The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

medicine. I learned French then. I learned German, too.” The smile got sadder still. “I used to think I was a cultured fellow.”
    “Well, what the devil are you doing here?” Luc asked. This miserable village was as far from culture as anything could get.
    “Tending my garden,” the Russian said, as Candide might have done. He went on, “What I grow in my ownplot, I get to keep and sell. The state takes what we grow on our collective lands, of course. And I still do what I can when someone gets hurt or comes down sick.”
    “Why aren’t you a doctor in some big city?” Luc inquired.
    “The council of workers and peasants was going to send me to a labor camp for being an intellectual,” the Russian answered, as calmly as if he were talking about someone else.“But they decided I could work out my antiproletarian prejudices here on the
kolkhoz
instead. I’ve been here since 1922.”
    “Well, now we’ve come to set you free.” Luc trotted out the propagandaline the Germans had fed their new allies to see what this cultured Russian would make of it.
    By the way the fellow looked at him, he might have pissed in the baptismal font—except the building that hadbeen a church before the Revolution was currently a barn. “If you’d come here in 1923, I would have welcomed you with open arms,” the Russian said. “So would almost everyone else. But now? No. We’ve spent a generation building up and getting used to the new ways of doing things. You want to tear down everything we’ve managed to do and tell us to start over one more time. We would rather fight forGeneral Secretary Stalin than go through that again.”
    He didn’t make fighting for Stalin sound like a good choice—only like a better choice than starting from scratch. Chuckling, Luc said, “Maybe I ought to shoot you now, then, to keep you from making trouble later on.”
    “It could be that you should.” The Russian wasn’t joking. “I see that, because you are French, some shreds of civilizationstill cling to you. The Nazis would not talk like that. They would just start shooting and burning. It has happened here in the Soviet Union many times already. No doubt it will happen many more.”
    Luc wanted to tell him that was all a pack of lies: nothing but garbage served up by the propaganda cooks in Moscow. He wanted to, yes, but the words stuck in his throat. After all, the Germans hadinvaded his country twice since 1914. They weren’t gentle occupiers either time. From all he’d heard, they were more brutal now than they had been a generation earlier. Why would he expect them to be gentle here in the East, then?
    Uneasily, he said, “International law gives them the right to be hard on
francs-tireurs
.” If you picked up a rifle without being a soldier, any army in the world thatcaught you would give you a blindfold and—if you were lucky—a cigarette and then fill you full of holes.
    Of course, the Germans took hostages if
francs-tireurs
troubled them. They murdered them by dozens or scores to remind the people they were fighting not to get frisky. Here in the East, they probably executed hostages by the hundreds. Would such frightfulness intimidate the Russians or onlymake them hate harder?
    Looking into the doctor-turned-peasant’s pale eyes, Luc didn’t like the answer he thought he saw. “Keep your nose clean, or you’ll be sorry,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d intended.
    “Oh, but of course,
Monsieur
,” the Russian said, his tone so transparently false that Luc wondered whether he should plug him right there.
    A Nazi would have. The Ivan understood asmuch. So did Luc. It was the biggest part of what stayed his hand. He didn’t have his men camp inside the village, as he’d intended when they approached it. Instead, he led them on for another kilometer. They were grumbling by the time he finally let them stop.
    He didn’t feel like listening to them. “Put a sock in it, you clowns,” he said. “We go to