Harry Turtledove - Fallout

“That’s nasty stuff. Horrible stuff. We’ll send you doctors who have some experience with it, yes.” Truman didn’t tell de Gaulle that nothing the doctors tried seemed to do much good. You watched and you waited and you kept people as clean and comfortable as you could, and either they got better or they didn’t. But then, de Gaulle might well already know that. Paris wasn’t the first French city to have had hellfire visited on it, just the biggest. And the war still showed no signs of ending.

–

Boris Gribkov, Vladimir Zorin, and Leonid Tsederbaum joined the queue in front of the field kitchen near Munich. The bomber pilot, copilot, and navigator carried tin mess kits the Red Army men holding this part of what had been West Germany gave them.

Nose twitching, Zorin said, “I smell shchi.”

“That’ll fill us up,” Gribkov said. With shchi, you started with cabbage, as you did with beets for borscht. Then you threw anything else you happened to have into the pot along with it. You let it simmer till it all got done, and then you ate it.

That was how Red Army-and Red Air Force-field kitchens turned it out, anyway, in enormous sheet-metal tureens. No doubt fancy cooks fixed it with more subtlety. Gribkov cared not a kopek for subtlety. Filling his belly was the only thing he worried about.

A Red Army noncom saw his blues and his officer’s shoulder boards and started to step out of line. “Go ahead, Comrade,” he said.

“No, no, no,” Boris answered. “We won’t starve to death before we get up there. Keep your place.”

“You’re the guys who gave it to the froggies, aren’t you?” the sergeant said.

“Well, some of them,” Gribkov told him. The Tu-4 that he flew had a crew of eleven.

“Good,” the noncom said. “You ought to drop a bomb on these German pussies, too. Blast ’em all to the devil so nobody has to worry about ’em any more. You ask me, every one of ’em’s still a Nazi under the skin.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Zorin said. Gribkov wouldn’t have, either. By everything he’d heard, German troops still fought the Red Army as fanatically as they had when Hitler called the shots.

He glanced over at Leonid Tsederbaum. The Zhid looked back, his handsome, swarthy face showing nothing. If anybody hated Germans and Nazis even worse than a Russian, you had to figure a Jew would. But Tsederbaum didn’t say anything that would show he did.

As a matter of fact, Tsederbaum hadn’t said one whole hell of a lot since he guided the Tu-4 back from the attack on Paris. He’d already made it plain that he didn’t like dropping atom bombs on famous, important cities. Boris Gribkov didn’t like it worth a damn, either. Liking it had nothing to do with the price of vodka.

Your superior told you to do something. You saluted. You said I serve the Soviet Union! And you went out and did it or you died trying. If you screwed it up, your superior gave it to you in the neck. If he didn’t, somebody would give it to him . How else could anyone run a military? The Germans, the enemy whose example the Russians knew best, had the same kind of rules.

All the same, Boris kept sneaking glances at Tsederbaum as men with mess kits shuffled toward those bubbling, fragrant cauldrons. The navigator had never been one of your talky guys. When he did open his yap, what came out of it was dryly ironic more often than not. But yeah, he’d been even quieter than usual lately.

When Gribkov reached the shchi, the chubby-cheeked corporal with the ladle-who ever heard of a skinny cook?-beamed at him. “Here you go, sir!” he said, and dug deep into the pot for the good stuff at the bottom. He did the same for Zorin and Tsederbaum. Gribkov didn’t think he was a hero, but he didn’t mind getting treated like one.

That sergeant who wanted to bomb the Germans waved the flyers to a commandeered bus bench. Then he and the rest of the Red Army men politely left them alone. They were heroes to the ground-pounders, enough so that Gribkov wished he felt more like a hero to himself.

He dug into the shchi. “Not half bad,” he said. “I do wonder what the meat is, though.”

“You mean whether it’d neigh or bark or meow?” Zorin chuckled, for all the world as if he were joking.

“As long as I don’t see the critter it came from, I’m not going to worry about it,” Boris said. “I just wonder, that’s all.”

“Curiosity killed the cat-which is why it’s in the shchi.” By the way Zorin shoveled in the soup, he didn’t worry about it, either.

The crack, though, was more one Gribkov would have expected from Tsederbaum. When he stole another look at the Jew, Tsederbaum caught him doing it. Raising his spoon in mock salute, the navigator said, “The condemned man ate a hearty meal.”

Nobody’d condemned them. They’d won medals for bombing America and then making it back to the rodina . Boris pulled a small metal flask off his belt. “Here,” he said. “I’ve got some vodka. That’s good for whatever’s bothering you.”

Leonid Tsederbaum’s smile called him a Russian, or possibly a small, stupid child. As if humoring such a child, the Zhid took a knock. But he said, “There’s not enough vodka in the world to fix what ails me.”

“How do you know? How much have you drunk?” Zorin asked. Tsederbaum’s chuckle was on the dutiful side. Boris Gribkov, who drank himself before passing the flask to Zorin, thought it was a good question. Sometimes if you got smashed out of your skull, whatever you’d been chewing on didn’t seem so bad in the light of the morning-after hangover.

In a day or two, the crew would fly the Tu-4 back to the Soviet Union. Chances were they’d pick up another gong for their tunic fronts. And then somebody would tell them what to do next, and they’d do it-or die trying.

They slept on pews in a gutted church. With enough blankets cocooning you, it wasn’t so bad. At least you had room to stretch out. At some point in the middle of the night, Tsederbaum got up and headed outside. “Sorry to bother you,” he whispered to Gribkov, who sleepily raised his head.

Heading for the latrine, Boris thought. He wondered if he ought to do the same. Instead, he yawned and submerged in slumber again.

Then somebody shook him awake. It was predawn twilight. Even in the gray gloom, he could see how pale Vladimir Zorin looked. “What is it?” Gribkov asked. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

But it was worse than he’d dreamt. “That stupid fucking kike!” Zorin sounded furious. “He went and blew his goddamn head off!”

“Bozhemoi!” Gribkov untangled himself and scrambled to his feet. “I knew something was eating him, but I never imagined-”

“Who would? Who in his right mind would, I mean?” the copilot said.

Boris pulled on his boots. “Take me to him.”

“Come on.” Zorin led him out just past the stinking trenches where Soviet fighting men eased themselves. There lay Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum. He’d put the business end of his Tokarev automatic in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The back of his once-so-clever head was a red, ruined mess. Flies had already started buzzing around it.

Going through his pockets, Gribkov found a note. He recognized Tsederbaum’s precise script at once. All it said was Men a hundred years from now will know what I have done. Let them also know I did not do it willingly. Maybe then they will not spit whenever they say my name.

He showed Zorin the note. Then he fumbled in his own pockets till he found a matchbook. He lit a match and touched it to the edge of the paper. He held it till it scorched his fingers, then dropped it and let it burn itself out. Once it did, he kicked at the ashes till nothing discernible was left.