Aftershocks by Harry Turtledove Page A

forward. They’d been doing that since the last round of fighting, when he’d breathed German nerve gas. Without the antidote, he would have died then. As things were, he’d got off lucky. Of the others who’d breathed the gas, Heinrich Jäger, after whom his younger son was named, had died at an early age. Ludmila Gorbunova had suffered far more from the lingering effects of the stuff than he had. Ludmila had been in Lodz. Odds were all too good—or all too bad—she wasn’t suffering at all any more.
    Over the years, Mordechai had come to take his aches and pains for granted. He couldn’t do that now. The Nazis had used poison gas again in this new round of fighting. How much of it had he breathed? How much harm was it doing? Just how much residual damage did he have? Those were all fascinating questions, and he lacked answers to any of them.
    And, in a most important sense, none of them mattered much, not when measured against the one question, the overriding question.
What happened to my family?
No, there wasn’t one question only. Another lay underneath it, one he would sooner not have contemplated.
Have I still got a family?
    After half a kilometer, the road stopped being too battered for a bicycle. He got back up on the bike and rode hard. The harder he worked, the worse his legs felt—till, after a while, they stopped hurting so much. He let out a sigh of relief. That had happened before. If he put in enough exercise, he could work right through the cramps. Sometimes.
    No road signs warned him he was coming into Widawa. For one thing, Polish roads had never been well marked. For another, Widawa wasn’t a town important enough to require much in the way of marking. And, for a third, the war had been here before him. If there had been signs, they weren’t upright any more. A lot of trees in the forest just north of Widawa weren’t upright any more.
    When the road curved around the forest and gave him his first glimpse of the town, he saw that a lot of the houses in it weren’t upright any more, either. His mouth tightened. He’d seen a lot of ruins in the first round of fighting and now in this one. Another set wouldn’t have been so much out of the ordinary—except that these might hold the bodies of his wife and children.
    A burnt-out German panzer and an equally burnt-out Lizard landcruiser sprawled in death a few meters apart, just outside of town. Had they killed each other, or had some different fate befallen them? Mordechai knew he would never know. He pedaled past them into Widawa.
    People on the street hardly bothered to look up at him. What was one more middle-aged bicycle rider with a rifle slung on his back? They’d surely seen a surfeit of those already. He put a foot down and used a boot heel for a brake. Nodding to an old woman with a head scarf who wore a long black dress, he asked, “Granny, who knows about the refugees who came in from Lodz?”
    She eyed him. He spoke Polish notable only for a Warsaw accent. He looked like a Pole, being fair-skinned and light-eyed. But the old woman said, “Well, Jew, you’d best ask Father Wladyslaw about that. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything.” She went on her way as if he didn’t exist.
    Anielewicz sighed. Some people had a radar better than anything electronic in the Lizards’ arsenal. He’d seen that before. “Thanks,” he called after her, but she might as well not have heard.
    A couple of shells had hit the church. Workmen were busy repairing it. Mordechai shrugged at that, but didn’t sigh. Jews would have fixed up a synagogue before they worried about their houses, too. “Is the priest in?” Mordechai asked a carpenter hammering nails into a board.
    The man nodded and shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth so he could talk more readily. “Yeah, he’s there. What do you want to talk to him about?”
    “I’m looking for my wife and children,” Anielewicz answered. “They came here out of Lodz