Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  “I wanna watch animals jumping up and down, I don’t need you,” Hank McCutcheon said. “I can look at the fucking Jap monkeys instead. Ain’t they a kick in the nuts?”

  “They’re something, all right,” Bill agreed. Most of the animals and birds and plants here didn’t look too different from the stuff back home. They weren’t identical, but you had to look twice to notice; the overall effect was similar. And then, in the middle of all that similarity—monkeys! He continued, “You could put ’em in uniform and they’d take over for our top brass without missing a beat. Nobody’d even notice.”

  “Like hell, nobody would,” the pilot said. “The orders would start making more sense if the monkeys gave ’em.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. And only a few of our generals have tails now, so people might spot that, too.”

  Chain-link fencing kept unwanted humans away from the runways. It didn’t bother the Japanese macaques one bit. As Bill watched, a monkey swarmed up one side and down the other, grabbing the wire with hands and thumbish feet. Watching something the size of a dog climb nimbly as a squirrel told him he wasn’t in Kansas any more. The monkey steered clear of him and McCutcheon. They were wary around men, though not too afraid of them.

  “Wonder what it’s after,” Bill said.

  “Anything that isn’t nailed down,” McCutcheon replied. “And if it wants something that is, it’s liable to pry out the nails. Whatever else they are, the damn things are pests. If we had ’em back in the States, there’d be a bounty on ’em.”

  “No kidding!” Bill said. Macaques raided garbage cans. They sneaked into kitchens and storerooms and stole food from them. They were like giant rats with hands that worked. Not long before the B-29s that bombed Pyongyang had to land here, one of them had swiped an MP’s .45. With its clever, curious fingers, the monkey managed to release the safety. That was its next to last mistake. It was pointing the pistol at itself when it found out what the trigger did….

  “You don’t want to mess with ’em. Rile ’em up and they’ll bite your face off,” McCutcheon said.

  That was also the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A macaque could look amazingly manlike with its mouth closed. But when it yawned or screeched or did anything else with its mouth open, you saw that a man might be a monkey’s nephew, but he sure wasn’t a monkey’s son. The chompers in there would have made a coyote think twice.

  “I suppose it’s because we don’t have those teeth that we started hitting things with sticks, and then throwing rocks at things, and then making spears and bows and arrows and…and like that,” Bill said vaguely. He glanced over toward the camouflaged revetment that held the B-29 McCutcheon and he flew. “If we’d kept our teeth, we wouldn’t be dropping bombs on each other right this minute.”

  “No—we’d be a bunch of lousy, flea-bitten monkeys on the prowl for whatever we could scrounge,” McCutcheon said.

  Bill grinned a crooked grin. “And this would make us different from the way we are how exactly?”

  “Hey, we aren’t lousy and flea-bitten,” McCutcheon said. “DDT takes care of that. We make the stuff that goes boom, but we make the stuff that lets life be worth living, too.”

  “Mm…maybe. Can I scrounge a butt off you, Major Monkey, sir?”

  “Ook,” McCutcheon said, and handed him a pack.

  —

  Marian had never seen Daniel Philip Jaspers after he tried to rob her car. She knew that was his name because a camp policeman pulled the would-be burglar’s wallet out of his pocket while he was still groggy. Marian and Fayvl Tabakman and a couple of other people all told the cop what he’d been up to.

  Glorying in his own self-importance, the policeman took Daniel Philip Jaspers away, poking him in the ribs with a billy club whenever he staggered. He staggered quite a bit. Marian was sure she would have, too. The rock Fayvl got him with hadn’t been small, and he’d thrown it hard.

  She didn’t know exactly what happened to camp criminals. If you put them in a jail, would they notice? The whole camp was too much like a jail. Maybe they went into labor gangs, clearing wreckage on the fringes of the blast area. Wreckage like what had been the house where she and Linda lived, for instance. Those labor gangs had plenty of work. They were about the only kind of workers in these parts that did.

