Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance Read online

  “Right” Doc and Jimmy set Mutt down where he wouldn’t be in the way of other stretcher parties carrying in the wounded. Doc came back with a syringe, a glass jar partly filled with a clear, oily liquid, and a clean rag. He jabbed Mutt in the backside with the needle.

  “Ow!” Mutt said. “Why didn’t you give me the ether first?”

  “Mississippi, if you can grouse about a needle after you took a bullet in the cheek, I think you’re probably going to live,” the colored doctor told him. He opened the jar, soaked the rag, and held it to Daniels’ face. The stink of the ether made Mutt cough and choke. He tried to pull away, but the doctor’s hand at the back of his head wouldn’t let him. His vision got frayed and fuzzy and faded out like a movie.

  When he woke up, his mouth was dry as a salt mine and tasted like a latrine. He hardly noticed; he had a headache worse than any he’d ever got from moonshine, and that was saying something. His backside felt as if an alligator had taken a good bite out of it, too.

  “Doc?” Mutt’s voice was a hoarse croak.

  “The doctors are busy,” an orderly said. “Can I get you some water?”

  “Oh, Lord, I wish you would,” Mutt answered. The orderly sounded like some kind of pansy, but if he’d bring some water, Mutt didn’t care what he did in his spare time. He shook his head, which made it hurt worse. A nigger doctor and a pansy orderly, colored troops fighting side by side with white men . . . what the hell was the world coming to?

  The orderly brought not only water but a couple of little white pills with BAYER on them. “I found some aspirin,” he said. “It may do your head a little good. You probably don’t feel real well right now.”

  “Buddy, you ain’t kidding,” Mutt answered. His hand trembled when he held it out for the aspirin tablets. He grimaced in self-reproach. “You’d think I had the DTs or somethin’.”

  “You’re still woozy from the anesthetic,” the orderly said. “That happens to everybody, not—” He shut up and held out the water to Daniels.

  Not just to old geezers like you: Mutt could fill in the blanks for himself. He didn’t care; what with his head and his ventilated backside, he felt as elderly as he probably looked. He popped the aspirins into his mouth and washed them down with some water. It probably came straight out of Lake Michigan; Chicago didn’t have running water, or even guaranteed clean water, any more. But you had to go on drinking, even if you did get the runs now and again.

  “Thank you, friend,” he said with a sigh. “That was mighty kind of you, even if I do wish it was a bottle of beer instead.”

  “Oh, so do I!” the orderly exclaimed, which made Mutt blink; when he thought about queers—which he didn’t spend a lot of time doing?he pictured them sipping wine, not knocking back a beer. The fellow studied Mutt’s bandages, which made him shift nervously from side to side. Just because he had to lie on his stomach didn’t mean . . . Then the orderly said, “You’re probably one of the few people who’s glad—for a while, anyhow—the toilets don’t work. With that wound, squatting over a bucket will hurt you a lot less than sitting down would.”

  “That’s true,” Daniels said. “Hadn’t much thought about it yet, but you’re right.” He was beginning to feel a little more like himself. Maybe the aspirin was starting to work, or maybe the ether cobwebs were going away.

  “You have trouble or need help, you just sing out for me,” the orderly said. “My name is Archie. Don’t be shy, I don’t mind—it’s why I’m here.”

  I bet you don’t mind. But Mutt kept his mouth shut again. Like the colored doctor, this guy was doing his job. He was entitled to enjoy it—if he did—so long as he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Mutt sighed. The world got crazier day by day, though he wished it hadn’t got crazy enough to shoot him in the ass. “Thanks, Archie. If I have to take you upon that, I will.”

  Sweat ran down George Bagnall’s face. When summer finally got to Pskov, it didn’t fool about. The grass on the hills outside of town was turning yellow as the sun. The forests of pine and fir to the east and south, though, remained as dark and gloomy in summer as at any other time of year.

