Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

He draped a tarp over the washing machine to keep it from getting dinged and secured the cover with masking tape. He laid the dolly flat and walked down the ramp to the warehouse floor. He lit a cigarette of his own—a Chesterfield. He thought Camels were too harsh, especially when you went through a couple of packs a day the way he did.
    Jim Summers got the ramp out of the way. He was a redneck from Arkansas or Alabama or somewhere like that. He had a red face to go with his neck, and an unstylish brown mustache. He was four or five inches taller than Aaron, and outweighed him by sixty or seventy pounds. But he was soft; his belly hung over the belt that held up his dungarees. In a brawl, Aaron figured he could hold his own.
    Summers didn’t like Negroes, and said so at any excuse or none. He didn’t like Jews, either. He knew Herschel Weissman, the guy who ran Blue Front, was Jewish. He bellyached about it every now and then. He had no idea Aaron was. Jim Summers didn’t come equipped with a hell of a lot of ideas. Aaron Finch’s name didn’t look Jewish, even if his face did, so Summers didn’t worry about it.
    Aaron chuckled as he blew out smoke. His father had turned Fink into its English equivalent when he came to America. His dad’s brothers hadn’t, so Aaron had Fink cousins. His old man had figured Finch was easier to carry. From some of the things Aaron had seen, his old man had figured pretty straight.
    “Where we gotta take these fuckers?” Jim asked.
    “Pasadena, I think.” Aaron reached for the clipboard with the order form. He nodded. “Pasadena—that’s right.”
    “Not too far,” Summers said, and it wasn’t. Pasadena lay only a few miles east of the Glendale warehouse. They were two of the older, larger suburbs north of Los Angeles. In sly tones, Jim went on, “If we take it easy, we can stretch the delivery out so as we knock off as soon as we get back from it.”
    “We’ll see.” Aaron had grown up believing you always worked as hard as you could: it was the only proper thing to do. How were you going to get ahead if you didn’t work hard all the time?
    He stepped on the cigarette butt, then climbed into the truck with Summers. He shook his head once or twice. How were you going to get ahead even if you did work hard all the time? He and Jim earned the same pay for doing the same job. Jim was as lazy as he could get away with. If that was fair…
    Well, a lot of things in life weren’t fair. You couldn’t bump up against fifty without seeing as much. Some of Aaron’s relatives—and some of Ruth’s, too—had become Reds, or damn close anyway, on account of it. Aaron had voted Democratic since the early 1920s, and he was proud of the Teamsters’ Union card in his wallet. He left it there, though.
    With the world as tense as it was, you could get into big trouble for admitting you liked the Russians. As Jim piloted the truck out of the Blue Front warehouse, Aaron asked him, “Hear any news since this morning?”
    “Heard the Sacramento Solons hired Joe Gordon to manage ’em and play second base,” Summers answered. “He was goddamn good in the big leagues. I bet he’ll tear up the PCL.”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Aaron was a fan, too, but he hadn’t been looking for baseball news. He tried again: “Anything about what’s going on in Korea?”
    “Not much. Far as I can make out, the Chinks are still goin’ great guns, the fuckin’ bastards. We oughta blow ’em into the middle o’ next week, teach ’em they gotta be crazy to mess with white men.”
    “Stalin’s a white man,” Aaron said dryly, “and he’s on their side.”
    “Screw him, too,” Summers said. “He wants to take us on, he’ll be sorry.”
    “No doubt about it,” Aaron agreed. “What scares me is how sorry
we’ll
end up being. He’s got the bomb, too, remember.”
    Joe Summers offered a suggestion about where Stalin could put the bomb. Aaron thought it was too big around to fit