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“It’s one of their better ones, I think,” Ludmila said, which was no small praise, for the team of Kupryanov, Krylov, and Sokolov probably turned out the best Soviet poster art. She went on, “This one shows a Lizard in Pharaoh’s headdress lashing Soviet peasants; the caption reads, ‘A Return to Slavery.’ ”
“That is a good one,” the partisan leader agreed. “It will make the people think, and make them less likely to collaborate with the Lizards. We will post it widely, in towns and villages and at collective farms.”
“How much collaboration goes on with the Lizards?” Ludmila asked. “This is something of which our authorities need to be aware.”
“It’s not as bad as what went on with the Germans at first,” the man answered. Ludmila nodded; little could be as bad as that. Large segments of the Soviet populace had welcomed the Nazis as liberators in the early days of their invasion. If they’d played on that instead of working to prove they could be even more savage and brutal than the NKVD, they might have toppled the Soviet regime. The partisan went on, “We do have collaboration, though. Many people passively accept whatever power they find above them, while others welcome the rather indifferent rule of the Lizards as superior to the hostility they had known before.”
“Hostility from the fascists, you mean,” Ludmila said.
“Of course, Comrade Pilot.” The partisan leader’s voice was innocence personified. No one could safely speak of hostility to the people from the Soviet government, though that shadow lay across the whole of the rodina.
“You called the Lizards’ rule indifferent,” Ludmila said. “Explain that more fully, please. Intelligence is worth more than many rifles.”
“They take crops and livestock for themselves; in the towns, they try to set up manufacturers that might be useful to them: forges and chemical works and such. But they care nothing for what we do as people,” the partisan said. “They do not forbid worship, but they do not promote it, either. They do not even forbid the Party, which would be only elementary prudence on their part. It is as If we are beneath their notice unless we take up arms against them. Then they hit hard.”
That much Ludmila already knew. The other perplexed her. By the sound of his voice, it perplexed the partisan, too. They were used to a regime that minutely regulated every aspect of its citizens’ lives-and disposed of them without mercy when they didn’t meet its expectations… or sometimes even If they did. Simple indifference seemed very alien by contrast. She hoped her superiors would have a better idea of what to make of it.
“Does anyone have letters for me?” she asked. “I’ll be glad to take them along, though with the post as disrupted as it is, they may be months on the way.”
The partisans queued up to hand her their notes to the outside world. None of them had envelopes; those had been in short supply before the Lizards came. The papers were folded into triangles to show they came from soldiers: the Soviet mail system carried such letters, albeit slowly, without a postage fee.
When she had the last letter, Ludmila climbed back into the front cockpit and said, “Would you please swing my aircraft around nose for tail? If I landed safely on this strip, I’d like to take off down the same ground.”
The little U-2 was easy to haul around by hand; it weighed less than a thousand kilos. Ludmila had to explain to someone how to turn the prop. As always on these missions, she had an anxious moment wondering whether the engine would start-no mechanical starter here If it didn’t. But it was still warm from the flight in, and kicked over almost at once.
She released the brake, pushed the stick forward. The Kukuruznik jounced over the rough field. A few partisans ran alongside, waving. They soon fell behind. The takeoff run was longer than the one she’d needed to land. That meant she was going over some new terrain (to say nothing of the holes she might have missed while she was landing). But after a last couple of jolts, the biplane made an ungainly leap into the air.
She swung the U-2 north and west, back toward the base from which she’d set out. Finding it again would take the same kind of search she’d needed to locate the partisans’ makeshift airstrip. A base that advertised its presence soon drew the attention of the Lizards. Once that happened, the base was unlikely to remain present for long.
Not that she had any guarantees of getting back safely, anyhow. U-2s were detected and destroyed less often than any other Soviet aircraft; Ludmila’s best guess was that they were too small and light and flimsy to be noticed most of the time. But Kukuruzniks did not always come home, either.
Off in the distance, she saw flashes, like heat lightning on a summer evening: someone’s artillery, probably the Lizards’. She glanced at her watch and compass, made the best position estimate she could. When she landed, she’d report it to Colonel Karpov. Maybe one day before too long, the partisans would fire a rack of Katyusha rockets that way.
Stars twinkled through gaps in the clouds. A couple of times, she spotted brief twinkles of light on the ground, too: muzzle flashes. They made the stars seem less safe and friendly.
Watching the compass and her watch, she flew on toward the base. When she thought she was overhead, she looked down and saw-nothing. That failed to surprise her; finding it on the first try by dead reckoning was no likelier than plunging your hand into a haystack and bringing out a needle between thumb and forefinger.
She began another search spiral. Now she watched her fuel gauge, too. If she was lost and had to set down in a field, she wanted to do it while she still had power, not dead stick.
Just when she was beginning to worry she might have to do exactly that, she spied the lights she’d been looking for. She gratefully made for them; knowing where you were made you feel ever so much more in control of things.
The airstrip had supposedly been leveled. As a matter of fact, it was no smoother than the one the partisans had marked off for her. Ludmila’s teeth clicked together at every jolt until the U-2 stopped. She told herself the roughness made the runway harder to spot. Was that consolation enough for the bruises she’d have wherever her safety harness touched her? Maybe.
She unbuckled the harness, got out of the plane while the prop was still spinning. The groundcrew ran up, hauled the Kukuruznik away to its between-missions home in a camouflaged revetment. “Where’s Colonel Karpov?” she asked.
“He went to bed an hour ago,” somebody answered. “It is close to three in the morning. You have anything so important it won’t keep till dawn?”
“I suppose not,” she said. The Lizard artillery wasn’t something he had to know about right now. She followed the Kukuruznik toward its shelter.
Ludmila would have bet as much money as she had that she’d find Georg Schultz waiting at the revetment. Sure enough, there he was. “Alles khorosho?” he asked in his usual mixture of German and Russian.
“Gut, da,” she answered, mixing the languages the same way.
He scrambled up int
o the cockpit No lantern was lighted, not even beneath the camouflage netting; the Lizards had gadgets that could pick up the tiniest gleam. That didn’t stop Schultz from starting to work on Ludmila’s biplane. He tested the pedals and other controls, leaned out to say, “Left aileron cable not good-feels a little loose. Come light, I fix.”
“Thank you, Georgi Mikhailovich,” Ludmila answered. She hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the cable, but If Schultz said it needed tightening, she was willing to believe him. His understanding for machinery was, to her way of thinking, all but uncanny. She flew the aircraft; Georg Schultz projected himself into it as if he were part plane himself.
“Nothing else bad,” he said, “but here-you leave on floor.”
He handed her a folded triangle of paper.
“Thank you,” she said again. “Our post is unreliable enough without me losing a letter before it ever gets into the mail.” She wasn’t sure how much of that he understood, but found herself yawning enormously. She was too tired to try to dredge up German to make things clear for him. If Colonel Karpov was asleep, she saw no reason she shouldn’t grab a couple of hours for herself, too.
She shrugged out of her parachute harness-not that she’d have much chance to use a chute if she got hit while she was hedgehopping the way she usually did-and stowed it in the cockpit, then started out of the revetment toward her sleeping quarters. As she passed Georg Schultz, he patted her on the backside.
Ludmila took a skittering half step, half jump. She whirled around in fury. This wasn’t the first time such things had happened to her since she’d joined the Red Air Force, but somehow she’d thought Schultz too kulturny to try them.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” she blazed in Russian, then switched to German to drive it home: “Nie wieder, verstehst du?” It was the du of insult, not intimacy. She added, “What would your Colonel Jager think if he found out what you just did?”
