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When Georg Schultz saw the Kukuruznik, he rocked back on his heels and started to laugh. “You’re still flying these little bastards, are you?”
“What about it?” Ludmila said hotly. He’d have done better to insult her family than her beloved U-2.
But the panzer man answered, “We hated these stupid things. Every time I had to go out and take a dump, I figured one of ’em would fly by and shoot my ass off. I swear they could stand on tiptoe and peek in through a window, and I bet the Lizards don’t like ’em one bit better’n we did.”
Ludmila translated that into Russian. As if by magic, the ground crew’s hostility melted. Hands fell away from weapons. Somebody dug out a pouch of makhorka and passed it to Schultz. He had some old newspaper in an inside pocket that hadn’t got wet. When he’d rolled himself a cigarette, a Russian gave him a light.
He shielded it with one hand from the drips that splattered down off the camouflage netting, walked around so he could get a good look at the engine and two-bladed wooden prop on the nose of the Wheatcutter. When he turned around, he wore a disbelieving grin. “It really flies?”
“It really flies,” Ludmila agreed gravely, hiding her own smile. She said it again in her own language. A couple of the mechanics laughed out loud. She returned to German: “Do you think you can help keep it flying?”
“Why not?” he said. “It doesn’t look near as bad as keeping a panzer going. And if that engine were any simpler, you’d run it off a rubber band like a kid’s toy.”
“Hmm,” Ludmila said, not sure she cared for the comparison. The little Shvetsov was made to be rugged as a mule, but surely that was something to be proud of, not to scorn. She pointed to Schultz. “Turn your back.”
“Jawohl!” He clicked his heels as if she were a field marshal in red-striped trousers, and performed a smart about-turn.
She gestured for a couple of Russians to stand behind him so he couldn’t see what she was doing, then loosened the sparkplug wire she’d noticed and her alleged mechanic hadn’t. “You can turn back now. Find out what’s wrong with the machine.”
Schultz walked over to the U-2, inspected the engine for perhaps fifteen seconds, and fixed the wire Ludmila had tampered with. His smile seemed to say, Why don’t you ask me a hard one next time? The mechanic who had failed to find the same defect glared at the German as if suspecting the devil’s grandmother had somehow migrated from the Shvetsov to him.
“This man will be useful on this base,” Ludmila said. Her eyes dared the ground crew to argue with her. None of the men said anything, though several looked ready to burst with what they weren’t saying.
The German panzer sergeant seemed at least as bemused as his Soviet counterparts. “First I fight alongside a bunch of Jewish partisans, and now I’m joining the Red Air Force,” he said, maybe more to himself than to Ludmila. “I hope to God none of this ever shows up in my file.”
So the Nazis worried about dossiers, too. The thought gave Ludmila something in common with Schultz, though it wasn’t one she’d be able to share with him. Somehow that didn’t matter, either. They both knew what was safe to talk about and what wasn’t.
Schultz also knew what the hostile looks he was getting meant. He undid his canteen, tossed it to the mechanic who was glaring hardest. “Vodka, russki vodka,” he said in his pidgin Russian. He smacked his lips. “Ochen khorosho.”
The startled groundcrew man undid the stopper, sniffed, then grinned and enfolded Schultz in a bear hug. “That was clever,” Ludmila said as the ground crew passed the flask from one eager hand to the next. A moment later, she added, “Your Major Jager would have approved.”
“Do you think so?” she’d found the right praise with which to reach him-his long, bony face glowed as if he were a small boy who’d just been told he’d written his school’s prize essay for the year. He went on, “The major, miss, I think he’s one hell of a man.”
“Yes,” Ludmila said, and realized she and Schultz might have something else in common after all.
14
Bicycling across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Chicago had seemed a good idea when Jens Larssen set about it. In summer, in a country that had never known invasion, it might even have been a good idea. In winter, pedaling through territory largely occupied by the Lizards, it looked stupider with every passing moment.
