Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  He made more sense than Truman wished he did. Was Alben Barkley still alive? How much of the Cabinet was left? What about Congress? Only this political junket had kept Truman from being in Washington. He might have lived through the blast. He probably would have, in the bomb shelter in the White House basement, had he got any warning. Had Bess got any? Had Margaret? Had anyone?

  “What are you hearing on the radio?” Truman asked.

  “They’re scrambling fighters, sir,” answered Captain McMullin, the copilot. “The Pentagon is directing—” He broke off. “Mr. President, I’m getting reports of a blinding flash in New York City. It—” He stopped again, and swore loudly and fluently. “Boston, too, damn them.”

  “Christ!” Harry Truman said. Marshall had assured him the Russians couldn’t reach the East Coast. Even the august and brilliant Secretary of Defense didn’t know everything there was to know. Truman hoped Marshall had survived the attack. He’d help pick up the pieces better than anyone else was likely to.

  If there are any pieces left to pick up. Truman had had that thought before. What brought it on this time was another flash ahead. They were closer to Washington for this one. It seemed fiercer and brighter than the first. Something buffeted the Independence, as if a big dog were shaking a mouse.

  Pesky and McMullin both cursed. They fought the DC-6 back under control. “Pentagon just fell off the air, Mr. President,” McMullin said. “Everything’s going to hell, sounds like.”

  The Tempest tolled in Truman’s mind like a funeral bell:

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind.

  What had Will known? How had he known it? Washington’s proud towers were capped by clouds, all right—mushroom clouds.

  Pesky’s thoughts ran on more pragmatic lines: “Sir, I am going to stay airborne as long as I can. I have fuel for another couple of hours. That should give us some kind of chance to sort out what’s going on.”

  “Do that, then,” Truman said heavily. “If you get…any word of how things are at the White House, please pass it on to me.”

  “Of course, sir,” pilot and copilot said together. McMullin sent a sympathetic glance over his shoulder.

  “We’ll make the Russians pay for this,” Pesky said.

  “Oh, yes.” Truman nodded. But Stalin had been making America pay for what B-29s did to the Soviet Union. Where did it end? Did it, could it, end anywhere except with both sides too battered and devastated to throw any more haymakers, as if two weary pugs in the ring knocked each other out at the same time?

  Slowly, reports filtered in as the DC-6 droned through the sky. A Superfortress that had to be a Bull in a lying paint job was said to have gone down outside of Philadelphia. No one had shot it down. It was flying so low, it clipped something tall and crashed in flames. If it was carrying an A-bomb, which seemed a good bet, the infernal device hadn’t gone off. Philadelphia lived.

  Truman stayed by the cockpit, hoping to hear something about his wife and daughter. He didn’t. News came in from the outskirts of both Washington blast areas, stories of fires and burns and wreckage. Plainly, the White House wasn’t on the outskirts of either. Truman ground his teeth. His dentist would have clucked. He cared nothing for what his dentist thought.

  “If you land in Richmond when we run low on gas, Major, can I get a helicopter or a light plane to take me over Washington after sunup so I can see what’s happened to it?” he asked the pilot.

  “Sir, I don’t think you’d be helping the country right now by going up in anything with only one engine,” Pesky said. “That goes double for those newfangled flying eggbeaters, but it holds for Piper Cubs and the like, too. If you want, though, we can refuel there and I’ll take you over myself.”

  “Thank you. That should work,” Truman said. “In the meantime, I’ll get off the plane at the airport and get on the telephone and see what I can do to let the country and the world know I’m still in business.”

  Major Pesky nodded. “Sounds like a good idea.”

  The President wasn’t so sure. If Washington and New York were down for the count, he wouldn’t have an easy time getting word out. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the hubs of all the radio and television networks…Gone now, probably.

  He gulped coffee for an hour and a half. Then Pesky smoothly landed the Independence. Reporters snapped photos of Truman as he got off. A boss’ phone in the terminal did very little for him or the country. He couldn’t make the connections he needed, and the local operators didn’t know enough to be helpful. Frustrated, he retreated to the airliner and drank more coffee.

