Tilting the Balance

Squelch, squelch, squelch. Someone, presumably the fellow who’d been standing in the apple orchard, was coming up to what had been her aircraft and was now just so much junk. In a dry voice, he said, “I’ve seen that done better. ”

“So have I, ” Ludmila admitted. “… Comrade Sholudenko? ”

“The same, ” he said. “They didn’t tell me you would be a woman. Are you all right? Do you need help getting out? ”

Ludmila took mental inventory. She’d bitten her lip, she’d be bruised, but she didn’t think she’d broken anything but her aircraft and her pride. “I’m not hurt, ” she muttered. “As for the other-” She released the catches of her safety harness, came down to earth with a wet splat, and, filthy, crawled out from under the U-2. “Here I am. ”

“Here you are, ” he agreed. His Russian, like hers, had a Ukrainian accent. He looked like a Ukrainian peasant, with a wide, high-cheekboned face, blue eyes, and blond hair that looked as if it had been cut under a bowl. He didn’t talk like a peasant, though: not only did he sound educated, he sounded cynical and worldly-wise. He went on, “How do you propose to take me where I must go? Will another aircraft come to pick up both of us? ”

It was a good question, one for which Ludmila lacked a good answer. Slowly, she said, “If they do, it won’t be soon. I’m not due back for some hours, and my aircraft has no radio. ” No U-2 that she knew of had one; poor communications were the bane of all Soviet forces, ground and air alike.

“And when you do not land at your airstrip, they are more likely to think the Lizards shot you down than that you did it to yourself, ” Sholudenko said. “You must be a good pilot, or you would have been dead a long time ago. ”

“Till a few minutes ago, I thought so, ” Ludmila answered ruefully. “But yes, you have a point. How important is this information of yours? ”

“I think it has weight, ” Sholudenko said. Someone in authority must have agreed with me, or they would not have sent you to do tumbling routines for my amusement. How large my news bulks in the world at large… who can say? ”

Ludmila slapped at the mud on her flying suit, which spread it around without getting much of it off. Tumbling routines… she wanted to hit him for that. But he had influence, or he wouldn’t have been able to get a plane sent after him. She contented herself with saying, “I don’t think we should linger here. The Lizards are very good at spotting wreckage from the air and coming round to shoot it up. ”

“A distinct point, ” Sholudenko admitted. Without a backwards glance at the U-2, he started north across the fields.

Ludmila glumly tramped after him. She asked, “Do you have access to a radio yourself? Can you transmit the information that way? ”

“Some, at need. Not all. ” He patted the pack on his back. “The rest is photographs. ” He paused, the first sign of uncertainty he’d shown. Wondering whether to tell me anything, Ludmila realized. At length he said, “Does the name Stepan Bandera mean anything to you? ”

“The Ukrainian collaborator and nationalist? Yes, but nothing good. ” During the throes of the Soviet Revolution, the Ukraine had briefly been independent of Moscow and Leningrad. Bandera wanted to bring back those days. He was one of the Ukrainians who’d greeted the Nazis with open arms, only to have them throw him in jail a few months later. No one loves a traitor, Ludmila thought. You may use him if that proves convenient, but no one loves him.

“I know of nothing good to hear, ” Sholudenko said. “When the Lizards came, the Nazis set him free to promote solidarity between the workers and peasants of the occupied Ukraine and their German masters. He paid them back for their treatment of him, but not in a way to gladden our hearts? ”

Ludmila needed a few seconds to work through the implications of that. “He is collaborating with the Lizards? ”

“He and most of the Banderists. ” Sholudenko spat on the ground to show what he thought of that. “They have a Committee of Ukrainian Liberation that has given our patriotic partisan bands a good deal of grief lately. ”

“What is the rodina, the motherland, coming to? ” Ludmila said plaintively. “First we had to deal with those who would sooner have seen the Germans enslave our people than live under our Soviet government, and now the Banderists prefer the imperialist aliens to the Soviet Union and the Germans. Something must be dreadfully wrong, to make the people hate government so. ”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she wished she had them back again. She did not know this Nikifor Sholudenko from a hole in the ground. Yes, he dressed like a peasant, but for all she knew, he might be NKVD. In fact, he probably was NKVD, if he had pictures of Banderists in his knapsack. And she’d just criticized the Soviet government in front of him.

Had she been so foolish in 1937, she’d likely have disappeared off the face of the earth. Even in the best of times, she’d have worried about a show trial (or no trial) and a stretch of years in the gulag. She suspected the Soviet prison camp system still functioned at undiminished efficiency; most of it was in the far north, where Lizard control did not reach.

Sholudenko murmured, “You do like to live dangerously, don’t you? ”

With almost immeasurable relief, Ludmila realized the world wasn’t going to fall in on her, at least not right away. “I guess I do, ” she mumbled, and resolved to watch her tongue more closely in the future.

“In the abstract, I could even agree with you, ” Sholudenko said. “As things are-” He spread his hands. That meant that, as far as he was concerned, this conversation was not taking place, and that he would deny anything she attributed to him if the matter came to the attention of an interrogator.

“May I speak-abstractly-too? ” she asked.

“Of course, ” he said. “The constitution of 1936 guarantees free expression to all citizens of the Soviet Union, as any schoolgirl knows. ” He spoke without apparent irony, yet his hypothetical schoolgirl had to know also that anyone trying to exercise her free speech (or any of the other rights guaranteed-or entombed-in the constitution) would discover she’d picked a short trip into big trouble.