Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove Page B

too,” her mother said. Bill had been gone for most of a year now. That felt like a long time to Marian. It had to be an eternity for Linda. She wasn’t the same person now as she had been then. She’d learned the alphabet. She could sound out words on her blocks and on pages in her books. More seemed to be going on inside her every single day.
    She changed. She grew. Bill, meanwhile, stayed what he’d been for her ever since he went back on duty: pictures on the wall and on the dresser in the big bedroom. He was still somebody she remembered and loved, but out of the ever more distant past.
    Marian bit down on the inside of her lower lip. Sometimes Bill seemed that way to her, too. Oh, she got letters from him. She wrote to him, too. How could you pour out your heart, though, when you knew a smirking censor stood between you and the one you loved?
    For that matter, how could you pour out your heart on paper any which way? Marian always felt like a fool when she tried to set down what was going on in her heart. Writing wasn’t made to do things like that, not unless you were Shakespeare or somebody. So it seemed to her, anyway. She could write about how a pot roast had turned out or how a hinge on the closet door needed fixing. She could even write about funny things Linda said. Love letters? When they were together, she could tell Bill she loved him. She did tell him so, all the time.
    On paper, though, it was different. The words looked stupid. They sounded stupid, too. Bill had to feel the same way. His letters were full of stories about baseball games between bomber crews and about who was on the latest USO tour. He’d write
Miss you. Love you
…and that would be that. Marian believed he did miss her and love her. She would have liked to read it in a way that made her feel it as well as see it on the page, though.
    She would have liked that, but she didn’t expect to get it. She’d married a flyer, not a writer. A cousin of hers had married a writer. He drank. He didn’t make much money. He chased other women. And he was a cold fish in person no matter what kind of pretty words he could put down on paper.
    “Do you remember the air-raid alerts Seattle and other West Coast towns went through in the early days of the Second World War?” the radio announcer asked rhetorically. “We didn’t know what Japan could do, and we didn’t want to take any chances. Well, civil-defense officials say those days are back again. We will be testing our defense tomorrow at ten A.M. Don’t be alarmed when the sirens go off. It’s not the Russians. It’s only a test. No one expects that the Russians can really get here. We just want to stay on the safe side.”
    Marian did remember those dark days after Pearl Harbor. She didn’t want to think days like those could come again. But she knew that not wanting to think it didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
Air-raid alert. Ten tomorrow morning.
    —
    “Come on! Come on! Come on!” Captain Oleg Gurevich yelled over the rumble of a company’s worth of big diesel engines. “Are we ready to move? We’d fucking well better be ready to move!”
    Konstantin Morozov waved from the turret of his tank to show it could roll whenever the captain ordered. Night was falling on the Red Army encampment near Meiningen. The tanks would move up to the border between the Russian zone in Germany and the American under cover of darkness. By the time the sun rose tomorrow, from the air it would look as if these tanks, and the rest at this enormous base, hadn’t gone anywhere.
    And, by the time the sun rose tomorrow, the tanks that had moved up to the border would be under netting and branches and dead grass that made them effectively invisible from the air. The Red Army took
maskirovka
seriously. What the enemy couldn’t see, he’d have a harder time wrecking.
    During the last war, the Germans had been pretty good at camouflage. But pretty good, against Russians, amounted to pretty bad. From