  As soon as the sky grew light, the DC-6 flew north. It wasn’t far from Richmond to Washington. Ninety years before, Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis had both fretted about that. Now…Now Truman watched smoke from fires still not quenched rise high into the air. Was what he breathed getting more and more radioactive as he neared the capital? He could wonder, but he didn’t know—or care.

  He’d seen photos of what A-bombs did to cities. He’d visited the West Coast in the wake of the Russian attacks there. Now he saw it again, with that smoke still swirling up and up and making him cough as the Independence’s ventilators sucked it into the fuselage. The Washington Monument was a melted, toppled stub. Not much was left of the Pentagon—part of one side of the five. The Capitol’s shattered dome lay on the Mall, in front of what remained of the ravaged, burnt-out building. Of the White House he could make out nothing at all.

  And he flew three miles above the disaster. Burned and charred and blinded and radiated people in terrible anguish, tens of thousands of them, were too small to make out at such a distance. So were the dead: more tens of thousands. But they were there. Truman knew they were. Some of them were his. All of them were somebody’s.

  “Stalin will pay, all right,” he whispered. “Oh, how he’ll pay!”

  —

  Commander Alexei Vavilov raised a glass in salute. “Congratulations!” he told Boris Gribkov. “To the glory and vengeance you and your crew have given the Soviet Union! To victory over the imperialists!” He tossed back his shot of vodka.

  Gribkov’s copilot stood up and hoisted his glass. “To Commander Vavilov and the splendid S-71!” Anton Presnyakov said.

  He drank. So did all the flyers. So did Vavilov and the other officers serving on the Red Fleet submarine. On and under the sea as in the air, the USSR learned from its foes. Just as the Tu-4 was a virtually identical copy of the American B-29, so the submarines that came out of Red Fleet Project 613 borrowed heavily from German Type XXI U-boats.

  The Yankees, at least, had also got good use from their heavy bombers. The Hitlerites developed the Type XXI too late for their fancy new subs to take more than one or two combat cruises. But the design made all previous boats obsolete. It had tremendous batteries, a snorkel to power the diesels and charge those batteries while most of the submarine stayed hidden beneath the water, and such perfect streamlining that it was faster submerged than on the surface.

  As German U-boats had before them, attack submarines like the S-71 harried the lifeline between America and Europe. Unlike the Kriegsmarine, the Red Fleet didn’t delude itself into thinking it could starve England into surrender. But it could sink enemy ships full of food and weapons and men, and it could make life difficult for the ones that did manage to cross.

  And its submarines could rescue bomber crews if not bombers, and take them back to the rodina to fly more missions in new planes. That was what the S-71 was doing, along with Gribkov didn’t know how many other boats. Some of them would head back to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk with no airmen aboard. Not all the bombers that struck at America would have reached their oceanic meeting points. Not all of them would have reached their targets, either.


  War was like that, however much people wished it weren’t. Things went wrong. The bastards on the other side proved more clever than you thought they would. You lost friends…or they lost you.

  Briefly, Boris thought of Leonid Tsederbaum again. Now he had Washington on his conscience along with Paris and the rest of the places he’d smashed. The old navigator hadn’t been able to stand it. The fighting went on without him.

  As if to prove as much, Commander Vavilov’s executive officer rose to make another toast. Lieutenant Yuri Krasnov lifted his glass and said, “To Comrade Filevich, whose navigation put you down right where it should have!”

  The men gathered under the conning tower—the only place in the boat with room for them all—drank together. Svyatoslav Filevich offered his own toast: “To the brave submariners who take all this crowding not just to save us but to carry the fight to the foe!”

