Tilting The Balance (51 page)

He said, “I wouldn’t mind following those tanks to find out where they’re going… if I could keep up with them, and if I had a radio to get the information to someone who could use it.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and grinned wryly. “And I might as well wish for buried treasure while I’m about it, eh?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Ludmila said, which made Sholudenko laugh. She went on, “Those tanks may not be going anywhere. If they hit some really thick mud, they’ll bog down. I saw that happen more than once last fall.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the same thing,” he agreed. “Doesn’t do to count on it, though. They’ve swallowed up too much of the rodina without bogging down.”

Ludmila nodded. Strange, she thought, that an
NKVD
man should talk about the rodina. From the day the Germans invaded, the Soviet government had started trotting out all the ancient symbols of Holy Mother Russia. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had scorned such symbols as reminders of the decadent, nationalistic past – until they needed them to rally the Soviet people against the Nazis. Stalin had even made his peace with the Patriarch of Moscow, although the government remained resolutely atheist.

Sholudenko said, “I think we can get moving again. I don’t hear the tanks any more.”

“No, nor I,” Ludmila said after cocking her head and listening carefully. “But you have to be careful:

their machines aren’t as noisy as ours, and could be lying in wait.”

“I assure you, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova, I have discovered this for myself,” Sholudenko said with sarcastic formality. Ludmila chewed on her lower lip. She had that coming-the
NKVD
man, having to serve on the ground, had earned the unlucky privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with Lizard hardware at ranges closer than she cared to think about. He went on, “It is, even so, a lesson which bears repeating: this I do not deny.”

Mollified by the half apology (which was, by that one half, more than she’d ever imagined getting from the
NKVD
), Ludmila slid the boot back onto her foot. She and Sholudenko left the grove together and headed back toward the road. One glance was plenty to keep them walking on the verge; the column of Lizard tanks had chewed the roadbed to slimy pulp worse than the patch into which Ludmila had stumbled before. This muck, though, went on for kilometers.

Tramping along by the road wasn’t easy, either. The ground was still squashy and slippery, and the year’s new weeds and bushes, growing frantically now that warm weather and long stretches of sunlight were here at last, reached out with branches and shoots to try to trip up the travelers.

So it seemed to Ludmila, at any rate, after she picked herself up for the fourth time in a couple of hours. She snarled out something so full of guttural hatred that Sholudenko clapped his hands and said, “I’ve never had a kulak call me worse than you just gave that burdock. It certainly had it coming, I must say.”

Ludmila’s face turned incandescent. By Sholudenko’s snicker, the blush was quite visible, too. What would her mother have said if she heard her cursing like – like… she couldn’t think of any comparison dreadful enough. Going on two years in the Red Air Force had so coarsened her that she wondered if she would be fit for anything decent when peace returned.

When she said that aloud, Sholudenko waved his arms to encompass the entire scene around them. Then he pointed at the deep ruts, already filling with water, the treads the Lizard tanks had carved in the road. “First worry if peace will ever return,” he said. “After that you can concern yourself with trifles.”

“You’re right,” she said. “From where we stand, this war is liable to go on forever.”

“History is always a struggle – such is the nature of the dialectic,” the
NKVD
man said: standard Marxist doctrine. All at once, though, he turned human again: “I wouldn’t mind if the struggle were a little less overt.”

Ludmila pointed ahead. “There’s a village. With luck, we’ll be able to lay up for a while. With a lot of luck, we’ll even find some food.”

As they drew closer, Ludmila saw the village looked deserted. Some of the cottages had been burned; others showed bare spots in their thatches, as if they were balding old men. A dog’s skeleton, beginning to fall apart into separate bones, lay in the middle of the street.

That was the last thing Ludmila noticed before a shot rang out and kicked up mud a couple of meters in front of her. Her reflexes were good – she was down on her belly and yanking her own pistol out of the holster before she had time for conscious thought.

Another shot – she still didn’t see the flash. Her head swiveled as if on a pivot Where was cover? Where was Sholudenko? He’d hit the dirt as fast as she had. She rolled through muck toward a wooden fence. It wasn’t much in the way of shelter, but it was a lot better than nothing.

