Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

None of which had anything to do with the price of beer. He might talk like a clodhopper from 1895, but his message was modern as tomorrow. He wasn’t saying anything Isztvan hadn’t asked himself a hundred times. Isztvan didn’t care a filler about the solidarity of workers and peasants all over the world. He was here because Stalin and Stalin’s followers, both Russian and Hungarian, would have killed him or tortured him or jailed him had he tried to refuse. That was the long and short of it.

“Kibaszott szarházi!” Those were Sergeant Gergely’s dulcet tones. How did he know that the Magyar-speaking American was a fucking shithouse clown? Odds were he didn’t, but that didn’t stop him.

“God fuck your stinking, wrinkled whore of a mother!” the guy on the other side yelled back. Isztvan giggled. Maybe he hadn’t learned all his Magyar from his mommy and daddy.

“Yell all you want, dog’s dick,” Gergely said. “We didn’t drop any A-bombs on your country.”

“No, Stalin did. You just suck him off,” the Hungarian-American replied.

Sergeant Gergely spoke to his own men: “You see how we’re all friends together, right?”

Some of the Magyars answered to show him they agreed. Whether in fact they did or not was anybody’s guess. Gergely had to know that. This was his second war fighting for a dubious cause. He had a different dubious cause now from the one he’d aided during World War II, but, as then, Hungary was doing what a great power required, not what it wanted to do itself.

Isztvan Szolovits kept his mouth shut. He didn’t think protestations of loyalty would give the sergeant any more confidence in him. For that matter, he had no confidence in himself. If he found a chance to surrender to the Americans without getting killed, he figured he would jump at it. The Magyar-speaking Yank had that much right.

In the meantime, though, he needed to keep fighting. Chances to surrender didn’t come along every day. The Americans would cheerfully kill him most of the time. The best way to stay alive and wait for the moment he might not find involved shooting back at them when they fired at him.

Which they did, with rifles, machine guns, and artillery. Under cover of all that flying metal, some of them started moving forward through the wreckage of whichever German city this turned out to be. They aimed to flank out the Hungarians and drive them back.

Isztvan was ready to retreat, if he could come out of his hole without getting killed. But half a dozen Soviet T-54s rumbled forward like dinosaurs squashing little mammals under their feet in some prehistoric swamp. Unlike those ancient little mammals, some of the Americans carried bazookas. But when two rockets in a row glanced off the tanks’ turtle turrets without penetrating, the Yanks gave it up as a bad job and fell back to their old line.

An American who’d stopped a machine-gun bullet from one of the tanks with his face lay only fifty meters or so from Isztvan’s hole. Greed overcame caution. He crawled to the dead Yank, took his food and cigarettes and first-aid kit, and slithered back to cover.

After dark fell, he gave Sergeant Gergely two of the three packs he’d looted. “Thanks, kid, but those Russian tankers deserve these more than I do,” the veteran said.

“Could be, but I know you and I don’t know them,” Isztvan said. “Boy, that American who spoke Magyar sure talked funny, didn’t he?”

“Oh, just a little,” Gergely answered. “Like he had cowshit on his boots and rode a donkey to church. I’ll tell you something else, though-you think the Yanks won’t fuck you over same as the krauts and the Ivans, you’re nuts. They’re big. You ain’t. That’s all it takes.”

“Could be,” Szolovits said again.

Gergely couldn’t have seen the expression on his face. It was too dark. He chuckled anyhow, unpleasantly. “Don’t do anything stupid-that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” he said. Isztvan wished it weren’t such good advice.

The doctor who examined Konstantin Morozov’s burned legs looked Jewish as Jewish could be: sallow skin, dark eyes, hooked nose. But she also filled out her white coat very nicely. “Sergeant, you look like you’re fit to go back on duty,” she said. “Do you feel fit?”

His flesh remained tender-or, if you wanted to tell the whole story, sore. He nodded anyway. “Yes, Comrade Doctor,” he answered. He might have said no to a sawbones who shaved and won another day or two on this cot. Telling a woman no was harder. It felt like admitting he had a needle dick.

“All right.” She wrote something on the paper in the clipboard she carried. “The rodina needs every man who can fight.” He was going to say I serve the Soviet Union! but she’d already moved on to the next iron cot.

They handed him a fresh set of tankman’s coveralls and a new leather helmet with built-in earphones. They gave him just enough time to put his sergeant’s shoulder boards on the coveralls. They they sent him over to the replacements’ assignment depot.

“What was your last duty before you were wounded?” asked the military clerk in charge of the depot. He wore a patch over his right eye, so chances were he’d paid his dues during the Great Patriotic War. He could still do a job like this, and save a whole man for combat.

“Tank commander,” Morozov replied proudly.

“Ochen khorosho,” the mutilated man said. “Have a seat on one of the benches. I don’t think you’ll need to wait long.”

Konstantin sat. The bench was too low. The building had been a school till war washed over it. Now half the roof had burned away. On one wall was a poster of a bulldozer clearing away rubble from the last war. Konstantin couldn’t read the words. It wasn’t his language, or even his alphabet. If he’d had to guess, though, he would have figured it said something like We’re getting back on our feet.

He scowled. You’re a bunch of fucking Fritzes, he thought. We flattened you once. Now we’ll do it again. After everything he’d seen in his own country during the last war, he wasn’t about to waste sympathy on Germans.

“I’m just out of the aid station,” he said to the corporal next to him. “Can you give me a smoke?”

“Sure thing, Comrade Sergeant.” The other guy let him have a papiros. He smoked one himself, too. They started talking. The corporal’s name was Igor Pechnikov. He added, “My father really did make brick stoves. How’s that for a kick in the head?”

“Funny,” Konstantin said. Pechnikov was a son of a stovemaker both by surname and for real. Names built from trades and the trades themselves hardly ever matched these days, but they did with him. Morozov asked, “What do you do in the army?”

“I’m an RPG man,” the other guy answered. “A 155 took out most of my squad, so they’re putting me in a new unit. How about you?”

“We probably shouldn’t be friends. I’m in a tank, and you go around blowing them up,” Morozov said.

“Not ours. The enemy’s,” the corporal said.

“I do understand that, yes.” Konstantin was about to say more, but the one-eyed clerk chose that moment to shout his name. He thumped Pechnikov on the shoulder, shouted “I serve the Soviet Union!”, and hurried over to the clerk’s little table. His legs hurt more than he wished they did; he could have used those extra couple of days on his back.

A captain stood there. He eyed Morozov the way a hungry man would eye pork sausages in a butcher’s shop. “A tank commander, are you?” he said.

“That’s right, Comrade Captain,” Morozov replied.

“Are you fit?”

“Sir, they wouldn’t have let me leave the aid station if I wasn’t.” That was nonsense, and the captain had to know it as well as Konstantin did. Aid stations were for getting people back into the fight fast.