He had his talk nicely timed—he’d practiced it with Rivka back in the flat. He was just reaching his summing-up when the engineer held up one finger to show he had a minute left, and came to the end as the fellow drew his index finger across his throat. The engineer grinned and gave him a two-finger V for victory.
Then it was Nathan Jacobi’s turn. He read an English translation (similarly stamped with censors’ marks) of what Russie had just said in Yiddish, the better to reach as large an audience as possible. His timing was as impeccable as Moishe’s had been. This time the engineer signaled his approval with an upraised thumb.
“I think that went very well,” Jacobi said. “With any luck at all, it should leave the Lizards quite nicely browned off.”
“I hope so,” Moishe said. He got up and stretched. Wireless broadcasting was not physically demanding, but it left him worn all the same. Getting out of the studio always came as a relief.
Jacobi held the door open for him. They went out together. Waiting in the hallway stood a tall, thin, tweedy Englishman with a long, craggy face and dark hair combed high in a pompadour. He nodded to Jacobi. They spoke together in English. Jacobi turned to Moishe and switched to Yiddish: “I’d like to introduce you to Eric Blair. He’s talks producer of the Indian Section, and he goes in after us.”
Russie stuck out his hand and said, “Tell him I’m pleased to meet him.”
Blair shook hands with him, then spoke in English again. Jacobi translated: “He says he’s even more pleased to meet you: you’ve escaped from two different sets of tyrants, and honestly described the evils of both.” He added, “Blair is a very fine fellow, hates tyrants of all stripes. He fought against the fascists in Spain—almost got killed there—but he couldn’t stomach what the Communists were doing on the Republican side. An honest man.”
“We need more honest men,” Moishe said.
Jacobi translated that for Blair. The Englishman smiled, but suffered a coughing fit before he could answer. Moishe had heard those wet coughs in Warsaw more times than he cared to remember. Tuberculosis, the medical student in him said. Blair mastered the coughs, then spoke apologetically to Jacobi.
“He says he’s glad he did that out here rather than in the studio while he was recording,” Jacobi said. Moishe nodded; he understood and admired the workmanlike, professional attitude. You worked as hard as you could for as long as you could, and if you fell in the traces you had to hope someone else would carry on.
Blair pulled his script from a waistcoat pocket and went into the studio. Jacobi said, “I’ll see you later, Moishe. I’m afraid I have a mountain of forms to fill out. Perhaps we should put up stacks of paper in place of barrage balloons. They’d be rather better at keeping the Lizards away, I think.”
He headed away to his upstairs office. Moishe went outside. He decided not to head back to his flat right away, but walked west down Oxford Street toward Hyde Park. People—mostly women, often with small children in tow—bustled in and out of Selfridge’s. He’d been in the great department store once or twice himself. Even with wartime shortages, it held more goods and more different kinds of goods than were likely to be left in all of Poland. He wondered if the British knew how lucky they were.
The great marble arch where Oxford Street, Park Lane, and Bayswater Road came together marked the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Across Park Lane from the arch was the Speakers’ Corner, where men and women climbed up on crates or chairs or whatever they had handy and harangued whoever would hear. He tried to imagine such a thing in Warsaw, whether under Poles, Nazis, or Lizards. The only thing he could picture was the public executions that would follow unbridled public speech. Maybe England had earned its luck after all.
Only a handful of people listened to—or heckled—the speakers. The rest of the park was almost as crowded with people tending their gardens. Every bit of open space in London grew potatoes, wheat, maize, beets, beans, peas, cabbages. German submarines had put Britain under siege; the coming of the Lizards brought little relief. They weren’t as hard on shipping, but America and the rest of the world had less to send these days.
The island wasn’t having an easy time trying to feed itself. Perhaps in the long run it couldn’t, not if it wanted to keep on turning out war goods, too. But if the English knew they were beaten, they didn’t let on.
