Tilting The Balance (36 page)

would discover she’d picked a short trip into big trouble.

Somehow, though, she did not think Sholudenko, for all his cynicism, would betray her after giving her leave to speak.

Maybe that was naive on her part, but she’d already said enough to let him ruin her if that was what he had in mind, and so she said, “It’s terrible that our own Soviet government has earned the hatred of so many of its people. Any ruling class will have those who work to betray it, but so many?”

“Terrible, yes,” Sholudenko said. “Surprising, no.” He ticked off points on his fingers like an academician or a political commissar. “Consider, Comrade Pilot: a hundred years ago, Russia was entirely mired in the feudal means of production. Even at the time of the October Revolution, capitalism was far less entrenched here than in Germany or England. Is this not so?”

“It is so,” Ludmila said.

“Very well, then. Consider also the significance of that fact. Suddenly the revolution had occurred – in a world that hated it, a world that would crush it if it could. You are too young to remember the British, the Americans, the Japanese who invaded us, but you wilt have learned of them.”

“Yes, but-”

Sholudenko held up a forefinger. “Let me finish, please. Comrade Stalin saw we would be destroyed if we could not match our enemies in the quantity of goods we turn out. Anything and anyone standing in the way of that had to go. Thus the pact with the Hitlerites: not only did it buy us almost two years’ time, but also land from the Finns, on the Baltic, and from the Poles and Rumanians to serve as a shield when the fascist murderers did attack us.”

All that shield had been lost within a few weeks of the Nazi invasion. Most of the people in the lands the Soviet Union had annexed joined the Hitlerites in casting out the Communist Party, which spoke volumes on how much they’d loved falling under Soviet control.

But did that matter? Sholudenko had a point. Without ruthless preparation, the revolution of the workers and peasants would surely have been crushed by reactionary forces, either during the civil war or at German hands.

“Unquestionably, the Soviet state has the right and duty to survive,” Ludmila said. Sholudenko nodded approvingly. But the pilot went on, “But does the state have a right to survive in such a way as to make so many of its people prefer the vicious Germans to its own representatives?”

If she hadn’t still been shaky from flipping her airplane, she wouldn’t have said anything so foolish to a probable
NKVD
man, even “abstractly.” She looked around the fields through which they were slogging. No one was in sight. If Sholudenko tried to place her under arrest… well, she carried a 9mm Tokarev pistol in a holster on her belt. The comrade might have a tragic accident. If he did, she’d do her best to get his precious pictures back to the proper authorities.

If he contemplated arresting her, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he said, “You are to be congratulated, Comrade Pilot; this is a question most would not think to pose.” It was a question most would not dare to pose, but that was another matter. Sholudenko went on, “The answer is yes. Surely you have been trained in the historical use of the dialectic?”

“Of course,” Ludmila said indignantly. “Historical progress comes through the conflict of two opposing theses and their resulting synthesis, which eventually generates its own antithesis and causes the struggle to recur.”

“Congratulations again – you are well instructed.

We stand in the historical process at the step before true communism. Do you doubt that Marx’s ideal will be fulfilled in our children’s time, or our grandchildren’s at the latest?”

“If we survive, I do not doubt it,” Ludmila said.

“There is that,” Sholudenko agreed, dry as usual. “I believe we should have beaten the Hitlerites in the end. The Lizards are another matter; Party dialecticians still labor to put them into proper perspective. Comrade Stalin has yet to speak definitively on the subject. But that is beside the point – you might have asked the same question had the Lizards never come, da?”

“Yes,” Ludmila admitted, wishing she’d never asked the question at all.

Sholudenko said, “If we abandon the hope of our descendants’ living under true communism, the historical synthesis will show that reactionary forces were stronger than those of progress and revolution. Whatever we do to prevent that is justified, no matter how hard it may be for some at present.”

By everything she’d learned in school, his logic was airtight, however much it went against the grain. She knew she ought to shut up; he’d already shown more patience with her than she had any right to expect. But she said, “What if, in seeking to move the balance our way, we are so harsh that we tilt it against us?”

“This, too, is a risk which must be considered,” he said. “Are you a Party member, Comrade Pilot? You argue most astutely.”

