Pfaff handed him the field glasses. “Have a look through these. You know how to adjust them for your eyes?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve used ’em before.” Willi aimed at the moon. It wasn’t very far out of focus even before he carefully twisted each eyepiece in turn to sharpen things up. His buddy’s vision couldn’t have been too different from his own. But once he got the image as clear as he could… “Wow,” he breathed, hardly even realizing he was making a noise.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Pfaff spoke with quiet pride, as if, instead of Galileo, he were the first one ever to see the heavens close up.
That pride was wasted on Willi, who didn’t even hear him. The moon hung there, seeming close enough to reach out and touch if he took one hand away from the field glasses. It wasn’t just a light in the sky any more. It was a world, a world out there in space. The faint gray patches you could make out with the naked eye (and Willi didn’t so much as think of naked women, the truest proof of how fascinated he was) swelled into plains that had to be hundreds of kilometers across. Craters pocked them and filled the brighter, whiter areas of the moon.
Shadows stretched across the craters closest to the straight line. The others, under higher sunlight, showed less contrast. “What made them?” Willi asked. “Volcanoes?”
Adam Pfaff understood what he was talking about right away. “Nobody knows for sure. We’ve never been there, after all,” he answered. “But that’s one of the best guesses.”
“Wow,” Willi said again, staring and staring.
“You see the three craters, one above the next, near the sunrise line-the terminator, they call it?” Pfaff said.
Willi peered again, then nodded. “I see ’em.”
“They’re called Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, and Azrachel.”
“All the shit on the moon has names?” That had never occurred to Willi before. You could make maps of what was up there, the same as you could down here. It really was another world.
“You think they look impressive through these, you should see ’em through a telescope,” Pfaff said. “Back home, I’ve got an eight-centimeter refractor. It’s little and pretty cheap, but it’ll let you magnify a hundred times, not just seven. Then you can really start to get an idea of how much there is to see.”
Willi tried to imagine the moon appearing that much bigger and closer than it did even through binoculars. He felt himself failing. After you’d started playing with yourself, you could try to imagine what a girl would be like, but you wouldn’t know what counted till one let you get lucky.
“What else can you show me here?” he asked.
“Well, you see those two bright stars close together, a little west of the moon?” Pfaff asked. Willi nodded once more. One of them was the brightest star in the sky; the other, the more easterly one, was fainter and more yellow. His friend went on, “You can take a look at them if you want. The bright one is Jupiter. Maybe you’ll see a couple of its moons if you hold the binoculars real steady. The other one’s Saturn.”
“Rings!” Willi exclaimed, remembering from school.
“Rings,” Adam agreed, “only the binoculars won’t show them. Through a telescope, they’ve got to be the most beautiful thing in the sky. You think they can’t possibly be real.”
If they were more beautiful than the magnified moon, Willi wished he had a telescope. Through the field glasses… The stars stayed stars. They looked brighter and you could see more of them, but they didn’t get bigger. Jupiter and Saturn did. Jupiter especially showed a tiny disk. It probably wasn’t even a quarter as wide as the moon through the naked eye, but it was there.
And, sure as hell, it had two little stars dancing attendance on it. That was interesting-not so glorious as the moon, but interesting all the same. “What else is there?” Willi’d ignored the heavens as long as he’d been alive. Now he wanted to look at everything at once.
Adam Pfaff pointed to the left of the moon this time. “See those faint stars in what looks like mist? You can’t make ’em out real well because the moon’s so close, but they’re there.” Following his finger, Willi spied what he was talking about. Pfaff said, “That’s the Pleiades. They look different through the field glasses.”
“Different how?” Willi asked. Pfaff didn’t enlighten him, so he turned the binoculars that way. He whistled softly. Had someone taken a bag of diamonds-along with the odd sapphire and ruby-and spilled them on velvet of the deepest blue imaginable, a blue only a whisper from black, he might have made an inferior copy of what Willi saw. Jewels don’t shine by their own light. The stars of the Pleiades did. Even more than with the moon, the naked eye gave no hint of what hid in plain sight.
“Hey, what are you clowns up to?” Arno Baatz’s grating voice made Willi yank down the binoculars, as if the corporal had caught him with dirty pictures. Baatz brayed on: “Trying to freeze your stupid dicks off? You don’t have to try real hard, not here you don’t.”
Willi had forgotten he was cold. Out in the open in the middle of a Russian winter, that would do for a miracle till a real one came along. “We’re just looking at the moon and stuff through my field glasses,” Pfaff said. “Want to see?”
“Nahh.” Awful Arno laughed at the idea. That saddened Willi without surprising him. “I got better things to do with my time, I do,” the corporal added. Willi almost asked him what they were, but held his tongue instead. If Baatz didn’t want to know, Willi didn’t want to tell him.
In the Red Air Force, political officers were like epaulets on a uniform: they were decorative, but you didn’t need them. Most of them had sense enough to know it, too. If a politruk tried to countermand a squadron commander’s orders, the arrogant fool would be ignored if he was lucky. If he wasn’t so lucky, he might leave a bomber without a parachute from several thousand meters up. Any half-clever officer could cook up paperwork explaining the unfortunate accident. It wasn’t as if the jerk it happened to would be there to give him the lie.
Ivan Kuchkov soon found out things in the Red Army were different. Political officers here took the job of indoctrinating the men seriously. They preached Communism the way priests preached religion. And, like priests, they thought what they were doing was important.
They also expected everybody else to think it was important. When a politruk started gabbing, he expected all the soldiers within range of his yappy voice to pay close attention. Ivan soon mastered the art of seeming to listen while his mind roamed free. He didn’t take long to realize he wasn’t the only one.
Lieutenant Vasiliev went on and on about the benefits of Party membership. The most important one for most Red Army men was that their families were sure to get word if they fell on the field. Unlike the Nazis, Soviet soldiers wore no identity disks. The government kept only loose track of them; they were interchangeable, expendable parts. But Communist Party members were part of the elite. They mattered to the state, so it monitored them more closely than ordinary fighters.
That might have been a selling point for most soldiers, but not for Ivan. His mother was dead. He couldn’t stand his brother or sister. And if he ever saw his old man again, he’d smack him in the snoot to pay him back for all the beatings he’d dished out when Ivan was a kid. Or he’d try, anyhow. His father was a sneaky weasel, and might get in the first lick himself.
So all that recruiting crap went in one ear and out the other. But sometimes Vasiliev went on about other stuff, too. One morning after breakfast-black bread, sausage, and tea, plus whatever the soldiers could scrounge from the countryside-he gathered the company together in the woods and spoke in portentous tones: “Romania has declared war against the Rodina.”
Back when the war was new, Kuchkov’s SB-2 had flown across Romanian airspace so Soviet “volunteers” could reach Czechoslovakia to fight the Fascists. That aid wasn’t enough. They’d had to get the hell out of there again a month later. But they’d tried, which was more than anybody else could say. Now…