Tilting the Balance

She began another search spiral. Now she watched her fuel gauge, too. If she was lost and had to set down in a field, she wanted to do it while she still had power, not dead stick.

Just when she was beginning to worry she might have to do exactly that, she spied the lights she’d been looking for. She gratefully made for them; knowing where you were made you feel ever so much more in control of things.

The airstrip had supposedly been leveled. As a matter of fact, it was no smoother than the one the partisans had marked off for her. Ludmila’s teeth clicked together at every jolt until the U-2 stopped. She told herself the roughness made the runway harder to spot. Was that consolation enough for the bruises she’d have wherever her safety harness touched her? Maybe.

She unbuckled the harness, got out of the plane while the prop was still spinning. The groundcrew ran up, hauled the Kukuruznik away to its between-missions home in a camouflaged revetment. “Where’s Colonel Karpov?” she asked.

“He went to bed an hour ago,” somebody answered. “It is close to three in the morning. You have anything so important it won’t keep till dawn?”

“I suppose not,” she said. The Lizard artillery wasn’t something he had to know about right now. She followed the Kukuruznik toward its shelter.

Ludmila would have bet as much money as she had that she’d find Georg Schultz waiting at the revetment. Sure enough, there he was. “Alles khorosho?” he asked in his usual mixture of German and Russian.

“Gut, da,” she answered, mixing the languages the same way.

He scrambled up into the cockpit No lantern was lighted, not even beneath the camouflage netting; the Lizards had gadgets that could pick up the tiniest gleam. That didn’t stop Schultz from starting to work on Ludmila’s biplane. He tested the pedals and other controls, leaned out to say, “Left aileron cable not good-feels a little loose. Come light, I fix.”

“Thank you, Georgi Mikhailovich,” Ludmila answered. She hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the cable, but If Schultz said it needed tightening, she was willing to believe him. His understanding for machinery was, to her way of thinking, all but uncanny. She flew the aircraft; Georg Schultz projected himself into it as if he were part plane himself.

“Nothing else bad,” he said, “but here-you leave on floor.”

He handed her a folded triangle of paper.

“Thank you,” she said again. “Our post is unreliable enough without me losing a letter before it ever gets into the mail.” She wasn’t sure how much of that he understood, but found herself yawning enormously. She was too tired to try to dredge up German to make things clear for him. If Colonel Karpov was asleep, she saw no reason she shouldn’t grab a couple of hours for herself, too.

She shrugged out of her parachute harness-not that she’d have much chance to use a chute if she got hit while she was hedgehopping the way she usually did-and stowed it in the cockpit, then started out of the revetment toward her sleeping quarters. As she passed Georg Schultz, he patted her on the backside.

Ludmila took a skittering half step, half jump. She whirled around in fury. This wasn’t the first time such things had happened to her since she’d joined the Red Air Force, but somehow she’d thought Schultz too kulturny to try them.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” she blazed in Russian, then switched to German to drive it home: “Nie wieder, verstehst du?” It was the du of insult, not intimacy. She added, “What would your Colonel Jager think if he found out what you just did?”

Schultz had been the gunner in the tank Jager commanded; he thought highly of his former leader. Ludmila hoped reminding him of that would bring him to his senses. But he just laughed quietly and said, “He would think I wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t done himself.”

A short, deadly silence followed. Ludmila broke it in tones of ice: “That is none of your business. If it will not make you keep your hands where they belong, maybe this will: remember, you are the only Nazi on a base full of Red Air Force men. They leave you alone because you work well. But they do not love you. Verstehst du dos?”

He drew himself to stiff attention, did his best to click his heels in soft felt valenki, shot out his arm in a defiant Hitlerite salute. “I remember very well, and I do understand.” He stomped away.

Ludmila wanted to kick him. Why couldn’t he have just said he was sorry and gone on about his business instead of getting angry, as If she had somehow wronged him instead of the other way round? Now what was she supposed to do? If he was that angry with her, did she still want him working on her aircraft? But if he didn’t, who would?