Striking the Balance

Lizard planes screamed by. Antiaircraft guns hammered at them. Every once in a while, the guns brought down a fighter-bomber, too, but seldom enough that it wasn’t much more than dumb luck. Bombs hit the American works; the blasts boxed Groves’ ears.

“Whatever that was they hit, it’ll take a lot of pick-and-shovel work to set it right again.” Omar Bradley looked unhappy. “Hardly seems fair to the poor devils who have to do all the hard work to see the fruits of their labors go up in smoke that way.”

“Destroying is easier than building, sir,” Groves answered.That’s why it’s easier to turn out a soldier than an engineer, he thought. He didn’t say that out loud. Giving the people who worked for you the rough side of your tongue could sometimes spur them on to greater effort. If you got your superior angry at you, though, he was liable to let you down when you needed him most.

Groves pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully. In its own way, that was engineering, too.

Ludmila Gorbunova let her hand rest on the butt of her Tokarev automatic pistol. “You are not using me in the proper fashion,” she told the leader of the guerrilla band, a tough, skinny Pole who went by the name of Casimir. To make sure he couldn’t misunderstand it, she said it first in Russian, then in German, and then in what she thought was Polish.

He leered at her. “Of course I’m not,” he said. “You still have your clothes on.”

She yanked the pistol out of its holster: “Pig!” she shouted. “Idiot! Take your brain out of your pants and listen to me!” She clapped a hand to her forehead.“Bozhemoi! If the Lizards paraded a naked whore around Hrubieszow, they’d lure you and every one of your skirt-chasing cockhounds out of the forest to be slaughtered.”

Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “You are very beautiful when you are angry,” a line he must have stolen from a badly dubbed American film.

She almost shot him on the spot.This was what she’d got for doing thatkulturny General von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt a favor, a trip to a band of partisans who didn’t have the wits to clear all the trees out of their landing strip and who hadn’t the first clue how to employ the personnel who, for reasons often inscrutable to her, nonetheless adhered to their cause.

“Comrade,” she said, keeping things as simple as she could, “I am a pilot. I have no working aircraft here.” She didn’t bother pointing out-what was the use? — that the partisans hadn’t come up with a mechanic able to fix her poorKukuruznik, which was to her the equivalent of failing kindergarten. “Using me as a soldier gives me less to do than I might otherwise. Do you know of any other aircraft I might fly?”

Casimir reached up under his shirt and scratched his belly. He was hairy as a monkey-and not much smarter than one, either,

Ludmila thought. She expected he wouldn’t answer her, and regretted losing her temper-regretted it a little, anyway, as she would have regretted any piece of tactics that could have been better. At last, though, he did reply: “I know of a band that either has or knows about or can get its hands on some sort of a German plane. If we get you to it, can you fly it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If it flies, I can probably fly it. You don’t sound like you know much.” After a moment, she added, “About this airplane, I mean. What kind is it? Where is it? Is it in working order?”

“I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it is. Where? That I know. It is a long way from here, north and west of Warsaw, not far from where the Nazis are operating again these days. If you want to travel to it, this can probably be arranged.”

She wondered if there was any such plane, or if Casimir merely wanted to be rid of her. He was trying to send her farther away from therodina, too. Did he want her gone because she was a Russian? There were a few Russians in his band, but they didn’t strike her as ideal specimens of Soviet manhood. Still. If the plane was where he said it was, she might accomplish something useful with it. She was long since convinced she couldn’t do that here.

“Khorosho,”

she said briskly: “Good. What sort of guides and passwords will I need to get to this mysterious aircraft?”

“I will need some time to make arrangements,” Casimir said. “They might go faster if you-” He stopped; Ludmila had swung up the pistol to point at his head. He did have nerve. His voice didn’t waver as he admitted, “On the other hand, they might not.”

“Khorosho,”Ludmila said again, and lowered the gun. She hadn’t taken off the safety, but Casimir didn’t need to know that. She wasn’t even very angry at him. He might not bekulturny, but he did understandno when he stared down a gun barrel. Some men-Georg Schultz immediately sprang to mind-needed much stronger hints than that.