Read Online The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online Page A

now.”
    “It’s a long walk.”
    “I can walk.”
    Hendricks shifted uneasily. It made too good a target, two people walking along. And the boy would slow him down. But he might not come back this way. And if the boy were really all alone—
    “Okay. Come along.”
    The boy fell in beside him. Hendricks strode along. The boy walked silently, clutching his teddy bear.
    “What’s your name?” Hendricks said, after a time.
    “David Edward Derring.”
    “David? What—what happened to your mother and father?”
    “They died.”
    “How?”
    “In the blast.”
    “How long ago?”
    “Six years.”
    Hendricks slowed down. “You’ve been alone six years?”
    “No. There were other people for a while. They went away.”
    “And you’ve been alone since?”
    “Yes.”
    Hendricks glanced down. The boy was strange, saying very little. Withdrawn. But that was the way they were, the children who had survived. Quiet. Stoic. A strange kind of fatalism gripped them. Nothing came as a surprise. They accepted anything that came along. There was no longer any
normal
, any natural course of things, moral or physical, for them to expect. Custom, habit, all the determining forces of learning were gone; only brute experience remained.
    “Am I walking too fast?” Hendricks said.
    “No.”
    “How did you happen to see me?”
    “I was waiting.”
    “Waiting?” Hendricks was puzzled. “What were you waiting for?”
    “To catch things.”
    “What kind of things?”
    “Things to eat.”
    “Oh.” Hendricks set his lips grimly. A thirteen-year-old boy, living on rats and gophers and half-rotten canned food. Down in a hole under the ruins of a town. With radiation pools and claws, and Russian dive-mines up above, coasting around in the sky.
    “Where are we going?” David asked.
    “To the Russian lines.”
    “Russian?”
    “The enemy. The people who started the war. They dropped the first radiation bombs. They began all this.”
    The boy nodded. His face showed no expression.
    “I’m an American,” Hendricks said.
    There was no comment. On they went, the two of them, Hendricks walking a little ahead, David trailing behind him, hugging his dirty teddy bear against his chest.
    About four in the afternoon they stopped to eat. Hendricks built a fire in a hollow between some slabs of concrete. He cleared the weeds away and heaped up bits of wood. The Russians’ lines were not very far ahead. Around him was what had once been a long valley, acres of fruit trees and grapes. Nothing remained now but a few bleak stumps and the mountains that stretched across the horizon at the far end. And the clouds of rolling ash that blew and drifted with the wind, settling over the weeds and remains of buildings, walls here and there, once in a while what had been a road.
    Hendricks made coffee and heated up some boiled mutton and bread. “Here.” He handed bread and mutton to David. David squatted by the edge of the fire, his knees knobby and white. He examined the food and then passed it back, shaking his head.
    “No.”
    “No? Don’t you want any?”
    “No.”
    Hendricks shrugged. Maybe the boy was a mutant, used to special food. It didn’t matter. When he was hungry he would find something to eat. The boy was strange. But there were many strange changes coming over the world. Life was not the same anymore. It would never be the same again. The human race was going to have to realize that.
    “Suit yourself,” Hendricks said. He ate the bread and mutton by himself, washing it down with coffee. He ate slowly, finding the food hard to digest. When he was done he got to his feet and stamped the fire out.
    David rose slowly, watching him with his young-old eyes.
    “We’re going,” Hendricks said.
    “All right.”
    Hendricks walked along, his gun in his arms. They were close; he was tense, ready for anything. The Russians should be expecting a runner, an answer to their own runner, but they were tricky. There was always the