Bombs Away (25 page)

Do not call up that which you cannot put down.
The really terrifying thing was, it could have been worse. And, had the war waited another few years—maybe two, maybe four—it would have been worse. Incalculably worse.

No, not quite incalculably. The physicists who were hard at work on the next generation of bombs worked those calculations as a matter of course. They had to. That was part of their job. Making the calculations mean anything to somebody who didn't take a slide rule to bed instead of a Teddy bear, though…That was a different story.

The biggest ordinary bombs the limeys dropped from one of their Lancasters in the last war weighed ten tons. The A-bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the last war packed the punch of ten or twenty
thousand
tons of TNT. So did the ones both sides were throwing around now. That was a hell of a big step up, the equivalent of putting on thousandfold boots.

And another step, every bit as big, lay right around the corner. So the boys with the high foreheads and the funny haircuts kept telling Truman, anyhow. The kinks lay in the engineering, not the physics. And the engineering, they assured him, was the easy part.

They'd convinced him. He believed them, even when believing them scared the living bejesus out of him. Because they talked glibly about bombs with blasts worth not thousands but millions of tons of high explosives.

What could you do with a few bombs like that? Blow not just a city but a medium-sized state clean off the map. Or, if you happened to drop them in Europe instead, the map might be missing a country or two.

Truman muttered to himself. He knew Senators who kept a bottle of bourbon—or, if they came from the Northeast, a bottle of scotch—in their desk drawers to lubricate the thought processes and shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous constituents. He'd never been a teetotaler, not even during Prohibition. But he'd always been clear that he had hold of the bottle. The bottle didn't have hold of him.

He'd always been clear about that, and he'd always been proud of it, too. Now he felt like getting blotto. He was presiding over a disaster, a catastrophe, a horror beyond the eldritch dreams of H.P. Lovecraft. The world wouldn't recover for years and years, if it ever did.

And yet…And yet…The USA and the USSR were only doing the best, or the worst, they could with the halfway tools they had right this minute. Give them a few of the scientists' new toys, and what would they come up with?

The end of the world. That was how it looked to the President. Life would go on after this war, however it turned out. After the next one, if they used the new goodies?

Einstein had said, or was supposed to have said, that he didn't know what the weapons of World War III would be like, but that he did know what they would use to fight World War IV. Rocks. What worried Truman was, Einstein might have been looking on the bright side of things.

Had the bushy-haired physicist really said anything so cynical? It didn't sound like him. Truman was tempted to pick up the phone, call the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and find out. When you were President of the United States, you could satisfy whatever whim you happened to have.

You could. Truman suspected Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man of more than a few whims and whimsies, would have. As for himself, he refrained. His hard Midwestern frugality was as much a part of him as his bifocals—more, because he'd had it longer. So was the relentless drive to get on with the job.

He muttered again, this time with the kind of language he'd used while his battery was throwing shells at the Huns during the First World War. Scientists here told him the new bombs, the end-of-the-world bombs, were coming soon.

Joe Stalin, damn his black, stubborn heart, had scientists working for him, too. Good ones. He wouldn't have been so dangerous if they were a pack of thumb-fingered clods. Hitler hadn't expected the Russians to make such good tanks, or so many of them. Truman hadn't expected Stalin to pull the Bull bomber or the MiG-15 out of his hat.

And nobody had expected the Russians to make their own atom bombs so fast. General Groves, who'd ramrodded the Manhattan Project through to its triumphant completion, hadn't figured Stalin would learn to build an A-bomb for twenty-five years, if he ever did. Which proved…what? That Groves made a better engineer and manager of engineers than a prophet.

No doubt those Soviet big brains were working just as hard for their boss as their American counterparts were here. They might be working even harder. Stalin, like Hitler, made unfortunate things happen to people who didn't satisfy him.

Truman muttered one more time. Even assuming the United States won this war—even assuming a war like this was winnable—what was he supposed to do about Russia, or with it? It was too big to conquer and occupy in any ordinary sense of the words. Napoleon had discovered that; despite far greater resources at his disposal, so had the
Führer.

You couldn't just leave it alone, either. When you did, the Russians got frisky. That was bad enough before, when all they exported was world revolution. Atomic bombs gave the question new urgency—but, dammit, no new answers.

IHOR SHEVCHENKO WAS NOT
a religious man—not an outwardly religious man, anyhow. He'd lived his whole life through the Soviet Union's aggressive campaigns against supernatural belief of every kind. Only a man with the urge to become a martyr or one with an insatiable curiosity about what a gulag looked like from the inside could be outwardly religious in this day and age. Assuming there was any difference between those two types.

Things had loosened up a little during the war against the Nazis. With the country's fate in the balance, Stalin had decided he'd be a Russian patriot first and a good Communist only later. If believing helped people kill Germans, he was all for it.