  When Marian remembered, she did keep an eye out for Daniel Philip Jaspers. He might want to get even for not being able to steal from her. She peered every which way the first few days. After that, he began to move into the background of her worries.

  Two big questions stayed in the foreground. Would Bill come back from the fighting in one piece? And, what the devil would she and Linda do till he did? She couldn’t do anything about the first one but pray, and she wasn’t much good at praying. The other…

  She could drive out of the camp. The trouble was, she didn’t know what she’d do then. The bombs that hit Seattle and Portland shot the whole Pacific Northwest’s economy right behind the ear. She could type; she’d been a clerk-typist at Boeing during the war. That was about the only kind of job this side of waiting tables or sweeping floors she could do. She’d been glad to walk away from it when Bill got his ruptured duck. Linda came along shortly afterwards.

  If she drove away, she might find a job, not that there were many around to find. If she did, who would take care of Linda while she worked, though? Where would she stay while she looked for work? Her bank account had gone up in smoke with her bank.

  All of those questions felt like more than she could handle. And so she drifted from day to day in what seemed both a no-place and a no-time. She was just kind of going along.

  She wasn’t the only one at the camp who felt that way. Some people accepted it and joked about it. Nobody ever found out who first tagged the place Camp Nowhere, but the name spread like wildfire as soon as someone came up with it. Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three, the camp’s official handle, couldn’t compete. Jokes helped, a little.

  They helped some people, anyhow. More and more victims of radiation sickness went into the graveyard alongside the camp. It got bigger and bigger.

  More and more inmates who killed themselves found final resting places there, too. Guns, nooses, and poison ran a close, if ghoulish, race for most popular method. There were no tall buildings to jump off, or that would have been another favored choice.

  When you were stuck in limbo like this, were you really living? The ones who took the long road out evidently thought not. Marian wondered herself. But wonder was all she did, or aimed to do. Whatever happened to her, she also had Linda to worry about. She wasn’t selfish enough to leave a little girl all alone in the world.

  The suicides bewildered Fayvl and his friends. “I seen plenty worse places than this,” Yitzkhak said. “Hardly anybody kill himself in those. They die, yeah—they die like flies. They get killed. They don’t kill themselves. Is crazy.”

  “You saw,” Moishe told him. “You didn’t seen. You saw.”

  “Afen yam,” Yitzkhak said without heat. When Marian asked him what that meant, he pretended not to hear.

  “People give up,” Fayvl said, puzzlement in his voice. “I don’t understand it. In the other camps, the Nazi camps, people didn’t give up. They tried to keep going as long as they could.”

  “Not the Mussulmen,” Moishe said. To Marian, he explained, “This is what we called the goners, the ones who would die soon and knew it and didn’t care.”

  “But they were goners,” Tabakman said. “They were starving, they were sick, they were beat up like you wouldn’t believe, like you hope you never see. If somebody with radiation sickness, he wants out of his pain, that I understand. But we got plenty food. We don’t got guards with Schmeissers and whips. Don’t gotta work sixteen hours a day. Don’t gotta work at all. So what’s to do yourself in for?”

  “Americans is soft,” Yitzkhak said.

  “Americans are soft,” Moishe said. Having corrected the phrase, he tasted it in his
mouth and nodded. “Americans are soft. They never have to go through the things we went through. They don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Hitler’s soldiers didn’t think they were soft,” Marian said.

  Fayvl Tabakman lit a cigarette. “I watched Americans shoot SS guards,” he said after a puff or two. “I watched them herd Germans from the town next door through my camp so they couldn’t say they never knew what Hitler did. You’re right, Mrs. Staley. That was not soft.” Another puff. “I weighed forty-one kilos then.”

  Whatever Marian had learned of the metric system in school, she’d long since forgotten. “How much is that in pounds?” she asked.

  The three middle-aged Jews went back and forth, fingers flashing as they worked it out. Finally Tabakman said, “Ninety—about ninety, anyways. And I was one of the healthy ones.”

