Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

The chief pointed south. Jager knew there were Lizards in that direction; that was the way he’d come. Then the chief pointed east, but made pushing motions with his hands, as if to say the Lizards over there weren’t close. Jager nodded to show he understood. And then the kolkhoz chief pointed west. He didn’t do any dumb show to indicate the Lizards thereabouts were far away, either.

Jager looked at Georg Schultz. Schultz was looking at him, too. He suspected he looked as unhappy as the gunner did. If there were Lizards between them and the bulk of the Wehrmacht… Jager didn’t care to follow that thought to its logical conclusion. For that matter, if there were Lizards over that way, the Wehrmacht might not have much left in the way of bulk.

The kolkhoz chief gave him another piece of bad news: “Berlin kaput, Germanski. Yasheritsi. ” He used those expressive hands of his to show the city going up in a single huge explosion.

Schultz grunted as if he’d been kicked in the belly. Jager felt hollow and empty inside, himself. He couldn’t imagine Berlin gone, or Germany with Berlin gone. He tried not to believe it. “Maybe they’re lying,” Schultz said hoarsely. “Maybe it’s just the God-damned Russian radio.”

“Maybe.” But the more Jager studied the kolkhozniks, the less he believed that. If they’d gloated at his reaction to the news, he would have doubted them more, have thought they were trying to fool him. But while a few looked pleased at his discomfiture (as was only natural, when his country and theirs had spent a year locked in a huge, vicious embrace), most looked at him and his companion with sympathetic eyes and somber faces. That convinced him he needed to worry.

He found a useful Russian word: “Nichevo.” He knew he pronounced it badly; German had to use the clumsy letter-group tsch even to approximate the sound that lay at its heart.

But the kolkhozniks understood. “Tovarisch, nichevo,” one of them said: Comrade, it can’t be helped, there’s nothing to be done about it. It was a very Russian word indeed: the Russians were-and needed to be-long on resignation.

He hadn’t quite meant it that way. He explained what he had meant: “Berlin da, yasheritsi-” He ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Berlin nyet, yasheritsi-” He ground his heel into the dirt again.

Some of the Russians clapped their hands, admiring his determination. Some looked at him as if he was crazy. Maybe I am, Jager thought. He hadn’t imagined anyone could hurt Germany as the Lizards had hurt it. Poland, France, and the Low Countries had gone down like ninepins. England fought on, but was walled away from Europe. And though the Soviet Union remained on its feet, Jager was sure the Germans would have finished it by the end of 1942. The fighting south of Kharkov showed the Ivans hadn’t learned much, no matter how many of them there were.

But the Lizards-the Lizards were an imponderable. They weren’t the soldiers they might have been, but their gear was so good it didn’t always matter. He’d found that out for himself, the hard way.

A faint buzz in the sky, far off to northward. Jager’s head whipped around. Any sky noise was alarming these days, doubly so when it might come from an almost invulnerable Lizard aircraft. This, though, was no Lizard plane. “Just one of the Ivans’ flying sewing machines, Major-not worth jumping out of your skin for.”

“Anything that’s up there without a swastika on it makes me nervous.”

“Can’t blame you for that, I guess. But if we aren’t safe from the Red Air Force here in the middle of a kolkhoz, we aren’t safe anywhere.” The tank gunner ran a hand along his gingery whiskers. “Of course, these days we really aren’t safe anywhere.”

The Soviet biplane didn’t go into a strafing run, although Jager saw it carried machine guns. It skimmed over the collective farm, a couple of hundred meters off the ground. Its little engine did indeed make a noise like a sewing machine running flat out.

The plane banked, turned in what looked like an impossibly tight circle, came back over the knot of people gathered around the two Germans. This time it flew lower. Several kolkhozniks waved up at the pilot, who was clearly visible in the open cockpit, goggles, leather flying helmet, and all.

The biplane banked once more, now north of the collective farm again. When it turned once more, it was plainly on a landing run. Dust spurted up as its wheels touched the ground. It bounced along, slowed to a stop.

“Don’t know as how I like this, sir,” Schultz said. “Dealing with the Russians here is one thing, but that plane, that’s part of the Red Air Force. We shouldn’t have anything to do with something connected to the Bolshevik government like that.”

“I know we shouldn’t, Sergeant, but everything’s gone to hell since the Lizards got here,” Jager answered. “Besides, what choice have we?” Too many kolkhozniks carried guns to let him think about hijacking the toy plane with the red star on its flank, even assuming he knew how to fly it-which he didn’t.

The pilot was climbing out of the plane, putting his booted foot in the stirrup on the side of the dusty fuselage below his seat. His boot, his seat? No, Jager saw: a blond braid stuck out under the back of the flying helmet, and the cheeks under those goggles (now shoved up onto the top of the flying helmet) had never known-or needed-a razor. Even baggy flying clothes could not long conceal a distinctly unmasculine shape.

Schultz saw the same thing at the same time. His long jaw worked as if he were about to spit, but he had sense enough to remember where he was and think better of it. Disgust showed in his voice instead: “One of their damned girl fliers, sir”

“So she is.” The pilot was coming their way. Jager made the best of a situation worse than he really cared for: “Rather a pretty one, too.”

Ludmila Gorbunova skimmed over the steppe, looking for Lizards or anything else interesting. No matter what she found, she wouldn’t be able to report back to her base unless the emergency was great enough to make passing along her knowledge more important than coming home. Planes that used radios in flight all too often stopped flying immediately thereafter.

She was far enough south to start getting alert-and worried-when she spotted a crowd around a collective farm’s core buildings at a time when most of the kolkhozniks should have been in the fields. That in itself wasn’t so unusual, but then she caught a glint of light reflecting up from a couple of helmets. As the angle at which she viewed them shifted, she saw they were blackish gray, not the dun color she had expected.

Germans. Her lip twisted. What the Soviet government had to say about Germans had flip-flopped several times over the past few years. They’d gone from being bloodthirsty fascist beasts to peace-loving partners in the struggle against imperialism and then, on June 22, 1941, back to being beasts again, this time with a vengeance.

Ludmila heard the endless droning propaganda, noted when it changed, and changed her thinking accordingly. People who couldn’t do that had a way of disappearing. Of course, for the past year the Germans themselves had been worse than any propaganda about them.

She wished that meant no one in the Soviet Union had anything good to think about the Nazis. The measure of Hitler’s damnation was that imperialist England and the United States joined the Soviets in the struggle against him. The measure of the Soviet Union’s damnation (though Ludmila did not think of it in those terms) was that so many Soviet citizens-Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Byelornssian, Tatars, Cossacks, even Great Russians-collaborated with Hitler against Moscow.