In the Balance

The Finnish base had better food than Ludmila had tasted in some time. It also seemed cleaner than the ones from which she’d been fighting. She wondered whether that was because the Finns hadn’t seen as much action against the Lizards as the Soviets had.

“Partly,” the officer who’d greeted her said when she asked. His greatcoat, she noticed once they were inside, was gray, not khaki; it had three narrow bars on the cuffs. She wondered what rank that made him. “And partly, again meaning no disrespect, you may see that other people are often just generally neater about things than you Russians. But never mind that. Would you care to use our sauna?” When he saw she didn’t understand the Finnish word, he turned it into German: “Steam-bath.”

“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. Not only was it a chance to get clean, it was a chance to get warm. The Finns didn’t even leer at her when she went in alone, as Russians would have done. She wondered how manly they were.

Flying over Finland and then over Sweden, she thought about what the Finnish officer had said. Just looking down at countryside that war had not ravaged was new and different; flying past towns that weren’t burned-out ruins took her thoughts back to better days she’d almost forgotten in the midst of combat’s urgency.

Even under snow, though, she could see the orderly patterns of fields and fences. Everything was on a smaller scale than in the Soviet Union, and almost toylike in its tiny perfection. She wondered if the Scandinavians were neater than Russians simply because they had so much less land and had to use it more efficiently.

That impression grew stronger in Denmark, where even forest had all but vanished and every square centimeter seemed put to some useful purpose. And then, past Denmark, she flew into Germany.

Germany, she saw at once, had been at war. Though her flight path took her a couple of hundred kilometers west of murdered Berlin, she saw devastation that matched anything she’d come across in the Soviet Union. In fact, first the British and then the Lizards had given Gennany a more concentrated beating from the air than the Soviet Union as a whole had received. Town after town had factories, train stations, and residential blocks pounded to ruins.

For that matter, the Lizards were still pounding Germany. When Ludmila heard the roar of their jets, she flew doubly low and slow, as if her U-2 were a tiny gnat buzzing by the floor, too small to be worth noticing.

The Germans were still fighting back, too. Tracers spiderwebbed across the night sky like fireworks. Searchlights stabbed, trying to pin Lizard raiders with their beams. Once or twice, off in the distance, Ludmila heard piston engines racing. So, she thought, the Luftwaffe still has fighters in the air too.

As she flew farther south, the land began to rise. Her landing strip the fourth night of her flight, outside a little town called Suilzbach, was in what looked to have been a potato field. A ground crew dragged her plane to cover while a Luftwaffe

officer drove her and Molotov to town in a horse-drawn wagon. “The Lizards are too likely to shoot at automobiles,” he cxplained apologetically.

She nodded. “It is so with us, too.”

“Ah,” said the Luftwaffe man.

Every so often, Pravda or Izvestia

would describe the atmosphere in diplomatic talks as “correct.” Ludmila hadn’t quite understood what that meant. Now, seeing the way the Germans treated her and Molotov, she did. They were polite, they were attentive, but they couldn’t hide that they wished they didn’t have to deal with the Soviets at all. It was mutual, Ludmila thought, at least as far as she was concerned. As for Molotov, he was seldom more than civil to anyone, Russian or German.

Ludmila had to work hard to suppress a yelp of glee at the prospect of sleeping in a real bed for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long. Suppress it she did, lest the Nazis take her for uncultured. She also studiously ignored the Luftwaffe officer’s hints that he wouldn’t mind sleeping in that same bed with her.

To her relief, he didn’t get obnoxious about it. He did say, “You will, I hope, forgive me; but I would not recommend trying to fly to Berchtesgaden by night, Fraulein Gorbunova.”

“My rank is senior lieutenant,” Ludmiila answered. “Why would you not recommend this?”

“Flying at night is difficult enough-”

“I have flown a good many night attack missions, both against the Lizards and against you Germans,” she said: let him make of that what he would.