Bombs Away

12

Gustav Hozzel sprawled in the ruins of the suburbs west of Alsfeld, forty kilometers northwest of Fulda. He’d never visited Alsfeld in all the time he’d lived in Fulda. He didn’t want to be here now, but the Russians had barged through the Fulda gap and were doing their best to overrun all of Western-occupied Germany, plus anything else they could get their grabby mitts on.

The Americans were fighting. Gustav had to give them that much. They’d battled the Ivans street by street, house by house, inside Alsfeld. That was why Gustav could still lie here on the outskirts of town. The Amis had smashed a lot of Russian tanks. They’d kept snipers in the cathedral bell tower till Russian artillery leveled it. Those guys had to know they would die if they went up there. They did it anyhow. They were soldiers, in other words.

Even if they were soldiers, Gustav still hated their helmet. It didn’t cover enough of a man’s head. A few German auxiliaries had put on the Wehrmacht’s Stahlhelm instead. But the Russians didn’t take prisoners from men who did that. They killed them in cold blood, and left them on display with swastika placards by the bodies. Gustav got the message, and kept his Yankee pot.

He didn’t care for the egg grenades on his belt, either. You could throw a German potato-masher farther. He had nothing against the Springfield the Amis had issued him. It was as good a rifle as a Mauser. But now he carried a PPSh he’d taken off a dead Russian. Close-range firepower was what he wanted, and the submachine gun gave it to him.

He really craved a Russian assault rifle. Some Landsers on the Eastern Front had carried weapons like that as the war drew toward its end, but never enough to hold back the Russian tide. Keeping the PPSh in ammo was easy: it fired ordinary pistol cartridges. The assault rifle used a special round, halfway between pistol and rifle. Feeding it might prove a chore if he got his hands on one.

In front of him and off to the left, a machine gun opened up. That was a Russian piece; he knew the sound as well as he knew Luisa’s heartbeat when he laid his head on her left breast. He hoped his wife was all right. He could only hope right now.

More submachine guns went off. American M-1s answered, a rhythm halfway between a bolt-action rifle and an automatic. They could hit somebody with a PPSh or a PPD before he got close enough to hit them. But if the guy with the submachine gun did get that close, he had the edge.

Very cautiously, Gustav looked out from behind the burnt-out carcass of the Mercedes that gave him cover. The Mercedes sat a good many centimeters lower than it had before fire swept over it. The tires were gone, so it rested on the metal wheels. Whatever color the expensive car had been, it was charcoal-gray now.

Not seeing anything dangerous coming his way, he pulled back. “How’s it look where you’re at, Max?” he called.

His friend and comrade lay behind an overturned steel file cabinet. The Mercedes probably gave better cover, but that wasn’t bad. “I’m smoking a cigarette,” Bachman said. “I think I have time to finish it.”

“Sounds about right,” Gustav said, and then, after a moment, “You know, it’s funny that all this doesn’t seem funny. We’re used to it. We know what to do, and we know how to do it, too.”

“Ja, ja.” Max sounded exaggeratedly patient. And he had his reasons: “Wait till they start throwing atom bombs around here. See if you know what to do then.”

“Of course I know what to do then. I fucking die, nicht wahr?” Gustav said. They both let out black chuckles. The Americans weren’t using atom bombs because this was the part of Germany they wanted to protect, not to wreck. The Russians hadn’t used them yet because…well, who the hell knew why? Maybe because they were still advancing without them. Or maybe because, with Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev radioactive dust, no one who could give the orders was still alive.

“Do you think it’s true Adenauer asked Truman not to use the bombs in the western zones?” Max asked.

“Why wouldn’t Adenauer ask? What does he have to lose?” Gustav said. “Whether his asking has anything to do with why they haven’t fallen-that, I can’t tell you.” Adenauer, at least, had the courage of his convictions. He’d been jailed for opposing the Nazis. That gave him some clout with the Amis. How much? Well, who could say for sure?

The firefight off to the left died away. The Russians’ hearts didn’t seem to be in it. Maybe all the bombs that had fallen between the front and where their supplies came from meant they didn’t have enough. It would be nice to think so, anyhow.

Then fire rippled on the eastern horizon-the other side of Alsfeld. Gustav knew too well what that meant. “Get down!” he shouted to anyone who could hear him. “Flatten out! Katyushas!”

Just to make themselves scarier, the rockets screamed when they came in, as if they were Stukas with Jericho trumpets. The whole salvo burst in the space of a few seconds. It could chew up most of a square kilometer. It wasn’t an atom bomb, but was in the running for next worst thing.

