Harry Turtledove: The Big Switch

“ Alles gut, skipper,” Peter answered. “Course 315, as you ordered. And the diesels are performing well-but you can hear that for yourself.”

“Ja,” Lemp agreed. It wasn’t just hearing, either; he could feel the engines’ throb through the soles of his feet. As Peter said, everything sounded and felt the way it should have. When it didn’t, you knew, even if you couldn’t always tell how you knew.

“You want the conn, sir?” Peter made as if to step away from the wheel. Discipline on U-boats was of a different and looser kind from what it was in the Kriegsmarine ’s surface ships. Most of the spit and polish went into the scuppers. No officer who was happy pulling the stiffening wire out of his cap missed it. Lemp sure didn’t. The men could fight the boat. As long as they could do that, who gave a rat’s ass if they clicked their heels and saluted all the time?

He shook his head. “No, you can keep it. I’m going to my cubbyhole and log the last two hours of-well, nothing.” Some of the rituals did have to be fulfilled.

Peter chuckled. “All right. Sometimes nothing is the best you can hope for, isn’t it? Damn sight better than a destroyer dropping ash cans on our head.”

“Amen!” Lemp said fervently. If a depth charge went off too close, the sea would crumple a U-boat like a trash bin under a panzer’s tracks. It would be over in a hurry if that ever happened-but probably not soon enough.

Only a curtain separated his bunk and desk and safe from the rest of the boat. Still, that gave him more room and more privacy than anyone else enjoyed. He spun the combination lock on the safe. When the door swung open, he took out the log book. A fountain pen sat in the desk drawer. Long habit meant he never left anything on a flat surface where it could-and would-roll away and get lost. He opened the log and began to write.

Walking in a winter wonderland. That was how Peggy Druce thought of Stockholm. It wasn’t that she didn’t know about winter. She’d grown up in a Philadelphia Main Line family, and married into another. She’d skied in Colorado, in Switzerland, and in Austria back in the days when there was an Austria. So it wasn’t that she didn’t understand what winter was all about.

But Philadelphia put up with winter. Ski resorts seemed intent on making money off it-which, when you looked at things from their point of view, was reasonable enough. Stockholm enjoyed winter.

Part of that, no doubt, was enjoying what you couldn’t escape. Scandinavia lay a long way north. If not for the Gulf Stream, it would have been as uninhabitable as Labrador. (She remembered a pulp story about what might happen if the Gulf Stream went away. She couldn’t recall who’d written it: only that he was a Jew. Now that she’d seen Hitler’s Berlin, that took on new weight in her mind.) But the Swedes did it with style. And the way they kept houses comfortable and streets clear of snow put Philadelphia-and every other place she’d visited in winter-to shame.

Not only that, all the lights stayed on through the long, cold nights. After her time inside the Third Reich, that seemed something close to a miracle. It had in Copenhagen, too… till the Germans marched in. Now the Nazis’ twilight swallowed up Denmark, too.

Yes, Stockholm was a wonderful, bright, civilized place. The only problem was, she didn’t want to be here. She had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have been able to come to Marianske Lazne in Czechoslovakia without it, or to maintain herself when the war stranded her on the wrong side of the Atlantic. But, just as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, all her jack couldn’t get her back to the good old US of A, or to the husband she hadn’t seen for well over a year.

Norway remained a war zone. Because it did, there was no air traffic between Sweden and England-no sea traffic, either. She wished she could go to Moscow and head for Vladivostok by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Though it was the long way back to the States, it would have done the job. But, with the railroad cut and Vladivostok under Japanese siege, that didn’t work, either.

And so she stayed where she was. Stockholm made a far more likable prison than Berlin had. The food was better, and she didn’t wonder whether everyone she spoke to would report her to the Gestapo. All the same, she wasn’t where she wanted to be.

She’d never been one to suffer in silence. If she was unhappy, she let people hear about it. The American embassy in Berlin had got to know her much better than the clerks and secretaries and diplomats ever wanted to. (And, one drunken night, she’d got to know one of the diplomats much better than she ever expected to. She did her damnedest not to remember that.)

Now she bent the personnel of the embassy in Stockholm to her will-or did her best. Again, the trouble was that, even when they wanted to do what she wanted (and they did, if for no more noble reason than to get her out of their hair), they couldn’t.

“I can’t call an airplane out of nowhere, Mrs. Druce,” said the undersecretary in charge of dealing with distressed travelers. “I haven’t got a liner, or even a freighter, up my sleeve, either.”

“Yes, I understand that, Mr. Beard,” Peggy answered. To her secret amusement, Jerome Beard sported a hairline mustache. “But if you could arrange something with the German and British authorities…”

He ran a hand over the top of his head, from front to back. Once upon a time, he might have used the gesture to smooth his hair. But where were the snows of yesteryear? He was on the far side of fifty-a few years older than Peggy. He had one of the baldest domes she’d ever seen, though, and it made him look older.

“Why don’t you ask me something easy?” he said testily. “Walking across the Baltic, for instance?”

“It’s frozen over for miles out to sea.” Peggy, by contrast, sounded as bright and helpful as she could.

Beard’s harried expression said he understood she was being difficult but sugarcoating it. “Pardon my French, Mrs. Druce, but hell will freeze over before they cooperate. Last time around, both sides were perfectly correct. They did everything they could to help displaced persons like you. Now?” He shook his head. His bare scalp gleamed under the overhead lamp. “No. I’m very sorry, but it’s not just a war.”

“You said that before,” Peggy pointed out. She was bound and determined to be difficult, regardless of whether she sugarcoated it.

“Well, what if I did?” Beard ran his hand over his crown again. “It’s true. You have no idea how much those two regimes despise each other.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I was in Berlin, remember,” Peggy said.

“All right, then.” The undersecretary yielded the small point. He wasn’t about to yield on the larger one. In fact, he poured more cold water over it: “And the same holds true for France and Germany. The French don’t merely hate the Germans, either-they’re scared to death of them. That makes joint efforts even more unlikely.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” Peggy demanded.

“How about thanking God you’re in one of the few countries on this poor, sorry continent where there’s plenty of food and no one is trying to kill anyone else?” Beard said. “You couldn’t pick a better spot to wait out the war.”

“I thought the same thing about Copenhagen. Then I watched German soldiers get out of their freighters and march on the palace,” Peggy said bitterly. “No guarantee the same thing won’t happen here.”

“No guarantee, no.” Beard paused to fill a pipe and light it. The mixture smelled like burning dirty socks. “Swedish blend,” he explained, a note of apology in his voice. “All I can get these days. But to come back to your point… The Swedes will fight. They’ve made that very plain to Germany. Since the Germans have plenty of other pots on the fire, Sweden’s safe enough for now. That’s the ambassador’s judgment, and the military attache’s, too.”