  He wasn’t a big man. He probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred fifty pounds now. At ninety, though…She’d seen photos from the liberated concentration camps. Who hadn’t? Men with fingers like pencils, arms and legs like broomsticks, necks too thin and weak to hold up the heads with skin stretched drumhead tight over skulls. Women so starved you couldn’t tell them from men. You didn’t want to believe photos like that. You didn’t want to think people could do that to other people. You didn’t want to—but there were the pictures.

  Marian glanced over at Linda, who was happily chomping on a cracker from her ration pack while the grownups talked grownup talk she didn’t care about. Marian asked the question she’d wondered about as long as she’d known the cobbler: “Did you have a family…before the war?”

  “My wife and me, we had a boy and a girl,” he said, looking down at the table. “We were partisans in the woods for a while after the fighting started. When we got caught, the Germans sent us to Auschwitz. We got there, the SS doctor, he told them to go one way and me the other. And that was the last I saw of them.”

  It was the last anybody saw of them, he meant. They would have gone to the gas chambers. Some German engineer would have designed false showerheads that didn’t do anything but lull the people herded into those rooms. Some German chemical firm would have sold the SS the poison gas. Some German funeral-supply company would have sold the crematoria, to deal with what the gas chambers turned out. How could you contemplate any of that without going mad?

  Marian didn’t want to contemplate it. It made all her unhappiness here seem like a small child’s temper tantrum. Maybe Americans were soft. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” he said, which was gracious of him. What was I’m sorry against the memory of watching your wife and children, everything that mattered most to you, go off to be murdered while you stood there unable to do a thing about it? How could you go on after that?

  Fayvl had. Marian glanced at Moishe and Yitzkhak. Their faces were both closed, inward. What were they remembering? Nothing very different, she feared.

  No wonder seeing her and Linda sometimes seemed to sadden Tabakman. They had to remind him of what the Nazis had stolen. She wondered what the Jew’s wife and children had looked like before…

  Her mouth tightened. She shook her head a little, as if she were warning Linda to behave herself (not that Linda needed warning right now—she was fine). Whatever she asked Fayvl Tabakman, she would never ask him that.

  —

  “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” No, it wasn’t Yuri Levitan, even if it was his signature opening. And it wasn’t Moscow, either, even if it was Radio Moscow. Ihor Shevchenko had no idea where the signal originated. The Soviet Union was a vast place. There were plenty of possibilities.

  He didn’t think much of the new chief newsreader. Roman Amfiteatrov had an annoying southern accent. He pronounced the letter O as if it really sounded like an o, rather than with the ah sound most Russian-speakers used. Ihor had fought alongside a few men like that. The other Russians said they sounded like mooing cows. Russian wasn’t quite Ihor’s language, but that accent seemed funny to him, too.

  Amfiteatrov went on, “Today is Tuesday, May the first, 1951—the glorious holiday of oppressed peasants and workers all over the world. Red Army victories continue unabated, the troops fighting with great courage and passion for Marshal Stalin. Milan has now fallen to the Fifth Guards Tank Army, which is proceeding westward in the direction of Turin. Fierce fighting in Germany has also yielded further advances against the Fascists and imperialists.”

  He named places in Italy. That meant there was some chance he was telling the truth about how things were going there. Further advances, by contrast, could mean anything. Or it could mean nothing. It could, and odds were it did. Anyone who got his news from Radio Moscow learned to read between the lines.

  “In the North Atlantic, heroic Red Fleet submarines have struck heavy blows against the convoys sailing from America to its jackal lackey, England,” Amfiteatrov mooed triumphantly. “Ships have been sent to the bottom and convoys scattered. The naval link between the continents is being broken.”

  Again, he was longer on claims than details. Ihor wondered how much the men in the submarines could actually see. He also wondered whether there actually were any men in submarines in, or under, the North Atlantic. No one here in the USSR would know if there weren’t.

