In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Russie surrendered himself to the fighting leader’s blunt, practical ministrations. He let Anielewicz manhandle him down the stairs. Waiting on the street was a bicycle with a sidecar. Anielewicz poured him into it, then climbed onto the little saddle and started pedaling.

  “Such personal concern,” Russie said. The wind blowing in his face did a little to revive him. “I’m honored.”

  “If I’d brought a car for you, then you’d have some business being honored,” Anielewicz said, laughing. Russie managed a wan chuckle himself. These days, gasoline was more precious than rubies in Warsaw: rubies, after all, remained rubies, but gasoline, once burned, was gone forever. Even diesel fuel for fire engines was in desperately short supply.

  A few dry leaves whirled through the streets on the chilly fall breeze, but only a few; a lot of trees had been cut down for fuel. More would fall this winter, Russie thought, and buildings wrecked in two rounds of fighting would be cannibalized for wood. Warsaw would be an uglier city when the fighting ended—if it ever did.

  Rain began falling from the lead-gray sky. Mordechai Anielewicz reached up, yanked down the brim of his cap so it did a better job of covering his eyes. He said, “It’s set. We’ll have a go at the transmitter tomorrow night. Stay sick till then.”

  “What happens if you don’t take it out?” Russie asked.

  Anielewicz’s laugh had a grim edge to it. “If we don’t take it out, Reb Moishe, two things happen. One is that some of my fighters will be dead. And the other is that you’ll have to go on taking your medicines, so that by this time next week you’ll likely end up envying them.”

  Maybe the fighting leader meant it for a joke, but Russie didn’t find it funny. He felt as if the Gestapo had been kicking him in the belly. His mouth tasted like—on second thought, he didn’t want to try to figure out what his mouth tasted like.

  Many of the Jews the Nazis forced into the Warsaw ghetto had left it since the Lizards came (many more, of course, were dead). Even so, the streets remained crowded. Adroit as a footballer dodging through defensemen toward the goal, Anielewicz steered his bicycle past pushcarts, rickshaws, hordes of other bicycles, and swarms of men and women afoot. No one seemed willing to yield a centimeter of space to anyone else, but somehow no one ran into anyone else, either.

  Then, suddenly, there was space. Anielewicz stopped hard. A squad of Lizards tramped past on patrol. They looked cold and miserable. One turned his strange eyes resentfully up toward the weeping sky. Another wore a child’s coat. He hadn’t figured out buttons, but held the coat closed with one hand while the other clutched his weapon.

  As soon as the Lizards moved on, the crowds closed in again. Anielewicz said, “If those poor creatures think it’s cold now, what will they do come January?”

  Freeze, was the answer that immediately sprang into Russie’s mind. But he knew he was probably wrong. The Lizards knew more than mankind about so many things; no doubt they had some simple way to keep themselves warm out in the open. That patrol certainly had looked chilly, though.

  Anielewicz pulled up in front of the apartment block where Russie lived. “Can you make it up to your flat?” he asked.

  “Let’s see.” Russie unfolded himself from the sidecar. He wobbled when he took a couple of tentative steps, but stayed on his feet. “Yes, I’ll manage.”

  “Good. If I had to walk you up, I’d worry about the bicycle being here when I got back. Now I can worry about other things instead.” Anielewicz nodded to Russie and rode off.

  Had Moishe felt more nearly alive, he might have laughed at the way people in the courtyard started to come up to greet him, then took a better look and retreated faster than they’d advanced. He didn’t blame them; he would have sheered off from himself, too. If he didn’t look horribly contagious, it wasn’t from lack of effort.

  He turned the key, walked into his flat; one perquisite of his position was that his family had it all to themselves. His wife whirled round in surprise. “Moishe! What are you doing here so early?” Rivka said, starting to smile. Then she got a good look at him—and maybe a good whiff of him as well—and asked a better question: “Moishe! What happened to you?”

  He sighed. “The Lizards happened to me.”

  She stared at him, her eyes wide in a face that, while not skeletal as it had been a few months before, was still too thin. “The Lizards did—that—to you?”

  “Not directly,” he answered. “What the Lizards did was to treat Washington, D.C., exactly as they had Berlin, and to expect me to be exactly as happy about it.”