All through the park, trenches, some bare, some with corrugated tin roofs, were scattered among the garden plots. Like Warsaw, London had learned the value of air raid shelters no matter how makeshift. Moishe had dived into one of them himself when the sirens began to wail a few days before. The old woman sprawled in the dirt a few feet away had nodded politely, as if they were meeting over tea. They’d stayed in there till the all-clear sounded, then dusted themselves off and gone on about their business.
Moishe turned and retraced his steps down Oxford Street. He explored with caution; wandering a couple of blocks away from the streets he’d already learned had got him lost more than once. And he was always looking the wrong way, forgetting traffic moved on the left side of the street, not the right. Had more motorcars been on the road, he probably would have been hit by now.
He turned right onto Regent Street, then left onto Beak. A group of men was going into a restaurant there—the Barcelona, he saw as he drew closer. He recognized the tall, thin figure of Eric Blair in the party; the India Section man must have finished his talk and headed off for lunch.
Beak Street led Russie to Lexington and from it to Broadwick Street, on which sat his block of flats. As with much of the Soho district, it held more foreigners than Englishmen: Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Greeks—and now a family of ghetto Jews.
He turned the key in the lock, opened the door. The rich odor of cooking soup greeted him like a friend from home. He shrugged out of his jacket; the electric fire here kept the flat comfortably warm. Not sleeping under mounds of blankets and overcoats was another reward of coming to England.
Rivka walked out of the kitchen to greet him. She wore a white blouse and a blue pleated skirt that reached halfway from the floor to her knees. Moishe thought it shockingly immodest, but all the skirts and dresses she’d been given when she got to England were of the same length.
“You look like an Englishwoman,” he told her.
She cocked her head to one side, giving that a woman’s consideration. After a moment, she shook her head. “I dress like an Englishwoman,” she said, with the same precision a yeshiva student might have used to dissect a subtle Talmudic point. “But they’re even pinker and blonder than the Poles, I think.” She flicked an imaginary bit of lint from her own dark curls.
He yielded: “Well, maybe so. They all seem so heavy, too.” He wondered whether that perception was real or just a product of so many years of looking at people who were slowly—sometimes not so slowly—starving to death. The latter, he suspected. “That soup smells good.” In his own mind, food had grown ever so much more important than it seemed before the war.
“Even with ration books, there’s such a lot to buy here,” Rivka answered. The pantry already bulged with tins and jars and with sacks of flour and potatoes. Rivka didn’t take food for granted these days, either.
“Where’s Reuven?” Moishe asked.
“Across the hall, playing with the Stephanopoulos twins.” Rivka made a wry face. “They haven’t a word in common, but they all like to throw things and yell, so they’re friends.”
“I suppose that’s good.” Moishe did wonder, though. In Poland, the Nazis—and the Poles, top—had cared too much that Jews were different from them. No one here seemed to care at all. In its own way, that was disconcerting, too.
As if to ease his mind over something he hadn’t even mentioned, Rivka said, “David’s mother telephoned this morning while you were at the studio. We had a good chat.”
“That is good,” he said. Working phones were another thing he was having to get used to all over again.
“They want us over for supper tomorrow
night,” Rivka said. “We can take the underground; she gave me directions on how to do it.” She sounded excited, as if she were going on safari. Moishe suddenly got the feeling she was adapting to the new city, the new country, faster than he was.
Teerts felt bright, alert, and happy when Major Okamoto led him into the laboratory. He knew he felt that way because the Nipponese had laced his rice and raw fish with ginger—the spicy taste still lay hot on his tongue—but he didn’t care. No matter what created it, the feeling was welcome. Until it wore off, he would feel like a male of the Race, a killercraft pilot, not a prisoner almost as much beneath contempt as the slops bucket in his cell.
Yoshio Nishina came round a corner. Teerts bowed in Nipponese politeness; no matter how much the ginger exhilarated him, he was not so foolish as to forget altogether where he was. “Konichiwa, superior sir,” he said, mixing his own language and Nipponese.
“Good day to you as well, Teerts,” replied the leader of the Nipponese nuclear weapons research team. “We have something new for you to evaluate today.”