“No,” Ludmila answered. Then, having come so far, she took one step further: “And you, Comrade – could you be from the People’s Commissariat for the Interior?”

“Yes, I could be from the
NKVD
,” Sholudenko answered evenly. “I could be any number of things,

but that one will do.” He studied her. “You needed courage, to ask such a question of me.”

That last step had almost been one step too far, he meant. Picking her words with care, Ludmila said, “Everything that’s happened over the past year and a half – it makes one think about true meanings.”

“This I cannot deny,” Sholudenko said. “But-to get back to matters more important than my individual case-the dialectic makes me believe our cause will triumph in the end, even against the Lizards.”

Faith in the future had kept the Soviets fighting even when things looked blackest, when Moscow seemed about to fall late in 1941. But against the Lizards-”We need more than the dialectic,” Ludmila said. “We need more guns and planes and tanks and rockets, and better ones, too.”

“This is also true,” Sholudenko said. “Yet we also need the half of imperialist invaders, whether from Germany or the depths of space. The dialectic predicts that on the whole we shall have their support.”

Instead of answering, Ludmila stooped by the edge of a little pond that lay alongside the field through which she and Sholudenko were walking. She cupped her hands, scooped up water, and scrubbed mud from her face. She pulled up dead grass and did her best to scrape her leather flying suit clean, too, but that was a bigger job. Eventually the mud there would dry and she could knock most of it off. Till then she’d just have to put up with it. Plenty of foot soldiers had gone through worse.

She straightened up, pointed to the pack on Nikifor Sholudenko’s back. “And for those who choose to ignore the teaching of the dialectic-”

“Da. Comrade Pilot. For those folk, we have people like me.” Sholudenko smiled broadly. His teeth were small and white and even. They reminded Ludmila of a wolfs fangs just the same.

He felt naked with just a hole in the ground for cover. Back in France during the Great War, he’d been able to dive into a deep dugout when German shells came calling. If you were unlucky, of course, a shell would come right in after you, but most of the time a dugout was pretty safe.

No dugouts here. No proper trench lines, either, not really. This war, unlike the last one, moved too fast to let people build elaborate field fortifications.

“Plenty of foxholes, though,” Matt muttered. The local landscape looked like pictures of craters on the moon. The Lizards had taken Randolph last summer in their drive on Chicago. Patton’s men had taken it back in the pincers movement that brought them into Bloomington, six or eight miles north. Now the Lizards were moving again. If Randolph fell, they’d be well positioned to drive back into Bloomington.

Yet another shell crashed into the ground, close enough to lift Daniels into the air and fling him back to earth as if body-slammed by a wrestler. Dirt pattered down on him. His lungs ached from the blast when he drew in a shaky breath.

“Might as well be between Washington and Richmond, the way we’re goin’ back and forth here,” Daniels said. Both his grandfathers had fought for the South in the War Between the States; as a small boy, he’d listened avidly to the tales they told, tales that grew taller with each passing year. No matter how tall the tales got, though, France and now this convinced him his grandfathers hadn’t had it as tough as they’d thought.

More shells whistled overhead, these southbound from Bloomington. Mutt hoped they were registered on the Lizard guns, but they probably weren’t; the Lizards outranged American artillery. Giving Lizard infantry a taste of what he was going through wasn’t the worst thing in the world, either. A flight of prop-driven fighters screamed by at treetop height. Mutt touched his helmet in salute to courage; pilots who flew against the Lizards didn’t last long.

Once the planes zipped out of sight, he didn’t spot them again. He hoped that meant they were returning to base by a different route instead of getting knocked down. “No way to find out for sure,” he said.

He abruptly stopped being interested, too, because Lizard shelling picked up again. He embraced the ground like a lover, pressed his face against her cool, damp neck.

Some of the blasts that shook him where he lay were explosions of the same sort he’d known in France. Others had a sound he’d first met retreating toward Chicago: a smaller bang, followed by a pattering as of hail.

“Y’all want to look, sharp,” he called to the scattered members of his squad. “They’re throwin’ out them goddamn little mines again.” He hated those little baseball-sized blue explosives. Once a regular shell went off, at least it was gone. But the Lizards’ fancy ammo scattered potential mutilation over what seemed like half an acre and left it sitting there waiting to happen. “Instant goddamn mine field,” Mutt said resentfully.

