Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  He caught it with a desperate lunge. “You are the most troublesome thing!” he exclaimed. The hatchling squealed and made Tosevite laughing noises. It thought his displays of temper were very funny.

  He noticed the skin around its anus and genitals looked red and slightly inflamed. That had happened before; luckily, one of the Race’s topical medications eased the problem. He marveled at an organism whose wastes were toxic to its own integument. His scaly hide certainly never had any such difficulties.

  “But then,” he told the hatchling, “I don’t make a habit of smearing waste all over my skin.” The hatchling laughed its loud Tosevite laugh. Fed, deflated, and cleaned, it was happy as could be. Tired, bedraggled Ttomalss wished he could say the same.

  Clouds rolled across the sky, more and more of them in bigger and bigger masses as the day wore on. The sun peeked through in ever-shorter blinks. Ludmila Gorbunova cast a wary eye upwards. At any moment the autumn rain would start falling, not only on Pskov but all over the western Soviet Union. With the rains would come mud—the fall rasputitsa. When the mud came, fighting would bog down for a while.

  And Pskov still remained in human hands. She knew a certain amount of pride in that, even if some of those hands were German. She’d done her part in the battle to hold up the Lizards, and the alien imperialist aggressors were not pushing attacks with the élan they’d shown the year before. Maybe, when snow replaced rain and mud, the human forces in Pskov (yes, even the fascist beasts) would show them the proper meaning of the word.

  The Lizards didn’t like winter. The whole world had seen that the year before. She hoped this winter would bring a repetition of the pattern. She’d already proved a Kukuruznik would fly through almost anything. Its radial engine was air-cooled; she didn’t have to fret about coolant turning to ice, as happened in liquid-cooled engines forced to endure Russian winter. As long as she had fuel and oil, she could fly.

  With Georg Schultz as her mechanic, she sometimes wondered, not quite jokingly, whether she might not be able to fly even without fuel and oil. The more he worked his magic on the little U-2, the more she wondered how the planes she’d flown had kept from falling apart before they enjoyed his ministrations.

  She opened and closed her hands. She had black dirt and grease under her nails and ground into the folds of skin on her knuckles; not even a steam bath could sweat the dirt out of her. She did a lot of work on her own aircraft, too, and knew she made a better mechanic than most Russian groundcrew men. But Schultz had an artist’s touch with spanner and pliers, to say nothing of an instinct for where trouble lay, that made Ludmila wonder if he was part biplane on his mother’s side.

  Houses thinned as she walked toward the airstrip just east of Pskov. It lay between the city and the great forest where partisans had sheltered until they and the Germans made uneasy common cause against the Lizards.

  If you didn’t know where the airstrip was, you’d walk right past it. The Russian passion for maskirovka made sure of that. The Lizards had repeatedly bombed a dummy strip a couple of kilometers away, but they’d left the real one alone. The Kukuruzniks all rested in shelters covered by netting with real sod laid over them. More sod replaced ruts in the grass the aircraft made on takeoff and landing. No sentries paced nearby, though several marched at the dummy airstrip.

  Ludmila reached into her pocket and pulled out a compass. She didn’t trust the one on her instrument panel, and wondered if some idiot groundcrew man had somehow got near it with a magnet. Whether or not that was so, now she’d have one against which to check it.

  She had to look sharp to find the first mat that concealed a U-2. When she did, she started counting; her aircraft was fifth in line. She paused outside the trench in which it rested, bent down, leaned her head toward the mat. Yes, someone was down in there; she could hear soft, muffled noises.

  “Bozhemoi,” she whispered silently. The better to preserve the maskirovka, no one, not even groundcrew, hung around the airplanes when they weren’t heading out to a mission or coming back from one. Had the Lizards managed to find a human being who would do sabotage for them here? Ludmila hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible, but then, she hadn’t imagined how many Soviet citizens would go over to the Germans, either.

  As quietly as she could, she drew her pistol out of its holster. Then she tiptoed around to the deep end of the trench, where her arrival would be least expected. Before she lifted up a corner of the mat, she paused to listen again. The noises seemed fainter here. She nodded in grim satisfaction. She’d give the wrecker in there something to remember as long as he lived, which wouldn’t be long.

