Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Again she wished she could wring a better turn of speed from the Wheatcutter. The sooner she got back to Pskov, the shorter the distance the supply convoy would have traveled and the better the chance for a hit.

  The tall stone pile of theKrom and the onion domes of the churches marked the town. The old citadel wasn’t badly damaged, but some of the domes had bites taken out of them and others leaned drunkenly away from the perpendicular. Some churches, along with a great many secular buildings, were in ruins.

  Ludmila was a loyal child of the October Revolution, and had no great use for churches. Had the Soviet government knocked them down, she wouldn’t have missed them a bit. But to have them destroyed by invading aliens was something else again. Even the Nazis, albeit for reasons of their own, had usually refrained from wrecking churches.

  Instead of using the airstrip to the east of Pskov, as she usually did, Ludmila brought theKukuruznik down in the park in the middle of town, the way she had when she first came to the city. Again, she managed to keep from running over people or livestock. Men came running to get the U-2 under the shelter of friendly trees.

  She scrambled out of the aircraft and hurried toward theKrom, whereGeneralleutnant Kurt Chill had his headquarters. Having a Nazi in overall command of the defenses of a Soviet city galled her, but she couldn’t do anything about it, not now. And if Chill didn’t fight hard against the Lizards, it was assuredly his backside, too.

  People shouted to her, asking what she’d seen that made her want to land in the middle of Pskov. “I can’t tell you that,” she answered. Some of the Pskovites seemed never to have heard of security. Well, if they hadn’t, she certainly had.

  She hurried over to theKrom. No sentries, Soviet or German, stood outside. Nobody wanted to give the Lizards a clue that anything important went on in there. Inside the entrance, a couple of tall Nazi soldiers leered at her. The Germans often found the idea of women in the fighting forces funny.“Was willst du, Liebchen?” one of them asked. His companion, a very rough-looking customer indeed, broke out in giggles.

  “Ich will Generalleutnant Chill sofort zu sehen,”Ludmila answered in the iciest German she could muster: “I want to see Lieutenant General Chill immediately.”

  “Give me a kiss first,” the guard said, which made his comrade all but wet himself with mirth.

  Ludmila drew her Tokarev automatic, pointing it not at the fellow’s head or chest but at his crotch. “Stop wasting my time,dummkopf,” she said sweetly. “If the Lizards get away on account of you, it won’t be my neck that goes into the noose.”

  “Bitch,” muttered one of the Germans. “Dyke,” the other said under his breath. But both of them moved aside. Ludmila didn’t put the pistol back in its holster till she got round the corner.

  Another German, a captain, sat at a desk in the antechamber outside Lieutenant General Chill’s office. He treated Ludmila like a soldier, but was no more helpful on account of that. “I am sorry, Senior Lieutenant, but he is away at the front,” the German said. “I do not expect him back for several days.”

  “I need to have an artillery barrage laid on,” Ludmila said, and explained what she’d seen moving up the forest track from the south. The German captain frowned. “I have no authority to commit artillery to action except in immediate defense of the front,” he said doubtfully. “Using it is dangerous, because Lizard counterbattery fire so often costs us guns and men, neither of which we can afford to lose.”

  “I risked my life to get this information and bring it back here,” Ludmila said. “Are you going to sit there and ignore it?” The captain looked too clean and much too well-fed to have seen the front lines lately, no matter where Lieutenant General Chill was.

  Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “If the matter is as important as all that, Senior Lieutenant, I suggest you take it to the Englishmen down the hall.” He pointed out the direction. “In the absence of the commander, they have the power to bind and to loose.” He sounded like a man quoting something. If he was, Ludmila didn’t recognize it. He also sounded like a man unhappy about command arrangements. He didn’t need to be happy, though-he just had to obey. Germans were supposed to be good at that.

  “Yes, I’ll try them, thank you,” Ludmila said, and hurried out.

  All three of the Englishmen were in their map-bedecked office, along with a blond woman in Red Army uniform, a rifle with telescopic sight slung on her back. She was so decorative, Ludmila doubted at first that she had any right to the uniform and sniper’s weapon. A second glance at the woman’s eyes changed her mind. She’d seen enough action herself to recognize others who had done likewise.

