Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove

change, he shook his head and slid the tiny coin back at her with the tip of the hook. A finger couldn’t have done it more neatly.
    “You’re a gent, Wilf,” she said.
    He snorted. “You need your head candled, to see if you’ve got any working parts in there. My missus knows better, she does. Daft old bugger, she calls me. Eh, it’s not as though she ain’t daft herself, mind. Would she have put up with me all these years if she weren’t?”
    “Not likely,” Daisy answered. They smiled at each other. Wilf’s father had been the town blacksmith and farrier. Wilf still worked out of the same shop. He styled himself a blacksmith, though. People brought autos and lorries and tractors to Fakenham from as far away as Swaffham and Wells-next-to-the-sea, sometimes even from Norwich, to have him set them right.
    He raised the pint in his good right hand. By the smile on his face, he started to give some kind of silly toast. But the smile slipped. What came out of his mouth was a simple, “Here’s to peace.”
    Daisy drew herself half a pint. She lifted her little mug. “I have to drink that with you,” she said.
    After a long pull at his bitter, Wilf said, “It’s a rum old world, ain’t it?”
    “Too right, it is!” Daisy said.
    “Last war not half a dozen years behind us, and here we’re staring another in the face,” he said. “So the Yanks are on alert, are they?”
    “They are, and the RAF, too,” Daisy answered sadly. “So you can see why the snug’s not full to the brim.”
    Wilf drank some more of his pint. “They fly the big bombers out of there,” he remarked. “If I was the Russians, that’s one of the places I’d want to knock flat, bugger me blind if it ain’t.”
    “Bite your tongue!” Daisy told him. “If they do that, how much’d be left of Fakenham?”
    “Probably not a lot, I reckon,” he said. “We were lucky the last go-round—not enough here to put the
Luftwaffe
’s wind up. But a bomb with them atom things inside…” He shook his head. “I don’t know much about that business, or want to. I’m thinking, though, the only question is whether there’d be enough left of us to bury.”
    “You say the cheeriest things!” Daisy’d got to the bottom of her half-pint. She filled it again.
    Wilf’s pint was empty, too. He slid it across the bar for his own refill. As Daisy worked the tap, he fished in his pocket for silver. He gave her another one and six, and again returned the change. “Sorry, ducks,” he said. “I’d like it better if I was talking moonshine, too. I wish I was. But that’s how it looks to me.”
    Far overhead, a thin banshee whine resounded. That was a jet fighter high, high in the sky. In the last war, England and Russia had fought side by side. As soon as Hitler attacked Stalin, Churchill had declared that any foe of Hitler’s was a friend of his. That lasted till Hitler was beaten. No, a few months longer—till atomic fire blossomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the plane up there was watching out for enemies who’d been friends not so long before.
    “They won’t come by day,” Wilf Davies predicted. “We’d spot ’em and shoot ’em down. No, they’ll sneak across the sea at night, the way the Jerries did after they saw they couldn’t knock us flat.”
    “That’s how the Americans did it when they bombed China,” Daisy said. “That’s what the radio says, any road.”
    “That’s how you’ve got to go about it nowadays. Even in the last war, didn’t the Yanks pay a beastly price for bombing Germany by day?” Wilf said. “And it’s worse now. The jets are so much faster than bombers, and that radar or whatever they call it lets you see in the nighttime almost like it’s noon.”
    “You make me want to sleep down in the cellar tonight,” Daisy said. “Not that that’d do me half a farthing’s worth of good if the bomb came down on Fakenham, would it?”
    “You could do worse,” Wilf said. “By all I hear,