Blast kicked Gustav around and slammed him into the dead Mercedes, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any real damage. A chunk of sheet iron from a rocket casing gouged a hole in the fender only thirty or forty centimeters from his head. Too often, whether you got up or they planted you depended on luck like that, stuff you couldn’t do anything about.

“Urra! Urra!” That was Russian infantry, probably snockered from the vodka ration, getting ready to charge. If the hair on Gustav’s nape hadn’t risen for the Katyushas, the rhythmic roar would have turned the trick. The Russians would come forward till they got slaughtered or till they cleared out whatever stood in their way.

Gustav felt terrified and exhilarated at the same time. He’d spent most of his youth in the Wehrmacht-spent it the way a gunner spent shells. He’d never felt so alive as on the Eastern Front, not least because he always knew life could end at any instant. Going back to Fulda was quiet, peaceful…and just a bit dull. All right, nightmares woke him screaming every so often. Did he feel so intensely about anything in the town, even Luisa?

To his own sorrow, he knew the answer. He hoped she was alive. He hoped she was safe. He hoped she was hiding-as the Russians had proved in 1945, they were swine around defeated women.

Hope was all he could do-hope and fight like hell.

“Urra! Urra!” The chant got louder, and higher in pitch.

He knew what that meant. “They’re coming!” he bawled, and peeped out from behind the Mercedes again.

Coming they were, and just as he remembered from the old days: rank after rank of men, arms linked, greatcoat skirts flapping around their legs, the troops in front firing as they ran. Gustav squeezed off a short burst, then scuttled to the far end of the dead car. Other Germans and Americans were also shooting back at the Red Army men.

When he looked out at the Russians again, soldiers were falling like ninepins. The ones who still lived closed up, linked arms, and trotted on. You had to admire courage like that. You also had to wonder what inspired it. Were the Russians more afraid of what would happen to them if they didn’t advance than they were of what happened when they did? God help them if they were, because this was suicidal.

Staying low, he fired at them again. They were close enough now for him to see his burst tear into them again. Then he wished for the Yankee Springfield and a long bayonet, because here they were, right on top of him. He fired till his magazine ran dry, then struck at the Russians with the PPSh’s hot barrel. He waited for someone to shoot him or stab him from behind.

But then the Ivans, the ones who could, were running back as fast as they’d run forward. Even Russian flesh and blood had limits. Sometimes. But you could never count on when or even whether.

Maybe one of the dead Ivans nearby had carried an assault rifle. Gustav wasn’t crazy enough to find out now. Later, when things calmed down a little, though…

–

The tiny, gray-haired Chinese woman sent Vasili Yasevich the fishiest of fishy stares. “You sure you know what you’re doing?” she snapped.

He bowed his head and looked down at the muddy ground. “This person does his humble best to follow the training in compounding medicines given to him by his father, who now, sadly, is among the ancestors.”

“Oh, cut the crap.” Her accent and her manner both shouted that she came from Peking. Her husband was one of the commissars charged with getting Harbin back on its feet as fast as humanly possible-or a little faster than that. Still giving him the fishy eye, she went on, “You can fix something to perk up Wang, keep him going?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He didn’t know as much as his father had. He hadn’t listened so hard as he might have. But that one he could handle. “The wise and distinguished lady will have heard of the herb called ma huang?”

“I told you to can the crap,” she said, but Vasili could tell it flattered her at the same time as it annoyed her. The Reds from Peking were often holier-than-thou when it came to aggressive egalitarianism. Almost as often, though, they expected to be treated as rulers. So he wasn’t amazed when she giggled before going on, “Yes, I know about ma huang. I’m surprised a round-eye would.”

“It’s used in our medicines, too,” Vasili said, which wasn’t even a lie. From what his old man had told him, the chemical that gave ma huang its kick was related to benzedrine.

“Ah. That I didn’t know.” The woman’s glare sharpened again. “You can get me some in this miserable, bombed-out, backward province?”

She wasn’t supposed to say things like that. She wasn’t even supposed to think them. He might be able to land her in trouble if he repeated them to the right people. He didn’t want to land her in trouble, though. He just wanted to make some money off of her. He wanted her to pass his name on to her friends, too, so he could also sell them drugs.

And so he nodded. “Yes, great lady. I have been lucky enough to secure a supply of the highest quality…. ”

He’d found some in a wrecked medicine shop. He’d tested it by chewing a little. It sped up his heartbeat and made him lose a night’s sleep no matter how tired he was. That was ma huang, all right.

