Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  When he told his wife as much, she said, “Don’t be an idiot.” It wasn’t so much that she was a New Soviet Woman, someone for whom religion was a relic of the primitive past. She was, however, a practical woman. Proving as much, she continued, “Do you want to bring the Chekists down on your head?”

  They both spoke in whispers, in the darkness of their cramped room in the middle of the night. Such talk was safe then if it ever was. Sometimes, of course, it never was. Ihor answered, “A lot of them went up in smoke along with the rest of Kiev.”

  “A lot of them, sure, but not all of them. You can bet on that—not all of them,” Anya said. “Can you imagine us without people watching to keep other people in line?”

  Ihor shook his head. He and his wife both usually called the Soviet secret police by the name the Tsars’ secret police had used. That said everything that needed saying about the permanence of secret policemen in this part of the world. Even if the Soviet Union stopped being the Soviet Union and for some reason went back to being Russia, whoever was in charge would use them to keep an eye on things. Unless, of course, he happened to be a secret policeman himself.

  Anya responded to the motion, saying, “Well, there you are.”

  “Tak. Here I am.” Only after the word was out of his mouth did he realize he’d said yes in Ukrainian. The language he’d learned from his mother and father was for moments like this—and for when he wanted to seem like a clodhopper to someone in authority trying to give him a hard time. Otherwise, he used Russian. He went on, “Here you are, too. I’m glad of it.” He squeezed her.

  She squeaked in surprise. “So am I,” she said when she got her breath back. “If I hadn’t come down with the sniffles—”

  “If God hadn’t sent you the sniffles,” Ihor broke in.

  But his wife only laughed. “Have you got any idea how silly that sounds?” she said.

  He listened to himself. “It does, doesn’t it?” he said, self-conscious and embarrassed at the same time. You thought about God—if you thought about God—as throwing thunderbolts around, not giving somebody a head cold.

  He kissed her. This time, her arms tightened around him. Things went on from there. When you weren’t doing it for the first time, messing around wasn’t embarrassing. You didn’t run the risk of saying something foolish, the way he had a moment before. In fact, you didn’t have to say anything at all. Ihor liked that fine.

  The other thing making love let Ihor do was show Anya how glad he was that she hadn’t gone to Kiev. He’d told her, of course, told her over and over, but this seemed so much better. Words weren’t enough for some things. He’d heard once from somebody—maybe during the war; he couldn’t remember now—that writers said the trick was showing readers things, not telling them about things. Ihor barely had his letters, but that made sense to him.

  Losing Kiev meant more to the collective farm than fewer visits from the MGB. It also meant gasoline didn’t come out to the kolkhoz for the spring plowing. At some collectives, progressive and advanced, that would have been a disaster. Here, it was an annoyance that cost people extra work, but no more. Horse-drawn plows sat slowly rusting in a barn. After the Red Army reconquered the area from the Hitlerites, plowing with horses again rather than people had seemed the height of modernity.

  One night near the end of March, just before plunging headlong into exhausted slumber, Ihor did think to ask Anya, “What will we do with our grain once we harvest it? We sent it in to Kiev, but Kiev doesn’t need so much any more.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Anya agreed. Nobody knew how many people had died in the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, not to the nearest ten thousand—maybe not to the nearest hundred thousand. Or if anyone did know, he wasn’t saying.

  More people still had fled the city. The kolkhozniks had herded refugees away. Some of the injuries those poor bastards sported were ordinary, the kind Ihor had seen over and over in the last war. The burns, though…He hadn’t seen anything like that before, except a couple of luckless men who wound up on the wrong end of a flamethrower. But these didn’t seem to want to heal. Raw, oozing meat…

  With an effort of will, he pulled his mind away from all that. “So what do we do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” his wife said. “We won’t have to worry about it till fall. By then, I’m sure somebody will have come around to give us orders.”

  “I suppose so,” Ihor said around a yawn. All the same, he found time to wonder some more before sleep dragged him down. The people who gave orders like that would have come from Kiev before the Americans lashed it with fire. If they didn’t come from Kiev, wouldn’t they come from Moscow? When you got right down to it, in the end everything came from Moscow.