  A lot of German troops in Pskov went around bare-chested to get a suntan. The Russians didn’t go in for that. The ones who weren’t in uniform and were lucky enough to have a change of clothes switched to lighter, baggier tunics and trousers. Bagnall’s RAF uniform wasn’t much more than tatters these days. He mostly wore Russian civilian clothes, with a Red Army officer’s cap to give him a semblance of authority.

  As happened on account of that, somebody came up to him and asked him something in Russian. He got the gist—which way to the new stables?—and answered in his own halting Russian. “Ah!” the fellow said. “Nemets?”

  “Nyet,” Bagnall answered firmly. “Anglichani.” You never could be sure how a Russian would react if he thought you were a Jerry—better to set him right straightaway.

  “Ah, Anglichani. Khorosho,” the Russian said: Englishman—good. He rattled off something Bagnall thought was thanks for the directions and hurried off toward the street to which Bagnall had pointed.

  Bagnall headed on toward the market square. As a fighting man, he got plenty of black bread, the cabbage soup called shchi, and borscht, along with the occasional bit of hen or mutton or pork. The Russians ate and thrived, the Germans ate and didn’t complain—the winter before the Lizards came, they’d been eating horses that froze to death in the snow. Bagnall wanted something better, or at least different; he wanted to see if any of the babushkas would part with some eggs.

  The old and middle-aged women sat in rows behind rickety tables or blankets on which they’d laid out what they had for sale. With their solid, blocky figures and the outlines of their heads smoothed and rounded by the scarves they all wore, they reminded Bagnall of nothing so much as figures from those cleverly carved, multilayered sets of Russian wooden dolls. The immobile stolidity with which they sat only enhanced the illusion.

  No one was displaying any eggs, but that didn’t necessarily signify. He’d found out good stuff often got held back, either for some special customer or just to keep it from being pilfered. He walked up to one of the babushkas and said, “Dobry den.” The woman stared at him, expressionless. “Yaïchnitsa?”

  She didn’t bother returning his good-day. She didn’t even bother scowling at him; she just looked through him as if he didn’t exist. It was one of the most effortlessly annihilating glances he’d ever received. He felt himself wilting as she let him know she didn’t have any eggs, and that even if she had had some eggs, she wouldn’t have had any for a German.

  Before the Lizards came, before the partisans emerged from the forest to reclaim a share of Pskov, she never would have dared to act so to a German, either. If she’d had eggs, she would either have turned them over or hidden them so well the Nazis would never had suspected they were there. As it was, he got the notion she was just taunting him.

  “Nyet nemets,” he said, as he had before. “Anglichani.”

  “Anglichani?” She gave forth with a spate of Russian, much too quick for him to follow in detail. What he did get, though, suggested that that made a difference. She plucked a few sorry-looking potatoes out of a bowl—you’d have to have been starving to want them. Underneath lay more equally unprepossessing spuds—and, nestled among them, several eggs.

  “Skolko?” he asked. “How much?”

  She wanted 500 rubles apiece, or 750 marks. German money had been falling against its Soviet equivalent ever since Bagnall arrived in Pskov. The Soviet Union and Germany were still going concerns, but the Lizards in Poland and to the south of Pskov screened the city away from much contact with other German forces. The Soviet presence, on the other hand, was growing. That might lead to trouble one day, as if the Reds and the Nazis didn’t already have enough trouble getting along.

  “Bozhemoi!” Bagnall shouted, loud enough to draw glances from babushkas several places away. He’d learned you’d best forget all you’d ever kn
own of British reserve if you wanted to get anywhere dickering with Russians. If you stayed polite, they thought you were weak and they rode roughshod over you.

  He knew he mixed his cases and numbers in a way that would have got him a caning in sixth-form Latin, but he didn’t care. This wasn’t school; this was the real world. However inelegant his Russian might have been, it worked, and he didn’t think the babushka was any budding Pushkin, either. He ended up buying three eggs for seven hundred rubles, which wasn’t half bad.

  “Nyet anglichani,” the babushka said, pointing at him. “Zhid.”

  Bagnall remembered an old, beautifully dressed Jewish man he’d seen walking slowly along a Paris street with a six-pointed yellow star with the word Juif on it sewn to his jacket pocket. The expression of dignified misery that man had worn would go with him to his grave. But the sneer in the babushka’s voice told him something of how others had thought it a good idea to make the old Jew wear a yellow star.

