Harry Turtledove - West and East

Bombs whistled down. Not all the sirens that screamed belonged to the warning system. Some came from ambulances and fire engines. Joaquin wondered if he should jump into a trench. The POWs had dug them to try to stay alive through air raids. But the show in the sky held a horrid fascination. He didn’t want to miss any of it.

He could have been smarter. He could have done a better job of gauging the screams of falling bombs. One went off close enough to knock him ass over teakettle. Fragments shouted and screamed past him. Once bitten, twice shy-he stayed flat as a run-over toad.

He did, anyhow, till he saw prisoners joyously running out through a big hole blasted in the wire. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran with them. No guards shouted warnings or opened fire. Had they been blown to hell? Or were they just cowering in their own foxholes, the way any men with a gram of sense would? Joaquin didn’t care. As soon as he got out into Madrid in these overalls, he’d look like anybody else. And, thanks to Chaim Weinberg, he knew how to sound like a Republican, too. They’d never catch him once he got loose. Then he could…

What? he wondered. What could he do? Something. Anything! As long as he was doing it for himself, who cared? If somebody needed him to haul sacks of shit, he’d do that. He’d like it, too. He’d never been afraid of work. Nobody who grew up on a Spanish farm could possibly be afraid of work.

Another bomb whistled down. Joaquin flattened out again. This one was going to be even closer. Maybe he should have waited before he …

Snow. Wind. Cold. Gloom. Sergei Yaroslavsky took them for granted in wintertime. He could think of very few Russians who didn’t-the lucky handful who lived on the Crimean coast, perhaps. The bad weather was settling in earlier than usual, but even ordinary winters were long and hard.

By contrast, Anastas Mouradian gave forth with a melodramatic shiver. “Bozhemoi, this weather’s beastly,” he said in his accented Russian. He swigged from a bottle of vodka and passed it to Sergei. Nobody would fly today: not the Red Air Force, not the Poles, not the Luftwaffe. Nobody. By all the signs, nobody would get off the ground any time soon, either.

“It’s winter, Stas,” Sergei answered. “You got out of Armenia a while ago now. You know what winters are like once you come north.”

“Like hell. Like Dante’s hell in the Inferno,” Mouradian said. “He put Satan in ice, not in fire.”

“Either one would work, if I believed in God or Satan or hell.” Mouradian tacked on the coda to keep the other officers sitting around there getting drunk because there was nothing more interesting to do from thinking him a believer. He wasn’t, or not much of one. Believing in God and worshiping weren’t illegal, but they wouldn’t do your career any good.

Another bottle came by. Sergei swigged, then passed it on to Mouradian. The Armenian said, “What do you suppose the other ranks are doing now?”

Overhearing that, Colonel Borisov laughed raucously. Everybody’d put away a good deal by then. “Those motherfuckers? They’re already under the table-you can bet your balls on it. When they settle in with the popskull, they don’t dick around,” the squadron commander said.

Maybe he’d poured down enough vodka to leave his tongue loose at both ends. Or maybe he was just using mat to tell the truth as he saw it. Either way, Yaroslavsky thought he was bound to be right. “I hope Sergeant Kuchkov doesn’t get into a brawl,” Sergei said. The liquor was making him fussily precise instead of careless and sloppy.

Even Mouradian smiled at the way he spoke. “The Chimp will do whatever he does,” he said. “He proves Darwin was right-if we still have ape-men among us, we must have come from them a long time ago.”

Kuchkov’s reputation had spread through the whole squadron. “Better not let him hear you talk like that,” a pilot warned. “He’d tear your head off and piss in the hole. He’d be sorry afterwards, but-”

“So would I,” Mouradian broke in, and got a laugh.

“You bet you would be,” the other officer said. “Wouldn’t do you a kopek’s worth of good, though.”

One more drunken truth. “He’s still a good man to have in the bomb bay,” Sergei said.

“Sure he is,” the other fellow agreed. “He’s got more muscles in his cock than most guys have in their leg.” That was an exaggeration. Sergei thought so, anyhow.

Colonel Borisov looked at his wristwatch. That made several other people, Sergei among them, do the same thing. It was three or four minutes before the top of the hour. Borisov stood up. A moment later, he involuntarily sat down again. Swearing, he tried again. He swayed this time, but stayed on his feet. Proud as a sozzled peacock, he shuffled over to the radio set and turned it on.

The tubes needed half a minute or so to warm up. When sound started coming out of the set, a children’s chorus was singing of the glories of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Listening, Sergei suddenly understood how a fly had to feel while it was drowning in a saucer of sugar syrup. His face showed none of that. Even drunk, he had no trouble hiding what he thought. Few Soviet citizens had that kind of trouble; most of the surviving ones who did were in a gulag these days.

Mercifully, the chorus ended. An announcer spent a minute urging his listeners to buy war bonds. “Work like Stakhanovites, save like Stakhanovites!” he boomed. Then he too shut up and went away. Sergei wondered how many exhortations like that he’d heard. Thousands. It had to be thousands. And the radio was a new invention, too. He remembered the first time he’d ever listened to one. He’d been sure it was magic. What else could it be?

“Moscow speaking,” a familiar voice said. You could set your watch by the hourly news bulletins. Sergei had, plenty of times. If he tried it now, he’d make a hash of it. Enough antifreeze coursed through his veins to make that a certainty.

“Moscow speaking,” the newsreader repeated. “Fierce fighting continues east of Warsaw. Fascist claims to have driven the heroes of the Red Army back in headlong retreat are, of course, nothing but the usual lies that spew like vomit from the Hitlerite and Smigly-Ridz regimes. Advances by the forces of progress, however, have proved less rapid than our beloved General Secretary, Comrade Stalin, would have preferred. Changes in the command structure of Red Army units fighting in Poland are expected to improve matters in short order.”

Someone whistled softly. Sergei didn’t see who it was, but he shared the sentiment. How many generals who hadn’t advanced fast enough to suit Stalin were advancing on Siberia right this minute? How many had died of 9mm heart failure? When you shot a man in the back of the head, his heart did stop beating. “Heart failure” made for a nice, neat death certificate.

“English, French, and Norwegian forces continue to retreat in Norway,” the newsreader continued. “We must resign ourselves to the fact that the capitalist and imperialist forces cannot be relied upon to check the Nazis, and that another country is vanishing down the Hitlerite maw. If Norway falls, it will bring the German cannibals dangerously close to the Soviet Union’s northwestern border-only a thin slice of Finnish territory separates Norway from the USSR. And Finland, under the reactionary rule of Marshal Mannerheim, cannot be relied upon the remain neutral.”

What did that mean? Was Stalin thinking about taking Finland himself before the Nazis could? If he was, would he get away with it? The Soviet Union had had a tougher time in Poland than anyone expected. How tough were the Finns? Sergei had no idea, and wasn’t eager to gain a firsthand education on the subject.