  Rivka did not much concern herself with politics; the struggle, for survival had taken all her energy. But she was no fool. “They wanted you to praise them for destroying Washington? They must be meshugge.”

  “That’s what I thought, so I got sick.” Moishe explained how he’d manufactured his illness on short notice.

  “Oh, thank God. When I saw you, I was afraid you’d come down with something dreadful.”

  “I feel pretty dreadful,” Russie said. Though drugs rather than bacteria induced his illness, his insides had still gone through a wringer. The only difference was that he would not stay sick unless it proved expedient.

  His little son, Reuven, wandered out of the bedroom. The boy wrinkled his nose. “Why does Father smell funny?”

  “Never mind.” Rivka Russie turned briskly practical. “We’re going to get him cleaned up right now.” She hurried into the kitchen. The water had been reliable since the Lizards took the town. She came back with a bucket and a rag. “Go into the bedroom, Moishe; hand me out your filthy clothes, clean yourself off, and put on something fresh. You’ll be better for it.”

  “All right,” he said meekly. Shedding the soiled garments was nothing but relief. He discovered he’d managed to get vomit on the brim of his hat. In a horrid sort of way, that was an accomplishment. The rag and bucket seemed hardly enough for the job for which they were intended; he wondered if the Vistula would have been enough. Thoughts of the Augean stables ran through his mind as he scrubbed filth from himself. He hadn’t discovered Greek mythology until his university days. Sometimes the images it evoked were as telling as any in the Bible.

  In clean clothes he felt a new, if hollow, man. He didn’t want to touch what he had been wearing, but finally bundled the befouled outfit so the filthiest parts were toward the middle. He brought everything out to Rivka.

  She nodded. “I’ll take care of them soon.” Living in the ghetto had made stenches just part of life, not something that had to be swept away on the instant. At the moment, questions were more urgent: “What will you do if the Lizards insist that you speak for them after you’re better?”

  “I’ll get sick again,” be answered, though his guts twisted at the prospect. “With luck, though, I won’t have to.” He told her what Anielewicz had planned for the transmitter.

  “Even if that works, it only puts off the evil day,” Rivka said. “Sooner or later, Moishe, either you will have to do what the Lizards want or else you will have to tell them no.”

  “I know.” Moishe grimaced. “Maybe we never should have thrown our lot in with them in the first place. Maybe even the Nazis were a better bargain than this.”

  Rivka vigorously shook her head. “You know better. When you are dead, you can’t bargain. And even if we have to disobey the Lizards, I think they will kill only the ones who disobey, and only because they disobey, rather than making a sport of it or killing us simply because we are Jews.”

  “I think you are right.” The admission failed to reassure Russie. He, after all, would be one of those who disobeyed, and he wanted to live. But to praise the Lizards for using one of their great bombs on Washington…better to die with self-respect intact.

  “Let me make you some soup.” Rivka eyed him as if gauging his strength. “Will you be able to hold it down?”

  “I think so,” he said after making his own internal assessments. He let out a dry chuckle. “I ought to try, anyhow, so
I have something in my stomach in case I, ah, have to start throwing up again. What I just went through was bad enough, but the dry heaves are worse.”

  The soup was thick with cabbage and potatoes, not the watery stuff of the days when the Germans starved the ghetto Jews and every morsel had to be stretched to the utmost. Though no one who had not known those dreadful days would have thought much of it, its warmth helped ease the knots in Russie’s midsection.

  He had just finished the last spoonful when somebody came pounding down the hall at a dead run. A fist slammed against his front door. The somebody shouted, “Reb Moishe, Reb Moishe, come quick, Reb Moishe!”

  Russie started to get up. His wife took him by the shoulders and forced him back into his chair. “You’re sick, remember?” she hissed. She went to the door herself, opened it. “What’s wrong? My husband is ill. He cannot go anywhere.”

  “But he has to!” the man in the hallway exclaimed, as if he were a twoyear-old convinced his word was law.

  “He cannot,” Rivka repeated. She stepped aside to let the fellow get a look at Moishe, adding, “See for yourself if you don’t believe me,” which told Russie he had to look as bad as he felt.

