Fallout

5

A Maxim gun spat death across the line toward Cade Curtis. The Russians and Germans had used the water-cooled murder mills during the First World War, long before Cade was born. The Germans moved on to lighter, air-cooled weapons. The Russians, having found something that worked, kept Maxims through the second war, too. And they passed them on to Mao’s band of brigands so the Red Chinese could shoot them at Chiang Kai-shek’s men, and now at the Americans.

The water-cooled Maxim gun might be obsolete. Lighter guns were much easier to haul around. When you advanced, they could come forward with you, not after you. But when the front wasn’t moving much, any old machine gun was about as good as any new one. If your luck happened to be out, old or new would kill you just as dead.

When the passing stream of bullets wasn’t close, Cade stuck his head up over the parapet to make sure the Red Chinese infantry wasn’t coming out of its trenches. The gunners spotted him and swung the Maxim back his way, but not till well after he’d ducked again.

“Anything?” Sergeant Klein asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Cade answered. “They’re just throwing lead at us.”

“Nice thing about a water-cooled piece is, you don’t burn through barrels like you do with an air-cooled gun,” Klein said. “All that happens is, the cooling water in that metal jacket starts to boil. The limeys in Italy liked water-cooled guns. When the water got hot enough, they’d pour it out and brew tea.”

“Yeah?” Cade didn’t know whether to believe that or not.

“Honest to God, sir.” The veteran raised his right hand, as if in a court of law. “Not like I never drank any of that tea myself. I used to think it was for limeys or fairies, but when it’s wintertime in the fucking mountains anything hot goes down good. Italy’s got winters a hell of a lot nastier than the steamship lines talk about.”

“How’s it stack up against the Chosin Reservoir?” Curtis asked dryly. “Near as I could tell, if we went any farther north we’d be fighting polar bears.”

“Sir, I wasn’t there for that. My hat’s off to you for coming through in one piece-a hell of a lot of good guys didn’t.” Lou Klein actually did sketch a salute. “From things I’ve heard from you and other people, that would’ve made the Russians and German come to attention in the first winter of their war.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cade didn’t want to talk about it, or even think about it, now that it was over. He’d had a balaclava under his helmet, plus a muffler wrapped around everything south of his eyes. He’d had a tunic, a sweater, and a parka. He’d had two pairs of long johns under his pants-hell when he had to take a dump-and padded, insulated boots. He’d worn mittens. He’d felt like a goddamn popsicle all the time in spite of everything.

The machine gun’s stream of bullets traversed past them again. Some of the fiery tracers looked close enough to let you reach up and light a Camel off of them. Cade understood that wasn’t a Phi Beta Kappa idea, which didn’t make it go away.

Lou Klein spat against the side of the trench. “Hell of a lot of good A-bombing those cities in Manchuria and Siberia did, huh? You can tell the Chinks’ll run out of ammo about twenty minutes from now. Boy, did we fuck the hell outa their logistics.”

Cade dug a finger into his none too pink and shell-like ear, as if at a loud noise. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said. “My sarcasm detector went off so hard there, it damn near deafened me.”

“Heh, heh.” Klein gave that two syllables’ worth of laughter-about what it deserved. “Yeah, I was just kidding, but I was kidding on the square.”

That was pretty much the definition of sarcasm. Saying as much to the veteran noncom struck Cade as one more losing proposition. Klein was old enough to be his father. Just like Cal Curtis back in Tennessee, he assumed he knew better than Cade. That Cade outranked him made him politer than the senior Curtis about saying so, but only to a certain degree. Senior sergeants were the men who taught junior officers their trade in the field. The U.S. Army had inherited that tradition from the English. Cade didn’t know or care from whom the Tommies had lifted it.

Little by little, as he showed he had some notion of what he was doing, Lou acted more as if he was his superior after all. That still came by fits and starts, though.

Thinking out loud, Cade said, “We got some more bazooka rounds in last night, didn’t we?”

