Tilting the Balance

He stuck a screwdriver into a pocket of his coveralls, came to attention so stiff it mocked the respect it was supposed to convey. “The aircraft is ready for flight, Comrade Pilot, ” he reported.

“Thank you, ” Ludmila answered. She did not call him “Comrade Mechanic” in return, not because it sounded unnatural to her in German, but because Schultz used for sarcasm what should have been a term of egalitarian respect. She wondered how he’d survived in Hitlerite Germany; in the Soviet Union that attitude would surely have seen him purged.

She checked the fuel level and the ammunition loads herself: no such thing as being too careful. When she was satisfied, she stepped out of the revetment and waved for groundcrew men. She, they, and Schultz manhandled the Kukuruznik out onto the runway. It stayed on top of the mud more easily than they did.

When Schultz yanked at the prop, the little Shvetsov five cylinder radial began to buzz almost at once. The engine’s exhaust fumes made Ludmila cough, but she nodded approvingly at its note. Nazi and lecher though he was, Georg Schultz knew his work.

Ludmila, released the brake, applied the throttle. The U-2 slid down the airstrip, mud splattering in its wake. When she d built up the speed she needed (not much), she eased back on the stick and the biplane abandoned the boggy earth for the freedom of the sky.

With the rasputitsa below her, Ludmila could savor the beginnings of spring. The slipstream that slid over the wind-screen no longer turned her nose and cheeks to lumps of ice. The sun shone cheerily out of a blue sky with only a few plump white clouds, and would not disappear below the horizon when later afternoon came. The air smelled of growing things, not of the mud in which they grew.

She wished she could fly higher to see more. This was a day when flying was a joy, not a duty. But just when, for a moment, she was on the verge of forgetting why she flew, she skimmed low over the rusting hulks of two T-34s, one with its turret lying upside down fifteen meters away from the hull. She wondered whether the Germans or Lizards had killed the Soviet tanks.

Either way, the melancholy sight reminded her someone would kill her, too, if she failed to remember she was in the middle of a war. With every second, Lizard-held territory drew closer.

After so many missions, flying into country the alien imperialist invaders controlled had begun to approach the routine. She’d dropped small bombs on them and shot at them, smuggled in weapons and propaganda for the partisans. Today’s mission was different.

“You are to pick up a man, ” Colonel Karpov had told her. “His name is Nikifor Sholudenko. He has information valuable to the Soviet Union. What this information is, I do not know, only its importance. ”

“I understand, Comrade Colonel, ” Ludmila had answered. The more one knew, the more one could be… encouraged to tell if captured.

An apple orchard halfway between Konotop and Romni. That’s what he’d said, at any rate. It would have been easy if she’d been able to fly straight over Konotop on a course for Romni. Well, it would have been easier, anyhow. But the Lizards held Konotop in their little clawed hands. Flying over it would have resulted in the untimely demise she’d so far managed to forestall.

And so, as usual, she flew a track that reminded her of what she’d learned in biology of the twists of the intestines within the abdominal cavity, all performed less than fifty meters off the ground. If everything went perfectly, the last jink would put her right at the orchard. If things went as they usually did-well, she told herself, I’ll manage somehow.

Off to her left, she watched a Lizard tank struggling to pull three or four trucks from the morass into which they’d blundered. The tank wasn’t having a much easier time moving than the trucks. Ludmila’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predator’s grin, If she hadn’t been under orders, she could have shot up the convoy. But deviating from the mission assigned would have caused her more grief than it was worth.

Another change of course and-if everything had gone right-the apple orchard should have been a couple of kilometers dead ahead. It wasn’t, of course. She began a search spiral, not something she was happy to do in broad daylight: too much chance of flying past Lizards who weren’t so preoccupied as that last bunch had been.

There! Bare-branched trees beginning to go green, with here and there the first white blossoms that before long would make the orchard look as if snow had fallen on it, though all the rest of the world was verdant with spring. A man waited in amongst the trees.

Ludmila looked around for the best place to land her plane. One stretch of boggy ground seemed no different from another. She’d hoped the partisans would have marked off a strip, but no such luck. After a moment, she realized no one had told her this Sholudenko was connected with the partisans. She’d assumed as much, but what were assumptions worth? Not a kopeck.

“As close to the orchard as I can, ” she said, making the decision aloud. She’d landed on airfields which were just that-fields-so often that she took one more such landing for granted. Down she came, killing her airspeed and peering ahead to make sure she wasn’t about to go into a hole or anything of the sort.

She was down and sliding along before she saw the old gnarled roots sticking out of the ground. She realized then, too late, that the orchard had once been bigger than it was now. She couldn’t wrench back on the stick and take off again; she wasn’t going fast enough.

The Kukuruznik didn’t need much room to land. God willing (a thought that welled up unbidden through her Marxist-Leninist education and training), everything would be all right.

She almost made it. But just when she started to believe she would, the tip of her left ski caught under a root as thick as her arm. The U-2 tried to spin back around the way it had come. A wing dug into the ground; she heard a spar snap. The prop smacked the ground and snapped. One wooden blade whined past her head. Then the Kukuruznik flipped over onto its back, leaving Ludmila hanging upside down in the open pilot’s cabin.

“Bozhemoi-my God, ” she said shakily. No, the dialectic somehow didn’t spring to mind when she’d just done her best to kill herself.