that angle. “It wouldn’t take more than a fleabite out of their bottom line.”

  “Mommy,” Linda said, “can we go home now? I have to tinkle.”

  “Okay.” Marian realized that listening to grown-ups talk about things that didn’t matter to her couldn’t be very exciting for a little girl. She said her good-byes to Fayvl Tabakman and got into the Studebaker.

  Even after she made dinner—lamb chops, which she could do quickly on top of the stove—Tabakman’s idea stayed in her mind. The more she thought about it, the better it seemed.

  Except for one thing. Who’ll bell the cat? Heber Stansfield’s question stayed in her mind, too. Whoever did try to bell the cat wouldn’t just be belling one cat, either. That person would have to go to all the lumber bosses in town. The more who said no, the more each of the rest would have to pay. How soon would that be enough to scupper the project?

  And if her own boss said no, she might very well be tossing her own job down the drain. She didn’t want to take the chance. Anyone who was a kid during the Depression learned that, when you had work, you hung on to it the way an abalone hung on to a rock.

  So, instead of talking to Mr. Cummings or the other big shots, she spent two or three days contemplating ways and means. Then she paid a call on Dale Dropo. “A friend of mine said that, if all the lumber companies chipped in on an ambulance, it wouldn’t cost any one of them too much,” she told the editor of the Weed Press-Herald.

  He scratched his cheek. “You’ve got a smart friend,” he said after a moment. “Who is he, she, whatever, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Fayvl Tabakman, the cobbler,” she said. “But talk to him before you put his name in the paper, okay?”

  “I will, honest injun,” Dropo said. “It’s a better scheme than trying to get any one outfit to cough up the dough, that’s for sure. Who does the dirty work, though?”

  “Here’s what I was thinking,” Marian said—the result of her contemplation. “If you put petitions in the paper and almost everybody in town signed them, wouldn’t the lumber companies have to notice that?”

  “Lumber companies don’t have to do a darn thing,” Dropo replied. “But the people who run them, if they don’t want their neighbors smearing dog poop on their windshields or slashing their tires in the middle of the night, they’ve got to think about it, anyway.”

  “That’s how it looked to me, too,” Marian said. “I’m glad you see it the same way.”

  “Worth a try. If they ignore the whole thing, we’re no worse off than when we started—and maybe they will get their tires slashed. What the heck? I can probably find a knife or an ice pick myself.” Dale Dropo eyed her. “I know you and that Tabakman guy both came out of the camps by Seattle. This town may be lucky you decided to stop here.”

  “Thank you. It’s a nice place,” Marian answered. “If we can make it a little better, well, good.”

  “No guarantees,” Dropo warned.

  “Oh, I know. When are there ever?” No guarantees your house doesn’t get blown up, Marian thought. No guarantee your husband comes home. No guarantees at all.

  —

  American 105s and 155s howled down on the Soviet positions. Ihor Shevchenko huddled in his foxhole, praying inexpertly but with great sincerity. The last time around, the Nazis hadn’t enjoyed this kind of artillery support. The Red Army was the one that lined up guns hub to hub and blasted its foes to jam and sausage meat.

  Red Army gunners had done the same thing this time…till the A-bombs in far western Germany and along Soviet supply lines gave the edge back to the imperialists. The Hitlerites hadn’t had the atom bomb, either. A good thing, too, or Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and Russia at least to the Urals would have turned into a radioactive wasteland.

  Well, here it was, only a few years after the Fascist beasts were ground into the dirt. Here it was, only a few years after fraternal socialist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe gave the USSR a giant glacis against any future invasion from out of the west. And…?

  And Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and Russia at least to the Urals had turned into a radioactive wasteland. Hitler might have been more thoroughly, more savagely, destructive than Truman. But Truman was doing fine on his own.

  Ihor dug the foxhole deeper. He flipped the dirt up onto the western side. When the shelling let up, he’d use bushes and branches to camouflage the foxhole’s lip. For now, that could wait. Sticking any part of himself above ground was asking to get that part mutilated.

  Anya’d been lucky. Without her horrible cold, she would have gone into Kiev the day the Yankees visited fire upon it. Ihor had been lucky himself. If he hadn’t sat on that stupid broken bottle, he would have been at the front, not behind it, when more atomic fire fell from the sky.

  His entrenching tool clanked against something. He dug more carefully than he needed for ordinary excavation. His amateur archaeology unearthed a sharp, curved chunk of rusty shell casing from the last war. Was it German or American? Or had the English dueled with the Nazis in this part of Germany? He didn’t know. Even if he had, it wouldn’t matter now.

  After all, what did one more shell fragment prove? Only that this war wasn’t the first time people had tried to kill one another here. A musket ball would have shown him the same thing, in case he didn’t already know it. So would an arrowhead. So would a spear point, or an axe blade, or a club made from a stone fastened to a length of wood by sinews. People had been trying to kill one another here for as long as people had lived here.

