Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“Yes,” Ludmila said. She still kept the letter Jager had sent her. she’d thought about answering, but hadn’t done it. Not only did she have no idea how to address a reply, but writing to a German would make another suspicious mark go down in her dossier. she’d never seen that dossier-she never would, unless charges were brought against her-but it felt as real as the sheepskin collar of her flying jacket.

Schultz said, “Anything to eat here? After what I’ve been stealing lately, even kasha and borscht would seem mighty fine.”

“We haven’t much for ourselves,” Ludmila answered. she didn’t mind feeding Schultz once or twice, but she didn’t want to turn him into a parasite, either. Then she had a new thought. “How good a mechanic are you?”

“Pretty good,” he said, not arrogant but confident enough. “I had to help keep my panzer running, after all.”

“Do you think you could work on an aircraft engine?”

He pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I never tried. Do you have the manuals for it?”

“Yes. They’re in Russian, though.” Ludmila switched to her own language: “You didn’t know any back at the kolkhoz. Do you understand it better now?”

“Da, a little,” Schultz answered in Russian, his accent not too scurrilous. But he dropped back into German with every sign of relief: “I still can’t read it worth a damn, though. But numbers don’t change, and I can make sense out of pictures. Let me see what you have.”

“All right.” Ludmila led him back toward the U-2 she’d just left. Members of the ground crew watched with hard, mistrustful stares as she approached. Some of that mistrust was aimed at Ludmila, for having anything to do with a German. She thought about her dossier again. But she said, “I think he can help us. He knows engines.”

“Ah,” everyone said, almost in unison. Ludmila didn’t care for that much more than she liked the mistrustful stares. Along with hating and fearing Germans, too many Russians were in the habit of attributing nearly magical abilities to them just because they came from the west. She hoped she knew better. They were good soldiers, yes, but they weren’t supermen.

When Georg Schultz saw the Kukuruznik, he rocked back on his heels and started to laugh. “You’re still flying these little bastards, are you?”

“What about it?” Ludmila said hotly. He’d have done better to insult her family than her beloved U-2.

But the panzer man answered, “We hated these stupid things. Every time I had to go out and take a dump, I figured one of ’em would fly by and shoot my ass off. I swear they could stand on tiptoe and peek in through a window, and I bet the Lizards don’t like ’em one bit better’n we did.”

Ludmila translated that into Russian. As if by magic, the ground crew’s hostility melted. Hands fell away from weapons. Somebody dug out a pouch of makhorka and passed it to Schultz. He had some old newspaper in an inside pocket that hadn’t got wet. When he’d rolled himself a cigarette, a Russian gave him a light.

He shielded it with one hand from the drips that splattered down off the camouflage netting, walked around so he could get a good look at the engine and two-bladed wooden prop on the nose of the Wheatcutter. When he turned around, he wore a disbelieving grin. “It really flies?”

“It really flies,” Ludmila agreed gravely, hiding her own smile. She said it again in her own language. A couple of the mechanics laughed out loud. She returned to German: “Do you think you can help keep it flying?”

“Why not?” he said. “It doesn’t look near as bad as keeping a panzer going. And if that engine were any simpler, you’d run it off a rubber band like a kid’s toy.”

“Hmm,” Ludmila said, not sure she cared for the comparison. The little Shvetsov was made to be rugged as a mule, but surely that was something to be proud of, not to scorn. She pointed to Schultz. “Turn your back.”

“Jawohl!” He clicked his heels as if she were a field marshal in red-striped trousers, and performed a smart about-turn.

She gestured for a couple of Russians to stand behind him so he couldn’t see what she was doing, then loosened the sparkplug wire she’d noticed and her alleged mechanic hadn’t. “You can turn back now. Find out what’s wrong with the machine.”

Schultz walked over to the U-2, inspected the engine for perhaps fifteen seconds, and fixed the wire Ludmila had tampered with. His smile seemed to say, Why don’t you ask me a hard one next time? The mechanic who had failed to find the same defect glared at the German as if suspecting the devil’s grandmother had somehow migrated from the Shvetsov to him.

“This man will be useful on this base,” Ludmila said. Her eyes dared the ground crew to argue with her. None of the men said anything, though several looked ready to burst with what they weren’t saying.

The German panzer sergeant seemed at least as bemused as his Soviet counterparts. “First I fight alongside a bunch of Jewish partisans, and now I’m joining the Red Air Force,” he said, maybe more to himself than to Ludmila. “I hope to God none of this ever shows up in my file.”

So the Nazis worried about dossiers, too. The thought gave Ludmila something in common with Schultz, though it wasn’t one she’d be able to share with him. Somehow that didn’t matter, either. They both knew what was safe to talk about and what wasn’t.

Schultz also knew what the hostile looks he was getting meant. He undid his canteen, tossed it to the mechanic who was glaring hardest. “Vodka, russki vodka,” he said in his pidgin Russian. He smacked his lips. “Ochen khorosho.”

The startled groundcrew man undid the stopper, sniffed, then grinned and enfolded Schultz in a bear hug. “That was clever,” Ludmila said as the ground crew passed the flask from one eager hand to the next. A moment later, she added, “Your Major Jager would have approved.”

“Do you think so?” she’d found the right praise with which to reach him-his long, bony face glowed as if he were a small boy who’d just been told he’d written his school’s prize essay for the year. He went on, “The major, miss, I think he’s one hell of a man.”

“Yes,” Ludmila said, and realized she and Schultz might have something else in common after all.

Bicycling across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Chicago had seemed a good idea when Jens Larssen set about it. In summer, in a country that had never known invasion, it might even have been a good idea. In winter, pedaling through territory largely occupied by the Lizards, it looked stupider with every passing moment.

He’d seen newsreel footage of half-frozen German soldiers captured by the Russians in front of Moscow. The Russians, in their white snow suits, many of them on skis, had looked capable of going anywhere any time. That was how Jens had thought he would do, if he’d really thought about it at all. Instead, he feared he much more closely resembled one of those Nazi ice cubes with legs.

He didn’t have the clothes he needed for staying out in the open when the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there. He’d done his best to remedy that by piling on several layers at a time, but his best still left him shivering.

The other thing he hadn’t thought about was that nobody was plowing or even salting the roads this winter. In a car, he would have done all right A car was heavy, a car was fast-best of all, his Plymouth had had a heater. But drifted snow brought a bicycle to a halt. As for ice… he’d fallen more times than he could count. Only dumb luck had kept him from breaking an arm or an ankle. Or maybe God really did have a soft spot in his heart for drunks, children, and damn fools.