  He glanced around the common room. The other kolkhozniks were all listening attentively. They all looked happy about the victories Roman Amfiteatrov reported. Well, so did Ihor. Whatever doubts you might have inside the fortress of your mind, your face couldn’t show them. If it did, somebody would report you.

  Fewer people had gone into the gulags after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Well, fewer Soviet citizens had. German and Japanese prisoners of war took up a good part of the slack. Had Ihor felt more sympathy for them, he might have wondered how many would ever see their motherlands again. Since he didn’t, his attitude was more along the lines of Better those sons of bitches than me.

  “The bestial American aggressors, still slavering to spill the blood of innocent and peace-loving Soviet citizens, have sent their terror bombers over Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don,” Amfiteatrov intoned. “In the latter city, bombs fell on a child-rearing collective. More than a dozen young lives were snuffed out.”

  Ihor’s first thought was that Kharkov (as a Ukrainian, he thought of it as Kharkiv) and Rostov-on-the-Don had already suffered enough, or more than enough. Both went back and forth between Hitlerite and Soviet forces twice in the last war. He knew not much of Kharkiv was left standing. He’d never been to Rostov-on-the-Don, but he didn’t think it would be in tip-top shape, either.

  As for the child-rearing collective…Radio Moscow had made those claims before, too. Maybe they were true, maybe not. Ihor wasn’t in Kharkiv now. Since he wasn’t, how could he know for sure?

  He couldn’t, and knew he couldn’t. He did remember that, in the last war, each side claimed the other made a point of massacring women and children. In the last war, the Nazis had really done it. So had the men of the Red Army, when they’d advanced far enough to get their hands on German women and children. Revenge spiced killing the way caraway seeds spiced pickled cabbage.

  In the last war, the Americans hadn’t had that kind of reputation. If anything, they were supposed to be softies then, too slow to start the Second Front and too easy on the Fritzes. But they’d been allies then. Now they were the enemy, with Harry Truman playing the role of Hitler.

  Roman Amfiteatrov blathered on. Truman had dropped atom bombs—a large number; Ihor didn’t know just how many—on the Soviet Union’s biggest cities. Even so, the kolkhoznik wasn’t sure whether they or the Germans had killed more of its people. Hitler hadn’t had the weapons Truman used, but no one could deny the force of his will. He kept the Germans fighting for a year and a half after more sensible people would have seen they had no chance.

  Ihor consoled himself by remembering all the extra fighting had cost the Hitlerites millions of casualties they wouldn’t have taken had t
hey surrendered. The trouble was, it had cost the USSR even more.

  He’d heard the Nazis had killed 20,000,000 Soviet citizens. He’d also heard they’d killed 30,000,000. He had no idea which number to believe. He suspected no one else did, either.

  He also had no idea how a country that had lost so many people—whichever enormous number came closer to truth—was supposed to pick itself up, dust itself off, and go on about its business. With Hitler’s savage regime shattered and prostrate at its feet, the USSR had actually done a decent job.

  Now it was at war again. Now somewhere close to the same number of Soviet citizens, men and women who’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, were suddenly gone. So were the cities where they’d dwelt. More still died in the fighting in Germany and Italy.

  Could any country that had lost somewhere between one in five and one in three of the people who’d been alive on 21 June 1941 stand on its own two feet here ten years later and still be a country? The USSR was doing it. How the USSR was doing it, Ihor had no idea.

  He glanced over at Anya. She was chatting with the kolkhoz chairman’s wife. She must have said something funny, because Irina Hapochkova laughed till her plump cheeks turned even redder than usual. Anya’d almost gone to Kiev. She’d almost become part of the monstrous, murderous statistics. But she hadn’t, and because she hadn’t Ihor’s life still meant something to him.

  Now Amfiteatrov was talking about how foresters and factory hands had smashed production norms all over the Soviet Union. The factory hands labored in places like Irkutsk, which was hard for American bombers to reach, and in towns like Vyazma, which wasn’t big enough for the bombers to waste A-bombs on it.