“Well, what do you want for it?” she demanded.

“You understand how hard it is to bring things in these days-”

She interrupted: “I understand you’re going to gouge me.”

He was, too, but politely. When he told her how much he wanted, she called him some things that weren’t from the Peking dialect of Mandarin at all. He knew most of the insults that one offered. He wondered where the commissar’s wife had grown up, to come out with those catfight-sounding curses. When she ran down, he gave her his politest bow. That inflamed her more, as he’d known it would.

They haggled for a while. He let her beat him down a little further than he’d expected. He didn’t want her leaving angry. If she did, she wouldn’t tell her friends about him.

She paid him. He gave her the ma huang, and told her how much to use. He didn’t want the commissar dying of a heart attack or stroke, either. That would be bad for business. “Don’t think that if a little is good, more is better,” he warned. “Ma huang is strong medicine. You should always respect it.”

“You are not my mother or my father,” she said tartly. A Russian would have told him Don’t teach your granny to suck eggs. They both amounted to the same thing. He bowed again. He’d done his best.

Away she went. It was the first day of spring-Vasili thought it was, anyhow; he’d been too frazzled lately to keep close track-but her breath smoked. In her shapeless trousers, quilted jacket, and cap with earflaps and a red star on the front, she might have been an undersized People’s Liberation Army private-except she carried herself like an empress. He wondered what she would do if he told her so. Probably have him shot. If her husband was who Vasili thought he was, she could arrange that with a word or two.

Instead, she did talk to the wives of other high-powered organizers who’d come into Manchuria. Vasili had to scout around for more ma huang. Luckily, it was easier to come by than he’d made it out to be.

One of the officials went back to Peking very suddenly. People said he suffered from nervous exhaustion. Maybe he did. Certainly, his wife had been one of Vasili’s best customers. If she’d brewed her tea too strong for too long, she was the only one who knew it. Vasili could only suspect-and, since he knew what was good for him, keep his mouth shut.

Railroad workers started rebuilding the line that ran through Harbin. It was one of the most important in China, since it connected North Korea to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Repairing the stretch the atom bomb had destroyed was important. Vasili understood as much. All the same, he was glad he wasn’t spending twelve- or fourteen-hour days breaking rock and laying track right where that bomb had gone off.

He wondered whether the workers knew radioactivity could be dangerous-or that there was such a thing as radioactivity. It made sense for their overlords not to tell them. After all, they wouldn’t pay any price for years.

Some of the railroad workers bought ma huang from him, too, so they could work harder longer. Like the official’s wife, they thought it was funny to be getting a Chinese herb from a Russian. Funny or not, as long as he had it, they wanted it.

Some of them tried to buy opium from him. They didn’t want to work harder; they wanted not to care about the work they had to do. Not without regret, Vasili told them he had none to sell. That wasn’t quite true, but he wouldn’t sell to strangers or even to a good many acquaintances. For opium, he had to trust his customers with his life. Mao had gone to war against the drug. Unlike earlier Chinese leaders who opposed it, he was serious to the point of killing people who grew it, people who sold it, and people who used it.

Vasili had enough money in his pocket so as not to need to take chances like that. He’d got a shack off to the west of the part of central Harbin the bomb had leveled. He picked one on that side of town on purpose. The winds here rarely blew from east to west. Whatever poisons remained in the seared ground, they wouldn’t come his way.

He wished he could move somewhere else, to a place where no atom bomb had fallen. But then he would have to start fresh, from nothing. And he would have to start someplace where no one had ever seen a white man before. In Harbin, at least, people were used to fair skin, blond hair, gray eyes, sharp noses, heavy beards. They mostly didn’t stare and point when he walked by. Some of them even spoke bits of Russian.

Every once in a while, he wondered if he could head north, slip over the border, and take up life in the Soviet Union. He might be able to pass himself off as somebody just out of the gulag. But everything his father had told him about the land argued against it.

Yes, there he would look like other people. He wouldn’t have papers like other people, though. Even released zeks-especially released zeks-had identity papers detailing who they were, where they could live, where they were allowed to travel.

Without those papers, you couldn’t get bread. You couldn’t get vodka. You couldn’t get cabbage. Unless you were a hermit in the woods who killed all his own food, you had to have papers.

Even if I looked like everyone else, I’d be a stranger there, he thought. Here in China, although people who’d never seen him before did double takes when he walked by, he knew how to fit in. He knew how things worked. The way the Chinese put it was, he had his bowl of rice. For now, that would have to do.