  “I’m sorry, Reb Moishe,” the man said, “but we really do need you. Some of our fighters are facing off with some Armja Krajowa louts up on Mickiewicza Street, and it’s getting ugly. They’re liable to start shooting at each other any minute now.”

  Russie groaned. Of all the times for hotheaded Jews and prejudiced Poles to start butting heads, this was the worst Rivka was too far away to make him keep sitting down. He rose, ignoring her look of consternation. But before he could do anything more, the man in the hallway said, “The Lizards are already bringing heavy equipment up there. They’ll slaughter everyone if a fight breaks out.”

  With another groan, Russie clutched his belly and sank back down. Rivka’s alarmed expression turned to real concern. But she rallied quickly. “Please go now,” she told the man. “My husband would come if he possibly could; you know that. But he really is ill.”

  “Yes, I see he is. I’m sorry. God grant you health soon, Reb Moishe.” The. fellow departed at the same breakneck pace at which he’d arrived.

  Rivka shut the door, then turned on Russie. “Are you all right?” she demanded, hands on hips. “You were going out there, I know you were. Then all, of a sudden—”

  He knew a moment’s pride that his acting had been good enough to give her doubts. He said, “If the Lizards are already there, I can’t let them see me, or they’ll know I’m not as sick as I let on.”

  Her eyes widened. “Yes, that makes sense. You—”

  “I’m not done,” he interrupted. “The other thing is, I don’t think our men are tangling with the Armja Krajowa Poles by accident. Think where the quarrel is—at the opposite end of Warsaw from the Lizard headquarters. I think they’re trying to draw troops—and maybe Zolraag’s attention, too—away from the studio and the transmitter. Mordechai said tomorrow night, but he works fast. Unless I miss my guess, this is a put-up fight.”

  “I hope you’re right.” For most of the next minute, Rivka looked as intensely thoughtful as a yeshiva student following a rabbi’s exegesis of a difficult Talmudic text. A smile broke through like sunrise. “Yes, I think you are.”

  “Good,” Russie said. He did feel better with the warm soup inside him. He hoped he wouldn’t have to spew it up again, but carried another vial of ipecac in a coat pocket.

  He got up and walked over to the battered sofa. Springs poked through here and there and the fabric was filthy, but just owning a sofa was a mark of status among Warsaw Jews these days. The Nazis hadn’t stolen it in one of their ghetto sweeps, and the family hadn’t had to break it up and burn it to keep from freezing the winter before. As he lay down on it, Russie was conscious of how lucky that made him.

  Rivka draped a threadbare blanket over him. “How can you look sick if you’re not covered up?” she asked.

  “I seem to have managed,” he said, but she ignored him. He let the blanket stay.

  About the time he came close to dozing off, Reuven started banging on a pot with a spoon. Rivka quickly hushed the boy, but the damage was done. A few minutes later, a new, more ominous racket filled the flat: the distant rattle of guns. “Where is it coming from?” Russie asked, turning his head this way and that. If it was from the north, the Jews and Poles might really have opened up on each other; if from the south, Anielewicz’s fighters in German uniform were hitting the radio transmitter.

  “I can’t tell, either,” Rivka said. “The sound is funny inside a block of flats.”

  “That’s true.” Russie settled himself to wait. The shooting and explosions lasted only a couple of minutes. He’d nearly forgotten the echoing silence that followed gunfire, though he’d heard it almost daily before the Lizards seized Warsaw from the Germans.

  Half an hour later, another knock came at the apartment door. Rivka opened it. Without ceremony, a Lizard walked in. He fixed both eyes on Russie. In hissing German, he said, “I am Ssfeer, from the governor Zolraag’s staff. You know me now?”

  “Yes, I recognized your body paint,” Moishe answered. “How can I help you? I fear I cannot do much at the moment; I was taken ill this morning.”

  “So the prominent Zolraag learned,” Ssfeer said. “He—how say you?—he gives permissions to you to get well more slow. Bandits from Deutschland just now they—how say you?—shoot up radio, maybe to keep you quiet, not let you speak. We need maybe ten days to fix.”

  “Oh, what a pity,” Russie said.