  One of the Englishmen-Jones-had his hand on her shoulder. She stood close to him, but she was watching the one called Bagnall, the one Ludmila had met in the park when she first came to Pskov. She felt as if she’d walked into something out ofAnna Karenina, not a place where battles got planned.

  But Ken Embry, the third Englishman, saw her and said,“Chto- What?” His Russian remained on the rudimentary side. Even so, he attracted the others’ attention to Ludmila. Jones jerked his hand away from the woman’s shoulder as if she’d suddenly become red-hot.

  Best, probably, for Ludmila to pretend she hadn’t seen anything. What the Englishmen did in their private lives was their private business, although she wished they hadn’t brought their private lives with them to theKrom. In German interspersed with Russian, Ludmila explained what she’d seen and what she’d wanted. George Bagnall translated her words into English.

  “Come to the map,” he said in German when he was done. He pointed to the forests south of Pskov. “Where exactly did you see these lorries, and how long ago?”

  She studied the map. It made her slightly nervous; in the Soviet Union, maps were secret things, not to be shown to the generality. She pointed. “It was here, west of this pond. I am sure of it. And it was”-she glanced at the watch strapped to her left wrist-“twenty-three minutes ago. I came in to report as soon as I saw them.”

  George Bagnall smiled at her. By Russian standards, his face was long, thin, and bony. He was not, to Ludmila’s way of thinking, a particularly handsome man, but that smile lit up his face. He said, “You did well to note the exact time, and to get back to Pskov so fast.”

  After that, he dropped back into English to talk with his comrades. Ludmila, who had no English, at first thought that rude. Then she realized the RAF men had business to do and needed their own language for it. Her irritation faded.

  Bagnall returned to the same mixture of German and Russian that Ludmila used: “By the time we can get the guns to open up, the lorries will be almost to the Lizards’ front line-do you see?” He drew their probable track up to the line south of Pskov marked in red ink. Seeing Ludmila’s disappointed expression, he went on, “But the Lizards may not be done unloading them. A few shells might do us some good. Wait here.”

  He left the map chamber, returning a few minutes later with a different sort of smile on his face. “Captain Dolger does not approve of us, but he is a good soldier. If he is ordered to do something, it will get done.”

  Sure enough, within a couple of minutes field guns off to the north and east of Pskov began hammering away in the short, intense bombardment that seemed best calculated to hit the Lizards. They shifted position before counterbattery fire could wreak full havoc.

  And sure enough, Ludmila heard incoming rounds hard on the heels of the last outgoing ones. “I hope they managed to move their cannon,” she said, and then shook her head. “Hoping anything good for the Germans still feels wrong to me.” Saying that in German felt wrong to her, too. She repeated it in Russian.

  The woman with the sniping rifle nodded emphatically. In fair Russian of his own, Jones, the youngest Englishman, said, “For us also. Remember, we were at war with the Hitlerites for almost two years before the Soviet Union joined that fight.”

  Ludmila did remember. For those almost two years, in the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany
could do no wrong. It was dealing blow after blow to the imperialist powers… until it dealt a blow to the Soviet Union that almost wrecked it forever. Ludmila said, “They are our allies against the Lizards. I try to forget everything but that. I try-but it is not easy.”

  “No, it is not easy,” George Bagnall said. “Things I’ve seen here, things I saw in France, make me glad we were dropping bombs on Jerry’s head. And yet the Nazis give the Lizards a thin time of it. Very strange.”

  Most of that had been in German, but the blond Russian woman understood enough of it to say, “Nobody says the Nazis cannot fight. Or if anyone does say it, it is a lie; we have all seen enough to know better. But they do not think why they fight. Someone tells them what to do, and they do it well. And for what? For Hitlerism!” Her cornflower-blue eyes blazed contempt.

  No one argued with her. A couple of minutes later, Captain Dolger came running into the room. His fleshy, handsome face glowed. “Field telephones from the front say our artillery touched off secondary explosions-some of those lorries were carrying shells.” Bagnall had told him what to do, and he’d done it well.