If you looked at things the right way, that was funny. Stalin was no more Russian than Hitler was. The thick accent with which he spoke Russian showed he was a Georgian, a blackass from the Caucasus. Again, though, if you were smart enough to see the joke there, you needed to be smart enough to know better than to tell it to anybody else.

After victory, the powers that be seemed willing to let babushkas and a few old men keep going to services without getting into trouble. Even a younger woman might get away with it, though it would be noted and wouldn't look good on her record. A man of Ihor's age who stuck his nose inside a church would still catch it. Since going with the current was always easier and safer than swimming against it, that was what he did.

All of which meant he had no real idea how to pray, only bits he remembered from when he was a little boy. For the first time in his life, he found himself regretting that. He wanted to prostrate himself before the icon of some mournful-eyed, white-bearded saint and give the holy man reverence for not letting Anya go to Kiev and get caught in the Americans' atomic fire. He wanted to light candles in front of the icon to show his gratitude.

When he told his wife as much, she said, “Don't be an idiot.” It wasn't so much that she was a New Soviet Woman, someone for whom religion was a relic of the primitive past. She was, however, a practical woman. Proving as much, she continued, “Do you want to bring the Chekists down on your head?”

They both spoke in whispers, in the darkness of their cramped room in the middle of the night. Such talk was safe then if it ever was. Sometimes, of course, it never was. Ihor answered, “A lot of them went up in smoke along with the rest of Kiev.”

“A lot of them, sure, but not all of them. You can bet on that—not all of them,” Anya said. “Can you imagine us without people watching to keep other people in line?”

Ihor shook his head. He and his wife both usually called the Soviet secret police by the name the Tsars' secret police had used. That said everything that needed saying about the permanence of secret policemen in this part of the world. Even if the Soviet Union stopped being the Soviet Union and for some reason went back to being Russia, whoever was in charge would use them to keep an eye on things. Unless, of course, he happened to be a secret policeman himself.

Anya responded to the motion, saying, “Well, there you are.”

“
Tak.
Here I am.” Only after the word was out of his mouth did he realize he'd said
yes
in Ukrainian. The language he'd learned from his mother and father was for moments like this—and for when he wanted to seem like a clodhopper to someone in authority trying to give him a hard time. Otherwise, he used Russian. He went on, “Here you are, too. I'm glad of it.” He squeezed her.

She squeaked in surprise. “So am I,” she said when she got her breath back. “If I hadn't come down with the sniffles—”

“If God hadn't sent you the sniffles,” Ihor broke in.

But his wife only laughed. “Have you got any idea how silly that sounds?” she said.

He listened to himself. “It does, doesn't it?” he said, self-conscious and embarrassed at the same time. You thought about God—if you thought about God—as throwing thunderbolts around, not giving somebody a head cold.

He kissed her. This time, her arms tightened around him. Things went on from there. When you weren't doing it for the first time, messing around wasn't embarrassing. You didn't run the risk of saying something foolish, the way he had a moment before. In fact, you didn't have to say anything at all. Ihor liked that fine.

The other thing making love let Ihor do was show Anya how glad he was that she hadn't gone to Kiev. He'd told her, of course, told her over and over, but this seemed so much better. Words weren't enough for some things. He'd heard once from somebody—maybe during the war; he couldn't remember now—that writers said the trick was showing readers things, not telling them about things. Ihor barely had his letters, but that made sense to him.

Losing Kiev meant more to the collective farm than fewer visits from the MGB. It also meant gasoline didn't come out to the
kolkhoz
for the spring plowing. At some collectives, progressive and advanced, that would have been a disaster. Here, it was an annoyance that cost people extra work, but no more. Horse-drawn plows sat slowly rusting in a barn. After the Red Army reconquered the area from the Hitlerites, plowing with horses again rather than people had seemed the height of modernity.

One night near the end of March, just before plunging headlong into exhausted slumber, Ihor did think to ask Anya, “What will we do with our grain once we harvest it? We sent it in to Kiev, but Kiev doesn't need so much any more.”

“No, it doesn't,” Anya agreed. Nobody knew how many people had died in the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, not to the nearest ten thousand—maybe not to the nearest hundred thousand. Or if anyone did know, he wasn't saying.

More people still had fled the city. The
kolkhozniks
had herded refugees away. Some of the injuries those poor bastards sported were ordinary, the kind Ihor had seen over and over in the last war. The burns, though…He hadn't seen anything like that before, except a couple of luckless men who wound up on the wrong end of a flamethrower. But these didn't seem to want to heal. Raw, oozing meat…

With an effort of will, he pulled his mind away from all that. “So what
do
we do?” he asked.

“I don't know,” his wife said. “We won't have to worry about it till fall. By then, I'm sure somebody will have come around to give us orders.”