  The Lancaster rumbled down the runway, engines roaring. The plane bounced and shuddered as it gained speed; Lizard bomblets had cratered the runway the week before, and repairs were crude. George Bagnall knew nothing but relief that they weren’t trying to take off with a full bomb load. Bombs were delicate things; once in a while, a bump would set one off…after which, the groundcrew would have another crater, a big one, to fill in.

  The bomber fairly sprang into the air. In the pilot’s seat next to Bagnall’s, Ken Embry grinned. “Amazing what lightening the aircraft will do,” Embry said. “I feel like I’m flying a Spitfire.”

  “I think it’s all in your head,” Bagnall replied. “The radar unit back there, can’t be a great deal lighter than the ordnance we usually carry.” The flight engineer flicked an intercom switch. “How is it doing, Radarman Goldfarb?”

  “Seems all right,” he heard in his earphones. “I can see a long way.”

  “That’s the idea,” Bagnall said. A radar set in an aircraft several miles above the Earth could peer farther around its curve pick up Lizard planes as they approached, and give England’s defenses a few precious extra minutes to prepare. Bagnall shivered inside his flight suit and furs as the Lanc gained altitude. He switched on his oxygen, tasted the rubber of the hose as he breathed the enriched air.

  Goldfarb spoke enthusiastically. “If we can keep just a few planes in the air, they’ll do as much for us as all our ground stations put together. Of course,” he added, “we also have a good deal farther to fall.”

  Bagnall tried not to think about that. The Lizards had pounded British ground radar in the opening days of their invasion, forcing the RAF and ground defenses to fight blind ever since. Now they were trying to see again. The Lizards were not likely to want to let them see.

  “Coming up on angels twenty,” Ken Embry announced. “Taking station at the altitude. Radioman, how is our communication with the fighter pack?”

  “Reading them five by five,” Ted Lane replied. “They report receiving us five by five as well. They are eager to begin the exercise, sir.”

  “Bloody maniacs,” Embry said. “As far as I’m concerned, the ideal mission is one devoid of all contact with the enemy whatsoever.”

  Bagnall could not have agreed more. Despite machine gun turrets all over the aircraft, the Lancaster had always been at a dreadful disadvantage against enemy fighters; evasion beat the bla
zes out of combat. The knowledge made bomber aircrew cautious, and made them view swaggering, aggressive fighter pilots as not quite right in the head.

  From back in the bomb bay, David Goldfarb said, “I ought to be able to communicate directly with the fighter aircraft rather than relaying through the radioman.”

  “That’s a good notion, Goldfarb,” Bagnall said. “Jot it down; maybe they’ll be able to use it on the Mark 2.” And maybe, if we keep on being luckier than we deserve, we’ll live to try out the Mark 2, he added to himself. He didn’t need to say it aloud; Goldfarb had known what the odds were when he volunteered for this mission.

  Bagnall wiped the inside of the curved Perspex window in front of him with a piece of chamois cloth. Nothing much to see out there, not even the exhaust flames from other bombers ahead, above, below, and to either side—reassuring reminders one was not going into danger all alone. Now there was only night, night and the endless throb of the four Merlins. Consciously reminded of the engines, the flight engineer flicked his eyes over the gauges in front of him. Mechanically, all was well.

  “I have enemy aircraft,” Goldfarb exclaimed. Back in the bomb bay, he couldn’t see even the night, just the tracks of electrons across a phosphorcoated screen. But his machine vision reached farther than Bagnall’s eyes. “I say again, I have enemy aircraft. Heading 177, distance thirty-five miles and closing, speed 505.”

  Ted Lane passed that word on to the Mosquitoes that lurked far above the radar-carrying Lancaster. The twin-engine planes not only had the highest operational ceiling of any British fighters, they were also, with their wooden skins and skeletons, harder for radar to acquire.

  “Rockets away from the Lizard aircraft,” Goldfarb yelped. “Bearing—straight for us. Speed—too bloody fast for my machine here.”

  “Shut it down,” Embry ordered. He threw the Lanc into a violent, corkscrewing dive that made Bagnall glad for the straps that held him in his seat. His stomach felt a couple of thousand feet behind the aircraft. He gulped, wishing he hadn’t had greasy fish and chips less than an hour before the mission started.