“Sure did.” Klein sounded disgusted. “Naturally, they send the fuckers up here when we ain’t seen no enemy tanks for a coupla weeks. They can-” He offered a suggestion for where the brass could stick them.

Cade didn’t think they’d fit there, even greased. But he said, “I wasn’t thinking of tanks so much. If we send out a bazooka or two after it gets good and dark, maybe we can get rid of that stinking Maxim.”

Klein didn’t answer for close to a minute. He stood there with his whiskery chin cupped in his hand, his eyes far away, weighing the scheme. Almost as slowly, he nodded. “Every once in a while, Lieutenant, you’re damn near worth what they pay you, huh?”

“You say the sweetest things.” Cade hesitated, then went on, “I’ll take one of the tubes myself. I know more about getting through wire than most of the guys.”

“You don’t gotta do that, sir,” Klein said quickly.

“It’ll give us a better chance to take out the machine gun,” Cade said with a shrug. “That’s good for everybody, me included.” Klein’s lips moved silently. Cade thought he said stupid kid, but wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to become sure badly enough to ask.

He and the other guy with a launcher, a PFC named Frank Sanderson, loaded their rockets before they set out on the craw across no-man’s-land. “Some fun, huh, sir?” Sanderson said.

“Now that you mention it, no.” Cade was wishing he’d listened to Sergeant Klein. He’d grabbed the bull by the horns. Now he had to wrestle it down.

The bazooka tube and rocket were awkward slung across his back. If something snagged the trigger…In that case, he’d have just enough time to be embarrassed before the Red Chinese killed him.

A couple of hundred yards to the left, an American machine gun started shooting at the enemy’s trenches-though not in the direction from which Cade and Sanderson were coming. As Cade had hoped, the Chinks returned fire. The Maxim’s tracers and muzzle flashes told him exactly where it lurked.

He snipped one strand of barbed wire after another. He heard every clip and every twang, but the enemy soldiers didn’t. The machine-gun duel drowned out softer sounds. His real worry was that the Red Chinese would send out their own patrol and find him. That wouldn’t be so real hot.

He worked his way to within a couple of hundred yards of the Maxim, Sanderson literally on his heels. He motioned for the PFC to come up alongside him. “I’ll go left now,” he whispered. “You go straight. Get in as close as you can. When I fire, you do the same. Then we get the hell out of here.”

“I like that part, Lieutenant,” Sanderson whispered back.

Cade slithered in to just over a hundred yards from the gun. Then he peered down the bazooka’s rudimentary sight and pulled the trigger. Whoosh! Roar! As the rocket zoomed away, a wire mesh screen at the front of the launch tube kept its flames from scorching his face.

Sanderson’s rocket went off no more than three seconds after his, from almost as close. The Maxim gun, which had been barking away, suddenly shut up. Cade discarded the launcher and scurried off toward the American trenches. He stayed as low to the ground as he could.

More than a little to his surprise, he made it. So did Sanderson. None of what the Red Chinese threw at them struck home. And now they wouldn’t need to worry about that Maxim…till the bastards on the other side made a nest for a new one.

–

Ihor Shevchenko methodically shoved 7.62mm pistol rounds into his PPD’s snail drum. The big magazine was stamped with a 71 to let you know the most cartridges you could fit in there. Whoever designed that into it was smart-but maybe not smart enough. Some of the dumb bastards the Red Army was sucking into its insatiable maw couldn’t even read the number.

Artillery shells flew by overhead with freight-train noises. Those were Soviet 155s, heading for the German town of Rheine. The Dutch border was only a few kilometers to the west.

Turning to one of the other guys topping up the tank on his submachine gun, Ihor said, “Crazy how you still know what kind of gun it is just by the sound of the ammo in the air.”

Dmitri Karsavin nodded. “It is, yeah.” Like Ihor, he’d been through the mill the last time around. His limp was worse than the Ukrainian’s, in fact. He went on, “It only works for our pieces, though. The Americans’ guns don’t sound the same as the Hitlerites’ did.”