He spoke slowly, not just to help Teerts understand but also, the male thought, because of some internal hesitation. “What is it, superior sir?” Teerts asked. The warm buzz of ginger spinning inside his head made him not want to care, but experience with the Nipponese made him wary in spite of the herb to which they’d addicted him.
Now Nishina spoke quickly, to Okamoto rather than directly to Teerts. The Nipponese officer translated: “We need you to examine the setup of the uranium hexafluoride diffusion system we are establishing.”
Teerts was a little puzzled. That was simple enough for him to have understood it in Nipponese. These days, Okamoto mainly reserved his translations for more complicated matters of physics. But pondering the ways of Big Uglies, even with a head full of ginger, seemed pointless. Teerts bowed again and said, “It shall be done, superior sir. Show me these drawings I am to evaluate.”
He sometimes wondered how the Big Uglies managed to build anything more complicated than a hut. Without computers that let them change plans with ease and view proposed objects from any angle, they had developed what seemed like a series of clumsy makeshifts to portray three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional paper. Some of them were like single views of computer graphics. Others, weirdly, showed top, front, and side views and expected the individual doing the viewing to combine them in his mind and visualize what the object was supposed to look like. Not used to the convention, Teerts had endless trouble with it.
Now, Major Okamoto bared his teeth in the Tosevite gesture of amiability. When the scientists smiled at Teerts, they were generally sincere. He did not trust Okamoto as far. Sometimes the interpreter seemed amiable, but sometimes he made sport with his prisoner. Teerts was getting better at reading Tosevite expressions; Okamoto’s smile did not strike him as pleasant.
The major said, “Dr. Nishina is not speaking of drawings. We have erected this facility and begun processing the gas with it. We want you to examine it, not pictures of it.”
Teerts was appalled, for a whole queue of reasons. “I thought you were concentrating on production of element 94—plutonium, you call it. That’s what you said before.”
“We have decided to produce both explosive metals,” Okamoto answered. “The plutonium project at the moment goes well, but more slowly than expected. We have tried to speed up the uranium hexafluoride project to compensate, but there are difficulties with it. You will evaluate and suggest ways to fix the problems.”
“You don’t expect me to go inside this plant of yours, do you?” Teerts said. “You want me to check it from the outside.”
“Whichever is necessary,” Okamoto answered.
“But one reason you have so much trouble with uranium hexafluoride is that it’s corrosive by nature,” Teerts exclaimed in dismay, his voice turning into a guttural hiss of fright. “If I go in there, I may not come out. And I do not want to breathe either uranium or fluorine, you know.”
“You are a prisoner. What you want is of no importance to me,” Okamoto said. “You can obey or you can face the consequences.”
Ginger lent Teerts spirit he couldn’t have summoned without it. “I am not a physicist,” he shouted, loud enough for the stolid guard who accompanied Okamoto to unsling his rifle for the first time in many days. “I am not an engineer, not a chemist, either. I am a pilot. If you want a pilot’s view of what is wrong with your plant, fine. I do not think it will help you much, though.”
“You are a male of the Race.” Major Okamoto fixed Teerts with a glare from the narrow eyes in that flat, muzzleless face: never had he looked more alien, or more alarming. “By your own boasting, your people have controlled atoms for thousands of years. Of course you will know more about them than we do.”
“Honto,” Nishina said: “That is true.” He went on in Nipponese, slowly, so Teerts could understand: “I was speaking with someone from the Army, telling him what the atomic explosive would be like. He said to me, ‘If you want an explosive, why not just use an explosive?’ Bakatare—idiot!”
Teerts was of the opinion that most Big Uglies were idiots, and that most of the ones who weren’t idiots were savage and vindictive instead. Expressing that opinion struck him as impolitic. He said, “You Tosevites have controlled fire for thousands of years. If someone sent one of you to inspect a factory that makes steel, how much would your report be worth to him?”
