Turtledove Harry
Fallout
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Harry Turtledove
Fallout
1
It was a bright, warm, sticky day in Washington, D.C. Summer wasn’t here yet, but it was less than two weeks away. President Harry Truman turned his swivel chair away from the desk in the Oval Office. For the moment, all the urgent papers demanding his attention could damn well shut up and wait. The green of the White House lawn seemed far more appealing.
Three or four robins hopped across the neatly mown grass. Every so often, one would pause and cock its head to one side, as if listening. Maybe the birds were doing just that. Pretty soon, one of them pecked at something. It straightened with a fat earthworm wrapped around its beak. The worm didn’t want to get eaten. It wiggled and clung. The robin swallowed it anyway, then went back to hunting.
“Go get ’em, boy,” Truman said softly. “Maybe you’ll catch Joe McCarthy next. I can hope, anyhow.”
The robins didn’t know when they were well off. Here in Washington, they didn’t need to worry-too much-about getting blown to hell and gone by an atom bomb. Lord only knew how many robins the Russians had just incinerated in Paris.
Of course, robins in Europe weren’t the same birds as the ones here. Truman had seen that as an artillery officer in the First World War and then again when he met with Stalin and Attlee at Potsdam, outside of Berlin. Robins over there were smaller than the American ones, and had redder breasts. He supposed the local ones had got their name by reminding colonists of the birds back home.
But, when you got right down to it, what the French robins looked like didn’t matter. The A-bomb didn’t care. It blew them up any which way. It blew up a hell of a lot of French people, too.
When the telephone rang, Truman spun the chair back toward his desk. He picked up the handset. “Yes?”
“Mr. President…” Rose Conway, his private secretary, needed a moment before she could go on: “Mr. President, I have a call for you from Charles de Gaulle.”
“Jumping Jehosaphat!” Truman said, and meant it most sincerely. He couldn’t stand de Gaulle, and was sure it was mutual. At the end of the last war, French and American troops had almost started shooting at each other when the French tried to occupy northwestern Italy. De Gaulle had been running France then, and Truman had cut off American aid to him.
These days, de Gaulle was out of French politics-or he had been. Damn shame, Truman thought unkindly. If he’d been in politics, he’d likely have been in Paris, and the bomb could have fried him along with all the poor, harmless little robins.
Here he was, though, unfried and on the telephone. And since he was…“Go ahead and put him through, Rose. I’d better find out what he’s got to say.”
“Yes, Mr. President. One moment,” she said. Truman heard some clicks and pops. Then Rose Conway told someone, “The President is on the line, sir.”
“Thank you.” Charles de Gaulle spoke fluent if nasal English. But he sounded as if he were calling from the Cave of the Winds. The connection was terrible. Well, most of France’s phone service would have been centered in or routed through Paris. De Gaulle might have been lucky to get through at all. The Frenchman said, “Are you there, President Truman?”
“I am, General, yes,” Truman answered. “Where exactly are you, sir?”
“I am in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, about two hundred kilometers southeast of martyred Paris.” Or maybe de Gaulle said murdered Paris . Both were true enough-all too true, in fact.
Two hundred kilometers was just over a hundred twenty miles. Truman remembered that from his days as a battery commander. He’d hardly had to worry about the metric system since. “Glad to hear you’re safe,” he said, thinking what a liar politics had turned him into.
“I am safe, yes, but my beloved country has had the heart torn out of her.” De Gaulle seemed matter-of-fact, which made what he said all the more melodramatic.
“That is tragic, General, but it’s not as if America hasn’t taken plenty of hard knocks, too,” Truman said.
“Seattle. Denver.