“You’re right about that.” Ihor nodded. “I didn’t hear the Americans’ guns the last time. A fragment took a chunk out of my leg when we were in western Poland, getting ready to drive on into Germany.”

“Sounds a lot like my story,” the other retread said. “I got mine in Budapest. A rocket blew up too close to me and bit me in the ass. You see me naked, I’ve only got half my right buttock.”

“No offense, buddy, but I don’t want to see you naked. You don’t do a fucking thing for me,” Ihor said. But no wonder Karsavin limped.

“Well, we’re even, believe me. It’s not like I’m perfect, but I ain’t no fruit.” Karsavin hadn’t shaved lately. He didn’t smell good. His uniform could have used a wash. He looked a lot like Ihor, in other words, even if his stubble was darker than the Ukrainian’s.

“I never in a million years figured I’d have to do this again.” As Ihor spoke, he went on filling the snail drum. He didn’t need to pay much attention to his fingers; they knew what to do on their own. “Once was plenty to last me the rest of my days.”

“You do what they make you do, that’s all.” Dmitri Karsavin spoke with a peasant fatalism Russians and Ukrainians shared. “My father fought against the Kaiser for the Tsar. He fought against the Whites for Lenin. When the Nazis jumped us, he fought them for Stalin. And they killed him outside of Kharkov in 1943.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Ihor said. To him, the city’s name was Kharkiv. He kept quiet about that. Ukrainians learned Russian whether they wanted to or not. It didn’t work the other way around.

Lieutenant Smushkevich came over to the fire to see what they were up to. When the company commander saw them doing something useful, he nodded and smiled. “Good job, boys,” he said, though he was younger than either of them. “Glad to see you’ll be ready. We’re going to pound the crap out of Rheine an hour before sunup, and then we’re going in and taking it away from the imperialists.”

“Comrade Lieutenant, I serve the Soviet Union!” Karsavin said. Ihor’s head bobbed up and down to show he did, too. He would have come out with it if the other veteran hadn’t beaten him to the punch.

“Ochen khorosho,” Smushkevich said. How nervous was he? This might well be his first time under fire. He didn’t talk about himself, though. Instead, he went on, “This isn’t a brand-new dance for either one of you, is it?”

“No, Comrade Lieutenant.” This time, Ihor spoke for them both.

“All right. Try to keep an eye on the new kids, will you? Don’t let them be too stupid. They’re our seed corn. We don’t want to throw them into the grinder if we can help it.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ihor got to say it, too. What the lieutenant meant was Try not to let them get killed because they have no idea what they’re doing. A veteran could do a little of that, but not a whole lot. If you held a rookie’s hand for him, you were liable to turn into a casualty yourself. Ihor had seen enough war to have a pragmatic attitude about it. He didn’t want to get killed or maimed. If somebody else did, especially somebody he didn’t know well or care about, that was the other guy’s worry.

“Good luck to both of you,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll see you in Rheine after we take it.” If he was nervous, he made a good stab at not showing it. With a nod, he went off to talk with some more of his men.

Ihor rolled himself in a blanket and tried to sleep. He got more than he expected, less than he hoped for: about par for the course. The old fear was back. Will I still be in one piece this time tomorrow? How hard would the Yankees fight?

He was dozing when the Soviet artillery started up in earnest. The thunder from all those guns bounced him awake. He grabbed the PPD. “Luck,” he told Dmitri Karsavin, who was also unrolling himself. Then he hunted up Misha Grinovsky. The youngster who wouldn’t be a pipefitter just yet was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous drags. Ihor set a hand on his shoulder. “Stick close to me, kid. It’s like anything else. As soon as you’ve done it once, you’ll know how forever.”

“I sure hope so.” Grinovsky threw down the butt and lit a new smoke.

