The War That Came Early: The Big Switch by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

unrecognizable scraps of meat, the guards had no idea. They only shrugged. “One or the other,” they chorused.
    “But which?” Chaim demanded. “Differences are important.”
    “One or the other,” the guards said again. They didn’t get it. Maybe they needed to listen to his harangues, too.
    Someone
on this side of the wire listened intently to what he told the captured Fascists. The authorities wanted to make sure he preached only good, pure, true Communist doctrine. Heaven—the heaven he didn’t believe in—help him if he showed himself out of step with what Moscow decreed to be so … or, worse, if he showed he’d fallen into the Trotskyist heresy. There were times when the old Inquisition had nothing on the Republic, though Chaim didn’t think of it like that.
    He didn’t not least because his minder was one of the best-looking women he’d ever set eyes on. La Martellita—her
nom de guerre
meant
the little hammer
—filled out overalls in a way their designer never intended. Midnight hair. Snapping eyes, coral lips, a piquant nose … He was in love, or at least in lust.
    La Martellita looked at him as if she’d just found half of him in her apple. If she didn’t like what he said, she might be able to have him shot. He didn’t care. If anything, the aura of danger that fit her as tightly as those overalls only made him hotter.
    He didn’t even know her real name. She wouldn’t tell him, and he hadn’t found anybody else who knew. One of these days, he would. And then, casually, in just the right spot, he’d call her by it. And then what? Chances were she’d tell him to fuck off. Even rejection, coming from her, seemed sweet.
    Which was a good thing, because rejection and criticism were all he got from her. He did try to be more careful with the doctrine he preached to the prisoners. He didn’t want to die at the hands of his own side. He didn’t
want
to die at all. He aspired to be shot at the age of 103 by an outraged husband. He’d come to Spain to fight the enemies of Marxism-Leninism, not its friends.
    When he said as much to La Martellita, she curled her kissable upper lip. “Then you shouldn’t deviate from the Party line,” she said, as if she were a bishop complaining about a priest’s sermon.
    Chaim was no priest. He didn’t have to stay celibate. He didn’t want to, either. La Martellita was also free. Unlike a lot of her Spanish sisters, she wasn’t easy, though, not with him.
    “Why don’t you go play with yourself?” she said when she couldn’t be in any doubt of his interest. Spanish women could also be very blunt.
    “You’d be more fun,” he answered honestly.
    “Not with you, I wouldn’t,” she said. “You’d make any woman wish she were with somebody else.” She stalked away. Maybe she didn’t realize how her hips swung. More likely, she was doing it with malice aforethought.
    Oh, yeah?
he wanted to shout back, like a stupid kid.
Says you!
Every once in a while, he’d learned, keeping his big mouth shut came in handy. This looked like one of those times.
    Maybe the way to her heart lay in the straight Party line. But Chaim, while a good Communist, was also an American to the tips of his stubby fingers. He enjoyed tinkering with ideas the way a lot of his countrymen enjoyed tinkering with motors. He tore them down and rebuilt them and did his damnedest to get them working better than ever. If they weren’t always the same afterwards, so what? They were new and improved—two magic words in the States.
    Not in Spain. (Not in the USSR, either: something Chaim preferred to forget. He knew about the gulags—knew they existed, anyhow, and held dissidents. He also preferred to forget that.) Here, a parrot did better than a tinkerer. Chaim had never been a parrot, and didn’t want to start.
    But he did want to jump on La Martellita’s elegantly cushioned bones. “Weinberg wants a cracker!” he screeched in English. It wouldn’t have made sense to the