Harry Turtledove - The Big Switch

An infantryman came up to him. “You’re in the same crew as that maniac?” the fellow asked.

“That’s right,” Theo said. “What about it?”

“If he drives like he plays, you’re screwed,” the foot soldier said. He swiped his sleeve across his forehead. Despite the cold, sweat stained his tunic under the arms. “He’ll send you right into the Russian panzers, and they’ll blow you to hell and gone. He doesn’t know how to go backwards.”

“We’re still here so far.” Theo looked to the touchline. His greatcoat lay over there. As soon as this mouthy guy-Theo saw anyone who talked to him as a mouthy guy-went away, he could find it and put it on.

“Don’t get me wrong. He plays good,” the infantryman went on. After a moment, he added, “You weren’t bad yourself, dammit. I thought a couple of the shots you stopped’d go in for sure.”

“Thanks,” Theo said in surprise. He didn’t think he was anything out of the ordinary. You did your best to keep the ball from getting past you. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you couldn’t. Even if you couldn’t always, you tried not to look like too much of a buffoon out there.

“Well…” More slowly than he might have, the man in field-gray figured out Theo wasn’t the world’s hottest conversationalist. “See you. Try and stay in one piece,” he said, and walked off.

It was good advice. Theo hoped he could follow it. He was relieved when he found his greatcoat. Nobody who’d lost his own had walked off with it. If he found himself missing his, he might have done that. You didn’t screw your buddies when you were in the field. People you didn’t know could damn well look out for themselves.

There it was: the essence of war. You stuck with your friends and gave it to the swine on the other side as hard as you could. Theo knew who his friends were-the guys who helped him stay alive. He had nothing in particular against Russians, any more than he’d had before against Frenchmen or Englishmen or Czechs. But if they were trying to kill his pals and him, he’d do his best to do them in first.

The greatcoat fought winter not quite to a draw. The Wehrmacht needed better cold-weather gear. Boots, for instance: the Russians’ felt ones far outclassed anything Germany made. Well, there was more a ground pounder’s worry than a panzer man’s. Theo snorted. It wasn’t as if he had no worries of his own.

Out in the North Sea again. Lieutenant Julius Lemp felt the change in the U-30’s motion right away. The Baltic was pretty calm. As soon as you passed out of the Kiel Canal, you got reminded what real seas were like. And a U-boat would roll in a bathtub.

A rating up on the conning tower with the skipper said, “Somebody down below’s going to give it back-you wait and see.”

“Not like it’s never happened before,” Lemp answered resignedly. Once something got into the bilge water, it was part of a U-boat’s atmosphere for good. All the cleaning in the world couldn’t get rid of a stink. Overflowing heads, spilled honey buckets, puke, stale food, the fug of men who didn’t wash often enough, diesel fumes… Going below after the freshest of fresh air was always like a slap in the face from a filthy towel.

He went back to scanning horizon and sky with his Zeiss binoculars. Looking overhead was purely force of habit. Clouds scudded by not far above the gray-green sea. The RAF wasn’t likely to put in an appearance. But nobody who wanted to live through the war believed in taking dumb chances.

“Skipper…?” The rating let it hang there.

Lemp’s antennae that warned of danger were at least as sensitive as the metal ones on the boat that caught radio waves. Something was on the sailor’s mind, something he wasn’t easy talking about. The way things were these days, Lemp could make a good guess about what it was, too. All the same, the only thing he could do was ask, “What’s eating you, Ignaz?”

“Well…” Ignaz paused again. Then he seemed to find a way to say what he wanted: “It’s mighty good to be at sea again, isn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it,” Lemp answered dryly, “yes.”

Thus encouraged, Ignaz went on, “The only thing we’ve got to worry about out here is the goddamn enemy. That’s a good thing, nicht wahr ?”

“Oh, you’d best believe it is,” Lemp said, and nothing more. Somebody on the U-boat was probably reporting every word even vaguely political from him to the Sicherheitsdienst. Probably every even vaguely political word from the whole crew. That was how things worked right now.

The U-30 had been in port when some of the generals and admirals tried to overthrow the Fuhrer. There’d been gunfire at the naval base. Who was shooting at whom was something about which it was better not to enquire too closely. The Fuhrer remained atop the Reich. Two or three dozen high-ranking officers no longer remained among the living. The show trials were right out of the Soviet Union. Many more lower-ranking men had been cashiered.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that everybody in the military had to watch what he said and to whom he said it. If you couldn’t trust the comrades alongside whom you risked your life…

Then you couldn’t, that was all, and you took the precautions you needed to take. Out here, as Ignaz had said, it was only the enemy who was dangerous. Back in port, you had to worry about your friends. And how were you supposed to fight a war like that?

Carefully, Lemp thought. He had to fight carefully any which way. He’d had the misfortune to sink an American liner. History would not have been kind to the U-boat skipper who dragged the USA into its second war against Germany. Neither would that man’s superiors. Fortunately, it hadn’t happened. The Reich denied everything at the top of its lungs. The Americans couldn’t prove what they suspected. Lemp’s superiors still didn’t love him, but they hadn’t beached him, which was the only thing that counted.

He wasn’t likely to find an American liner in the North Sea. This was a war zone by anybody’s standards. British and French troops still hung on against the Germans in northern Norway. The only thing that could supply them or get them out of there was the Royal Navy. U-boats and Luftwaffe aircraft were making the Tommies pay. That didn’t mean they’d given up, though. They were both brave and professional, as Lemp had reason to know.

In weather like this, the Luftwaffe was no more likely to get planes off the ground than the RAF was. If anybody was going to keep enemy ships from slipping through, it was the U-boat force.

Down this far south, Lemp didn’t really expect to spy the foe. But he and the ratings on the conning tower braved awful weather and spray that froze in midair and stung cheeks like birdshot to keep binoculars moving up and down and from side to side. For one thing, the crew needed the routine. For another, as Lemp had thought not long before, you never could tell.

No planes in the sky now, though: neither English nor German. No smoke smudges darkening the horizon, not even when waves lifted the U-30 to their crests and let the lookouts see farther than they could otherwise. After a two-hour stint, Lemp and the crew went below, to be replaced by fresh watchers. You didn’t dare let concentration flag; the moment you weren’t paying close attention was bound to be the one when you most needed it.

This early in the patrol, the boat’s stench wasn’t so bad as it would get later on. Lemp wrinkled his nose all the same. But the reek inside the iron tube was familiar and comforting, no matter how nasty. And the dim orange light in there also made him feel at home, even if his eyes needed a few seconds to adjust to the gloom.

“ Alles gut, Peter?” he asked the helmsman.