Before Ihor could offer any consolation-and before he had to start lying-Lieutenant Smushkevich blew a whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “Forward for the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union and for our glorious leader, the great Comrade Stalin!”

Everybody who heard him cheered his head off. When someone used Stalin’s name that way, what else could you do? Somebody would report you for keeping quiet. If the Americans didn’t get you after that, the MGB damn well would.

Ihor didn’t know how many men trotted forward with him. A couple of divisions’ worth, anyway. Tanks went ahead with the foot soldiers, new T-54s and beat-up T-34/85s pulled from storage alongside them. Against a modern American or English tank, the Great Patriotic War’s workhorse was a deathtrap. Till it ran into one of those, though, it could smash up a lot of enemy infantry.

Rheine was a town of about 40,000. It lay in a valley between two low ranges of hills. The Americans had guns in the hills to the west. Ihor could see them winking in the distance. That meant shells were on the way. Sure as hell, he heard the hateful rising shriek in the air.

“Down!” he screamed. He had his entrenching tool out and started digging himself a foxhole before the artillery rounds began to burst. He saw that Karsavin hit the dirt with a veteran’s speed, too.

Misha Grinovsky…didn’t. He stayed on his feet a couple of fatal seconds too long. Flying fragments spun him around and tore him apart. What was left lay twitching a few meters from Ihor. He was dead; he just might not have figured it out yet. Once you’d done it once, you were fine. Too many, though, never made it past the first time. So much for one grain of seed corn.

A church steeple more than a hundred meters high dominated Rheine’s skyline. The Soviet shelling hadn’t toppled it. The American artillery fire was so accurate, Ihor would have bet a Yank spotter lurked up there. He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Shturmoviks roared in and rocketed the steeple. The Red Army men cheered when it tumbled down.

Ihor ran forward, yelling to hold fear at bay. Machine-gun and rifle rounds cracked near him, but none bit. He got into the outskirts of town. Something in olive drab moved behind a fence. He fired a quick burst. The something went down. You had to be careful with the PPD. On full auto, it pulled up and to the right even worse than the PPSh.

The Yanks fought street by street, house by house. They didn’t know all the tricks, the way the Fritzes had. But they were brave, and they had a lot of firepower backing them. The Red Army had to spend lives to clear them out. Spend lives it did. By afternoon, the hammer and sickle floated over Rheine.

–

For the first time in his life, Vasili Yasevich found himself among people who all looked like him. No one in the little town of Smidovich stared at him because he didn’t have golden skin, black hair, high cheekbones, and narrow eyes. No one here casually said insulting things about him assuming he couldn’t follow and wound up gaping when he came back with filthy Mandarin of his own.

He knew he should have felt like a man who’d just fallen asleep on earth and awakened in paradise. If this was paradise, though, he found himself a stranger here.

Smidovich was about as far into the back of beyond as anyone could go while still remaining in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Moscow, even Irkutsk, lay thousands of kilometers to the west. Vasili would have thought that no one in any Soviet center of power would have paid any attention to this village even before atom bombs fell on the two closest cities of any size, Khabarovsk to the east and Blagoveshchensk to the west.

The problem with Smidovich wasn’t that it was so far away from everything else. The problem was that the four thousand or so people here had all come from somewhere else-or if they hadn’t, their parents had. And they’d brought the rest of the Soviet Union with them. Inside their heads.

Vasili had lived in Harbin while it was part of Japanese puppet Manchukuo. He’d lived on there after Mao’s men took over for the Red Army soldiers who drove the Japanese out of Manchukuo and turned it back into Manchuria. He’d been careful during those bad times, and cautious, but he’d never known anything like this.

More and more, he understood why his father and mother swallowed poison rather than letting the Chekists haul them back to the USSR. Everybody here was scared all the time. That was the biggest part of what isolated him from his own neighbors.