  Had he done some digging in the black soil of his collective farm outside Kiev, he would have come up with the same kind of lethal hardware going back to the dawn of time. People there had tried to kill one another for as long as people dwelt in those parts, too.

  People everywhere had done their damnedest to kill one another for as long as they’d been around. The story of Cain and Abel distilled a lot of truth down into a teacup.

  These days, though, the would-be murderers had better tools than they’d enjoyed in Biblical
days. Even as Ihor dug to strengthen and deepen his hole, nearby shell bursts threatened to collapse it on him. Earth tortured by high explosives sprang into the air in anguish. Clods and pebbles came clattering down onto his helmet. He rubbed at his nose and wasn’t surprised to find it bloody. Had one of those 155s hit a little closer, blast might have killed him without leaving a visible mark on his carcass.

  And, of course, everything didn’t turn to sunshine and roses the instant the shelling stopped. In case any of the men in the company were too stunned to remember that or too stupid to know it, Lieutenant Kosior called, “Be ready to fight! They’ll be coming now!”

  Ihor heard him as if from five kilometers away. He wondered how far his ears would recover. He made sure he had a round chambered in his Kalashnikov. That wouldn’t help his hearing, either. It would help him stay alive, though, which also counted.

  Or it might. The Americans knew how to play this game. They sent tanks forward with their foot soldiers. German panzers, all slabs of steel and sharp angles, looked more frightful than these beasts. But thick armor and a high-velocity 90mm gun were nothing to sneeze at. If that gun sneezed at you, there’d be nothing left.

  Against the panzers, though, Russian foot soldiers hadn’t had any weapons but magnetic mines and Molotov cocktails. To use either, you had to sneak suicidally close to your target. If the bastards inside the panzer didn’t get you first, the infantry shepherding them would.

  The game was different now. A Red Army man launched an RPG at an oncoming Pershing. The rocket fell short, and the tank fired two rounds of HE at his foxhole. Ihor hoped he stayed alive. Whether he did or not, though, that trail of fire would make all the Yankee tank crews who saw it thoughtful.

  They came on anyway. Like their Soviet counterparts, they had their orders. They’d catch it if they didn’t follow them. And they paid the price for courage or obedience or whatever it was. Another Red Army man waited till the American tanks reached the forwardmost Soviet foxholes. Then he launched his RPG. It burned through a Pershing’s side armor and set off the shells inside the steel box.

  Flame and smoke shot out of the turret. The tank stopped. It would never go again. The crew probably died fast. All the questions that had vexed philosophers and prophets since men wore skins? Whatever the answers were, those Americans had just discovered them.

  Ihor squeezed off a quick burst in the direction of the advancing infantry. When he came up to shoot again, he wasn’t quite in the same place. A good thing, too, because a bullet cracked past his head. He ducked down again in a hurry.

  A crashing clang told of an RPG deflecting off a tank it didn’t hit squarely. HE rounds from the tank’s cannon said that the man who’d loosed the rocket-propelled grenade was paying the price for failure.

  Maybe he’d be able to talk it over with the crew from the incinerated Pershing. Or maybe there was just nothing. One way or the other, he knew now. Ihor didn’t. Nor was he anxious to find out, not in any final way.

  Another American tank brewed up, and then another, both of them spectacularly. Soviet artillery woke up to the idea that the sons of bitches on the other side were attacking. Shells started falling among them—and short rounds started falling among the forward Red Army troops.

  “You stupid cocksuckers!” Ihor screamed when a shell from his own side left him stunned and deafened. Your friends could kill you every bit as dead as the enemy could. He laughed as he tried to shake himself back to usefulness. Anatoly Prishvin might be telling the Yankee tank crew and the RPG man all about that right now.

  Someone peered over the edge of the foxhole. Evidently all the artillery fire had chewed up the ground enough so the spoil Ihor had thrown out didn’t seem anything special. The shape of that helmet was wrong—too much dome, not enough brim. Ihor fired a burst at point-blank range. The American groaned and sagged. Barring Resurrection Day, he wouldn’t rise again. When things calmed down a bit, Ihor would rifle his pockets.

  One more Pershing went up in fire and smoke. The Yanks seemed to decide that, if they were going to move forward, they weren’t going to do it right here. Sullenly, competently, firing as they went, they pulled back.

  “Urra! for the rodina! Urra! for the great Stalin!” Lieutenant Kosior shouted. “They shall not pass!”

  “Urra!” Ihor said. He had schnapps in his canteen. He drank greedily.

  Like vodka, schnapps was good for what ailed you. It might not fix anything, but making you not care worked just as well. Ihor wondered how the great Stalin would have done in one of these foxholes. Not so well, was his guess, even if he couldn’t tell anyone about it.