  If it could. The Americans had desecrated Moscow along with Kiev. They hadn’t killed Comrade Stalin; he still spoke on Radio Moscow. But Ihor had no way of knowing whether Radio Moscow still came from its namesake city, or from somewhere like Magnitogorsk or Irkutsk. He did know Yuri Levitan and the other regular broadcasters weren’t reading the news on the radio any more. He couldn’t prove that meant anything, but it probably did.

  The people who were reading the news on the radio warned against going into the ruins of cities struck by atomic bombs. The warning was twofold. The authorities declared looting a crime punishable by summary execution—a bullet in the back of the neck. And they warned of poisonous radioactivity lingering in the air and water and on the ground.

  Maybe the radio told the truth. Maybe it served up a fresh helping of government lies. Ihor didn’t try to find out himself. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t looted in Soviet, Polish, and German cities retaken from the Nazis. When you were in the Red Army, you were supposed to be your own quartermaster sergeant. Anything over and above keeping yourself fed was a bonus.

  But plundering Kiev felt different to him. He couldn’t have said why, but it did. Not everybody on the kolkhoz thought the way he did. People pedaled off, saying they wanted to see what the ruins looked like. If they came back with more than they had when they set out, how could you prove it?

  Then again, sometimes they didn’t come back. A kolkhoznik named Orest Makhno rode away to see what he could see. That was the last anyone at the collective farm saw of him. He might have come across an enormous cache of goldpieces stamped with the shaggy visage of one Tsar or another, enough to set himself up as a prince of thieves. If you wanted to look on the bright side of things, that was how they would look to you.

  More likely, though, he’d met a stocky, unsmiling man in a bad suit, one who’d heard enough protestations of innocence to laugh at them or ignore them altogether. And, more likely, Orest had found nine millimeters’ worth of answers: as much as he would need for the rest of his life.

  —

  Cade Curtis cradled his M-1 carbine. They’d congratulated him for making it from the Chosin Reservoir to the UN lines far to the south. They’d asked him how he’d done it, and taken careful notes as he spun his story. Fair enough. Knowing what had worked for him might let them give other soldiers in trouble tips that would really help.

  Afterwards, they’d promoted him to first lieutenant. They’d given him a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And they’d given him not just a platoon but a company of his own. Officers were scarce in Korea, officers with combat experience even scarcer.

  The war here ground on just the same, even if the wider world, distracted by atoms and mushroom clouds, hardly bothered looking this way any more. Despite the bombs that had fallen on the Manchurian cities, the Red Chinese kept throwing as many troops into the fight as they could. And the North Koreans, though reduced to rifles and submachine guns and homemade grenades, went on fighting, too. They were bastards, but they were brave bastards.

  Cade wished he had a Russian-made submachine gun himself. Having lugged one most of the way south, he’d come to like it better than the weapon with which the USA armed its officers. The Russian guns were more reliable than his carbine, m
ore compact, and had a much higher rate of fire. They didn’t jam in cold weather. His piece looked like a rifle. Unfortunately, it didn’t perform like one—or like a submachine gun. It combined the worst of both worlds.

  There was a loophole in front of the trench. You could, if you were so inclined, examine the enemy positions up ahead through it without exposing your whole head. Cade Curtis wasn’t so inclined. He figured some sniper with a scope-sighted Russian rifle was watching it. If the son of a bitch saw an eyeball looking back at him, the family of the eyeball’s owner would get a Deeply Regrets wire from the Department of Defense.

  So Curtis looked up over another stretch of the entrenchment. He showed more of himself, but only for a couple of seconds. Then he ducked out of sight again. Nothing looked to be stirring. All he saw was snow and dirt and rusting wire. That proved only so much, of course. The Red Chinese and North Koreans had learned plenty about the fine art of camouflage from their Russian instructors. But you did what you could. In this imperfect world, that was all you could do. This imperfect world’s weather worked the same way. The calendar said it was spring, but nobody’d told the countryside.