They would say good morning. They would hire him to chop wood or to shape it into a bedframe or cabinet or to lay bricks. Every place needed people who could do those things. He was pretty good at them, even if his old man would rather have turned him into a druggist.

But behind Good morning or How much do you want for laying these bricks?, they didn’t want to talk to him. They hadn’t known him for years. They didn’t think they could trust him not to rat on them to the MGB if they said anything the least bit out of line. So they didn’t.

Something else also showed he wasn’t from these parts, something he couldn’t possibly have imagined: how fast he worked. He told a plump widow named Nina Fyodorova that he would make a bookcase for her in three days. When he lugged it to her cabin on the day he’d promised, her eyes almost bugged out of her head.

“You really meant it!” she blurted.

“Da.” He nodded. “Why not?” He didn’t see anything extraordinary about that. The work was as straightforward as you pleased.

But she said, “Two weeks from now, most people would still be telling me lies about how soon it would be ready.” To prove she wasn’t joking, she paid him half again as much as she’d told him she would. He didn’t ask her for the extra-she did it of her own accord.

The same kind of thing happened when Vasili made a little brick shed for Nikolai Feldman, who wanted to use it to smoke fish. Staring at how quickly one course of bricks went onto another, Feldman said, “You’re a regular Stakhanovite, aren’t you?”

Vasili knew only vaguely what a Stakhanovite was. It had to do with working long and hard; he knew that much. He said, “The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can start something else.”

Feldman eyed him. “Were they all like you in Khabarovsk?” he asked-he’d found out where Vasili was supposed to have come from.

If that wasn’t a loaded question, though, Vasili had never heard one. “I got along,” he answered cautiously. “How come?”

“On account of if they were all like you over there, no wonder the American fuckers bombed the place,” the Jew said.

“I’d sooner work than sit around playing with my dick all the time.” Vasili’s father had smacked him whenever he dropped in some mat that he picked up from other Russian exiles in Harbin. The filthy dialect flourished here. His old man had said it sprang from the foul mouths of convicts and political prisoners. Convicts and political prisoners who’d served their stretches in the gulag made up a big part of the population here. Who else would want to, or could be made to, live in this part of the Soviet Union? No wonder mat grew like a weed in these parts.

By his cackle, Feldman could have been a laying hen. “You work too hard, sonny, somebody’s gonna kick you in the stones hard enough to smash ’em into gravel.”

“I don’t want trouble,” Vasili said: an understatement of epic proportions. “I just want to get by, same as I did there.”

“People in hell want cold water to drink, too,” the old Jew said. “That’s doesn’t mean they’re gonna get it. You keep doing like you’re doing, you’re the one who’s gonna get it-right in the neck.”

“What are you talking about?” Vasili didn’t get it now. He was behaving the way he would have back in Harbin. If you didn’t jump in there and outhustle the Chinese, they’d steal your lunch and eat it before you even knew it was gone. They worked hard all the time. They knew they had to. There were swarms of them, which made every one easily replaceable. Wasn’t it like that everywhere?

Evidently it wasn’t. Nikolai Feldman cackled some more. “What? I’ll tell you what. You make everybody in Smidovich look bad, that’s what. How many friends have you got here?”

Vasili hadn’t made any, or missed them. These weren’t the kind of people he wanted to get friendly with (well, except some of the pretty girls, but that wasn’t what Feldman meant). To him, they seemed like a bunch of lazy bums.

And the way they drank! The Russians in Harbin had put it away, but not like this. Vasili hadn’t believed some of the stories his old man told. Now he was starting to.

He had to say something. He tried “I’m only trying to get by” again.

“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not whining. I’ve got my smoking shed now, and that’s great. But people, ordinary people, they don’t love Stakhanovites. If you want to bust your balls, that means they got to bust theirs whether they want to or not. You hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear you.” Vasili’d gone at top gear his whole life. In China, that was as automatic as breathing. Here? Maybe not.

