In the Balance

“I know we shouldn’t, Sergeant, but everything’s gone to hell since the Lizards got here,” Jager answered. “Besides, what choice have we?” Too many kolkhozniks carried guns to let him think about hijacking the toy plane with the red star on its flank, even assuming he knew how to fly it-which he didn’t.

The pilot was climbing out of the plane, putting his booted foot in the stirrup on the side of the dusty fuselage below his seat. His boot, his seat? No, Jager saw: a blond braid stuck out under the back of the flying helmet, and the cheeks under those goggles (now shoved up onto the top of the flying helmet) had never known-or needed-a razor. Even baggy flying clothes could not long conceal a distinctly unmasculine shape.

Schultz saw the same thing at the same time. His long jaw worked as if he were about to spit, but he had sense enough to remember where he was and think better of it. Disgust showed in his voice instead: “One of their damned girl fliers, sir”

“So she is.” The pilot was coming their way. Jager made the best of a situation worse than he really cared for: “Rather a pretty one, too.”

Ludmila Gorbunova skimmed over the steppe, looking for Lizards or anything else interesting. No matter what she found, she wouldn’t be able to report back to her base unless the emergency was great enough to make passing along her knowledge more important than coming home. Planes that used radios in flight all too often stopped flying immediately thereafter.

She was far enough south to start getting alert-and worried-when she spotted a crowd around a collective farm’s core buildings at a time when most of the kolkhozniks should have been in the fields. That in itself wasn’t so unusual, but then she caught a glint of light reflecting up from a couple of helmets. As the angle at which she viewed them shifted, she saw they were blackish gray, not the dun color she had expected.

Germans. Her lip twisted. What the Soviet government had to say about Germans had flip-flopped several times over the past few years. They’d gone from being bloodthirsty fascist beasts to peace-loving partners in the struggle against imperialism and then, on June 22, 1941, back to being beasts again, this time with a vengeance.

Ludmila heard the endless droning propaganda, noted when it changed, and changed her thinking accordingly. People who couldn’t do that had a way of disappearing. Of course, for the past year the Germans themselves had been worse than any propaganda about them.

She wished that meant no one in the Soviet Union had anything good to think about the Nazis. The measure of Hitler’s damnation was that imperialist England and the United States joined the Soviets in the struggle against him. The measure of the Soviet Union’s damnation (though Ludmila did not think of it in those terms) was that so many Soviet citizens-Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Byelornssian, Tatars, Cossacks, even Great Russians-collaborated with Hitler against Moscow.

Were these kolkhozniks collaborators, then? If they were, a quick pass with her machine guns would rid the world of a fair number of them. But the line from Radio Moscow on Germany had changed yet again since the Lizards came. They were not forgiven their crimes (no one who had fled from them would ever forgive their crimes), but they were at least human. If they cooperated with Soviet forces against the invaders from beyond the moon, they were not to be harmed.

So Ludmila’s forefinger came off the firing button. She swung the Kukuruznik back toward the collective farm for a closer look. Sure enough, those were Germans down there. she decided to land and try to find out what they were up to.

Only when the U-2 was bumping along the ground to a stop did it occur to her that, if the kolkhozniks were collaborators, they would not want a report going back toward Moscow for eventual vengeance. She almost took off again, but chose to stay and see what she could.

The farmers and the Germans came toward her peacefully enough. She saw several weapons in the little crowd, but none pointed at her. The Germans kept their rifle and submachine guns slung.

“Who is the chief here?” she asked.

“I am, Comrade Pilot,” said a fat little fellow who stood with his back very straight, as if to emphasize how important he was. “Kliment Yegorevich Pavlyuchenko, at your service.”

She gave her own name and patronymic, watching this Pavlyuchenko with a wary eye. He’d spoken her fair and called her “comrade,” but that did not mean he was to be trusted, not with two Germans at his elbow. She pointed at them. “How did they come to your collective farm, comrade? Do they speak any Russian?”

“The older one does, a word here and there, anyhow. The one with the red whiskers knows only how to eat. They must have been straggling a good while-they hadn’t even heard about Berlin.”