Or give you a rakeoff, Marian thought. But she thanked Babs and left a fifty-cent tip. Roland’s turned out to be okay. After Camp Nowhere, any halfway decent motor court was okay. Roland himself did knock six bits a day off the tab when she mentioned Babs’ name-and when she said she’d stay awhile if she could land a job.
Weed itself…A small town in the middle of nowhere. That suited Marian fine. Better than fine, in fact. Nothing in the whole wide world could make the Russians want to drop an atom bomb on a no-account place like this.
13
Konstantin Morozov rubbed his chin. Whiskers rasped faintly under his fingertips. He’d got used to having skin as smooth as that of a boy who didn’t need to shave yet.
No more. He’d grown some fine brown fuzz on top of his head, too. It wasn’t enough yet for a Red Army barber to clip it down into a soldier’s crop-a lot like a zek’s, when you got right down to it-but it was there. He could see it in the mirror every morning.
He was regrowing hair on the rest of his body, too. He itched in places where he hadn’t even known he had places: the backs of his thighs, for instance. He scratched all the time. Sometimes he did it without even noticing. And sometimes he scratched himself raw.
Even so, the doctors seemed pleased. “This is a good recovery,” one of them told him.
“I’m glad to hear it, Comrade Physician,” Konstantin said. Like a lot of Soviet quacks, this one was a woman. Unlike a lot of the female doctors, she wasn’t old or homely. He noticed that she wasn’t, which seemed as novel to him as the fuzz on his scalp. When he was egg-bald, he wouldn’t have cared if a gorgeous, naked nineteen-year-old plopped herself down on his cot. If that didn’t say all that needed saying about how hard the radiation had bitten him, nothing ever would.
“Khorosho,” she said once more, sounding…amused? Something of what he’d been thinking must have shown in his voice.
“How are my crewmates?” He realized she wouldn’t remember offhand who they were, so he named them: “Eigims and Kalyakin and Sarkisyan.”
“Kalyakin…still struggles.” She picked her words with care. “He has needed blood transfusions, because his anemia persists in spite of everything we can do to combat it.”
You don’t know how to combat it. Morozov had no trouble reading between the lines. “The others?” he asked. Poor Vladislav would pull through on his own, or he wouldn’t.
“They’re in about the same shape you are,” the doctor said. “You should all be ready to return to duty in ten days to two weeks. All of you but Kalyakin, I mean. He’ll have to stay behind a bit longer.”
“I hope it will be sooner,” Konstantin said. “From what the radio says, the front’s gone back since those damned bombs fell.”
“Da,” she agreed. “But we will not release you too soon. You’re weaker than you think-and we’ve had bad results with radiation-sickness victims we sent back to duty before they could handle it.”
What did bad results mean? He decided he didn’t want to know badly enough to find out. He did say, “I’m tired of sitting on the shelf like a jar of pickled cabbage.”
That got a smile out of her. But she said, “You’re not sitting on the shelf, Comrade Sergeant. You’re getting over a wound, a bad wound. Just because you don’t have a hole in you and eighty stitches, that doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt. Radiation sickness is nothing to sneeze at. You’re lucky you didn’t get an infection, for instance. You might not have been able to fight it off.”
One more cheerful thought. They hadn’t said much about that when he was sickest. Probably they hadn’t wanted to give him anything more to fret about. There was kindness, or as much as a Soviet military hospital was likely to show.
The doctor went on to the next patient. An orderly-by his bandaged left arm, one of the walking wounded-brought Konstantin a bowl of liver stewed with turnips and cabbage. He realized how sick of liver he was getting. It built blood, though. He remembered the East German doc talking about that.
How much liver were they feeding poor Vladislav? They might really be giving it to him up the other end, too. Transfusions? Konstantin shivered. He remembered the SS guys in the last war, with their blood group tattooed under one armpit. If they got captured, that tattoo usually bought them a bullet in the nape of the neck. But if they got hurt, it could keep them alive. They thought it was worth the risk.
In the last war, Morozov had never heard of Soviet doctors transfusing wounded men. They could do it now, plainly. Stalin had warned that the USSR had to catch up with Western Europe and America or go under. It had survived the Hitlerites-barely, but it had.
Now it was trading shattered atoms with the USA. America was rich and strong. Russia’d hit back hard, though. The rodina was still in there punching. Sometimes you’d win if you refused to admit you were beaten.
Sometimes.
He listened to Roman Amfiteatrov on Radio Moscow, going on about the victories the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were winning over the forces of imperialism, capitalism, and reaction. Someone had brought a radio into the ward. The only way he could not listen was by jamming his fingers into his ears. The MGB would be curious about why he’d want to do something like that. And when the Chekists got curious, your story didn’t have a happy ending.
Russian radios received only the frequencies on which the USSR broadcast. That made it harder for people with a counterrevolutionary cast of mind to hear what the BBC and the Voice of America and other lying, anti-Soviet subversive stations were saying about the world situation.
After you’d listened to Radio Moscow since you were in short pants, you learned what its claims were likely to mean in the real world. Konstantin worked out that the Chinese might still be advancing in Korea, but the Red Army had lost enough front-line forces so the Americans and their friends were moving forward, not back.
He’d damn near been part of the front-line forces the Red Army had lost. He wondered how radioactive his old T-54 was. He and what was left of his crew wouldn’t get it back when they returned to action. He was sure of that. The men who gave orders would never let a runner sit idle so long. They would have had repair crews hose off the outside and scrub the inside and given it to some healthy foursome.
Or maybe they wouldn’t have bothered with the hosing and the scrubbing. Maybe they would have just told the unsuspecting new guys Here’s your machine. Go out and smash some Americans for Stalin!
He had the bad feeling it would have worked that way. You couldn’t see radioactivity, or smell it or hear it or taste it or feel it…unless you got enough to make you sick, of course. If it wasn’t at a level where it would fry a fresh crew right away, why not just slap them in?
Radiation might make them sick somewhere down the road? Comrade, that’s down the road! They’re a tank crew! We’ve got a war to fight! And chances are they won’t live long enough for the radiation to bother them any which way!
Yes, that was how Red Army planners would use a tank that hadn’t been quite close enough to an A-bomb for its cannon to sag. To be fair, those men used themselves as hard as any other soldiers they could get their hands on. It had worked against the Nazis. It might work again.
Konstantin went looking for Juris Eigims. He wasn’t deathly tired all the time, the way he had been when he was sickest. Walking around, though, made him realize the nice-looking lady doctor had a point. He wasn’t up to fighting a tank for a day and a half without sleep, or for keeping it in good running order.
The Balt looked pretty much the way he did, only with blond fuzz in place of brown. “Still want to shoot for me when we’re good to go?” Morozov asked him.