–

Any time they wouldn’t let you sleep at night, any time they put you to work or put you on the road instead, you were going to get the shitty end of the stick. Even a conscript like Tibor Nagy had no trouble figuring that out. He grumbled as he climbed up into the battered truck that would haul him and his countrymen out of Schweinfurt and into…into whatever disasters waited at the other side of the ride.

Isztvan Szolovits put it a little differently. As he scrambled into the truck, he muttered, “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

Sergeant Gergely heard that. Tibor didn’t think he was supposed to, but he did. He had ears like a rabbit’s. With a harsh laugh, he said, “You got it backwards, Jewboy. All the fires are behind us. The frying pan is where we’re going. What’s the worst they can do to us at the front?”

“Shoot us. Blow us up. Fry us with flamethrowers…Sergeant,” Szolovits answered. All that was much too true, but he might not have come out with it unless Gergely delivered that endearment.

The sergeant could have given him hell. Instead, Gergely just nodded. “That’s about the size of it, yeah,” he said. “When you put it next to one of those fucking atom bombs that still kill you even when they miss by two kilometers, it’s nothing.”

“Nice of the Russians to give us the chance to die for their country,” Tibor remarked.

“I don’t think they would if they had a choice,” Sergeant Gergely said. Once under canvas himself, the veteran lit a cigarette. The brief red glow of the match gave his sharp features a satanic cast. He went on, “But the way it looks to me is, they’re having trouble getting their own guys up to the front on account of everything that’s fallen between there and here. Lucky us, we’re already forward, and so they’ll use us.”

“They’ll use us up,” Szolovits emended. Gergely didn’t hear that-or if he did, he thought it was too obviously true to need comment.

With an out-of-tune roar, the truck got rolling. German roads were damn good. All the same, every jolt, every pothole, went straight from Tibor’s tailbone to his head. The workers at the factory must have given the truck springs once upon a time. They’d long since died of old age, though.

And the road, while good, had been bombed and shelled more than it had been repaired-and the men doing the repair work were Russian military engineers, not fastidious German roadbuilders. The only thing that mattered to the Red Army was keeping traffic going. Comfort was for capitalists and fairies and other socially undesirable elements.

No one had bothered fixing the truck’s muffler, either. The rear compartment stank of exhaust. The noise was also impressive-or depressing, depending on how you looked at it. Tibor was used to riding in such clunkers. They were what the Russians could spare for their satellite forces. The racket from this one, though, might keep the driver and him from hearing enemy fighter-bombers overhead till too late.

He couldn’t do anything about that but worry. Worry he did, even as he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t want to fight the Americans. He would rather have shot at the Russians who’d flung him into this war that wasn’t his. He had no doubt that he wasn’t the only conscript in the truck with such notions.

Sergeant Gergely wasn’t a conscript. But he’d been riding herd on reluctant soldiers since the Hungarian Army did its halfhearted best to help the Nazis try to keep the Red Army away from Budapest, away from Lake Balaton, away from the oilfields west of the lake…. He knew how they thought. He knew what kind of odds they were weighing.

Not at all out of the blue, he said, “Listen, you sorry sacks of shit, don’t be any dumber than you can help. If you bug out, people on our side will shoot you in the back. The Americans or limeys or Germans or whoever the hell we bump up against will shoot you in the front. And the Russians and our own security forces will make your families pay like you wouldn’t believe.”

He didn’t gloat about that, the way a movie villain might have. No-he sounded as matter-of-fact as a butcher telling a customer the price of a leg of mutton. If you do this, that will happen. As far as Tibor was concerned, he seemed scarier as he was.

The farther north and west they went, the worse the roads grew. They were passing through land that had been recently fought over, land the Red Army had taken away from the Americans. Dawn began to leak into the compartment through the opening in the rear. Through that opening, Tibor got glimpses of wrecked and shattered vehicles-everything from motorcycles all the way up to Stalin heavy tanks-shoved off to the shoulder so the ones that still ran could get through.

Not long before sunup, the truck convoy halted. The brakes on the machine that carried Tibor squealed like a kicked dog. “Out!” Sergeant Gergely yelled. “Out and under cover! The Americans spot us in the open in broad daylight, we deserve to get killed. They’ll sure think so, anyhow.”

Out Tibor went. They were at the edge of a large village or small town. Trenches and shell holes already marred the landscape. Tibor slid into a hole in the ground and started improving it with his entrenching tool. He hadn’t seen much fighting yet, but air attacks had already taught him that a well-made foxhole would save your life if anything would.