  She slid under the mat and dropped down to the dirt beneath. The bottom of the trench was almost three meters below ground level. She landed hard, but didn’t try to stay on her feet. If by some mischance the wrecker had a gun, too, a prone figure made a smaller target than an upright one.

  It was dim and dark under the matting. Even so, she had no trouble picking out the pale body—no, bodies: there were two of them, something she hadn’t thought of—under one wing of the Kukuruznik. They both lay on the ground, too. Had she alerted them when she jumped down into the trench?

  “Stop what you’re doing!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, swinging the muzzle of the Tokarev automatic toward them.

  Only then did she realize the two bodies seemed so pale and white because she was seeing skin, not clothes. “Gott in Himmel, is that you, Ludmila Vadimovna?” Georg Schultz demanded. “You don’t want me, and now you want to kill me for finding somebody else? Are you crazy?”

  “Bozhemoi,” Ludmila repeated, this time quite loudly. She started to giggle. The giggles turned to guffaws. “I thought you were sabotaging the Kukuruznik, not—not—” Laughter swallowed speech.

  “Not funny,” Schultz muttered. He was on his feet now, getting into his clothes as fast as he could. So was his partner. Ludmila’s eyes were more used to the gloom now. They widened as she recognized Tatiana Pirogova.

  “I am sorry,” Ludmila said, speaking very quietly and taking only tiny breaths to hold mirth in check. “The only reason I came here was to mount a spare compass on the aircraft, and—” She thought too much about the use of the word mount in another context, and couldn’t go on. Tears filled her eyes as she sputtered and coughed.

  Tatiana Pirogova strode up to her. The blond sniper was several centimeters taller than Ludmila, and glared down at her. “If ever you speak a word of this to anyone—to anyone, do you understand me?—I will kill you,” she hissed. Even in the dimness under the matting, her blue eyes glittered dangerously.

  “Your top tunic button is still undone, dear,” Ludmila answered. Tatiana’s fingers flew to it of themselves Ludmila went on, “I’m not in the habit of gossiping, but if you threaten me, you are making a big mistake.” Tatiana turned her back. Ludmila looked over to Georg Schultz, switching to German as she did so: “Will you please make her believe I’m just as glad to have you with someone else so you’re not pestering me any more? Just thinking of that is more likely to keep me quiet than her bluster.”

  “It’s not bluster,” he answered, also in German.

  That was probably—no, certainly—true. Tatiana with a scope-mounted rifle in her hand was as deadly a soldier as any. And Ludmila had also seen that Schultz was a viciously effective combat soldier even without his panzer wrapped around him. She wondered if that shared delight in war was what had drawn him and Tatiana together. But she’d been in enough combat herself to keep Tatiana or Georg Schultz from intimidating her.

  Schultz spoke to Tatiana in the same sort of mixture of German and Russian he used to talk with Ludmila. Tatiana angrily brushed aside his reassurances. “Oh, go away,” she snapped. Instead, she went away herself, slithering out from under the netting at the shallow end of the trench that hid the Kukuruznik. Even in her fury, she carefully smoothed out the net after she got free of it, so as not to damage the maskirovka.

  “You might have waited another
minute or two before you jumped down in here,” Schultz said petulantly. He hadn’t finished, then. That set Ludmila laughing yet again. “It isn’t funny,” he growled. It occurred to her then that the two of them were alone under the netting. Had she not had the Tokarev, she would have worried. As things were, she knew she could take care of herself.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, the weight of the pistol reassuring in her hand. “Look, if you want to come down here again, move one of the rocks that holds down the netting so it’s just off the edge instead of just on. I had no idea anyone was down with the aircraft, and when I did hear noise, I thought it was wreckers, not—not lovers.”

  Somewhat mollified, Schultz nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said, adding gloomily, “if there is a next time.”

  “There probably will be.” Ludmila surprised herself at how cynical she sounded. She asked, “Why was Tatiana so upset at the idea of anyone finding out she’s with you? She didn’t care who knew she was sleeping with the Englishman—Jones, his name is.”

  “Ja,” Schultz said. “But he’s an Englishman. That’s all right. Me, I’m a German. You may have noticed.”

