Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“I will,” Moishe promised. Straightening his cap, he trudged down the stairs. His arms and shoulders twinged aching protest as he picked up the handles of the pushcart. Ignoring the aches as best he could, he made his slow way through the crowded streets and back to the old flat.

He was just pulling the sack of cans down from the shelf in the bedroom when someone rapped on the open front door. He muttered under his breath and put the sack back as quietly as he could, so the cans didn’t clank together-letting people know you had food squirreled away invited it to disappear. He wondered whether it would be one of his neighbors coming to say goodbye or the landlord with a prospective tenant for the flat.

He’d be polite to whoever it was and send him on his way. Then he’d be able to get on his own way. Fixing a polite smile on his face, he walked into the living room.

In the doorway stood two burly Order Service men, both still wearing the red-and-white armbands with black Magen Davids left over from the days of Nazi rule in the Lodz ghetto. They carried stout truncheons. Behind them were two Lizards armed with weapons a great deal worse.

“You Moishe Russie?” the uglier Order Service ruffian asked. Without waiting for an answer, he raised his club. “You better come with us.”

Flying over the Russian steppe, traveling across it by train, Ludmila Gorbunova had of course known how vast it was. But nothing had prepared her for walking over what seemed an improbably large chunk of it to get where she was going.

“I’ll have to draw new boots when we get back to the airstrip,” she told Nikifor Sholudenko.

His mobile features assumed what she had come to think of as an NKVD sneer. “So long as you are in a position to draw them, all will be well. Even, if you are in a position to draw them with none to be had, all will be well enough.”

She nodded; Sholudenko was undoubtedly right. Then one of her legs sank almost knee-deep into a patch of ooze she hadn’t noticed. It was almost like going into quicksand. She had to work her way out a little at a time. When, slimy and dripping, she was on the move again, she muttered, “Too bad nobody would be able to issue me a new pair of feet.”

Sholudenko pointed to water glinting from behind an apple orchard. “That looks like a pond. Do you want to clean off’?”

“All right,” Ludmila said. Since she’d flipped her U-2, the time when they returned to the airstrip, formerly so urgent, had taken on an atmosphere of nichevo. When she and Sholudenko weren’t sure of the day on which they’d arrive, an hour or two one way or the other ceased to mean anything.

They walked over to the orchard, which did lie in front of a pond. Ludmila yanked off her filthy boot. The water was bitterly cold, but the mud came off her foot and leg. She’d coated both feet with a thick layer of goose grease she’d begged from a babushka. If you were going to get wet, as anyone who traveled during the rasputitsa surely would, the grease helped keep rot from starting between your toes.

She washed the boot inside and out, using a scrap of cloth from inside her pack to dry it as well as she could. Then she splashed more water on her face: she knew how dirty she was, and had in full measure the Russian love of personal cleanliness. “I wish’ this were a proper steam, bath,” she said. “Without the heat first, I don’t want to take a cold plunge.”

“No, that would be asking for pneumonia,” Sholudenko agreed. “Can’t take the risk, not out in the field.”

He spoke like a soldier, not like someone who’d surely enjoyed a comfortable billet in a town until the Nazis invaded the SSSR, and maybe till the Lizards came. Ludmila had to admit he performed the same way: he marched and camped capably and without complaint. She’d viewed the secret police as birds were supposed to view snakes-as hunters, almost fascinating in their deadliness and power, men whose attention it was far better never to attract. But as the days went by, Sholudenko seemed more and more just another man to her. She didn’t know how far she could trust that.

He knelt by the side of the pond and splashed his face, too. While he washed, Ludmila stood watch. What with Lizards and collaborators and bandits who robbed indiscriminately, not a kilometer of Ukrainian territory was liable to be safe.

As if to drive that point home, a column of half a dozen Lizard tanks rolled up the road the pilot and NKVD man had just left. “I’m glad they didn’t see us carrying firearms,” Ludmila said.

“Yes, that could have proved embarrassing,” Sholudenko said. “For some reason, they’ve developed the habit of firing machine-gun bursts first and asking questions later. A wasteful way to conduct interrogations, not that they asked my opinion of it.”

The casual way he talked about such things made the hair prickle up on Ludmila’s arms, as if she were a wild animal fluffing out its fur to make itself look bigger and fiercer. She wondered what sort of interrogations he’d conducted. Once or twice she’d almost asked him things like that, but at the last minute she always held back. Even though he was NKVD, he seemed decent enough. If she knew what he’d done instead of having to guess, she might not be able to stomach him any more.

He said, “I wouldn’t mind following those tanks to find out where they’re going… if I could keep up with them, and if I had a radio to get the information to someone who could use it.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and grinned wryly. “And I might as well wish for buried treasure while I’m about it, eh?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Ludmila said, which made Sholudenko laugh. She went on, “Those tanks may not be going anywhere. If they hit some really thick mud, they’ll bog down. I saw that happen more than once last fall.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the same thing,” he agreed. “Doesn’t do to count on it, though. They’ve swallowed up too much of the rodina without bogging down.”

Ludmila nodded. Strange, she thought, that an NKVD man should talk about the rodina. From the day the Germans invaded, the Soviet government had started trotting out all the ancient symbols of Holy Mother Russia. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had scorned such symbols as reminders of the decadent, nationalistic past-until they needed them to rally the Soviet people against the Nazis. Stalin had even made his peace with the Patriarch of Moscow, although the government remained resolutely atheist.

Sholudenko said, “I think we can get moving again. I don’t hear the tanks any more.”

“No, nor I,” Ludmila said after cocking her head and listening carefully. “But you have to be careful: their machines aren’t as noisy as ours, and could be lying in wait.”

“I assure you, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova, I have discovered this for myself,” Sholudenko said with sarcastic formality. Ludmila chewed on her lower lip. She had that coming-the NKVD man, having to serve on the ground, had earned the unlucky privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with Lizard hardware at ranges closer than she cared to think about. He went on, “It is, even so, a lesson which bears repeating: this I do not deny.”

Mollified by the half apology (which was, by that one half, more than she’d ever imagined getting from the NKVD), Ludmila slid the boot back onto her foot. She and Sholudenko left the grove together and headed back toward the road. One glance was plenty to keep them walking on the verge; the column of Lizard tanks had chewed the roadbed to slimy pulp worse than the patch into which Ludmila had stumbled before. This muck, though, went on for kilometers.

Tramping along by the road wasn’t easy, either. The ground was still squashy and slippery, and the year’s new weeds and bushes, growing frantically now that warm weather and long stretches of sunlight were here at last, reached out with branches and shoots to try to trip up the travelers.