  “All quiet, sir?” Staff Sergeant Lou Klein asked. He was about forty, with graying whiskers and sagging jowls. The Germans hadn’t killed him in North Africa or Italy, though the ribbon for the Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters said they’d tried hard enough. He could have run the company better than Cade, but he’d never bothered going to OCS.

  “Looks that way,” Cade said. “I mean, you can’t tell with the Chinks, but I didn’t see anything stirring.”

  Klein lit a Camel. “Mind if I look for myself?”

  “Be my guest.” If the career noncom thought Cade would get huffy about the question, he had another think coming. Curtis did say, “You may not want to do it right where I did, though.”

  “Nope. That wouldn’t be so real great.” If the warning offended Klein, he didn’t show it. He walked along the trench till just before it kinked, popped up to check things, and promptly disappeared from sight. Somebody fired at the place where he’d been, but he wasn’t there any more.

  “You reckon we’ll ever see the tanks they keep promising us?” Cade asked him.

  “Sir, I been in the Army about as long as you been around, so I gotta say stranger things have happened.” Klein paused to think. “You ask me to name two of ’em, though, I’m gonna have some trouble.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too. I was hoping you would tell me I was wrong,” Curtis said. The Reds hated and feared American armor. They hadn’t had that many old Russian T-34/85s to begin with, and a lot of the ones they had had were wrecks now. Even a new T-34/85 wasn’t a match for a Pershing. And the enemy wasn’t likely to get new ones, or T-54s, not when Stalin needed tanks a hell of a lot closer to home.

  Of course, that shoe also fit the American foot in Korea. With the Red Army trying to crash its way to the Rhine, every American, British, and French tank around was busy doing its best to hold the Ivans back. After World War II ended, the French had taken on some ex-Nazi Panthers to tide them over till they built up their own tank factories again. If any of those brutes were still running, the froggies had probably thrown them into the fight, too.

  All of which left Korea half forgotten, dangling from the ends of both sides’ ridiculously long supply lines. And it turned the fighting here into something out of the war before last: trenches and artillery and grenades and machine guns. The fighters that sometimes strafed the trenches were more modern than Sopwith Camels. But, with the aviation world swinging at top speed from prop jobs to jets, they were hardly less obsolete than those cloth-and-wood-and-wire biplanes.

  Just to show you never could tell, a regiment’s worth of Pershings clanked up to the front under cover of darkness a couple of days later. Astonishment made the cigarette in Klein’s mouth twitch. “Fuck me,” the noncom said. “We went and won the Irish Sweepstakes.” Cade couldn’t have put it better himself.

  The attack was to be in the direction of Chongju. The way the higher-ups put it showed they didn’t think it would get that far. Cade noted that without much surprise. The Americans had more and better planes and tanks and big guns than the enemy. The Red Chinese and North Koreans had committed far more soldiers to the fight. Their tactics often reminded Cade of smothering a fire by piling bodies on it till it went out, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t work.

  As it had on the Somme thirty-five years before, artillery thundered to soften up the foe. It had gone on for days then, throwing away the advantage of surprise. Generals had learned since—not quickly, but they had. After three hours, the 105s and 155s fell silent. The tanks went forward, foot soldiers in their wake.

  Enemy machine guns started barking as soon as the barrage shut down. Unless you used an A-bomb, you wouldn’t kill all the troops in front of you. Even if you did, you might not get them all. And this stretch of Korea wasn’t worth splitting atoms.

  Nor did it need them. England had invented tanks during World War I to deal with the Kaiser’s machine-gun nests. They still did the job. The Pershings’ 90mm main armament smashed sandbags and knocked reinforced concrete to pieces. A few Red Chinese soldiers carried rocket-propelled grenades—what the Russians used for bazookas. They knocked out a couple of American tanks, but only a couple. The rest ground ahead.

  Cade and his men loped after them. You couldn’t let tanks get too far out in front of infantry. Or you had better not. If you did, brave enemies would shove Molotov cocktails into the engine compartment or chuck grenades through open hatches and make the crews unhappy.

  Here and there, live Chinks fought back with rifles and submachine guns. After the pounding the forward trenches had taken, there weren’t too many of them. They didn’t stay alive very long, either. Cade picked up a PPSh whose former owner wouldn’t need it any more. He scavenged as many magazines of pistol ammo as he could to keep it fed.