A couple of days later, a burly bruiser named Grigory Papanin gave him the same message in almost the same words. “You piece of shit, you make me look like a chump,” said Papanin, who had been the number one handyman in Smidovich till Vasili got there. Unlike Vasili, he had friends-of about his own size. He also had a hatchet. One friend carried a crowbar, the other a meter’s worth of galvanized pipe.

A Chinese would have said You’re breaking my rice bowl. This also got the message across. Vasili just hoped they wouldn’t cripple him. (He also hoped his hand in his pocket would make them worry that he had a pistol. He wished like anything he did.)

“Khorosho,” he said. “I won’t make like a fucking Stakhanovite any more.” He showed his left hand, open in apology. The right stayed where it was. A straight razor wasn’t much, but it was all he was carrying.

He waited to see whether they would knock the crap out of him any which way. Three against one made bad odds. But they didn’t know what was in his pocket. They didn’t want to find out, either. Scowling, Papanin snarled, “You better not, cuntface, or you’ll be sorry.” He stomped off, his buddies in tow. Vasili didn’t sag with relief till after they’d gone around a corner.

–

Daisy Baxter felt giddy and guilty at the same time. She’d gone dancing with Bruce McNulty. Now, though the world was burning all around them, they headed for the seaside. It seemed a mad extravagance, especially since the Russians had hit the airfield at nearby Sculthorpe with ordinary bombs and visited atomic hell on Norwich, less than thirty miles east of Fakenham.

Mad extravagance or not, here she was, pedaling along on a bicycle next to the American bomber pilot. “But you’re from California!” she said. “The North Sea will seem like ice to you!”

“I’m from California, yeah, but I’m from San Francisco,” he said, and surprised her by laughing. “The way to bet is, the water in the Pacific there’ll be colder than it is here.”

“You’re pulling my leg!” she exclaimed.

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, looking at her in a way that made her cheeks heat and her heart race. But, shaking his head, he went on, “I’m not kidding, though. San Francisco’s foggy, and it can get chilly. And the ocean never warms up, not even in summertime.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. When she thought of California, she thought of Hollywood miles ahead of anything else. But running a distant second were oranges. She knew they needed hot weather to grow.

He must have picked the thought from her brain, because he said, “Sweetie, my state’s half again as big as your whole country. It’s got room for all kinds of stuff. Cities and mountains and deserts and beaches and farms and…well, like that.”

A state half again as big as the United Kingdom? And the USA had forty-eight states! California was a big one-Daisy knew that. Even so, was it any wonder the United States was top nation now, with Britain trundling along on its coattails? The wonder had to be that Britain had kept the lead as long as it had.

But that was visibly coming to an end. The two great wars were more than any nation was meant to endure. Britain had won them both, but all the bills were coming due at last. The empire was falling to pieces. India gone, Egypt and the rest of Africa restive…

“Mighty pretty countryside,” Bruce said. “Flatter than it is where I come from, but everything is so green!”

The land sloped gently down from Fakenham to Wells-next-the-Sea. Cattle and sheep grazed in the meadows. They didn’t even look up as the two humans pedaled by; they were used to that. A kestrel hung in the air above a field, looking for grasshoppers or mice or whatever else it could swoop down on and kill. They’d seen only a couple of autos since they set out. Petrol was rationed as tightly as it had been during the last war, and hideously dear even when you could get the coupons.

“It’s peaceful,” Daisy said.

“Yeah.” This time, Bruce’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. His job was destroying peace-and destroying places like this. After a moment, he went on, “It’s gonna heat up again. You didn’t hear that from me-I’ll call you a liar to your face if you say you did-but it is.”

She nodded. The news shocked her less than she wished it would have. With the way the Russians kept coming forward, how else could you stop them than by…dropping things on them? “How bad will it be?” Daisy asked after a hundred yards or so.

“Well, it won’t be good,” he said, and then it was his turn to ride along in silence for a little while. Finally, he went on, “You can hope that, when it’s all over, there’ll be enough people left to pick up the pieces.”

