Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Every once in a while, he wondered if he could head north, slip over the border, and take up life in the Soviet Union. He might be able to pass himself off as somebody just out of the gulag. But everything his father had told him about the land argued against it.

  Yes, there he would look like other people. He wouldn’t have papers like other people, though. Even released zeks—especially released zeks—had identity papers detailing who they were, where they could live, where they were allowed to travel.

  Without those papers, you couldn’t get bread. You couldn’t get vodka. You couldn’t get cabbage. Unless you were a hermit in the woods who killed all his own food, you had to have papers.

  Even if I looked like everyone else, I’d be a stranger there, he thought. Here in China, although people who’d never seen him before did double takes when he walked by, he knew how to fit in. He knew how things worked. The way the Chinese put it was, he had his bowl of rice. For now, that would have to do.

  —

  Any time they wouldn’t let you sleep at night, any time they put you to work or put you on the road instead, you were going to get the shitty end of the stick. Even a conscript like Tibor Nagy had no trouble figuring that out. He grumbled as he climbed up into the battered truck that would haul him and his countrymen out of Schweinfurt and into…into whatever disasters waited at the other side of the ride.

  Isztvan Szolovits put it a little differently. As he scrambled into the truck, he muttered, “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

  Sergeant Gergely heard that. Tibor didn’t think he was supposed to, but he did. He had ears like a rabbit’s. With a harsh laugh, he said, “You got it backwards, Jewboy. All the fires are behind us. The frying pan is where we’re going. What’s the worst they can do to us at the front?”

  “Shoot us. Blow us up. Fry us with flamethrowers…Sergeant,” Szolovits answered. All that was much too true, but he might not have come out with it unless Gergely delivered that endearment.

  The sergeant could have given him hell. Instead, Gergely just nodded. “That’s about the size of it, yeah,” he said. “When you put it next to one of those fucking atom bombs that still kill you even when they miss by two kilometers, it’s nothing.”

  “Nice of the Russians to give us the chance to die for their country,” Tibor remarked.

  “I don’t think they would if they had a choice,” Sergeant Gergely said. Once under canvas himself, the veteran lit a cigarette. The brief red glow of the match gave his sharp features a satanic cast. He went on, “But the way it looks to me is, they’re having trouble getting their own guys up to the front on account of everything that’s fallen between there and here. Lucky us, we’re already forward, and so they’ll use us.”

  “They’ll use us up,” Szolovits emended. Gergely didn’t hear that—or if he did, he thought it was too obviously true to need comment.

  With an out-of-tune roar, the truck got rolling. German roads were damn good. All the same, every jolt, every pothole, went straight from Tibor’s tailbone to his head. The workers at the factory must have given the truck springs once upon a time. They’d long since died of old age, though.

  And the road, while good, had been bombed and shelled more than it had been repaired—and the men doing the repair work were Russian military engineers, not fastidious German roadbuilders. The only thing that mattered to the Red Army was keeping traffic going. Comfort was for capitalists and fairies and other socially undesirable elements.

  No one had bothered fixing the truck’s muffler, either. The rear compartment stank of exhaust. The noise was also impressive—or depressing, depending on how you looked at it. Tibor was used to riding in such clunkers. They were what the Russians could spare for their satellite forces. The racket from this one, though, might keep the driver and him from hearing enemy fighter-bombers overhead till too late.

  He couldn’t do anything about that but worry. Worry he did, even as he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t want to fight the Americans. He would rather have shot at the Russians who’d flung him into this war that wasn’t his. He had no doubt that he wasn’t the only conscript in the truck with such notions.

  Sergeant Gergely wasn’t a conscript. But he’d been riding herd on reluctant soldiers since the Hungarian Army did its halfhearted best to help the Nazis try to keep the Red Army away from Budapest, away from Lake Balaton, away from the oilfields west of the lake…. He knew how they thought. He knew what kind of odds they were weighing.

