Harry Turtledove - Fallout

“I expect there is.” Actually, Daisy wasn’t so sure of that herself. The last time she’d wondered about it, she’d been going out with Tom before…well, before.

“Can you get somebody, then?” Bruce asked.

“I expect I can.” Daisy wasn’t so sure of that, either. But she was very sure she’d try her hardest.

Boris Gribkov and the rest of the Tu-4’s crew had lingered in western Germany much longer than he’d ever expected they would. Having your navigator blow out the back of his head would do that to you.

They could have flown back to an airfield in the eastern zone or in Poland or Czechoslovakia. They could have done a little hop like that without a navigator, or with Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, filling in for poor, dead Tsederbaum. It would have been safe enough.

But no one who outranked Gribkov thought for a moment of letting them get away without interrogation. First came the men from the MGB, the Ministry of State Security. “Did Lieutenant Tsederbaum show any sign of disaffection before committing suicide?” a Chekist with a double chin asked Gribkov.

Of course he did, you dumb prick, Gribkov thought. His face, though, showed nothing of what went on behind his eyes. In the USSR, you learned not to give yourself away…or you gave yourself away and paid the price for it.

You also learned not to give anyone else away if you could possibly help it. His voice as wooden as his features, the pilot said, “Never that I noticed, Comrade.” They couldn’t do anything to Leonid, not now. They could build a dossier against his relatives. Gribkov didn’t care to lend them a hand.

“Before his act, was he in any way unsatisfactory in the performance of his duties?” the MGB man persisted. Yes, they were trying to make a case, all right.

“He wouldn’t have won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal if he had been,” Gribkov said, shaking his head. “We struck Seattle. We struck Bordeaux. We struck Paris. We couldn’t have hit our targets without the best navigation.”

“Then why did he do it?” the fat fool demanded.

He did it because we struck Seattle and Bordeaux and Paris, Boris thought. Tsederbaum made the mistake of seeing enemies as human beings. For a fighting man, that could be fatal. For the thoughtful Jew, it damn well had been.

Try explaining as much to a Chekist, though. To the men who’d been headquartered at the Lubyanka till the Americans turned it into radioactive fallout, enemies were always enemies. Even friends were sometimes enemies.

This fellow badgered Gribkov awhile longer, then gave up and left him alone. But he and his pals also had to interrogate the rest of the crew. They took their time about it. Boris didn’t ask if anyone told them more than he had. The less you asked, the less you could get in trouble for later.

He got questioned again two days after the session with the MGB man. The fellow who grilled him this time wore the uniform of a Red Army major. Gribkov rapidly began to doubt that that was what he was, or that it was all of what he was. Everyone knew about the MGB. Hardly anyone heard more than whispers about the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate. It was the military’s intelligence branch, aimed at the parts of the world that didn’t belong to the Soviet Union.

“Did anyone get to Tsederbaum?” the major asked. “Did he talk to or listen to people he shouldn’t have?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Gribkov answered truthfully. “As far as I know, he spent just about all of his time with us and with other Soviet flyers and soldiers.”

The major grunted. He’d introduced himself as Ivan Ivanov, a name so ordinary it couldn’t be real. “Did he ever talk with foreigners? When you flew your plane in here, did he go out and find a German popsy to screw?”

“No, Comrade Major.” Again, Gribkov told the truth. “Remember, he was a Jew. He liked Germans even less than Russians do, and that’s not easy.”

Another grunt from “Ivanov.” “He was a rootless cosmopolite, you mean,” he said, which was what the Party line called Jews when they were out of favor. “Who knows what those people really think? They’re masters of mystification. It’s part of what makes them so dangerous.” Like the MGB man before him, he was working to build a case against the late Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum.

As with the MGB man before him, Gribkov didn’t want to help. “Sir, as far as I know, the only people he was dangerous to were the Soviet Union’s enemies. Thanks to him, my bombs hit America once and France twice. How many other crews have done so well?”

“Ivanov” didn’t answer, which was in itself an answer of sorts. The likely GRU man did say, “If he was such a stalwart in the service of the working class, why did he shoot himself like a plutocrat after a stock-market crash?”

“Comrade Major, the only person who could have told you that was Tsederbaum, and he isn’t here to do it any more,” Gribkov said.

“We don’t need-we don’t want-weaklings in important military positions,” “Ivanov” said fretfully. “I have to get to the bottom of this, no matter how long it takes.”

“You can’t mean we won’t fly any more missions till you do!” Boris said. There was a kick in the head for you! As far as the pilot could see, Tsederbaum had stuck the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger because he couldn’t stand the missions the Tu-4 was flying. Now, because he had, it wouldn’t fly them?

Was that irony? No, madness! And Boris knew that if he burst out laughing he’d never be able to explain it to the GRU man, any more than he would have been able to with the Chekist. People who served the Soviet Union in those ways had their sense of humor cut out of them as part of the initiation process, probably without anesthetic.

In any case, Major “Ivanov”-though his rank might be as fictitious as his name-shook his head. He wasn’t so porky as the MGB man had been, but he’d never gone hungry for long. “No, no, Comrade, no. We will furnish you with a new navigator so you can keep on carrying the action to the imperialist warmongers. But the investigation will continue until we reach the truth concerning the late Lieutenant Tsederbaum.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which here meant something like I’m stuck with whatever you tell me.

The new navigator was a round-faced first lieutenant named Yefim Vladimirovich Arzhanov. Boris put him through his paces at the navigator’s station, which lay directly behind his own but was separated from it by a bulkhead. As any pilot had to, Gribkov knew a little something about the art of navigation: enough to tell someone who also knew from a clown running a bluff. Arzhanov had a sleepy look to him, but he passed the tests the pilot gave him without needing to wake up all the way.

“You’ll do,” Gribkov said.

“Thank you, sir,” Arzhanov said. “Did you think they were trying to stick a rotten egg in your crew?”

“Of course not,” Boris answered, which, to anyone with ears to hear, meant You bet! “I just wanted to see how you run.”

“Like a stopped clock, Comrade Pilot-I’m sure to be right twice a day,” Arzhanov answered with a grin that made him look no more than fourteen.

His voice didn’t sound like Tsederbaum’s. He looked nothing like the Jew: he looked like the Russian he was. But it was a crack the dead man might have come out with. Gribkov shook his head. “I think the factory that makes navigators stamps them out crazy.”

“That’s me, sir. Just another spare part, at your service.” Yefim Arzhanov came to attention, clacked his heels together, and saluted as if he were flying for Austria-Hungary in what was now the big war before last.