Two Fronts by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

topcoat. Peggy put on a coat, too. The dishes could wait till she got back from dropping him off. He said, “One thing about rationing gasoline—less traffic these days.”
    “You’ve got that right,” Peggy agreed. Most people’s “A” stickers limited them to four gallons a week. You couldn’t go very far on that—to work and back every day, if you were lucky. The Druces’ Packard got a good deal more fuel; because he was in what the government reckoned an essential occupation, he had one of the rare and coveted “C” stickers.
    It was cold but clear. There wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any ice on the roads. Peggy got in on the driver’s side. She’d have to bring the car back. As Herb slid in beside her, he said, “Lucky me. I’ve got myself the best-darn-looking chauffeur in town.”
    “You!” Peggy said fondly.
    The Packard started right away. There went one more worry. Cold weather could do rude things to a battery. If Herb had had to wait till a taxi got here, he really might have missed his train.
    She drove downtown, toward Broad Street Station. When she passed an Esso station, she saw a cop checking ration stickers. Herb noticed, too. “Some ways, it hardly seems like a free country any more, does it?” he remarked.
    “Oh, it’s not so bad. Trust me—it’s not.” Peggy had seen with her own eyes what things were like in a country that suddenly stopped being free. The grin on that German’s face at Marianske Lazny after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938 … He’d been cutting off a Jew’s beard with a big pair of shears. If he cut off some cheek or ear at the same time, well, hey, that only made the fun better. He thought so, anyhow, and he had enough rifles and machine guns and tanks on his side that the poor damned Jew had to stand there and take it unless he felt like dying on the spot. She still wondered sometimes what had happened to him.
    “If you say so,” Herb answered, which meant he didn’t think it was worth an argument. He left no doubt where he stood, though: “I don’t have to like it, and I darn well don’t.”
    “Neither do I. Who does?” Peggy said. “But things are worse plenty of other places.”
    She pulled up in front of the station. Herb leaned toward her for a quick good-bye kiss. He got out, pulled his suitcase off the back seat, and lugged it inside. Peggy waited till he disappeared before heading back to the house.
    A long sigh escaped her when she pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t that she worried he’d go looking for some round-heeled waitress or hat-check girl as soon as he got to whatever super-duper-secret place he was inspecting in Tennessee. It wasn’t , dammit. But they’d been apart for two years while she was stuck in Europe, and he’d had himself a little fling while she was gone. She’d had her own— mishap was probably the best word for it—over there, too.
    When things came out, they’d forgiven each other. Peggy meant it when she did it. She was sure Herb was every bit as sincere. But forgiving wasn’t quite the same as forgetting. Their marriage wasn’t the same as it had been before she sailed for the Continent.
    Peggy hadn’t the least desire to go to Nevada and get a quickie divorce. Again, she was sure Herb didn’t want to, either. It didn’t seem like that to her. It was just one more thing the war had wounded. And it was also the reason she fixed herself a stiff highball as soon as she got into the house.

Winter on the Barents Sea. There was a handful of words to chill the heart, however you chose to take them. The wind had knives in it, and seemed to take a running start from the North Pole. Waves slapped the U-30, one after another. The submarine rolled, recovered, and rolled again, over and over.
    All the same, Lieutenant Julius Lemp was happier to have chugged out of Narvik on patrol than he would have been to stay at the Kriegsmarine ’s U-boat base in northern Norway any longer. To say