After a while, the barrage let up. Daniels grabbed his tommy gun and took a cautious peek out of the foxhole. If the Bodies had been doing that shelling, they’d follow up with an infantry attack just as sure as you were supposed to hit the cutoff man. But the Lizards didn’t always play by the book Mutt knew. Sometimes they fooled him on account of that. More often, he thought, they hurt themselves.

So here: if they wanted to drive the Americans out of Randolph, they’d never have a better chance than now, while the shelling had stunned and disorganized their human foes. But they stayed back in their own lines south of town. The only sign of action from them was a single plane high overhead, its path through the sky marked by a silvery streak of condensation.

Mutt gave the aircraft a one-finger salute. “Gonna see how bad you beat on us before you send in the ground-pounders, are you?” he growled. “Mis’able cheap bastards.” What was infantry for, after all, if not to pay the butcher’s bill?

His battered eardrums made the quiet that followed the barrage seem even more intense than it was. The short, sharp bang! that punctuated it wouldn’t have seemed worth noticing, save for the shriek right after.

“Oh, shit,” Mutt exclaimed. “Somebody went and did somethin’ dumb. Goddamn it to hell, why don’t nobody never listen to me?” He’d thought minor-league ballplayers were bad at paying attention to what a manager told them. Well, they were, but they looked like Einsteins when you set ‘em next to a bunch of soldiers.

He scrambled out of the foxhole. His body was skinnier and sprier than it had been while he was wearing his Decatur Commodores uniform, but he’d have cheerfully gone back to fat and flab if anybody offered him the choice.

No one did, of course. He crawled over battered ground and through ruined buildings toward where that shriek had come from. Memory wasn’t his only guide; a low moaning kept him on course.

Kevin Donlan lay just outside a shell hole, clutching his left ankle. Below it, everything was red ruin. Mutt’s stomach did a slow lurch. “Jesus Christ, kid, what did you do?” he said, though the answer to that was all too obvious.

“Sarge?” Donlan’s voice was light and clear, as if his body hadn’t really told him yet how bad he was hurt. “Sarge, I just got out to take a leak. I didn’t want to piss in my hole, you know, and-”

Next to what he had, swimming a river of piss was nothing. No point telling him that, though, not now. “Miss Lucille!” Mutt bawled. While he waited for her, he got a wound bandage and a packet of sulfa powder out of a pouch on Donlan’s belt. He dusted the powder onto the wound. He wondered if he ought to get the remains of Donlan’s shoe off his foot before he started bandaging it, but when he tried, the kid started screaming again, so he said the hell with it and wrapped the bandage over foot, shoe, and all.

Lucille Potter scrambled up a minute later, maybe less. In dirty fatigues and a helmet, she looked like a man except that she didn’t need a shave. The helmet bore a Red Cross on a white circle; the Lizards had learned what that mark meant, and weren’t any worse than people about respecting it.

She looked at the way blood was soaking through the bandage, clicked her tongue between her teeth. “We’ve got to get a tourniquet on that wound, Sergeant.”

Mutt looked down at Donlan. The kid’s eyes had rolled up in his head. Mutt said, “You do that, Miss Lucille, he’s gonna lose the foot.”

“I know,” she said. “But if we don’t do it, he’s going to bleed to death. And he’d lose the foot anyhow; no way to save it with a wound like that.” Her sharp stare dared him to argue. He couldn’t; he’d seen enough wounds in France and Illinois to know she was right.

She cut Donlan’s torn trousers, took out a length of bandage and a stick, and set the tourniquet. “Hell of a thing,” Daniels said, to himself and her both: another young soldier on crutches for the rest of his life.

“It’s hard, I know,” Lucille Potter answered. “But would you rather have him dead? Ten years from now, if this war ever ends, would he rather we’d let him die?”

“I reckon not,” Daniels said. In his younger days in Mississippi, a lot of the older white men he’d known were shy an arm or a leg or a foot from the States War. They weren’t glad of it, naturally, but they got on better than you’d expect. When you got right down to it, people were pretty tough critters.