Tilting the Balance

There down below-was that a light? It was, and a moment later she spotted the other two with it. She’d been told to look for an equilateral triangle of lights. Here they were. She buzzed slowly overhead, hoping the partisans had all their instructions straight.

They did. As goon as they heard the sewing-machine whine of the U-2’s little Shvetsov engine, they set out two more lights, little ones, that were supposed to mark out the beginning of a stretch of ground where she could land safely. Her mouth went dry, as it did every time she had to land at night on a strip or a field she’d never seen before. The Kukuruznik was a rugged machine, but a mistake could still kill her. http://storecosmetics.ru

She lined up on the landing lights, lost altitude, killed her airspeed-not that the U-2 had much to lose. At the last moment, the lights disappeared: they must have had collars, to keep them from being seen at ground level. Losing them made her heart thump fearfully, but then she was down.

The biplane bounced along over the field. Ludmila hit the brakes hard; every meter she traveled was one more meter in which a wheel might go into a hole and flip the U-2 over. Fortunately, it did not need many meters in which to stop.

Men-dark shapes in darker night-came running up and got to the Kukuruznik while the prop was still spinning. “You have presents for us, Comrade? ” one of them called.

“I have presents, ” Ludmila agreed. She heard the mutters when they heard her voice-variations on the theme of a woman! She was used to that; she’d been dealing with it ever since she joined the Red Air Force. But there were fewer such murmurs among the partisans than there had been at some air force bases to which she’d flown. A fair number of partisans were women, and most male partisans understood that women could fight.

She climbed down from the front cockpit, set a foot in the metal stirrup on the left side of the fuselage that gave access to the rear one. She didn’t go up into it, but started handing out boxes. “Here we are, Comrades: presents, ” she said. “Rifles-with ammunition… submachine guns-with ammunition. ”

“The weapons are good, but we already have most of the weapons we need, ” a man said. “But next time you come, Comrade Pilot, bring us lots more bullets. It’s the ammunition we’re short of-we use a lot of it. ” Wolflike chuckles rose from the partisans’ throats.

From back in the crowd of fighters, someone called, “Comrade, did you fetch us any 7. 92mm ammunition? We have a lot of German rifles and machine guns we could use more if we had bullets for them. ”

Ludmila hauled out a canvas bag that clinked metallically. The partisans’ murmurs turned appreciative; a couple of them clapped gloved hands together in delight. Ludmila said, “I am told to tell you: you cannot expect this bounty on every resupply run. We have to scavenge German cartridges-we don’t manufacture them. The way things are, we have a hard enough time manufacturing our own calibers. ”

“Too bad, ” said the man who had asked about German ammunition. “The Mauser is not a great rifle-accurate, da, but a slow, clumsy bolt-but the Nazis make a very fine machine gun. ”

“Maybe we can work a trade, ” the fellow who’d first greeted Ludmila said. “There’s a mostly German band of fighters back around Konotop, and they use our weapons just as we use theirs. They might swap some of their caliber for some of ours. ”

Those couple of sentences spoke volumes about the anguish of the Soviet Union. Konotop, a hundred fifty kilometers east of Ludmila’s native Kiev, had been in German hands. Now it belonged to the Lizards. When would the Soviet workers and people be able to reclaim the rodina, the motherland?

Ludmila started handing out cardboard tubes and pots of paste. “Here you are, Comrades. Because wars are not won only by bullets, I bring also the latest posters by Efrimov and the Kukryniksi group. ”

That drew pleased exclamations from the partisans. Newspapers hereabouts had been forced to echo the Nazi line; now they slavishly reproduced Lizard propaganda. Radios, especially those able to pick up signals from land still under human control, were few and far between. Posters gave one way of striking back. They could go up on a wall in seconds and show hundreds the truth for days.

“What do the men of Kukryniksi do this time? ” a woman asked.

“It’s one of their better ones, I think, ” Ludmila said, which was no small praise, for the team of Kupryanov, Krylov, and Sokolov probably turned out the best Soviet poster art. She went on, “This one shows a Lizard in Pharaoh’s headdress lashing Soviet peasants; the caption reads, ‘A Return to Slavery. ’ ”

“That is a good one, ” the partisan leader agreed. “It will make the people think, and make them less likely to collaborate with the Lizards. We will post it widely, in towns and villages and at collective farms. ”

“How much collaboration goes on with the Lizards? ” Ludmila asked. “This is something of which our authorities need to be aware. ”

“It’s not as bad as what went on with the Germans at first, ” the man answered. Ludmila nodded; little could be as bad as that. Large segments of the Soviet populace had welcomed the Nazis as liberators in the early days of their invasion. If they’d played on that instead of working to prove they could be even more savage and brutal than the NKVD, they might have toppled the Soviet regime. The partisan went on, “We do have collaboration, though. Many people passively accept whatever power they find above them, while others welcome the rather indifferent rule of the Lizards as superior to the hostility they had known before. ”

“Hostility from the fascists, you mean, ” Ludmila said.

“Of course, Comrade Pilot. ” The partisan leader’s voice was innocence personified. No one could safely speak of hostility to the people from the Soviet government, though that shadow lay across the whole of the rodina.

“You called the Lizards’ rule indifferent, ” Ludmila said. “Explain that more fully, please. Intelligence is worth more than many rifles. ”

“They take crops and livestock for themselves; in the towns, they try to set up manufacturers that might be useful to them: forges and chemical works and such. But they care nothing for what we do as people, ” the partisan said. “They do not forbid worship, but they do not promote it, either. They do not even forbid the Party, which would be only elementary prudence on their part. It is as If we are beneath their notice unless we take up arms against them. Then they hit hard. ”