Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

Harry Truman’s chuckle was dry as a martini in the desert. “I’m sure they would wring their hands in dismay.” He scratched the side of his jaw, considering. “If we’d been able to get our forces out through Hungnam, I wouldn’t think of this for a minute. The atom is a dangerous genie to let out of the lamp-deadly dangerous. But now the Chinese are bragging that they really can do what Kim Il-sung had in mind-they want to drive us into the sea and turn all of Korea into a satellite.”

“Yes, sir. That’s exactly what they want to do,” MacArthur agreed. “We’d betray our loyal allies in the south if we let them get away with it, too. The enemy has the advantage in numbers-China always will. He has the advantage in logistics, too. He’s right across the river from the fighting, and we’re six thousand miles away. If we insist on fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs, what can we possibly do but lose?”

“You’ve got something there.” Now it was Truman’s turn to sound surprised. He hadn’t expected arrogant MacArthur to make such good sense. In other words, he hadn’t looked for the general’s thoughts to march with his own so well. He’d already ordered the bomb used once, and ended a war with it. How could ordering it into action again be anything but easier?

–

“Come on, Linda!” Marian Staley called. “Whatever you do, don’t dawdle! We’ve got to go to the cobbler’s and then to the supermarket.”

“I’m coming, Mommy,” the four-year-old answered from her bedroom. “I’m just putting my coat on now.”

“Okay,” Marian said, knowing it might not be. Four-year-olds could dress themselves, sure, but not always reliably. And Linda didn’t have all the buttons on her coat through the buttonholes they were supposed to occupy. Marian didn’t fuss about it; she just fixed things. Then she asked, “Have you gone potty?”

Linda’s blond curls bobbed up and down as she nodded. Her eyes were hazel like Bill’s, not gray. Otherwise, she looked like her mother. “Just a little while ago,” she said.

Young children’s sense of time being what it was, that might mean anything or nothing. For that matter, it might be a fib. “Well, go one more time,” Marian said. “We’ll be away from home for a while.”

A put-upon secretary might have aimed the look Linda sent her at an obnoxious boss. But Marian’s flesh and blood went off to the bathroom, flushed, and came back. Marian didn’t think Linda had enough deceit yet to flush when she hadn’t done anything. If she was wrong, she’d find out about it.

“It’s raining!” Linda started to open her own little Mickey Mouse umbrella.

“Don’t do that indoors! It’s bad luck!” Marian said. “Wait till we get out on the front porch.”

Once they left the house, she opened her own plain navy-blue bumbershoot-much plainer than her daughter’s, but able to cover both of them if it had to, and it probably would. It wasn’t raining too hard. Everett, Washington, north of Seattle, had the same kind of weather as the bigger city. You could and did get rain any time of year at all, in other words, but it seldom snowed even during winter.

By what Bill’s letters said, Korea wasn’t like that. It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and impersonated Siberia now. He was copilot on a B-29. From things she read between the lines in his letters and from little snippets on the news, the Reds gave the big bombers a hard time. She just wanted him to finish his hitch and come home safe.

The sun-yellow Studebaker sat in the driveway. “C’mon, sweetie,” Marian told Linda. They went to the car together. Marian opened the driver’s-side door and held her umbrella while Linda shut hers and slithered across the seat to the passenger side. She sat up straight there. Even though her feet barely got past the front edge of the seat, she looked very grown-up.

Marian got in, too. She laid her purse on the seat between them, set the choke, and started the car. It was a postwar model, with the windshield a single sheet of glass, not two divided and held in place by a strip of chromed metal. She liked that. She liked the automatic transmission, too. She could drive a stick-who couldn’t? — but she didn’t believe in working any harder than you had to.

Keeping her eye on the rear-view mirror to watch for kids on bikes or silly dogs or grownups who weren’t paying attention, she backed out into the street. The cobbler’s was only a few blocks away.

The shop window had a shoe and a cobbler’s small hammer painted on it, and a legend: FAYVL TABAKMAN-COBBLER. REPAIRS amp; RESOLING. Under the shoe was another legend in smaller letters from an alphabet Marian couldn’t read. She supposed it said the same thing in Yiddish, but it might have been Russian or Armenian or Greek for all she could prove.

Inside, the shop smelled of the cheap cigars Tabakman smoked. One was in his mouth. He was about fifty, skinny, with a graying mustache. He wore a cloth cap and short sleeves. A number was tattooed on his arm. He knew more about horror than most people who lived in America.

What he knew, though, he didn’t peddle. He just touched the brim of his old-fashioned cap and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Staley. Hello, little girl.” He had an accent, but not a thick one. If he’d learned English since the war, he’d done a bang-up job.

“My name is Linda!” Linda said.

“Hello, Linda,” Tabakman said gravely. “I had a little girl about your age.”

“You had one?” Linda caught the past tense. “What happened? Did you lose her?”

“Yes. I lost her.” Behind gold-rimmed glasses, the cobbler’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. With an effort, he came back to the here-and-now. “Both pairs you left are ready to take home, Mrs. Staley. If you want to see them…”

“I’m sure they’re great,” Marian said. He showed them to her anyway. He did fine, neat work; you could hardly see where the half-sole ended and the older leather picked up. Both pairs together came to seventy-five cents. She gave him a dollar and waved away the change.

“You are very kind,” he murmured, touching his cap again. “Have a happy New Year, both of you.”

Marian only shrugged. She knew the tip wouldn’t blot out the memories Linda had stirred up. It was what she could do, though, so she did it.

The wide aisles and abundant food at the supermarket made her smile. Riding in the welded-wire shopping cart made Linda smile. The prices…The prices made Marian wish she were on a military base. But Bill had been a bookkeeper for Boeing till the new war sucked him back into uniform. They’d bought the house with the idea that they’d keep it for a long time. Trying to do that on military pay wasn’t easy, but Marian had made it work so far.

She bought ground chuck instead of ground round, margarine instead of butter, and pot roast instead of steak. If it came to beef hearts and chicken giblets and lots of macaroni and cheese, then it did, that was all. She’d eaten that kind of stuff as a little girl during the Depression. She could do it again if she had to. So far, she hadn’t had to.

She splurged a little-a whole nickel-on a Hershey bar for Linda. After a moment fighting temptation, she lost and spent another nickel on one for herself, too. When she spread her bread with something that tasted like motor oil, she could look back on the chocolate and smile.

When they got home, she took Linda inside first with a stern, “Now you stay here till I finish bringing in the groceries, okay?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Linda said. If she messed that one up, her Teddy bear spent the night on a high shelf and she had to sleep without it. That had happened only a couple of weeks earlier, so the tragic memory was still fresh.