  Not at all out of the blue, he said, “Listen, you sorry sacks of shit, don’t be any dumber than you can help. If you bug out, people on our side will shoot you in the back. The Americans or limeys or Germans or whoever the hell we bump up against will shoot you in the front. And the Russians and our own security forces will make your families pay like you wouldn’t believe.”

  He didn’t gloat about that, the way a movie villain might have. No—he sounded as matter-of-fact as a butcher telling a customer the price of a leg of mutton. If you do this, that will happen. As far as Tibor was concerned, he seemed scarier as he was.

  The farther north and west they went, the worse the roads grew. They were passing through land that had been recently fought over, land the Red Army had taken away from the Americans. Dawn began to leak into the compartment through the opening in the rear. Through that opening, Tibor got glimpses of wrecked and shattered vehicles—everything from motorcycles all the way up to Stalin heavy tanks—shoved off to the shoulder so the ones that still ran could get through.

  Not long before sunup, the truck convoy halted. The brakes on the machine that carried Tibor squealed like a kicked dog. “Out!” Sergeant Gergely yelled. “Out and under cover! The Americans spot us in the open in broad daylight, we deserve to get killed. They’ll sure think so, anyhow.”

  Out Tibor went. They were at the edge of a large village or small town. Trenches and shell holes already marred the landscape. Tibor slid into a hole in the ground and started improving it with his entrenching tool. He hadn’t seen much fighting yet, but air attacks had already taught him that a well-made foxhole would save your life if anything would.

  Sometimes nothing would. If one came down right where you happened to be, all your digging in just meant digging your own grave a little deeper. But you did what you could.

  Artillery up ahead bellowed. The Russian guns didn’t sound very far up ahead. Tibor wondered whether American shells could reach this far. They had at some point, or the village wouldn’t be a jumble of wreckage with dead, swollen dogs—and, no doubt, dead, swollen people who hadn’t been planted yet—perfuming the air. But maybe the Russians had pushed them out of range.

  Then again, maybe it didn’t matter. American fighters—prop jobs, left over from the last war—screamed by at just above treetop height, pounding the place with rockets and heavy machine guns. Tibor had never faced a couple of trucks’ worth of Katyushas. He no longer felt he was missing anything.

  Several of the trucks that had brought the Hungarians here were ablaze, sending their smoke screens up into the sky now that smoke screens didn’t matter any more. They’d gone under camouflage netting as soon as the soldiers piled out of them. The enemy flyers might not have seen them, but they’d hit them just the same. Tibor did hope the drivers had got out.

  Someone behind him shouted something: guttural consonants mired in palatalized nouns. Tibor recognized Russian without being able to speak it. He looked around and found himself on the receiving end of a Red Army major’s glare. Saluting, he said, “Sorry, sir. I don’t speak your language”—in Magyar. That didn’t make the major any happier. Tibor called, “Sergeant, there’s a Soviet officer here.” He didn’t say what he thought of the Soviet officer. The bastard might understand more than he let on. Trusting Russians didn’t come naturally to their fraternal socialist allies.

  Sergeant Gergely climbed out of his hole and walked over. Saluting the Russian, he said, “What do you need, sir?” He also used his own
language. The major gave forth with something impassioned. Gergely only shrugged. Scowling, the Russian switched to German to order everyone into the front line at once. Tibor followed that only too well. Gergely also must have. But he just spread his hands and stuck to Magyar: “Sorry, sir. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  The Red Army major scorched him up one side and down the other. But he couldn’t prove the Hungarians were playing dumb. He stormed off, his face as red with rage as a baboon’s backside. “Good job, Sergeant!” Tibor exclaimed. “They won’t throw us into the sausage machine yet.”

  “Yet. Yeah.” Gergely nodded. “Gimme a cigarette, will you? I stalled him this time, but they’ll use us up pretty damn quick any which way.”

  —

  During the Twenties and Thirties, Harry Truman had read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy. He’d enjoyed the stories; they’d kept his mind loose and elastic. When even ordinary reality could stretch and twist like taffy, a loose, elastic mind wasn’t the least useful thing to have. He sometimes wished he had time for that kind of reading now.

  Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought sourly. Reports of the disaster the Russians had visited on the West Coast (and even on Maine) clogged his Oval Office desk. He hadn’t dreamt Stalin could hit that hard. Yes, the USSR had been paid back in spades, doubled and redoubled. That didn’t mean the United States was in anything like great shape.

  But even as Truman was reading about the devastation in Los Angeles, science fiction and fantasy bubbled back into his thoughts. Somebody’d said Do not call up that which you cannot put down. He thought it was H.P. Lovecraft, but he wasn’t sure. Lovecraft hadn’t been one of his favorites.

  That might have been because Lovecraft was a strange, gloomy New Englander, not at all in tune with Truman’s Midwestern optimism. Lovecraft’s style was overblown and ornate, too: out of step with the straightforward prose that flowed from Truman’s pen. But strange and gloomy or not, overblown and ornate or not, old H.P. had hit that particular nail square on the head.

  Do not call up that which you cannot put down. In the Second World War, it hadn’t mattered. The USA could go ahead and incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and lose no sleep afterwards. The Japanese were already on the ropes, even without the A-bombs. No matter how much they wanted to, they couldn’t hit back. All they could do was endure the unendurable and surrender.

  Well, Red China couldn’t hit back, either, when the United States threw those Manchurian cities onto the pyre. The Red Chinese couldn’t, and neither Truman nor Douglas MacArthur had believed that Joe Stalin would. Didn’t he see he was in over his head against America?

  Whether he did or not, he must have decided he didn’t care. If he couldn’t avenge his biggest and most important ally, who would want an alliance with him afterwards? He had an almost Oriental sense of face. So he’d dropped bombs in Europe, and so….

  And so now his country and Truman’s, and Western Europe and his satellites and Red China as well, wouldn’t be the same for years, decades, maybe centuries to come. No matter who wound up dominating Korea, no matter how the European land war turned out, nobody would come out better off than he’d been going in. Nobody.

  Do not call up that which you cannot put down. The really terrifying thing was, it could have been worse. And, had the war waited another few years—maybe two, maybe four—it would have been worse. Incalculably worse.

  No, not quite incalculably. The physicists who were hard at work on the next generation of bombs worked those calculations as a matter of course. They had to. That was part of their job. Making the calculations mean anything to somebody who didn’t take a slide rule to bed instead of a Teddy bear, though…That was a different story.

  The biggest ordinary bombs the limeys dropped from one of their Lancasters in the last war weighed ten tons. The A-bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the last war packed the punch of ten or twenty thousand tons of TNT. So did the ones both sides were throwing around now. That was a hell of a big step up, the equivalent of putting on thousandfold boots.

  And another step, every bit as big, lay right around the corner. So the boys with the high foreheads and the funny haircuts kept telling Truman, anyhow. The kinks lay in the engineering, not the physics. And the engineering, they assured him, was the easy part.

  They’d convinced him. He believed them, even when believing them scared the living bejesus out of him. Because they talked glibly about bombs with blasts worth not thousands but millions of tons of high explosives.

  What could you do with a few bombs like that? Blow not just a city but a medium-sized state clean off the map. Or, if you happened to drop them in Europe instead, the map might be missing a country or two.

  Truman muttered to himself. He knew Senators who kept a bottle of bourbon—or, if they came from the Northeast, a bottle of scotch—in their desk drawers to lubricate the thought processes and shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous constituents. He’d never been a teetotaler, not even during Prohibition. But he’d always been clear that he had hold of the bottle. The bottle didn’t have hold of him.

  He’d always been clear about that, and he’d always been proud of it, too. Now he felt like getting blotto. He was presiding over a disaster, a catastrophe, a horror beyond the eldritch dreams of H.P. Lovecraft. The world wouldn’t recover for years and years, if it ever did.