  “Zhid?” Bagnall said quietly. “Spasebo. Thank you.” The babushka’s gray eyes went blank and empty as a couple of stones. Bagnall took the eggs and headed for the house he shared with Ken Embry and Jerome Jones. He hoped he wouldn’t run into Tatiana the sniper.

  A buzz in the sky made him turn as he walked past a grassy park on whose greensward sheep grazed under the watchful eyes of Red Army and Wehrmacht guards. After a moment, he spotted an approaching plane: not a Lizard fighter, lean and graceful as a shark and a millionfold more deadly, but a human-built machine that hardly looked as if it belonged in the same sky as Lizard aircraft or even those of the RAF.

  It was, nonetheless, the first human-built airplane—and, not coincidentally, the first plane not loaded with ordnance intended to punch his ticket—he’d seen in a long time. That alone sent his spirits soaring. The Red Army guards raised a cheer when they spied the red stars painted on the wings and fuselage and tailplane.

  The Russian aircraft was coming into Pskov at treetop height. At first Bagnall thought that was just because it skimmed the ground to give the Lizards a harder time spotting it. Then, as it lowered its flaps, he realized the pilot intended to bring it down right in the park.

  “He’s out of his bloody mind,” Bagnall muttered. But the pilot wasn’t. The biplane wasn’t going very fast and wasn’t very heavy; it rolled to a stop with better than a hundred yards of meadow to spare. It even managed to avoid running over a sheep or butchering one with its prop as it taxied. Bagnall trotted toward it with the vague notion of congratulating whoever had done the flying.

  First out of the aircraft was a tall, skinny fellow with a thick red beard. He wore a field-gray tunic, but Bagnall would have guessed him for a German even without it—his face was too long and beaky to belong to most Russians.

  Sure enough, he started yelling in German: “Come on, you dumb-heads, let’s get this stinking airplane under cover before the Lizards spot it and blow it to hell and gone.”

  The pilot stood up and shouted support for the Nazi. Bagnall didn’t follow all of it, but he knew maskirovka meant camouflage. That wasn’t what made him stop and stare, though. He’d heard the Reds used female pilots, but he hadn’t more than half believed it till now.

  Yet there she was. She took off her leather flying helmet, and hair the color of ripe wheat spilled down almost to her shoulders. Her face was wide and rather flat, her skin fair but tanned except around the eyes, where her goggles shielded it from the sun. The eyes themselves were intensely blue.

  She saw him and the officer’s cap he was wearing, climbed down out of the biplane, and walked up to him. Saluting, she said, “Comrade, I am Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, reporting to Pskov as ordered with the German sergeant Georg Schultz, a tank gunner and highly capable mechanic.”

  Fumblingly, Bagnall explained he wasn’t really a Red Army officer, and who he really was. Without much hope, he added, “Vuy gavoritye po-angliski?”

  “No, I don’t speak English,” she replied in Russian, but then she did switch languages: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich kann Deutsch ein wenig sprechen.”

  “I speak a little German also. Perhaps more than a little now,” he answered in the same tongue.

  Hearing German, Georg Schultz came up and greeted Bagnall with a stiff-arm salute and a loud, “Heil Hitler.”

  Bugger Hitler, was the first thought that came to Bagnall’s mind. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, he and Schultz—and, for that matter, Schultz and Ludmila Gorbunova—would have been at each other’s throats. The Germans made even more uncomfortable allies than the Russians.

  Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova looked pained. “He is a dedicated fascist, as you hear. But he has also done very good work for the Red Air Force. With tools in his hand, he is a genius.”

  Bagnall studied Schultz. “He must be,” he said slowly. If the Nazi hadn’t been bloody good, the Communists would have got rid of him on general principles. That they hadn’t was probably a measure of their own desperate situation.

  Men came running up to drag the biplane as far in among the trees over to one side of the park as its wings would permit. Others draped it with camouflage netting. Before long, it had all but disappeared.

