Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

Food in hand, submachine gun slung on his back, he started south out of the village, happier with himself than he’d been in a while. He’d find somewhere to lie up during the day, and then he’d go on….

Someone behind him coughed.

He whirled, knowing it would do no good. The food fell in the snow. The jug of kimchi didn’t even break, not that it mattered. Three Koreans or Chinese, widely separated, had the drop on him. He was history, nothing else but.

Understanding he was history, he didn’t make a useless grab for his PPSh. He crossed himself instead, and gabbled out a quick “Ave Maria, gratia plena-” If you were done in this world, might as well worry about the next.

The Koreans stood as if carved from stone. Then they crossed themselves, too. One of them came out with his own Hail Mary. His Latin sounded odd to Cade, but Cicero wouldn’t have followed either one of them. The Koreans ran up and clasped his hands. Little bits of Latin were the only language they had in common with him. They managed to tell him Kim Il-sung persecuted Christians of all creeds even worse than Stalin did. Any Christian they found was a friend of theirs.

Dizzily-but not too dizzily to pick up the victuals he’d dropped-he followed them out of the smashed village and off toward wherever they lived. Till that moment, he’d been fighting a rearguard action against death, slowing it down, holding it off. Now he began to think he really might live after all. Like an orchid pushing up through snow, hope flowered past despair.

Grunting as he shifted the weight, Aaron Finch got the washing machine moving on the dolly. “Plenty of room,” Jim Summers said between puffs on a Camel. He’d earned the chance to play sidewalk superintendent-he’d just loaded the matching dryer into the back of the Blue Front truck.

“Okay,” Aaron said. He grunted again when the washer started up the ramp. He wasn’t a big man-five-nine, maybe a hundred fifty pounds. But he had the kind of whipcord strength that came from working with your hands and your back your whole life long. He’d be fifty on his next birthday. He couldn’t believe it. His hair was still black, even if it had drawn back at the temples to give him a widow’s peak. But his craggy face had the lines and wrinkles you’d expect from anyone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun and the open air. At least he wasn’t shivering now, though he wore no jacket over his Blue Front shirt. It was in the mid-seventies in the middle of January. You couldn’t beat Southern California for weather, no way, nohow.

The dolly with the washer bumped once more when it bounced down off the wooden ramp and into the bed of the truck. Aaron paused a moment to settle his glasses more firmly on his formidable nose. Without them, he couldn’t see more than a foot past its tip.

To his disgust, that had kept him out of the Army. He’d tried to volunteer right after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t take him. He was too nearsighted and too old (he’d turned forty less than a week before the attack). So he’d joined the merchant marine instead. He’d been on the Murmansk run, in the Mediterranean, and in the South Pacific. He’d done more dangerous things than a lot of soldiers, but he wasn’t eligible for any of the postwar benefits. That disgusted him, too.

He wrestled the washer into place by the dryer. It was one of the new, enclosed models. He and his wife still had a wringer machine. One of these days…He’d been married three years now. He’d got into middle age as a firm believer in why-buy-a-cow-when-milk-is-cheap. But after the war he’d come down to Glendale to stay with his brother, Marvin, for a while. He’d met Ruth there and fallen, hook, line, and sinker. They’d run off to Vegas to tie the knot. And now they rented a house in Glendale themselves. Leon was eighteen months old, and looked just like his old man.

“You gone to sleep in there?” Jim called.

“Keep your shirt on,” Aaron answered without heat. He draped a tarp over the washing machine to keep it from getting dinged and secured the cover with masking tape. He laid the dolly flat and walked down the ramp to the warehouse floor. He lit a cigarette of his own-a Chesterfield. He thought Camels were too harsh, especially when you went through a couple of packs a day the way he did.

Jim Summers got the ramp out of the way. He was a redneck from Arkansas or Alabama or somewhere like that. He had a red face to go with his neck, and an unstylish brown mustache. He was four or five inches taller than Aaron, and outweighed him by sixty or seventy pounds. But he was soft; his belly hung over the belt that held up his dungarees. In a brawl, Aaron figured he could hold his own.

Summers didn’t like Negroes, and said so at any excuse or none. He didn’t like Jews, either. He knew Herschel Weissman, the guy who ran Blue Front, was Jewish. He bellyached about it every now and then. He had no idea Aaron was. Jim Summers didn’t come equipped with a hell of a lot of ideas. Aaron Finch’s name didn’t look Jewish, even if his face did, so Summers didn’t worry about it.

Aaron chuckled as he blew out smoke. His father had turned Fink into its English equivalent when he came to America. His dad’s brothers hadn’t, so Aaron had Fink cousins. His old man had figured Finch was easier to carry. From some of the things Aaron had seen, his old man had figured pretty straight.

“Where we gotta take these fuckers?” Jim asked.

“Pasadena, I think.” Aaron reached for the clipboard with the order form. He nodded. “Pasadena-that’s right.”

“Not too far,” Summers said, and it wasn’t. Pasadena lay only a few miles east of the Glendale warehouse. They were two of the older, larger suburbs north of Los Angeles. In sly tones, Jim went on, “If we take it easy, we can stretch the delivery out so as we knock off as soon as we get back from it.”

“We’ll see.” Aaron had grown up believing you always worked as hard as you could: it was the only proper thing to do. How were you going to get ahead if you didn’t work hard all the time?

He stepped on the cigarette butt, then climbed into the truck with Summers. He shook his head once or twice. How were you going to get ahead even if you did work hard all the time? He and Jim earned the same pay for doing the same job. Jim was as lazy as he could get away with. If that was fair…

Well, a lot of things in life weren’t fair. You couldn’t bump up against fifty without seeing as much. Some of Aaron’s relatives-and some of Ruth’s, too-had become Reds, or damn close anyway, on account of it. Aaron had voted Democratic since the early 1920s, and he was proud of the Teamsters’ Union card in his wallet. He left it there, though.

With the world as tense as it was, you could get into big trouble for admitting you liked the Russians. As Jim piloted the truck out of the Blue Front warehouse, Aaron asked him, “Hear any news since this morning?”

“Heard the Sacramento Solons hired Joe Gordon to manage ’em and play second base,” Summers answered. “He was goddamn good in the big leagues. I bet he’ll tear up the PCL.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Aaron was a fan, too, but he hadn’t been looking for baseball news. He tried again: “Anything about what’s going on in Korea?”

“Not much. Far as I can make out, the Chinks are still goin’ great guns, the fuckin’ bastards. We oughta blow ’em into the middle o’ next week, teach ’em they gotta be crazy to mess with white men.”

“Stalin’s a white man,” Aaron said dryly, “and he’s on their side.”

“Screw him, too,” Summers said. “He wants to take us on, he’ll be sorry.”

“No doubt about it,” Aaron agreed. “What scares me is how sorry we’ll end up being. He’s got the bomb, too, remember.”