Free The War That Came Early: The Big Switch by Harry Turtledove Page B

Goldman,” their clerk said as he handed Father his new card.
    “I understand,” Father answered. That was safe enough. He didn’t have to tell the clerk whether he agreed or approved. But he couldn’t very well fail to understand.
    Mother got hers next. “For all official purposes, you are now Sarah Hanna Goldman,” the clerk droned.
    She also said, “I understand.”
    Then it was Sarah’s turn. The clerk started to type, but hesitated. He got up from behind the desk and went over to talk with an older man a couple of desks away. Sarah couldn’t hear what they said. Her clerk shrugged and came back. He typed again, this time with assurance: someone had told him what to do, and he was doing it.
    Handing Sarah her new card, he intoned, “For all official purposes, you are now Sarah Sarah Goldman.”
    “What? That’s silly!” she blurted.
    “That is what regulations require in your circumstances. I have verified it with
Herr
Memminger, my supervisor.” The clerk nodded toward the older man. He sounded as confident as a Catholic who’d just consulted with Bishop von Galen on a subtle theological point.
    “It’s still silly,” Sarah said.
    “If you feel strongly enough about the matter, you may make a formal complaint to the Office for Jewish Affairs in Berlin,” the clerk said with no irony Sarah could hear.
    She gulped. “Never mind,” she said quickly. The last thing—the very last thing—she wanted was to draw the notice of the Office for Jewish Affairs. No matter how bad things were, they could always get worse.
    “Very well,” the clerk said. “Goldmans, is everything on your cardsnow correct? At this time, there is no fee for adjusting them. If you find an error later and return to have it changed, the law requires a ten-Reichsmark charge.”
    Did the law require the same thing for Aryans? It might. Governments were greedy whenever they found the chance. Sarah checked the card. Except for being ridiculous, it was accurate. So were her parents’. They all got out of there as fast as they could. Sarah, Sarah … When they were smaller, her brother would have turned it into a mocking chant. Even the Office for Jewish Affairs didn’t know what had happened to Saul. Sarah did, but she would never, ever tell.
    PETE MCGILL WAS full of what a philosopher might have called existential despair. Pete was no philosopher. He was a hard-faced, raspy-voiced Marine corporal, one of the relatively small garrison charged with protecting the American consulate in Shanghai. Back in the days when the Marines, like similar forces from the European powers, protected their country’s interests against Chinese mobs, the arrangement had been reasonable enough. (The Chinese didn’t think so, but the next time any of the powers worried about what the Chinese thought would be the first.)
    Things were different now, though. Like Peking (where Pete had served before coming closer to the coast, to a city where evacuation by sea was possible), Shanghai lay under Japanese occupation. The Japs had divisions’ worth of infantry near the two big cities. The Western powers’ companies of troops stayed on only because Japan didn’t feel like cleaning them out. Existing on Japanese sufferance rubbed Pete—and the rest of the leathernecks—the wrong way.
    But that was only an insult, an accident of geopolitics. It was plenty to piss Pete off. Existential despair, though? No way in hell. What drove him there was falling head over heels for a White Russian taxi dancer named Vera. She was a blonde. She was built. She was, in his admittedly biased opinion, drop-dead gorgeous. She screwed like there was no tomorrow. She was even smart. And, in spite of that last, she gave every appearance of having fallen head over heels for Pete.
    It was the kind of romance officers went out of their way to warnyou against. Blah, blah, blah till they were as blue in the face as a USMC dress uniform. A lot of the time, of course, a guy fell for a