  Klein eyed him. “You weren’t shitting me when you said you liked those Russian jobs, were you? Uh, sir?”

  “Not even a little bit,” Cade said. “They’re like Model T’s. They’ll run forever, and they don’t wear out.”

  “Sir, you weren’t even born yet when they quit makin’ Tin Lizzies,” Klein said.

  He was right. Even so, Cade answered, “There were still plenty of ’em around when I was a kid. People down the road from us had one.”

  “Me, I got my face slapped in my old man’s Model T,” Klein said. “If she’d come across instead, I might’ve married her and never joined the Army. Just goes to show, don’t it?” He didn’t say what it showed. Chances were he didn’t know, either. They slogged on through the ruined Korean countryside.

  —

  It was what would have been a lazy Sunday morning in Glendale. Aaron Finch hadn’t seen a lot of lazy Sunday mornings in his life. He’d known a few after he married Ruth. He might have known more with her, but then Leon came along. Babies didn’t believe in lazy mornings, not even after they turned into toddlers.

  And the bombs that had smashed Los Angeles made Aaron only too sure that nobody around here would know any lazy Sunday mornings for a long time to come. The people the bomb hadn’t killed were too busy scrambling to kick off their shoes, pour some more coffee, and relax with the paper (assuming the paper they were used to relaxing with had survived, which the big ones hadn’t). Aaron found himself no less busy at the game of survival than anyone else.

  “You ready, Leon?” he asked his little son.

  Leon was fidgeting, which made it hard for Ruth to finish tying his shoes. He fidgeted a lot. He had more energy than he knew what to do with. But he nodded, which made the baby curls bounce up and down on top of his head. And he said, “Ready, Daddy!”

  Aaron and Ruth looked at each other. They knew Leon knew what ready meant. But he hadn’t said it himself till just now. Kids came out with new stuff every day. From everything Aaron could see, coming out with new stuff all the time was
a big part of what being a kid was about.

  “Well, come on, then.” Aaron stubbed out his cigarette. “Let’s go see what the Kasparians want for eggs. And you can pay your respects to the ducks.”

  “Ducks! Quack!” Leon jumped up and down in excitement. He wasn’t a whole lot taller than a duck or a chicken, but he did act oddly solemn around the mallards. If he wasn’t paying his respects to them, Aaron didn’t know what else to call it.

  They walked down the street together, Leon’s little hand in Aaron’s big one. No cars went past them. It was still early, but even so…. Gas was scarce in and around Los Angeles, and cost upwards of half a buck a gallon when you could get it. That was one reason Aaron was down to part-time at Blue Front. Another was that nobody was hauling appliances into L.A. Even if people had brought them in, nobody was buying them. Herschel Weissman cursed the way his business was going in Yiddish and in accented English.

  No cars drove the street, but a beat-up station wagon and a newish De Soto that didn’t belong in the neighborhood were parked on the far side. The windows on both were steamed up, which meant somebody, or a family’s worth of somebodies, slept inside. Aaron locked his doors all the time now, which he hadn’t bothered doing before the bombs fell. He kept a heavy iron fireplace poker and a carving knife where he could grab them fast if he had to, too. He hadn’t needed them, but he was ready if he did.

  Leon suddenly yanked his hand out of his father’s. “Flarn!” he said. “Flarn!” He plucked a yellow dandelion on the next-door neighbor’s lawn. Flarn was what he said when he meant flower. He knew what he meant, and so did Aaron and Ruth, but not everything that came out of his mouth was what strangers would recognize as English. His parents didn’t always recognize it right away, either. He’d gone Drin-drin! for a couple of weeks before Ruth figured out it was the noise he made for a ringing telephone.

  The Kasparians had a hand-lettered sign on their front lawn: POULTRY & EGGS FOR SALE HERE. Clucks and quacks floated up from the back. Leon picked another flarn. One of these days, he’d probably tear up somebody’s prize tulips and catch hell for it, but so far he’d stuck to dandelions.