Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

She wasn’t going to get any more out of him. She could see as much, even if she couldn’t see why. But if he couldn’t talk about why he couldn’t talk about why things were secret … “Would they hang me for a spy if I asked you for one of those cigarettes?”

“They’d have to hang me first.” Herb shook the pack till a Chesterfield stuck out. Peggy took it. Herb flicked the wheel on his Zippo. As advertised, a flame shot up the first try.

Peggy leaned forward to get the cigarette going. She sighed out smoke. “That does go nice with food.”

“Sure does.” Herb smoked another one, too. Then he went upstairs, and came down with his suitcase. He shrugged into his topcoat. Peggy put on a coat, too. The dishes could wait till she got back from dropping him off. He said, “One thing about rationing gasoline-less traffic these days.”

“You’ve got that right,” Peggy agreed. Most people’s “A” stickers limited them to four gallons a week. You couldn’t go very far on that-to work and back every day, if you were lucky. The Druces’ Packard got a good deal more fuel; because he was in what the government reckoned an essential occupation, he had one of the rare and coveted “C” stickers.

It was cold but clear. There wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any ice on the roads. Peggy got in on the driver’s side. She’d have to bring the car back. As Herb slid in beside her, he said, “Lucky me. I’ve got myself the best-darn-looking chauffeur in town.”

“You!” Peggy said fondly.

The Packard started right away. There went one more worry. Cold weather could do rude things to a battery. If Herb had had to wait till a taxi got here, he really might have missed his train.

She drove downtown, toward Broad Street Station. When she passed an Esso station, she saw a cop checking ration stickers. Herb noticed, too. “Some ways, it hardly seems like a free country any more, does it?” he remarked.

“Oh, it’s not so bad. Trust me-it’s not.” Peggy had seen with her own eyes what things were like in a country that suddenly stopped being free. The grin on that German’s face at Marianske Lazny after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938 … He’d been cutting off a Jew’s beard with a big pair of shears. If he cut off some cheek or ear at the same time, well, hey, that only made the fun better. He thought so, anyhow, and he had enough rifles and machine guns and tanks on his side that the poor damned Jew had to stand there and take it unless he felt like dying on the spot. She still wondered sometimes what had happened to him.

“If you say so,” Herb answered, which meant he didn’t think it was worth an argument. He left no doubt where he stood, though: “I don’t have to like it, and I darn well don’t.”

“Neither do I. Who does?” Peggy said. “But things are worse plenty of other places.”

She pulled up in front of the station. Herb leaned toward her for a quick good-bye kiss. He got out, pulled his suitcase off the back seat, and lugged it inside. Peggy waited till he disappeared before heading back to the house.

A long sigh escaped her when she pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t that she worried he’d go looking for some round-heeled waitress or hat-check girl as soon as he got to whatever super-duper-secret place he was inspecting in Tennessee. It wasn’t , dammit. But they’d been apart for two years while she was stuck in Europe, and he’d had himself a little fling while she was gone. She’d had her own- mishap was probably the best word for it-over there, too.

When things came out, they’d forgiven each other. Peggy meant it when she did it. She was sure Herb was every bit as sincere. But forgiving wasn’t quite the same as forgetting. Their marriage wasn’t the same as it had been before she sailed for the Continent.

Peggy hadn’t the least desire to go to Nevada and get a quickie divorce. Again, she was sure Herb didn’t want to, either. It didn’t seem like that to her. It was just one more thing the war had wounded. And it was also the reason she fixed herself a stiff highball as soon as she got into the house.

Winter on the Barents Sea. There was a handful of words to chill the heart, however you chose to take them. The wind had knives in it, and seemed to take a running start from the North Pole. Waves slapped the U-30, one after another. The submarine rolled, recovered, and rolled again, over and over.

All the same, Lieutenant Julius Lemp was happier to have chugged out of Narvik on patrol than he would have been to stay at the Kriegsmarine ’s U-boat base in northern Norway any longer. To say his soldiers had worn out their welcome there was to belabor the obvious.

Port authorities thought his crew were a gang of hooligans. His men thought Narvik was as dull as embalming-about the worst thing a liberty port could be. As usual in such arguments, both sides had a point.

The southern sky glowed pink. In a little while, the sun would actually creep over the horizon for a little while. They were well past the solstice now, on the way toward the vernal equinox. Old Sol was heading north again. Darkness didn’t reign supreme here all through the day, as it had a little while ago.

But it wouldn’t stay light very long. England loved this season of the year. This was the time when convoys bound for Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had the best chance of sneaking past German patrol planes and U-boats from Norway. You couldn’t sink or bomb what you couldn’t find. Darkness was the freighter’s friend.

Another wave, bigger than most, slammed into the U-30 portside. Frigid seawater splashed over the conning tower. Lemp and the ratings up there with him wore oilskins over their peacoats and wide-brimmed waterproof hats strapped under their chins to keep that raw north wind from stealing them. They got wet anyhow. When you got wet in these latitudes, you got cold. No-you got colder.

“ Scheisse! ” Lemp said, most sincerely.

One of the petty officers nodded. “We’ll all end up with pneumonia,” he predicted, his voice gloomy.

Lemp would have argued, if only he could. The one thing worse than getting splashed up here was going into the drink. You wouldn’t last longer than a few minutes before the sea sucked all the warmth from your body and killed you. People said freezing to death was an easy way to go. Lemp didn’t want to find out for himself if those people were right.

He tried to clean the salt water off the lenses of his Zeiss binoculars. How were you supposed to look into the distance when everything seemed blurry and smeared? Simple-you couldn’t.

“In the summer,” the rating said wistfully, “it’s daylight all the time.”

“And we can see them, and they can see us,” Lemp replied. “Downsides to everything. No sneaking away from the destroyers under cover of night then.”

Another big wave smacked the U-30. More icy water cascaded over the conning tower. More poured down the hatch, too. As if spawned by the law of equal and opposite reactions, hot language came out of the hatchway. Some of the water would get pumped out of the boat. Some, yes, but not all. Take any U-boat ever made, and she always had water in her bilges. And the water soaked up and redistributed all the manifold stinks that accumulated in a submarine.

Lemp sighed. Spillage from the heads? Puke? Rotting bits of sausage and tinned herring in mustard sauce? The thick animal fug of a boat full of poorly washed seamen? Diesel exhaust? Lubricating oil? They were all there, along with assorted other sordid but not so easily nameable stenches.

Pretty soon, the skipper’s watch would end. He’d have to lay below. The air out here was bloody cold, but it was clean and fresh-none cleaner and fresher, in fact. People talked about air like wine. This wasn’t wine: it was more like vodka straight out of the icebox, just as chilly, just as smooth, and just as potent.