Upsetting the Balance

Not for the first time, she wished theKukuruznik had a radio. She sighed; a lot of Soviet aircraft and tanks went without radios. That saved the expense of building and installing them, and the trouble of training personnel who were liable to be illiterate peasants just off the farm. Whether such economies were worth the disadvantage of being without good communications was another question entirely.

When she bounced in for a landing outside Pskov, no Soviet groundcrew men waited for her. The possibility that she might come back early had never entered their minds. She taxied as far from the concealed airplanes as she could, leaving her own at the very edge of the trees. With luck, the Lizards would be so intent on their retreat that they wouldn’t notice theKukuruznik.

Without luck…“Nichevo,” Ludmila said: “It can’t be helped.”

She hurried into Pskov. By the time she got to theKrom, she was sweating; if anything would keep you warm, flight gear would. She almost ran into George Bagnall as he was coming out “What’s going on?” he asked in his bad Russian.

She poured out the story, first in Russian and then, when she realized she was going too fast for him to follow, in German instead.

“And so I must seeGeneralleutnant Chill and the Soviet brigadierssofort — immediately,” she finished. German was a good language in which to sound urgent. If you didn’t get your way, it seemed to warn, something terrible would happen.

But Bagnall only nodded.“Da, they all need to know that,” he said, and, setting a hand on her shoulder to show she was with him, he marched her through layers of sentries and subordinates to the commandments of Pskov.

She told them the story in the same mix of languages she’d used with Bagnall. Aleksandr German translated from the Russian for Kurt Chill and from the German for Nikolai Vasiliev. The leaders were as excited as Ludmila had been. Vasiliev slammed a fist down on the tabletop. “We can drive them far from our city!” he shouted.

“They’re already going,” Chill said. “Whereare they going-and why? We must have more intelligence reports. I shall order up additional flights.” He reached for a field telephone.

Until they got more data, the commanders weren’t about to order anything irrevocable, which struck Ludmila as sensible. She and Bagnall both withdrew. He said, “You did well to come back so soon. You showed a lot of-” He had trouble with the word, both in Russian and in German. Finally, after some fumbling, Ludmila decided he was trying to sayinitiative.

She shrugged. “It needed doing, so I did it.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she realize that was unusual, at least among the Soviets. You did what you were told, and nothing else. That way, you never got in trouble. From what she’d seen, the Germans were looser, more demanding of imagination from their lower ranks. She didn’t know how the English did things.

“Das ist gut,”he said, and then repeated himself, this time in Russian:“Khorosho.” Ludmila supposed that meant he thought initiative was a good thing, too. Like a lot of Soviet citizens, she mistrusted the concept How could social equality survive if some people shoved themselves ahead of the rest?

Coming out of the gloomy confines of theKrom took such ideological concerns from her mind. The sun had escaped the clouds while she was passing her news on to the local commanders. It gilttered off the snow on the ground and made the whole world dazzlingly white. The day wasn’t warm-they wouldn’t see a warm day for months-but it was beautiful.

Bagnall must have felt it, too. He said, “Shall we walk along the river?”

Ludmila looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Yes, he definitely believed in initiative. After a moment, she smiled. “Well, why not?” she said. Maybe she had a weakness for foreign men, something that struck her as vaguely-well, not so vaguely-subversive. Then she shook her head. Georg Schultz was foreign, but she’d never had the slightest yen for him. Maybe she had a weakness forkulturny men. In the Soviet Union, she sometimes thought, they were almost as hard to come by as foreigners.

The Pskova River was frozen over, ice stretching from bank to bank. Here and there, men had cut holes in it and were fishing. A couple had plump pike and bream out on the ice to show their time wasn’t going to waste.

“Fish here keep fresh all winter long,” Bagnall said.

“Well, of course,” Ludmila answered. Then she paused. England was supposed to have warmer winters than the Soviet Union. Maybe it wasn’t anof course for him.

After a while, he stopped and looked across the river. “Which church is that?” he asked, pointing.

“I think that is the one they call the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian on Gremyachaya Hill,” Ludmila answered. “But I ought to be asking you these things, not the other way round. You have been in Pskov much longer than I have.”