Harry Turtledove - Fallout

And Mrs. Torres or Mrs. Lombardi or Mrs. Callahan or Mrs. Rabinowicz would break down and sob and say something about her parents or husband or children or all of the above who hadn’t escaped or who had but who were hurt worse than she was.

Every so often, whichever network Aaron was watching at the moment would cut away to a makeshift headquarters in Philadelphia. A tired-looking reporter-sometimes a tired-looking reporter with a cigarette in his mouth-would give the latest estimates on numbers of the dead and amount of damage. Those amounted to hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars. Once Aaron knew that much, he knew everything he needed to know. Precision hardly mattered, though the reporters kept trying to provide it.

They also kept posting lists of Senators and Representatives known to be dead. Most Congressmen and -women had Washington digs not far from the gutted Capitol. Most of the time, that meant they could easily get to work. Now it meant that large numbers of them would never run for reelection, or for anything else, again.

Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy were both on the lists. So were Hubert Humphrey and Estes Kefauver. Averell Harriman was known to be dead, too; he’d been at a hotel in Manhattan that the falling Empire State Building drove into the ground like a sledgehammer hitting a railroad spike. George Marshall had been working late at the Pentagon. His diligence meant only that nothing of him was left to bury.

Of the Federal government’s leading organs, the Supreme Court came through best. Seven of the nine Justices were at a lawyers’ conclave in St. Louis when doom fell on the capital. Naturally, that was the branch of government with the least to do with setting policy or carrying it through.

Harry Truman still lived, too, but the more Aaron saw him the more he thought the President wished he didn’t. Truman looked suddenly, cruelly, old. Some of that might have been that he wasn’t bothering with makeup any more before he came in front of the cameras. More, though, had to come from the loss of his wife and daughter.

“I brought the United States into this war. God has given me my own full measure of the nation’s grief. The Psalms tell us that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. I bow before those judgments. I see nothing else that I can do. The Bible also says that vengeance is the Lord’s. There I must respectfully disagree with the Good Book.”

Listening to the way Truman came out with that, Aaron felt a chill run up his back. “I wouldn’t want to be in Joe Stalin’s shoes right this minute,” he said to Ruth.

“I wouldn’t want to be in Stalin’s shoes any time at all,” she answered. “They’d probably steal my toes.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aaron said. “Or else paint ’em red. But you do that yourself, at least with the nails.”

“You’re crazier than I am,” Ruth said, not without admiration.

“I try,” Aaron said. But with the stricken President on the screen in front of him, he couldn’t stay lighthearted. “That poor man. He’s lost his family, and Pearl Harbor looks like a pinprick next to this. And somehow he’s got to go on.”

“We face a crisis in our system of government,” Truman said. “Neither house of Congress has enough members for a quorum. Governors may appoint Representatives, but Senators must be elected. All of that will take time, time we don’t have in the middle of a war. I’ve spoken by telephone with Chief Justice Vinson, who was in St. Louis when Washington was attacked. He assures me that I may continue carrying out policies I find necessary, both at home and abroad, even without Congressional approval, because of the national emergency. ‘We have to move forward,’ was the way he put it. He’s right-we do. And we will, with God’s help and with the help of the American people.”

His face disappeared from the TV. Ruth said, “He sounds like he wants to cry but won’t let himself, not where anybody can hear him do it.”

Aaron nodded. “You’re right. That’s just what he sounds like. I heard something in his voice was odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.” He sent her an admiring glance. “You’re as smart as you are pretty.”

“Break out the shovels, boys!” Ruth said. “It’s getting pretty deep tonight.” Aaron laughed, very fond of her in that moment.

Again, though, laughter couldn’t last. The picture cut away to a field-the reporter at the edge of the field said it was five miles west of New Egypt, New Jersey. Aaron had never heard of New Egypt, New Jersey, till that moment.

“This is the final resting place of the Bull bomber that crashed before it could deliver its cargo of death to Philadelphia, less than thirty miles away,” the reporter said. “None of the eleven Russians who made up the crew survived. Because they perished, all of Philadelphia’s more than two million people still live. America’s third-largest city escaped the tragedy that struck Boston, New York, and Washington.”

The bomber’s tail had broken off from the rest of the fuselage. It stood upright amidst the grass and bushes, almost like a cross marking a grave. The star on the vertical surface looked the same as the ones on U.S. Air Force planes.

“Russian Bulls are modeled after American Superfortresses, and look nearly the same,” the reporter said. “The Russians often paint them in our colors to help fool our air defenses.”

Did B-29s on their way to Moscow or Kiev bear Soviet markings? The reporter said nothing about that. He was a propagandist. If the Reds did it, it was a dirty trick. If the USA did it, it was a ruse of war.

Men wearing gas masks and what looked like rubberized suits were moving about near the wreckage. The reporter did talk about that: “This Bull was carrying an A-bomb. Obviously, it didn’t explode, or I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you now. But it did release a certain amount of radioactivity because of the crash. The authorities have assured me that I am at a safe distance from the crash scene. The experts in the protective clothing are making sure that the bomb is secure and that the radiation is properly contained.”

How much were the authorities’ assurances worth? Aaron wouldn’t have wanted to trust somebody who might not know what the dickens he was talking about-or who might be lying through his teeth. The guy with the mike and his camera crew couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards from the Bull’s wreckage.

They had a job to do. They were doing it. Reporters didn’t face danger as often as soldiers did, but they did face it. Aaron just wanted to do his job, too. So did most of the people in the world. But how could they, if it was going up in radioactive fire around them?

–

Rolf Mehlen scratched himself under his left armpit. It was only an itch. Not six weeks after the last war ended, he’d given a doctor two cartons of Old Golds to cut away the blood-group tattoo every Waffen -SS officer carried there. It hurt like a son of a bitch after the novocaine wore off, but the scar was almost invisible now.

In Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, he’d been a Hauptsturmfuhrer, the SS rank equivalent to captain. In this new, half-assed West German army, he was just a guy named Rolf. A rifleman. A spear carrier. It was better this way. Nobody asked a whole lot of questions about a private. That suited Rolf fine.

He wrapped some oil-soaked cloth around the end of his cleaning rod and pushed it through the barrel of his Springfield. Except for firing a cartridge of different caliber, the American rifle was as near the same as his old Mauser as made no difference.

Sitting across the little fire from him, Max Bachman took care of his own Springfield. Bachman had served in the Wehrmacht, not the Waffen -SS. His politics weren’t just soft. They were squishy. When the Fuhrer was running things, the Gestapo would have had a little talk with him, or maybe not such a little one. Back then, though, he would have been smart enough to keep his big yap shut.