“I suppose so,” Ihor said around a yawn. All the same, he found time to wonder some more before sleep dragged him down. The people who gave orders like that would have come from Kiev before the Americans lashed it with fire. If they didn't come from Kiev, wouldn't they come from Moscow? When you got right down to it, in the end everything came from Moscow.

If it could. The Americans had desecrated Moscow along with Kiev. They hadn't killed Comrade Stalin; he still spoke on Radio Moscow. But Ihor had no way of knowing whether Radio Moscow still came from its namesake city, or from somewhere like Magnitogorsk or Irkutsk. He did know Yuri Levitan and the other regular broadcasters weren't reading the news on the radio any more. He couldn't prove that meant anything, but it probably did.

The people who were reading the news on the radio warned against going into the ruins of cities struck by atomic bombs. The warning was twofold. The authorities declared looting a crime punishable by summary execution—a bullet in the back of the neck. And they warned of poisonous radioactivity lingering in the air and water and on the ground.

Maybe the radio told the truth. Maybe it served up a fresh helping of government lies. Ihor didn't try to find out himself. It wasn't as if he hadn't looted in Soviet, Polish, and German cities retaken from the Nazis. When you were in the Red Army, you were supposed to be your own quartermaster sergeant. Anything over and above keeping yourself fed was a bonus.

But plundering Kiev felt different to him. He couldn't have said why, but it did. Not everybody on the
kolkhoz
thought the way he did. People pedaled off, saying they wanted to see what the ruins looked like. If they came back with more than they had when they set out, how could you prove it?

Then again, sometimes they didn't come back. A
kolkhoznik
named Orest Makhno rode away to see what he could see. That was the last anyone at the collective farm saw of him. He might have come across an enormous cache of goldpieces stamped with the shaggy visage of one Tsar or another, enough to set himself up as a prince of thieves. If you wanted to look on the bright side of things, that was how they would look to you.

More likely, though, he'd met a stocky, unsmiling man in a bad suit, one who'd heard enough protestations of innocence to laugh at them or ignore them altogether. And, more likely, Orest had found nine millimeters' worth of answers: as much as he would need for the rest of his life.

Cade Curtis cradled his M-1 carbine. They'd congratulated him for making it from the Chosin Reservoir to the UN lines far to the south. They'd asked him how he'd done it, and taken careful notes as he spun his story. Fair enough. Knowing what had worked for him might let them give other soldiers in trouble tips that would really help.

Afterwards, they'd promoted him to first lieutenant. They'd given him a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And they'd given him not just a platoon but a company of his own. Officers were scarce in Korea, officers with combat experience even scarcer.

The war here ground on just the same, even if the wider world, distracted by atoms and mushroom clouds, hardly bothered looking this way any more. Despite the bombs that had fallen on the Manchurian cities, the Red Chinese kept throwing as many troops into the fight as they could. And the North Koreans, though reduced to rifles and submachine guns and homemade grenades, went on fighting, too. They were bastards, but they were brave bastards.

Cade wished he had a Russian-made submachine gun himself. Having lugged one most of the way south, he'd come to like it better than the weapon with which the USA armed its officers. The Russian guns were more reliable than his carbine, more compact, and had a much higher rate of fire. They didn't jam in cold weather. His piece looked like a rifle. Unfortunately, it didn't perform like one—or like a submachine gun. It combined the worst of both worlds.

There was a loophole in front of the trench. You could, if you were so inclined, examine the enemy positions up ahead through it without exposing your whole head. Cade Curtis wasn't so inclined. He figured some sniper with a scope-sighted Russian rifle was watching it. If the son of a bitch saw an eyeball looking back at him, the family of the eyeball's owner would get a Deeply Regrets wire from the Department of Defense.

So Curtis looked up over another stretch of the entrenchment. He showed more of himself, but only for a couple of seconds. Then he ducked out of sight again. Nothing looked to be stirring. All he saw was snow and dirt and rusting wire. That proved only so much, of course. The Red Chinese and North Koreans had learned plenty about the fine art of camouflage from their Russian instructors. But you did what you could. In this imperfect world, that was all you could do. This imperfect world's weather worked the same way. The calendar said it was spring, but nobody'd told the countryside.

“All quiet, sir?” Staff Sergeant Lou Klein asked. He was about forty, with graying whiskers and sagging jowls. The Germans hadn't killed him in North Africa or Italy, though the ribbon for the Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters said they'd tried hard enough. He could have run the company better than Cade, but he'd never bothered going to OCS.

“Looks that way,” Cade said. “I mean, you can't tell with the Chinks, but I didn't see anything stirring.”

Klein lit a Camel. “Mind if I look for myself?”

“Be my guest.” If the career noncom thought Cade would get huffy about the question, he had another think coming. Curtis did say, “You may not want to do it right where I did, though.”