“And enough pieces left that are worth picking up?” Daisy asked.

He nodded. “Uh-huh. And that, too.” Perhaps to keep from having to say anything more, he deftly used one hand to take out a packet of Luckies, to put a cigarette in his mouth, to replace the packet, and to light the Lucky with a Zippo. The other hand stayed on the handlebars and kept the bike going straight.

Daisy made a small, needy noise. Bruce passed her the packet and the lighter. Her bicycle wobbled a little while she got the smoke going, but only a little. She blew out a gray stream. “That’s very nice,” she said. “Smoother than the Navy Cuts I usually get.”

“Jesus, I hope so!” he said. “I’ve had some of those. You can file your teeth on the smoke from ’em.”

“Some people like them strong,” Daisy said. She didn’t herself, or not particularly; she bought Navy Cuts because they were cheap.

“You’ve got that right,” Bruce said. “One guy at Sculthorpe-one of your RAF fellas, not an American-smokes those, uh, darn Gauloises. God, but they’re foul! I think there’s something about them in the Geneva Convention rules against poison gas.”

Daisy nodded. “They’re poisonous, all right. The first few months after the war, demobbed soldiers would bring them into the pub. They’d clear out the snug faster than anything this side of a polecat.”

“We’d say ‘this side of a skunk,’ but you don’t have skunks over here, do you?” McNulty said.

She shook her head. “No. I saw one, though, at the Norwich zoo. A very neat black-and-white beast, about the size of a cat. It wasn’t doing much, not that I recall.”

“They mostly go around at night. If you leave them alone, they’ll do the same for you. If you don’t-watch out! You wouldn’t believe how much they stink.”

“I suppose not.” Remembering the Norwich zoo made Daisy remember that all the animals in it, including the handsome little skunk, were probably dead now. So were all their keepers. That was what happened, or a tiny bit of what happened, when an atom bomb ripped the heart out of a city.

She didn’t care to remember things like that. She concentrated on the unblemished countryside here instead. It was pretty when you concentrated on it instead of taking it for granted the way she usually did.

Pretty soon, they rolled through the twin villages of Great and Little Walsingham. Added together, they didn’t come close to a thousand people. Bruce McNulty exclaimed at some of the half-timbered houses. “Those things must have been here four or five hundred years!” he said.

“Of course.” She looked at him. “And so?”

He laughed. “It’s not of course to me. San Francisco wasn’t anything till a hundred and fifty years ago. It wasn’t a city till a hundred years ago. There’s nothing like this where I come from.”

“We must seem as strange to you as you do to us,” Daisy said.

“Now that you mention it, honey,” he answered, “yes.”

Wells-next-the-Sea lay another four miles north. It wasn’t quite next-the-sea, or even next to the sea. The harbor had silted up, so the little town lay a mile inland. A narrow-gauge railroad took people to the beach, though.

Daisy and Bruce didn’t have it to themselves, but it wasn’t crowded. They spread out towels and lay down on the soft yellow sand. A Royal Navy corvette went by not far from shore, fast enough to kick up a big white wake. “He’s got a bone in his teeth,” Bruce said. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”

“That is what they say,” Daisy agreed. “Are you a naval personage, too?”

“Mm, I have a navel,” he said, and she made a face at him. More thoughtfully, he continued, “I wonder if he’s hunting a Russian sub or something.”

“Just what we need!” Daisy remembered how the U-boats had almost starved England into submission during the last war. There had been sinkings in the Atlantic and North Sea this time, but not nearly so many.

Gulls wheeled overhead, squawking shrilly. The sun was warm-not hot, but at least it wasn’t pouring rain. She enjoyed the company. Bruce put his arm around her. She enjoyed that, too. She wished the moment could last forever.

Then he leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back. It was her first real kiss, her first kiss that meant anything, since the end of 1944. She wondered how she’d ever gone so long without.