  Everyone in the Tu-4’s crew drank. So did the submarine’s officers, but they seemed amused. “If you think this boat is crowded,” Vavilov said, “you should have seen the ones we used during the Great Patriotic War. We were as bad as the Germans. The junior ratings slept on top of the fish in the forward torpedo room till we used a few and gave them more room to swing their hammocks.”

  “Maybe it was worse then, Commander,” Gribkov said. “I mean no disrespect when I tell you it’s still pretty bad.”

  The boat was divided into three pressure compartments. Going from one to the next meant slithering through a round hatchway not much wider than a man’s torso. That might have been the smallest breach practicable in a bulkhead, but it was far from convenient. Corridors were so narrow, two men going in opposite directions had trouble squeezing past each other. Every so often, metal things with corners and edges stuck out into them. The top of the pressure tube made a low ceiling. The pipes running along it had valves and fittings that could knock an unwary man in a hurry for a loop.

  Boris and the rest of the flyers kept quiet about one more aspect of how crowded the S-71 was. The boat stank. It smelled of dirty sailors and dirtier socks, of food going off and of heads that had backed up, all mixed in with the heavy reek of diesel fuel. The men wore shabby clothes and let their beards grow while they were at sea. Shaving soap was a luxury judged needless. By the fug, so was any other kind of soap.

  As a man familiar with commanding and maintaining one kind of complicated mechanism, Gribkov used his time as a passenger aboard the S-71 as a chance to watch another skilled professional in charge of a different, perhaps even more complex, piece of machinery.

  On the Tu-4, what the pilot and navigator could see was still an important part of completing a mission. Except when making an attack run with periscope raised, Alexei Vavilov depended almost completely on his sensors. Men with earphones constantly monitored the passive sonar, listening for any warning that U.S. Navy or Royal Navy vessels were near enough to be dangerous.

  “I don’t expect to surface till we’re up in the Arctic Ocean,” Vavilov told him. “We’d be asking for it if we did. The snorkel will keep the diesels going and the batteries happy. If we show ourselves on the surface, even at night, the enemy’s radar will spot us and he’ll send out planes after us.”

  “More and more gadgets,” Gribkov said. “It’s the same in the air. Pretty soon the gadgets will do all the fighting, and the crews will just come along for the ride.”

  “Or there won’t be any crews,” Vavilov replied. “Think of a big rocket, one like a V-2’s big brother. It’ll fly thousands of kilometers, not hundreds. It’ll be powerful enough to do that with an A-bomb on the head of its dick. And it’ll land within a hundred meters of where somebody aims it. As soon as they build it, you’ll be out of work.”

  Boris hadn’t thought of the future of war in those terms till now. As soon as he did, he realized the submarine skipper was bound to be right. “Your job won’t last much longer than mine,” he said.

  “You never can tell,” Vavilov said. “Mount those rockets on a submarine, and it’d pop up and launch them before the enemy realized it was in the neighborhood.”

  “You could do that, couldn’t you?” Now the bomber pilot saw what might be the future of war spread out for him, almost as if in a religious vision. He shuddered. That future held even more deaths than he’d already dealt out.

  The current state of the art faced them the next day. Alexei Vavilov had explained that the S-71, like its Type XXI ancestors, ran much quieter than earlier models. Enemy ships detected the boat anyhow, and attacked. Vavilov dove deep and sneaked away. Depth charges burst in the sea above the boat, close enough to be alarming but not to put it in serious peril.

  “How’s this stack up against antiaircraft guns?” the skipper asked Boris in a low voice—silence was literally a matter of life and death.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you can keep them both,” he whispered back.

  Vavilov nodded. “About what I figured. This, this isn’t too bad. They don’t really know where we are, and the charges foul up their sonar something fierce. Slow and steady, and we’ll get away. Once we slide through the gap between Britain and Iceland, we’re just about home free.”

  “I used that gap flying south to strike Washington,” Boris said.

  “I’m not surprised. It’s there to be used,” Vavilov said. “We’ll get you back, and they can pin some more medals on you.”

  “Who cares about medals? I just want to live through the war.”