  The blonde with the rifle threw her arms around Bagnall and kissed him on the mouth. Captain Dolger coughed; he left the Englishmen’s office as fast as he’d come in. Jerome Jones flushed till he looked like a boiled crayfish. Ludmila turned away, embarrassed. Such behavior by a Soviet woman was uncultured in the extreme.

  She expected Bagnall to take all he could get from the shameless sniper. For one thing, men were like that. For another, he was an Englishman, therefore a capitalist, therefore an exploiter. But he broke the kiss as soon as he decently could, and looked as embarrassed about it as Ludmila felt.

  She scratched her head. Bagnall wasn’t behaving the way school had taught her Englishmen were supposed to behave. What did that say about her lessons? She didn’t really know, but the more you looked at things, the more complicated they got.

  Jens Larssen pedaled wearily into Hanford, Washington. He stopped in the middle of the main street. “God, what a dump,” he muttered. He could see why the physicists back at the Met Lab had been hot for the place. He could hear the murmur and splash of the Columbia as it flowed by next to the town. It was all the river anybody could ask for, and he knew what the Mississippi was like.

  Not only that, the place already had a railroad line coming into it from the north: the train station was much the biggest building in town. No tracks came out of Hanford going south; it was the end of the line.In more ways than one, Jens thought. But the railroad line was a point in favor of the place. With it, you could conveniently move stuff in and out. Without it, that wouldn’t have been so easy.

  River and railroad: two big pluses. Everything else, as far as Jens could see, was a minus. Hanford couldn’t have held more than a few hundred people. Any major industrial activity here would stand out like a sore thumb. Hanford didn’t have any major industries. Just to make up for it, Hanford didn’t have any minor industries, either. If it suddenly developed some, the Lizards couldn’t help but notice.

  Jens looked around. Both the pile and the plant to get the plutonium out of its fuel elements would have to go underground; there were no buildings big enough to conceal them. Could you do that much digging and keep it a secret? He had his doubts.

  “It’s too damn little,” he said, as if someone were arguing with him. The only reason Hanford existed was to act as a market town for the nearby farmers. Some of the fields to the north, south, and west were still green; more, thanks to the job the Lizards had done on pumping stations, lay brown and dry under the sun.

  Besides the railhead, Hanford’s amenities were of the basic sort: a couple of general stores (one of them now closed), a gas station (also closed), a school (it being summer vacation, Jens couldn’t tell if that was closed or not), and a doctor’s office. The doctor’s office was open; Jens saw a pregnant woman walk into it.

  He scratched absently at a flake of peeling skin on his wrist. Back in Ogden, Utah, that doctor-Sharp, that was his name-had said some small-town doc might have some sulfa to give him to get rid of the clap. He’d tried once or twice on his way here, but no sawbones had had any, or been willing to use it on somebody just passing through. As long as he was here, he figured he might as well ask this one, too. If he heard no, he heard no. He’d heard it before.

  He walked his bike over in front of the doctor’s office, put down the kickstand with his foot. On second thought, he shook his head and carried the bike upstairs. If a local absconded with it, everyone else would pretend he hadn’t seen a thing. Jens had grown up in a small town. He knew what they were like.

  The waiting room was clean and pleasant. All the magazines were more than a year old, but that might have been true even if the Lizards hadn’t come. Behind the desk sat a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman in a gingham dress. If the arrival of an unkempt, rifle-toting, bike-hauling stranger fazed her, she didn’t show it. “Good morning, sir,” she said. “Dr. Henry will be able to see you soon.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Jens sat down. He hadn’t paid any attention to the name on the sign outside. As long as it had M.D. after it, that would do. He leafed through aLife with pictures of Germans retreating through the snow of the fierce Russian winter. Worse things than Nazis were loose in the world these days, even if that hadn’t seemed possible in the early days of 1942.

  “Uh, sir,” the receptionist asked, “what’s your name?” Larssen gave it, then spelled it for good measure. People always fouled up either his first name or his last one, sometimes both of them.