  He’d solved the problem of peace! Put the leaders in the trenches and the war wouldn’t last five minutes! The only problem with that was, who could do it? But if you wanted to worry about every little detail…

  —

  Luisa Hozzel’s stomach growled. She was so worn by another day out among the pines, she was ready to fall over during the evening count. She wanted to eat. She wanted to go back to the barracks. She wanted to sleep. Since the Russians threw her into the gulag, her horizon had shrunk to that. Supper. Her bunk. They would both be bad, but bad was better than none.

  The guards prowled up and down. They looked angry and jumpy. The count kept coming out wrong. Luisa hated days like this. Piling the stupid guards’ incompetence on top of all the other Schweinerei here just seemed like too much.

  Beside her, Trudl Bachman murmured, “They should take off their boots so they can count with their toes.”

  “No.” Luisa almost imperceptibly shook her head. “One of them will have got a toe shot off in the war, and that will mess things up worse than ever.”

  Even though a nervous guard prowled past not three meters away from them, he didn’t turn his head or snarl at them to shut up. By now, practice and need had turned them both into fine ventriloquists. Give me a dummy—one of these guards, say—and I’ll go on stage, Luisa thought.

  “I hate it when they have kittens over nothing,” Trudl said.

  “I know. Doesn’t anybody here know how to count?” Luisa answered. They weren’t the only zeks grousing, either. As time wore on and the women still weren’t allowed in to eat, grumbles in both German and Russian grew more and more audible. Even the bitches were getting angry.

  The two top guard sergeants put their heads together. At last, one of them slowly and unhappily clumped off to the administrative office, so it wasn’t over nothing after all.

  The man came back with a lieutenant: a man who had a hook where his left hand should have been and whose eye patch didn’t come within kilometers of covering all the scars on the left side of his head. He looked fearsome enough when he wasn’t irked. When he was, as he was now, he would terrify children. He scared Luisa. She hadn’t seen many men in Germany more horribly mutilated. He was lucky to be alive, though she wasn’t so sure he would call it luck.

  “We have had an escape,” he said. Something was wrong with his voice, too. It sounded more like the scraping of sandpaper on hard-wood than anything that should have come from a human throat. He went on, “The count is five short. You will be interrogated to discover who helped the criminals abscond with themselves. For now, go to your barracks at once.”

  “What about supper?” Nadezhda Chukovskaya spoke for all the hungry, weary women. Since she was neither a political nor a German, she thought she could get away with the question.

  “We have had an escape, you stupid, worthless cunt,” the mangled officer said in tones of cold fury. “I don’t give a fuck if all of you starve to death. Then we can count you, anyway. Dismissed to your barracks! Now, damn you!”

  “I hope they get away,” Luisa said as they dejectedly did what the lieutenant ordered them to do.

  Like her husband, Trudl Bachman was a very practical person. “I hope they weren’t from our work gang,” she said.

  “Five? They couldn’t have been—could they?” Luisa said.

  “I don’t think so
. But would I swear?” Trudl shook her head. “I didn’t pay any attention on the way in tonight. I was so worn out, all I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

  “Same here,” Luisa agreed. “You’d think the guards would have noticed, though. That’s what they’re there for.”

  “Maybe they were too stupid,” Trudl said. “Or maybe the women who escaped paid them off.”

  With what? Luisa started to ask. She didn’t come out with the question. Not much in the way of cash or valuables circulated in the gulag. Most of what there was was in the hands of the bitches and the inside workers, the people with the least incentive to flee. But a woman who was desperate enough to do anything to get away always had a coin she could offer a man. All it would cost her was her self-respect. If losing that meant getting out of this horrible place, it might be a small price to pay.

  She guessed she’d be too hungry to sleep. She wasn’t, as she hadn’t been too tired to eat a few times after tough days in the taiga. As soon as she lay down on her bunk, her eyes sagged shut. The next thing she knew, a guard was banging on the shell casing to summon the women for the morning count.

  Then she realized how hungry she was. She did notice that two of the escapees came from her barracks: a German and a Russian political. They didn’t belong to her work gang.

  Once the guards were satisfied no one else had flown the coop during the night, all the gangs except the one from which the five women had fled were allowed to go to breakfast. Luisa ate every scrap of the nasty fare set before her, and felt as hungry afterwards as she had before. The luckless members of that work gang who’d got kept out there had to be hungrier yet. The guards would be grilling them—and, no doubt, their comrades who’d taken more women out into the woods and brought fewer back.

  No one went into the woods after the quick and noisome latrine call. The guards separated the women into their gangs, but they stayed on the flat ground where they lined up.

  Some of the women from the first gang came out of the administrative building. Some didn’t, at least not where Luisa could see. She guessed they went straight to the punishment cells.