  “Well, so do I. Who doesn’t?” Vavilov said. “But when you serve the Soviet Union, you get what the rodina needs, not what you want.” It was Boris Gribkov’s turn to nod. He’d already worked that out for himself.

  —

  Whenever Aaron Finch wasn’t at work or asleep—and he slept as little as he could get away with, or rather less than that—he sat staring at the television set in his living room. TV in and around Los Angeles had gone cattywumpus when the A-bomb leveled downtown: it took out most of the local studios.

  TV here was back in business now, and relayed from the East Coast to the West more horrific images of what atomic war did to great cities. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building both wrecked and toppled, Old Ironsides burnt to the waterline in Boston harbor, the glassy wasteland that had been the White House…

  Seeing the damage to what had been national monuments was bad. Seeing and hearing about the damage to what had been people was worse. It had a horrid fascination to it, though. Aaron found he couldn’t look away.

  The television reporters understood that only too well. A man with a jacket and tie would go up to a scorched or bandaged woman who’d somehow been pulled alive from a ravaged Manhattan apartment house and stick a microphone in her face. “Excuse me, Mrs. Torres,” he’d go, or it might be Mrs. Lombardi or Mrs. Callahan or Mrs. Rabinowicz, “but could you tell me what happened to you and what you’re feeling now?”

  And Mrs. Torres or Mrs. Lombardi or Mrs. Callahan or Mrs. Rabinowicz would break down and sob and say something about her parents or husband or children or all of the above who hadn’t escaped or who had but who were hurt worse than she was.

  Every so often, whichever network Aaron was watching at the moment would cut away to a makeshift headquarters in Philadelphia. A tired-looking reporter—sometimes a tired-looking reporter with a cigarette in his mouth—would give the latest estimates on numbers of the dead and amount of damage. Those amounted to hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars. Once Aaron knew that much, he knew everything he needed to know. Precision hardly mattered, though the reporters kept trying to provide it.

  They also kept posting lists of Senators and Representatives known to be dead. Most Congressmen and -women had Washington digs not far from the gutted Capitol. Most of the time, that meant they could easily get to work. Now it meant that large numbers of them would never run for reelection, or for anything else, again.

  Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy were both on the lists. So were Hubert Humphrey and Estes Kefauver
. Averell Harriman was known to be dead, too; he’d been at a hotel in Manhattan that the falling Empire State Building drove into the ground like a sledgehammer hitting a railroad spike. George Marshall had been working late at the Pentagon. His diligence meant only that nothing of him was left to bury.

  Of the Federal government’s leading organs, the Supreme Court came through best. Seven of the nine Justices were at a lawyers’ conclave in St. Louis when doom fell on the capital. Naturally, that was the branch of government with the least to do with setting policy or carrying it through.

  Harry Truman still lived, too, but the more Aaron saw him the more he thought the President wished he didn’t. Truman looked suddenly, cruelly, old. Some of that might have been that he wasn’t bothering with makeup any more before he came in front of the cameras. More, though, had to come from the loss of his wife and daughter.

  “I brought the United States into this war. God has given me my own full measure of the nation’s grief. The Psalms tell us that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. I bow before those judgments. I see nothing else that I can do. The Bible also says that vengeance is the Lord’s. There I must respectfully disagree with the Good Book.”

  Listening to the way Truman came out with that, Aaron felt a chill run up his back. “I wouldn’t want to be in Joe Stalin’s shoes right this minute,” he said to Ruth.

  “I wouldn’t want to be in Stalin’s shoes any time at all,” she answered. “They’d probably steal my toes.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aaron said. “Or else paint ’em red. But you do that yourself, at least with the nails.”

  “You’re crazier than I am,” Ruth said, not without admiration.

  “I try,” Aaron said. But with the stricken President on the screen in front of him, he couldn’t stay lighthearted. “That poor man. He’s lost his family, and Pearl Harbor looks like a pinprick next to this. And somehow he’s got to go on.”