He used Nipponese for as much of that as he could, and spoke the rest in his own language. Okamoto interpreted for Nishina. Then, much to Teerts’ delight, the two of them got into a shouting match. The physicist believed Teerts, the major thought he was lying. Finally, grudgingly, Okamoto yielded: “If you don’t think he can be trusted to be accurate, or if you think he truly is too ignorant to be reliable, I must accept your judgment. But I tell you that with proper persuasion he could give us what we need to know.”
“Superior sir, may I speak?” Teerts asked; he’d understood that well enough to respond to it. The surge of pleasure and nerve the ginger had brought was seeping away, leaving him more weary and glum than he would have been had he never set tongue on the stuff.
Okamoto gave him another baleful stare. “Speak.” His voice held a clear warning that if Teerts’ words were not very much to the point, he would regret it.
“Superior sir, I just wish to ask you this: have I not cooperated with you since the day I was captured? I have told everything I know about aircraft to the males of your Army and Navy, and I have told everything I know—much more than I thought I knew—to these males here, whom your Professor Nishina leads”—he bowed to the physicist—“even though they are trying to build weapons to harm the Race.”
Okamoto bared his broad, flat teeth. To Teerts, they were unimpressive, being neither very sharp nor very numerous. He did, however, recognize the Big Ugly’s ugly grimace as a threat gesture. Mastering himself, Okamoto answered, “You have cooperated, yes, but you are a prisoner, so you had better cooperate. We have given you better treatment since you showed yourself useful, too: more comfort, more food—”
“Ginger,” Teerts added. He wasn’t sure whether he was agreeing with Okamoto or contradicting him. The herb made him feel wonderful while he tasted it, but the Big Uglies weren’t giving it to him for his benefit: they wanted to use it to warp him to their will. He didn’t think they had, so far—but how could he be sure?
“Ginger, hai,” Okamoto said. “Suppose I tell you that, after you go look at this uranium hexafluoride setup, we will give you not just ginger powder with your rice and fish, but pickled ginger root, as much as you can eat? You’d go then, neh?”
As much ginger as he could eat … did Tosev 3 hold that much ginger? The craving rose up and grabbed Teerts, like a hand around his throat. He needed all his will to say, “Superior sir, what good is ginger to me if I am not alive to taste it?”
Okamoto scowled again. He turned back to Nishina. “If he is not going to inspect the facility,
do you have any more use for him today?” The physicist shook his head. To Teerts, Okamoto said, “Come along, then. I will take you back to your cell.”
Teerts followed Okamoto out of the laboratory. The guard followed them both. Even through the melancholy he felt after ginger’s exaltation left him, Teerts felt something akin to triumph.
That triumph faded as he went out onto the streets of Tokyo. Even more than he had in Harbin, he felt himself a mote among the vast swarms of Big Uglies in those streets. He’d been alone in Harbin, yes, but the Race was advancing on the mainland city; had things gone well, he could have been reunited with his own kith at any time. But things had not gone well.
Here in Tokyo, even the illusion of rescue was denied him. Sea protected the islands at the heart of the Tosevite empire of Nippon from immediate invasion by the Race. He was irremediably and permanently at the mercy of the Big Uglies. They stared at him as he walked down the street; hatred seemed to rise from them in almost visible waves, like heat from red-glowing iron. For once, he was glad to be between Major Okamoto and the guard.
Tokyo struck him as a curious mixture. Some of the buildings were of stone and glass, others—more and more outside the central city—of wood and what looked like thick paper. The two styles seemed incompatible, as if they’d hatched from different eggs. He wondered how and why they coexisted here.
Air-raid sirens began to wail. As if by magic, the streets emptied. Okamoto led Teerts into a packed shelter in the basement of one of the stone-and-glass buildings. Outside, antiaircraft guns started pounding. Teerts hoped all the Race’s pilots—males from his flight, perhaps—would return safely to their bases.
“Do you wonder why we hate you, when you do this to us?” Okamoto asked as the sharp, deep blasts of bombs contributed to the racket.
“No, superior sir,” Teerts answered. He understood it well enough—and what it would do to him, sooner or later. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that. For the first time since he’d resigned himself to captivity, he began looking for ways to escape. He found none, but vowed to himself to keep looking.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 136