  “Ah,” Ludmila said. It did make sense. The fair Tatiana used her sniping talents against the Lizards these days, but she’d honed them against the Nazis. She made no secret of her continued loathing for Germans in general—but not, evidently, for one German in particular. If word got out, she would be compromised in a whole unpleasant variety of ways. “If she hates Germans so much, what does she see in you?”

  “She says we’re both killers.” Georg Schultz shuffled his feet, as if unsure whether he liked the sound of that or not.

  As far as Ludmila was concerned, it not only had a lot of truth in it, it also confirmed her earlier guess, which made her feel clever. She said, “Well, Gospodin Killer—you, a German, would be angry if I called you Tovarishch Killer, Comrade instead of Mister—I think we had both better go now.”

  She was nervous as she got out from under the netting. If Schultz wanted to try anything, that was the moment he’d do it. But he just emerged, too, and looked back toward the place where the U-2 was hidden. “Damnation,” he said. “I thought sure nobody would ever bother us there.”

  “You never can tell,” Ludmila said, which would do as a maxim for life in general, not just trying to fornicate with an attractive woman.

  “Ja.” Georg Schultz grunted laughter. After the fact, he’d evidently decided what had happened was funny, too. He hadn’t thought so at the time. Nor had Tatiana. Ludmila didn’t think she would find it funny, not if she lived another seventy-five years.

  Ludmila glanced over at Schultz out of the corner of her eye. She chuckled softly to herself. Though she’d never say it out loud, her opinion was that he and Tatiana deserved each other.

  David Goldfarb sat up in the hay wagon that was taking him north through the English Midlands toward Nottingham. To either side, a couple of other men in tattered, dirty uniforms of RAF blue sprawled in the hay. They were all blissfully asleep, some of them snoring enough to give a creditable impression of a Merlin fighter engine.

  Goldfarb wished he could lie back and start sawing wood, too. He’d tried, but sleep eluded him. Besides, looking at countryside that hadn’t been pounded to bits was a pleasant novelty. He hadn’t seen much of that sort, not lately.

  The only thing he had in common with his companions was the grubby uniforms they all wore. When the Lizards invaded England, nobody had thought past fighting them by whatever means came to hand. After Bruntingthorpe got smashed up, he’d been made into a foot soldier, and he’d done his best without a word of complaint.

  Now that the northern pocket was empty of aliens and the southern one shrinking, though, the Powers That Be were once more beginning to think in terms longer than those of the moment. Whenever officers spied an RAF man who’d been dragooned into the army, they pulled him out and sent him off for reassignment. Thus Goldfarb’s present situation.

  Night was coming. As summer passed into autumn, the hours of daylight shrank with dizzying speed. Even Double Summer Time couldn’t disguise that. In the fields, women and old men labored with horses, donkeys, and oxen to bring in the harvest, as they might have during the wars against Napoleon, or against William the Conqueror, or against the Emperor Claudius. People would be hungry now, too, as they had been then.

  The wagon rattled past a burnt-out farmhouse, the ground around it cratered with bombs. The war had not ignored the lands north of Leicester, it merely had not been all-consuming here. For a moment, a pile of wreckage made the landscape seem familiar to Goldfarb. He angrily shook his head when he realized that. Finding a landscape familiar because the Lizards had bombed it was like finding a husband familiar because he beat you. Some women were supposed to be downtrodden enough to do just that. He thought it madness himself.

  “How long till we get to Watnall?” he called to the driver: softly, so he wouldn’t wake his comrades.

  “Sometime tonight, Ah reckon,” the fellow answered. He was a little old wizened chap who worked his jaws even when he wasn’t talking. Goldfarb had seen that before. Usually it meant the chap who did it was used to chewing tobacco and couldn’t stop chewing even when tobacco was no longer to be had.

  Goldfarb’s stomach rumbled. “Will you stop off to feed us any time before then?” he asked.

  “Nay, no more’n Ah will to feed mahself,” the driver said. When he put it that way, Goldfarb didn’t have the crust to argue further.

