So would the day after that, and the day after that, and the day afterthat. Free? Once more, the guard’s barking laughter seemed to reverberate from his heating diaphragms. As sleep overcame him, he thought how sweet never waking up would be.
Ludmila Gorbunova looked to the west, not in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the evening star (in any case, Venus was lost in the skirts of the sun) but longingly nonetheless.
From right beside her elbow, a voice said, “You would fly another mission into theWehrmacht lines in a moment, wouldn’t you?”
She jumped; she hadn’t heard Ignacy come up. She also felt no small anger and embarrassment. Wearing her heart on her sleeve was the last thing she wanted to do, especially when it was given to a Nazi panzer colonel.A Germanpanzer colonel, she thought, correcting herself. That sounded better to her-and besides, could any man who called a medal he’d won “Hitler’s fried egg” be a dedicated fascist? She doubted it, though she knew her objectivity was suspect.
“You do not answer me,” Ignacy said.
She wanted to pretend the guerrilla leader hadn’t spoken, but she couldn’t very well do that. Besides, since his Russian was better than anyone else’s hereabouts, ignoring him would cut her off from the person to whom she could most readily speak. So she replied with something that was true but not responsive: “What I want does not much matter. With the cease-fire in place between the Germans and the Lizards, I will have no occasion to fly over there, will I? If the Germans have any sense, they will not do anything to make the Lizards lose patience with them and start fighting again.”
“If the Germans had any sense, would they be Germans?” Ignacy returned. Ludmila would not have cared to take piano lessons from such a cynical man; perhaps the war had revealed to him his true calling. After pausing a moment to let the jab sink in, he went on, ‘The Germans will, I think, encourage unrest in the parts of Poland they do not control.”
“Do you really?” Ludmila embarrassed herself all over again by how eager she sounded.
Ignacy smiled. It was not altogether pleasant, that curl of lips, not in a plump face in a land full of thin ones, not when it didn’t quite light up his eyes. She hadn’t told him anything of her meeting with Jager; as far as she was concerned, that was her business and nobody else’s. But whether she’d told him or not, he seemed to have drawn his own conclusions, most of them disconcertingly accurate. He said, “As a matter of fact, I am trying to arrange-ever so discreetly, of course-to get my hands on some German antitank rockets. Would you be interested in transporting those if I succeed?”
“I will do whatever is required to bring victory to the workers and peasants of Poland against the alien imperialists,” Ludmila answered. Sometimes taking refuge in the rhetoric she’d learned from childhood was comforting. Using it also gave her more chance to think. She said, “Are you certain flying those rockets in would be the best way to get them? Moving them along back roads and paths might be easier and safer.”
Ignacy shook his head. “The Lizards have been patrolling rear areas much more aggressively than they did when they fought major battles along the front. Also, the Nazis do not want anyone capturing antitank rockets that could be shown to have entered Poland after the cease-fire began. That might give the Lizards the excuse they need to end the truce. But if you flew the rockets back here without having them noticed on the ground, we could use them as we like: who could prove when we acquired them?”
“I see,” Ludmila said slowly, and she did. The Nazis had an interest in playing it close to the vest, while Ignacy, she suspected, didn’t know how to play it any other way. “And what happens if I am shot down trying to deliver the rockets to you?”
“I shall miss both you and the aircraft,” the guerrilla leader answered. She gave him a dirty look. He stared back, his face bland and blank. She got the idea he wouldn’t miss her much, even if she did give him an air force of sorts. She wondered if he wanted to get her airborne to be rid of her, but soon decided that was foolish. He could pick many more direct ways of disposing of her, ones that didn’t involve the precious FieselerStorch.
The nod he gave her was almost a bow: a bourgeois affectation he’d preserved even here in a setting most emphatically proletarian. “Be assured I shall let you know the instant I have word that this plan goes forward, that I have persuaded the German authorities here there is no danger to it. And now I leave you to enjoy the beauties of the sunset.”
Itwas beautiful, even if she bridled at the way he said that. Crimson and orange and brilliant gold filled the sky; drifting clouds seemed to be aflame. And yet, though the colors were those of fire and blood, they didn’t make her think of war. Instead, she wondered what she ought to be doing when, in a few short hours, the sun rose again. Where was her life going, tomorrow and next month and next year?
She felt torn in two. Part of her wanted to go back to the Soviet Union in any way she could. The pull of therodina was strong. But she also wondered what would become of her if she returned. Her dossier already had to be suspect, because she was known to have associated with Heinrich Jager. Could she justify going off to a foreign country-a country under occupation by the Lizards and the Nazis-at the behest of a German general? She’d been in Poland for months, too, without making any effort to come back till now. If the NKVD happened to be in a suspicious mood, as the NKVD so often happened to be (the nasty, skinny face of Colonel Boris Lidov flashed in front of her mind), they’d ship her to agulag without a second thought.
The other half of her wanted to run to Jager, not away from him. She recognized the impracticalities there, too. The Nazis had theGestapo instead of the NKVD. They wouldn’t just be looking at Jager through a magnifying glass, either. They’d rake her over the coals, too, maybe more savagely than the People’s Commissariat for the Interior would. She tried to imagine what happened to Nazis who fell into the NKVD’s hands. That same sort of shuddersome treatment had to await Soviet citizens in the grip of theGestapo.
Realistically, she couldn’t go east. As realistically, she couldn’t go west, either. That left staying where she was, also an unpalatable choice. Ignacy was hardly the sort of leader she’d follow into battle with a song on her ups (though if she did, she thought wryly, she’d better sing in tune).
As she stood and thought and watched, gold faded out of the sky. Now the horizon was orange, with crimson creeping down the dome of heaven toward it. Some of the clouds, off in the east, were just floating dumplings, not fire incarnate. Night was coming.
Ludmila sighed. “What I’d really like,” she said, though nothing and no one was likely to pay her any heed, “is to go off somewhere-maybe by myself, maybe. If he wants, with Heinrich-and forget this whole war and that it ever started.” She laughed. “And while I’m wishing for that, why don’t I wish for the moon from out of the sky, too?”
Ttomalss paced back and forth on the concrete floor of his cell. His toeclaws clicked over the hard, rough surface. He wondered how long he would take to wear a groove in the floor, or maybe even wear through it so he could dig a hole in the dirt below and escape.
That depended on how thick the concrete was, of course. If the Tosevites had put down only a thin layer of the stuff, he shouldn’t need more than, oh, three or four lifetimes.
Not much light came in through the small, narrow windows of the cell. Those windows were set too high for him to see out through them, and too high for any Big Ugly to see in. He had been told that if he raised an outcry, he would be shot without a chance to explain or make amends. He believed the warning. It was very much in character for the Tosevites.