  And yet…And yet…The USA and the USSR were only doing the best, or the worst, they could with the halfway tools they had right this minute. Give them a few of the scientists’ new toys, and what would they come up with?

  The end of the world. That was how it looked to the President. Life would go on after this war, however it turned out. After the next one, if they used the new goodies?

  Einstein had said, or was supposed to have said, that he didn’t know what the weapons of World War III would be like, but that he did know what they would use to fight World War IV. Rocks. What worried Truman was, Einstein might have been looking on the bright side of things.

  Had the bushy-haired physicist really said anything so cynical? It didn’t sound like him. Truman was tempted to pick up the phone, call the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and find out. When you were President of the United States, you could satisfy whatever whim you happened to have.

  You could. Truman suspected Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man of more than a few whims and whimsies, would have. As for himself, he refrained. His hard Midwestern frugality was as much a part of him as his bifocals—more, because he’d had it longer. So was the relentless drive to get on with the job.

  He muttered again, this time with the kind of language he’d used while his battery was throwing shells at the Huns during the First World War. Scientists here told him the new bombs, the end-of-the-world bombs, were coming soon.

  Joe Stalin, damn his black, stubborn heart, had scientists working for him, too. Good ones. He wouldn’t have been so dangerous if they were a pack of thumb-fingered clods. Hitler hadn’t expected the Russians to make such good tanks, or so many of them. Truman hadn’t expected Stalin to pull the Bull bomber or the MiG-15 out of his hat.

  And nobody had expected the Russians to make their own atom bombs so fast. General Groves, who’d ramrodded the Manhattan Project through to its triumphant completion, hadn’t figured Stalin would learn to build an A-bomb for twenty-five years, if he ever did. Which proved…what? That Groves made a better engineer and manager of engineers than a prophet.

  No doubt those Soviet big brains were working just as hard for their boss as their American counterparts were here. They might be working even harder. Stalin, like Hitler, made unfortunate things happen to people who didn’t satisfy him.

  Truman muttered one more time. Even assuming the United States won this war—even assuming a war like this was winnable—what was he supposed to do about Russia, or with it? It was too big to conquer and occupy in any ordinary sense of the words. Napoleon had discovered tha
t; despite far greater resources at his disposal, so had the Führer.

  You couldn’t just leave it alone, either. When you did, the Russians got frisky. That was bad enough before, when all they exported was world revolution. Atomic bombs gave the question new urgency—but, dammit, no new answers.

  IHOR SHEVCHENKO WAS NOT a religious man—not an outwardly religious man, anyhow. He’d lived his whole life through the Soviet Union’s aggressive campaigns against supernatural belief of every kind. Only a man with the urge to become a martyr or one with an insatiable curiosity about what a gulag looked like from the inside could be outwardly religious in this day and age. Assuming there was any difference between those two types.

  Things had loosened up a little during the war against the Nazis. With the country’s fate in the balance, Stalin had decided he’d be a Russian patriot first and a good Communist only later. If believing helped people kill Germans, he was all for it.

  If you looked at things the right way, that was funny. Stalin was no more Russian than Hitler was. The thick accent with which he spoke Russian showed he was a Georgian, a blackass from the Caucasus. Again, though, if you were smart enough to see the joke there, you needed to be smart enough to know better than to tell it to anybody else.

  After victory, the powers that be seemed willing to let babushkas and a few old men keep going to services without getting into trouble. Even a younger woman might get away with it, though it would be noted and wouldn’t look good on her record. A man of Ihor’s age who stuck his nose inside a church would still catch it. Since going with the current was always easier and safer than swimming against it, that was what he did.

  All of which meant he had no real idea how to pray, only bits he remembered from when he was a little boy. For the first time in his life, he found himself regretting that. He wanted to prostrate himself before the icon of some mournful-eyed, white-bearded saint and give the holy man reverence for not letting Anya go to Kiev and get caught in the Americans’ atomic fire. He wanted to light candles in front of the icon to show his gratitude.