He’d seen newsreel footage of half-frozen German soldiers captured by the Russians in front of Moscow. The Russians, in their white snow suits, many of them on skis, had looked capable of going anywhere any time. That was how Jens had thought he would do, if he’d really thought about it at all. Instead, he feared he much more closely resembled one of those Nazi ice cubes with legs.
He didn’t have the clothes he needed for staying out in the open when the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there. He’d done his best to remedy that by piling on several layers at a time, but his best still left him shivering.
The other thing he hadn’t thought about was that nobody was plowing or even salting the roads this winter. In a car, he would have done all right A car was heavy, a car was fast-best of all, his Plymouth had had a heater. But drifted snow brought a bicycle to a halt. As for ice… he’d fallen more times than he could count. Only dumb luck had kept him from breaking an arm or an ankle. Or maybe God really did have a soft spot in his heart for drunks, children, and damn fools.
Jens looked at a map he’d filched from an abandoned gas station. If he was where he thought he was, he’d soon be approaching the grand metropolis of Fiat, by God, Indiana. He managed a smile when he saw that, and declaimed, “And God said, Fiat, Indiana, and there was Indiana.”
His breath puffed out around him in a cloud of half-frozen fog. A couple of times, on really frigid days, he’d had it freeze in the mustache and beard he was growing. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror any time lately, so he didn’t know what he looked like. He didn’t care, either. He’d decided scrounging for razor blades was a waste of time, and shaving without either mirror or hot water hurt too much to be worthwhile. Besides, the new growth. helped keep cheeks and chin warm. He wished he could sprout fur all over.
As he had on most of his journey, he owned the road. Cars and trucks just weren’t moving, especially not in this Lizard-occupied stretch of country. Trains weren’t moving much, either, and the few he’d seen had Lizards aboard. He’d wished for a white snow suit of his own, to keep from drawing their notice. But the aliens hadn’t paid any attention to him as they chugged by.
He supposed that was one advantage to having been invaded by creatures from another planet as opposed to, say, Nazis or Japs. The Lizards didn’t have a feel for what was normal on Earth. A Gestapo man, spotting a lone figure pedaling down a road, might well have wondered what he was up to and radioed an order to pick him up for questions. To the Lizards, he was just part of the landscape.
He rolled past a burned-out farmhouse and the twisted wreckage of a couple of cars. Snow covered but did not erase the scars of bomb craters in the fields. There had been fighting here, not so long ago. Jens wondered how far west into In
diana the Lizards’ control reached, and how hard crossing back into American-held territory would be.
(Down deep, he wondered if Chicago was still free; if Barbara was still alive; if this whole frozen trek wasn’t for nothing. He seldom let those thoughts rise to the surface of his mind. Whenever he did, the urge to keep going faltered.).
He peered ahead, shielding his eyes against snow glare with the palm of his hand. Yes, those were houses up there-either Fiat or, if he’d botched his navigation, some other equally unimpressive little hamlet.
Off to one side of the road, he saw little dark figures moving against the white-splashed background. Hunters, he thought In hard times, anything you could add to your larder was all to the good. A deer might mean the difference between starving and getting through the winter.
He was not a great outdoorsman (though he’d learned a lot lately), but one good glance at how the dark figures moved warned him his first hasty thought was wrong. Hunters, at least of the human variety, did not walk like that. It was some sort of Lizard patrol.
And, worse luck, they’d seen him, too. They broke off whatever they were doing and came toward the road. He thought about diving off his bike and running away from them, but no surer way to get himself shot came to mind. Better to assume the air of an innocent traveler out and about.
One of the Lizards waved to him. He waved back, then stopped his bicycle and waited for them to come up. The closer they got, the more motley and miserable they looked. That struck him as somehow wrong; bug-eyed monsters weren’t supposed to have troubles of their own. At least, they never did in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials.
But a couple of the Lizards were tricked out in their own kind’s shiny cold-weather gear, while the rest had draped themselves with a rummage sale’s worth of stolen human coats, mufflers, hats, snow pants, and boots. They looked like sad little tramps, and they also looked frozen in spite of everything they had on. They were, in fact, so many Winter Fritzes in the scaly flesh.