  He rummaged in his pockets and came up with half a scone he’d forgotten he had. It was so stale, he worried about breaking teeth on it; he devoured it more by abrasion than mastication. It was just enough to make his stomach growl all the more fiercely but not nearly enough to satisfy him, not even after he licked the crumbs from his fingers.

  He pointed to a cow grazing in a field. “Why don’t you stop for a bit so we can shoot that one and worry off some steaks?”

  “Think you’re a funny bloke, do you?” the driver said. “You try lookin’ at that cow too long and some old man like me back there in the bushes, he’ll blow your head off for you, mark mah words. He hasn’t kept his cow so long bein’ sweet and dainty, Ah tell you that.”

  Since the driver was very likely right, Goldfarb shut up.

  Night fell with an almost audible thud. It got cold fast. He started to bury himself in the hay with his mates, then had a second thought and asked the driver, “Besides the Fighter Command Group HQ, wot’n ‘ell’s in Watnall?” By sounding like a Cockney for three words, he made a fair pun of it.

  If the driver noticed, he wasn’t impressed. “There’s nobbut the group headquarters there,” he answered, and spat into the roadway. “ ‘Twasn’t even a village before the war.”

  “How extremely depressing,” Goldfarb said, going from one accent to another: for a moment there, he sounded like a Cambridge undergraduate. He wondered how Jerome Jones was faring these days, and then whether his fellow radarman was still alive.

  “Watnall’s not far from Nottingham,” the driver said, the first time since he’d stepped up onto his raised seat that he’d actually volunteered anything. “Nobbut a few miles.”

  The consolation Goldfarb had felt at the first sentence—Nottingham was a good-sized city, with the promise of pubs, cinemas when the power was on, and people of the female persuasion—was tempered by the second. If he couldn’t lay hands on a bicycle, a few miles in wartime with winter approaching might as well have been the far side of the moon.

  He vanished into the hay like a dormouse curling up in its nest to hibernate. One of his traveling companions, still sleeping, promptly stuck an elbow in his ribs. He didn’t care. He huddled closer to the other RAF man, who, however fractious he might have been in his sleep, was also warm. He fell asleep himself a few minutes later, even as he was telling himself he wouldn’t.

  When he woke again, something had changed. In his muzziness, he needed a moment to figure out what: they weren’t
moving. He sat up, brushing straw from his hair. “What’s happened?” he asked.

  One of the other RAF men, a Liverpudlian whom Goldfarb knew only as Henry, answered before the driver could: “We’re in Nottingham, we are. They’re going t’give us some grub after all.” His clotted accent said he was a factory worker from a long line of factory workers.

  “Jolly good!” Goldfarb brushed at himself again, trying to get as close to presentable as he could. It was wasted effort, because of his own disheveled state and because the night was too dark to let anyone see anything much. Stars glittered in a black, black sky, but shed little light, and the moon, some days past full, hadn’t yet risen.

  “We’ve soup for you, lads,” a woman’s voice said out of the gloom; Goldfarb could make out her silhouette, but no more. “Here, come take your panikins. Have a care—they’re hot.”

  Hot the soup was, and full of cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. Goldfarb didn’t find any meat in his tin bowl, but the broth tasted as if it had been somewhere within shouting distance of a chicken in the not too distant past.

  “Sticks to your ribs, that does,” Henry said happily. The other RAF men made wordless noises of agreement. So did the driver, who was also getting outside a bowl of soup.

  “Pass me back your bowls when you’re done, lads, and we’ll serve ’em out again to the next lot who come through hungry, or maybe to some of our own,” the woman said. Goldfarb couldn’t see her, couldn’t tell if she was young or old, ugly or beautiful. Food—and, even more, kindness—made him feel halfway in love with her just the same.

  When all the bowls and spoons had been returned, the driver said, “Get along there,” and the horses ambled on. Goldfarb called thanks back to the woman who’d given them the soup.

  As the driver had said, they got into Watnall in the middle of the night. The transition was abrupt: one minute they were rolling through open country, the next in among Nissen huts and Maycrete buildings that seemed to have sprung from the middle of nowhere—which made a pretty fair description of Watnall, now that Goldfarb thought on it. They rattled by a couple of ack-ack guns, whose crews jeered at them: “Coming back to work are you at last, dearies? Did you have a pleasant holiday?”