  The door by the receptionist opened. The pregnant woman came out. Except for being big as a blimp, she looked fine. She was smiling, too, so the doc had probably told her she was fine.

  A woman a few years younger than the receptionist poked her head out the door. “Come in, Mr. uh, Larssen,” she said. She wore a frayed but clean white coat and had a stethoscope slung round her neck.

  Jens went into the room to which she waved him. She weighed him, stuck a blood-pressure cuff on his arm, and asked him what his trouble was. He felt his ears get hot. “I’d sooner talk about that with the doctor,” he mumbled.

  She raised an eyebrow. She had a long, rather horsey face, and wore her dark hair pulled back from it and caught behind in a short ponytail. “Iam the doctor,” she said. “I’m Marjorie Henry. Did you think I was the nurse?” By the way she asked the question, a lot of people over a lot of years had thought she was the nurse.

  “Oh,” Jens said, embarrassed now for a different reason. “I beg your pardon.” That new embarrassment was piled on top of the old one, which hadn’t gone away. How was he supposed to tell a woman, even a woman doctor, he had the clap? He wished to Jesus he’d read the sign out front. Gonorrhea wouldn’t kill you, and he could have looked for a different doctor to do something about it.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” Dr. Henry repeated. When Larssen didn’t answer, that eyebrow went up again. “I assure you, Mr. Larssen, whatever it is, I’ve probably seen it and dealt with it before. And if I haven’t seen it before, I’ll just send you on your way, because with things as they are I won’t be able to do anything about it anyhow.”

  She had a no-nonsense attitude Jens liked. That made things easier, but not enough. “I, uh, that is, well, I-” He gave up. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t make himself say it.

  Dr. Henry got up and shut the door to her office. “There. Now Beulah can’t hear,” she said. “Mr. Larssen, am I to infer from this hemming and hawing that you are suffering from a venereal disease?” He gulped and nodded. She nodded, too, briskly. “Very good. Do you know which disease you are suffering from?”

  “Gonorrhea,” he whispered, looking down at his Army boots. Of all the words he’d never imagined saying to a woman, that one was high on the list. Gathering courage, he went on, “I’ve, uh, heard that sulfa can cure it, but no doc I’ve talked to has had any to spare.”

  “No one has anything to spare an
y more,” she said. “But you’re lucky here. Just before the Lizards came, I received a large shipment of sulfanilamide. I expect I can spare you a few grams. Believe me, actually being able to attack germs rather than just defending against them is quite an enjoyable sensation.”

  “You really will give me some sulfa?” he said, happy and disbelieving at the same time. “That’s great!” His opinion of Hanford underwent a quick 180-degree shift.Great town, friendly people, he thought.

  Dr. Henry unlocked a drawer full of medications. As she’d said, she had several large jars of sulfanilamide tablets in there. The tablets were small and yellowish-white. She said, “Take three of these five times a day your first day with them, four times a day the second day, three times a day the third day, and twice a day after that until you’ve taken them all. Do you have something to carry them in? I have plenty of pills, but I’m desperately short on jars and bottles and vials.”

  “Here, I’ve got a spare sock,” he said, digging it out of his pack. Dr. Henry started to laugh, but she filled the sock full of pills. There were an awful lot of them. Larssen didn’t care. He would have swallowed a bowling ball if he could have got rid of the clap that way. When the doctor was done counting pills, he asked her, “What do I owe you?”

  She pursed her lips. “Mr. Larssen, these days you can’t really buy medicine for money. You can still buy other things, though, so money has some use… A fair price, I’d say, would be about two hundred dollars. If you don’t have that, and you probably don’t-”

  Jens reached into a hip pocket and pulled out a roll of bills fat enough to choke a horse. Dr. Henry’s eyes widened as he started peeling off twenties. “Here you go,” he said. “You may just be surprised about medicine, too.”

  “Really?” she said. “Who are you, anyway?”

  Who was that masked man?ran through his head. It was a fair question, though. People who looked like unshaven bums didn’t often go around with enough loot to make them seem like apprentice John Dillingers. And people who did go around with that kind of loot probably weren’t in the habit of dropping in on small-town doctors to get their social diseases treated.