“Who’s shooting at us? And why?” she called to Sholudenko.

“The devil’s uncle may know, but I don’t,” the
NKVD
man answered. He crouched behind a well, whose stones warded him better than the fence shielded Ludmila. He raised his voice: “Hold fire! We’re friends!”

“Liar!” The shout was punctuated by a burst of submachine-gun fire from another cottage. Bullets sparked off the stone facing of the well. Whoever was in there yelled, “You can’t fool us. You’re from Tolokonnikov’s faction, come to run us out.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea who Tolokonnikov is you maniac,” Sholudenko said. All he got for an answer was another shout of “Liar!” and a fresh hail of bullets from that submachine gun. Whomever the anti-Tolokonnikovites did favor, he gave them plenty of ammunition.

Ludmila spied the flame the weapon spat. She was seventy or eighty meters away, very long range for a pistol, but she squeezed off a couple of shots anyway, to take the heat off Sholudenko. Then, quick as she could, she rolled away. The relentless submachine gun chewed up the place where she’d been.

The
NKVD
man fired, too, and was rewarded by a scream and sudden silence from the submachine gun. Don’t get up, Ludmila willed at him, suspecting a trap. He didn’t. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes the gunner opened up again.

By then, Ludmila had found a boulder behind which to shelter. From that more secure position, she called, “Who is this Tolokonnikov, and what do you have against him?” If the people who didn’t like him acted this way, her guess was that he probably had something going for him.

She got no coherent answer out of the anti-Tolokonnikovites, only another magazine’s worth of bullets from the submachine gun and a yell of, “Shut up, you treacherous bitch!” Deadly as shell fragments, rock splinters knocked free by the gunfire flew just above her head.

She wondered how long the stalemate could go on. The answer she came up with was glum: indefinitely. There wasn’t enough cover for either side to have much hope of moving to outflank the other. She and Sholudenko couldn’t very well retreat, either. That left sitting tight, shooting every so often, and hoping you got lucky.

Then the equation suddenly grew another variable. Somebody showed himself for a moment: just long enough to chuck a grenade through the window from which the fellow with the submachine gun had been firing. A moment after it went off, he jumped in the window himself. Ludmila heard a rifle shot, then silence.

The grenade chucker came out by way of the window, too, and vanished from her sight. “Whose side is he on?” she called to Sholudenko.

“I keep telling you, ask the devil’s uncle,” he answered. “Maybe Tolokonnikov’s, maybe his own, maybe even ours, though I wouldn’t bet my life on that.”

The anti-Tolokonnikovite with the pistol, the one who’d fired first, took a fatal moment too long to realize his comrade had been disposed of. Ludmila wasn’t sure what was happening because she couldn’t see, but she heard another grenade, a rifle shot, a pistol shot, and then two rifle shots closer together; After that came silence all the more deafening because of the clamor that had gone before.

“Now what?” Ludmila asked.

“I think we wait some more,” Sholudenko answered. “After they got cute when I fired at them, I don’t fancy taking any more chances, thank you very much.”

The highly charged silence persisted. At last, from out of the village, came a cautious call: “Ludmila, bistduda?”

She shook her head. “Someone here knows you?” Sholudenko asked quietly. “Someone German here knows you?” That was not a good thing to admit to an
NKVD
man, but she did not see she had much choice.

“Georg, is that you?” she asked, also in German. If Sholudenko spoke it, well and good. If he didn’t, she’d already become an object of suspicion in his eyes, and so had little more to lose.

“Ja,”he answered, still not showing himself. “Tell me the name of the general who commands our base, so I can be sure it is truly you.”

“Tovarishch Feofan Karpov is a colonel, as you know perfectly well,” she said. “He is also certain to be furious with you for leaving the base without his leave, as I guess you did – you’re the best mechanic he has.”

“I begin to see,” Sholudenko said – so he did understand German, then. “Is he your, ah, special friend?”

“No,” Ludmila answered angrily. “But he wishes he were, which sometimes makes him a nuisance.” Then, as if she were reading the
NKVD
man’s mind, she added hastily, “Don’t harm him for that. He is an excellent mechanic, and has given the Red Air Force good service even if he is a fascist.”

