Free Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove Page B

many of the exiles in Harbin were. They still managed to get along.
    Vasili’s father taught him what he needed to know about compounding drugs. He learned fast but, like his mother, he was better with his hands than with his head. Give him a saw, an adze, a chisel, or a hammer and he couldn’t be beat. He helped his father now and then, but he made a better carpenter than a druggist, and they both knew it.
    All at once, in August 1945, Japan and Russia—Manchukuo and Russia—were at war after all. The Red Army rolled into Harbin. The NKVD rolled in with it. The Soviet secret police had lists of people to execute or to send to the gulag. Instead of going with them, Vasili’s father and mother swallowed poison. They knew what to use. They were dead in less than a minute.
    The NKVD didn’t bother with Vasili. He didn’t show up on their lists. Maybe they thought he was born after his folks came to Harbin. Maybe they decided making his parents kill themselves counted for enough to settle their score against the whole family.
    He stayed on even after the Chinese Reds took over for their Russian tutors in 1946. He spoke Mandarin as well as he spoke Russian. He knew a couple of trades people needed. Even if he was a round-eye with a pointed nose, the Chinese in Harbin had got used to such folk.
    He drifted from one job to another. The Red Army’s thunderous occupation of the city had made sure a carpenter wouldn’t lack for work. He picked up bricklaying as he helped rebuild what the Russians had knocked down.
    One of these days, he supposed, Stalin’s flunkies would come back and take him away. Like any other wolves, they didn’t give up a trail. In the meantime, he did his best to keep going.
    They were finally getting around to repairing the train station at Pingfan, twenty-five or thirty kilometers south of Harbin. It had been big and fancy during the war years—the Japanese had had some kind of secret project going on outside the little town. Vasili didn’t know, or want to know, the details. He just hoped he would get back to the city alive. Workers kept coming down with horrible things like cholera or the plague. A couple of them had caught smallpox, too, but he’d been vaccinated against that.
    He lay on an old, musty sleeping mat in a barracks hall that couldn’t have been much flimsier if it were made of cardboard. You could see stars between the planks that made up the walls. When it rained, it was just as wet inside as out. Dung-burning braziers did little to fight the icy breezes.
    And, of course, those ill-fitting planks—Vasili could have done much better if only someone had asked him to—did nothing to hold out the noise of gunfire. Vasili had snorted to see antiaircraft guns poking their snouts to the sky here. No one would want to bomb Pingfan. He didn’t think the Americans wanted to bomb Harbin, either. Had they wanted to, wouldn’t they have done it by now? The Chinese volunteers had gone into Korea months ago.
    Vasili chuckled to himself, the way he always did when he thought of “volunteers.” He’d seen how the Japanese got them in Manchukuo.
Volunteer or we’ll kill you
worked wonders every time. His father had told stories that showed the Soviets understood the same principle.
    So when the guns started going off in the middle of the night, he thought it had to be either a drill or a false alarm. “I hear planes!” another workman shouted in excited Chinese.
    “You hear farts inside your stupid head,” Vasili muttered, but in Russian. He didn’t think any of the other men he was working with knew the language. Anywhere else in China, he would have been sure that was so. Near Harbin, you couldn’t be quite certain.
    He couldn’t be sure the other workman was hearing brainfarts, either. Through the pounding of the guns, he might have heard engines high overhead, too. Maybe they were his imagination. He hoped they were. But he wasn’t sure, not any more.
    Then he thought the sun