  “That may do,” Ludmila said, casting a critical eye its way. She turned back to George Bagnall. “I think I am glad to meet you. You English here in Pskov, you are—” She ran out of German, then tried a couple of Russian words Bagnall didn’t understand. Finally he got the idea she meant something like arbitrators.

  “Yes, that is right,” Bagnall answered in German. “When the Wehrmacht commander and the partisan brigadiers cannot agree, they bring their arguments for us to decide.”

  “What if they don’t like what you decide?” Georg Schultz asked. “Why should they listen to a pack of damned Englishmen?” He stared at Bagnall with calculated insolence.

  “Because they were killing each other here before they started listening to us,” Bagnall answered. Schultz looked like one very rugged customer, but Bagnall took a step toward him anyhow. If he wanted a scrap, he could have one. The flight engineer went on, “We do need to stick together against the Lizards, you know.”

  “That is part of why the two of us were sent here,” Ludmila Gorbunova said. “We are German and Russian, but we have worked well with each other.”

  Schultz leered at her. Bagnall wondered if she meant they were sleeping together. He hoped not. She wasn’t as pretty as Tatiana, but on three minutes’ acquaintance she seemed much nicer. Then she noticed Schultz’s slobbering stare, and answered it with one that would have made any longsuffering English barmaid proud.

  It also made the world seem a much more cheerful place to George Bagnall “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you to the Krom, where both sides have their headquarters.” Ludmila Gorbunova smiled at him as she nodded. He felt like bursting into song.

  7

  “Do you know what one of the troubles with Big Uglies is?” Atvar said to his English-speaking interpreter as they waited for the emissary from the United States to be shown into the conference chamber.

  “They have so many, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter answered. “Which in particular are you thinking of today?”

  “They are untidy creatures,” Atvar said with distaste. “Their clothes flap about them like loose skins, the tufts they grow on their heads either flap about, too, or else are held down with enough oil to lubricate a landcruiser engine, and they spew water from their hides instead of panting, as proper people should. They are disgusting.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter said gravely.

  Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, came on one of the communications screens. “Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevite from the United States is here. I remind you, his name is Cordell Hull; his title is Secretary of State. Before we came, he was the chief aide in dealing with other Big Ugly empires for his not-empire’s leader.”

  “Send him in,” Atvar said.

  Cordell Hull looked uncomfortable in w
eightlessness, but made a good game show of pretending he wasn’t. Even for a Big Ugly, he was long, though not especially wide. The tuft of fuzz on top of his head was almost white. Atvar knew that meant he was aging. So did the wrinkles and sags in his integument. He was not attractive, but then, to Atvar’s eyes, no Big Ugly was.

  After the polite greetings customary even between enemies, Atvar plunged straight in: “I demand from you the immediate return of the traitorous shiplord Straha, who fled to you in violation of all law.”

  Cordell Hull spoke a single sharp word: “No.” The translator indicated that that was a negative; Atvar had suspected as much. Hull went on at some length afterwards: “The United States does not give back people who come to us seeking shelter. My land is made up of people who came seeking freedom. We welcomed them; we did not turn them away.”

  “You welcomed criminals?” Atvar said, and then, in an aside to the interpreter. “It does not surprise me a bit, though you needn’t tell him that.”

  “We did,” Hull answered defiantly. “Many things that were called crimes were really nothing more than disagreeing with the leaders of the lands they left.” His eyes, though sunk deep in his head like any Tosevite’s, bored into Atvar’s with disconcerting keenness.

  The fleetlord said, “Do you not call stealing a shuttlecraft a crime? Straha is a robber as well as a traitor. Is your not-empire also in the habit of keeping stolen goods? We demand the shuttlecraft’s return, too.”

  “Go ahead and demand,” Hull replied. “In war, if one side is generous enough to help the other, it doesn’t get its toys back.”

  “In war, the side that is losing is usually wise enough to deal politely with the side that is winning,” Atvar said. “So the ancient records of the Race tell us, at any rate; the Race has never lost a war against another species.”