“This I will hear,” Sholudenko said. “Had you been sentimental-” He let the sentence hang, but Ludmila had no trouble completing it for herself.

Through the front window of the hut where Schultz had disposed of the second anti-Tolokonnikovite, Ludmila spied something move. She couldn’t quite tell what it was. A few seconds later Georg Schultz came out, still holding an old rag on the end of a stick. Ludmila realized that was what she’d seen. Had anyone fired at it, Schultz would have sat tight. Yes. he’s been through combat once or twice, hasn’t he? she thought with reluctant admiration.

Schultz certainly looked like a veteran. He wore his usual mixture of Russian and German gear, though the Nazi helmet on his head gave his nonuniform uniform a Germanic cast Stuffed into his belt, along with a couple of potato-masher grenades, was a pistol He held a Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun, and had slung his rifle over his back.

The panzer gunner’s teeth showed in a grin that seemed all the whiter because of the beard surrounding it – a beard that did nothing to hinder his piratical aspect “Who’s your Kamerad?” he asked Ludmila.

Sholudenko answered for himself, giving his name and patronymic but not announcing he was
NKVD
(Ludmila would have been astonished had he admitted it). He went on in German: “So what’s this? Did you desert your post to seek the fair maiden here? Your colonel will not be happy with you.

Shultz shrugged. “Fuck him. It s not my army or even my air force, If you know what I mean. And when I get back with her” – he jerked a thumb at Ludmila-”old man Karpov’ll be glad enough to see both of us that he won’t bellyache all that much. You should have heard him-”My best pilot gone. Whatever shall I do?’” He raised his voice to a falsetto nothing like the colonel’s but comically effective all the same.

“How did you know where to look for me?” Ludmila asked.

“I can follow a compass bearing, and I figured you were smart enough to be doing the same if you were able.” Schultz sounded affronted. Then his face cleared. “You mean, how did I find out which bearing to follow?” He set a finger alongside his nose. “Believe me, there are ways.”

Ludmila glanced over at Sholudenko, who was undoubtedly taking all that in. But the
NKVD
man just asked, “How far from the airstrip are we?”

“Eighty, ninety kilometers, something like that.” Schultz looked from him to Ludmila and back again before asking her, “Who is this fellow?”

“The man I was supposed to meet. Instead of bringing back the information he had, I find I’m bringing him, too.”

By way of reply, Schultz just grunted. Ludmila felt like laughing at him. If he’d found her alone on the steppe, as he’d probably figured he would, he’d have had several days to try to seduce her or, failing that, just to rape her. Now he had to be wondering if she’d slept with Sholudenko.

None of your business, Nazi, she thought. With the first smile of genuine amusement she’d worn since she flipped her aircraft, she said, “Shall we be off, comrades?” The rest of the trek back to the airstrip was liable to be interesting.

Along with the rest of the physicists, Jens Larssen watched tensely as Enrico Fermi manipulated the levers that raised the cadmium control rods from the heart of the rebuilt atomic pile under the University of Denver football stadium.

“If we have the design correct, this time the k-factor will be greater than one,” Fermi said quietly. “We will have our self-sustaining chain reaction.”

Beside him, Leslie Groves grunted. “We should have reached this point months ago. We would have, if the damned Lizards hadn’t come.”

“This is true, General,” Fermi said, though Groves still wore colonel’s eagles. “But from now on work will be much faster, partly because of the radioactives we have stolen from the Lizards and partly because they have shown us that what we seek is possible.”

Larssen thought about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bringing it down to mankind. He thought about what happened to Prometheus afterwards too: chained to a rock somewhere, with an eagle gnawing his liver forever. He suspected a lot of his colleagues had had that image at one time or another.

Unlike most of them, of course, he didn’t need the Met Lab to have a feel for the myth of Prometheus. Every time he saw Barbara hand in hand with that Sam Yeager, the eagle took another peck at his liver.

The project was an anodyne of sorts, though the pain never left him, not entirely. He watched the instruments, listened to the growing chatter and then the steady roar of the Geiger counter as it let the world know about the growing cloud of neutrons down in the heart of the pile. “Any second now,” he breathed, more than half to himself.