Sometimes nothing would. If one came down right where you happened to be, all your digging in just meant digging your own grave a little deeper. But you did what you could.

Artillery up ahead bellowed. The Russian guns didn’t sound very far up ahead. Tibor wondered whether American shells could reach this far. They had at some point, or the village wouldn’t be a jumble of wreckage with dead, swollen dogs-and, no doubt, dead, swollen people who hadn’t been planted yet-perfuming the air. But maybe the Russians had pushed them out of range.

Then again, maybe it didn’t matter. American fighters-prop jobs, left over from the last war-screamed by at just above treetop height, pounding the place with rockets and heavy machine guns. Tibor had never faced a couple of trucks’ worth of Katyushas. He no longer felt he was missing anything.

Several of the trucks that had brought the Hungarians here were ablaze, sending their smoke screens up into the sky now that smoke screens didn’t matter any more. They’d gone under camouflage netting as soon as the soldiers piled out of them. The enemy flyers might not have seen them, but they’d hit them just the same. Tibor did hope the drivers had got out.

Someone behind him shouted something: guttural consonants mired in palatalized nouns. Tibor recognized Russian without being able to speak it. He looked around and found himself on the receiving end of a Red Army major’s glare. Saluting, he said, “Sorry, sir. I don’t speak your language”-in Magyar. That didn’t make the major any happier. Tibor called, “Sergeant, there’s a Soviet officer here.” He didn’t say what he thought of the Soviet officer. The bastard might understand more than he let on. Trusting Russians didn’t come naturally to their fraternal socialist allies.

Sergeant Gergely climbed out of his hole and walked over. Saluting the Russian, he said, “What do you need, sir?” He also used his own language. The major gave forth with something impassioned. Gergely only shrugged. Scowling, the Russian switched to German to order everyone into the front line at once. Tibor followed that only too well. Gergely also must have. But he just spread his hands and stuck to Magyar: “Sorry, sir. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

The Red Army major scorched him up one side and down the other. But he couldn’t prove the Hungarians were playing dumb. He stormed off, his face as red with rage as a baboon’s backside. “Good job, Sergeant!” Tibor exclaimed. “They won’t throw us into the sausage machine yet.”

“Yet. Yeah.” Gergely nodded. “Gimme a cigarette, will you? I stalled him this time, but they’ll use us up pretty damn quick any which way.”

–

During the Twenties and Thirties, Harry Truman had read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy. He’d enjoyed the stories; they’d kept his mind loose and elastic. When even ordinary reality could stretch and twist like taffy, a loose, elastic mind wasn’t the least useful thing to have. He sometimes wished he had time for that kind of reading now.

Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought sourly. Reports of the disaster the Russians had visited on the West Coast (and even on Maine) clogged his Oval Office desk. He hadn’t dreamt Stalin could hit that hard. Yes, the USSR had been paid back in spades, doubled and redoubled. That didn’t mean the United States was in anything like great shape.

But even as Truman was reading about the devastation in Los Angeles, science fiction and fantasy bubbled back into his thoughts. Somebody’d said Do not call up that which you cannot put down. He thought it was H.P. Lovecraft, but he wasn’t sure. Lovecraft hadn’t been one of his favorites.

That might have been because Lovecraft was a strange, gloomy New Englander, not at all in tune with Truman’s Midwestern optimism. Lovecraft’s style was overblown and ornate, too: out of step with the straightforward prose that flowed from Truman’s pen. But strange and gloomy or not, overblown and ornate or not, old H.P. had hit that particular nail square on the head.

Do not call up that which you cannot put down. In the Second World War, it hadn’t mattered. The USA could go ahead and incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and lose no sleep afterwards. The Japanese were already on the ropes, even without the A-bombs. No matter how much they wanted to, they couldn’t hit back. All they could do was endure the unendurable and surrender.

Well, Red China couldn’t hit back, either, when the United States threw those Manchurian cities onto the pyre. The Red Chinese couldn’t, and neither Truman nor Douglas MacArthur had believed that Joe Stalin would. Didn’t he see he was in over his head against America?

Whether he did or not, he must have decided he didn’t care. If he couldn’t avenge his biggest and most important ally, who would want an alliance with him afterwards? He had an almost Oriental sense of face. So he’d dropped bombs in Europe, and so….

And so now his country and Truman’s, and Western Europe and his satellites and Red China as well, wouldn’t be the same for years, decades, maybe centuries to come. No matter who wound up dominating Korea, no matter how the European land war turned out, nobody would come out better off than he’d been going in. Nobody.

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.